City of Dreams (80 page)

It was just the way it had been when she was an orphan and penniless. She knew then her one hope for a better life was to go to the colonies in America, but she had no money for passage. She could only offer herself as an indenture, let the captain sell her when they arrived in New York, and work off the bondage in ten years. After all, she’d told herself, she’d only be twenty-five when it was over and she was free. Didn’t she have the skills her mother had taught her?
It’s never you’ll die of hunger, Roisin my love, long as you remember the ways of the Women of Connemara
. The plan might have served her, except that she had never reckoned with a terror like the pit.

“Don’t,” Cuf said, seeing the tears that rolled slowly down her pale cheeks. “Don’t cry, Roisin. None of this is your fault.”

“What difference does it make whose fault it is? I’m to be his whore or hers.”

“Not unless that’s what you want.”

“Of course it’s not what I want. To be used by any man with a wooden penny … How could you think— Oh, go away. You don’t know anything about it. You were born a slave. You can’t imagine what freedom is.”

“You’re wrong,” Cuf said. “I can imagine it very well.”

Morgan’s ship lay at anchor in the roads. Her canvas had been refurbished and repaired and stored belowdecks. The masts were sail-bare wooden sentinels guarding his vessel. Still his. But not for much longer.

The
Fanciful Maiden
had been readied for the auction block. Her hull was newly caulked, her decks had been scrubbed with sand, and every joint was freshly tarred. Her brass had been polished until it glittered gold in the last rays of the setting autumn sun. The distinctive smell of fresh hemp rose to meet him as he walked past the ropes, neatly coiled and ready.

He climbed the masts, checking as he went. No cracks anywhere, by God. He fingered each inch of block and tackle, hearing in his mind the whir of the lines being fed through, and the snap of the topsails taking the wind. The song sang in his heart, until he climbed to the quarterdeck above the forecastle and looked over the high wooded hills of Manhattan, and the city of New York nestled at the island’s southern tip, and the ship’s song died, drowned out because the city sang to him as well. It was a different melody. He’d heard it many times and been seduced by it too often. The melody was power of a different sort. Her kind of power. His legacy.

But only if he wanted it. She couldn’t force him to accept any of what she willed him. He had to take it by choice. A heritage of blood and, Holy Savior, a legacy of murder.

Well, what of it? Who was he to be sickened by his mother’s willingness to do whatever she must to get her way? How many men had he killed in the last three years? No, those were fair fights, not the cold-blooded murders of men who had stood by him in all weather and reckoned his life as precious as their own.

What kind of woman had borne him?

Some thirty yards away he saw a boat with eight oarsmen row alongside a frigate flying the red duster of the Royal Navy. While he watched, men newly impressed were forced to climb aboard the frigate or be shot. Morgan had seen the small drama a hundred times before. Not that frequency made it right. He couldn’t imagine sailing with a crew who needed the threat of the cat or worse to make them do their jobs. Sailors were born, not made. Another thing Tobias Carter had taught him.

It’s not just the spoils wot gets ’em to go with ye, lad. It’s love o’ the sea. Treat ’em fair, show ’em you can plan a battle wot wins the prize, and most voyages, long as you don’t never let ’em question who’s in charge, you can forget about gauntlet running and keelhauling and the rest
.

Poor Tobias. That might well have been the best advice he ever offered. Because Morgan had listened, and not given in to the urge to prove his authority before he’d earned respect, sailing with the
Maiden
was a prized berth. Now, give him a couple of hours in the grog shops and alehouses, and he’d have a new crew handpicked from among the most able tars in the city.

Sweet God, Tobias Carter had deserved better.

If he went ashore he might find Roisin as well as a crew. Another small boat rowed by. This one had only two oarsmen, and it came close enough to the
Maiden
for Morgan to see the five doxies aboard, on their way to service the men of yet another of His Majesty’s ships. All according to the regulations: women brought aboard got tuppence for every man they lay with. No encounter was permitted to last longer than seven minutes, and a hammock was provided. The location of same, by long tradition, was determined by the senior midshipman.

The wake raised by the whores’ passage lifted the
Maiden’s
bow. After a few seconds she settled gracefully back into position, cradled in the gentle rocking of the upper harbor.

Morgan had taken no more than five minutes to look for Roisin before he left his mother’s house. Getting away had seemed to be the greater imperative. Now he thought of her red hair and green eyes and skin like fresh cream and wished he’d spent time finding her.

The sailors were gathered on the deck of the frigate, cheering the women’s approach. No more frequently than three nights out of seven, the rules said. At the discretion of the captain. For the necessary relief of concupiscence.

Otherwise the men would wind up buggering each other, or the nearest bung hole. Happened anyway on a long voyage. He never had, but he understood the need.

As for the women, poverty drove them to whoring. As it had Roisin. He couldn’t blame her for that. And whore or no, there was no question but he’d not yet had his fill of her. If he had, he wouldn’t be aching at the thought that he might never see her again.

