City of Dreams (59 page)

Brinker’s heart churned in his chest, this time with joy. DaSilva was going to get what he deserved. The scar on the dwarf’s hand tingled and pulsed. Clinging to the top of the fence, he could just about see the gallows in front of City Hall. Easy to imagine himself standing on the ground below them, staring up at Solomon DaSilva’s white satin breeches and shiny black boots, cheering at the snap of the trapdoor.
Jesu Cristo!
He could almost see DaSilva’s legs dangling high above the gallows platform.

The image made him deliriously happy. Then he imagined what it would be like to be poor again, to have to beg in the markets and chance a trip to the stocks to keep from starving.

After the initial shower of coins in the cellar the night DaSilva burned him with the coal, the Jew paid Brinker two shillings a week. And all he be having to do was keep an eye on Caleb Devrey. Normally it be easy work, a whole big lot safer than begging. And
Jesu Christo,
better than any charity from the poor boxes.

The crowd was still screaming for blood, pushing and shoving toward City Hall. Away from the Devrey house.

The sun had gone down and the redbrick mansion cast deep shadows either side.
Jesu Cristo
… if he could get behind the Devrey house without nobody be seeing him, he could make his way north. Once he be away from City Hall, be easier to move.

He looked from the gallows in front of City Hall to his hand, thinking about the money. Brinker took a long breath, held it for three heartbeats, then dropped off the fence and began scurrying through the shadows of the front garden toward the house. Behind it, about half a mile north, was Nassau Street.

“And what is it you’d be wanting here?” Flossie kept a silk pocket cloth pressed to her nose while she spoke. The stench of the dwarf was horrific. There were dried bits of horse manure sticking to his clothes, and his face and his big bald head were streaked with the dirt of the streets.

“Same as I be telling the blackbird be coming to the door first. I got to talk to Mijnheer DaSilva.”

“Well, you can’t. And in this house we have no dealings with God-cursed freaks. Go away.”

Flossie started to close the door, but Brinker had wedged his foot in it. Desperate he be. Already been to the sign of the Greased Griddle over by Queen Street, he and DaSilva met there sometimes. Right next to one of the Jew’s whorehouses, the Griddle be, but no sign of DaSilva in neither place. And nearly thirty minutes gone since Caleb Devrey joined the pack of Jew-haters out for blood. He be losing much more time, be too late. “Ach, mevrouw, you be blessed if you help me.” Brinker put on his best whine. That sometimes worked with women as gave themselves airs like this one did. “Me with me short legs and all, be an hour afore I be getting to Mijnheer DaSilva’s …”
Jesu Cristo,
he couldn’t say “whorehouse.” The old bitch be slamming the door in his face. Close his foot right in the door, she would. “Mijnheer DaSilva’s establishment over by Hudson’s River. Have some charity, mevrouw. Tell if it be worth the journey. Will I be finding Mijnheer DaSilva once I be getting over by Hudson’s River?”

Flossie stared at him a moment, struggling with revulsion and pity. Finally she shook her head. “No, himself isn’t there. And not here, neither. It’s away Mr. DaSilva is. Doing a bit of business. Now get yourself gone, you ugly little man. If you come back again I’ll be after setting the constables on you, I will. ’Tis a promise.”

Brinker withdrew his foot from the doorway. Flossie closed the door and leaned against it, fanning herself with the bit of silk cloth. There wasn’t much she hadn’t dealt with in her forty-six years, but God’s truth it made her go that peculiar to have to talk to them as bore the devil’s mark in their very flesh.

The mob surged from Wall Street to Broad Street, an animal with its fangs bared, looking for prey. It was full dark now. A few pitch-topped torches had appeared and been set ablaze and lifted aloft. “What about Simpson?” someone shouted. “The Jew what stamps a curse on the meat afore he sends it south to the islands. He lives near here.”

“Aye, that’s a Jew thing, cursing the meat afore Christians eat it. I say we—”

“Not Simpson!” came a voice. “Simpson’s a Tudesco, from Germany!”

“So? He’s a Jew, ain’t he?”

“But what they put on the meat, it ain’t a curse,” the boy protested. “They says some prayers over it, and puts the stamp o’ their church on it, so’s other Jews can—”

The crowd turned on the lad, drawing back and isolating him in the circle of dancing light.

“How come you know so much about them heathens?”

“You got some Jew blood in you, boy?”

“Yeah, he must have! I say we take him down by the fort and string him up on the old gibbet.”

Caleb’s heart was hammering in his chest. He spotted a rain barrel and jumped up on it, waving his arms and yelling. “Stop! Stop! You’re making a huge mistake!”

