City of Dreams (113 page)

A couple of times Cuf actually raised the weapon. Once he came within a single breath of firing it. Then something else happened to distract him. Cuf wasn’t sure what. A bird, perhaps.

Dear God, Cuf, you wouldn’t do anything foolish? Promise me you wouldn’t.

Finally everyone was gone and Morgan was crossing the street and coming toward him. “Morning, Cuf.”

Morgan walked with a limp. The British had nearly killed him, Roisin said. That had to be why he needed the stick. And why one of his eyes didn’t seem to be entirely open, and why his left arm hung at his side. Not that any of it had kept him from lying over Roisin and planting his child in her belly. His second child.

“You going to use that or not?” Morgan was standing a foot away from Cuf now, looking straight at him. They were the only people left outside the tavern. Morgan nodded toward the pistol in Cuf’s hand. “I’ve been watching you and wondering, so you may as well tell me. Do you mean to kill me or don’t you?”

“I mean to.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought. Are you going to do it?”

Cuf didn’t answer.

“Will it make any difference if I say I’m sorry?” Morgan asked.

“Not much.”

“I know. But Roisin and I, we both are. If the war hadn’t happened, we’d probably never … When I came back that first time, Cuf. When I realized she was your woman, I had no intention of trying to get her back. And she wouldn’t have come if I had. It was just—” He broke off and shook his head. “The war,” he said finally. “It’s not an excuse. Only a reason.”

“How old’s your son?”

“Eighteen months. Joyful Patrick. Mighty strange name, but Roisin insisted.”

Cuf nodded. The pistol was still hanging heavy by his side.

“I hear your mother died.”

“Yes. The day the redcoats evacuated.” Morgan held up his walking stick. The wood was new, but the fancy top was not. “Recognize this?”

“The horse’s head I buried on Bedloe’s Island.”

“The very same. Cuf, did you ever know what was in it?”

“Some kind of paper, I figured. Didn’t weigh enough to be anything else.”

“But you never looked at it?”

“Never did. Back then I believed in getting the promise.”

Morgan smiled. “Too bad. If you’d read it and remembered what it said, we might both be some richer.”

“You wrote down what was in there, didn’t you? The directions for burying it, seemed to me they had to come from you.”

“They did. And you’re right, I wrote the note. But it’s gone, and these days”— Morgan gestured toward his own head—“I don’t remember things as well as I once did.”

“Anyway, with your mama dead you’re already a rich man. You going to move into her house? You and Roisin and your boy?”

“Never. I’m never going to live there again, Cuf. Roisin, either. I’ve let it to Isaac Sears. You remember Captain Sears.”

“From the Sons of Liberty. Of course. So you and Roisin, where are you—”

“Not the Fiddle and Clogs, Cuf. It’s your property. In fact, we won’t be in New York but a few more weeks. We’re going to China.”

“China?”

“The West Indies are finished for New York trade. The British plantation owners won’t buy our goods. But the East India Company can’t keep our ships out of the Orient now we’re independent. Some of us have gotten together and outfitted a three-masted merchantman, a real beauty.
Empress of China,
she’s called. Loaded to the gunnels with pelts and some root called ginseng. You can dig it up in the woods down in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Roisin doesn’t know much about it, if you can imagine that, but the Chinese think it cures just about everything. Pay a fortune for it, they will. We’re sailing for Canton soon as the Narrows and the harbor are free of ice.”

Poxed pistol was weighing down Cuf’s arm.
You wouldn’t do anything foolish? Promise me you wouldn’t.
He was stupid. Standing here talking when he should be taking the vengeance he was owed. “So you’re to be a sea captain again.”

“Not exactly. I’m taking the owner’s cabin.” Morgan made an awkward movement with his bad arm. “Can’t con a ship when you’re not in top form. But you, Cuf, you’ve come out of the war looking as fine as I’ve ever seen you. Are you—”

“You and Roisin, you going to be married?” She’d never married Cuf. She couldn’t have, of course. There were laws against a white woman marrying a mulatto.

