City of Dreams (44 page)

“We’d never tell,” the right head said.

“Never,” the left agreed. “You can count on it. No matter what anyone did.”

“We’d never say who it was as—”

“No,” Jennet interrupted, her voice firmer now. “It isn’t that I’m afraid. I can’t do it. Not I won’t. I can’t.”

The twins looked at each other and, without a word, one began undoing the drawstring that tied the large skirt that covered them both.

“Please,” Jennet protested. “Don’t do this. It won’t make any difference.”

The twins ignored her. The skirt dropped to the ground. Both pairs of hands reached down and lifted their shared petticoats, revealing their plump legs in striped stockings. Above that they were naked. Jennet could see their privates, and the thick bond of flesh and skin that forever locked them together. The bridge was some nine inches long and positioned immediately below the waists of the two women. Jennet couldn’t stifle her fascination. She moved a bit closer.

The twins waited in silence.

Jennet put out her hand, hesitated a moment, then touched the join. All the great surgeons insisted that the finest tool is touch.
Before he takes up the Scalpel, much less the Saw, a wise surgeon relies on his Fingertips.
Slowly, with total concentration, she let her fingers explore the connection between the two women.

The skin of the bridge was thick and rough, callused like the hands of a laborer; judging from the springy, resilient character of the link, it was strengthened by cartilage, not bone. It was warm. Blood flowed across this incredible union, and that made it impossible to operate.

Jennet shook her head for the twentieth time that afternoon. “I’m sorry. It can’t be done. At least not by me. I don’t think anyone could do it. Your blood is circulating through both bodies as if they were one and the same. If you were cut apart, you’d bleed to death.”

“What about legs and arms, then?” the left twin demanded. “Surgeons like your father, they cut off legs and arms all the time. Those people don’t bleed to death after. They gets stitched up.”

“That’s sawing bone, it’s different.”

“How’s it different?”

Jennet was at a loss to explain what she’d gleaned from years of spying on Christopher, and from her secret reading. “It’s done all the time. Everyone knows exactly which vessels have to be tied off. But you two, no one can say what … I can’t explain more. You simply have to believe me. I can’t do this. I have no idea what would happen if I tried.”

“No one can say about freaks, that’s what you mean. You can’t help us ’cause we be cursed by God.”

“No, please. That’s not what I said. I’d never—”

The right twin sighed. “It will be all right, miss. Don’t be your fault. ’Twas probably too much to hope for. But sometimes that be all you can do. Hope.”

“Not even Meg and Peg?” Martha Kincaid asked. “I’d have thought that was a simple thing.”

“No,” Jennet said. “It isn’t. It’s very complicated. I can’t help any of the people you sent to see me, least of all Meg and Peg.”

“Pity. The women from the tanneries, they said you was kind. That you wanted to help.”

“I do want to help.” Dear heaven, only a heart of stone would not have responded to the way those poor souls looked at her with so much hope. “I’d give anything to help. But all your friends are beyond my skills. I don’t think anyone can help them.”

“Then tell me something,” Martha Kincaid asked wearily, knowing quite well the girl would have no answer, “what were they made for? This just and merciful God the preachers are always goin’ on about, how come He allows things like this? Does He enjoy watching people suffer?”

Chapter Seven

C
HRISTOPHER HAD STOPPED
looking at Amba. Twenty years since that night, and not once in all that time had he actually looked into her face. He preferred not to do so now, but she’d come into the room and closed the door and planted herself in front of it. Now she was simply standing there, waiting for him to acknowledge her.

“Yes, Amba, what is it?” he said without lifting his head, continuing to work on his article, a treatise on bleeding in cases of gout. “I didn’t send for you.”

“Amba knows Master didn’t send for her. Amba come to talk with Master.”

“I’m rather busy just now. You must discuss whatever it is with your mistress.” He dipped his quill in the inkpot and scratched a few words more on the paper. Amba did not move. The piece was for the
Boston Weekly News-Letter,
the first they’d ever asked him for. He could not afford to make a hash of it. “Go, Amba. I have no time for you.”

It was a bitter night and there was a coal fire in the grate; thanks to the many ships that loaded Newcastle coal for ballast, it had become cheaper to burn than wood, even in this place where there was endless forest. Amba walked across to the fireplace and positioned herself in front of the glowing coals. “This be something as matters, master. Got to talk to you, not Mistress Jane. You got to hear me.”

He raised his head. That’s where she’d lain after he bid her take off her clothes. Her naked black body had been stretched out on the hearth rug in front of the fire. And he had almost … Sweet Christ, it was impossible not to remember the way she’d looked back then. But he remembered, as well, the revulsion he’d felt at the mutilation that had been practiced on her. And how proud she’d been of it, as if such barbaric butchery were something to glory in.

Her hair was still close-cropped. In return for the favor he’d never claimed, he would not allow Jane to forbid her cutting off her hair. She continued to do so, but she was no longer beautiful. Twenty years on, Amba looked like what she was, an old, work-worn slave. “Look,” he said, “if it’s about Phoebe, she’s hired out to Mistress Tamsyn. Anything you want to ask about her, you have to—”

“Ain’t nothin’ ’bout my girl. Amba got to talk to you ’bout yours.”

“Jennet? Whatever have you to do with her?”

“I got plenty to do with that girl. Been lookin’ after her since she was born.”

