City of Dreams (53 page)

“What?” He put the cup down. “Exactly what do you do?”

“You know what I do. I bring the tanneries women food, and the salves and ointments I get from Phoebe at the apothecary shop. And I give them a bit of money so they can buy ale and not drink that terrible swamp water, or the salty stuff as comes from the wells.”

“And more often than not they use the money to buy rum or geneva.”

She shrugged. “I suppose they do sometimes.”

“You know they do. Frequently. Jennet, you didn’t answer my question. What else do you do?”

Her hand was trembling when she set down the Spode cup. “You’ve heard something, Solomon. You’d best tell me what it was.”

“In my business I hear a great deal, not all of it true. But when a story is repeated in enough coffee shops, and taverns, and slop shops, not to mention bordellos … Repetition serves for truth in the end, Jennet. You know that.”

“You’re thinking of my father. Yes, I know it.”

“Well, what about this story? The one that says you’ve played at being a surgeon, actually used a lancet and a scalpel.” His voice softened. “On the wide arc between absolute truth and total fiction, beloved, where does that fit in?”

Jennet pursed her lips and toyed with her rings for a moment, then raised her head and looked at him. “It’s absolute truth, Solomon.”

“Yes, Jennet, I thought it probably was.”

Her eyes widened. “You did?”

“Of course. You’re clever enough. You grew up in a surgeon’s house. God knows you can achieve anything with those magical hands. And I know there’s a part of you that doesn’t hesitate to do what you want when you want, and count the cost later.”

“But I’m a woman.”

“Now that is something I know to be the absolute truth.”

The mood for flirting had left her. “Everyone says it’s unnatural.” She watched him from below lowered lashes, waiting, trying to judge his reactions. “Everyone says I shouldn’t—”

“I am not usually much concerned with what everyone says.” Her heart soared. Then he went on. “In this case, however, I have to be.”

Disappointment was a short, sharp pain in her chest. “For a moment I thought you would understand.”

“I do. I simply cannot countenance the notion of you in one of His Majesty’s prisons. What you are doing is illegal, Jennet. You can be prosecuted. To the full rigor of the law, as they say.” He tapped the newspaper beside him with one finger. “However desperate the state of these children, you cannot—”

She had spread a linen napkin over her lap. Now she crumpled it and flung it on the tea table. “You can stop worrying about that, Solomon. I haven’t the faintest idea how to cure the bladders. If I did, I would. Whatever the law says. But I don’t. As for illegality … In God’s name, what do you call what you do?”

“Clever,” he said. “I call it clever. And profitable. And necessary. And I assure you, I’m in complete compliance with the real law, the one that controls how we actually live and get by.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I know you don’t. That’s why we’re having this discussion. Jennet, the reason my houses and I are in no danger from the magistrates is because I conduct my business properly. I pay those whose job it is to interfere with me so well and so discreetly that they have no motive to make me any trouble, and a strong one to leave me alone.”

Her mouth opened in one of those little circles of surprise that always made him want to kiss her. “Oh. I see. I never thought …”

“No. I am aware of that. That’s why I’m telling you. And have you thought about Zachary Craddock?”

“Zachary. What has he to do with any of this?”

“Everything. I gave him to you on a salver, Jennet, and you’ve yet to take up the gift.”

“His taste for whoring, you mean. I don’t know how to use it. I’ve thought about it occasionally, but what can I do? Even if I could make him apologize, I don’t believe it would do any good at this late date. I think it would just stir up all the—”

“Hush. You are talking like a little girl. Of course it would be useless to have Craddock make some public declaration concerning your father. Revenge is not about this for that, Jennet. It is about getting a good deal more of this than however much you were made to pay of that.”

She shook her head. “Solomon, I don’t understand. I know you mean me to, but I simply can’t see what you want me to do.”

“Very well. I’ll spell it out, if you give me your word that you will never again take a surgical tool into your hands.”

She was silent.

“Your word, Jennet. I am offering you a bargain: help for your tanneries women and their brats, and vindication for your father. In return, you give up surgery.” She didn’t speak, didn’t even look at him. “Come, my love, have you ever known me to make a promise and not keep it?” She shook her head. “Well, then,” he persisted, “do we have an agreement?”

Jennet bit her lip and folded her hands and stared at them. He’d called them magical hands. It was almost the same thing she’d said to Caleb Devrey. I
can do anything with these hands, Caleb, I can work magic. Surely that is a gift from God and it is meant to be used.
And Caleb had shaken his head and looked shocked, and now Caleb was spreading vicious stories. The women would never tell. It was as her father had warned her: Caleb Devrey had become her enemy.

She stood up and began pacing the room, clenching and unclenching her fingers.

Solomon sat and watched her.

Since she was eight years old and happened on her father when he was removing a tumor from a man’s arm, she had been transfixed by the courage it took to cut into living flesh. And when doing so could save a life … Even now, the thought made her breathless. Especially now. She’d gotten better and better at it the more practice she had. These days when she cut, it didn’t seem that her hands were a gift from God. It felt as if she were God. She could cut away evil and leave good behind. At least sometimes.

“I am waiting for your decision, Jennet.”

He spoke softly but with no attempt at persuasion, as he had spoken to her in the carriage on their wedding day. God knew she’d made the right decision that time. “I love you, Solomon.”

“I know you do. The only question in my mind is whether you love me enough to give up this dangerous but apparently intoxicating practice.”

“I do good, you know. I can’t save everyone, but I save some.”

“I’m sure you do.”

She sighed. “But I do not choose to do good to others at my husband’s expense.” She paused, and took a deep breath, “Very well, Solomon. I will never again touch a scalpel or a lancet.”

