City of Dreams (107 page)

Edward Preble had opened his eyes and was looking at them.

“Here, take a look. Getting it brought me this close to a noose.” Andrew held up a thumb and forefinger that almost touched.

Sam Devrey took the dun-colored booklet and flipped it open. He held it closer to the moonlight penetrating the chinks in the rocks above their heads, and studied the first page. “Holy God Almighty! It’s the flag code for the bloody English fleet, that’s all! I don’t believe it. Bloody marvelous, Andrew!”

“Keep your voice down. The redcoats are right above us.”

The cousins were in the old storage cellar below the remains of Christopher Turner’s house on Hall Place. The house was a charred ruin, but the fire had not touched the meat storage room that Ankel Jannssen had dug below his butcher shop over a hundred years before.

The dark was filthy, rank with the smells of rats and June heat, and with the fear neither man could entirely suppress. They had made their plans back in ’76:

“One to side with the British and take every advantage doctoring allows. The other to join Washington’s army. Are we agreed?” Sam had asked.

Andrew had hesitated only a moment. “We’re agreed.”

It was three days after the Declaration had been read, and they’d been in a slop shop where neither was known. It was Sam who had called the meeting, but it was Andrew who flipped the Connecticut penny that would decide the matter, and Andrew who called the toss. “If it lands with the writing uppermost, I take the British part.”

The copper landed on the table between them. Neither man had to lean forward to read the stamped words, I
am good copper.

“Sweet Christ,” Andrew had said, staring at the coin. “So I’m to be a Tory, as well as the man all my colleagues most love to hate. I didn’t think I’d mind so much.”

“Don’t mind. Remember what’s really behind the ill will of our distinguished medical brotherhood. Hell, Andrew, they’re so envious of your skills they piss green when they hear your name. There’s not a man among them has a quarter of your reputation for healing, and they know it.”

“I just wish—”

Sam had touched his arm. “We all wish a lot of things. Now’s not the time. We’ll get the job done first.”

“I shall do it to the best of my ability,” Andrew had promised.

And he had done it as well as he knew how: played out the charade with Sam that night in Bolton’s, after he was practically the only doctor in New York who didn’t volunteer to serve with Washington’s army and every gossip in town called him a coward or a traitor. Swallowed every instinct that made him despise the role of Judas, never letting on to anyone what he really believed. Not Meg. Not his children. Not even his aging, legless father. Except for Sam Devrey and George Washington, there wasn’t a human being alive who knew that Andrew Turner was as passionate and committed a rebel as any man in America. “Yes, flag code,” he said now. “That’s why I sent for you.”

Their meetings were arranged by James Rivington, the printer of the weekly
Gazette.
Every issue of the paper bore the king’s arms on the masthead, but when the third word of the second paragraph on the paper’s front page was “come,” Sam Devrey knew he must sneak into the enemy camp and meet his cousin in the old meat cellar. The number of paragraphs in the first column of the next page told him the number of days to wait before making the attempt. The time of the meeting was always the same: midnight.

Rivington had started out a true Tory, but he’d come over to the rebels within six months of the start of the occupation. He didn’t, however, know who else in New York was spying for the rebels. Better that way, they all agreed. What you didn’t know you couldn’t tell, however much you were tortured. Rivington collected his instructions for the secret codes from prearranged hiding places that varied according to the week of the month.

“Absolutely worth coming tonight.” Sam flipped the pages of the booklet Andrew had discovered aboard the
Laurel.
“Listen to this, ’Private Signals by Day for the Ships of His Majesty’s Line,’ and these pictures below …”

“I know. I studied it well.”

The booklet was full of sketches of flags, carefully divided into segments and colored red and blue, or left natural to indicate white. “The meaning changes according to whether it’s Monday or Tuesday and so forth,” Andrew said. “Also, whether it’s night or day.”

“But now that it’s been stolen, won’t they change the code?”