Extraordinary that she’d speak to him in that tone of voice and look at him that way. “You still think you’re a queen, don’t you?” he said, more in surprise than in anger.

Her gaze never left his face. “Master know Amba’s a queen. Master saw.”

“So I did.” He returned his quill to its holder and covered the bottle of ink. Finally he turned back to her. “Very well, Amba. Say what you’ve come to say. I’m listening.”

“You not let Miss Jennet be marrying Master Caleb. Evil gonna come if that happens.”

“I see. And are you going to tell me how you’ve reached this remarkable conclusion?”

“They is clan. It’s forbidden. In Amba’s place. In this place. Everywhere. All peoples know it’s forbidden. Bad magic. Make bad things happen.”

“Perhaps.” He turned back to his work, reached again for his quill. “But in this case Miss Jennet and Caleb Devrey are officially second cousins, which is a sufficient degree of separation to satisfy both the church and the law. And they are not blood kin at all. My father was—”

Sweet Christ, why was he wasting his time explaining things to a slave? Christopher paused, looked over his shoulder. Amba remained standing in front of the fire. “I can’t imagine that you understand one word of what I’m saying, Amba. And I don’t in the least care. Go back to the kitchen. I’m sure there is work for you to do.”

“Amba understand. But Amba knows things.”

He sighed. “I see. Well, I’m sure you do know things, Amba. I’m sure you are very wise in the ways of your people and your country, but you can trust me to know how things work here. Now go and—”

“Amba knows things about Master Nicholas.”

Christopher had taken up his pen and was holding it above the paper, preparing to begin the discussion of why the lancet was preferable to leeches in cases of gout. “Master Nicholas,” he said without moving. “Am I to take it you mean my father?”

“Yes. Master Nicholas weren’t born to that lady in the picture near the front door. The one with the white hair. He was brung here. And left outside the door. Old Hetje, before she die, she tell Amba the truth.”

His fingers had started to tremble. Slaves talked, and they were privy to most of the family secrets of their owners. Considering how they lived, in the heart of the household, how could it be otherwise? But Amba had not been in New York when the child who became Nicholas Turner was born. Hell, she hadn’t yet been born. Hetje, on the other hand … He’d seen her only a few times, but Christopher never forgot the way the old black woman had looked at him. “Exactly what did Hetje tell you?”

“She said it was a secret. She said she was giving me the secret because—”

She broke off, hesitated. That was unusual. Amba never seemed to be afraid to say anything. That was one of the things Jane so disliked about her. “Go on, Amba. Hetje gave you the secret because … ?”

“Because she said once you was a slave that’s all you got to protect you with. Old Hetje, she tell me having secrets be what makes a slave strong.”

“Stronger than your masters, you mean. Yes, I can see how it might.” Christopher wasn’t trembling anymore. He was suddenly very calm, entirely self-possessed. He got up from his chair, leaned against his desk, folded his arms and finally looked straight at this woman whom he had once so fiercely and so briefly desired. “Very well, tell me what Hetje told you about my father.”

She still hesitated.

“Come, Amba. You no longer have a choice. You admitted to having a secret that concerns me and my family. If you don’t tell me of your own free will, I’ll have it whipped out of you.”

“Amba knows that,” she said softly. “And it don’t matter how much you whip Amba, how many lashes, fifty, a hundred. If I don’t want to talk, I won’t.”

Tied to a stake, watching her husband slowly burn to death while she was pregnant with his child, singing all the while. “Yes, I know that as well. So we both know things. But you’re the one who came in here to tell me what you know.”

“Ain’t telling for you. Not for me, neither. Telling ’cause of Miss Jennet. ’Cause she be like my own baby girl.”

“I realize that.”

He waited. They looked at each other. Eventually she spoke. “Master Nicholas, he be Mistress Sally’s boy. Master Lucas, he thought he was adopting a baby from another clan, but it don’t be true. Baby Nicholas, he be the son of Master Lucas’s sister.”

His first sensation was elation. He was related by blood to the man he idolized, not to the miserable drunk, Ankel Jannssen. He was well and truly a Turner. Lucas was his … his great-uncle.

Then he rejected the whole notion. She was an illiterate heathen, for God’s sake, a black savage. How could she possibly be relied on in a matter like this? “Thank you for telling me, Amba, but I don’t believe a word of it. I’m sure old Hetje made up the entire story.”

Amba shook her head. “Old Hetje, she don’t be making up nothin’. She be the one put that there baby on the doorstep. Mistress Sally birthed him, but he don’t be her husband’s baby. One of them Indians, he be planting his seed in her. That be why she got to get rid of her baby. ’Cause otherwise her husband be killing it. Mistress Sally, she always be thinking Hetje took her baby to the slave compound, but Master Nicholas, he don’t be having dark skin like they ’spect. So old Hetje, she be leaving that baby right outside the door to this place. And the man and the lady in the pictures, they make him they’s son, tell everyone the lady be birthing him. Before she died, Hetje, she tell me all how it was. Said it be my secret now. Said it be making me strong. But I can’t keep no secret what’s gonna let Miss Jennet bring no evil spirits on her. Not my baby Miss Jennet.”

“I don’t believe it, Papa. I cannot believe it.”

Christopher sighed. “My dear Jennet, I felt exactly the same when I first heard the tale. Then, when I spoke to Tamsyn …” He shrugged. “We put together what she knew, the things Red Bess had told her over the years, with what Amba reported Hetje saying, and it all fell into place.”