City of Dreams (65 page)

“Go,” Solomon DaSilva whispered. A dribble of spittle came from the corner of his mouth. “Get your mistress. Bring her here. Now.”

“Solomon! Oh, thank God! Thank God!” Jennet knelt beside him, right there on the kitchen floor where he lay, still tied to the board, and pressed her face to his chest. “Solomon. Oh, my dearest …” She couldn’t stop weeping. All the time he’d been gone she hadn’t allowed herself to weep. Now she couldn’t stop. “I thought you were dead. I couldn’t … Oh, Solomon.”

Most of the women of the bordello were crowded around her: Rosa Jollette, four of the whores, the indentured kitchen maid who had been hanging out the wash, Flossie, and Tilda. They watched the young woman sob over a husband who now looked as if he might be her grandfather.

Jennet lifted her head. “Oh, my darling Solomon, what have they done to you?” He’d left her three months earlier with only a few strands of gray in his thick black hair; now every bit of it was white. A heavy, unkempt, mostly white beard covered the lower half of his face. Above it his eyes were dead; dark brown stones in hollow sockets. They refused to meet hers.

“Get them all out of here.” He didn’t look at her when he spoke, and his voice was so low only she could make out the words. “Tell them to go.”

Jennet stayed on her knees beside him, staring into his ravaged face. “Leave us alone. My husband wishes it. Go. All of you.”

Rosa Jollette hesitated a moment, as if weighing the authority of a man wrapped like a savage’s papoose, then began herding her charges from the kitchen. Tilda went with them, casting only one last glance at the man on the floor, then pressing her hands to her mouth to stifle her sobs.

Flossie didn’t follow the other women. When they were gone she took a step closer. “You don’t want me to go as well, Mr. Solomon, sure you don’t. Herself might need a bit of help getting you out of that thing.”

Jennet wore a silk morning wrapper, and beneath it an assortment of petticoats. She wore no corset, so the clothes didn’t hide the six-month bulge of her belly. “Flossie means I might need help because I’m carrying your child, my darling. I was going to tell you as soon as you returned.” She couldn’t speak fast enough. She wanted to see his eyes come alive, see him look at her with love. “I’m sure it’s a boy. He’ll be born in March. Toward the end, I think, a son to welcome the spring. Now, my dearest Solomon, we need to get you untied and into a proper bed. Flossie, help me. If we can—”

“Get away from me.” He finally turned to her. The dead eyes had become burning coals. A madman’s eyes. “Flossie, get her away from me.”

“It’s your Jennet, Mr. Solomon. Your wife—”

“Merda!
I know who she is. Go,” he repeated, staring at Jennet. “Now. Flossie will help me.”

Jennet rocked back on her heels. His words came at her like knives. “Solomon,” she whispered the only thing that seemed to answer his fury, “surely you know this is your child. You can’t think I—”

“Go.” She still didn’t move. He shouted. “Go, damn you! I can’t bear the sight of you. Get away and leave me with Flossie.”

Jennet stumbled to her feet and stood looking down at him. “Solomon, what have I done?” He turned his face to the wall and didn’t answer.

“You’d best go, child,” Flossie whispered, pushing her toward the door. “I’ll look after him. And sure I’ll come to you soon as I can.”

The other women were all jammed into the hall outside the kitchen, waiting and listening. Rosa looked triumphant.

Jennet pushed past them. She kept her head high and willed herself not to cry. Tilda was sobbing, great openmouthed gasps filled with choking tears. Jennet reached out and touched her arm. “Come with me, Tilda. I need you.”

“Can you lift this thing?” Solomon asked. “Stand it against the wall?”

“Sure, I think so. But—” Flossie had a knife and was preparing to cut the leather thongs that held him to the board—“if I cut the bindings it might be easier to—”

“No. Stand me up first. Before you release the bindings.”

She set the knife down, took hold of the board, and put her considerable strength into raising it. The task was so much easier than she’d expected that Flossie almost lost her footing.

“Good,” Solomon said. “Now lean me against the wall.”

He was featherlight. Holy God, how much of him must have melted away up there in them woods where only the angels and saints knew what else happened?

She stood the board upright against the wall, then reclaimed the knife. The leather was tough but one by one the thongs fell to the floor. Solomon was clutching the wrappings from the inside. “‘Tis free you are now,” Flossie said softly when the last binding was released. “Can you walk?”

“I think so, if you help me.”

“Put your arm around me, Mr. Solomon. Can you be doing that?”

“Not exactly.” He stuck what should have been his left arm out of the covering blankets. It ended at the elbow.

Flossie gasped. “Bloody savages,” she whispered. “Cursed heathen. May they rot in hell.”

