City of Dreams (49 page)

Solomon insisted that Jennet’s family must go to Greenwich to escape the disease. And Jennet must go with them.

“But what of you? I do not want you to stay here and catch the fever, Solomon. I should be miserable if anything happened to you.”

“That’s true, isn’t it?” With one finger stroking her cheek, gazing into her astonishing eyes. “I believe you have come to love me a little, my dear.”

“I love you a great deal, Solomon.” She was no longer afraid to say it. “And I want you to come to Greenwich with us, so you—”

“Hush. I cannot leave the city now. My business will not permit it.”

Jennet had no idea exactly what Solomon’s business might be. He owned a great deal of land, including a fair-sized piece of a few of the city’s many markets, but most of his holdings were north of the Common, in the far reaches around the Collect Pond.

Flossie said that land would be worth a fortune someday but it was a wilderness of brambles now, and no one had the least interest in buying or renting it. So where did this enormous wealth come from? “He buys and sells things, does the master,” Flossie said when Jennet pressed her. “Goods and services alike. Buys ’em cheap and sells ’em dear.”

“What sorts of things?”

“All sorts. And if you want to know more, it’s himself you’ll have to ask.”

But bold as she was with him, as he was teaching her to be, Jennet was still not bold enough to ask her husband what it was he bought cheap and sold dear. “I don’t care a fig about your business,” she said instead. “Not if it exposes you to yellowing fever.”

“I have already been exposed, in Brazil when I was a boy. So I am immune. Isn’t that what you tell me about these things?”

“Yes. That seems to be how it is. No one knows quite why.”

“Who cares why? I am immune, and you and your family are to go to the village of Greenwich and be safe.”

Jennet had never been on a boat before. This one was painfully crowded. New Yorkers were as anxious to get away from the yellowing fever as they had been to escape the smallpox. “Where do they arrive from, Papa? How do these contagions come among us?”

“I don’t know.” Christopher and his daughter had found themselves a place on deck, immediately beside a bulkhead. They could see the waves lapping the boat’s planked wooden sides and feel the cool breeze on their face while they watched the heavily forested hills of the west coast of Manhattan slip by. “Some say they’re a result of the unhealthy air rising off the swamps, here on Manhattan Island, but I am not convinced. The rest of the colonies get these pestilences as well. There’s another theory that says their arrival is spontaneous, that somehow it is in our human nature to produce these things every few years.”

“Do you find that more convincing?”

“I used to think so. But we know it profits any as can to take themselves to the country when the city succumbs to these plagues, and if the illness were part of our being then leaving town would do us no good.” Christopher opened his coat, reached into the largest pocket, and pulled out a small, bound volume. “A case in point. Young fellow in Philadelphia, Ben Franklin, sent me this. Seems he’d read some of my articles in the press.”

“I thought you never signed them with your own name.”

“I don’t. He found me out nonetheless. Apparently he’s an enterprising sort.”

Jennet nodded toward the book. “Is Mr. Franklin the author?”

“Yes. And the printer as well. He means the book to be an annual thing if the public takes to it. An amusing title.”

He held the book out to her and Jennet read the words aloud. “
Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Does Mr. Franklin say something in his ‘almanack’ about the yellowing fever?”

“Only as part of general advice about health. He reminds us that fresh air and exercise may forestall illness, and prevention is better than the blistering and purging and bloodletting that comes after it arrives.”

Jennet made a face. “That’s all the physicians do, isn’t it? They can fairly kill you while they’re curing the disease. I told Luke he was quite mad to want to go to Edinburgh and become like them. I said he should stay here and learn surgery from you.”

Christopher sighed. Not much good would come from talking to Luke. Certainly not by Jennet. The boy had always been a bit resentful of his younger sister’s superior cleverness and his father’s reduced circumstances. Of all Christopher’s children it was Luke who most detested the penury in which they’d grown up. “The Edinburgh doctors say they are trained in the ‘benign use of the knife.’ At least that’s what Zachary Craddock said.”

“I hate Zachary Craddock. It’s his fault that you—”

Christopher reached out and patted her hand. “Don’t trouble yourself, Nettie.”

Jennet smiled. He used to call her that when she was a little girl. Using her old pet name now meant he’d truly forgiven her for marrying without his permission. “I do trouble myself. It was a grave injustice, Papa.”

He shrugged. “Injustice is the way of the world. Anyway, it’s nothing to do with you. As for Luke … Your brother likes the things that money can buy. He was right to go to Edinburgh once your kind husband gave him the opportunity. No workaday surgeon will ever earn what the grand physicians do. And Luke is handsome and charming. He’ll get on well with the society ladies who call him in to see to their vapors and suchlike.” He chuckled softly. “I forget, you’re one of them now yourself. My little Jennet, a society lady.”

“But I’m not. My husband’s a Jew, Papa. Society has no room for him.”

“I’ve wondered if that bothered you.”

She shook her head. “Why should it? I never wanted to be like those idle, empty-headed women. You know that.”

Christopher did know. But he doubted that his daughter had any idea how her husband earned his lavish fortune, or exactly what besides his being a Hebrew caused him to be shunned. On the other hand, he couldn’t be entirely sure she didn’t know. Jennet was frequently a surprise even to him. “Listen, child, I’ve been wanting to ask you something. Once, shortly after you were married, I chanced on Caleb … It doesn’t bother you to talk about him, does it?”

“Not a fig.”