“I’m betting they won’t. For one thing, I don’t think this was a booklet in daily use. I think it’s some kind of fallback copy the
Laurel’s
captain put by for himself. For another, if he did discover it was missing, I’m guessing he’s not the sort of man could bring himself to own up to losing it.”

Sam shook his head in wonder. “It’s a bloody marvel, Andrew. Worth every risk you took.”

As if Sam’s risk didn’t matter. Or Rivington’s. As if what any of them were doing was simple.

Sam put his hand on Andrew’s shoulder. “Stop looking so grim. We’re going to win, you know. And already … You wouldn’t believe how things are outside the city, Andrew.”

“I would. I hear they’re terrible. Bands of runaway slaves preying on the patriot farms. And that half-Jew wretch, Oliver De Lancey … I’m told he’s head of something he calls Refugees. Marauders, more like. Causing all kinds of mayhem.”

“Worse,” Sam said, closing the booklet and tucking it inside his tattered shirt. His face was blacked with dirt, he wore clogs rather than boots, and a clever artifice made him look hunchbacked. “Much of that part is worse than anything you’ve heard. Especially now Ben Franklin’s wretched Tory son’s put together his Associated Loyalists. Animals, all of them. But there’s nothing new about rape and murder and pillage, cousin. Wars have always been the same. What’s new is that we’ve a constitution for the State of New York. The State, mind you, not the bloody king’s province. Constitution says there’s to be elections for governor, not royal appointments. And they’re to be decided by secret ballot, mind you. No more lining up in a field where everyone can find out what you think. And jury trials, same as back in London. No religion to be official, but all comers free to practice whatever mumbo jumbo their superstitious beliefs demand.” Sam grinned, and in the moonlight his teeth gleamed white against his blackened skin.

“You think that’s better? Everyone choosing his own God?”

“’Course it is. Who’s to say the King knows any more about the hereafter than the rest of us do?”

Over their heads the footsteps of a redcoat patrol could be heard marching by. “There they go,” Andrew said when the sound faded. “And us right after. Who’s to leave first?”

“You go,” Sam said. “Hurry home to your pretty wife. There’s no one waiting for me. Only …”

“Yes. What?”

“Blood transfusion,” Sam murmured, tapping the part of his shirt that covered the codebook. “God, I can hardly believe it. Just like Christopher Turner did with old Red Bess?”

“The very same.”

“But she died.”

“Believe me, I thought of it all the while I was on that miserable ship. Edward Preble, however, thrived. It was truly like watching a miracle, Sam. A minute and a half, no more, and he opened his eyes. And second after second, he just kept getting better. Two hours later, by the time I left their poxed ship, he was sitting up and eating his dinner.”

“Amazing. What’s the explanation, do you think? For him living and Red Bess dying, I mean.”

“No idea. Except that we all know treatments work sometimes and don’t work others.”

“Indeed. Well, I’m glad the gods smiled on you, Cousin Andrew. Would have been a pity to lose such a gallant ally.”

“I rather think so myself, Cousin Samuel.” Then, just before he climbed up to what had once been the alley behind his grandfather’s Hall Place house, and was now simply a passage through the scarred remains of the old Nieuw Amsterdam neighborhood, Andrew paused. “Sam, tell me something. When this is all over, when we’ve won—”

“We will win, you know.” Devrey patted his chest again. “This will help ensure it.”

“I know. And you and I will be back drinking in Bolton’s before you know it.”

“Exactly.”

“So tell me, when that happy day arrives, will you still support two hospitals in the city?”

“Of course.”

“But why? It doesn’t make sense. All along I thought you were only doing it because of your opposition to me.”

“I was.”

“Then why pick me to be part of this scheme?”

“Because I knew you not only had the skill for the job, you had the guts. Doesn’t change the fact that after we’ve whupped their arses I shall go back to pissing green whenever I’m told what a magnificent doctor you are.”

