City of Dreams (82 page)

As soon as she got home Squaw sent Tilda to Golden Hill to buy back her father’s surgical instruments.

Late that night she sat with them spread out on the writing table before her. A scalpel of her very own. How much she’d longed for that. It was quite possibly the real reason she’d married Solomon. And if she hadn’t, she’d never have known passion, or love, or birthed Morgan. She’d been barely seventeen; small wonder she’d no idea she was doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Now she was forty-four; she could have scalpels aplenty if she wanted them, but she had neither husband nor son.

She picked up one of her father’s well-used instruments. Her hands trembled as she fingered the exquisitely honed blade, sharp enough to cut out her own heart. Would God she had the courage.

Jennet Turner DaSilva opened her fingers and let the scalpel fall. “Good-bye, Jennet,” she whispered, echoing her sister’s words. Then, clasping herself as if that would ease the anguish that roiled her gut, she freed the sobs she’d stifled for over twenty-four hours. “Morgan,” she whispered, “my son, oh, my son.” And finally, “Your farewell came too late, Wella. Jennet died long ago.”

The dwarf wore green tonight, a leaf-green brocade coat over a yellow undercoat and yellow satin breeches. He’d put on a powdered wig. Roisin liked the sight of his bald head better. The wig made Jan Brinker look like what the world took him to be, a freakish man no longer young. Without it he was neither old nor young, only himself.

“There be this one for too much wind,” he said, indicating one of the closely worded notices called quackbills. Posted all over the town, they advertised treatments for various ailments. “And this one be for them as doesn’t fart enough. Then there’s this one. I like it best of all.”

Cuf drew the third notice toward him across the scarred table at the rear of the taproom. “‘Cures for every disease known to man,’” he read softly. “‘A guarantee is given to all who come for a consultation.’”

Brinker turned to Roisin. “
Ja
, that be a fine idea! We can say you be giving a guarantee!”

She shook her head. “Not for everything. I can treat what I say I can. Only that.”

“Not good enough.” Brinker tapped a finger on the quackbill that swore to cure any disease. “Not if this woman be promising—”

“Just ’cause she promises don’t make it true,” Martha said. “Folks get to know the difference soon enough. If Roisin can do half what she says, she be a miracle worker.”

“Oh, no!” Roisin was appalled. “Almighty God and his holy saints make miracles. I only do what my mother taught me.”

Martha wasn’t having it. “She can work miracles. Mark my words.”

“Then that’s what we’ll put on the quackbills,” Brinker said, tugging on the front of his green brocade coat as he did when he got excited. “We be saying miracle worker!”

“Absolutely not.” Roisin was adamant. “I shan’t see anyone if you do that.”

“If you don’t see ’em as comes with a sickness, it’s back on the street you be. And in the whipping pit soon after.” The dwarf leaned forward so he could look deep into her eyes. “Is that what you be wanting, juffrouw?”

“Nothing about miracles,” she said stubbornly. “I won’t have it.”

“We don’t be needing you, you know. Me and Cuf here, we still got our first plan. We be goin’ back to that, you don’t want to do what you said.”

Cuf didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. “Roisin never claimed she could guarantee to cure every illness, Mr. Brinker, or work miracles. Besides,” he added, “I like this plan better than the first one we came up with. You said yourself—folks won’t have money for fancy goods when the war ends, but sickness comes whether there’s war or peace.”

True enough, and Jan Brinker knew it as well as any. The dwarf leaned toward Roisin. “You be having a cure for a dose?” he whispered. “Only I be asking,” he added quickly, “because if you do, that be a good thing to put in one of these here quackbills.”

“There’s the smoke cure,” Roisin said, careful not to let her voice show that she knew it was Jan Brinker who had the dose. “It does well for the French disease, some say.”

Jan Brinker nodded. “
Ja
, some does. I be asking what you say?” He’d had the smoke cure years ago. Sat in a chair with a hole in the seat like a stool and had a blanket put round him, and a
Jesu Cristo
mix of something as stank worse than any shit be burned on an iron plate beneath him. Nearly choked to death. But after that it stopped burning like fire to piss, and the sore on his cock went away. Came back later on his arms and his legs. Got the red salve to rub all over himself from another quack when that happened. That be a fine cure. No trouble for years and years. Now the burning was back, and his piss stank like rotten cabbage. “I be wanting to know what you say.”

“If a woman comes when the trouble first starts, I can help with that. I’ve never tried with a man.”

Brinker grunted and turned away in disgust.

Up front a fiddler had climbed onto one of the long wooden tables. The crowd was clapping and stamping.
Ja
, a good thing. Laugh and sing when you can. Sooner or later everyone be finished the same. In the grave. The dwarf turned to Martha. “Come, we be going up front, see how they do it these days.”

They took their tankards and made their way forward. Roisin and Cuf stayed where they were. All the attention focused on the noisy entertainment at the other end of the room made it seem as if they were alone. “Your first plan,” Roisin said. “You meant to open a fancy goods shop.”

He nodded. “I’ve a friend, a silversmith; he’s been teaching me the craft. I made those things you saw. Paid for the metal out of the allowance Mistress makes— the allowance she used to make me. Four pennies a week.” He let the words trail away, suddenly shamed by what a tiny amount of money he’d ever been able to call his own. “You thought I’d stolen the goblets and plates. I’m a slave, so how could I have them otherwise?”

Roisin shook her head. “I didn’t think that. You don’t strike me as the stealing sort.”

