“Abigail Keene,” the magistrate intoned, “you are convicted of having congress with men for money in the streets of this city and are therefore sentenced to fifteen lashes and banishment from the province. Whipper, do your duty, and for the good of all here present, do not spare your arm.”
Roisin didn’t want to watch, but she couldn’t turn away. Ah, sweet God Almighty, look at the length of that thing. The leather whip had to be eight feet long, attached to a solid four-foot handle. The sound it made singing and snapping in the air seared itself into her soul. Dear God, dear God … And the whipper was simply preparing himself. He hadn’t yet approached the woman fixed to the whipping post.
If this had been a hanging the man paid to do the job would have knelt and begged the victim’s forgiveness before he did it. At whippings the man in the black leather apron was free to use all the showmanship he possessed.
For the benefit of all present,
the regulations said.
That they may be strengthened in Christian virtue.
The whipper cracked his whip once more. It was a signal to the audience to quiet itself. The spectacle was about to begin.
The man in the leather apron drew back his arm a third time, raised it, and the flicking thong made its first contact with the soft, pale skin of the woman’s back. The first kiss, the whippers called it. It was best if there were no old welts. A virgin kiss. Like this one.
The crowd craned forward, holding its breath, and saw the woman’s body jerk. They waited, but they were disappointed. There was no sound. The whipper smiled. A strong one. But he’d have her. He had them all in the end. Melted for him, they did. Pleased with the challenge, he drew his arm back for the second kiss.
The blood drained from Roisin’s face. She felt her head go light and her knees begin to buckle. No! Damn them all to everlasting hell! She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. Look away, she told herself. Pretend it isn’t happening. Look at the crowd, not the poor creature in the pit. Make yourself hate them even more. Then you’ll be strong.
See how the women are leaning forward as eagerly as the men. Practically licking their lips behind their fans, the heretic bitches. As for the gentlemen in their cut velvet coats and satin breeches, they probably have to keep their filthy Protestant hands in their Protestant pockets to hide how much they’re enjoying it. And who was it paid women to whore, if not gentlemen like these? How come no man had ever been sentenced to a flogging for illegal congress in the streets of New York? Blessed Virgin, who is that creature in the black veil? She’s staring at me. I can’t see her eyes, but I can feel them.
Actually, two pairs of eyes were staring at her.
Morgan Turner stood behind his mother in the shadows of the small private gallery suspended above the pit. He couldn’t be seen, but he could see everything. It was he who had drawn his mother’s attention to the redheaded girl, right after he gave her a report of the fight on Dock Street. “Two of them. Both dead. Who is that luscious creature? The one in the middle with the red hair.”
“I’ve no idea. But we shouldn’t stay. You’re sure there were no other attackers?”
“I’m sure.”
“Then we’ll go. That shoulder needs attending to.”
“No, it can wait. The copperhead, I want to know what she’s done.”
“The same as the other two. Whoring in the streets. Making a public nuisance of themselves.”
“Giving you competition, you mean.”
Squaw DaSilva didn’t answer. Her boy was what she’d raised him to be. Hard as granite and smarter than most men twice his age. And she had never hidden from him the fact that part of the DaSilva wealth came from running the finest bordellos in the city.
In the pit below the leather snake hissed for the seventh stroke. The woman had been mostly silent so far, only grunting and moaning when the whip made contact with her welted back. This time the first droplets of red blood appeared on her white flesh. She let out a short cry of torment. The crowd sighed with satisfaction.
“I want her,” Morgan said.
“The redheaded lass?”
“Yes. Get someone to free her and bring her to me.”
“It doesn’t do to flaunt power, Morgan.” His mother spoke softly without turning around, her voice muffled by the many folds of her veil. “Control is best exercised behind the public stage.”
The crowd was stomping and cheering again, because the whipper had broken the woman. She was crying and screaming for mercy now. And she’d only had nine of her fifteen lashes. “No one’s paying us any mind,” Morgan said. “If you don’t do it your way, I’ll do it mine.”
Squaw turned her head just in time to see her son ease his cutlass in its scabbard. She put out a cautionary hand, then looked away again so he wouldn’t see her smile. Exactly what she’d raised him to be. She was sure he’d go to the redheaded whore’s rescue in full view of the assembly. And probably succeed. That might amuse her, but it simply wouldn’t do. She raised her arm and motioned to the constable stationed by the door at the rear of the gallery.
