City of Dreams (37 page)

If a speaker could jump from the tall cliffs at the end of the High Hills Path, in the place of the tree that had been divided by sky fire, and soar like a bird rather than sink like a stone to be smashed on the rocks below, the speaker’s words were true.

In the case of a disputed truth, those whom the tests killed were known to have been liars. If, however, a person did not wish to submit to the test, they too were proven to have lied. Such a one was made to leave the places of the People and live like an animal in the forest, without friends or kin. The clan no longer knew him.

Chapter Six

A
UGUST
1731.
Smoke hung over the city. It clogged the nostrils and made the eyes tear and choked the throat. There was no escaping it.

A bonfire burned on every corner. Every hour patrols of redcoats marched double time down the New York lanes and streets and byways, bringing fresh logs. The flames soared and the sparks flew as the desperate townspeople and their equally desperate government tried to burn the smallpox out of the air. It was the only thing they knew to do.

Official New York had a tenuous hold on this pestilence. The last Royal Governor had died quite suddenly the previous month, and his replacement hadn’t yet arrived. The responsibility for ruling the colony fell to Rip Van Dam, simply because he was the eldest member of His Majesty’s Council for the Province of New York. Van Dam, canny and shrewd, had grown rich from the Caribbean trade. But the smallpox was beating him.

The disease had spread to every part of the town, from the fort on the southern tip of the island—renamed Fort George II, for the present king—to newly built streets like Franklin and Cherry a mile north. Beekman’s Swamp had been drained to make room for the new streets. Some said that was how the smallpox got started, rising up from the depths that were exposed when the old swamp was emptied. Even if that was true, there was no way to put the swamp back.

The bonfires were supposed to protect the people, but they extracted a high price. Seven houses caught fire in one August week. Five people were burned alive. That same week the city’s first newspaper, the
New-York Gazette,
announced the smallpox tally. Twenty-two Church of England, eleven Dutch Reformed, six Presbyterians, five Quakers, and two Negroes had died of the disease. Nearly fifty victims in seven days, a new record. The fires burned on.

The pox was God’s scourge, the preachers ranted. Let the people mend their ways, and this plague would pass as it had passed before.

Van Dam left church one Sunday morning after a particularly passionate sermon and declared the following Wednesday a day of humiliation and public penance. And an occasion for the renunciation of evil practices, cures that amounted to little more than witchcraft.

“It is strictly prohibited and forbidden to all and every of the Doctors, Physicians, Surgeons, and Practitioners of Physick, and all and every other person within this Province, to inoculate for the smallpox—variolation as the detestable practice is called—any person or persons within the City and County of New York. On pain of being prosecuted to the utmost rigor of the law.”

Christopher Turner thought of that while he made his way to the home of a Dutch family living on Stone Street, with the tools of variolation tucked in his pockets. Stupid bastards. They made him almost as sick as the choking smoke and the August heat, as the gritty cinders that made his eyes sting until he was practically blind.

God knew he was in no position to ignore the law. He could never have paid their poxed fines. Nine people were crowded into his little house on Hall Place, all depending on him.

Nearly twenty years since the business with Red Bess’s tit, and he was still treated like a bloody leper. He kept his household fed and clothed and off the streets only by giving a few private classes in surgical practice. To idiots, mostly. Might as well invite them to murder as put a scalpel in their hands. He also got a few pence for the medical articles he wrote for the
Gazette.
Couldn’t use his own name, of course. That galled him as much as anything, but he needed the money. Thank Christ for the occasional braver-than-most patient. The only time he truly felt alive was when he operated. Now, God help him, he was putting that miserable living at risk.

He kept patting his pockets every few minutes, in between coughing and wiping his eyes. Of course everything was exactly where he’d put it. Lancets, vials, blades … Where would it have gone? He was almost as bad as Van Dam and the rest of the politicians.

