City of Dreams (48 page)

She had in the end chanced the buying of the instruments on her own. No one she could send to the ironmonger’s in her stead would make as good a job of selecting her tools, and she did not want to involve one more person in her secret. Better to choose a purveyor in a quiet part of town, up from Lions Slip on Golden Hill, and go there dressed as inconspicuously as possible, in her old gray cloak with the hood pulled forward so it shadowed her face.

“Barbering things them is,” the shopkeeper had said while she examined the display in the wooden case at the rear. “If it’s knives for cutting the vegetables you’re wanting, I have some up there by the door.”

“No, this is what I’m after.” She’d pointed quickly to a pair of scalpels in different sizes, and a lancet, and a probe, and a needle for stitching wounds. “They’re for my uncle.”

“I take it he’s a barber.”

“That’s right.”

“Never heard of no one sending a girl to buy his barbering tools.” But while he grumbled the man took the things she’d indicated from the case, and wrapped them in a bit of newspaper. “Four shillings that comes to.”

Jennet fished the coins out of her pocket, put them on the counter, grabbed her bundle, and ran.

The first thing she’d done when she got the instruments home was to lock herself in the bedroom and put the things in the soft linen pouch she’d made to receive them. After that she hid the pouch in a bureau drawer, beneath the silk undergarments that Flossie had made her buy. In the morning, after Flossie had laced her into her corset and helped her dress, Jennet went down for breakfast, then sneaked back upstairs. She reclaimed the pouch and tied it around her waist under her petticoats with the long cotton ribbons she’d attached for the purpose.

There it stayed all day, every day, lying against her hip, protected by the wire panniers that held out her skirts. Waiting until the moment when she could take out the instruments and use them to do what she was convinced she’d been born to do.

“There you have her.” Bede Devrey threw out his arm as if presenting a queen to her court. “Isn’t she magnificent?”

Caleb stared at the ship sitting on the ways, waiting to be fully fitted, then launched. “I suppose it is magnificent, as that sort of thing goes.”

“Not it, you dunce; a ship is never an it. She’s a she, a beautiful woman. The
Nancy Mariah.”

It was the name of Bede’s wife, Caleb’s sister-in-law. “Pretty soon all the women in this family will have ships called after them. You’ll have to make a few more daughters if you aren’t to run out of names.”

“Not if you bring us a new possibility. Caleb, look, I know you were disappointed over Cousin Jennet, but Papa wants me to tell you—”

“That it’s time I married. I know. I presumed that’s why you’d brought me up here to Dolly’s to see your blasted ship. So you could talk to me like a proper older brother.”

“Something like that,” Bede admitted.

Caleb turned from the ways and faced the rear of the sprawling shipyard. It was three of the afternoon, the dinner hour, when all the workers had gone home. The place was pretty much deserted. It seemed he never saw Dolly’s under any other conditions. As far as he was concerned, this was truly a ghost yard, though the three-masted merchantman Bede was so proud of cost upwards of five thousand pounds to build. “You want to tell me I should marry,” he said quietly, more to himself than his brother. “That it is the right and the proper thing to do. But this may well be the worst place you could have chosen to raise the subject.”

“In God’s name, Caleb, why? I know you’re not interested in the business, but that doesn’t mean—”

“It’s nothing to do with Devrey Shipping. It’s that shed back there at the far end of the yard.” Caleb pointed to the neglected structure near the outer fence. “I find it rather a bitter reminder. And if I told you what I suspected went on there, I doubt you’d believe it.”

The scalpel fit her hand as if it had been made for it. When she was a tiny girl, the first time Mama had placed a sewing needle in her hands, Jennet had the same feeling. She simply knew what could be done with it.

All she’d needed to do was look at a piece of embroidered goods to see exactly how the stitches were made; nothing of the intricacies of needlework were a mystery to her. When she set herself to making something like whatever she looked at, she could do so with truly astounding exactitude.

Jane bragged about her daughter’s needlework to all as would listen. The house on Hall Place was filled with cushions Jennet had picked out in petit point, with curtains she’d decorated with exquisite crewel stitches, and with table coverings bordered with her hand-made lace. No one, however, would praise her mastery of surgery, for all it was a far more important craft. Instead, if she were discovered she would probably be put in the stocks outside City Hall, or tied into the ducking chair and lowered into the well until she was just short of drowned. Maybe even locked in the dungeons.

Because she was a female, and that meant she could stitch as much as she liked on cloth, but never, never on human flesh.

