City of Dreams (5 page)

They planted before they built, and all that first summer they slept rough with a musket between them, though so far the natives they’d seen weren’t hostile. “A little sullen and withdrawn,” Sally said. “As if they needed a good purging, but harmless enough.”

Lucas wasn’t so sure. Even when their cabin was finished—hewn timber walls and a thick roof thatched with reeds and grasses, as was permitted north of the wall—he went every night to his bed with the musket loaded and at hand. People in the town told endless stories of women who’d been raped, children murdered, men tortured before they were killed, and years of work gone up in flames when a homestead was burned to the ground.

One good thing: the Dutch had never been greedy enough or stupid enough to sell guns to the tribes living closest to them. In the vicinity of Nieuw Amsterdam, superior weapons gave the Europeans an advantage, though they were outnumbered. In the far north, near Dutch Fort Orange, there was constant fighting with the marauding Catskill and Wawarsink tribes who had been armed by the French and the English, desperate to have the Indians take sides in their wars over colonial territory. It seemed an idiotic policy to Lucas. If you had to choose between trusting a savage or trusting your gun, the weapon won every time.

Sometimes, long after dark, when he heard the sounds of strange night birds calling to one another in the surrounding woods, he remembered the stories he’d heard about ritual fires where death came after hours of screaming agony, and about mutilation that began with the toes and moved slowly upward. Lying awake in the night, Lucas put his hand to his head and wondered whether a man was always dead before some savage peeled off his scalp. And whether Sally had heard as many stories of rape and torture as he had.

They were too busy to speak of such things. The earth around their cabin was black and rich. The first season, despite how late she was getting things in the ground, nearly all the seeds Sally brought with her sprouted and thrived. She planted local vegetables as well, the pumpkins and Indian corn the settlers had adopted as basic foods, and at Lucas’s urging she gave over a large field at the edge of their cleared land to poppies. “I need enough laudanum, Sal, so I can perform any surgery I want and the patient will not run screaming from the knife.”

“For the patient’s sake, of course,” Sally said.

“Of course.”

“You’re a liar, Lucas Turner. You want the people you’re cutting to be all but senseless because that way, once you cut into them, you can take your time and study how they’re made.”

“Aye, there’s some truth in that.” Lucas spoke without looking up. It was October, five months after their arrival, and he was sitting by the fire in their cabin, using the light to write by. “Truth, but no harm.”

“You’re a barber, Lucas, not a surgeon. Only surgeons are permitted to perform an anatomy.”

“You’re contradicting yourself, Sal. It’s not an anatomy if the patient is alive. Only if you cut open a corpse.”

“Don’t lecture me, Lucas. According to Company rules, you are not a surgeon. If they were to discover what you’re doing, we—”

“Are you entirely mad, girl? We’re in Nieuw Netherland, not New England. And the Company is on the other side of the ocean. Do you think any English magistrate is going to live through eleven weeks on one of those hell ships just to come and see whether Lucas Turner is being a good boy?”

“I suppose not.” She finished wiping clean the pewter bowls they’d used for their stew of rabbit and corn, and placed them neatly on the shelf above the hearth.

The pewter bowls had come from a gentlewoman in England. Lucas had moved away the veil that made her blind in her right eye. The literature on the subject went back to the great practitioners of the mystic East, but it was an operation so delicate—only the very tip of the lancet could be used, and the amount of pressure applied was critical—that three English surgeons had refused to attempt it. After he said he would, and did so successfully, Lucas was expelled from the Company on the grounds that he, a barber, possessed surgical instruments. If the woman had died, perhaps he would have been dealt with more leniently. Since she lived and thrived, the jealous surgeons hounded Lucas and Sally from London.

He watched Sally put away the pewter bowls. A penny to a pound the surgeons who made such grief for him still ate their suppers off wood.

Sally caught his smile and saw her chance. “Lucas, things are going well for us here, are they not? Your business is doing well?”

“They are and it is. And if you’d stop worrying about me so I could stop worrying about you, everything would be perfect.”

“I’ll try, Lucas. Meanwhile”— she turned away, so she wouldn’t have to look at him—“I’ve been meaning to ask you …”

“What? Go ahead, Sal, ask.”

“Since we’re here and you have so much custom … Is there enough money to put some by for a dowry?”

It was something they’d talked about before they left Rotterdam. With a dowry, Sally might find a husband who was worthy of her. It was the only chance at marriage she’d have, since she wouldn’t accept a man of the class they’d come from, and Lucas had sworn he wouldn’t force one on her. “I’ve thought of it, Sal. But often as not I’m paid in wampum rather than guilders, and—”

“Everyone uses wampum here. It’s as good as money. I’m sure wampum would do for at least part of a dowry.”

“Perhaps you’re right. I’ll do some asking, Sal. And keep my eyes open for someone who wouldn’t mind—” He broke off.

“Wouldn’t mind what, Lucas?”

“That you’re nearly twenty-four. And …”

“And not comely.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You may as well have.”

“No. What I was going to say was ‘Nearly twenty-four, and more clever than any man I’m likely to find in need of a wife here in Nieuw Amsterdam.’”

Three years earlier, during the typhoid epidemic of 1659, Stuyvesant had established a hospital for those who had not long to live. The worst of the town’s whores and drunkards, most of them. Decent folk died in their homes. The hospital had five beds in which, at no cost and purely for the love of Almighty God, the undeserving indigent were allowed to die.