Like every other street, lane, and alley in the town, the cobbles of Stone Street had a thick coating of brick dust and quicklime. That was another of their idiotic remedies. He’d wager anything it had been Zachary Craddock’s idea. Craddock had Van Dam’s ear. Probably he’d been the one to …
Ah, sweet Christ, be fair.
The damned government had been doing the same thing as long as anyone could remember. Every time some filthy plague came, be it the smallpox or the yellowing fever or any other kind of pestilence, it was the same. Prayers and penance and fire, brick dust and quicklime over the cobbles, and violent blistering, bleeding, and purging for the patient. But God knew the smallpox was the worst. And the fools wouldn’t take a chance on variolation, the one thing that could help. Craddock, damn his soul, carried a large part of the blame for that.

The Scot wasn’t alone. The great objections to variolation came mostly from university-trained medical men. Christopher ground his teeth just thinking of it. Sweet Christ, if he could make Van Dam look at the simple, straightforward results of the thing …

The house he wanted was at the far end of Stone Street, almost facing what used to be known as Jews’ Lane. It was Mill Street now, though the Jews’ synagogue had been built there a year before. The door he was looking for was a few steps away from the place the Hebrews called Shearith Israel, the Remnant of Israel. Probably the good Dutch Reformed people in the small yellow brick house believed that was why this disaster had struck them. Probably thought the Jews put a curse on them.

As soon as he was inside Christopher knew it wasn’t likely. Anyone living like this was beyond thinking.

The stench was unbelievable. It took all his will not to gag. The hunched crone who led him through the tiny front hall to the small sitting room didn’t seem to notice.

She walked with a cane. Her clothes hung limp and neglected around her sticklike frame. The wood floors of the house were covered with remnants of the powder that had been tracked in from the streets, and the old woman’s skirts had trailed so much through the mess they’d developed a dark, orange-red hem.

“Can’t nothing do,” she muttered as she led him from the sitting room to a kind of back hall. “Can’t nothing do more for my grandboy. Not neither for my girl and her man.” She made a vague gesture to a rag-covered hump on the floor beside what appeared to be a back door.

The reek was worse in here. Christopher gagged and hoped she hadn’t seen. His eyes began to adjust to the dim light. Sweet Christ, two bodies lying on the floor, covered with burlap sacking. He put out a hand and touched the woman’s arm. “Mevrouw …”

She turned to him. The old Dutch courtesy made her eyes flicker with something left over from a time before the pox came. The light died quickly. “Did all what I could,” she repeated. “Can’t nothing do more.”

He started to say something, but she stopped him by raising her face—it was the first time she’d looked at him full-on—and pushing back her lank and dirty white hair. The skin of her left cheek was badly pitted, an ugly hole that stretched as far as her ear.

She let him look for a while, then pulled the hair back over the scars. “That’s why I’m still here, no?”

He swallowed, but he couldn’t answer. The stink would choke him if he opened his mouth.

The woman had lived with it so long she didn’t seem to notice. “I knowed you when a boy you were, Christopher Turner. Knowed your papa. And your mama, God rest them both. Smart, all you Turner people. So you tell me, is that why I’m left and they be all gone? Because already I had it? In 1702, last time it came.” She nodded toward the corpses under their covering of sacks. “Afore they were born.”

He summoned all his grit, and told himself it was like taking the saw in his hands and starting to cut. “That’s why, mevrouw. But you shouldn’t stay here like this. With these …” He nodded toward the rotting corpses. “There must be somewhere for you to go.”

She shook her head. “Born in this house. Die here I will. Soon, please God.”

“Mevrouw, your church, they’ll come and bury your dead. You must let me inform them.”

She shrugged her hunched shoulders. “Do what you want. But …” She drew away, gave him a sly glance. “What you promised you will give me, no? You won’t refuse because of them?”

“No, mevrouw, I won’t refuse. The child, he’s still alive?”

“Last time I looked he was.” She took a step toward a door, opened it. “In here he is. See for yourself.”

