City of Dreams (26 page)

Hours later Bess could still feel his hands gripping her waist. Dear Lord, what a long time it had been.

Four babies in five years Moses Smythe had fathered on her. By the time she was bearing Tamsyn she thought her belly would burst, so tender and tired of baby weight had it become. But the getting of them … ah, that had been so sweet. If Moses had lived she’d have gone on bearing him children until she dropped in her tracks. As many a woman had before her, except for some who were wiser. And more daring.

Tincture of nux vomica, mixed with a decoction of black bryony and a few grains of powdered aconite. Deadly poisons all, but if combined in exactly the right proportions and taken before the second month passed with no effusion of blood, cramps would occur that were terrible enough to make a woman scream aloud with the pain, and ofttimes strong enough to expel the babe from the womb.

Nux vomica was the dried seed of the poison nut tree and came from the East. It had to be bought from the spice dealers. The other herbs grew in the gardens Sally had made when she ripped out the old orchard and surrounded the house with the plants of her craft. As for the receipt, that, too, was part of Sally’s legacy. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not, as I know full well” had been the cryptic comment that went with the lesson. “But you should know the making of it, nonetheless. Only be careful, Bess. When it comes to this particular receipt, take exceptional care.”

She’d been a child of twelve at the time and she’d replied earnestly, “I will, Mama. I know those herbs are all poisons.”

“I’d have taught you nothing if you didn’t know that. It’s not the herbs you must guard against. Listen to me, child; all men are terrified of women who know this manner of expelling their seed. It means they cannot entirely control us. And mark my words, Bess, frightened men can be vicious beyond telling.”

How right Sally had been. The very midwifery oath Bess was constantly reciting to Hetje contained the clause “No midwife shall administer any medicine to produce miscarriage …” But clearly some did. And sometimes the decoction worked.

Take her brother Willem’s wife, for instance. Susannah had borne Willem no more than five children in the fourteen years they’d been wed, and only three of those survived. Must be she knew how to stop a babe growing inside her when that was what she wanted. Susannah with her laces and frills and fans hadn’t produced a brood so large they sucked her tits down to her belly. At thirty-one the bloody woman still had the high, firm pappes of a girl, not a sagging shelf like Bess’s. Of course that might be because Willem was such a dried-up fig of a man.

Her brother had been a skinny, pimple-faced youth who didn’t look as if he knew how to use the gift between his legs. Probably he’d never learned. Else, with a man to sleep beside her and all she had of this world’s goods, why would Susannah always look as if she needed a strong purge?

This Scotsman, however, he was something different.

Just remembering the feel of his hands on her waist when he swung her off the counter made Bess sure of it. Good. She wouldn’t wish a dried-up fig on her Tamsyn. Not when she thought of the hot sweetness of being abed with the girl’s father. But a virile young man with a degree in medicine, who would have cause to avail himself of every remedy that could be simpled in the only apothecary shop in New York City … And had she not heard that there were a few such university doctors in Philadelphia, and that they charged ten shillings a visit while a physician who had been apprenticed was paid only five … ?

A match worthy of serious thought. Not least because once she had Tamsyn wedded and bedded, she could stop worrying about the way bloody Christopher Turner mooned over the girl.

“I’ve had no truck with any that live under Lucas Turner’s roof,” Sally had whispered in her last minutes, holding tight to her daughter’s hand. “Not ever, Bess. Lucas sold me so he could have her. Not Ankel Jannssen’s seed, either. No truck. And nor must you.”

She had yet to find her half brother, but the means of fulfilling her second promise might have finally presented itself.

The day was chosen by Peter the Doctor. According to the
obeah
, the auspicious moments occurred during the first hours of the first day of April, which fell on a Thursday. Peter advised the time right after moonset, around two in the morning.

Kinsowa the Ibo made the plan. They would attack in the way his people had always made war on their enemies: create a distraction that would draw the warriors out of their stronghold, then kill them.

Finally, to make success absolutely certain, Peter the Doctor gave them a magic powder to rub on their bodies before they left their masters’ homes that night. And he promised to bring the fire, red-hot coals transported from his cabin in a covered tin bucket.

Seven of the original oath-takers had been sold to owners in other towns, even other colonies. One had died of an illness. Twenty-nine kept their word. They met in the field behind the Crooke house. It was the first time since the night they had sucked one another’s blood that they were all together. In the dark and the silence they dug up the butcher knives and the hatchets and the clubs they had buried. Three of them, the two Indians and one of the Africans, had even managed to steal their masters’ muskets. When they were all armed and ready, they made a circle around Kinsowa.

Quaco stepped forward. He was one of the Ashantis, the one whose woman had bitten off the head of the chicken. She was near to giving birth now, but she stood with them in the field beside her man, who didn’t look at her but thought instead of the son to come. The son who would be born free.