His family’s wealth and social standing made Caleb a natural leader. A couple of the flaming torches were thrust in his direction, bathing him in a crimson glow. The mob quieted itself and waited.

Caleb picked up their willingness to defer to him the way he’d picked up their bloodlust. He was above them, but one with them. It was right and natural that he, an educated man, should be the general of these troops.

“Leave him be,” he said, pointing toward the youth who’d made the mistake of trying to explain Hebrew ways. “He’s Liam Jones. You all know he’s no Jew. He works in the market where Simpson slaughters his beef. That’s how he knows so much about the business.”

The hostility that had been aimed at Jones eased some, but it didn’t go away. The hatred was waiting to be directed.

“We don’t want the Tudesco Hebrews,” Caleb shouted into the night. “The ones who came from Brazil and Holland, who’ve been here the longest and wormed their way into our very lives, taken possession of what’s rightly ours—they’re the men we’re after!”

“The women as well!” a voice shouted from the rear. “Cursed Jews come here and marry our women!”

“Aye, that’s right!” another said. “Christian woman marries a Jew, she ain’t nothin’ but a whore! Any man here don’t know what you do with whores?”

The response was deafening.

Sweet Christ, the thought of Jennet at the mercy of this crowd of men. At his mercy. Caleb’s blood pounded in his veins. “Solomon DaSilva!” The name burst out of him, half curse, half war cry. “Solomon DaSilva’s the kind of Jew we’re after! Came from Brazil and made himself filthy rich with our money!”

“DaSilva’s the biggest whoremaster of ’em all!”

“Aye, and he has a Christian wife!”

“C’mon, what are we waiting for?”

Caleb jumped off the rain barrel, and the horde surged forward with him at its head.

Brinker was hidden in the shadows across the road from the DaSilva place. He’d been there since Flossie O’Toole turned him away, chewing on his disappointment, thinking that whatever the women in that house got, it was no better than they deserved. All the same, he didn’t leave.

’Course, there be no guarantee they be coming here. The mob might be after one of them other Hebrews by now, Levy or Gomez or Simpson. Most of ’em be closer to City Hall. Over near the place they called their synagogue, on Mill Street.
Ja
, but if Caleb Devrey be having anything to do with it …

Give him a lot of pleasure, it would, seeing them wreck Solomon DaSilva’s fine mansion. And seeing what they’d do to his servants and his beautiful young Christian wife.

Jesu Cristo!
What be the reward for someone as saved Solomon DaSilva’s wife from that pack of howling wolves? Even more than he be giving for a warning about what was on the way. Five minutes went by. Ten. The September evening wasn’t cold, but the dwarf shivered. The way she’d looked at him, the one who called herself Flossie O’Toole. Half pity, half disgust. He hated that kind of look. Hated her ….

He felt the beast before he heard it; the tramp of many feet seemed to make the earth shiver. Then came the insistent, clattering sound of men’s leather boots on the stone cobbles. Finally the shouts. “Jews out! Death to the Christ-killers! Get DaSilva! Aye, him and his whore wife!”

They were coming here. And when they found DaSilva had escaped they’d be crazy, ready to tear anything and anyone apart. Him too.
Jesu Cristo!

Candles and firelight flickered behind the tall, curtained windows on the ground floor of the elegant DaSilva mansion. Brinker kept looking at those glimmers of light as he darted across the road.

Jennet had been in the drawing room almost an hour, watching the candles burn down in their beautifully polished brass holders, trying to decide.

Not what to do, but how to do it. Solomon would have to know. Indeed, now that she was sure, she couldn’t wait for him to know. She’d have to … Ah, there! Was that little twitch the child quickening? No, of course not. Just a bit of gas. It was too soon. She was being an idiot.

Dear God, why couldn’t she concentrate? Sitting with her feet propped on a small stool, comforted by the warmth of the fire, she seemed able only to dream.

Won’t you be surprised, my darling Solomon? Five years you’ve faithfully used those wretched silk sheaths, pumped your seed all over my belly instead of inside it, and despite that, nature won’t be denied, and here I am. Almost three months gone with your child.

We must be cautious now, beloved. For our child’s sake.
That was what she’d say.

Solomon would see that. As soon as she told him the news, he would promise to give up selling guns to the Indians, just as she’d given up the scalpel because he asked her to. Never mind his assertions that those whose job it was to interfere with his activities were well paid to look away; Jennet wasn’t reassured. The gun business terrified her, more now than before. The troubles with Canada were on the rise again, and the stories in the papers about alliances between the French and the Indians grew more and more ominous. Every week there was something about how the government would not tolerate private individuals interfering with— Dear God, what was that noise?