The good women of the town saw it as their duty to care for the dying, however unworthy. Anna Stuyvesant was frequently seen at the hospital. Occasionally the governor’s wife also came. Judith Bayard (though a French Huguenot, she followed the Dutch custom of retaining her own name after marriage) was beautiful, but also a woman of strict rectitude. Even the dying were less likely to scream and curse when she was present. So, too, when the wife of the rector of the Dutch Reformed Church did some of the nursing. Sally Turner, on the other hand, inspired no awe. She got the full brunt of the patients’ misery and discontent. Nonetheless, she appeared the most consistently of all the nursing women.

Nearly every day the juffrouw Turner and her basket could be seen walking along the narrow woodland path between her brother’s
plantage
and the town, entering through the west gate in the sturdy wooden wall, hurrying along the wide Brede Wegh, skirting the small offshoot of the main canal known as Bever’s Gracht, then crossing by the narrow bridge that led to Jews Lane.

That was the only part of the walk Sally disliked. The Jews were fairly recent arrivals, a remnant from a settlement in Brazil. Stuyvesant was known to loathe them, but he’d been forced to let them in because there were Dutch Jews among the directors of the West India Company.

Just walking past the Jews’ yellow brick houses below the mill made the back of Sally’s neck prickle. All those stories of strange rituals involving the blood of Christian children … She could never get through the lane fast enough. Sally was glad to gather up her skirts for the passage through Coenties Alley, always slick with mud, toward the three-story stone building that stood at the water’s edge.

Until the year before, the structure had been merely Nieuw Amsterdam’s largest tavern and its only inn. When Stuyvesant needed somewhere big enough for all the townspeople to meet, he made it the Stadt Huys, the city hall, as well. Coenties Slip, leading to the town wharf, was in front of the Stadt Huys. Nearby were the town storehouses. Above them, in five workshops that had formerly been leased to the shipwrights, was the hospital.

There were two windows in the hospital. The dying stank, so the windows were kept open except in the worst of weather. While she went about her duties Sally could look out and see the short street called Hall Place, and the door to the butcher’s house Lucas visited so frequently.

To buy the pig bladders and sheep intestines he needed in his craft, Sally told herself. That’s why her brother was so often at the butcher’s on Hall Place. And never mind that it was a ten-minute walk from Lucas’s shop. After all, he came to the hospital a few times a week to see if anyone needed bleeding or surgery, so naturally—

“Juffrouw… Please, juffrouw…” A woman’s voice. A few hours earlier, weeks before her time and squatting in the alley behind the Blue Dove alehouse on Pearl Street, she’d given birth to twins—dead, and that was a blessing. One had no legs, the other a huge hole in the top of its head. The woman, a notorious whore, had been bleeding since the birth. Sally figured she’d be dead within the next hour or two.

“Please, juffrouw, can you give me something as stops the burning in my chest? Him over there”—the woman nodded toward the man in the next bed, a drunk who the previous day had had the lower half of his body crushed by a falling barrel but refused to allow Lucas to saw off his legs—“he says you can.”

Sally reached into her basket for a salve of saxifrage and egg yolk, and made herself stop thinking about her brother’s too-frequent visits to the butcher’s on Hall Place.

“Good day to you, mevrouw.” There was no one else in the shop. Lucas didn’t have to keep the twinkle from his eye or the laughter from his voice.

“And to you, barber. I’ve something put by just for you. The intestines of a large cow. Come in the back and see.”

Marit Graumann, wife of Ankel Jannssen, stepped from behind the wooden block. Her husband was one of the town’s twelve “sworn butchers,” permitted to slaughter cattle inside the wall. He paid the tax for a stall in the Broadway Shambles, the market across from the fort, and was required to be there every morning except Sunday. In the afternoon he was permitted to do business from his home. All well and good, except that after Marit gave him his dinner Ankel always stumbled off to bed in a drunken stupor. She herself had to hack apart the meats and poultry sold from the house on Hall Place.

A curtain of burlap separated the front from the rear of the shop. Marit pushed it aside and waited for Lucas. As soon as he brushed past her he felt himself get hard. She had a special smell. A woman smell. He’d had countless whores in London and Rotterdam, even a few here, but none had ever smelled like Marit. Neither did the women who came to him for treatment. They reeked of illness, often of filth. Mevrouw Marit Graumann smelled of flowers. And her lust had a dark and seductive fragrance of its own. Lucas had never before been with a woman who actually desired him. The experience was intoxicating.

It was foolhardy to visit the Hall Place house as often as he did, he knew, but he didn’t stop. The butcher’s wife was as blond as he was dark, and almost as tall. Her body was lush and full. When he held her, Marit’s flesh yielded to him, seemed to melt against his. What he could see of it in the dimness behind the butcher shop where all their meetings had taken place was pink and white, and always, when he was near, flushed with longing.

She led him past the hanging carcasses to the corner of the room they used and that she kept clear for the purpose. The floor of the storeroom, like that of the shop, was covered in sawdust, and she dared not make her husband suspicious by sweeping it clean. They had to couple standing, but that didn’t inhibit them. When Marit turned to him she’d already loosed the ties of her bodice.

Lucas put both hands on her full breasts. He stroked them gently. He’d never known such softness; only the nipples were hard. “Suck them,” she whispered. “Lucas, please, suck them. I cannot wait another moment.”