City of Dreams (83 page)

“My mama’s an apothecary. I can ask her to tell you what they use here for whatever it is you want to do.”

Roisin shook her head. Martha Kincaid had told her about Phoebe. “No. Your mother won’t know about this. It’s different. A secret.”

She was shutting him out. Secrets were for white folks. Not Negroes like him or his mother. Cuf stopped walking and let her get a few steps ahead. The wind off the ocean was cold and sharp. It had blown most of her red hair free of her mobcap. Jan Brinker had bought Roisin a shawl and she held it wrapped tight to her body. The wind molded the woolen cloth to her hips and her breasts, and showed off the deep curve of her waist.

Cuff whirled around, turning his back to her. Roisin Campbell wasn’t for him. No matter what.
Rapacious lust
. And a slow fire in front of City Hall.

“Cuf! Cut! Come see! I think I’ve found it!”

He turned back, and strode up the beach toward her, unable to keep from smiling simply because she was. Roisin had both hands full of something that shone bright orange in the weak afternoon sunlight. The stuff was flat, with slightly ruffled edges, the various segments joined by little orange balls the size of a hickory nut. They felt empty when he squeezed them. “Are you telling me this is a plant that grows under the sea?” He tried to stifle his laughter, unsure whether it was the strange notion of a garden below the ocean, or simply the sight of her face, shining with delight.

“Yes, Cuf. Indeed I am. Look, you can see where the salt’s dried on. Here and here.”

“That’s salt?”

“Of course. Lick it. You’ll know for sure.” Cuf hesitated. “Go on,” she said, laughing at him. “It’s not poison. You can trust me that much.”

He opened his mouth and she rubbed a bit of the orange stuff over his tongue. He tasted the sweetness of her finger. And salt, just as she’d said. “It’s salt,” he conceded. “Is this the plant your mother told you about? The one that cures … whatever it cures?”

Roisin nodded. “I believe so, yes.”

“Believe? Aren’t you sure?”

“No, not absolutely. Everything’s a bit different here. Many of the plants are exactly the same as we have at home, but some are not. This one … I’m not sure, Cuf, but I think it’s the same. The same sort anyway.”

There was an easy way to be certain. She could try it on herself. She had missed her monthly flow. It should have started the week before—she’d been planning to use it as an excuse to get Morgan to leave her in peace for a few nights—but it hadn’t. If this was the right sea gift, it could end any worry she need have about that. Could she bear the pain? Scrape the thing out with her own hands?

Yes, if she must. But she wasn’t sure she wanted it to end. Every relative she had was dead or at the other side of the ocean. She was by herself in this heretic land. And about to begin a new life. Maybe two new lives, if she birthed the babe. A part of Morgan to keep with her.

“What are you thinking?”

“What? I’m sorry, Cuf. What did you say?”

“You seemed to have gone far away.” She was gazing out to sea, with an expression he didn’t understand. A kind of longing. It had to be for Morgan, whatever she said.

“I was thinking about the future,” Roisin said softly, beginning to stuff the sea plant into the drawstring bag she’d brought for the purpose. “Come, Cuf, help me look for more of this.”

“Only if you tell me your secret,” he said. Perversely, he knew. He’d no cause to torment her. It wasn’t her fault if she was besotted with Morgan Turner, same as every other woman in New York. And certainly not her fault if Cuf was fool enough to have feelings to which he had no right.

Roisin looked at him. He was nearly as tall as Morgan. But so different, a creature from another world almost. Her mother had told her stories about blackamoors, but until she came to New York Roisin had never seen one. She had never seen a slave, or imagined what it would feel like to be owned. The way the biddy had owned her, or Squaw owned Cuf.

She liked the soft, pale golden color of Cuf’s skin, and the way his dark eyes were so wise and yet so kind, but she had no idea what he would make of her legacy. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “That’s why it’s a secret. Come.”

Roisin turned and began striding forward, head down, her gaze focused on the sand. “There must be more, Cuf. It’s never you find only one bit. My mother always said that.”