He decided to believe her. “When I got the promise from Mistress,” he said, “when she made me free, that’s what I was going to be. A silversmith like my friend.”

“But you decided not to wait.”

“Jan Brinker said soon as the war with the French ends hard times will come. No one will be able to afford silver, maybe not pewter even. Anyway, Mr. Brinker thinks Mistress is lying. He says she’ll never keep her word and give me my freedom. He says it will be like the reward she promised him. He never got that, either.”

“Do you think Squaw was lying to you all these years?”

“I’m not sure.” Cuf didn’t look at her. “Maybe she was telling the truth, but I can’t wait any longer. Anyway, you said yourself it wasn’t right for someone to be able to own another person.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Well, then?” He looked hard at her, daring her to rebuke him for leaving his rightful owner.

“Well, nothing. I never said you were wrong to run away, Cuf. I was only asking why you decided things that way.”

“No time to wait,” he said again, still not looking at her.

Roisin fingered the quackbills still on the table between them. “How did you learn to read?” she asked softly.

“Morgan taught me.”

“Good. Everything you know, it helps to keep you safe.” She smiled when she said it, and Cuf felt something move deep inside him, something he wished never to feel. Not for her. Not for any white woman.

When he was a little boy and they had burned black slaves in slow fires until the whole town was filled with the greasy, sick-making smell of their roasting flesh, they said that the slaves wanted every Christian man and boy dead, so the black men would be free to vent their rapacious lust for white women.

Rapacious lust
. He never forgot the phrase. White men who went to the mistress’s bordellos often asked for a black whore, but if a Negro man’s blood stirred for a white woman, it was
rapacious lust
. And he could be burned for it.

That wasn’t Roisin’s fault. “I’ll keep you safe,” he promised. “But that means you’ll have to stay with me and Jan Brinker and do your cures.”

“Yes, it does. And I will. But I won’t let him say I can do miracles as if I were a saint.” She had to raise her voice to be heard. The fiddler and the rhythmic clapping of the crowd had grown much more boisterous.

“I promise he won’t say that.” It was Brinker who had the money they needed for quackbills, and Brinker who could provide them a place to hide from the mistress and see clients, but Cuf knew he could persuade the dwarf to do things the way Cuf thought they should be done. The little man had always been in awe of the two boys.
Smart you both be as well as tall
. Brinker would listen to Cuf in the end.

“Very well, it’s settled then,” Roisin said, clasping his hand.

“Except…”

“Except what?”

“How can you all be so sure we won’t be found? If we stay right here in New York, why won’t Squaw find us?”

Cuf shrugged. “Jan Brinker says she won’t. I think he’s right. She’d never come to a place like this.” He waved his arm to indicate the taproom full of raucous good cheer. “Can you picture her in the Fiddle and Clogs?”

Roisin giggled. “No. I can’t.”

“Neither can I. Look at that.” Cuf pointed to the front of the room.

Jan Brinker was scrambling up onto the table. The crowd cheered loudly when he took the fiddler’s instrument and began to play. Pretty soon old Martha Kincaid was up there beside him, lifting her skirts and dancing a jig with as much energy as if she were still a young girl.

“What are you looking for?” Cuff asked.

“A special kind of plant.” Roisin kicked at the sand as she spoke. The tips of her heavy, tightly laced boots sent damp clods flying, uncovering a great variety of green and black and dark red shapes.

“There are no plants here,” Cuf said in astonishment. “Plants don’t grow in the sand.”

“What do you think these things are? And why did I make you bring me here?”

They were the same two questions he’d been asking himself all day. “Is there a beach nearby?” she’d demanded when they breakfasted on johnnycakes and coffee in the taproom. “A true beach with real sand and the sea.”

Cuf had considered taking her to Bedloe’s Island, but he had no desire to expose Roisin to the pox, and he’d heard they were building the pesthouse. The two might be seen. For all he knew Morgan might be there, digging up the gold horse’s head. Besides, the beach on Bedloe’s Island was shingle and stone. She’d asked for sand.

There were a few stretches of sandy shore at the southern tip of Manhattan, but the court part of town had become dangerous for both of them in the four days since they left Squaw DaSilva’s. So he’d settled on Brooklyn.

They’d paid a penny each to be ferried from Manhattan to the place the authorities had named Nassau Island, though most of the locals still called it simply the long island. It was Cuf who got the ferry money from Jan Brinker, but he handed it over to Roisin before they left the Fiddle and Clogs. “You keep the coins and pay the fare. Everyone will think I’m your slave and no one will pay us any mind.”

Now Roisin looked as if she were about to weep. The sight of the open sea, Cuf thought. Probably she was thinking of Morgan and wishing she’d gone with him when she had the chance. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing’s the matter.” Roisin turned and examined the deserted sweep of sand behind them, then turned again to look at the equally deserted stretch that lay ahead.

“Something is. You’re almost crying. Are you missing Morgan?”

“Missing Morgan! Did you not listen to a thing I told you?”

“Ssh. I remember what you said. I wonder why we’ve come here, that’s all. And why you’re so troubled by whatever it is we’ve found.”

“It’s what we’ve not found that troubles me. I’m looking for a special kind of ocean plant.”

Cuf shook his head. “I don’t believe there can be plants in the sea.”

“There are many different kinds of plants in the sea. The tide washes them up on the sand and people gather them. A gift from the Holy Virgin, my mother always said. Some are good to eat, and some are for making poultices and some for brews. But here in Brooklyn”—she kicked at another clump of wet sand—“I’ve not seen a single sea plant I recognize.”