And then suddenly he saw her rising, the wings catching the wind, in flight. It was as though she had been lifted by one of those new Otis elevators, but with nothing underneath holding her up. It had to be an illusion, or a miracle.
He reached the edge and teetered to a stop just before he went over. Ahead of him, Mary Ann was already 100 yards away, flying into the red and orange glow of the evening sun, those ungainly wings now translucent and elegant. Below her were haystacks, looking like friendly pillows.
As Harding watched, Mary Ann did an aerial dance, making lazy circles to the right or left by dipping or raising her wings. She was going down the hill that he had just labored up, seemingly without effort. It was the most graceful thing he had ever seen. Then she went skimming across the fields, kicking the tops off the haystacks for pure joy. Harding saw flight and fluff and a spring sunset, and he thought: “Maybe I can pull this off.”
Chapter Two: New York City, The Garment District—May 8
Once Harding convinced Mary Ann to come to New York with him, he moved fast. He helped her pack a few clothes and her father’s log book of his experiments. They left that night, locked the double doors of the church behind them, and walked down into Jericho, where they rented a carriage. Mary Ann left Harding’s address in New York with the local telegraph office—in the unlikely event that there were any messages.
Then they were off. Harding’s stamina was amazing, thought Mary Ann. He drove the carriage all night, and reached Knoxville the next morning. There they caught an express train and arrived in New York City early the following day.
Both were exhausted, which was not the best way to face the city. First she saw the screaming headlines about men who used hypodermic needles to put young women to sleep and abduct them into white slavery. Then she tried to buy a bunch of violets from a young girl on the street and was told by Harding that the girl wasn’t really selling flowers—but her body. She and Harding pushed their way onto a trolley car, only to have a man put his hand between her legs. Harding grabbed him and pitched him off the car headfirst. Mary Ann grabbed his arm.
“Maybe we should walk,” she said.
She saw wonderful sights as they strode up the longhorn curve of Broadway: pink stone houses that looked like four-layer cakes, trains that ran on stilts over the streets, and the new Flatiron Building that seemed impossibly tall. But the traffic was horrible. Pedestrians pushed her off the sidewalk. Then a motorized runabout grazed her with one of its thin, spidery wheels, and the driver cursed at her as if it had been her fault.
When they arrived at Neville Bishop’s office in the garment district at 10 a.m., Mary Ann was amazed. The whole building seemed to shake with the sound of machines. The racket made her put her hands over her ears.
“What is it?” she shouted to Harding.
“Shirtwaists!” he yelled back. “Bishop makes shirtwaists. Get used to it. It pays the bills for his little hobbies...like us.”
Inside, jammed together in a long room with a low tin ceiling, she saw hundreds of women bent over their sewing machines, pedaling furiously. Supervisors in vests and ties walked the floor behind them. A fight broke out between two women who both grabbed the same piece of cloth. They started tugging and pulling, yelling at each other in a strange language. A supervisor backhanded one of the women, and pushed the other into her chair.
Harding took her up two flights of rickety wooden stairs to a small outer room. There a male secretary with rolled-up sleeves and bulging forearms motioned them to a hard wooden bench outside Bishop’s office.
“He looks like a bodyguard,” she whispered.
Harding nodded. “Bishop needs one.”
The morning dragged into afternoon. Bishop kept them waiting as a steady stream of worried-looking young men with green eyeshades and celluloid collars ran into the office. Then she’d hear shouting and they’d come scurrying out with their heads down. Mary Ann felt like she did the day that she had been called to the principal’s office in grade school. For the first time in two days she had time to think. How had she let Harding talk her into this?
Part of it was his disarming manner. He looked as nervous as she did. Harding reminded her of her father, she thought, flawed but basically decent and caring. At least, up until now. But what about Bishop? He sounded horrid. The vile smell of the secretary’s cigarettes made her want to choke.
Harding could see she was upset. “The city hasn’t lost any of its hustle since you’ve been here, has it?” he said, forcing a smile.
