City of Dreams (64 page)

“Yes. I will myself deliver the money, Colonel. The very day Phoebe is returned to my father. You have my word on it.”

“Indeed. And what gentleman could doubt the word of a fine lady like yourself, Mistress DaSilva?”

V

Let the bowl pass, drink to the lass, I warrant she’ll prove an excuse for the glass.

That she had, whoever she was. The bowl had passed Caleb Devrey so damned often he was drowning in rum punch. He staggered across the cobbles of Broad Street, catching Oliver’s arm to steady himself. “Listen, I need to piss.”

“Not here, Caleb. Old biddy Livingston across the way is sure to be watching from behind her lace curtains. A few more steps and you can piss as much as you like and offend no one.”

Etienne De Lancey, the father of James and Oliver, was a French Huguenot who had escaped to New York in 1685, when Protestant blood ran in the gutters of Paris. Two things made him rich: he married a well-dowered Van Cortlandt daughter, and he had a head for trade. In 1719 Etienne had built the house on the corner of Pearl Street and Broad—tall, square, redbrick, with long elegant windows and a steep balustraded roof—that became the model for the home of every other wealthy New York merchant with social aspirations.

Caleb paused by the familiar front door framed by two white columns with a fan window above the lintel. “Oliver, you rotten sod, you’ve betrayed me. I told you my father would skin me alive if I came home one more ti—”

De Lancey grabbed his arm and urged him forward. “Don’t be difficult, old man. This is my house, not yours. Come, I thought you wanted to piss.”

“I do indeed. But—”

“But nothing. Just a few more steps. That’s it.” They were inside, in the long ground-floor room where dinner was served promptly at three every afternoon, where Etienne’s sons and their wives and children were bidden to be present at the seventy-three-year-old patriarch’s table if they valued their inheritance.

Oliver shoved his foot under the massive carved sideboard and kicked forward a chamber pot. “Here you go. Piss away. Only mind your aim.”

“I assure you, old man, my aim is the equal—nay, the better—of any man’s in the province.” Caleb undid his buttons as he spoke. “In fact, I challenge you to a pissing contest. Get yourself another pot and we’ll see who can fill it first. Ten-point demerit for each splash that misses the target. A guinea to the winner.”

“Master Oliver, you gentlemen best be hushing yourselves some.” The black man who stood in the doorway carried a candle and shaded it with his hand. “Dr. Turner, he be upstairs just now. Whole family be up there with him.”

“Good Christ, Thomas, why’s that? Who’s ill?”

“It’s Mr. James’s daughter, sir. Little Emma. She’s choking with the throat bladder. The doctor, he come some ten minutes past.”

Caleb fumbled himself back into his britches. He sensed Oliver looking at him. “No,” he said. “If they’ve sent for bloody Luke Turner, they’ve no need of me.”

“Couldn’t have sent for you, could they? You were with me, drinking yourself blind at the Black Horse. For the love of Jesus, Caleb, the child’s not yet lived a year.”

“There’s not a lot can be done for throat distemper.”

“There must be something. At least come upstairs and see if Turner’s doing the best that can be done. Christ, Caleb, I was dandling little Emma on my knee this very afternoon. She seemed perfectly well.”

“It takes them quickly sometimes. There’s not a lot … I’m sure even a fool like Luke Turner knows enough to cup and purge.”

Oliver turned to the slave still standing in the doorway. “Thomas, is that what Dr. Turner is doing?”

“That not be what I seen, Master Oliver. Dr. Turner, he be putting a pig’s spirit down baby Emma. He be telling Master James and the others the pig be powerful magic for the throat bladder.”

Luke had been playing with the idea for weeks now, ever since his father did that anatomy on the girl who died in the almshouse hospital when Luke tried to open her trachea. That’s why he had the thing ready when the De Lanceys summoned him. A hollow tube of copper, bent to just the right angle, no bigger across than the nail of his little finger, with the small bladder of a piglet attached to one end. Elegantly simple. If it worked.

So far it seemed to be working.

He had simply instructed the others to hold her still, then forced open the child’s mouth and carefully and gently inserted the copper tube down her throat. Now he was bending over her, blowing his breath into the bladder and letting it out again, squeezing and releasing in a steady rhythm. He was too busy with the apparatus to explain what he was doing, but the little girl’s skin was no longer blue and she was no longer struggling to breathe. For the moment that counted as success.

“What in Christ’s he doing?”

“Good evening, Oliver. We’re not exactly sure.” James sounded exhausted, and—unusual for him—frightened. Emma was his youngest and favorite child. “Whatever he’s doing, he can’t stop long enough to tell us about it.”

“Caleb here says cupping’s the thing. And a strong purge with calomel. Has he—”

“No,” Caleb said. “He hasn’t.” He’d gone close enough to the bed to peer over Luke’s shoulder at the patient. The child showed no evidence of a throat blister. “Look, if you want to send someone for my bag, I can try and—”

Luke turned his head just enough to see Caleb Devrey while still breathing in and out of the pig’s bladder. “No,” he said in the two-second interval when he allowed the bladder to deflate. “No cupping. Waste of time.”

