City of Dreams (8 page)

“Foxglove. Please, you must refresh my memory. The flowers are shaped like the heart? Or is it perhaps the lungs?”

Sally stared at him. Lucas made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh and got ready to dust the patient’s head wound with stanching powder. Van der Vries darted forward. He moved with astonishing speed for a man of his bulk. Before Lucas could begin sprinkling the yarrow on the wound, the Dutchman had pushed his hand away. The precious powder was scattered on the floor.

“Good God, man! Do you see what you’ve done? How can—”

“I am a physician in the Company’s employ. That means I am responsible for these poor people, barber. And apparently both you and your sister are ignorant of the doctrine of signatures. The juffrouw Sally tells us she makes her stimulating tonic from a plant the flowers of which look neither like a heart or a lung, and her stanching powder from, of all things, yarrow. Yellow flowers, not red. Yarrow cannot, therefore, be effective in anything to do with bloody wounds.”

“You’re not serious, man?” Then, after a few seconds, “Sweet Jesus, you are. I don’t believe— C’mon, Sal, simpling’s your line of country. Tell him. The doctrine of signatures was disproved … what? Thirty years past?”

Sally was still holding the decoction of foxglove and the dosing spoon. “Lucas, the woman, she’s barely breath—”

“Tell him, Sally. Gerard, wasn’t it? Gerard disproved the doctrine of signatures.”

“Yes, he did. Over forty years ago. It took time for his ideas to be accepted, but now every apothecary agrees.”

“Thank you. Here, Sal, give me that.” Lucas took the tonic from her, and the spoon. The woman was unconscious, but he managed to get a few drops between her lips. “Let’s see how she responds to that before we give her more. And we have to deal with the head wound, or it won’t matter.”

Van der Vries looked at Sally; indeed, he seemed to be studying her, but he spoke to Lucas. “Since there has not before been a practicing, I might say a practical, physician to take charge of your activities, I will ignore your dosing of my patient without my permission. And since you have no cauterizing iron, I assure you there is nothing to be done for her head wound until the soldier returns with my bag.”

Lucas began threading a needle with catgut.

“I swear, barber, you will not sew up this woman’s head before I have cauterized her skull.”

“Fried her brain, more like.”

“Wounds burn the body. Fire is needed to treat fire. A first principle of medicine. Though of course you know nothing about that, either. I will not— Ah.”

A young corporal came in. He handed a fair-sized leather satchel to Van der Vries. The physician snapped it open and pulled out a long iron rod with an ivory handle. He went to the fire and shoved the metal part of the device deep into the red-hot embers. “It needs to be as hot as we can make it. Nothing else will do. We must wait.”

Lucas looked at Sally. She shrugged. He looked at the young woman, whose breathing was if anything even shallower. He thought of giving her more of the stimulating tonic, but by the time he finished Van der Vries would be ready to burn her alive. Lucas turned to the old man still lying on the stretcher on the floor. “You said she was your daughter. What do you want done? Do you want this Van der Vries here to burn her skull, or me to sew her scalp back on?”

There was no answer.

Sally crouched beside the old man. She put her hand beneath his shirt and over his heart and waited a few seconds. “He’s dead, Lucas.”

The soldier meanwhile had been staring at the half-scalped woman, fascinated with her extraordinary wound. “So’s this one. Leastwise, she don’t seem like she’s breathin’.”

Lucas went to the table and put his hand on the woman’s chest, then leaned down and pressed his ear to her heart. Nothing. Sally appeared beside him, holding a shard of silvered glass. Lucas took it and held it to the woman’s lips, then leaned toward the light of the fire to study the result. There was no haze of moisture. “She’s dead. Damn your eyes, Van der Vries, we’ve lost her. The old man as well.”

Van der Vries took the cauterizing iron from the fire and laid it carefully on the hearth to cool. He became for a moment entirely preoccupied with his lace cuffs, examining first one then the other. When he spoke, his voice was very soft. “So much for your stimulating tonic, Mistress Sally.” Then, to Lucas, “From now on my instructions will be followed without question. Do you understand?”