Christopher went through the narrow door. Following the lay of the land, the room had been built slightly below ground level. He had to step down to cross the threshold. The light was no better than in the back hall, and the atmosphere still more foul. There was a tiny window, but it was high up, and closed tight. Considering the smoke and ash and cinders flying about in Stone Street, he dared not open it.

The boy lay in an old-style Dutch bed built into one wall. Christopher steeled himself to the stink of rotting flesh and stepped closer to the patient. “I’m going to take a look at you, son,” he murmured. “See if I can—”

He broke off. In the face of so much misery the lie wouldn’t come. He wasn’t here to see if he could help the boy. It was far too late for that. The child—nine or ten, Christopher guessed—was past hearing or reacting. He was still alive, but only barely. Death would come in a few hours, perhaps. And it would be a mercy.

He bent nearer. The acrid smell of vomit mingled with the stench of putrefying flesh, and he spotted rust-colored stains on the covers. Blood. The internal hemorrhage that often accompanied the final stages of the disease. Gingerly he touched a corner of the bedding and moved it aside.

“You’re not feared of the pox, are you?” The old woman’s voice came out of the shadows beside the door where she still stood. In her mind, Christopher realized, she’d already said good-bye to her grandson. This stinking thing on the bed bore no relation to the child she’d loved. “Already you had it, yes?” the old woman persisted. “In 1702?”

“I had it,” he said curtly.

“But your face is unmarked. How can that be, Christopher Turner?”

“I was lucky, mevrouw. Now, if I can get on with what I came for …”

“
Ja
, of course. A shilling, you said.” She stuck out a bony hand.

Christopher reached into his pocket and found the coin and gave it to her. The old woman closed her fist around it.

“How are you eating? The farmers refuse to come into the town, and the markets are empty by nine of the morning. Do you go early and stand in the lines?”

She chuckled. “Not me. Pompey, he goes. Brings me back things.”

“Pompey’s your slave?”

“Not mine. Ain’t got no slaves. Sold them years ago to make a dowry for my daughter. A foolishness that turned out to be.” She nodded in the direction of the back hall and the corpses. “Pompey, he be my neighbor’s boy. Went to the country, they did. To the village of Greenwich to get away from the pox. Left Pompey to look after things. He don’t get it neither. The blacks don’t, most of ’em. That did you know, smart Christopher Turner?”

“I knew it, mevrouw.”

“Why? That you know, too?”

“I’m not sure. A natural immunity, maybe. A gift from God to make up for their black skin. Mevrouw, I have to …” He gestured to the boy.

“
Ja, ja
, of course. Do it and go and leave me alone.”

Christopher returned to the boy and rolled back the covers. A new wave of stink rose from the bed. The child was naked and his entire body was so thickly covered with the pox it was impossible to see clear skin. He had the confluent form of the illness, the most deadly. A factor to be reckoned with.

Christopher took a lancet and a small glass vial from one of his pockets. The boy was so far gone in the disease that most of the pustules, the variola, had long since scabbed over and fallen off, taking the skin with them. The child’s entire body was a suppurating wound. He could be of no use to Christopher if all that was left was this hunk of rotting butcher’s meat. No, there on the lad’s left thigh, a few fresh pox.

He pricked each one with the lancet. Then, with the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, he squeezed gently to expel the yellow pus. As each drop appeared he used the broad side of the lancet to scrape it up and transfer it to the glass container.

After a minute or two he had enough. He took a last look into the face of the dying boy. The child hadn’t moved. His head was like a skeleton’s, the skin taut over the bones, sunken eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

Then, slowly and with enormous effort, the wasted face turned toward his. The boy’s mouth opened as if he wanted to speak. Christopher bent nearer; he heard nothing but an ominous rattle. There were maybe minutes left, not hours. He straightened and turned away.

The old woman went with him as far as the sitting room, then left him to find the front door by himself. Thank Christ for that. He couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. When he stepped into the street and yanked the door closed behind him he had to fight the urge to draw a deep breath of the smokepoisoned air.