“The literature is entirely clear on the subject. Cupping and a strong purge are …” Caleb knew he sounded exactly like Cadwallader-Pompous-Ass-Colden. And that he was quickly becoming more sober than he’d care to be. And that Luke looked as if he’d like to murder him. Fine. Let him try. He’d like nothing better than to kill Luke Turner and have self-defense as an excuse. “You’re acting irresponsibly, Turner. These people have the right to—”

“She was choking to death. Now she’s not—” Luke broke off, aware that he’d let the rage that filled him at the mere sight of Caleb Devrey interrupt the far more important task of keeping little Emma De Lancey alive. Save the favorite daughter of an influential family like the De Lanceys, you’d never want for patients again. Bloody murdering bastard Caleb Devrey could be dealt with another time. Luke returned to forcing air into his patient’s lungs.

“Don’t turn your back on me, you sod! I say you’re wrong and your patient will pay for your stupidity.” Oliver put a restraining hand on Caleb’s arm, but he shook it off. “You’re endangering this infant’s life.”

“You two can settle your heats and animosities elsewhere. Not at my daughter’s sickbed.” James De Lancey held a lace-trimmed cloth over his nose when he turned to Caleb. “Oliver, judging from the alcohol on his breath, I think your friend’s had a bit more punch than is good for him.”

The child in the bed moved her hand.

Emma’s mother and two of her aunts were in the room, and all three women were instantly hovering over her. “Back,” Luke said in his next rhythmic pause. The women retreated. He heard James and Oliver and Caleb speaking in the background, but he shut out the sound. Breathe into the bladder. Expel the air. Breathe into the bladder. Expel the air. Breathe into the bladder. Expel the air.

And note that after the next few sequences the child started to pour sweat, and her cheeks had some normal color. Her eyes darted around the room as if she were looking for a familiar face. Slowly, with some trepidation, Luke lifted his head. Unwittingly he held his own breath while he watched the pig’s bladder. It inflated, and deflated, and inflated again. By itself. Luke put a hand on Emma’s forehead. She was damp, but cool to the touch. “Fever’s broken,” he said into the sudden hush in the room. “And she seems to be breathing on her own.”

Three weeks later, in the tavern at the sign of the Black Horse where Caleb got most of his news, he heard that little Emma De Lancey had died. Her fever had suddenly shot up and she was gone before they could summon help. “Bad luck, Oliver,” he said. “I know the family were all fond of the child.”

“We were. All of us. Phila’s quite beside herself.”

Caleb looked away. It made him uncomfortable to talk about Oliver’s wife. Phila De Lancey was the daughter of Jacob Franks, a Tudesco Jew. “I did warn you,” he said, staring at his mug of rum punch and avoiding Oliver’s glance. “Cupping and purging. Not a lot of black-art rubbish about the spirit of a pig.”

“Look, I know you detest Luke Turner, but that’s not what— Ah, what difference does it make? The child’s to be buried tomorrow. Anyway, she seemed to have gotten over the throat bladder. Must have been something else that took her.”

Caleb shook his head. “Not at all. I’ve seen it numerous times. They appear to recover from
angina suffocativa,
then a few weeks later they’re dead. There has to be some connection.”

“Perhaps.” The bowl came his way and Oliver ladled himself a double helping of punch, throwing two coppers into the center of the table to pay for it. “If, as you say, it happens all the time, you can’t blame Luke Turner, can you?”

Caleb did not reply.

The oars dipped silently in and out of the December-cold waters of Hudson’s River, barely breaking the gray-blue surface. The canoe traveled swiftly, moving with the tide. It stayed close to the eastern bank, the coast of Manhattan, sheltered first by the overhanging cliffs, then, at the island’s southern end, by the tangled shadows of the leafless trees that grew on the sloping ground that met the river’s edge.

The man who lay in the bottom of the craft had no idea where they were. He was swaddled like a papoose, wrapped in blankets and tied to a long board. He could lift his head, but not high enough to see over the canoe’s side. The oarsman knelt with his back to his passenger. The two did not speak. The swaddled man could not remember how long he had lain like this, drifting in and out of consciousness. He remembered very little. Except for the things he could not forget.

After a time they landed. The Indian pulled the man on the board onto dry land and left him lying there while he hid the canoe in the scrubby bushes along the shore. Then, dragging the board behind him, he moved farther inland.

The man could see only the treetops breaking the skyline. Perhaps they were different from those he’d stared up at for many weeks marked by agony and delirium. He wasn’t sure, and he did not have the strength to consider the question further. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the pain of his jolting passage over the rough ground.

He must have passed out. When he again opened his eyes he lay at the edge of a clearing. No, a sort of yard. With poles, and lines stretched between them. A drying yard. And bending over him a young girl, eyes wide with terror, her hand pressed to her mouth, the first white woman he’d seen since the September day he rode out of New York to meet Shea. With Clemence and the rifles. Both gone now. And if the truth be told, he, like Clemence and Shea, had gone to a distant place from which there was no return.