“I understand that you’re a—”

“A practicing physician. And in England, as in my country, physicians oversee surgeons and barbers, not the other way around. Is that not so? Come, Mijnheer Turner, the barber who also practices surgery: this soldier and I are waiting for your answer.”

“It’s so.”

“Good. An honest man, however ignorant. I hoped that would be the case.” Van der Vries continued to adjust his lace cuffs. “Corporal, you must tell your superiors that in the future any injured are to be brought directly to me. If I need the barber’s services, I will send for him.”

The worms were black, many-segmented, each about three inches long. Van der Vries had nearly a pint of them. They made a throbbing black aggregation inside his large glass jug stoppered with thick cork. From the shadows where he stood Lucas saw the squirming mass as a single entity, but he knew what he was looking at.
Hirudo medicinalis.
Leeches.

Customarily Lucas checked the hospital once every day or two. In the week since the Indians attacked, since Van der Vries arrived in the colony, he’d been too busy. Treating arrow wounds, mostly. The Canarsie and the Shinnecock and the Raritan—all local tribes—were on the warpath.

Only once had Indians breached Nieuw Amsterdam’s defenses. In 1655 a Wappinger war party managed to land their canoes a short distance from the fort and rampage through the streets. On that occasion Stuyvesant had been far north, at Fort Orange. This time he was at home. The southern shore was bristling with men-at-arms, and there were sentries every ten feet along the wall. Naturally enough, every colonist living in the Voorstadt and beyond had sought protection in the town. The settlement was heaving with people. In response the savages had mounted a siege.

And in the midst of all this, Lucas had Jacob Van der Vries to deal with. A man who believed in the doctrine of signatures three decades after every sensible physician had discarded the theory, and who had apparently provided himself with a supply of the black worms that did a barber’s job without the necessity of a scalpel.

Lucas left the protection of the doorway. “Good afternoon, Mijnheer Van der Vries. I take it your patient needs bleeding.”

“Ah, barber. Yes, I believe bleeding would profit this poor creature. But I won’t be needing you. I have my little friends.” Van der Vries held up the glass jar. The leeches that had been trying to climb the slick sides had given up. The black mass was still. In the parlance of the trade, the leeches were relaxed: meaning they were in the optimum state to attach themselves to human flesh and suck blood.

Lucas nodded toward the jar. “Found them here, did you? They’re too big to be from Holland.”

“Indeed they’re not. Came from a pond not five minutes’ walk from my house. Remarkably large, don’t you agree?”

“I do. That’s the difficulty with them. Leeches suck until they’re full before they drop off. Those we grow here in Nieuw Netherland take a lot of filling.”

“All to the good.” Van der Vies was busy opening his bag. “Going to do something, you might as well do it right, I always say. Never saw any point in half measures.”

Lucas leaned toward the patient. The woman was unconscious, perhaps forty and gaunt to the point of emaciation. There was a protrusion almost the size of his fist on her neck. Lucas palpated the tumor. It was cold and hard as rock. He used both hands to finger the throat on either side of the growth. The flesh was of a normal temperature and yielded to his touch. Finally he looked again at the woman’s face. This time, despite the disfigurement of illness, he recognized her. “The Widow Kulik. Lives near the fort. Not the sort usually to be found in this place. How long has she been here?”

“Couldn’t say.” Van der Vries had ignored Lucas’s uninvited examination of the patient. He was preoccupied with pawing through the contents of his satchel. “Don’t know what I did with my cupping tool. I’m sure it was in here …”

“Your cupping tool,” Lucas said quietly. “You mean to blister her, then?”

Van der Vries was still pawing through his bag. “The thought had occurred to me, yes.”

Lucas looked around. Sally was usually at the hospital, but not today. Since the siege began they’d been living in the one-room barber shop. His sister hated it. Sally spent all her time trying to get the place as clean as she kept the cabin. It was a battle she’d never win, but she refused to give in.

