City of Dreams (62 page)

In 1608, when the French first established a foothold in Canada, there were three thousand Wendat Island People. The French called them Huron, ruffians. By 1737 only three hundred Huron remained in the homeland they knew as Hochelaga and the French called Québec.

Those Huron who had survived the sicknesses the Europeans brought with them, and the Beaver Wars the tribes fought over the fur trade they introduced, lived as their ancestors had done for as long as anyone could remember, in long-houses surrounding a huge fire pit.

Spread-eagled on the ground, his arms and legs pegged to stakes driven deep into the earth, Solomon could smell the fire, thick wood smoke redolent with pine and crackling with pitch. “Going to burn us, are they?” he asked, turning his head to see Shea, staked out beside him. “Ritual fires to appease their gods?”

“Not exactly,” the Irishman said. “The Mohawk, the Oneida, the Cayuga and the rest o’ the Iroquois, they’s the ones as does that kind o’ burnin’. The Huron, they got ways o’ their own.”

DaSilva tried to raise his head and see what was happening. A moccasin slammed it back to the earth.
“Merda,”
he muttered.
“Filho da puta
…” Seemed he could say what he liked, as long as he didn’t try to move. “Shea,” he said, this time without turning his head, “You can speak to them. Tell them the rifles they captured aren’t the half of what we have. Say we’ll bring them fifty more next week if they let us go.”

“Sure and do you not think I tried that already? They ain’t interested. They know them rifles they took from us was goin’ to the Mohawk. Ain’t nobody in this world the Huron hates more’n the Mohawk. That’s a big part of it.”

“What’s the rest of it?” DaSilva asked.

“I ain’t sure,” the Irishman said softly. “Maybe huntin’ ain’t been so good this summer. Maybe they’s hungry for a bit o’ fresh meat.”

Phoebe rolled herself closer to Jethro, welcoming the warmth of his body. The ground was hard and smelled of frost. It had not occurred to either of them that the farther north they went, the more mid-September would feel like the dead of winter in New York City.

“Jethro, you asleep?”

“No.”

“You got any idea why we don’t be seein’ them Indians yet?”

“Must be they don’t want to be seen.”

Phoebe sighed. That’s what she’d thought as well. “But everybody says they take in runaway Negro folks. Treat ’em good and let ’em live in their villages. So why they be hidin’ from us?”

“Don’t know.” Jethro put his arm around her and drew her close. “But I figure the only choice we got be to keep goin’ the way we be headed. Sooner or later the Indians will figure out we mean no harm. Then maybe they be lettin’ us see ’em.”

“If I can make ’em understand what be in my basket, Jethro, what I can do, I know they be taking us in. We be real useful to ’em.”

“Right now,” he murmured against her hair, “how ’bout you bein’ useful to me?”

Phoebe giggled.

The man watching in the woods licked his lips. Christ, he was on fire. Had to have been a month or more since he had a woman. And blackbirds were sweet. Better’n white women, lots o’ times. Definitely better’n squaws. On t’other hand, runaway slaves brought a bounty. Double if you took ’em alive this close to the border. Up here the redcoats were real nervous.

The rain had cooled the cinders and damped down the ash. Jennet was able to step over the broken glass and jagged brick into what had been her drawing room.

Three nights past she’d sat there safe and warm and considered how she could make Solomon promise to stop selling guns to the savages.

“T’ain’t no use hangin’ about here, mevrouw. Better you come back to Martha’s with me. I’ll keep a sharp lookout for Mijnheer DaSilva. Soon as he be anywhere near I’ll—”

“What’s the condition of the stairs?” Jennet picked her way across the blackened earth. “Have you been upstairs?”

“No, mevrouw. There ain’t no stairs anymore.” Jan Brinker followed her, speaking with quiet urgency. “No upstairs neither. I told you, mevrouw. Nothin’s left. But what do you care? You’re alive. Mijnheer DaSilva, he’ll build you another house, mevrouw. Soon as he gets home. You just come back to Martha’s with me.”

“Why do you keep looking over your shoulder like that? What are you afraid of?” She was standing where the stairs should have been, looking up at the starry sky and the bright moon, and the blackened timbers that once supported the pitched roof with the shiny white balustrade that ran round the edge. Solomon was very particular about that balustrade. It had to be given a fresh coat of paint every six months. “Will the mob come back, Jan Brinker? Is that what’s worrying you?”

“I don’t know, mevrouw. But the way things are in the town …”

“Wasn’t the fire enough sport for the rabble? And for Caleb, of course. My loving cousin, Caleb Devrey. He did this, didn’t he?”

“
Ja
, it be him, mevrouw. I swear it. Mijnheer DaSilva, he …”

“Yes, you told me. He paid you to watch Caleb. That’s how you happened to be here when I needed you.” She heard her own voice, calm, unconcerned, and wondered where it came from. “Did Flossie and Tilda get away as well? Caleb and the rest, they got the house, but none of the occupants? Is that why they’re not satisfied?”

“I told you, mevrouw. I don’t know nothin’. Must be them two you mentioned got clear, since I never heard nothin’ ’bout them.”

“Ah, that implies you heard something about other matters. What were they, Jan Brinker?”

“Nothing special, mevrouw. Only that the Morrisites got their way in the end. They took the Jews out of the count, said they couldn’t vote in New York no more. Mijnheer De Lancey’s candidate ain’t gonna sit in the Assembly. It’s Morris’s man what got elected.”

“How fortunate for him. And for all the upstanding men of New York who voted for him. Like my cousin Caleb, perhaps. Do you think he voted before he led his mob here and torched my house? Do you think he did his civic duty and voted?”