But Mary Ann noticed that his hand kept moving toward the hip pocket of his coat, and she knew what was there. “What’s your boss like?” she said, trying to distract him.
Harding hesitated, sizing up what he could say without upsetting her. “Neville Bishop is a gentleman inventor,” he said finally. “You’ve heard of gentlemen farmers, the kind who run sweat shops in the city, but love their horses and cows in the country. Well, Bishop makes his scratch in shirtwaists, but he wants to be remembered as a heroic inventor. He’s sort of like Andrew Carnegie, the steelmaker. Carnegie used to shoot down his workers and then build libraries for their children.”
Mary Ann nodded grimly. “You don’t like him much, do you?”
“I don’t have to like him. I just work for him.”
The secretary rushed over to a door that opened to a small elevator. Now Mary Ann understood how Bishop avoided the noise and turmoil below. Two waiters came past, carrying covered serving dishes on silver trays. They smelled heavenly. She caught a whiff of roast chicken and her stomach growled.
“Lunch,” said Harding. “But not for us."
The burly secretary ushered in the waiters. When they came out he glanced at Mary Ann and Harding. “Mr. Bishop will see you now.”
Bishop’s office was like stepping into another world. Heavy brocade drapes in the windows shut out the light and noise. There were three overstuffed leather chairs surrounding his desk. Paintings of hunting scenes covered the walls.
Neville Bishop was sitting at a mahogany desk with lion’s claws for feet, eating oysters and roast capon and drinking chilled white wine from a silver ice bucket with a mermaid’s figure as a handle.
“Where is Pitman?” he shouted. “I told you to bring him back here. Not some shop girl.”
“This is Pitman,” said Harding. “It’s his daughter, Mary Ann.”
Bishop didn’t even glance at her. He turned the full force of his gaze on Harding. “I asked you to bring me Doctor Samuel Pitman, one of the leading aeronautical scholars, and you find this...”
“My father is dead,” Mary Ann cut him short.
“Then you’ve wasted both my time and my money,” said Bishop, still looking at Harding. God, thought Mary Ann, he doesn’t even have the good grace to say he’s sorry.
She started to get up to leave when she heard Harding say, “She knows how to fly.”
“She knows what?” said Bishop. He was eating as he spoke.
“I saw her. She took a pair of wings and flew from a hill. She was 50 feet in the air.”
“What does that prove,” snorted Bishop. “I can take a paper airplane and do the same thing.”
“Control, Mr. Bishop,” said Mary Ann. “I’ve seen pictures of the heavier-than-air machines you’ve made. My father used to laugh at them. You think just because you’ve put a big engine on a pair of wings you can fight your way into the air, as if you were driving a car. Well, you can’t. Everything you’ve ever tried just hits the ground and crashes.”
Harding looked at her, open-mouthed. No man had ever talked to Neville Bishop that way, and certainly no woman.
But Mary Ann was tired and sore and hot and mad and thirsty. The ice bucket with beads of moisture dripping off the mermaid didn’t help either.
He resembled the vice president, Teddy Roosevelt, she decided, but a meaner version. He was a big man with a bulky figure, broad shoulders, full chest and a heavy paunch. Leonine was the way she would have described hi
m...if she liked him. He was of an age where overeating was considered both a virtue and an art form. Much of his face was hidden behind pince-nez glasses and a big mustache that was beginning to streak with white, but his gray eyes were piercing.
And they were piercing her. For the first time, Neville Bishop really looked at her. It was like staring down the tunnel at the headlight of a train. He was trying to make her flinch.
Instead there was a straight-eyed look about her that he found unnerving. She wasn’t the demure type he was used to when he had need of a woman. The thought occurred to him: What does she know that I don’t? And how do I find it out?
“And you have solved the problem of aerial navigation that’s baffled mankind for centuries?” said Bishop, not bothering to hide the contempt in his voice.
Mary Ann took a deep breath. She realized suddenly that she was out of her element. She knew what her father was trying to do his last few months in Jericho; she knew how he was doing it, but she didn’t know why. The theory of flight had never been explained to her. Her anger with Bishop evaporated. Suddenly they were both looking at her, waiting.
