City of Dreams (7 page)

“No.” Lucas was cleaning the wound, swabbing the bloody stumps.

“For the pain,” Sally whispered. “She will suffer so much less.”

“And appreciate less what we’re doing for her. No laudanum, Sal. I can’t spare it.” The child’s hand had largely stopped bleeding. “How did you know to pack the wound with sumac leaves? It seems they’re excellent for the purpose.”

“Tamaka showed me. The Indians use sumac for hemorrhage.”

“Kept her wits about her, did she? After her mischance with the tomahawk.”

“No, she fainted. I mean she’d told me about the sumac before.”

“Ah, yes, I forgot. You’ve known her since we arrived. Though you never thought to mention it before now.”

“Lucas, I—”

“It doesn’t matter. I forgive you, Sally. We need not discuss it again.” He was examining the severed fingers while he spoke. “Won’t be a great deal left of these after I even them up. But worth trying all the same.”

“You must succeed, Lucas. If she’s missing fingers, she’ll be rejected for marriage. The Indians believe—”

“Good God, you’re an expert on what they believe as well?”

“Of course I’m not. I simply— Can you do it, Lucas? Sew her fingers back on?”

“I don’t know. But it’s interesting to try.”

Lucas began working on the detached fingers. Sally took up her post beside Tamaka, stroking her head, murmuring soothing words. Lucas paid no attention to his sister and the child. He was intent on sawing the splintered bone from the severed fingers, leaving a clean cut, then using a razor to clip the mangled flesh. Finally he dropped the fingers in the wine that was simmering over the fire.

It was one of Lucas’s distinctions as a practitioner that he used wine the way the ancients had, to wash wounds and to soak bandages before applying them. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he was convinced that wine often helped the healing. And it really would be more interesting if this girl lived with her fingers sewn back on than if she took his handiwork to an early grave. “Now let’s see about the hand, shall we?”

Lucas put a piece of board beneath Tamaka’s hand. He strapped it to her arm. “Hold her down,” he told Sally. “If she moves she’s liable to have no hand as well as no fingers.”

“She won’t move,” Sally said.

Lucas looked up. “Hold her,” he said. He chose his smallest saw, the one with the finest teeth, and bent over his patient.

Lucas could make no attempt to reunite the bones or the sinew. All he could do was stitch the fingers back in place and hope nature would somehow nourish them. The books spoke of the body leaking blood into the once-severed part, enough to keep it from turning gangrenous and sending poison through the entire system. The best he could do was create a clean place for the join. He must trim away the damaged flesh and bone on the hand exactly as he had on the fingers.

He began to saw. Slow, careful strokes, as if he were paring toenails. The girl didn’t move. Lucas lifted his head, glanced at his patient and his sister. Sally’s face was screwed up in a grimace, as if she suffered the child’s pain. Tamaka had not changed her expression.

A few more minutes, then the sawing was finished. Lucas took his most delicate scalpel and began trimming the shredded flesh. Each time he raised his head and looked at Tamaka she was looking at him. She made no sound.

“Tough,” Lucas said when he was done preparing for the surgery. “Very tough, your friend. No wonder she and her kind are so hard to get rid of.”

Sally swallowed her rage. Lucas was simply repeating what he’d heard. “Indian women don’t utter a single cry when they give birth, Lucas. It’s a matter of honor with them. Do you know any white woman who can do the same?”

“Couldn’t say.” He didn’t look at her. “Birthing’s not my line of country. Get me the stanching powder.”

She got it and Lucas applied it liberally to the wounded hand. Then he took up the index finger and began to sew. Small, dainty stitches, close together, making an overlap of the skin from the stub of the hand so that there would be strength enough to hold in place the finger that was not attached by bone. It took him nearly four minutes to sew on the first finger. Then he moved on to the second.

“They’re at least a third shorter than they were,” he said when he was finished. “But that’s her doing, not mine. And she won’t be able to move them, of course.”

