City of Dreams (86 page)

Vrinck cut him off with a stubborn shake of his head. “No, it don’t be gone. I told ye, the
Maiden’s
been over in Europe all this time, takin’ what French and Spanish prizes she can find off the Guinea coast. Ain’t no point in any privateer sailin’ in the Caribbean these last years. Navy’s sent all the enemy merchant ships to the bottom o’ the sea. Wherever Morgan Turner put that treasure in ’fifty-nine, it still be there.”

“Idle hope,” Caleb said quietly, the excitement he’d felt dying in him as he spoke the words. “You are deluding yourself, Mr. Vrinck.”

“I kin find someone as knows,” Vrinck insisted. “Might take a time. But I visit enough alehouses and slop shops and taprooms, sooner or later I be finding someone as knows somethin’.”

“It’s not a bad plan,” Caleb conceded. “But why do you need me?”

“Has to stand me rounds o’ the bowl I does. Takes a bit o’ money.”

“How much?” A waste of time as well as money, even presuming he could squeeze one more loan out of Bede. Utterly stupid. “How much would you need?”

“Three shillings a week, maybe.” Vrinck didn’t look at him. “For a month, maybe two. Like I said, tars come and go.”

Sweet Christ. A pound or two to secure thousands. “And if I were to agree, and—an even more unlikely possibility—you were to discover something, how am I to know you won’t take what information you have and run off with it? Why should you share whatever profit you stand to make?”

“I be needing a ship, don’t I? Morgan Turner hid his treasure somewheres in the islands. I knows that for certain. Be needin’ a ship and a crew to go get it. That costs some.”

Ah yes. A ship. Not a couple of pounds but many thousands. A somewhat different matter. “I could never get that much money. It’s an idle fancy, Vrinck. Put it out of your mind.”

“A fancy, be it?” Vrinck stood up. He looked like a bent tree trunk when he leaned forward, supporting himself on his two thick arms, and pressed his knuckles into the scarred wood of the table. “It don’t be fanciful that you don’t be the only loser. And them other investors, at least some of ’em still be rich, don’t they? For all they was cheated out o’ what was rightfully theirs, same as yerself. Ye goes to ’em, tells ’em they can get what was comin’ to ’em since six years past. They be puttin’ up the stake we need to get a ship and a crew to sail her, sure as God.”

Caleb stared at Vrinck. Little warning prickles were racing through his gut. The pain was alive, inside him, taunting him with the fact that in the end, whatever he did, it would win. God-cursed bitch and her God-cursed son. All their fault. Maybe he could live long enough to see them pay.

Vrinck was waiting. Caleb nodded.

October twenty-third in this year of grace 1765. Twilight. A cannon boomed twice from the direction of the harbor, signaling the arrival of the frigate
Edward
under the protection of two men o’ war. The
Edward’s
hold was stuffed with stamped paper.

The guns of Fort George had been repositioned on the northern wall and trained on the Broad Way, on the people of New York. The cannon of the Battery had been spiked. Even if the citizenry managed to overpower the redcoats and gain control, the guns couldn’t be turned on the fort. Governor Colden’s orders.

Fog rolled in off the harbor, muffling the tramp of boots and shoes and clogs on the cobbled streets of the court part of town. An army was assembling. Marching without drill, not entirely in unison, but with a single purpose. They were determined the Stamp Act would not be enforced.

More than two thousand came and stared down the barrels of the guns.

“That bastard Colden’s to blame for this.”

“Aye. But he’s only licking the hind ends of his London masters. Sons o’ bitches would make us all Negroes. Here take these papers, give ’em to all you know.”

The man who blamed Cadwallader Colden for the tax that would make him a pauper took the papers eagerly. “They be saying this can’t happen, right? That it won’t happen.”

“Here, I’ll read you what they say. ‘The first man that either distributes or makes use of stamped paper, let him take care of his house, person and effects.’ Plain enough, ain’t it?”

It was no night to try and get through the town in a carriage. Squaw DaSilva walked. She’d never before been in the new neighborhood that had grown up on the west-facing land that had once been Trinity Church Farm. The dirt streets of the new section hadn’t been included in the Council’s latest municipal improvement: whale-oil lanterns on the city streets and official lamplighters to tend them. Neither, apparently, did the people of the district follow the old custom of a candle lantern hanging from every seventh house. The dark was absolute.

The fog made it worse. She was chilled to the bone. She pulled her long black cloak tighter against the sharp wind. One good thing, the bad weather might help disperse the mob that had gathered on the Broad Way. Then again, it might not. Sweet God, men were such flaming fools. And kings were the worst of all.

She hadn’t been easy in her mind about leaving the house, not with so much obvious trouble brewing at her front door. But she’d had no choice. She’d summoned three of her strongest barkeeps and left them on guard. That would have to be enough.

The wind was sharp as glass. Despite all the years she’d lived in the whorehouse beside Hudson’s River, she’d never become accustomed to the gale that almost always blew on this side of the city. Small wonder few wanted to live over here on the Church Farm. But offer a laboring man a lot for an annual rent of two pounds and he’d be bound to take it. Not that two pounds a year was as easy to come by now as it had been. Not for laborers and artisans.

England had taken Canada. France had given up her claim to all land east of the Mississippi, except for the enclave at New Orleans. Not satisfied, England moved on the French possessions in the Caribbean. When Spain indicated that she might assist the French, England, the strongest nation on earth, declared war on Spain as well. All that bluster and triumph had been a disaster for New York.

