City of Dreams (24 page)

The problem seemed to be in the brass valve he’d had made at the smith’s. It had a nozzle at either end and was divided by a movable partition made of lead and controlled by a thumb screw. Meant to regulate the flow of blood between the pig bladder and the glass tube, the partition was proving totally ineffective. Christopher turned the screw as far as it would go, but still the blood gushed forth. The old man was struggling to breathe. His skin had gone from pasty white to ghostly blue. “Bloody hell! Don’t die, you daft old bugger. Don’t you dare die.”

“Sorry, Chris.” Jeremy had moved in closer and was looking over Christopher’s shoulder. “Looks to me as if this one’s spent as much time with you as he cares to. And sweet Jesus, does he stink.”

“The flow is too fast. If I can slow it down, he—”

“Good God, man, you never give up. What is it this time? More calf’s blood?”

“No.” The valve wouldn’t close. The thumb screw was jammed. “Bloody smith. Can’t do a damned simple thing like—”

“Squirrel and pigeon? That was the mix about three corpses back, wasn’t it?”

“Four. This is neither. Dog.”

“Dog!”

“Yes.”

“Whose dog?”

“Does it matter?” Christopher gave up on the screw and began pinching the bladder, trying to decrease the rate of flow at the source. There was a chattering sound from the throat of the man on the bed.

“No,” Jeremy said, “actually it doesn’t matter. Your patient is no longer with us, Mr. Turner.”

Christopher looked from the pig bladder to the man on the burlap-covered cot. Jeremy was right. Dead. Definitely. He shrugged. “Poor old bugger. But he didn’t have a chance anyway. Though God knows, I did everything I could.” He began dismantling his apparatus, being particularly careful of the valve. It was still usable, though he’d need to get the smith to make some changes. “What are you doing here, anyway? Why were you looking for me?”

“To take you to the Nag’s Head. The new year is two days old. It’s time we drank its health.”

“I have no interest in going to the Nag’s Head, and not much interest in the health of the new year. I’m a surgeon, remember. Illness makes my living.”

“It’s liable to make your jailing. At the very least, a trip to the whipping cage. I wonder how the town fathers would take to the idea of your experiments in their hospital. Or the clergy. They’ll be denouncing you from every pulpit in New York if they get the chance, Chris. You’ll be famous.”

“‘Infamous’ is the word. Look, Jeremy, I know you don’t approve of my experiments, but you wouldn’t say any—”

“Don’t be a jackass. Of course I wouldn’t. I simply want you to take an interest in something besides your odd ideas about putting blood in people rather than taking it out. Come with me, Chris. You’ll have a fine time once you do. You know you will.”

Christopher shook his head. “No, I won’t. Not today.” He looked at his dead patient. “I don’t think he ever realized I really was doing the best I could for him. Damn it, Jeremy, this should work. It does work. They were transfusing blood successfully in France nearly seventy-five years past.”

“But they’re not doing it now. Not in Paris or anywhere else.”

“I can’t say. Perhaps—”

“Perhaps nothing, Chris. It was a disaster. You told me so yourself.”

“Not entirely. Of course there were a few deaths. Such as I’ve had. It’s inevitable that any new technique—”

“It’s not new. You just said as much. It’s a failed technique, Christopher. Come on, man. Let’s get out of this charnel house. There’s a good time waiting to be had.”

“Hang on a minute.” Christopher leaned over his patient, lifted the arm that had not been amputated, and began palpating the vein in the crook of the elbow.

“He’s dead, Chris.”

“I know.”

“Then why—”

“Something’s just occurred to me. Jeremy, after a man’s dead, until the body stiffens, his blood is still liquid in his veins, is it not?”

“I presume it must be. Where could it go?”

“Nowhere. So one could collect it—draw it out exactly as I’ve drawn the blood of the various creatures I’ve been using until now.”

“Sweet Jesus. You’re not serious, Christopher. You can’t be thinking of using human blood?”

“I am serious. And it’s been done before. Pope Innocent I think it was. Somewhere around fourteen-ninety-something. They put the blood of four little boys into—”

“Of course! What black arts wouldn’t they practice in Rome? We’re Protestants. We’re supposed to know better.”