“No more adventures in the cutting trade?”

“None.”

“You swear it?”

“I do, Solomon. I swear it.”

He exhaled as if a great weight had been lifted from him. “Thank God. Very well, here’s my part of the bargain. Your women out by the tanneries, and all the other charity cases you wear yourself out seeing to, would they not be better treated in some central place? A place like St. Bartholomew’s in London, say?”

“A hospital?”

“Exactly. But not those miserable things that have passed by the name in this colony. A proper hospital. Where the poor could get proper treatment.”

“Oh! Oh, Solomon, what an extraordinary idea! Could you—”

“No, I could not. What’s needed is a place with public standing, not a private act of charity. It must be sanctioned by the Common Council of the Corporation and made official by the signature of the governor. And it is those authorities who must name your father to be the surgeon in charge.”

Jennet pressed her hands to her cheeks. They were burning. Solomon’s idea was a wonderful fantasy shimmering in the distance. “But they won’t. The idea has been mentioned once or twice, and the Council has shown no inclination to build a hospital. And my father? What would persuade the Council to make such an appointment?”

“For one thing,” Solomon said, “business is not good in the city these last months. Pennsylvania produces more wheat than we do in New York. Pennsylvania wheat is nowhere near as good, but the owners of the sugar plantations don’t give a damn. So the Caribbean slaves eat poorer but cheaper bread, and the workmen of New York eat none. Right now, there are only two ships being built in the entire city. Eighteen months ago there were two dozen. The politicians have promised to make things better for the craftsmen. The only way they can do it is by starting some building works paid for out of the general taxes.”

“But won’t they build something they want rather than a hospital they don’t want? How could we possibly persuade them?”

“Not we.
You.”
He saw the disbelief on her face and chuckled. “You, my darling girl, will use your power to make them do what you want.”

Jennet went back to her chair, settling her wide skirts with a great rustling of silk and taffeta. Her brilliant and wonderful and always clever husband had gone mad. “I have no power on the Common Council, Solomon.”

The way her breasts rose over her tightly laced bodice heated him. Later. “You do,” he said. “I gave it to you.”

Jennet stared at him, her lovely face a study in puzzlement. Two tears had formed in the corners of her incredible blue eyes.

“Sweet child, listen to me. You think yourself clever, and you are.” He leaned forward, took her hands, and lifted first one then the other to his lips. The scent of her skin was intoxicating. “But to win in the world of men you must be ruthless as well as intelligent. Zachary Craddock has been reelected to the Council six times. It is the basis of his standing in the community. And a source of enormous pride to him and Tamsyn and their children. And you have the power to take it away.”

The doing of the thing, to use her mother’s favorite phrase, took nearly fourteen months, and what she got was not exactly what Jennet had set out to get. But it was close.

Luck, Solomon said, usually comes down a crooked street. Jennet’s—and through her, Christopher’s—arrived by a number of indirections. The latest census put the population of New York at nearly nine thousand, living in fourteen hundred houses. In a city of such size it was no longer possible to deal with the indigent from the proceeds of the church poor boxes and a small topping-up by the government.

Crime and illness went together in the minds of the public. Both were increasing in New York City, though the four bellmen had been exchanged for a dozen watchmen who patrolled the streets by night. They had been instructed to walk very softly and pause often to stand and listen. They were equipped with oak truncheons with metal tips. All the same, disease and destitution had not immediately disappeared. Nor had criminal acts.

Then there was the matter of election promises. The Council had vowed to give work to the skilled craftsmen whose incomes had plummeted so severely these last months.

Those truths helped Zachary Craddock accomplish the task Jennet Turner DaSilva set him, once she had described his most personal and secret activities in terms so accurate he was sure she must be a witch.

Craddock stood no chance of convincing the Council to appropriate the funds for a hospital as such, but the notion of one made part of an almshouse might be acceptable, even welcomed. There was such a resolution already on the books, dating from 1700, but after over thirty years it was decided that a new vote was required.

When it passed without dissent Craddock, who had moved the question, was left in such a cold sweat of relief he barely made it out the door—smiling and shaking the hands of his fellow councilors—before he had to lean over in the street and vomit.

In November 1734 a committee was established to look for a suitable house to buy. In December they reported that construction was a better idea: “We recommend using a portion of the city’s unimproved Common Land.” The gentleman who reported the conclusion owned land near the Common. Any development that took place in the far north of the town would put money in his pocket.

Zachary Craddock was the first to approve the proposal. Loudly enough so that when the time came to try and get more difficult ideas adopted, the resurrection of a discredited surgeon for example, what he said today would still have an echo. “A purpose-built structure on the Common’s a superb suggestion. Zachary Craddock’s for it, gentlemen. In fact”—slapping the table with the flat of his hand—“I think we’ve talked long enough. So moved, Mr. Chairman.”

The owner of the adjacent land was still on his feet. “Second!” he shouted before he sat down.

The chairman had eaten a particularly large dinner that day. He burped softly before he spoke. “The motion has been made and seconded. Has anyone more to say on the subject?”

“Get on with it,” someone murmured. “Call the question.”

The chairman took up his gavel. “The question is called. May I hear the ayes?” A rumble of approving voices. “Nays?” A lone dissent, from an old curmudgeon who as a matter of course dissented from everything. The gavel fell. “The ayes have it. The motion is carried. Now, a name for our venture. Zachary, this all began with you, as I recall. Any suggestions?”

“Well, being a medical man … ‘Hospital for the Poor and Needy,’ perhaps?”