Sally dismissed this with a shake of her head. “That doesn’t matter. It’s missing parts that would make her unacceptable. To the braves.”

“How nice to know that if she lives, your little friend can make more Indians to come and burn us out.”

“Tamaka would never do such a thing. Neither would her people. Lucas—she will live, won’t she?”

“Truthfully?” Sally nodded. “I can’t say. But I’ve done my work carefully and she’s young and strong. I suspect she will.”

“You’ve done a great thing, Lucas. You and I, we’ll have nothing to fear from the Indians after this.”

A week after the surgery, two of Tamaka’s restored fingers had turned black. “Too bad,” Lucas said. “Still, it was interesting to try.”

“Lucas, what about Tamaka? If she—”

“If the black fingers don’t come off, she’ll die. I’ve seen it many times. First the blackened flesh signaling the gangrene. Next the fever. Then death.”

“And if I can get her to agree, will you take off the black fingers for her?”

Lucas hesitated only a moment. “Why not? But it will have to be here in the cabin, not at my shop in town. We were lucky last time. I don’t want to chance it again.”

“Chance what?”

“Being seen operating on a squaw brat.”

As it turned out, Lucas needn’t have worried. Sally went to the village. Tamaka’s aunt appeared. “Tamaka,” Sally said, “please, I must see her. My brother has agreed to help her. It’s very important that she—” The Indian woman lifted her finger and put it over Sally’s lips. Then she turned and walked away.

Another week went by and Tamaka didn’t appear. Finally, Sally screwed up her courage and returned to the Indian village. At first no one came to meet her. She stood at the edge of the cluster of bark-covered huts and waited the way she always did. A couple of the women glanced toward her on their way to work in their fields, but no one approached. Sally could think of nothing to do except stay where she was and wait. Eventually an old woman walked over to her. “Tamaka,” Sally said, pointing to her own hand. “How is she?”

Apparently the woman had been chosen as emissary because she had a few words of English. “Tamaka dead,” she said.

III

“Good afternoon, barber. I am Jacob Van der Vries.”

Lucas looked up and saw a thickset man, not tall, but with an air of importance. He had startlingly red hair, a small red beard, and an exceptionally full red mustache. And though he’d spoken in English, his accent was plainly of the Low Countries. “Good afternoon, mijnheer. I presume it’s shaving you were wanting?”

“No, not shaving.”

“Delousing, then?” Lucas rose from the stool beside the fire—it was a dark day in early December and he’d been using the light to write by—and carried his journal to the surgical table.

“Not delousing either,” the Dutchman said. “What do you have there?”

“Some notes on various ailments. Nothing for you to worry about, I imagine. You do not look ill.”

On the contrary, Van der Vries looked particularly healthy. Rich, as well. The cuffs of his shirt were ruffled lace. His belt was buckled with polished silver and strained to keep his coat together over his well-fed paunch. “I haven’t seen you in the town before,” Lucas said. “Does that mean you’ve just arrived?”

“A few days past. And you are right, I am not ill. But your notes do interest me, barber.” Van der Vries held out his hand. “May I see?”

“No. They are simply notes, so someday I can make a fuller account of what I’ve observed in two and a half years in Nieuw Amsterdam.” Lucas locked his journal away. “Now, if you don’t want shaving or delousing, and you don’t need bleeding, what brings you to me, Mijnheer Van der Vries?”

“Actually, I am Jacob Van der Vries, Practitioner of Physic.”

“Ah, I see.” Lucas pocketed the key to the drawer in the surgical table. “A physician.”

“Indeed. I was apprenticed to the most fashionable practitioner in The Hague. And for a time I served the sick in your fine city of Cambridge. Now I am in the employ of the Dutch West India Company. So we shall be seeing quite a bit of each other, barber. I shall call on you when my patients require bleeding. And now that there is someone to oversee your activities here, you will perhaps no longer feel it necessary to make notes of—”

The door swung open so hard both halves thwacked against the wall. “Business for you, barber! Bring ’em here, lads!” Four soldiers trotted behind the sergeant, carrying two stretchers. “Savages—attacked the Bronck
bouwerie
and the little
plantage
of old man Heerik. Burned them to the ground. Left seven dead. Fortunately one of our patrols happened to be passing. Ran the bloodthirsty animals off Heerik’s land before they finished the job. Two of the wounded seemed worth bringing to you.”

