City of Dreams (43 page)

She’d never planned it this way. She’d been born respectable Martha Jenson and she married Tom Kincaid when she was sixteen. She kept his house clean and helped with the milling and she bore him five children in four years, including two strong sons yet alive. He’d had nothing to complain of until the thing on her face started growing and he turned her out of his bed. One night a year or so later she tried in the dark to climb back into it—needing beyond all things to feel a human and loving touch—and he’d screamed her out of the house. She’d run sobbing through the streets until she found this abandoned shack at the edge of the woods that backed up on the farmland skirting the King’s High Road to Boston.

The shack became her refuge and she returned often, fixing it up little by little with her own hands. Eventually Jan Brinker came and helped her. And the others. Until now she was what fate had made her. Martha Kincaid, proprietor of the best bawdyhouse in New York City.

Now Christopher Turner had changed everything. Martha reached up and probed beneath her shawl. The jaw had swollen some; it was tender and felt hot to the touch. Mr. Turner had told her it would be so. A reaction to the surgery. But there was no black lump. She did not have to look into a glass to know it.

Jan Brinker was standing on a stage made of abandoned wooden packing cases dragged up from the docks. He had the fiddle tucked under his chin—it was almost as big as he was—and he was bowing wildly. The crowd was singing and cheering. “Do a dance for us, Martha,” someone shouted.

“Aye, c’mon, Martha, a dance!”

“No, not tonight. I don’t feel like dancing tonight.”

They wouldn’t be put off. She was pushed forward to the makeshift stage, not able to resist because both her hands were busy keeping her shawl in place. They mustn’t see. Not yet. She wasn’t sure how would they’d feel now that she was no longer one of them.

Black Bento clasped her around the waist. A runaway slave from a Caribbean sugar plantation, he was wanted for hanging, on account of he’d strangled an overseer with his bare hands. Strongest hands she’d ever met. God knows she’d been glad enough to feel them the dark and lonely nights of these past winters. Not tonight, though. Not when he swung her up on the stage beside Jan, and the dwarf switched to a lively jig.

“That’s our girl, Martha! Come on, show us your ankles!”

They were all shouting at once. Smiling at her. They didn’t care about the black thing on her face. They had never cared. They were all freaks together here. That was the secret of the place. That’s why it was home.

Martha spun around and faced the wall. Then she released her grip on the shawl and lifted her skirt and her petticoats as high as her knees and began to dance. Her clogs pounded the wooden stage in a fierce rhythm matched only by the fiddle and her wildly beating heart. She moved so fast the stripes of her knitted stockings blurred into a single flash of color. The black scarf slipped off her head and down her back and fell on the floor. Martha kept dancing.

At last, she turned around.

Bento was the first to notice. “Holy Jesus, girl,” he whispered. “I never seed … Holy Jesus.”

One by one they saw, those with eyes whispering the message to those who had none, or were too far in the back of the room to see.

The noisy clapping and yelling died away.

“The thing on her face, it’s gone.”

“No black lump.”

“Like the rest of ’em.”

“Not like us.”

Martha stopped dancing. The crowd quieted. The sound of the fiddle was the last noise to die away. At last Jan Brinker stopped playing and stood on his toes so he could see better. “
Jesu Cristo.
I don’t believe it. I never …”

Martha bent down and grabbed her shawl. She started to put it on, but Bento vaulted onto the stage and yanked it away. “Don’t you do that, woman. Don’t you be hidin’ this here miracle. It’s a visitation from Jesus Christ. You got to tell the world.”

Years before, Christian missionaries had gone to the islands and begun converting the slaves, Bento among them. The law said that baptism didn’t entitle a slave to manumission, but Bento remembered what was written in the holy book,
No slaves or free men, only equals in Christ Jesus.
So Bento took his freedom. Killing the overseer had been self-defense, though no one would believe it. But God knew. Jesus traveled with him. Bento had managed to get as far as Martha Kincaid’s bawdyhouse, so he could be witness to this miracle. “You got to tell the world what Jesus done for you, woman.”

“Your Jesus had nothin’ to do with it.” She couldn’t hold back the words. “Your Jesus ain’t never done nothin’ for me. Where was he when my husband threw me into the street?” She lifted her hand and pointed at the joined twins who had shoved their way forward to get a better look at Martha’s face. “Where was he when these two was born stuck together like that? Where was he when your mother was chained in a Guinea ship, then sold to some plantation owner to work herself to death hacking his sugarcane? You tell me, Bento, what has your Jesus done for any of us here?”

Bento had both his hands clasped over his ears. He was swaying back and forth under the weight of his distress. “You close your mouth, woman. You shut your mouth and go down on your knees and beg forgiveness. Otherwise I ain’t sayin’ what’s gonna happen here in this place.”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” Martha shouted. “It waren’t your Jesus fixed my face. Not your God or anyone else’s God. It was the surgeon, Christopher Turner. Him who lives over on Hall Place. He done it.”

