City of Dreams (47 page)

When she bit her lip to keep from crying out the thrill was something close to bliss, perhaps madness. He was past separating the two, and he couldn’t hold back any longer. DaSilva pumped wildly and screamed aloud his triumph. She was his.

III

It was close to five by the time Christopher returned from Nassau Street. He staggered into the kitchen, still reeling with shock, and found Jane waiting for him, sitting at the kitchen table, dabbing at her reddened eyes. She looked up when he appeared. “Where is she? Have you brought Jennet home?”

“No. I couldn’t. I was too late. He’s already … I mean she is no longer—” He broke off, white-faced and shaking with anger, unable to speak the words to the thin, pale, distraught woman who faced him. She’d borne him ten children, six of whom yet lived, but talk like this was never easy between them.

“Now,” she said, vaguely. “But it’s not yet evening. I mean …”

“I know what you mean. It seems, however, that at least for Hebrews, it is not necessary to wait until dark.”

Jane pressed the handkerchief to her eyes again. “My poor little girl, my poor dear child.”

“She may be many things,” Christopher said, fetching himself a mug of ale from the bucket in the corner of the kitchen, “but poor she is no longer. Not if she is truly the wife of Solomon DaSilva.”

Which Jennet surely was.

“I have arranged with Flossie to take you to the gown-maker, my dear. May I suggest you listen very carefully to her advice.”

Indeed, Flossie was remarkably knowledgeable for a servant. Jennet knew it, despite the fact that she had grown up with only one black slave and no indentures. Christopher could never afford to purchase one from the sea captains, who, in return for passage to the colonies, owned the immigrant’s labor for a term of ten or more years and sold it to the highest bidder as soon as the ship docked. On the other hand, her Craddock and Devrey cousins all had indentures. And since she wasn’t a black slave, that’s what Flossie must be. But the Irish woman called herself Solomon’s housekeeper, a phrase Jennet had never before heard. She went abroad in the city streets dressed like a fine lady, with skirts held so wide on wire panniers she had to sidle through most doors, the cuffs of her sleeves made of four or five flounces of lace, and her bodice laced with satin ribbons. She was addressed as Mistress O’Toole, and the shopkeepers smiled when she walked through the door. They fawned over her and, to Jennet’s observant eye, nearly turned themselves inside out trying to please her.

And the money she spent was a scandal.

At the mantua-maker—the gown-maker, Solomon had called her—Jennet felt faint when she heard the cost of the frocks that had been ordered. “One hundred and ninety-six pounds and seven pence that comes to, Mistress O’Toole.”

“Fine. Himself will be seeing to it by nightfall.”

“No!” Jennet objected. “We cannot spend such an amount. It is wicked.”

Flossie took her arm and pulled her to the door, making some laughing remark about her being a young bride who wished to spare her husband’s purse. But she wasn’t laughing when she got Jennet into the carriage and Clemence started on the journey to the milliner. “You listen to me, child, for it’s not another time I’ll be telling you this. It’s never again you’re to be making it sound as if Solomon DaSilva’s wife need be concerned about the price of some bit of stuff in the shops.”

“But it’s sinful, Flossie. I could have half as many gowns and still be as well dressed as you are, and the rest of the money could be used to help the poor.”

“For the first thing, you’ll not be telling me about the poor, Jennet Turner DaSilva. Not when me it was who grew up sleeping in the Dublin streets and picking crusts out of gutters to keep flesh on my bones. And you it was lived in a snug house with a blackbird to wipe your bottom, and always something on the table to put in your belly.”

“Yes, but—”

“Hold your tongue, lass. It’s not done I am yet. For the second part of it, your husband is quite probably the cleverest man in New York, and the kindest, as I’ll go to my grave saying. But for all that, he’s a Jew, a Christ-killer, and while there’s plenty as will raise a mug with him in a tavern, there’s not a decent Christian gentleman in this town would have him inside his home with his wife and his wee ones in the same room. So it’s grand you’ll look, my girl, from morning to night and every hour in between. And never the same gown you’ll wear when them as saw it before might chance to see it again. He’s that proud of you, is Solomon, and I mean to see he has reason to stay that way.”

The bill at the milliner’s was also well over a hundred pounds. A family of ten could have eaten for four years on what Flossie spent for more corsets and shifts and caps and cloaks and hoods and muffs than it seemed to Jennet she could ever wear, but she had learned her lesson and she said nothing. Until that night, when she was finally alone with her husband.

The cold had deepened considerably in the six days they’d been married. Winter had truly taken hold. And for the first time she could remember, Jennet was perfectly warm inside no matter how cold the outdoors might be.

Solomon’s mansion had been built to the most exacting specifications, unlike the old Dutch wooden house in which she’d been raised. There were no cracks for the piercing winds to enter, and every room had a fire blazing day and night. Though it was nearly bedtime, the grate in their bedroom was heaped high with a mix of logs and coals, not—as was customary—burning down preparatory to damping for the night.

Jennet sat beside the fire, wearing one of Solomon’s silk dressing gowns since none of hers were yet come from the shops, and brushing her black hair. Her husband stood leaning on the mantel, sipping his brandy and looking at her. And smiling.

“Solomon, I was thinking … I do not mean to make you angry, but you said I could help the poor if I married you.”

“Indeed. And so you can.” She lowered her brush. He held up a forestalling hand. “No, don’t stop what you’re doing. I like to watch you.”