One of the stretchers carried a young woman, unconscious, an arrow still in her gut. Her pale blond hair dragged on the ground, because her scalp was half off. The second victim was an old man. He had three arrows in him, but he was awake and his hair was still tight on his head. “Forget me,” he whispered as the soldiers put his stretcher down. “See to my daughter.”

“
Ja, ja,
be calm. I will see to you both.” It was Van der Vries who answered, and Van der Vries who was bending over the young woman, examining the remarkable head wound.

Lucas was more interested in the soldier. “My sister, Sergeant! She is alone. Our
plantage
isn’t far from—”

“It’s all right. We’ve already sent patrols to bring the families from the nearby farms into the fort until we catch the war party.”

“Soldier!” Van der Vries again. “Send someone to my quarters immediately. Tell him to bring my bag. My servant will give it to him. Hurry!”

“
Ja
, mijnheer. Right away.”

Van der Vries removed his jacket and held it out to Lucas. “Here, barber. Put this somewhere it will stay clean. Then put another log on that fire. I will have to get the cauterizing iron good and hot to deal with this wound.”

Lucas took the other man’s coat and slung it over his shoulder. “I don’t have a cauterizing iron, Mijnheer Physician. In fact, I don’t believe in cauterizing. Though logs we have aplenty, and I’m happy to put as many on the fire as you wish.”

Van der Vries leaned forward and squinted. He seemed to be studying Lucas. “You don’t believe— What can you possibly know about medical treatment?”

“I am a surgeon as well as a barber.”

“Ach, so that’s it. A surgeon. I gave you the benefit of the doubt, since everyone calls you barber. Instead I find you are one of those butchers who practice their foul trade on human flesh. Well, I am here now, surgeon or barber or whichever you are, and—”

“And the patient is weakening while we argue.” Lucas took a step closer to the woman on the stretcher. “The skull is not injured, and there hasn’t been overmuch bleeding. If we are quick and use some of my sister’s stanching powder, and bathe the wound with wine and sew the scalp back on, then get that arrow out of her gut, she might even survive.”

“Stanching powder. Now, that is something interesting. Where does your sister get this stanching powder?”

“She—”

“I make it from the root of the plant the herbalists call
Achillea,
mijnheer. You probably know it as yarrow.” Sally was removing her shawl as she came into the surgery. “The soldiers brought me, Lucas. They told me what happened. And about the good physician being here.” She was already at the dispensing bench, shaking the dried and powdered yarrow root onto a sheet of birch bark. “Good day to you, mijnheer.”

Van der Vries looked in her direction. The squint remained in place. “Interesting,” he murmured. “The cutter has his own resident apothecary. Tell me, what part of England are you from?”

“Dover in Kent,” Lucas said, “originally.”

“Ah, the provinces. I thought so from your accents.” The Dutchman turned to the patient, bent over her, and began squinting at her wound. “But of course you’ll have studied your trade in London, no?”

“Yes,” Lucas said. “In London.”

Sally caught her breath. She covered by quickly handing her brother the piece of bark containing the stanching powder. “Here, Lucas, it’s ready.”

Lucas moved toward the young woman lying on the stretcher. Her breathing was very shallow. There wasn’t a great deal of time. “Sally, have you some stimulating tonic?”

“I think so. If not here, then in my bas—Yes, here it is.” She was unstopping a small flask as she spoke, reaching for her dosing spoon.

“So now,” Van der Vries said softly, “you must tell me about your stimulating tonic, Juffrouw.”

“A decoction of
Digitalis purpuria.
Foxglove to you, mijnheer. Gerard and Culpepper are both—”