“He won’t be troubling her again.”

“And you don’t want me to tell Mary I met her brother?”

“I’d prefer not.” Sean’s gaze went round the richly appointed room. Master watched him.

“You know,” Master said quietly, “you Tammany boys didn’t invent the game. My ancestors were doing this kind of thing even before Stuyvesant was here. I reckon it’s the way cities always have been. Always will be, I dare say.” He nodded contentedly. “New crowd. Same game.”

“So one day my grandson might be sitting in a place like this?”

“Maybe. You seem like a coming man.”

“I’d like that,” Sean said frankly. Then he grinned. “Perhaps even my sister would approve of me then.” He paused. “You’ve treated me very well, sir. I shall remember it. Especially considering the great difference between us.”

Master took a slow draw on his cigar, sighting the young man through half-closed eyes.

“Not so different, O’Donnell,” he said softly, “just dealt a better hand.”

Lincoln

1860

WHEN HETTY HAD asked him to accompany her, Frank had almost refused. And when he did decide to go, it wasn’t really to please her, but because he supposed he’d better take a look at this damn fellow Lincoln, since he’d turned up in New York.

The first time Frank Master had heard of Abraham Lincoln was a couple of years earlier, when Lincoln had made a name for himself in Illinois running for the Senate against Douglas, the Democratic incumbent. When the two men had held a series of public debates, the newspapers had covered them extensively, and since the principal subject of the Lincoln-Douglas debates had been the slavery question, Master had read the accounts carefully. Though Lincoln hadn’t taken the seat, it was clear to Frank that the fellow was a skillful politician.

After that, however, Frank hadn’t paid much attention to the Illinois lawyer until this month when, as the election year opened, the influential Chicago Tribune had suddenly, and rather surprisingly, endorsed him for the presidency. So despite the fact that he shared none of his wife’s enthusiasm, and it was a chilly, damp February evening, he nonetheless set out with her to the Cooper Institute’s Great Hall at Astor Place. Since the hall was only a dozen blocks away down Third Avenue, they decided to walk.

As they left Gramercy Park, he offered his arm, and Hetty took it. Years ago the gesture would have been the most natural thing in the world. God knows, Frank thought, how many miles they had walked arm in arm back in the early days of their marriage, when she was still the young woman who’d come with him to the Croton Aqueduct. But they seldom walked arm in arm nowadays, and as he glanced at her he wondered, when exactly had the coolness between them begun?