The man approached and bent near. Squaw spoke a few words. The constable bounded off, raced down the narrow stairs, then forced his way through the screaming mob at floor level. They were counting the lashes now, shouting “Ten! Eleven!” while the whore howled in agony.
Morgan took a step forward, closer to the gallery rail. He estimated the drop at ten feet, maybe twelve. He could easily make the jump. There was a door behind the magistrate’s podium that led directly to the street. Yes, that would be best. He drew his cutlass half out of its scabbard. “Wait,” his mother cautioned.
The constable approached the presiding official, bent down, and whispered in his ear. The magistrate looked up at the gallery. Squaw nodded. The magistrate hesitated. She nodded again. Squaw DaSilva’s telling you what she wants, you old fool, and if you value the extra ten pounds that finds its way to your pocket every quarter, you’ll be quick to see that she gets it.
The magistrate put his hand to the seal of office hanging around his neck, fingered it a moment, then spoke to the constable. The man set off around the edge of the sawdust-covered pit, ducking to be sure he missed both the backward flick of the whip and the blood now spurting from the whore’s back.
“Thirteen!” the crowd shouted in unison. “She’s passed out! Swooned she has! Wake her up, whipper, so she feels the last two!”
Someone rushed forward with a bucket of water and flung it over the woman’s head and her bleeding back. The water was heavily salted; the stinging in the lacerated flesh was unbearable. The woman came to consciousness with a scream. The whip whistled again, the victim wailed in agony, and the crowd yelled “Fourteen!” in an ecstasy of pleasure.
The constable had reached the redcoat guarding the waiting prisoners. He pointed at Roisin and shouted his orders so he could be heard above the howling mob. “Unshackle the redhead. I’m to take her. Magistrate says there’s been a mistake.”
The redcoat tore his glance from the woman fixed to the whipping post. He looked in the magistrate’s direction, got the nod, then took a key from the ring hanging at his waist.
Seconds later Roisin felt the manacles drop from her ankles. The constable took her arm and began dragging her up the aisle toward the door.
She didn’t believe it was really happening until the cold night air slapped her in the face. She saw the black carriage and the veiled woman who paused and looked over her shoulder at Roisin before she climbed inside. There was a man standing beside the carriage, openly staring at her, waiting and grinning. Tallest man she’d ever seen, and handsome as a god. Or a devil. Roisin sketched the sign of the cross onto her palm with her thumb. For the sake of the Women of Connemara, she prayed, Holy Virgin, give me strength.
II
New Yorkers had to find some way to spend all that war-spawned money. No one had curbed the pigs that still ran loose in the streets, but upward of eighteen thousand people now lived in the city, in two thousand houses. Some, like the Walton house everyone talked about, were as fine as the finest London mansion. Morgan had actually been inside the Walton house once. When he was seventeen he got himself into a ball to which he hadn’t been invited (there never was a New York ball to which Morgan Turner was invited) and saw the marble floors and the oak-paneled walls and the damask this and gilt that before he was recognized and evicted.
The Walton house was in the fashionable court part of town, at the southern tip, not far from the fort and the governor’s mansion. The court section, indeed all the city, occupied the narrowest part of the island, where land was severely limited. Some of the richest residents had been forced to locate their elaborate houses farther north, in the outlying district that went by the name of Manhattan rather than New York.
Old man Rutgers was one. He’d made a fortune brewing beer to satisfy the boundless thirst of the redcoats, but he had to locate his grand manor on a hundred acres of East River frontage north of the second wall and south of Kip’s Bay. When he was a boy, Morgan Turner had gone wherever he pleased on the Rutgers property; the fences and guards and wardens were no match for him. The same was true of James De Lancey’s estate in the Bouwery, separated from the Rutgers property by what was known as Division Street.
