City of Dreams (72 page)

The steps to the fourth floor were narrow, twisting up the side of the house at the end of a dim corridor where no one but she and Tilda were permitted to go. Flossie sometimes worried that if she got any fatter she wouldn’t be able to squeeze her way up that final set of stairs. And what would himself do then? Same as he’d been doing for the more than twenty years since the murdering savages dumped him in the drying yard of the whorehouse over by Hudson’s River: nothing.

Dear Lord and all the saints, she’d have sworn after that day nothing could be worse. Showed how little she knew.

She paused for a moment outside his door, preparing herself. Or trying to. Would it never get any easier? No, probably not. She’d never stop breaking her heart over what he’d become.

Flossie opened the door. Solomon was sitting by the fire. He didn’t acknowledge her presence even when she stood in front of him, but he knew she was there. He had an empty pewter tankard clasped in his bony hand and he thrust it at her.

“More rum, is it?” She glanced at the tray Tilda had brought up a couple of hours earlier. It contained almost as much food as had been on it when it left the kitchen. “Sure and it’s a wonder you haven’t starved to death long since, it’s that little nourishment you take.”

Dear God and all the saints, you took so much from him in those cursed woods, sent him back to us such a small part of the man he’d been. Could you not have left the poor thing his mind?

DaSilva wore a nightshirt and a dressing gown, and a cloth draped over his head. It covered his few tufts of white hair and shaded his staring eyes and toothless mouth. If they tried to take it away from him he screamed bitter Portuguese curses, the only words he uttered these days. The remainder of his communication was a growling from somewhere low in his throat. He made it now, brandishing the tankard.

“All right! For the love of Jesus and his Blessed Mother, be easy.” She took the tankard and poured another portion of rum from the decanter that was always on the table beside his bed. “It’s drinking yourself into your grave you are, Solomon DaSilva. Sixty-seven and not likely to see sixty-eight the way you carry on. And sure it will be a blessing when the last day comes.”

She never heeded what she said to him these days. Why should she? Hadn’t they always been frank with each other? Even back when she’d loved him so much—and gone on loving him long after he’d tired of her—that simply to be near him was all she wanted from life. She was bolder still now, though she was never entirely convinced he was as mindless as he seemed to be. That was why she went on telling him things, though he never reacted to a word she said.

“Long as you’re still breathing you might like to know your boy’s back safe and sound.”

DaSilva growled again, banging his tankard on the table hard enough so some of the rum splashed out over his wrist.

“Your son,” she repeated, ignoring his agitation. “She never made you a cuckold, you old fool. Not once. Do you not think I’d have told you if she had?”

He said nothing, didn’t even look at her. But she wouldn’t stop trying.

“Sure your lad’s downstairs,” she added as she picked up a few things he must have knocked to the floor earlier. Probably in one of those silent rages he sometimes had, twisting and turning and stamping his feet until he fell down with dizziness and exhaustion. “Home safe and sound, and having a fine time. Just now he’s fucking the brains out of the prettiest little redheaded doxy you’ve ever seen. Fifteen she is. Mother from Connemara, so she’s half Irish.”

She stopped what she was doing and closed her eyes for a moment, remembering how it had been. “Reminds me a bit of myself at her age, she does,” Flossie whispered. “Sure, and do you remember me then, Solomon? Back when you couldn’t get enough of my twat, and being in each other’s arms was all we needed of heaven.”

He gave her no answer, but she hadn’t really expected one. “See yourself into bed, will you?” she said with a sigh. He made no move to get out of the chair. “Yes, I thought so. Good night then. Sleep well.”

Flossie turned and headed for the door, pausing once before she let herself out of the attic room that contained so much hatred and misery. “Sure and everything you once loved and cared about is here under your own roof, Solomon DaSilva. That’s as much as any man can ask for in his old age. It’s lucky you are in spite of yourself. Same as always.”

Flossie let herself out. Solomon waited until he could no longer hear her footsteps in the corridor outside his room or on the stairs, then he got out of the chair beside the fire and stretched out on the floor.

He was right above Jennet’s head. He knew it. His room was over hers. The day they brought him to this house he’d noticed that arrangement and been satisfied. He could stretch out over Jennet, the way he had all those many years ago on their bed. When he lay like this, with his ear pressed to the floorboards of his room, Solomon heard nearly every word that was spoken in Jennet’s private parlor. He possessed her. Just as he always had.

In the morning, when Morgan saw the blood spots on his breeches, he assumed they were from the fight with Caleb Devrey’s hired killers. “Stay a day or two,” he told Roisin, feeling kindly toward her because however undemanding he’d been as a result of his weariness, she had pleasured him. “Later, I promise I’ll see you get work with my mother. The street’s no place for anything as pretty and pleasing as you.”

The cortège was impressive, made up of at least a dozen carriages draped in black. Hall Place wasn’t wide enough to serve as the marshaling point for so elaborate a funeral. Six pallbearers carried Christopher’s pine coffin out of the house, past the old barbering pole that still stood where Lucas Turner had installed it ninety years before, and up to Hanover Square where the others were waiting.

“God protect us,” one of the watching neighbors murmured. “There’s no one in the city can be trusted with a knife now.”

“Not so,” the man next to him said. “The way I hear it, Luke’s boy Andrew is the one with the Turner touch. Holds a scalpel like he was born with one in his hand.”

