City of Dreams (42 page)

Christopher reached a long arm to the table behind him where his instruments waited. He fumbled till he found a hand glass in a tortoise frame, then grabbed it and shoved it at her. “Look at yourself. Go on. You came here for help. This is the best I can offer.”

She lifted the glass for a moment, then dropped it to her lap.

“Now,” Christopher said. “Sit very still. And don’t worry, I won’t cut until I have your permission. Jackson, come closer. Watch me. That’s what you come for, isn’t it? To learn something. Well, learn this.”

He put his long fingers on either side of the largest of the black, boil-like eruptions on the tumor’s surface, midway on a point between her earlobe and the tip of her nose. The head of the apparent boil was faintly indented, resting in a pit in the skin. Fair chance the entire growth had begun in the scars left by a brush with the pox. Probably when she was a small child.

“What we have here, Mr. Jackson, is a benign sebaceous cyst, a sac below the skin that is constantly filled and refilled. And see, right here where I’m pointing? That black mark, like all the others, is one of the outlets. So if I compress the sides like this …” He pressed hard. The dark point shot out first, followed by an undulating thread of white.

“Worms …” Hezekiah breathed the word on a long sigh. “There are live maggots below the surface of her skin.” Martha Kincaid gasped. “It’s not maggots, you idiot,” Christopher snapped at Jackson. “It’s fatty matter. Your patient has a disease of the skin.” He squeezed while he spoke, extracting a nearly six-inch length of the white, grainy substance. “The sac fills with these fatty particles and flakes of the dead epidermis. And while we may squeeze as much as we like—even empty the whole lump of its contents—the sac, unless cut away, will soon fill again.”

Christopher reached behind him once more. This time he retrieved a flat pewter dish and a small spatulate probe. He used the probe to scoop the sebaceous matter from the woman’s face and deposit it on the dish. There was at least an ounce of it. Possibly two. “Here, mistress, examine this. Then raise the glass again and take a very close look at your face. Tell me if you find the lower part of the lump somewhat decreased in volume.”

She spent only a moment on the substance in the dish, a little longer studying herself in the tortoise-framed mirror. “It is smaller,” she said finally. “You can’t know how many nights I went to my bed prayin’ to wake up and find it so. Even by a tiny bit. Now …” She broke off and looked at him, plainly trying to decide whether, despite his terrible reputation, she could trust him.

“If you choose,” Christopher said, “you may leave here tonight without any disfigurement. I shall not, I think, find it necessary to stitch the wound, only cauterize it, perhaps, then treat it with nitrate of silver and cover it with a small bandage of lint. You have a sac beneath your skin that has filled with solid and decaying fatty matter.” Christopher gestured at the pewter dish and set it aside. “You now see it with your own eyes. It is natural for your body to continue to produce this substance. As long as the sac remains, it will keep filling. If, on the other hand, I make a small cut and extract the sac—then, mistress, you need no longer hide behind your shawl.” His hands itched to pick up his weapons and begin the battle. The scalpels and the lancets were his armory. When he couldn’t use them he was a knight without a sword. Useless.

“Will it hurt much?” the woman asked.

Christopher forced himself to relax. She would agree, or she would not. “It will hurt. Not, I think, as much as living with this black and ugly thing distorting your face.”

She turned her head and looked at Jackson, then back at Christopher. “He said it would be three shillings. For the consultation.”

“That’s right.”

“And for the surgery? If I agree, I mean.”

However miserable his finances, Christopher missed the chance to operate, far more than he missed money. “No additional charge, mistress. The surgery is included.”

“Very well. Then do it.”

He stifled the yelp of pleasure that rose in his throat. “A wise decision, mistress. You will not regret it.” Christopher reached for his scalpel. “Come closer, Mr. Jackson. Hold her head steady.”

At the door, with her face pressed close to the tiny crack she had been peering through for the past hour, Jennet felt her hands start to tremble. She saw her father make the first incision—near the lower part of the jaw, a half-moon opening about an inch across—and she had to twine her fingers together to keep them from twitching. Soon. Only two weeks more. The very moment she was married to Caleb she would begin showing him what she could do, and convincing him she must be allowed to do it.

“Come, I will walk you home,” Jackson said.

Martha Kincaid had her black shawl wrapped tightly around her face, covering the small bandage. And the absence of the lump. “Ain’t no need to trouble yourself. I’m well used to going about alone.”

It was late. The streets were empty and the town’s four bellmen were doubtless making their rounds. “The curfew …” Jackson said. “You’ll be—”

“The bellmen got more to do than look out for the likes of me, Mr. Jackson. Go on. These last four years …”

Walk her home, he said. He meant to Tom Kincaid’s mill over on Cortlandt Street. Foolish waste of steps that would be. Tom Kincaid didn’t care where she went, or who with, not so long as she brought him a purse full of coins once every week. Otherwise, he said, he’d report her as a runaway wife. Get her a trip to the whipping cage, that would, and thirty-nine strokes on her bare back with any as wanted to looking on. To be warned against evil ways, the preachers said. Because they liked the sight of blood, more likely. Not to mention bare tits.

She lifted a tentative hand to her face. Holy God Almighty. It still felt flat. “Don’t fuss yourself none, Mr. Jackson. I knows me way about in the dark.”

“Well, if you’re quite sure …” He was glad to be let off his task. The curfew applied to loitering on the streets, but it wasn’t enforced inside the taverns. Jackson was impatient to get to the sign of the Horse and Wagon over on William Street, and explain to any as would listen the vital role he’d played in the brilliant surgery. He lifted his tricorn and quickly replaced it, then turned his back on the woman and hurried up the moonlit road.