“I think Denis used human blood at the Sorbonne as well. When he successfully transfused three people. And why not? Give me one reason why it wouldn’t work.”

“Because it’s unnatural. It’s like … like cannibalism. Some savage eating the heart of his enemy. What do you propose, Chris? Putting the blood of a Quaker or an Anabaptist into the veins of an Anglican bishop? Good God, man, don’t you see how contrary to nature that is?”

“Calm down.” Christopher bent forward and closed the old man’s eyes. “It was just a thought. It’s difficult enough getting animal blood. I’ve no idea where I’d get the human variety. Very well, let’s go before the rest of your rowdy friends have drunk the Nag’s Head dry.”

When he stood Chris almost touched the attic ceiling. At twenty-two years of age he was just under six feet. Easily the tallest man in New York. That and his straight, coal-dark hair had earned him a nickname: the Black Giant. Mothers were known to point him out on the street when their children misbehaved. But when he stretched out one long arm to reclaim the tricorn hanging on a nail in the wall, clamped the hat on his head, and draped the other arm around his friend’s shoulders, Christopher Turner looked like any other young man concerned with having a good time. He even smiled. “Listen, I was thinking. Perhaps we might go by way of Pearl Street.”

“I might. You might not. Red Bess will spot you.”

“Yes, probably. I meant you could go that way. Put your head into the apothecary shop. Only for a moment, Jeremy. Before we go on to the tavern.”

“The Nag’s Head is more than a tavern, my lad. It’s a palace of supreme pleasure. It is not, however, best reached by way of Pearl Street.”

“I know, but Red Bess doesn’t know where we started from. Besides, she has no reason to suspect you.”

“Wrong. She does suspect me. Because I’m your friend.”

“But she can’t—”

Jeremy chuckled. “Earnest Chris. Don’t know when you’re being teased. Never have and never will. Of course I’ll stop by the apothecary shop. I’ll march myself in the front door and ask for Mistress Tamsyn and say her cousin Christopher is wanting to arrange a tryst. Will tonight do? Sometime after dark, of course. After her mother—”

Christopher grabbed his friend by the arm and began dragging him toward the stairs. It wasn’t difficult: Jeremy Clinton was small, fair, of a delicate, almost frail build. The youngest son of one of a pair of lawyering brothers, Jeremy was apprenticed to the firm, but it was hard to imagine him arguing a case before a jury. He would never be taken seriously.

They were nearly out the door when Christopher remembered he hadn’t raised the black flag. Unless he did the bellmen would have no way of knowing there was a corpse to be collected and buried in the potter’s field out by the Common. He got the banner, unfurled it, and pushed it firmly into the holder by the window. A strong wind snapped it into a stiff, familiar statement of death. “There, no way they can miss that. Maybe for a change they won’t leave the body here until it rots.”

II

Red Bess. That was what the whole town called her. She was forty-seven, the elder of the two children Jacob Van der Vries had fathered on Sally Turner. Bess had Jacob’s red hair, but she had Sally’s wit and Sally’s grit. She was a woman afraid of nothing and no one, certainly not of a toothless old slave who stayed in her tiny room at the top of the house on Pearl Street, not doing much except sitting and dreaming and waiting to die.

Hetje was sixty-five, possibly older—she wasn’t entirely sure what year she’d been born—and Bess’s great fear was that the slave would die before she told the truth. That was why once or twice every day she stomped up to Hetje’s room and slammed the door and threatened the old woman with all kinds of mischief, not just here but in the hereafter.

“You took an oath and you broke it, so you’re going to hell. Going to burn for all eternity, you are, Hetje. Forever and ever. In fires so hot you can’t even imagine them.”

“Hetje never swore no oath.”

“Yes, you did. Doesn’t matter whether or not you knew. You swore. The governor said so—he wrote it down in a law.” She had quoted that code to Hetje so many times Bess knew it by heart. “‘No woman shall exercise the employment of midwife until she have taken oath.’ That’s what the law says, Hetje. So you are sworn, and you broke your oath and you’re going to hell.”