She remembered an example her father had used. She grabbed the box of soda crackers from Bishop’s tray.
Did you ever watch a bird fly?” she asked.
Bishop looked blank; it had been a long time since he’d spent any time watching birds.
“When he wants to turn, he dips one wing and raises the other,” she said. She took the box of crackers and twisted the center in two different directions. Crumbs exploded from both sides of the box but no one noticed. “It’s called wing warping.”
“It’s that simple?” asked Bishop.
“Yes,” she said, “but no one knows how to do it...except my father and me.”
“Well,” said Bishop. “I think you might be useful on our trip to Paris.”
Paris? No one had said anything about Paris. Coming to New York was bad enough. She glanced at Harding, trying to keep the surprise out of her face. He was staring down at the pattern in the Persian rug.
Now Bishop was smiling, as if he were examining her teeth in a slave market. He had regained the upper hand.
“Harding has given me confidential information that in less than a fortnight, an extremely wealthy French automobile maker named Henri Meurthe will offer a million francs to anyone who can fly around the Eiffel Tower. He expects a Frenchman to do it. But I am going to win that prize, and you are going to help me.” The way he said it left no doubt.
Mary Ann shivered. “Harding,” she said, “I don’t want to go to Paris. I think I want to go back to Tennessee.” Events had once again unexpectedly gotten away from her.
Bishop must have pushed a button under his desk because a moment later the secretary appeared. “Show Miss Pitman back to the waiting room,” he said.
Harding rose, too. “No,” said Bishop. “You stay.”
“I think it could work,” Bishop said when they were alone. “I could hire a private steam launch. We could be there in 10 days. The contest doesn’t start until July 14, the French Independence Day.
“The Pitman girl, Marian or whatever her name is, will be critical. She’s worked at her father’s elbow. She knows something and we need to find it out. Until we do, you can’t let her out of your sight.
“Do whatever you have to do to get her to go. Take her down to one of those fancy stores along Lady’s Mile, you know, the ones with the cast iron fronts, and buy her a new dress. You’re single again, aren’t you?” Bishop gestured with his paring knife. “Romance her. Take her to see ‘Floradora’ or one of those Broadway musicals. Hell, make love to her if you have to. Where is she staying?”
“I don’t know,” said Harding.
“You’ve got an empty house. Keep her with you until she agrees to go. Tell her about Paris. There’s not a woman in New York who wouldn’t trade her virtue for a trip to Paris. Believe me, I know.” He chuckled, and for a moment Harding thought he was almost human.
“One more thing,” said Bishop, and his voice turned steely again. “This is your last chance.”
Harding flinched. “What do you mean?”
Bishop grabbed Harding’s coat, yanked out the bottle and tossed it into the nearby spittoon. “That’s what I mean,” he said.
* * *
The square-faced gaslights were just being lit as they arrived at Harding Cooper’s brownstone on 68th Street. Harding started to help Mary Ann down from the dogcart, but she pushed his hand away and jumped down herself. On the sidewalk an organ grinder played a song of young love:
“I’ve a secret in my heart, Sweet Marie;
A tale I’d impart, love for thee.
Every daisy in the dell
Knows my secret quite well,
Yet I dare not tell
Sweet Marie!”
Harding brushed past him, went up the steps and fumbled in his pockets for his key. He picked up a pile of mail in the foyer and opened the second door.
If Mary Ann was surprised by Bishop’s factory, she was stunned by what she saw now. The walls were blank, except for dark squares on the wallpaper where pictures once hung. The oriental carpet had been rolled and jammed end up in the corner. Sheets were draped over chairs and tables. They looked like ghosts waiting to receive them.
She turned on him, furious. "How could you do this to me?" she screamed. "Why didn't you tell me what he wanted? And what do you want?"