III

Dawn of the following Tuesday. The wooden wagon piled high with bodies arrived on Duane Street just as Roisin did. She ducked into the shadows of a door across the road from the Rhinelander sugarhouse, clinging to her basket, not wanting to see but unable to look away.

Just as Dr. Turner had predicted, when the prison ships were full, captured rebels were kept in the city. The New Gaol on the Common, the Middle Dutch Church on Nassau Street, and the North Dutch Church on William had all been pressed into the filthy service, and three of the town’s ten sugarhouses as well. Each day the dead cart made the rounds.

Two red-coated guards swung open the wide doors once used for rolling out kegs of rum. Five new bodies were added to the heap on the wagon. It was the prisoners had to bring out any who had died during the night, otherwise the corpses were left to rot where they lay. Holy Virgin, help them. The way things were inside, it was a wonder any of the men were strong enough to do the hauling and tossing.

“God damn you to everlasting hell, Joshua Loring.” Roisin whispered the same thing a dozen times a day as she went about the city. “May devils burn out your eyes and put hot pokers in your flesh. May you suffer eternal torment.”

Joshua Loring was the Boston Tory in charge of providing for the prisons. Two years before, in ‘77, all New York heard how Loring offered his wife to General Howe in return for a blind eye where certain business dealings were concerned. They all knew Howe had accepted the bargain. Nothing had changed when Clinton took charge; must be he got a share of the profit. Didn’t the Holy Virgin herself know Loring had made a fortune twice over supplying the black market run by the quartermasters and barracksmasters of the poxed British army? Meanwhile, once a day, guards tossed a few hunks of salt beef crawling with maggots, and some loaves of bread covered with mold, on the floor of the prisons. It was up to the men to fight over them.

“Unending hellfire, Joshua Loring. Forever and ever, amen.” Roisin whispered the prayer aloud and openly sealed it with the sign of the cross. Hatred had made her that bold.

“Any more to come?” the driver of the dead cart shouted.

“No more until tomorrow. On your way.” The redcoats swung closed the sugarhouse doors. The driver clucked a signal to his horse and the wooden wheels clattered off over the cobbles. Roisin waited until the wagon had turned the corner, then pasted a smile on her face and crossed the road.

“Good morning, Mistress Healsall. Come to look after your charges, have you?” She was a regular. None of the guards demanded to see her pass.

“I have.”

“Then in you go. And mind you, lift your skirts and show off your pretty ankles. That way the hem won’t turn brown.” He guffawed when he said it. Same as he’d done every time for the last four years. Stupid bloody man. Wicked. They were all wicked. The devil was in them. Eternal hellfire wasn’t near bad enough.

The stench was appalling. The sugarhouse was five stories tall, each floor a cavernous open space built for storing vast quantities of sugar and turning it into rum. Now it was crammed with men—no, half-starved skeletons—who lay in their own excrement and vomit, sometimes scratching a final message on the stone walls with their fingernails before they died.

She did what she could. God knows it was little enough. “Mostly,” she’d told Andrew Turner, “I just let them know there are still human beings in the world. A smile’s as much as I can provide, more often than not.”

She couldn’t help feeling sorry for Dr. Turner as well, even though she despised his Tory ideas. The war had made him gaunt-cheeked and stooped. And hadn’t his fair hair turned white, and weren’t his eyes always shadowed black with fatigue? Andrew Turner seemed weighed down with despair. Still, every time they met she railed at him because there was no one else. “And there’s nothing you can do? You’re Clinton’s private physician now, as you were Howe’s. Surely you can tell him the prisoners must have decent food. They’re starving. Dying like animals, without even fresh air to breathe.”

Usually she’d break off about then because of the way he looked at her, his eyes begging to be spared more details. And because sometimes she entertained the notion that Andrew Turner wasn’t what he seemed.

The idea had come to her the day she brought Clare to his surgery, and she’d never entirely gotten it out of her mind. If she was right, there was no way he could argue on behalf of the prisoners. There was too much at stake. And the truth was that nothing Dr. Turner could say would change anything.