Five minutes later they came on a place where the ocean had thrown up so many plants the sand was entirely covered for a distance of some ten or more yards in every direction. Roisin was ecstatic. “Oh, Cuf, it’s a gift from heaven! I can use this, and this.” She pounced on a large clump of something bright green and another that was almost black. Finally she found a little more of the vivid orange variety and she laughed with joy as she stuffed it in her bag of treasures. “God bless Brooklyn! How many women will have reason to be thankful now!”

“Ah,” he said, pleased to have discovered a bit more of the truth. “The sea plants are for a female malady. I might have guessed.”

“Why might you have?” She didn’t look at him when she said it.

“Because it’s made you so excited.”

“Yes, I guess it has. Well, you’re right about that. It’s for a woman’s … malady.”

He sensed something in her tone. “But that’s not the secret, is it?”

Suddenly she wanted to tell him. Cuf had saved her from being Morgan Turner’s whore or Squaw’s. He had given her a chance to hope again. “Me. My mother,” she said, “and her mother before her. And her mother before that. We’re part of an ancient tribe of healers known as …”

“Yes?”

It was the first time she’d ever spoken the words aloud to someone who had not taken the oath. “We’re known as the Women of Connemara. We make a solemn vow to heal in the name of the Holy Virgin. And never to do harm. And—”

“What else?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing else.” She couldn’t make herself say the last part.
And never to take a babe from the womb after it had quickened and was ensouled
.

She had six, possibly seven weeks more. Time enough to make the decision, especially now that she’d found the sea gift. Except that she had already decided.

She wanted to let the babe grow and quicken and be born. She wanted it entirely, with every part of her. But a babe had to have a father. Not a pirate who was already probably murdering and robbing some poor ship full of unlucky fools. A man who would look after her and the child. Who—if the Holy Virgin was kind—might believe the child was his.

Roisin knew Cuf wanted her. She could smell the wanting on him, and see the tension that rippled through his arm when he touched her accidentally. She looked around but there was only the open sand and the crashing sea. The tide had been far out when they arrived. It was heading in now, wavelets licking ever closer to where they were, already washing away the footprints they’d earlier left in the sand.

“Say something,” she whispered, moving closer to him. “I’ve given you my secret. What shall you give me in return, Cuf?”

“I have nothing.” He ached to hold her. “I’m a slave.”

“No. You must stop saying that. You and me, Cuf, we’re free. Because we say we are. Not slave or indenture, free.”

“Yes,” he said, exulting in the word, feeling strong because she expected him to be. “Yes! We are, Roisin, we’re free!”

She let the shawl fall open and reached up and put her arms around his neck, pressing her body against him, her mouth to his.

Cuf felt her breasts against his chest, his male hardness against the softness of her hips and her belly. He clasped her to him, lifting her off the ground and carrying her a few yards farther inland, away from the steadily encroaching waves. The wind didn’t feel cold any longer; it was a caress, a soothing balm to his fire. He set her down. She fell to her knees, then lay on her back and lifted her skirt and her petticoats so he could see her rosy flesh, the dark red, inviting triangle between her thighs.

Groaning, Cuf lowered himself onto her, entered her, possessed her.

Roisin opened herself to him as utterly as she could, taking him deep inside her, accepting—no, inviting—his seed. Her hands gripped his shoulders and she listened to the waves breaking on the shore and waited, unmoving until he was finished. Thank you Holy Virgin for yet another gift of the sea.

Morgan. Ah, Morgan.

The woman was badly marked by the pox, and so thin you could see her bones. “You’re sure you’re breeding?” Roisin demanded.

“Aye. I’m sure. Why wouldn’t I be? It’s the twelfth time.”

It was a story Roisin had heard often enough in the two weeks since Jan Brinker installed her in a room in the attic above his taproom. She slept there by night and saw those who came for cures by day. A whole stream of them had begun passing beneath the sign of the Fiddle and Clogs, climbing the stairs to consult Mistress Healsall.