“Can’t say, mevrouw. But I know he be on the Morrisites’ side. Even if he do be friends with Mijnheer De Lancey’s brother.”

“Yes, Caleb’s a real man of the people. Anxious for justice for the common folk.”

“Mevrouw, it’s not safe to be here. The watchmen will be coming around. And the town’s still all riled up. Everyone’s sayin’ if the rain hadn’t come the whole city might have burned.”

“Indeed.” Jennet gathered up her skirt of rough homespun and began making her way back toward the street. Martha Kincaid had loaned Jennet clothes, and a white mobcap to cover her long dark hair. She might have been the girl she once was, the daughter of the impoverished surgeon whom everyone despised. “Tell me, Jan Brinker, if the town is so exercised about what could have happened to their property, are they about to put Caleb Devrey in the stocks? Or try him for willful arson? Have you heard anything about that?”

“No, mevrouw.”

“No? Why is it I am not surprised?”

“They say it be the Jews what done it, mevrouw.”

“The Jews? My husband’s fellow Jews came here shouting for Jews’ blood and burned a Jew’s house?”

“
Ja
. That’s what folks be sayin’. Now we got to go. Otherwise—”

“Yes. I know about otherwise. Be quiet for a moment, Jan Brinker. Let me think.”

Martha Kincaid’s bawdyhouse was out of the question. It was safe, but she couldn’t bear it another minute. Solomon might not be back for four or five days. It wasn’t unusual for him to be gone a week or ten days on these trips, and he slipped home in the dead of night. The dwarf might miss him. How then would Solomon find her? She had never told him about Martha Kincaid’s.

Her father’s house was possible. Or her brother’s. Luke had a new house on Ann Street. It was less crowded than Hall Place, and she’d always gotten on well with the bride Luke brought back from Edinburgh. But if she went to either her father or her elder brother, she was placing herself once more under their authority. She couldn’t bear that either. Besides, if the feeling in the town was as the dwarf said, her presence could put her family in danger. Better to go elsewhere. Once she was sure her father couldn’t find her, she’d send him a note to say she was safe.

The ring of a handbell pierced the silence of the night. “Mevrouw…”

“Yes, very well. I’ve decided.”

“Thank God. Now come, hurry.”

“No. I’m not going back with you to the bawdyhouse, Jan Brinker.”

“But, mevrouw—”

“I’m going to my husband’s … to his establishment over by Hudson’s River. I would be glad of an escort. Will you accompany me?”

Brinker hesitated only a moment. It wasn’t as good as having her at Martha Kincaid’s but she’d be safe. That was what mattered: keeping her safe until Solomon DaSilva got back, “
Ja
, sure, mevrouw. Why not? Only let us leave here. Now.”

The bell was growing louder. Jennet turned and took one last look at the burned-out ruin that had been her home. She spotted a faint gleam amid the cinders. It was the gold horse’s head with the ruby eyes, the one that had topped Solomon’s favorite walking stick.

Jennet bent down and reclaimed it, wiping it clean on her skirt. It left an ugly black smudge on the homespun. Then, with great deliberation, Jennet pressed her right hand against the soot-blackened bricks of the wall beside the vanished front door.

“Mevrouw, please.” The dwarf’s voice was an urgent whisper. “What are you doing? We have to—”

“I’m taking a memento.” Slowly, and with great care, Jennet wiped her soot-stained hand on the homespun skirt, making the black smudge even more obvious. For some seconds she looked at it, dark and ominous in the moonlight.

“Come,” she said finally. “We will go now. You and I, we have a long way to travel.”

IV

“Why have you brought me here, Jan Brinker?” It was three days since Jennet had seen the dwarf. Not since they arrived at Solomon’s fanciest bordello and discovered Flossie and Tilda already there. Now he was leading her up a steep and narrow path to the top of a cliff overlooking Hudson’s River, scurrying ahead of her on his skinny little legs.

Jennet was annoyed with herself for becoming short of breath so quickly. Time was when she could have climbed this hill with no difficulty whatever. Now, though she didn’t think her belly yet betrayed her secret, she moved in a different manner, and she did not like it.

“I told you to bring the note to Hall Place and say nothing. If you expect a reward when Solomon returns, you are to tell no one where I am. So what is all this nonsense about someone wanting to see me?”

She didn’t want anyone to see her. Only that morning, when she finished her bath, Flossie had eyed her with a knowing look. Jennet was determined to say nothing to anyone until she’d told Solomon … Ah, thank heaven. The top of the hill at last. And someone waiting over by that tree the wind had bent into such a curious position. “Amba! In heaven’s name, what are you doing here?”

Jennet didn’t wait for an answer. She rounded on the dwarf, shaking her finger at him. “I warned you there would be no reward if you told where—”

“I be the one made the
haptoa
tell me where you be hiding,” Amba said. “I told him I’d hex him. A big hex. A lot bigger than he be. A killing hex.”

Jan Brinker listened with his oversized bald head hunched down in his narrow shoulders, and one hand shielding his face, half covering his eyes. “That’s what she said, mevrouw. She swore she’d hex me. And I knew she could do it.”

“Go away,” Jennet said. “Stop your whinging and leave us.”

“But mevrouw, I couldn’t—”

“Go!”

The dwarf hurried off. Jennet watched until he’d begun to slide down the cliff path; then she turned back to Amba.

It was early evening and the late-September air had developed an autumn chill. Seagulls swooped and cawed, filling their bellies from the abundant waters of the river. “Does my mother know where you’ve gone?” Jennet asked. Amba shook her head. “My father?” Another shake of the head. “You’ll be missed. And possibly punished when you return.”