City of Dreams (75 page)

Cuf grinned. The dwarf had always been good to him, and to Morgan. The pair of them had been taller than Jan Brinker by the time they were six, but he always seemed more like them than any of the other adults. “I’m glad you’ve got on so well, Mr. Brinker. This is a splendid carriage. And you look … splendid as well.”

Jan Brinker nodded.
“Ja
, thirty pounds I be paying the tailor for these clothes. And to get this carriage from London, three hundred.”

It was an astonishing figure. But then, it was an astonishing carriage.

The velvet curtains blocked out the daylight. A small lantern provided dim illumination. The dwarf leaned toward Cuf and squinted, as if trying to decide what kind of man the boy had grown up to be. After a few seconds he appeared to have made up his mind. He reached for the carefully folded newspaper that lay on the seat beside him. It was the latest edition of the
Weekly Post-Boy
, published just that afternoon. “You be seeing this, Cuf?”

Cuf shook his head and looked neither at Jan Brinker or the paper.

“Honest you can be with me,” the dwarf whispered. “I be knowing you read. Morgan teached you years ago.”

“That doesn’t mean I go around the streets of New York examining the
Weekly Post-Boy
,” Cuf said quietly.

This was caution he’d learned almost before he could walk. Cuf had been barely four in 1741, when plans were discovered for a second slave revolt. Everyone said it was a conspiracy to burn down the city. The Great Negro Plot, they called it, ready to believe anything after what they’d heard about recent slave uprisings in the Carolinas and what they knew had happened in New York in 1712.

For weeks on end none of the black people who worked for Squaw DaSilva—Tilda and the other maids and a few of the whores and most of the barkeeps—could leave the house. At night they had to sleep all together in the old strongroom in the cellar. Even Cuf. Squaw DaSilva locked them in and piled stuff in front of the little door cut into the rock. So if the soldiers came, they wouldn’t be found.

Mistress Flossie said no one, not even the stupidest English redcoat, could imagine that a four-year-old boy the color of sand might have anything to do with a plot to burn down New York City and murder all the whites in their beds. But Squaw DaSilva said that redcoats and, worse, magistrates, could convince themselves of anything. So Cuf was locked in the strongroom every night with the others.

He didn’t mind. By then he knew what happened when one of His Majesty’s judges declared you guilty of anything at all, perhaps just thinking about killing white people.

For weeks on end during the time of the Great Negro Plot the city reeked of burning flesh. The smell wafted across even the open land that bordered Hudson’s River. There were some two thousand slaves in New York City; nearly two hundred were arrested. Seventeen were hanged and thirteen burned at the stake. The rest were transported to the living death of the Barbados sugar plantations.

“I know you be able to read, Cuf,” Jan Brinker repeated.

“As I said, I don’t announce it on the public streets.”

“
Ja
, but we be private here. And Rudolf, me driver, be big and strong. We be safe.”

So the coachman was a guard as well. That made sense. You needed physical protection if you were three feet tall, totally bald, and dressed as if you were going to a ball at the governor’s mansion. “What do you want me to read?” Cuf asked.

“This be the story right here.”

Cuf took the paper and leaned toward the dim glow of the lantern. The
Post-Boy
was reporting on a battle that had taken place a short time before in Canada, on the Plains of Abraham above Quebec City. “Though we are informed that the great General Wolfe is dead, we can also report the good news that General Montcalm has been grievously injured,” the newspaper exulted. “The valiant British forces were triumphant. England has won a glorious victory. Canada must surely be ours.”

“This war be all but over,” Jan Brinker said when Cuf lifted his head. “The English be beating the French. Just like they be beating the Netherlanders years ago. You know the meaning of that, Cuf?”

“Canada will be an English colony. One of us.”

“
Ja
, I suppose so. But that’s not what be important.
Jesu Cristo
, boy, think! War be over, that be an end to all our profits. Me and my Chappaqua beer, your God-cursed mistress and her whores, Morgan Turner and his licensed piracy—we all be finished. Home the redcoats will go, to Europe to fight somebody else.”