“Can you put an arm around my waist to support me?” Solomon asked. “Yes, like that. Now I think we can move.”

Sweet Jesus and his Holy Mother, there was almost nothing to him. She could carry him with just the one arm wrapped around his midsection. “One little step at a time,” she said cheerfully. “It’s home you are now, Mr. Solomon, and sure there ain’t no need to rush.”

“Rosa!” she bellowed. The other woman’s head immediately appeared in the door. “Waitin’ right outside, were you? I thought as much. Well, clear the hall. Get ’em all back to wherever they belong. And move your things out of the big bedroom. There’s nowhere better, so the master will have that room now.”

“His left arm’s cut off at the elbow,” Flossie said. “And I think he’s missing most of the fingers on the right.”

Jennet sat on the side of the narrow bed in the tiny attic room Rosa Jollette had assigned to her, rocking back and forth, trying to calm herself with motion, to understand why what should have been such a joyful day was turning into a nightmare. “What else? Don’t hold back, Flossie. Tell me everything.”

“Sure, and I don’t know what else, child. I swear I don’t. He kept himself wrapped in them Indian blankets. Only fell on the bed and told me to send Tilda with some hot broth, then to let him sleep.”

“And that’s where he is now? In Rosa’s room, sleeping?”

“Aye.”

“Did he say anything more about me? Why would he think it matters to me if he’s lost part of his arms? Or both arms, for that matter. What do I care as long as he’s here?”

“Sure, I don’t know, child. I swear I don’t.”

“Don’t ever lie to me, Flossie. I need to know I can count on you to tell me the truth. Especially now.”

“You can. It’s the truth I’ve been telling you since we got here. I said he’d come back, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did.” But nothing was as Flossie had promised or as Jennet had imagined it would be.

“Perhaps I should go to him now.” She whispered the words, trying to convince herself, waiting for Flossie to encourage her. “If he’s sleeping I can lay down beside him and be there when he wakes.”

“I don’t think you’ll be welcome, child. I’m sorry, but what I read in his eyes …”

“What, Flossie? What did you see? Tell me.”

“Hatred,” the Irishwoman whispered. “And terror.”

“For me?” The words scorched her mouth. “My husband hates and fears me?”

“I don’t know. But he hates and fears something. And one way or another, it’s yourself is a big part of it.”

The idea was monstrous. She clasped her hands over her distended belly. “Bring me a quill and some paper, Flossie.” Her voice was firm and sure. “Then find Jan Brinker. Tell him I want him to take a note to my father.”

Christopher sat beside the bed, lightly probing the mangled stump that had been Solomon DaSilva’s left arm. “The lesions are not in any way inflamed. You are fortunate. The wound has been well treated. You say the Huron did this?”

“It was a Huron tomahawk that cut off the arm, but Mohawk squaws that did the healing.”

For Christopher, Indians were what they’d always been: all alike and all better dead. “A skirmish, I suppose, and you got in the middle of it.”

“Not exactly. I was traveling north with my coachman, Clemence, and an Irish fur trader named Shea.” DaSilva’s voice was neutral. “We were delivering a shipment of thirty rifles. So if you want to say I brought this on myself, you’d not be mistaken.”

“I said nothing of the sort.” Christopher reached for the pipe Flossie had put beside the bed. “Would you like me to fix this for you? It must be difficult with one hand.”

“Everything’s difficult with one hand, and that one with only two fingers. Yes, thank you, I’d like that very much.”

The time he spent tamping the tobacco into the pipe and lighting it from a coal he took from the bedroom fire gave Christopher a chance to get a better look at his son-in-law. Solomon had allowed himself to be shaved by Flossie O’Toole. His face was gaunt and hollow-cheeked; that and the white hair made him look like an old man. The vigorous and clever Jew who had shaped his life to his choosing, run off with Christopher’s daughter when she was barely seventeen, and managed to somehow make them all bless the day he’d bullied his way into their lives, that man was no longer here. Christopher would wager a fair sum the Solomon DaSilva he’d known was dead. But who had taken his place? “Here you go. This should be ready to yield a few puffs.”

DaSilva took the pipe with his right hand, with the thumb and forefinger he had left. He was a man accustomed to adapting to circumstances, even when they were as horrific as this.

“I take it your coachman is dead,” Christopher said.

“Yes. Fortunately for Clemence, he went quickly. An arrow to the heart in the first couple of moments after the Huron attacked.”

“To get the guns?”

“Exactly.”

“But you and this Shea, you got away?”

“There were ten of them and two of us. We were taken prisoner.”

“Isn’t that unusual? I thought the Huron were as murderous as any other savages.”

“They are. But they have their own ways.” Solomon went on sucking on the pipe stem.