It was said with a clear-eyed glance that told him she really meant it. Extraordinary. A man twice her age, a Jew, and in half a year he’d made her forget her youthful passion for her handsome cousin. Ah well, he’d long known how little any man understood women. “Good. Then I can tell you what he said.”

“Caleb?”

“Yes. At the sign of the Black Horse over on William Street. The place was crowded and noisy, of course, so I can’t be sure of his exact words. And he’d had perhaps a dram too many. But I believe he made some mention of you with … I know this sounds ridiculous, even offensive, but Caleb was talking about seeing you …”

“Yes, Papa?”

Christopher swallowed hard. Sweet Christ. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to discuss this, but he’d begun so he must finish. “He said he once saw you with a lancet in your hands.”

The coastline was becoming less wooded. The rolling farmlands of the small village of Greenwich, its gentle hills, even the sparkling trout stream called Minetta Water, were coming into clear focus. The crew adjusted the sails and the boat creaked as she came about and began to tack toward shore. “We’re going to dock, Papa. We must join Mama and the others.”

He put out a restraining hand. “Your mother can wait a moment more. Jennet, I am troubled. Have you nothing to say?”

She was wearing the gold bracelet, the one she’d given the little boy to bite on when she operated on his knee. The soft metal still showed his tooth marks, but the boy had died a week after the surgery. The wound had festered. Jennet had gotten Phoebe to give her some curative powders from Tamsyn’s apothecary shop, but nothing had helped. Perhaps, if she had been able to be her father’s pupil openly rather than merely catch what she could of the lessons he gave others, she might have saved the child.

“And if Caleb were not lying, Papa? If I had used a lancet, even a scalpel, and I did so to help my fellow creatures, would that be so dreadful?”

“Dear God … You know I am not old-fashioned in such matters. I myself taught you to read. But this … It isn’t natural, Jennet. It’s an offense against every type of human decency.”

“Why? I do not understand how it is that the fact that I am a woman means I cannot be a surgeon.” Close enough now to see the waving leaves of Greenwich’s lush tobacco plants. The spacious white mansion that had been the first house built in the area still dominated the village from its perch atop the highest hill. Rural, peaceful Greenwich was a pretty sight, but Jennet’s vision was blurred by tears. She was trembling so badly she had to clutch the side of the boat to steady herself. “I have thought about it for years, Papa. Still I cannot understand.”

Christopher looked at his daughter’s white-knuckled hold on the boat’s railing. The passion he’d unleashed shook him more than her virtual admission that she had practiced surgery. “It is … Jennet, I can find no words. Does your husband know of this … this aberration?”

She kept her face turned to the coastline that was rushing toward them. “We are about to dock. Mama will be worried if we do not join her.”

“Jennet, listen to me. Whatever I think of your activities is no longer important. You are a married woman now, your husband’s responsibility. But there are things you must understand. Yours is not an ordinary situation. Your husband is … a Jew. And there are other matters I cannot explain that could be used against him.”

“Very well. If you cannot explain these other matters, there is nothing more to say. Let us find Mama and the others.”

Christopher put a hand on her arm. “There is one thing more to say. Caleb Devrey is no longer your friend, Jennet, though you were as innocent in the matter as he.”

“I am not troubled by what Caleb thinks. I don’t care a fig about him.”

“Yes, you are very busy today telling me all the things you don’t care a fig about. Including the delicacy which is supposed to be born into all females, and which is apparently missing in you. I presume, however, that you care about your husband.”

“Of course I care about Solomon. I would never do anything to harm him. How can you suggest such a thing?”

“I am trying to tell you, Jennet, that Caleb has become your enemy and, by implication, your husband’s enemy. And if, as you have all but admitted, you have given him such a weapon to wield against you as the fact that you actually took a surgeon’s tools into your hands and used them, then you must take care. For Solomon’s sake, if not your own, you must take great care.”

DaSilva urged his horse into the shallow but swiftly flowing water and leaned forward, speaking softly, gentling the creature across the rocky streambed and up the steep northern bank. He’d left Manhattan behind four hours earlier, paying the three-penny toll to cross the vicious double tide at Spuyten Duyvil Creek via old man Philipse’s King’s Bridge. Once across, he was in the sparsely settled county of West Chester. He’d soon turned off the well-traveled road that led to the small villages and neat farms of the area—all were tenants of the eighty-six-thousand-acre Van Cortlandt plantation—and ridden deep into the woods.

Usually he made the journey with Clemence. This time, with the yellowing fever raging and the nearly empty city at the mercy of looters, he had preferred to leave Clemence to look after Flossie and Tilda, the maid, and the Nassau Street house. Jennet, thank God, was in Greenwich, safely away from all the trouble, which freed him from having to say that business would keep him away from home for a few days. Not that she’d demand an explanation yet. But she would soon enough. Every day she became more a strong-willed woman than the child he’d married. DaSilva chuckled at the thought.

The woods were quiet, but the man DaSilva was meeting could hear the falling of a leaf a quarter-mile distant. He picked up the sound of the approaching horse and stepped into the path and waited to be seen. His greasy buckskins blended into the forest. DaSilva didn’t see him until he’d almost run him down. “Whoa!
Santo Deus!
Hold back, girl! Whoa, I say!” DaSilva pulled back on the reins. The mare reared, spun half around, and finally yielded to the pressure on the bit.
“Merda!
You’re a bloody fool, Patrick Shea.”