Cuf stared at the foppish dwarf. He looked ridiculous, but there was something wise in his eyes. “Why do you think that matters to me? I’m a slave. Why should I care if times are good?”

“Don’t be playing the fool with me, Cuf boy. I been watching you.
Ja
, even all these years I been away, I be keeping me eye on you. I know the God-cursed Squaw promised you your freedom when you be twenty-five. And I know about the little shop you be thinking to open. Nice things you be selling. Gold things and silver things.”

Cuf’s heart started thumping. No one knew about the shop—it existed only in his imagination—or about the smithing lessons. No one. The dwarf could have guessed only by getting inside Cuf’s head.

When Cuf was a child he’d heard Grandmama Amba use the word
haptoa
. And he knew his mother believed that the night she and her Jethro ran away, the dwarf had put a hex on her, the bad
obeah
. Phoebe thought that was why they were captured and why Jethro was killed and why she had a half-white baby.

Cuf had been doubtful about all those magical stories. But Jan Brinker was looking at him and smiling. And, God curse him, he was right about everything he’d said. “You’re sure that the end of the war will mean hard times?”

“Times that ain’t so good like they been.
Ja
, I be sure about that. And something else. You be a fool to trust that God-cursed hag, Squaw DaSilva. Ain’t nobody knows better’n me how she be keeping her promises.” The words were thick with bitterness.

Cuf took a deep breath and held it. Far better to have magic—black or white—on your side than against you. “Say you’re right,” he asked softly, “what do you propose?”

“A little change,” Jan Brinker whispered. “You be doing the same plan, only be a little sooner than you be thinking.”

Flossie had given the girl a dress of yellow calico and a few decent petticoats, and a white mobcap to cover her red hair. “Sure and ye can’t be goin’ around here in them homespun rags, Roisin Campbell, half-breed Scots and Irish though ye be. ’Tis not fitting.”

She’d been a week in the grand house on the Broad Way, and she was glad of the clothes, for all they were probably some whore’s castoffs. Her nights, however, were spent buff-naked, with Morgan Turner riding her and doing things to her she’d never imagined a man to think about, much less do. Like the night before when he’d turned her on her belly and thrust himself into her back passage. True, he’d had her put oil on his cock first. All the same, she’d had to bite the corner of the pillow to keep from screaming aloud with pain, and it still hurt to sit.

She didn’t mind. The pain was slight compared to the pit and the whipper. And after the first moment it had been … No, she mustn’t think such things. She was a decent woman, a Woman of Connemara, not what Morgan Turner and all the rest of them believed her to be. No point in arguing that now. She wasn’t a virgin anymore. That hadn’t been her choice, but she didn’t have to give in to pleasure when he did the things he did. She need not stoop that low. Besides, that wasn’t really what she felt toward him. Not that he was a source of secret delight.

She was grateful to Morgan. Still. No matter what he wanted her to do in his bed. Each time she remembered the crowd screaming out the numbers of the strokes and the man in the black leather apron drawing his arm back as far as it could go, she knew she could endure any kind of perversity Morgan Turner could imagine. And that however many sins she might be committing against the virtue of chastity (and whatever shameless pleasure she sometimes took in those sins) being here with Morgan was the Virgin’s gift and the answer to her prayers. The only thing that bothered Roisin, made her sick with worry, was the conversation she’d overheard between Tilda and Mistress O’Toole:

“Mark me words, Tilda. Mistress will be after sending her away.”

“Why you be thinking that?”

“Sure and it’s too fond of the doxy Master Morgan’s becoming. And herself, she won’t be doing with a whore for a daughter-in-law. Or a whore’s piglet for a grandbabe. So’s it will be off to one of the houses she’ll be sending pretty Roisin Campbell and her sweet twat. Sooner rather than later.”

Roisin had marked those words. And she knew that like everything that had happened to her since the ship docked in New York harbor, and the captain sold her indenture to a hunchbacked old biddy who wanted a white slave because she lived alone and didn’t trust Negroes, this, too, would lead to the pit unless she kept her wits about her.