Some years back the eldest of Etienne De Lancey’s sons had left the family home to establish a three-hundred-acre country seat. The move not only symbolized James’s independence, it outclassed all his rivals in the struggle for power in the city. De Lancey’s impressive manor was on Bouwery Lane. His land stretched west as far as the village of Greenwich and included the old Collect Pond. The estate had a racecourse at one end and a hunting wood at the other. It always gave Morgan Turner particular pleasure to bag a rabbit or a woodcock in James De Lancey’s private hunting ground, and bring it home and tell his mother where it had come from.
“The De Lanceys give him cover,” his mother had explained when Morgan was still a child. “Caleb Devrey has no money of his own and, now that his father is dead and Bede has taken over Devrey Shipping, no expectations. Caleb has nothing except what his poor practice of physic brings him, and he has to share that pittance with Cadwallader Colden. It’s his friendship with Oliver De Lancey, and through him James, that gains Caleb Devrey a measure of sufferance in the town.”
“Is Oliver De Lancey a rich man, Mama?”
“Not as rich as his brother James. Oliver’s like Caleb, a second son.”
“I’m not a second son, am I, Mama?”
“Oh no, my darling boy.” She’d reached out a hand to touch him, and he thought he saw her smile behind the black veil. “You are the heir to everything I have. But that means you have responsibilities as well as rewards.”
“What am I responsible for?”
“Seeing that Caleb Devrey gets what he deserves.”
“Do you mean for me to kill him, Mama? Am I to kill Caleb Devrey when I grow up?”
It was one of the few times he’d ever seen her anger directed at him. “Never! Never!” She’d spat the words out from behind the veil, and her fingers had dug into his shoulder like iron grips. “Killing is much too easy for Caleb Devrey. If I wanted him dead I could have arranged it myself. Swear to me that in this matter you will do exactly as I tell you, Morgan. Swear it!”
“I swear, Mama.”
She still wasn’t satisfied. “No matter what the provocation, you will never put Caleb Devrey to death. In fact, if he is threatened by someone else you will help him. Anything to keep him alive. Swear it, Morgan!”
“I do swear it, Mama. I said so. I swear.”
She loosed her grip on his aching shoulder and drew him close. “Good, good. That is as it should be,” she whispered. “Caleb Devrey must not be given the release of death. Not until he’s very, very old and has suffered as much as he made us suffer.”
“How, Mama? What did Caleb Devrey do to us?”
“Later, Morgan. When you are older and better able to understand, then I’ll explain.”
Sitting in the small carriage across from his mother and a girl whom he wasn’t sure he fancied now that he could smell her, Morgan knew there were still parts of the story he didn’t understand. They didn’t matter. He knew what he had to know. He had just claimed the first installment of Caleb Devrey’s debt.
For a time he’d worried that he wouldn’t be able to pull it off. James De Lancey had become lieutenant governor of the colony six years before, when the last royal governor sent from London hanged himself. De Lancey was richer and more powerful than ever, but not as rich or as clever as Squaw DaSilva or her son. And in the end not so powerful. De Lancey never discovered their plan, and Caleb Devrey lost his patched breeches in an investment that should have been a sure thing. Merely thinking about it made Morgan smile.
Roisin thought he’d caught her staring at him and that his knowing smile was a response. She flushed and turned her head. She’d never been in this fancy part of the city before. Grand the houses were, and this was the first time she’d ever been in a private carriage. The way it swayed back and forth made her queasy.
She kept her hands folded in her lap and pretended to look at them. They were filthy, like the rest of her, the nails broken and dirty and the skin roughened by living on the street. But at least her wrists were no longer bound together. She still didn’t know who he was, or who the veiled woman was, or what they wanted with her. It didn’t matter. Anything was better than what she’d been expecting.
Roisin thought of the cracking whip and the screaming crowd and shuddered. The woman turned and looked at her, but said nothing.
The carriage stopped in front of a pair of tall iron gates and the driver jumped down and swung them open, then hoisted himself back to his perch and drove up to the biggest house she’d ever seen. Yellow brick, with more windows than she could count, and an entrance so wide it required two carved wooden doors.
The tall man got out of the carriage first, then turned and helped the older woman. Roisin saw how careful she was to hold her black taffeta skirts so they didn’t touch any part of Roisin’s ragged homespun. Not the man. He made sure his thigh rubbed hers when he handed her down. “Mind yourself,” he said softly. “The step’s higher than you think.”