“We are married, Cuf. Been so for more than a year.”

Holy God Almighty. Cuf felt the bile rise in his throat and feared he was going to puke up his guts right here in the street, make himself ashamed. Holy Jesus Christ.

“There’s a Jesuit priest in New York,” Morgan said. “Going to be a Catholic church, too, I’m told. Anyway, this Mr. Steenmayer, he married us. It’s Roisin’s religion, but it seemed all right to me. Cuf, give me the pistol.” Morgan stretched out his undamaged right arm. “Someone comes by, sees you holding it… There could be trouble.”

Because after all this bloody war, after all the killing and dying, there were still slaves and still masters. And everyone knew which was which. Cuf didn’t hand over the pistol, but he turned away and started walking.

“Cuf, wait. Where are you going? I don’t—”

Cuf raised the hand holding the weapon and fired it off straight over his head. Over both their heads.

“Cuf!”

Cuf heard steps coming after him. Uneven, off-balance steps. Morgan Turner could never catch him if he didn’t want to be caught. Morgan was a cripple. Cuf could take some satisfaction in that, maybe. But not much. Crippled or no, Morgan had Roisin.

III

March, three months after Evacuation Day, and the almshouse was chock-full. A few weeks after the British left, a new Assembly had been voted in, and a mayor elected to preside over a new Common Council. Soon the basic services were restored. Anyone who knew how to run them was expected to do the job. Andrew reckoned that was pretty much the reason he was still in charge of the City Hospital in the poorhouse. He was available and he knew how. And God knew there were plenty of sick poor.

Poverty and filth and disease: they seemed to go together. All those people crammed into Canvas Town, it was as if they passed their contagions and illnesses among themselves. Invisible worms. Maybe so.

A short time before he’d taken Lucas’s journals and Christopher’s notes out of the secret drawer in his desk and returned them to the bookshelf. The only thing in the drawer now was the paper he’d taken from Caleb Devrey. Andrew was still certain it contained directions for finding a treasure. Maybe someday he’d make the journey. Meanwhile, as soon as he had a few hours clear, he planned to read the medical material again from start to finish. The boy Preble, the way he’d revived after the blood transfusion, though Red Bess had died after the selfsame treatment… There was a good deal yet to learn.

“Here’s the last of them, Dr. Turner.” The man assigned to the orderly’s job pointed to the woman in the last bed. She’d been sent up to the hospital from the almshouse carding and weaving room, he explained. “Got a fierce throat, she has, and I expect a fever. And she can’t work the loom for the coughing as sets her shaking from head to toe.” As if to prove his point the woman began another siege of hacking and shivering.

Andrew could feel the heat radiating from the woman’s body before he touched her; nonetheless he put his palm against her forehead. A raging fever, as the orderly said. “You were re—” He broke off, hearing screams and shouts. “What’s that damnable noise?”

The orderly held a heavy tray containing Andrew’s instruments and supplies. He shifted from foot to foot. “Coming from outside it be, sir.”

“On the Common?”

“Aye, sir. Be a number o’ folks down there.”

“You don’t have any windows open, do you? The foul humors—”

“No windows open, Dr. Turner. None. Like ye always says.”

Andrew grunted approval. “Then how come the rabble on the Common can be heard up here?”

“There be a fair number of ’em, sir.”

“Yes. Must be.” He dismissed the noise and returned to his patient. Her lungs were filling up with fluid, he’d take a wager on it. He and his grandfather had opened dozens of corpses that demonstrated the fact. “Tartar emetic,” he said, reaching for the bottle and the dosing spoon. “Open your mouth, mistress. I’m going to help you bring up the sickness.” She’d vomit until her stomach was empty, and empty her bowels of everything they held. Tomorrow he’d bleed her. If she lived, she might recover.

“Grandfather, why can’t we open the chest while patients are alive? The way you do after they’re dead.”

“And do what, boy?”

“Suck the fluid out of the lungs.”