The siege had not, however, made Anna Stuyvesant desert her nursing duties. The governor’s sister was standing at the opposite end of the little ward watching them. If it had been Sally, Lucas would have summoned her. As it was, he walked the few steps. “I see the Widow Kulik has been brought to your care, mevrouw. May I ask why? And how long she has been here?”

“Since yesterday. Neighbors brought her. There was no one at home to attend her dying. Her last surviving son was killed two days past.”

“Savages?”

“Of course. What greater plague do we know in this place?”

Lucas nodded. “I seem to recall there were children.”

“Three. Babies still. The Widow Kulik was caring for them since their mother died last year in childbirth. The good folk who lived nearby have taken the children. They could not be expected to take the dying grandmother as well.”

“So now she’s Van der Vries’s patient,” Lucas said quietly. “And he means to bleed and blister her. Is that his usual way, mevrouw?”

“How could I know? He’s been here less than a fortnight.”

“Long enough for one with your astuteness to make a judgment.” Anna Stuyvesant didn’t meet his eyes.

“He’s a practicing physician, barber. He learned his art with men who served the most fashionable society. It is fitting that he be put in charge of the hospital.”

And earn the twenty-guilder-a-year stipend that went with the appointment. “You’ve seen the lump on Widow Kulik’s neck?”

“It would be difficult not to see it.”

“Indeed.” Lucas’s voice was soft but insistent. “The entire medical world recognizes such goiters, mevrouw. They must be surgically removed. Raising a blister with the cup is sure to do nothing but add to the patient’s misery. As for bleeding, in these cases it is of no value whatever.”

“And if the Widow Kulik had come to you, you’d have cut away this goiter?”

“Yes. I could not guarantee— Sweet bloody Jesus!” Lucas turned and dashed back to the woman in the bed. Jacob Van der Vries had given up on finding his cupping tool. Instead he had removed the cork stopper from the wide-mouthed glass jar and upended it above the woman’s head. “Are you insane! You can’t apply leeches in that fashion. For the love of God, you’ll kill her!”

“That’s a strange philosophy for a barber, isn’t it? Thought bleeding was your answer to everything.” Van der Vries watched the leeches tumble from the jar. A number fell on the bedding, but many more landed on the woman’s face. And at least six attached themselves to her neck. “Good,” the Dutchman whispered. “Excellent. Do your work, little friends. Suck the poison out of the swelling.”

Lucas was nearly sputtering with rage. When he spoke his voice trembled. “The swelling, as you call it, is a tumor. Not a boil that will profit from bleeding or lancing.”

Van der Vries chuckled. “Jealous, are you, Englishman? These creatures, after all, ask no fee for their services. Only to fill themselves with the evil blood that is causing this poor woman such distress.”

Lucas swallowed a protest. It was too late. Nearly every leech was now well attached. The woman’s face and neck had become a black mass, a writhing thing that grew ever larger as the jointed, hairy bodies of the worms became engorged with her blood. “You are a fool,” Lucas whispered. “Worse, you’re a criminal and a murderer. Four leeches at a time. Perhaps five. And applied to the inside of the arm, not—”

“I seem to have forgotten my cupping tool. Careless of me, I admit.” Van der Vries was studying the fingernails of his left hand. “But hardly cause for consternation, given how far advanced this woman’s illness is. And it would do little good to take blood from her arm when any fool, even a barber who believes himself to be a surgeon, can see that the evil humors have lodged themselves in the poor creature’s throat.”

Lucas drew a long breath. The enormity of the error was stupefying. He all but choked on it.

Anna Stuyvesant had stayed out of their argument. Now she took a few steps toward them. Lucas took a step to his right so she could get a good look at the black and writhing thing on the bed. She gasped. “So many, Mijnheer Van der Vries.” None of her famous bossiness. She sounded as if she were pleading. “I have never … Perhaps, barber, you and the physician can possibly remove a few of the—”