City of Dreams (6 page)

He buried his face in her breasts, sucking both nipples, one after another. Dear God, the smell. And the velvet skin that burned wherever he touched it. She was trembling in his arms.

“Lucas, ah Lucas … I dream about you every moment. Waking and sleeping. I live only to feel what I feel when I give myself to you.”

He began fumbling himself out of his breeches. She started to lift her skirts. Suddenly there was a clattering above their heads. They froze. Another sound, louder than the first. Then silence.

“It’s all right,” Marit whispered after a few seconds. “The bedroom is just above. He must have knocked something over. He drank three mugs of geneva and two of rum with his dinner. He will not wake for hours.”

Lucas stared up at the splintered wooden planks and the rough timbers that formed both the ceiling above his head and the floor of the Jannssen’s bedroom. Ankel Jannssen was a hulking brute of a man, a drunken animal. He had no right to a woman like Marit, but he had her nonetheless. God help them. If the butcher found out he could go to law, have Marit whipped and turned into the streets with only the clothes on her back. And everything Lucas owned would be forfeit to him.

Sweet Jesus, this was insane. Why did he continue to do it? Because even now, after that moment of stomach-churning fear, he was again hard as a rock and raging for her.

Marit was breathing through her mouth, the tip of her tongue tracing the outline of her lips. “Lucas,” she whispered, and lifted her skirt and her petticoats, held them above her waist, and leaned aginst the wall and spread her legs. “Take me, Lucas. Do whatever you want to me. Only kiss me while you do it. Let me feel your tongue in my mouth.”

He put his lips on hers and sucked her breath into his body. His hands were on her buttocks, squeezing the hot flesh, pulling her toward him. His cock knew where to go. It had learned the way these past three months. She began to moan. He thrust deeper into her, squeezed harder. She trembled more. Her moans came faster. The sounds she made grew louder.

The bell on the shop door rang. “Mevrouw Graumann, are you serving?”

They had long since decided that locking the door would arouse more suspicion than Marit’s absence from the front of the shop. Lucas took his mouth from Marit’s. She turned her face to the flimsy curtain that separated them from the waiting customer. “I’ll be with you immediately, mijnheer—a moment only.”

“
Ja,
fine. I’ll wait.”

Marit leaned her head back. Lucas could see her face in the dim light. Her cheeks were flushed, her skin dewy with the sweat of her passion. He could smell her. She looked into his eyes. He began thrusting again. Slowly at first, then faster. She closed her eyes and bit her lips to stifle the sounds of her delight. Watching her, feeling her shiver and tremble in his arms, was the most exciting thing he had ever experienced. He finished in a burst of such indescribable pleasure it left him hungry for more, knowing full well he could never have enough.

A moment later she’d laced her bodice and adjusted her skirts. Marit patted her hair into place and went out into the front room. Lucas heard her discussing the relative merits of pork and venison and soon after, the sound of her cleaver hacking apart the meat the customer had chosen.

From his corner of the storeroom Lucas could see a side of beef hanging from a hook in the wall, still dripping blood onto the sawdust. A pig’s head hung from a second hook, a large and formless drape of cow’s intestines from a third. Lucas had mentioned that he’d like to try making ligatures from that rather than the intestines of a sheep. There were a couple of pig bladders as well. They were probably also for him. Lucas could never have too many pig bladders.

“Lucas, come out front now. He’s gone.”

Marit was standing in the storeroom of the doorway, beckoning to him. Lucas went to her, but he drew her to his side of the curtain. “Marit, we must stop this. It is insane. What if you were to find yourself with child? Or—”

“In seven years of marriage, Lucas, I have not conceived. But if I were with child, people would assume it was my husband’s.”

He felt the rush of blood to his head, knew his face was dark with anger. “I cannot bear the thought of that pig touching—”

“Ssh, calm yourself. He almost never does. Ankel prefers drink to me.”