Quaco took the fire from Peter the Doctor. He had prepared a number of cloths soaked in pitch and he distributed them to six of the fastest runners. Amba, his woman, had wanted to be the first. She said it was her right because she had been the one to bite off the chicken’s head. Quaco agreed with her reasoning, but in her present condition it was not practical. The runners, he told her, had to move like the wind passing over the earth.

Quaco crouched down close to the earth and uncovered the fire brought by Peter the Doctor. His face shone in the red glow of the coals. “Come,” he whispered, looking around the assembly. “Come now. Rise up and come.”

For long seconds no one moved. So far everything they’d done would get them nothing but a whipping. This was different.

“Come,” Quaco repeated. In his homeland he had been the son of a king, born to rule. Here he had only his conviction to persuade them that having braved so much they must take the final step. “Come and make you free.”

Amba started to step forward, to again offer herself for the task. The first runner, shamed by the courage of a woman, pulled her aside and went to where Quaco squatted. He leaned down and held his pitch-soaked rag above the coals. A tongue of fire shot up and the cloth burst into flame. The man held it above his head and turned and raced toward the outbuilding they had chosen. His flaming torch was a shooting star crossing the sky. In seconds he had flung it into the timber barn. No sooner had he turned to run back to the others when the second torchbearer came. And after him the third. Six in all.

By the time the third fire carrier reached the small wooden building it was ablaze. Quaco, the son of an Ashanti king, had done his part. Kinsowa, the Ibo warrior chief, was again the leader. He motioned to the others and they began moving closer, padding silently across the field and into the orchard.

“Fire!” someone screamed. The sound came from the direction of the Crooke house. “Fire! Sound the alarm!”

Moments later the great bell by the side of the road started clanging. At the same time the family ran out of the house and began streaming toward the orchard. The Crookes’ slaves came as well, roused from their sleep by the cry of fire.

“Kinsowa, listen to me,” Peter the Doctor whispered urgently. “We don’t kill our own.” He grabbed the other man’s arm. “You hear me, African? We don’t kill our own kind. It’s bad magic.”

Until they put him in the slave fortress in Guinea, Kinsowa had never seen a white face. He was captured by black men, sold by other black men, from tribes that had always been the enemies of his people. But in the year since he was brought to the slave fortress, since he was stuffed into the Guinea ship and chained in one tiny space where he must always stand, never sit or lie down, and eat and sleep and relieve himself without moving in the stifling dark, in the time since he was hauled out of that ship and put on the block and sold, in those twelve months Kinsowa had learned to recognize the enemy who was above all other enemies. That’s why he had been willing to drink the blood of Fantis and Ashantis and all the rest who were not his people. Because he had learned that the true enemy was white.

“No black,” he whispered, using the few words of English he’d learned since coming to this terrible place. “Kill no black.”

“Good,” Peter the Doctor whispered. “Good. Pass the word.”

The people hurrying to fight the fire were all in the orchard now, babbling and shouting and trying to organize themselves into a line for passing buckets of water from the well to the burning barn. The Crookes naturally, but also people who lived in houses close enough to see the flames before they heard the alarm. They came with their own buckets, ready to help with putting out the fire. And since every live body was required, they had brought their slaves.

There were twenty-odd whites—including five women and three children— and eleven blacks among the firefighters. And still hidden, the twenty-eight oath-takers. Who alone were armed.

Kinsowa stepped forward and raised his fist to the sky. There was no moon, but the light from the burning building gleamed on the butcher knife he held.
“Hah-noooo,”
Kinsowa cried in a single, breathless yell that came from somewhere deep in his belly.
“Hah-fawaaah.”
Those were the war words his people had used for as long as anyone knew, and even those who did not recognize their meaning heard menace in the sound.

“What the bloody hell!” The white who was standing closest to Kinsowa saw the slave materialize like a spirit out of the black night. “Hey, boy! Who do you belong to? What do you—”

Kinsowa slashed the white’s throat before he could finish the sentence. The man fell.

It was not enough.

An orgy of killing had erupted all around him. Kinsowa could smell the hot blood as it spilled and the stink of bowels loosened by terror. Still it was not enough.

He plunged his knife into the heart of the man whose throat he’d slit. For the time in the slave fortress. He ripped open the man’s belly. For the horror of the Guinea ship. He slashed at the man’s genitals. For making him stand on a block and be sold with a collar around his neck like an ox yoked to a plow.

A woman at the top edge of the orchard, up near the house and the well, was the first of those not in the thick of the mêlée to realize what was happening. She heard the tone of the shouts change, and she smelled the fear and the blood rising on the breeze, overcoming the smell of smoke and cinders. The woman grabbed a young boy standing frozen with terror beside her. He, too, had begun to realize that this was not a fire like any other he had seen. This was Armageddon, come to claim them all, just like the preachers said.