Her words shocked the crowd into silence. If an ordinary man had cured Martha Kincaid of her disfigurement, what might he be able to do for the rest of them?

On a January Sunday the banns announcing the betrothal of Jennet Turner to Caleb Devrey were cried for the second time. Will Devrey came out of Trinity Church surrounded by well-wishers with Susannah by his side and Caleb a few steps behind them. The Devreys were too occupied by people who wanted to congratulate them on the forthcoming marriage to notice the woman standing by the door.

At first Christopher didn’t notice her, either. He was busy watching New York society licking the buttocks of the rich. Sweet Christ, all of ’em toadying to Will, acting as if the fact that his son was marrying the daughter of the man they called the butcher of Hall Place wasn’t the best gossip in the town. As for himself and Jane, they might as well not have been there.

That had to be painful for Jane. Even a quick glance showed she minded the snubbing. They never should have come, except that Jane insisted on doing things the “mannerly way.”

By long tradition the second crying of the banns was a major social occasion, at least according to the people who attended Trinity Church. Once Christopher had dreamed of buying a fine house in Hanover Square and joining their company. He knew better now. New York society had dung for brains and cash boxes where their hearts should be. If you cut ’em they’d probably bleed pounds, shillings, and pence. Sometimes he was glad he’d never—

“Mr. Turner, Mr. Turner … It’s me, Martha Kincaid. I been tryin’ to—”

“Here, stop pulling at my sleeve, mistress. I see you.”

“Please, you got to give me an answer, Mr. Turner. Them folks I told you about … If you could just see ’em and say whether—”

“I’m sorry, mistress.” He tried to speak kindly even while he pushed her hand off his arm. “I’ve told you again and again, I can’t help the kinds of cases you describe. Now please, let me and my family pass in peace. If you do not, I’ll have no choice but to summon a constable.”

Martha backed away. The surgeon and his wife and their daughter passed her by. Then the girl looked over her shoulder and fixed her dark blue eyes on Martha.

The lass was a beauty. No wonder she was marrying one of the best catches in the city. Despite what people said about her father.

“It was you, waren’t it?”

Jennet looked at the woman who stood in her path. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please let me pass.”

In a week she’d be married to Caleb and she’d have slaves to send to the market while she and her husband served the poor. But at the moment she was still an unmarried girl living under her father’s roof, and she had to get home with the makings of the day’s dinner or face the rough of her mother’s tongue. Amba’s, too, most likely. “Let me pass. You have no right to prevent my—”

“It were you in the hall that night. Spying on your father. I know it were you.”

Jennet’s heart began to thump. “You’re the woman who had the lump. Martha…”

“Martha Kincaid. And I know it were you spying on us. I could tell by the way you was looking at me last Sunday after church.”

“I told you, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Now let me pass.”

“You got every idea. Else how would you know my name?”

“I guessed.”

“No, you didn’t. You saw the whole thing and I figure that waren’t the first time. I been talking to the folks who live up in the tanneries. They say you do it, too.”

“Do what?” Jennet’s voice was a faint whisper. Her heart beat a tattoo of fear And excitement. “What are you talking about?”

“There’s some as say you’re as clever with the knife as your pa is. That you can cure by cutting good as he can.”

Jennet looked down and began fussing with the parcels in her basket. “A woman can’t be a surgeon. It’s forbidden.”

“Men make the rules. That’s why women is forbidden to do lots of things. But that don’t mean we always got to do what the rules say.”

The joined twins were the last to present themselves. By then Jennet was nearly overcome with exhaustion. She’d seen more deformities in the last two hours than in her whole life before. Even in her worst nightmares she had not imagined such things could exist. Now the worst had been saved for last: two heads on what seemed to be a single four-legged body.

The girls marched into the little room Martha Kincaid had set aside for the consultations, and stood mute before Jennet, who had so far refused to do anything for any of the people she’d seen.

The joined twins knew at once they were not going to be the exception. They could tell by her expression. And her tears.

“I’m sorry.” Jennet dabbed at her eyes with a sodden handkerchief and shook her head. “I wish I could help you. I can’t. I haven’t the knowledge or the skill.”

“Your pa,” the one on the left asked, “can he do it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ve never seen anything— I mean, he’s never talked about doing any such thing. And I’ve never seen it in the medical books.” Not even in Lucas Turner’s journals, which she’d secretly been reading since she was nine years old.

“We don’t be the only ones as are born like this.” The twin on the right spoke this time. “A man who comes here to … A learned man who visits sometimes. He says it be happening before, only usually the babes die.”

“But we lived,” the left twin said. “Because we strong and healthy. We be tough, miss. Tough as any man. We could stand the pain if you cut us apart.”

Jennet shook her head. “I’m so sorry. If I had the least idea how to help you, I promise I would. But I—”