That’s what the quackbills Brinker circulated all over the city proclaimed her. It was a compromise between herself and the dwarf who wanted her to guarantee to cure everything. Healsall might be a name, after all, not a promise. Besides, she couldn’t announce herself as Roisin Campbell and wait for the biddy to send the constables to get her. Or Squaw.

Cuf was in charge of keeping Roisin’s clients in order and taking the money they paid for her services. She charged between a penny and three for most things. Martha Kincaid didn’t approve of the pricing schedule. “A shilling at least if you really can rid ’em of a babe they don’t want to breed,” she’d advised in the dark of night when she and Roisin were in the little lean-to behind the alehouse. “And Lord knows most’ll steal if they must to get it.”

“They shall pay whatever they wish for that cure,” Roisin had said. “Those are the rules. For ending a breeding that hasn’t quickened, a woman pays whatever she can.”

“And whose rules might those be, God Almighty? None as has ever done business in New York, I promise you that.”

“My rules,” Roisin insisted since she had no intention of explaining to Martha Kincaid about the Women of Connemara. “And if you tell Mr. Brinker, I’ll leave. I swear it, Martha, I will.”

“Ah, don’t get yourself so upset, lass. I’ll not be telling Jan. Not any man short or tall. Not about a woman ending a breeding.” She’d narrowed her eyes and peered at the girl. “What about Cuf? Have you told him?”

Roisin shook her head. “No, not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“I said I treated female maladies. All kinds.”

Martha Kincaid was fairly certain that Roisin and Cuf were lying together. Didn’t bother her none, though some would call it reason enough to set him burning. That’s because they hadn’t never felt Black Bento’s kind hands in the lonely night, nor had the warmth of him like a covering quilt when everything else was ice and cold. Burned, Black Bento did, but not at no stake, thank God. In the fire took the bawdyhouse. When he was trying to help some of the others get out and a roof beam crashed down on his head. Everyone said he was dead before the flames touched him. Maybe. Either way, better than the stake.

Woman like this one Roisin was questioning now, thin as a rail she was. Sure to God, she couldn’t afford a shilling to be rid of the babe growing inside her. But that wasn’t what be going to decide Roisin Campbell about whether to help her or not. Martha had heard it all before. The girl had ways of her own, and the only thing to do be to accept them.

“When was the last time you bled?” Roisin demanded.

The pockmarked woman didn’t look sheepish and refuse to meet her glance. Not like the last few clients who had climbed up to the attic with the same complaint. “In September,” she said, her eyes steady on Roisin’s face. “This be nearly November, ain’t it? So’s I been breedin’ six weeks. Maybe seven.”

Roisin remained unconvinced, unwilling to trust the consciences of the heretic Protestant women of New York. It was a problem her mother had never faced. Every Catholic knew the Church would condemn her to everlasting hell for ending a breeding after the thing inside her was a babe with a soul.

The thin woman was watching her with anxious eyes, waiting for a sign that Mistress Healsall would help her. “’Tain’t quickened. I swear it,” she said. “Mary Flanagan I was ’fore I was wed,” she added in a hoarse whisper. “I knows the difference.”

Most of the Irish in America were from Ulster. They’d been Scots originally, them as deserted the cause of Catholic Queen Mary and turned heretic and went over to the side of the she-devil Elizabeth. Their reward was land in the north part of Ireland. Roisin trusted people from Ulster less than the rest of the New Yorkers, but Flanagan wasn’t an Ulster name. And the woman wasn’t shamed to look at her. She’d been a Catholic once, Roisin was sure of it. “Very well. I’ll help you.”

It was the first time she’d agreed to end a breeding, and she could only pray that the orange sea plant from Brooklyn was truly the same as the one the Holy Virgin delivered to the beaches of Scotland and Ireland. Never England, her mother had said.
Sure and the Blessed Mary would not be giving treacherous Englishwomen the way to be safely free of a babe afore it quickened. Murderous whores that they all be
.