City of Dreams (36 page)

There were things he’d experienced once or twice with the Princes Street whores, things he would never do to Jane or expect from her. But with Amba … Still kneeling beside her he leaned forward and tangled his fingers in the lush thatch of her pubic hair, then, using both his hands, he opened her legs.

She had no vulva.

The labia, both major and minor, had been entirely removed, sliced away in what appeared to be a single sweep of the knife. And afterward, judging from the scar, the wound had been sewn tightly shut, leaving only a tiny opening for the demands of nature. God knows how she must have been torn when she gave birth. Now she had healed into a wide and gnarled ridge of flesh stretching from her mons pubis almost to her rectum.

Christopher stared at the brutal disfigurement. It was many seconds before he could look at her and be sure his face did not betray his horror.

Horror apparently didn’t enter into it for Amba. Certainly not shame. She was smiling at him again, a broad smile of immense satisfaction. Her large dark eyes and her white teeth gleamed in the firelight. “Amba a queen,” she said softly. “Master see proof now. Amba a queen.”

Someone was knocking on the door of the study. “Master, you come now. Midwife Hancock, she say to tell you it’s time to come. Baby’s here, Master! Baby’s here!”

Christopher staggered to his feet, ran his hands through his hair, swallowed hard, and finally found a somewhat normal voice. “I’m coming. Tell your mistress I’ll be there in a moment.”

“Come quick, Master! Mistress make you a little boy. Midwife Hancock say you come—”

“Yes, yes. I heard you. I’ll be right there.”

“Well, is it working out?” Jeremy asked.

Chris raised his tankard and took a long pull of ale before he answered. “It’s wonderful of course, but it does rather change the character of a man’s household.”

For a moment Jeremy stared at him, uncomprehending; then he grinned. “Ah, I understand. You mean the birth of young Luke. I was referring to the purchase of your expensive black pigeon and her fledgling.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.”

“Frankly, it’s not. Working out, as you put it. I’m thinking of sending her away.”

“For God’s sake, man, you paid a fortune for the wench! Not that I have the least idea why.”

“Nor have I, to be perfectly honest. It just seemed unbearably cruel to separate her and the child like that. But she unnerves Jane. She says just looking at Amba curdles her milk. I’ll have to do something. I need to find somewhere she’s wanted, and where they’ll let her keep her daughter.”

“You never will, Chris. And if you did, you’d never get your money back.”

“I know. I don’t expect to. Not that I couldn’t use it.”

Jeremy looked away. They were in the place where his father and his uncle did most of their legal business, a large and comfortable room in the front of the Clinton mansion on the corner of the Broad Way and Little Queen Street. “Am I to take it that the purchase of the Hanover Square property is … Well, you know …”

“At a loss for words, Jeremy? You? Allow me to say it for you. My plan to elevate my station is now out of the question. Buying Amba has beggared me.”

Jeremy lifted a document from the corner of the small desk his father and uncle had assigned him, rolled it tightly, and shoved it into a pigeonhole. “Pity. I was quite looking forward to actually lawyering a transaction. And the grand place would have suited you. Did I tell you I’m now absolutely certain that it, not the house next door, is the property Captain Kidd occupied for a time? Sixteen-eighty-one to ’eighty-two, I think. Something like that, anyway.”

“Pity. Jane will be doubly disappointed. She was all set to have the slaves digging up the garden looking for buried treasure.”

Equally a pity for him. Christopher had set his heart on the Hanover Square house. He’d already made a sketch to take to the smith and planned the inscription of the sign he would order. Christopher Turner, Surgeon. A simple proclamation that Lucas Turner’s grandson lived with his wife and his child in fashionable Hanover Square, in a four-story, twelve-room brick house overlooking the leafy greenery of the small park in the middle, among the most prosperous of the gentlemen of New York City. In, if anyone cared to notice, a rather better house than was occupied by Zachary Craddock, M.D., even now that he’d moved into his mother-in-law’s substantial old place on Pearl Street.

Jeremy saw his friend’s disappointment. “Chris, are you quite sure? I mean, there are ways these things can be managed. You know I’ve no money my father doesn’t control, but perhaps your cousin Will … Some sort of mortgage loan.”

“Out of the question. For one thing, I doubt he’d do it. The family is still in at least a theoretical state of war, whatever good Bess wrote in her will. For another, it’s not just the sum I paid for Amba that’s left me scratching. I’ve seen barely ten patients all this month. And not many more the month before that.”

“Yes, well …”

“Well what? Damn it, Jeremy, is the entire city of New York so bloody stupid they think I killed the woman because she gave me the rough side of her tongue when I was a lad trying to court her daughter? Does a preposterous tale become less so when it’s told with a Scots burr?”

“Fair questions, I suppose.”

“Good. Then tell me the answers.”

Jeremy went to the window and opened it. The soft June evening was sweet with the smell of honeysuckle from the King’s Arms across the road. The sound of music—a hammer dulcimer and a flute—drifted on the breeze. People in the town said Jeremy Clinton’s fondness for wine and song were the result of his growing up in direct view of the most fashionable tavern in the city. But when his father built the house a quarter-century before, Little Queen Street was a bucolic retreat. Back then people said the attorney was mad to move his young family so far north of the wall.