“Hetje be no midwife. Hetje be a good slave who—”

“You’re a lying slave, Hetje. You birthed me, didn’t you? And my brother, Willem, and my three dead sons, God rest their souls, and my daughter, Tamsyn. Well, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but only because the mistress—”

“See, you’re convicted out of your own mouth. You’re a midwife because you birthed us all. Including the one you took away. And it says in the midwife’s sworn oath that she will not ‘suffer any woman to claim any other woman’s child for her own, nor collude to keep secret the birth of a child, nor keep secret the birth of bastards.’ So it’s eternal fire for you, Hetje. Forever and ever and ever.”

“Never swore no oath. Only did what the mistress—”

“All her life my mother grieved over that child, and you never told her what happened to him.”

“Yes I did. I told Mistress Sally and I’m telling you. Hetje be doing exactly what Mistress said. Took that baby up to the compound. Had to. He don’t be a white baby. The master wouldn’t let—”

“But there wasn’t anyone at the compound the right age. Mama went there. She asked. She tried to buy a little boy who’d been born when her baby was born, but there wasn’t any such boy, Hetje, because—”

“Because they be selling him to someone else first. How many times I need to tell you the same thing, Miss Bess? That little boy, he be five by the time your mama went looking for him. Lots of times by then they be already sold.”

That was true enough. Mama had waited for five years after her first child was born, when Bess was four and Willem was three. A short time after Papa was found hanging from the old scarecrow gibbet down by the waterfront, covered in pitch.

Killed himself, people said. Jacob Van der Vries climbed up on a stack of wooden crates, put the noose around his own neck, and kicked the crates away. They said the devil got into him and made him do it. Must have been the devil that poured black pitch over his corpse, as well.

So after she had him cut down Sally had to bury Jacob in the potter’s field well north of the town, near the burying place for Negroes and Jews. All because the churches said Jacob Van der Vries was a suicide, and not one of them would let him lie in hallowed ground. Which didn’t bother her overmuch, considering everything else.

After it was done, that was when Sally began trying to buy a little boy slave.

She said she was looking for a child born in the autumn of 1664, right after the English came, but she was never able to find exactly what she wanted. For a long time she haunted the compound and went to every slave auction in New York. Later, when the little boy she’d been looking for would have grown up into a man, she took to stopping slaves in the street and looking deep into their eyes. “When I find the one I want, I’ll know him,” she used to say. But she never did.

The night Bess’s first child was born, Sally confided her secret grief to her daughter. After Hetje helped Bess deliver her son and Sally laid the child in her daughter’s arms, her mother sent Hetje from the room. She told Bess the tale of the rape, of why she’d had no choice but to send her son to the slave compound. And, she said, she would never stop looking for him.

Sally rested her palm on the head of her newborn grandson, and looked into her daughter’s eyes. “Never,” she whispered. “As long as I draw breath, I’ll never stop grieving and looking.” And, in 1697, when Sally was sixty years old and on her deathbed, she held Bess’s hand and made her promise to continue the quest. “Find your half brother. Tell him I’m sorry. Swear you will.”

Bess swore.

Hetje knew something. Bess was sure of it. Sally had been devoted to her slave and had never questioned Hetje’s word. Bess did. She had four slaves of her own, left to her when her husband died. They lived in a shed out behind the house, but Hetje she kept under the family roof. Bess fed the old woman and clothed her, and looked after her as Sally would have wished. And every day she demanded the truth. It was a war of wills between mistress and slave, and any weapon was permitted. “You swore an oath, Hetje.”

“Never swore no oath. Not a midwife. Just be doing what Mistress Sally say.”

The bell on the shop door rang. Even here, at the top of the house, Bess heard it. No matter if she’d left one of the slaves or even her daughter, Tamsyn, minding the old simpling room that had become an apothecary shop; like Sally before her, as soon as she heard the bell Bess rushed to see who had come and what they might wish to buy.

She’d already pulled open the door of Hetje’s room and gathered up her skirt and her petticoats in preparation to run down the stairs, but she had to have the final word. “You swore an oath, Hetje, and unless you tell what you did you’ll go to hell and burn for all eternity.”