Harding stood near the doorway. “There’s a bed upstairs for you,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
He paused, as if wrestling with his conscience. “Listen, you can do whatever you want. Don’t worry about Bishop. His only chance of dying an upright man is on the end of a rope. I’m sorry that I got you into this.
“There’s a bar up the block...a blind pig,” he went on. “I’m going to get a drink. My bottle was, shall we say, confiscated.” The strains of “Sweet Marie” came through the still-open door. “Damn hurdy-gurdy,” he said, “doesn’t he know any other song?”
Harding started toward the door, the mail still in his hand. Then he stopped and turned around. “This one’s for you,” he said. “It’s a telegram.”
Telegrams had never been good news. She opened it reluctantly and read:
REGRET TO INFORM YOUR HOME IN JERICHO BURNED TO GROUND. CAUSE SUSPICIOUS.
SHERIFF HEWITT.
She crumpled up the telegram, trying not to sob. Then she threw it in his face. “All my father’s work,” she whispered, and ran up the stairs.
Harding picked up the telegram and read it. “They didn’t waste any time, did they?”
She had almost reached the top step when she realized that she hadn’t brought any light with her and was about to stumble into the darkness. She looked back at him. He seemed more dejected than she was, more in need of help. She didn’t like Bishop and couldn’t trust Harding either, at least, not completely. But she didn’t have many choices. She weighed each one of them as she walked back down the stairs.
“Maybe burning my home was a sign,” she said. “Maybe we’re supposed to go to Paris. Maybe we’re even meant to win. All I know is, I’ve got no place to go back to.”
She searched Harding’s face for an answer. But he just flopped onto one of the overstuffed chairs. The sheet on top of the chair spread out around him as if to carry him off into the land of ghosts. He had apparently forgotten his need for a drink, and perhaps that was a good thing, she thought.
Mary Ann took an oil lamp and went upstairs, this time all the way. The double bed in the master bedroom had a sheet across it but was otherwise unmade. It looked as if it had been cold—and lonely—for a long time. On the dresser, lying face down, was an ornate gold frame, the kind used for wedding pictures. She hesitated, and then picked it up. There was no photograph inside.
What should she do? She didn’t know, and no one was going to tell her. She only knew that she couldn’t sleep, not with all that was running through her head. She searche
d the night table for something to read. There were novels: “The Prisoner of Zenda,” “Choir Invisible,” “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” and then she saw that Harding—or someone—had pressed flowers in between the pages. The last one was a thin volume covered in rich purple vellum. Almost against her will, she opened it.
It was “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” a book of oriental poetry. Across from the title page was an inscription: “Paris, March 1897. To my beloved wife, Maria. Your devoted Harding.”
She felt embarrassed, as though she had seen him naked. In a way, she had. And no well-brought-up girl ever looked at a book without her parents’ permission, let alone one like this. But she read on. The lush oriental quatrains were illustrated with pictures in gold leaf of dark-bearded sensual men in turbans lying next to graceful women. The women seemed to be wearing only the sheerest of undergarments, and halters that barely covered their breasts.
Outside the organ grinder had started to play his song again, the lament about Marie. She heard a voice shout, “Shut the hell up!” and it took her a second to recognize the voice as Harding’s. She had never heard him angry before.
She turned the pages until she fell asleep. And the last poem she read that night was the one that she remembered longest:
“And that inverted bowl they call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling, cooped, we live and die,
Lift not your hands to it for help—for it
As impotently moves as you or I.”
Chapter Three: Paris—May 14, 1901
"For a city so full of itself, Paris certainly has its share of bad weather," Neville Bishop complained. "Heat in summer, rain all winter and now, on this of all mornings - fog."
Mary Ann looked up. Over the last week, bouncing on the waves as they crossed the Atlantic, she learned to despise Bishop and everything he stood for - even more than at their first meeting. But he was right. This was a horrible day.
The fog obscured the heights of the Eiffel Tower over their heads as she, Bishop and Harding stood in the crowd, pushed and jostled as they waited for the President of France to arrive. It was New York City all over again, except they all spoke French.