Then, when Jeremy was five, the country inn and tavern had gone up across the way. And this past May the Broad Way had been graded from Maiden Lane to the flat land known as the Common, once so far from the town it had seemed safe to put the powder house there and declare it a burial place for Jews and Negroes.

The grading made it official: the city of New York stretched a generous mile from the fort. The Clintons’ front door no longer opened on a wide dirt path at the top of a steepish rise. The house looked out on a broad and flat cobblestone road bordered on either side with a prim row of newly planted shade trees. At the moment the road was empty, but the tavern sounded as if it was doing a lively business. Jeremy turned back to his friend. “Do you fancy going over the way for some punch? I daresay if we’re careful we can get across the cobbles without being knocked down by old man Beekman’s coach. That’s why they did this bit of stonework, you know. So fat old Beekman could drive his grand imported rig from the fort to his farm without having to—”

“What I fancy, Jeremy, is for you to tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I already have. A mug of punch and a song or two. Maybe even a sight of—”

“Fat old Beekman’s coach whizzing over the cobblestones. Yes, Jeremy, so you said. But that’s not what you’re thinking. Come, I know you too well. We’re not done with the subject of poor Bess’s tit, are we?”

“I’d as leave be done with it. But as for the rest of the town, no, they are not.” Jeremy returned to his desk. “Look, it’s not killing Bess by cutting off her pappe that folks hold against you.”

“I didn’t—”

Jeremy held up his hand. “All right. I know. And you’ve made such a reputation with the knife that nearly everyone would give you the benefit of the doubt on that score. But the other—” He broke off, shrugged. “You know how people are.”

“I take it,” Christopher said softly, “you’re telling me that what disturbs the good folk of New York City is the notion of the transfusion of blood.”

“Exactly. Damn, Chris, I did warn you. I can’t count the times I told you it was a fool’s idea.”

“It nearly saved her, Jeremy. No, don’t look at me like that. It’s the truth. When I infused my blood into her veins she was remarkably revived. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Listen to yourself! Chris, you’re the stubbornest man in America, I swear it. The woman’s dead. She died with her own daughter looking on, watching you do that … that despicable thing you did.”

For most of the conversation Christopher had watched Jeremy pace back and forth between the desk and the window while he sat in his chair, with his ale in his hand and his long legs stretched out in front of the cold fireplace. Now he got up and deliberately walked the length of the room and restored the empty tankard to the tray on the sideboard. It gave him a few seconds to think. “Despicable,” he said finally. “Is that what you really believe, Jeremy? That I am to be despised for what I did?”

“No, of course not. I mean … I know you don’t see it that way.” Only a slight hesitation in the words, but enough.

“I see. Very well; acting as my lawyer, then, advise me.”

“I can’t.”

“Why in bloody hell not? Tell you what, I’ll advise myself. I suggest I make a statement and have it cried from every corner of the town. I, Christopher Turner, have done nothing to countermand the surgeon’s oath to do no violence or cruelty to the body of any. That should do it. What say you, lawyer?”

“That your statement won’t do any good. It’s a bloody waste of time, and the money you’d pay the scriveners and the criers. Tamsyn and her husband are two voices. You have only one.”

“And the fact that I was born and raised in this place, that everyone who knows me also knew my father and grandfather before me … You’re telling me that counts for nothing against the accusations of a medical doctor from Edinburgh?”

“It doesn’t. Not when—”

“When what? Sweet Jesus, Jeremy. You’ve something else on your mind. Spit it out.”

“Craddock says it’s not just what you did to his mother-in-law that so disturbs him. It’s what you did to the whole of the city, particularly to the Crookes and their unfortunate neighbors.”

“The Crookes? Jeremy, what new madness is this? What am I supposed to have done?”

“The revolt. Craddock says you had word of it before it happened and you warned no one. He says you admitted as much in front of him and Tamsyn and their old slave Hetje.”

Christopher stood where he was for some long seconds. “The old man,” he whispered finally. “The chicken dance.”

“Exactly. Chris, I don’t know what to make of that myself. I was with you the day the old duffer died. You never gave hint of what you’d heard. Not even to me. You were so full of your thoughts of blood transfusing that you never so much as mentioned a word of anything the man told you.”

“For the love of Christ, Jeremy, that’s because he didn’t tell me anything. He was delirious with fever, ranting. How can you think I’d—”

Jeremy had been looking straight at him. Now he looked away. As if he could no longer stand the sight of his oldest friend.

“Very well,” Christopher said softly, “you make your feelings quite clear. And I’m in your debt. At least now I understand the true dimensions of the problem. It appears that if my family is to eat I had best polish up my grandfather’s pole and see to my delousing skills.”

Book Three

The High Hills Path
A
UGUST
1731-F
EBRUARY
1737

The Canarsie people who lived on the long island of Metoaca in winter and on Manhattan, the island of hills, in summer knew that truth was a thing men saw with different eyes. To discern what was reality and what was not, they devised tests. If those were passed, then all people could know that a thing was proven and it was no longer necessary to doubt.

If a speaker could hold fire and not be burned, the speaker’s words were true.

If a speaker who had been tied into an overturned canoe, which was then pulled across the Sun-Coming River from Manhattan to Metoaca, was alive when the journey ended, the speaker’s words were true.