The bawdyhouse in the woods had burned down years before. Now Martha Kincaid lived in a room behind the alehouse at the sign of the Fiddle and Clogs, the most popular taproom west of Trinity Church.

The Fiddle and Clogs anchored a new neighborhood, sprung up on parcels of land a hundred feet deep by twenty-five wide, leased by the trustees of Trinity Church for two pounds a year to craftsmen and artisans who could afford to pay now that work was so plentiful. The houses the workmen cobbled together on their rented ground were built of wood, not brick, and feral pigs and dogs snuffled along the dirt streets that quickly became bogs of mud, garbage, and human waste. All the same, Martha Kincaid thought her new living arrangements were paradise. “A whole room I has, all to meself.” She patted Jan Brinker’s arm. “Thanks to me friend here, I’m well taken care of.”

“
Ja
.” Brinker basked in her praise. “I be taking good care of all me friends. Leastwise them as was good to me in the old days.”

Roisin looked from the dwarf in his elaborate gentleman’s clothing, to Cuf in his leather breeches and flannel jacket, to the wrinkled old woman with the shawl over her head, and down at herself in a whore’s bright yellow calico, half frozen because she’d neither cloak nor shawl. The four of them must look quite mad, and anyone hearing them talk would be sure of it. It seemed to Roisin insane to think they could hide right here in New York from someone as powerful as Squaw DaSilva.

“It not be really hidin’,” Brinker insisted. “Squaw won’t be coming after you. It’s fleas the likes of you be to the likes of her. She only cares about getting even with Caleb Devrey. And now she be worrying ’bout losing her precious Morgan. And ’bout her brother with his legs cut off. The rest of us, we be fleas.”

“Fleas are squashed,” Cuf said.

“
Ja
, but only if they bite. Otherwise they can hop away and never be noticed.”

Roisin wasn’t convinced. “Cuf’s her property, and I guess she thinks I am too since she and Morgan saved me from the whipper. So won’t running away make her think we’re biting fleas, as you put it?”

Brinker shook his head. The noisy taproom was full of men and women playing at dice and cards. The long, narrow space was lit by iron chandeliers suspended from the main roof beam. Every few moments someone was scalded by a drop of hot wax and shouted an oath, while the rest made up an instant lottery on which candle would be the next to gutter out.

“Gambles on anything, they do,” Brinker said, smiling. “That be fine for me. Landlord be taking a tenth part of whatever the prize comes out. My rule. And if they be wanting to drink here, be my rules they obey.”

Cuf had told Roisin that the dwarf owned the alehouse and how he came to get it. She’d never have thought brewing beer such a profitable enterprise. Particularly for someone as peculiar-looking as Jan Brinker.

“He’s the strangest sight in New York,” Cuf had said when he and Roisin were still hiding in the root cellar, “but Jan Brinker’s my friend. He wants to help me.”

“And you trust him?”

“I do.”

“Very well then, but why will he want to help me?”

“Why not? If you can simple as well as you say, you’ll be valuable. Anyway, I think he enjoys doing whatever he can to get back at the mistress.”

“What did she do to him?”

“The way I heard the story, he saved her from a mob once. He was promised a reward but she never paid him. He’s rich now anyway, no thanks to her. So he wants to get even.”

“And you, Cuf, what do you want?”

“To be free,” he’d told her quietly. “So if that’s what you want as well, come with me.”

Bad choices, that’s all she ever had. This time the best of the lot had seemed to be to leave Squaw’s house with Cuf. Right now all she could think of was that it was a pity she’d not had time to bring a shawl.

“Cuf says you simple,” Brinker said, looking at her, thinking that with that hair and those tits he couldn’t blame Squaw DaSilva for wanting to put her in one of the bordellos.
Jesu Cristo
, if the hair between her legs was as red and as curly …

“I do. My mother taught me. Her mother taught her. I know receipts passed down in Ireland for as long as anyone can remember. Since long before that devil Cromwell made the Boyne run red with blood, and those as was left alive all slaves to the English.”

“Ah,” Martha Kincaid said softly. “It’s one o’ them you be.”

Roisin was startled. It hadn’t occurred to her that an old crone in New York might know about the Women of Connemara. “Maybe I am.”

Martha waved a gnarled hand. “Not here, child,” she said softly. “Besides, that’s not what’s bein’ talked about this night.”

“Show Mr. Brinker the soap,” Cuf said, impatient with the murmuring of the two women.

Roisin reached into the pocket of her dress and brought out the cream-colored oval. The scent of roses was strong enough to overcome the taproom reek of sweat and ale.

“You’re sure she won’t find me here?” Roisin asked. A single candle cast a dim shadowy light in the lean-to tacked onto the rear of the Fiddle and Clogs. Martha Kincaid had offered to share it with her for a time.

“Sure as I am about most things.” Martha sat on the edge of her bed—a straw mattress spread on two trestles and some planks—rubbing absently at her thin legs in their knitted striped stockings. “You can sleep easy as that hard floor allows, lass. Mistress Jennet’s a fierce one, but I think she has more to worry about right now than the likes of you.”