Papa’s medical books were full of illustrations of boils and careful descriptions of how to open them, but none were clearer than Lucas Turner’s handwritten instructions.
If the Boil is raised entirely above the Skin and shows no sign of having a Core that has burrowed Deep into the secondary Dermal layer, even perhaps into the Underlying Bone, then the proper examination of it will reveal a Whitened spot at the apex of the Hummock. It is there that the small Triangular Scalpel must be inserted, always being of careful Mind to Allow for the inconvenience of the spouting Poisonous Effluent such Treatment may provoke, and an X cut made that will give Opportunity to entirely empty the Wound of Noxious Matter.

She had seen the whitened spot as soon as she examined the boy. Now Jennet held a bit of rag above the place she meant to open, and positioned her knife to do its work. “You must hold him very still. I do not wish to pierce any but the external skin.”

She seated the other woman on the stool, with her son in her lap, and knelt beside them. “Very well, let us begin. Remember, he will flinch but you must not.”

She lowered her hand and made the first swift, deft cut.

The child wailed as if she were slitting his throat.

“I don’t understand you, Caleb. You’re quite likely the most sought-after bachelor in New York, yet you—”

“Be quiet.”

“No, I shan’t be quiet. You’re acting a total idiot. There are women just as beautiful as—”

“Shut your mouth, will you! For a moment only.”

Bede stopped arguing. His brother stood where he was, staring at the fenced perimeter of the shipyard as if he had spotted the Holy Grail among the stacks of sawn lumber and trampled sawdust and barrels of pitch.

There was, however, no repetition of the sound Caleb thought he’d heard.

“Mind telling me what you’re looking for?” Bede asked after almost a minute had passed.

“I’m not looking, I’m listening. I thought I heard a scream.”

“A scream! Good God, Caleb, you’ve been too long in the highlands listening to scare stories told round the peat fire.”

“Edinburgh is not the highlands. And it’s Ireland, not Scotland, where they burn peat.”

“Be that as it may. There’s no one screaming in Dolly’s Shipyard in broad daylight. Come on, we may as well go back to town. I don’t fancy my chances of getting you to listen to reason wherever we are.”

“I am listening,” Caleb said. “And I hear everything quite clearly.”

“Good. Then perhaps you’ll do something about it. There’s nothing to be gained by holing up and licking your wounds, little brother. Take matters in hand and do something about them. That’s a man’s way of dealing with setbacks.”

The pus did not spout, it oozed. Moreover, Jennet had to squeeze the boil to get it to release its suppurating fluid. And when she did so the walls of the thing did not come together as she expected them to. She was instead met with some kind of resistance in the heart of the abscess.

Lucas had written that boils sometimes had a core, and she had more than once heard her father expound on the subject to a student. He called it a funnel of tissue that encompassed the nub of the infection. Tissue, however, did not feel as this did: uneven to the touch, sharp and gritty. “There’s something buried inside,” she told the boy’s mother. “Some foreign body.”

“Foreign? I don’t be doin’ with foreigners, mistress. Not if I can help it. I’m after doin’ the best I can by my young ones, like I said, and there’s none as comes to my place out here, foreign or New Yorker though he may be. I meet ’em in the town and—”

“Ssh, calm yourself.” She probed the wound as gently as she could. “I didn’t mean that kind of foreigner. A cinder perhaps. Or a pebble.”

“In his knee? How did he get a pebble in his knee? I had a hard time when I was carrying him, but I never ’et no pebbles.”

“I know you didn’t. He got it by scraping or cutting his flesh on some surface where such things were present. I can easily get it out.” She reached down and retrieved the scalpel from the dirt floor of the shed. “Hold tight, little man, two or three more cuts and this will be over. Now, show me how strong you are. Bite on this.”

With her free hand Jennet reached into her basket and got her gold bracelet. Flossie had put it on her when she left Nassau Street, and she’d taken it off on her way to the shipyard. Now she shoved it into the little boy’s mouth.

IV

By the summer of 1732 Jane Turner had decided it was no bad thing to have her eldest daughter married to a rich Jew. God knew life had been a little easier in the following six months.

For one thing Jennet was frequently able to slip her mother a few coins to ease the running of the household. For another, Jane’s eldest, Luke—his given name was Lucas but he was only ever called by the shortened version—had been able to go off to Edinburgh to study medicine thanks to Solomon’s generosity. For a third, that first August after Jennet’s marriage the yellowing fever came. It was called so because the victims turned yellow after death. The few who survived were left imbecile, shaking and babbling in delirium. The yellowing fever was a dreadful plague.