He took her face between his hands, began kissing her cheeks and her nose and her forehead. “Ah, Marit, Marit… We are mad. This is incredibly dangerous. The consequences are—”

“I want to go to the woods with you.” It was as if she hadn’t heard him. “I have been thinking of it for days and days. I want to take off all my clothes and all your clothes, and lie down on the clean earth and have you lie atop me.”

“Marit, we can’t. What if—”

She lifted his hands to her lips and began kissing them, sucking his fingers. Drawing each deep between her pursed lips, keeping her gaze locked on his all the while. “You would not believe the things I want to do to you, Lucas, to have you do to me. I do not believe them. They come into my head and I do not know from where. Think of a way, my darling. It will have to be a Sunday when the shop is closed. Ankel sleeps all Sunday afternoon. You live far from the town. Find a place we can meet and tell me how to get there.”

Sally also had secrets. Hers, too, involved women. Indian women.

The contact began the first autumn, when they had been only a few months in Nieuw Amsterdam. Sally came across a little Indian girl gathering rose hips in the woods near the cabin. The child ran as soon as she saw the white woman standing nearby, but apparently the bushes near the Turner homestead were specially prized, because she kept returning. There was another accidental meeting, and soon a third. Each time the girl and the woman came a little nearer to trust.

Finally the moment came when the youngster stood still long enough for Sally to point to the rose hips she was collecting and to simulate a loud sneeze.

The child giggled. Then she also pretended to sneeze. Next she, too, pointed to the contents of her basket and made an exaggerated wiping motion across her face.

“Yes, exactly,” Sally said, “rose hips ease the winter sickness. And do you, I wonder, make them into a tisane as I would?” She made the motions of pouring water from a jug to a pot and placing it over a fire. The little girl nodded furiously in agreement, an enormous smile on her face. “Ah, so you do! How I wish you could tell me what else you gather from these woods and how you use it.”

The child looked puzzled and shook her head.

“No, of course you don’t understand a word I’m saying. But perhaps… Sally.” Sally pointed to herself. “I am Sal-lee.”

The child smiled. “Tamaka,” she said. “Ta-ma-ka.” Then she grabbed her basket and ran.

A few days later the child appeared again, this time at the edge of the clearing surrounding the cabin. She was carrying two ears of Indian corn. Sally went out to meet her with a mug of homemade root beer.

Sally and Tamaka communicated mostly by signs at first; then each learned a few words of the other’s language. Finally they developed a shared language of their own—part signs, part English, part the tongue of the child’s people—in which they communicated with ease.

Tamaka told Sally about how once, long ago before the white people came to this island, the place the Turners’ cabin stood had been special. It was where women went to give birth; that was why the healing plants here were filled with so much power. Another day the child led her new friend to a thicket where the blackberries grew larger than any Sally had ever seen. And yet another time she showed Sally a shy yellow iris that grew in hidden places beside streams, and explained that the root of the plant could be made into a paste that was good for burns.

In return Sally showed Tamaka the sweet-smelling pink gillyflowers whose seed she had brought with her from Holland. They could be steeped in honey and the syrup used to treat sore throats, as well as made into a poultice to ease bruises of the ankles and wrists. She gave Tamaka some seed to take back to her village. A few days later Tamaka brought her mother and her aunt to see the gillyflowers growing in Sally Turner’s garden.

That first winter Sally saw Tamaka many times, but she didn’t see the older women again until the following summer. Not until Tamaka brought her to the outskirts of the Indian village, and the women who had visited Sally came to meet them. On that occasion, looking grave and purposeful, they led Tamaka’s friend to see the gillyflowers growing in their fields among the pumpkins and the squash and the corn.

Sally never mentioned any of this to her brother. It was the first real secret she’d ever kept from him, but she knew what would happen if she told. Lucas would rail at her about savages. He’d make her swear she wouldn’t again go to the Indian village. This little corner of her life, Sally decided, she would keep from her brother. In the interest of peace.

She kept that promise to herself for two years, until a summer’s day in 1663 when she staggered screaming into the barber shop, carrying Tamaka’s limp body. “Lucas! Are you here? Lucas!”