Jennet went back to brushing her hair. “Today, at the mantua-maker, and at the milliner as well, Flossie insisted we must spend such a huge amount. I can’t think how—”

“My dear Jennet, you must never worry about what you spend. It is entirely my affair. Besides, I told you, you may trust Flossie completely. She’ll not allow you to be cheated.”

“I’ve no reason to think the shopkeepers cheated us. But if I’m to do something for—”

“Ah yes, something for the vagrants and beggars up by the tanneries. I have not forgotten your concerns, my dear. Here, use this to help your supplicants.” Solomon took a handful of coins from his pocket. He crossed the room and, one by one, began stacking gold sovereigns on her dressing table.

Jennet’s mouth formed into a tiny circle of astonishment. Seven. Eight. Nine. Solomon paused, looked at her, smiled, and added a final coin to the pile.

Ten pounds. Quite possibly more, since gold coins had extra value. Certainly enough to feed everyone in the tanneries for months. And with more than enough left over to make the other purchases she had in mind.

Solomon came to where she sat, took the brush from her hands. “Well, have you nothing to say?”

She raised her glowing face to his. “I am trying to—”

He put his fingers over her lips and bent toward her. “On second thought, be quiet. I don’t want you to say anything. I want to kiss you.”

He lifted her up and carried her to the bed, untied the sash of the silk dressing gown and looked for a long moment at her naked body, then began to do those incredible things that he never seemed to tire of doing. In the six days she’d been his wife he had done them so frequently Jennet had already lost count.

She was no longer sore as she had been before, and not rubbed raw each time. Indeed, now, as soon as he touched her, even so much as patted her arm with his hand, something remarkable happened. Her heart began to beat more insistently. She fancied she could feel the blood moving through her veins. And each time that part of her—which until that afternoon in his carriage she had never considered it ladylike to think about—became the center of her being.

She was moist and hot between the legs; her flesh pulsed and prickled. And she wanted him to do exactly what he did. Everything he did. With his hands and his mouth. And his cock. A word she had never dared to even think until Solomon taught her to say it aloud. The way he did. All the time. “Look how my cock stands up to greet you. Come, Jennet, don’t be bashful, look. It’s different from your brothers’, eh?”

“Maybe.” It was a small, shy whisper, but she couldn’t turn away. “I only ever saw Paul’s when he was a tiny boy. My brother Luke is older than I.”

“Yes, but I was different from the time I was eight days old.” He took her hand and guided it toward the head of his shaft. “The foreskin is cut away. Circumcision. It marks me as a Jew. The great secret is that it also makes me more sensitive. Even to a touch as gentle as this.” He drew her fingers lightly back and forth.

And she didn’t pull away. She smiled.

All in less than a week.

He had definitely not been wrong about her.

The lump on the knee was the size of a large walnut. It might not have seemed so big on the leg of an adult. But on a three-year-old it looked enormous.

“How long has he had this?” Jennet did not look up as her fingers traversed the swelling. Lightly, the way her father did it, but with an economy of motion that was hers alone. The lump was hot to the touch, and tight-feeling, as if the skin were stretched to thinness. “Come, tell me when this began.”

“Don’t know. Only ever saw it this morning.”

“This morning! But a boil like this … it didn’t start growing today.”

“Never said it did, only as I ain’t seen it before.”

Jennet bit her lip. There were, she had long since discovered, mothers of many sorts in the tanneries. Some were devoted, others were not, just as anywhere else in the city. What was different about the women in tanneries was that practically none had husbands. They were widows, or women who had been made pregnant by someone who refused to marry them or who was already married. If the women were to feed themselves and their children, they had to resort to petty theft and whoring on the city’s streets.

“So what’s going to happen?” the boy’s mother demanded. “Ada Carruthers told me you’d say whether or not he was going to die.”

That wasn’t unusual. Jennet came to the shed at the far end of Dolly’s Shipyard two or three days a week—thanks to a sympathetic watchman it was never locked against her—and Ada Carruthers was usually among those waiting for her. The woman had a brood of five and it seemed there was always something wrong with one of them. If it were not one of her children that was ailing, it was one of her neighbors, or their children.

“Ada said you’d tell me, mistress. Is my wee lad going to live or die?”

Jennet stopped fingering the little boy’s knee. He’d fallen asleep in her arms, and his small, pinched face was hot and flushed. “He need not die from the boil,” she said quietly, her hand on his forehead. “But he’s burning with fever. Have you been giving him swamp water to drink?”

The woman turned away. “I give ’em all what I have. Ale when I can buy it, water when I can’t.”

“All. How many children have you?”

“Five. This one here, he’s the baby.”

“And that’s why it’s important to you that he lives? Because he’s your baby?”

This time the woman stared straight into Jennet’s eyes. “It’s important ’cause if he’s gonna die, I’d best start adding his share of the food to what I give the other four. Ain’t no point in wasting it.”

Jennet hugged the small body to her, as if she could protect him from his mother’s pragmatic cruelty. “He will live if I treat the boil,” she said again. “And if he gets proper care after that.”

“I’ll do what I can,” the woman said sullenly. “Always have. What I can. How you going to treat that thing, then?”

Jennet reached for the linen drawstring bag that lay on the ground beside her. “We are going to treat it together. You are going to hold your son quite still, and I am going to open the boil.”