Martha heard the bellman’s call. “Eleven of the clock and all is well on a dry and frosty evening.” He was getting closer. It wouldn’t do to be found standing here.

A bank of clouds covered the moon and Hall Place became quite dark. Behind her Christopher Turner’s house was darker still, the last of the candles snuffed out. All of ’em tucked up in their beds, even whoever it was had been watching in the hall. Stupid men. So wrapped up in themselves and whatever they were doing they were blind and deaf to all else. No doubt at all that someone had been spying on the goings-on in Christopher Turner’s front room.

She felt something suddenly duck beneath her skirts and begin crawling up her leg. Martha started to cry out, then clamped her mouth tight shut. A tongue was licking the inside of her thigh. “You,” she whispered, lifting her skirts and pushing away an oversized bald head. “What are you doing here? Stop!”

“Thought you liked it.” The dwarf crawled out from under her skirts and wiped his mouth with the edge of his battered tricorn, then clamped it back on. When he stood up he barely reached her waist. “You always be saying you like it.”

“Not here I don’t, you silly fool. Bellman’s coming. You must be mad.”

“Bellman won’t be finding me. Nobody be finding Jan Brinker if he be wanting to hide. That be the good part about being three feet tall.”

She’d heard that boast a hundred times. It was a lie. There was no good part of being a freak. Jan Brinker hated being a misshapen Dutch midget. Children chased him and threw the nastiest things they could find at him. Women crossed the road so they wouldn’t have to pass too close to him. They knew Jan Brinker could put the evil eye on them just by looking. Anyone who was different hated it. Like she’d hated having that ugly thing on her face.

She pulled the shawl forward, grateful for the dark, not wanting the dwarf to know yet how changed she was, afraid, though she wasn’t sure of what. “We best go. Bellman’s nearby.”

“Don’t want anyone be knowing where you been, do you?” Brinker said. “Not considering what everyone be thinking about him in there.”

“I don’t care what everyone— It were you, weren’t it? You were the one spying on us.”

“In there? Not on your life! Jan Brinker ain’t never been inside that murderer’s house. Nothing would make me—” Somewhere a window banged shut. “Guess you be right,” the dwarf murmured. “Best we go. Seems we be disturbing the peace.”

He shuddered. Disturbing the peace carried a penalty of a day in the stocks. Whatever happened to ordinary folk when they were forced to stand with their head and hands imprisoned in the oak frame in front of City Hall, it was a hundred times worse for Jan Brinker.

They’d put him in the stocks once. For cavorting and begging down at the place over on Pearl Street that used to be named for an old Dutchman called Vly, until the Englishers started calling it the Fly Market. He don’t be cavorting, how they called it. He be trying to get a bit of money because he was hungry.

Told ’em so, but they took him to City Hall all the same. Put him in the stocks. Gave him a chair to stand on so he could reach the openings. And before an hour went by a giggling brat kicked it away. He hung like that—taking all his weight on his neck and his wrists—for hours. Jailer finally come to release him, he be laughing himself silly at the sight. Jan Brinker didn’t laugh. Both his shoulders were pulled from their sockets and his throat was swollen nearly shut. Ill for a month he be. Almost died. Would have died except for Martha Kincaid. “Come,” he said. “You be right. Best we go.”

The night was a familiar friend. They melted into the dark and hurried through the silent streets to the one place both knew they would be safe.

Except for a large stone chimney, the building hidden in the trees of the thick woods beyond the city’s northern border, about a mile and a quarter from the harbor and Fort George, looked like a derelict shack. Inside it was comfortably furnished with wooden tables and benches, and full of the yeasty smell of ale and the rich sweetness of rum. The air was thick with pipe smoke and candle smoke, and the smoke of the roaring log fire that eased the chill of the winter night.

There were at least fifty people in the taproom. Men and women, black and white. All mixed together as equals. That was extraordinary enough in New York City, but not the most remarkable thing about this particular crowd.

“Where you two been?” a black man shouted as soon as Martha and the dwarf appeared. “We been waitin’ for a song. C’mon, somebody get the midget his fiddle.”

Eager hands lifted Jan Brinker and passed him over the heads of the raucous mob. Martha stayed by the door. They were all there, the people she’d come to think of as family these last few years. A few who had survived the pox and wished they hadn’t. A couple of hunchbacks, any number of blind and crippled. At least five runaway black slaves with a price on their heads. And those were just the ordinary misfits.

Leaning against the wall in the far corner were fourteen-year-old twin sisters, joined at the hip since birth. By the standards of this company, they were rich. Extraordinary what some men would pay to have something different to fuck. Like the woman who’d been born with short, stubby little arms and her hands connected where her elbows should be. Or the one whose face was entirely covered by a puckered red devil’s mark. And you couldn’t go to the bordellos on Holy Ground if you had to be carried to the whore’s bed. Two legless men were propped in a corner, banging their pewter mugs on the table to add to the uproar. Another who had a gnarled growth like a horn sticking out of the top of his skull shoved his way through the mêlée, waving a violin in the air. “Here it is! Out o’ the way, you lot. Let the dwarf have his fiddle.”

They all came to Martha Kincaid’s. No matter what was wrong with you, you’d fit in at Martha’s and find someone who’d lie with you, long as you paid. And if it chanced that you had some dealings to discuss that might not bear close scrutiny, well, at Martha’s no one asked difficult questions, not as long as you put a few coins in the general purse.