War and the wealth created by war had moved on. The city was left with inflation, unemployment, debt, and faltering trade. Not even privateering was a sure source of profit any longer. The Royal Navy had driven almost all French and Spanish shipping out of local waters. Most of the men-o’-war sailing under letters of marque rode at anchor in the harbor. But not the
Fanciful Maiden.

Damn you, Morgan, why must you be as stubborn as I am? Six years. I’m fifty. Healthy so far, but who knows how long I have left. Morgan, oh, my boy.

She heard the snuffling of a pair of wild hogs rooting through the garbage that clogged the ditch down the middle of the road and stopped moving, trying to tell from the sound exactly where the pigs were and how to navigate around them. It was hard to believe Jan Brinker had settled here after he could afford so much better. Same as when he insisted on staying up at the bawdyhouse in the woods, whatever other accommodation she’d offered. Stubborn little freak.

“Mistress.” The voice was very quiet and very close. She gasped, then held her breath. “Don’t be feared, mistress. It’s me, Rudolf. I’ll take you to him.”

The arrangement had been made that afternoon in the market on the ground floor of the Royal Exchange on Broad Street. “Tonight,” the big black carriage driver whispered without seeming to look at her. “At an hour before midnight, on Little Cortlandt Street. I’ll show you where he is.”

“Tonight may not be convenient.” She’d known then it would be no evening to move about town. She’d already had word that the stamps would arrive in a matter of hours. “I can reward your trouble if we do it next week.”

“Tonight,” the coachman insisted. “Has to be. He doesn’t have much time left.”

She had to see with her own eyes. Nothing else would satisfy her. Not after everything that had happened. “Tonight,” she’d agreed.

Now the black man led her through a maze of streets she knew she’d never remember. She wouldn’t get out of this cursed neighborhood unless this Rudolf brought her out.

A final turn and they were in a narrow alley. Rudolf stopped walking. She sensed rather than saw him push open a door. It moved silently on well-oiled hinges. “He’s in there, mistress. May be that he’s sleeping.”

He held the door open for her to enter. She turned to him. “Wait,” she whispered anxiously. “However long I’m in here, you must wait. An extra shilling if you do.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be waiting.”

She hesitated a moment, then stepped inside. Rudolf pulled the door closed behind her.

There was a small lantern flickering in one corner. It cast long shadows across a surprisingly large square room with a good-sized fireplace on one wall. The bed had been drawn close to the warmth of the glowing embers. Jan Brinker’s little form barely disturbed the coverings.

He wasn’t sleeping. “You came,” he said. “I hoped you would.”

“Of course I came, old friend. I’d have been here a lot sooner if you hadn’t waited so long to send word you were ill.” She took off her cloak as she spoke, hanging it on a peg beside the door and moving closer to the dwarf. “Can I get you anything? Will you take a drink?” There was a jug of ale on the bedside table, and a pewter mug.

“Not now,” Brinker said. His voice was weaker than she’d ever heard it.

“Are you getting any nourishment?” she asked. “And what about treatment for your illness? I can send Phoebe.”

“The girl, Roisin, she simples as well as any apothecary alive. She takes good care of me. And Rudolf and old Martha Kincaid besides, though Martha won’t be long joining me on t’other side. I be well looked after, mevrouw. Don’t trouble yourself. It’s only that I be wanting to see you again. Once more before I be going.”

“Ah, Jan Brinker, what a long road we’ve traveled.” She drew a chair close to the bedside and sat down and took his hand. “I’ve missed your company these past eighteen years.”

“Nineteen,” he corrected. “Nineteen years since we be doing all that shouting and screaming in the bordello, loud enough so’s any could hear.”

He chuckled at the memory and she laughed with him, until he started coughing and spewing up phlegm. Squaw DaSilva held a cloth to his mouth, supporting his small, thin shoulders with her arm. Finally he settled back on the pillows. “You must rest, Jan. I should go.”

He pretended he hadn’t heard her. “Remember when you be moving to your big fancy house on the Broad Way, mevrouw? Finer than anything you had over on Nassau Street it be, don’t it?”

“Oh, yes, Jan. Much finer.”

“And you be sending me off to Chappaqua to brew beer.”

“That turned out a good plan, didn’t it? It made you rich.”

“
Ja
, mevrouw.” Richer than them
Jesu Cristo
sons of bitches what be wanting to put me in the stocks again. “Rich as a king I be. All ’cause redcoats be so thirsty. But I always be missing you and the old days, mevrouw. And the whores, truth be telling. For all it’s them what gave me the French disease be killing me now.”

She wanted to say she’d never realized you could lick a dose of the French disease from between a whore’s legs as well as get it in the ordinary way, but she didn’t. That would be too forward even for Jan Brinker, who knew better than most what she was capable of saying as well as thinking. “I missed you, too, Jan. But it was wise. For both of us. I always knew the time might come when I’d need you, and that it would be best if no one suspected we were still friends. I was right.”

“You be right most times, mevrouw. Sometimes being right be hard.”

“Yes, sometimes it is.” Still, she had no regrets about most of it. Far better for dear Cuf to believe he’d taken his freedom than that she’d given it to him. As for Roisin, her plan had been simply to get her out of Morgan’s sight as well as his bed. One of the bordellos where he could find her at will would have been no answer at all. Of course she could never have known that the girl would become Cuf’s woman, and that Morgan would leave so it didn’t matter.

Jan Brinker saw her tremble. “You be too cold, mevrouw.” He reached out a hand. “Where’s me little bell? If I ring it Rudolf be coming to put another log on the fire.”