The first man grunted and peered more closely at the tall, fair lad shouldering his share of the coffin’s weight. He was at the front, directly opposite his cousin Morgan. “Makes ’em a right twosome then, doesn’t it?” the man said. “Pair of giants, both making their living by hacking away and drawing blood.”

Christopher was buried beside Trinity Church, the first of the Turners to be laid to rest in that distinguished graveyard. Every important official in the city was present, and Governor James De Lancey spoke a few words of eulogy for New York’s most respected surgeon.

“Full restitution, I’d say,” Luke murmured to his sister.

“Never.” She was looking toward the back of the crowd, at two cousins from the Devrey side who had decided they’d face less gossip by coming to the funeral than by avoiding it. Bede Devrey and Zachary Craddock stood side by side. Each wore an appropriately somber expression, and both were careful to avoid anything that might look like an acknowledgment of the notorious Squaw DaSilva.

Bede was Croesus-rich these days. Devrey Shipping had come into his hands a few years before the wartime boom began. Her old enemy Zachary Craddock didn’t look anything like as prosperous. He was considerably older, of course, and for all he’d been the first Edinburgh-trained physician in the city, he’d always cared less about doctoring than about politics. He’d been bad at both, as it turned out.

She smiled behind her veil. A year or so over seventy Zachary was, a bent and feeble old man whose only income came from the apothecary shop he’d gotten by marrying Red Bess’s daughter. These days there were other such shops in the city, so the old place on Pearl Street wasn’t quite the gold mine it had been. Still, Zachary was dependent on Phoebe for his income. Not one of the brats Tamsyn bore him had any talent or interest in simpling, and Tamsyn herself had been dead for five years of a cancerous pappe. Like her mother.

Kitchen gossip said that a short time before she died Tamsyn went to Christopher and begged him to cut off her tit, but he refused. Squaw considered that unlikely. It wasn’t in her father’s nature to turn away from such a surgery. Besides, he never resented what had been done to him as much as she did. “There can’t be any repayment for the years they kept him in exile,” she said softly, still looking at Bede and Zachary rather than at Luke.

“You’re a hard one, Jennet.”

A little shiver slid down her spine like a dribble of ice water. Now that Papa was dead, who but Luke would call her by her proper name? Her mother had been gone for six years. Her younger brother, Paul, had been killed four years ago in a quarrel over a bet on a match between a fighting terrier and twenty rats. As for her three sisters, the babies she’d helped her mother raise, one had married a Boston man and moved to New England. The two others were spinsters, living still on Hall Place. They didn’t seek her company and she hadn’t seen them in years. Even today they stood on the opposite side of the grave from their elder sister and pretended they didn’t know her. Solomon didn’t count since he hadn’t spoken a word to her in nearly a quarter of a century. Apart from Morgan, Luke was now her only real family. “I’m as hard as I need to be,” she said quietly. Oh, yes. No one should make any mistake about that.

A bit over a mile away, at the northwestern edge of town where the paupers’ burial ground had been established sixty years before, the bodies of the dead were committed to the earth without ceremony, the only witnesses to their internment the gravediggers.

“Regular plague it must be. One as only strikes Jack Tar.” The first of the pair of diggers leaned on his shovel and looked at the six fresh corpses awaiting burial. Every one of them had arrived at the cemetery wearing the tarred breeches and checked shirts that marked him as a seaman. And with his throat slit ear to ear.

“C’mon,” the second digger urged, “get on with it. Be here until dark we will otherwise. No call to go mournin’ over ’em, has ye?”

“None. Though I knows this one.” The grave digger thrust his shovel in the direction of one of the corpses. “Name’s Tobias Carter. Captained a privateer of his own, time past. These last years he’s been first mate to Morgan Turner and the
Fanciful Maiden.
Rich as the devil himself, was Tobias Carter.”

“No privateers is rich. Spends it soon as they gets it, they do. And rich or poor, didn’t keep any o’ the six of ’em from bein’ butchered like hogs, did it?”

“No. Anyways, this one ain’t a privateer.” The first grave digger prodded the final body in the row. “Knows him as well, I do. Drank at the sign o’ the Dog’s Head in the Porridge when he could find the price of a mug o’ grog. Same as me. Had that little boat did the run back and forth to the harbor islands. The
Margery Dee,
he called her.”

“Don’t call her nothin’ now.” The second man stretched out a mud-crusted boot and rolled the old seaman’s body into the freshly dug grave. It fell with a soft thud. “Dead men tells no tales. It’s what they say, and it’s true enough.”

Chapter Ten

“Y
OU WEREN’T AT
the funeral. I was surprised.” His Excellency Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey handed his guest a snifter of brandy and put the pinch bottle as well as his elegantly shod feet on the small table between them. “A blood relative, after all. I’d have thought you’d be there.”

“Everyone knows I hated the arrogant bastard.” Caleb Devrey tossed back the brandy and helped himself to another. “I hope he’s burning in hell.”

“I’ve never understood what harm Christopher Turner did you. It wasn’t his fault things turned out—” De Lancey saw the black look on Devrey’s face. “Forget I mentioned it. Nothing worse than family discords, God knows.”

“Speaking of family, it was Oliver who said you wished to see me. About a matter that was to our mutual advantage.”

“Yes, I believe it is.”

“Nothing to do with any Turners, I hope.”