The biddy had threatened Roisin with the public whipper from the moment she brought her home and set to her working eighteen hours a day. “You be doing what I tell you, slut, or it’s the public whipper at the poorhouse the Thursday to come. A few licks to break your haughty spirit and teach you to be grateful you’re not sleeping in the streets—that’s exactly what you need.”

And when on a particular Thursday she saw the woman looking at her slyly, almost licking her lips with anticipation, then putting on her cloak and announcing they were going out together, Roisin knew what her mistress planned. A few licks. Expensive at one and six, but worth it since she’d have the pleasure of watching.

They set out and Roisin walked meekly beside her mistress for a time, waiting for her chance. It came when they passed a crowd gathered around a coach that had overturned and crushed some passersby. The shattered, lifeless bodies were surrounded by curious onlookers, but it was the horse they were interested in. The animal had broken its leg in the accident and was lying on the cobbles whinnying in agony. Soon someone would come with a musket to put it out of its misery. Then a butcher would arrive and cut up the carcass where it lay. Horsemeat went cheap in such circumstances.

The old woman turned her head, checking on the arrival of the musketman and the butcher. Roisin gave her a mighty shove in the back, thrusting her into the middle of the throng. “Here!” a man shouted. “Wait yer turn, ye humped old hag!” Mistress began an indignant tirade, shaking her fist in the man’s face. Roisin ran.

She’d spent her first night of freedom behind a sailors’ slop shop down by the docks, listening to the street doxies who’d invited her to share the warmth of the fire they’d made with a few scraps of wood and some twigs.

“Two things you’d best be avoiding, girlie. First is gettin’ picked up by the constables now you be run out on yer indenture. Ach, don’t look like that. ’Course we know. Yer white, so ye can’t be a slave. Ach, girlie, stop shakin’. Ain’t we all in the same fix?”

“Aye, every woman here’s the same. But mind ye, there’s things is worse than gettin’ returned to the one what buyed yer indenture, and going to the public whipper at the almshouse for a taste of leather.”

“Much worse.”

“No,” Roisin said. “There can’t be anything—”

“Stop blatherin’ foolishness, girlie. Ye ain’t been long enough in New York to know. The pit’s much worse than the almshouse.”

That was the first time she’d heard about the sawdust-covered ring on William Street, and the noisy crowd that was much larger than any gathering at the almshouse. And how after you’d been flogged until the skin was peeled from your back, they sometimes tied you to the rear of a wagon and dragged you through the streets. Then banished you from the province.

“’Course, they don’t do the banishing part till whatever redcoat wants ye has ye, all bloodied and bruised though ye be. For free, o’ course. Never pay for it, redcoats. Always takes what they wants with not so much as a thank-ye. And leave behind a dose o’ the French disease more likely ’n not.”

That was something she knew about. The syphilis. Nearly impossible to cure, even for the Women of Connemara. The sores and the terrible burning when you pissed and the stinking discharge went away, but later they came back, and far worse came with them. “But if you risk all this by whoring in the streets,” Roisin said, almost unable to keep the despair from her voice, “in God’s name, why do you do it?”

“’Cause we likes to eat, girlie. Same as you and every other creature put on this earth. In God’s name, like ye said.”

“And don’t make the mistake o’ thinkin’ that because ye be a bit of a looker with that red hair and all, ye might be doin’ better in one of Squaw DaSilva’s fancy houses. Get yerself into one o’ them and Squaw owns yer body and soul. Have to do it with dogs and horses, ye do, if ye be one of Squaw DaSilva’s whores.”

“No! I don’t believe any—”

“Yer a great one for not believing what yer told. But just get took in by the Squaw and ye’ll soon see the truth o’ me words. Costs men a fortune jus’ to step inside one o’ the Squaw’s fancy houses. A guinea or more. No man be paying that for an ordinary fucking. Why should he?”