“Sally, what’s wrong? What— In Christ’s name, girl, who are you bringing me?”

“Tamaka. She … in the woods … Oh, God …” Sally had carried the child all the way from the cabin to the town, and she was so exhausted she was barely coherent. “Tamaka.” She put the girl on Lucas’s surgical table and, relieved of her burden, leaned against the wall, panting. “Tamaka.”

Lucas stared at his sister. He made no move toward the child.

“Her hand. Look.” It was all she could manage. Sally slid down the wall and huddled in a heap on the floor, hanging her head between her splayed knees, sucking air into her lungs, waiting for the fiery pain in her chest to subside and her legs and arms to stop quivering.

Lucas glanced at the girl Sally wanted him to examine. The front of her deerskin skirt was soaked in blood. She lay perfectly still. Only the faint rise and fall of her bare chest told him she was alive. Lucas went to his sister, bent over her, put his hand on her shoulder. “Here, girl, you’re half dead with fatigue. Hang on a minute. I’ll run across the road and get you a draught of ale.”

“Not me. Tamaka.” The words came a little easier now. “Look at her hand, Lucas.”

He turned his head and glanced at the girl on the table. “Sally, she’s a squaw brat. An Indian. One less of them means a few less of us to be murdered in our beds.”

Lucas had adopted the colonial summer fashion of wearing a tightly belted leather jerkin in place of a coat. Sally reached up and grabbed its hem. “It’s not like that. Don’t turn away, Lucas. Look at me. For the love of Jesus Christ, she is a child! And she’s my friend.”

“Your what?”

“My friend. I’ve known her almost as long as we’ve been here. We were gathering orris roots in the swamp. She was using a tomahawk. It slipped and she cut her fingers off. I brought them to you. I brought you Tamaka’s fingers, Lucas, so you can sew them back on. The ancient Egyptians did it. You told me so. You can do it, too. Please, Lucas. Please.”

Despite himself, Sally’s words thrilled him. He’d read of such operations. Back in London he’d even heard of a case in Prussia where a foot was sewn back on, though later it turned black with gangrene and the patient died. But a child’s fingers … Small, malleable, an excellent place to practice such surgery. And this was a squaw brat, so it didn’t matter if she lived or died.

Sally was still clinging to his jerkin. Lucas detached her hands and turned to the treatment table.

Above the blood-soaked skirt he could see the child’s budding breasts. She did not move. Lucas thought she was still unconscious; then he looked into her face. She was wide awake and staring at him. Her large dark eyes gave away nothing of what she might be feeling, not even her pain.

She was holding her left hand with her right, both clasped over her belly. Lucas touched her hands. She did not relax her grip and her eyes never left his face. “She won’t let me touch her.”

Sally struggled to her feet and came to the table. She stood beside Tamaka, stroked her forehead and her cheeks. “It’s all right, my dear. Brother, mine.” She linked her thumbs in one of their private signs. “He can help you.” She turned to Lucas. “You can examine her now.”

Lucas peered at the damage to the left hand. Sally had bandaged the wound with sumac leaves and wrapped her shawl around it, but the blood had soaked through everything. He took the shawl and the leaves away. Three small fingers fell to the floor.

Lucas knelt down and reclaimed them. They were cut clean, but on an awkward slant. “A challenge,” he murmured.

Sally remained beside Tamaka, stroking her face.

Lucas studied his sister. “Your friend,” he said again. “A squaw brat.”

“She’s a child, Lucas.”

“It’s a fascinating surgery.” Lucas had made up his mind. “Come, Sal, assist me.

She had helped him before and knew exactly what he’d want. She rushed to pour wine into a pot hanging over the fireplace. Lucas always kept a fire going, though in these hot days of August it was well banked. Sally poked at the logs, making them flare, then rushed back to the other side of the room for his instrument case and opened it. Finally she went to the store of simples for the jug of laudanum.