“Yes, I suppose that might help. But what you see me do here in this little dissecting room, peeling the skin and the muscles back from the rib cage, cracking the sternum to see better, no one could endure such pain and live, boy. Remember what Lucas Turner said, no such thing as painless surgery, so we’ll never open a belly or a chest.”

“But if we could, Grandfather…”

“If we could, Andrew, we might save many lives.”

Andrew turned and replaced the tartar emetic on the orderly’s tray. “You’ll have to spend the next few hours with her.” The man looked pained. “Better than going back to work breaking stones, isn’t it?”

“She be going to puke and shit for hours, that’s what you reckon, Doctor?”

“That’s what I reckon.” Andrew lifted the bottle he’d just used and checked the level. “In fact, most of them will.”

“Then I don’t be so sure it’s better.”

“Andrew Turner.” The voice came from a man standing in the doorway of the ward, holding a cloth over his nose against the stench of illness.

Andrew turned. “I’m Dr. Turner. Do I know you, sir?”

“Don’t matter if ye does or not. Yer to come with me.”

“On whose authority?”

“Theirs.” The man turned as he said it and motioned two others forward. They were armed with muskets and carried short swords at their waists.

“Bloody hell,” Andrew said softly. “I thought the army was gone.”

“Redcoat army is. Now we’re getting rid of the poxed Tories was brazen enough to stay behind.”

There had to be a hundred people on the Common, wedged into the flat stretch of meadowland between the powder house and the rear of the prison and the almshouse. No wonder he’d heard their shouts and screams even with the ward’s windows shut.

“Exactly what are you doing here? What do you want with me?”

They’d tied his hands behind his back and were pushing him forward. “Ye be seeing soon enough. Going to get the same as all them other Tories.”

He knew he should tell them that he wasn’t a Tory, that he never had been, but the words stuck in his throat. Bloody animals. Seven years in hell, risking his life, and the lives of his family, dragging his honor in the gutter doing the dirtiest job in the war, for what? So a horde of maniacal lunatics led by the same rabble-rousers who’d been in charge of the Sons of Liberty could take over the city and attack every decent principle that gentlemen defended. Hell would freeze over before he’d befoul himself by making explanations to such vermin.

Besides, they wouldn’t believe him.

The men with the muskets shoved him through the thick of the crowd. Hands grabbed at him, struck him, ripped at his clothes, and tugged at his hair. A few spat in his face. Screaming furies, they all were. Sweet Christ, as many women as men, and apoplectic with rage, most of them. Oh, Jesus God Almighty.

Straight ahead of him was a stake and beside it a roaring fire.

Andrew’s bowels churned and his heart thumped in his chest. He wouldn’t beg. They’d all grow horns before he’d do that. It was a filthy way to die. Filthy. But he wouldn’t beg for mercy, because he knew there was none to be had.

“This one’s next!” someone shouted.

Andrew stiffened himself and willed himself to walk upright to the burning place. Nothing happened. No one shoved him forward. Next didn’t mean him. It was an elderly man with thinning hair and a paunch, and clothes that had been fine until shortly before, when they were splattered with excrement and dirt. The man’s forehead was badly cut. A thrown stone, no doubt. Blood was dripping down his cheek.

It took Andrew a moment to put a name to the terrified figure. Yes, of course. Leominster Harmon. One of the sugar kings. Had a fine house on Wall Street. Thrived during the war, made a fortune supplying the British navy with rum. The poor benighted bastard. Should have had the sense to get out while he could. They all should have.

Harmon was roped to the stake. One of the men who seemed to be in charge of things went over to the fire. Probably to get coals to set the victim alight. The screams of the crowd were deafening. Harmon was moving his mouth as well. Praying, maybe. Yes, of course, Leominster Harmon was a Catholic, that’s why he’d stayed. Nothing could be worse than being a Catholic in Britain, except maybe being burned alive right here in New York. Oh Jesus God Almighty, give me the strength to die well. So when they hear about it, Meg and the children and my father, they can be proud.