To talk about Rebel Conlon is to talk about Brooklyn, and to talk about Brooklyn is to talk about Spot Conlon. Spot embodied the spirit of the burrough; beauty, spite, danger, power, and self importance. The idea, the dream, the castle-on-the-clouds fairytale that was Brooklyn was all Spot. Rebel was what made the fairytale a concrete reality, though she'd never take any of the credit for it.
Rebel loved Spot, and Spot was Brooklyn. They were all interconnected. Without one, the rest ceased to make sense.
There were only ever a few people who knew the true story of Spot Conlon's fabled existence, start to finish, and I was one of them. He wasn't born on a pier in Brooklyn, and he wasn't killed on the Brooklyn bridge by a scorned lover. He wasn't a god, and he sure as hell wasn't a saint, but he was Rebel's brother, and he was the best leader of Brooklyn that ever was. Spot and Rebel were born rich, which no one ever believed either. How could someone as street smart as Spot Conlon come from some hoity-toity background in Conneticut?
Even the people that know the truth find it hard to believe. Spot ran away from his privledged existence at the tender age of ten, leaving his eight year old sister to try and hold the family together. That was just like Spot. When he'd gotten all he could get out of something, he just discarded it, be it a girl, an alliance, a bet, a horse, or even a family.
So Rebel, nee Bridget Elizabeth Conlon, grew up lonely and missing her brother fiercely. She stuck around for nine years, trying to fix a mess that wasn't hers, before she left home the night before her wedding to Lucas Davenport. It was the first selfish act of her young life, and it was a doozy. Another Conlon trait she shared with her brother; if you're going to make a mistake, make it big and loud so that no one will be likely to forget it. Bridget had only ever wanted to be like her brother, so she left like he had; without a backwards glance, and headed to New York City, a place she'd only heard mentioned in passing. Ladies whispered about it out of their daughter's hearing, as if it were a particularly dirty word, a particularly dangerous idea. It wasn't a place where well bred young ladies like herself went. It was a place where (and here the ladies would lower their voices even further, they're cheeks coloring as they spoke) fast girls lived.
But she wouldn't come to be known as Rebel for no good reason, after all, and she was more like her brother than anyone could have anticipated.
The story of the Conlon siblings is usually told with reverence, as if they were more than human beings, more than a newsie leader and his pretty sister.
That's how the story is remembered---but that ain't exactly how it happened.