City of Dreams (9 page)

“No. We cannot.” Lucas watched one last sluggish worm make its way across the bedclothes and crawl over the bodies of its relatives until it found a bit of exposed skin behind the woman’s ear. He could have prevented that one from attaching itself, but there was no point. “Leeches have to be allowed to fill themselves until they drop off, mevrouw. Otherwise they leave their sucking tool inside the patient and the wound becomes poisonous.” He looked at Van der Vries. “Is that not correct, mijnheer?”

“Yes, of course.” Van der Vries was leaning over his patient, staring at the worms. “But see, at least six are fixed on the goiter. It will be drained of the evil blood that—”

“Tell me, Van der Vries, when you were healing the sick with the fashionable practitioner of physic in fashionable Cambridge, England, did you not hear of the English king’s extremely fashionable personal physician, William Harvey?”

Van der Vries didn’t look up. “Harvey,” he murmured. “Yes, I seem to recall the name.”

“I’m pleased to hear it. Because over thirty years ago Harvey proved that the blood circulates in the human body. The Widow Kulik’s goiter is a growth, a struma made of tissue and fed by blood from the whole body. It is not depend—”

“At last we have reached the nub of the argument.” The Dutchman looked directly at Lucas. “You wished to cut, did you not, barber?”

“I could have removed the goiter, yes. There is no guarantee of success, but—”

“But definitely a guarantee of excruciating pain. Look at the size of this swelling. As big as two pullet eggs. Do you not agree it must have been growing on the woman’s neck long before my arrival in the colony?”

“Of course.”

“Indeed. And despite the fact that you were here and I was not, this poor creature never consulted you.”

“Some are afraid of the knife. You know it as well as—”

Anna Stuyvesant put herself between the two men. “Look, the leeches … They are starting to fall off.”

“Ah, yes.” Van der Vries bent over the bed and began scooping the fat black worms into his jar. “Thank you for recalling me to my duty, mevrouw. These beauties will serve some other patient as well. Be ready for a new meal soon, won’t you, my little friends?”

The face of the Widow Kulik began to emerge from the curtain of leeches. Her skin was ghostly white, her eyes open and staring, her mouth relaxed. Lucas put his hand on the woman’s chest. “She’s dead.”

“
Ja, ja.
I thought so already.” Van der Vries was intent on gathering up the leeches. It was not difficult; they weren’t only stiff with blood, they were stupefied with it. They tumbled happily into the glass jar and made no effort to attach themselves to the Dutchman’s pudgy hands. “Her case, as you just admitted, was well advanced. Nonetheless, it is the duty of the true physician to try all possible remedies until the very end.”

IV

Having known her naked in the woods, Lucas found it difficult to once again have Marit only in the storeroom of the butcher shop.

Still, any way was better than no way. Over a year now, and their lust hadn’t cooled. Marit still moaned and gasped in delight when he entered her, and trembled like a leaf in a tempest when finally she was overcome by ecstasy. Seeing her that way had always made Lucas feel like a god. It still did. But it was not the same.

Sometimes when he thought about the things they had done to each other in the cave—a mere twenty minutes’ walk from Wall Street—he blushed. Both of them naked as Adam and Eve, surrounded by nothing but the forest, bathing naked in the cool fresh water of the Collect Pond.

Lucas desperately missed the freedom of those precious hours. So did Marit. While he was deep inside her in the storeroom, she would whisper her memories in his ear. “Ah, yes, do that, Lucas. Put your fingers inside me there and rock them back and forth. When we went to the cave you used to put your cock inside that place. Do you remember, my darling Lucas, putting your cock in my arse? Do you remember?”

When she said those things he went wild. Who would imagine a woman would speak such words? Not a whore—a respectable woman who had a husband and went to church on Sundays, and sometimes caught his eye when she came out of the service, and just from the way she looked at him made him know what she was thinking. What she would say aloud as soon as they were together in their secret cave.
I want to suck your cock, Lucas. I want to take it in my mouth and suck it dry.

No more. They dared not risk it. Aside from the threat posed by Ankel Jannssen asleep upstairs, there were the customers, more of them than ever before.

Normally Nieuw Netherland was a place of incredible plenty, much of it free for the taking. Now, with overland access to the farms and the surrounding countryside cut off, all the town’s provisions had to arrive by ship. Stuyvesant inaugurated a rationing system. It should have meant less business in Jannssen’s shop.

But the atmosphere of danger bred rumors faster than maggots on a dung heap. A story made the rounds that Ankel and Marit had a secret supply of meat hidden in the cellar beneath their house. That it would have long since become putrid didn’t stop people from coming and asking to buy some of the hoard. They seemed to think if they could just catch the mistress butcher on her own and offer her a bit of extra money, she’d find them something over their ration.

Marit turned them all away. “Even if I had extra meat, which I do not, I wouldn’t dare sell you more than your share. The fine for cheating on the rationing is a fortune, three guilders.”

The first time Lucas heard her say it he was hiding in the storeroom, his still-unsatisfied cock stiff as a broom handle inside his breeches. When he thought about the penalty for what they were doing—far worse than a three-guilder fine—he marveled at their foolhardiness. But he didn’t leave. And he didn’t stop visiting the butcher shop at every possible opportunity. Neither did the customers who continued to believe the rumor because they wanted it to be true.

It was rare that Lucas and Marit could be together the way they were that January Thursday, over a month into the siege. For once they hadn’t been interrupted, and when he was done Lucas could chance staying inside her for a few seconds. He smoothed Marit’s golden hair back from her forehead. He kissed her cheeks and her lips and her eyes.

“I miss the woods,” she whispered between his kisses. “I long to be naked with you.”

“Me, too. But I don’t long to lose my scalp, or see you lose yours.”

He eased out of her. Marit sighed. “Each time you part from me it’s like a little death.”

“I know. I feel the same.”

“Do you, Lucas?”

“Dear God, Marit, of course I do. How can you ask?”

“Because if you are as unhappy apart from me as I am from you, then we must do something about it.”

Lucas adjusted himself and buttoned his breeches. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “Dearest Marit, there is nothing to be done.”

“We could go away, Lucas.”

He pulled back, stared at her. “What are you saying?”

“We could go to New England. To Boston.”

Lucas chuckled. “Wouldn’t we have a fine time with the Puritans in Boston! A nonbelieving barber and a runaway wife. They’d hang us ten minutes after we arrived.”

“Then we could take a ship back to Europe. To England.”

“I can’t return to England. Anyway, I can’t leave here. I have my sister to look after.”

“Ah yes.” Marit began lacing her bodice, easing her heavy breasts back into their restraint. “The saintly Juffrouw Sally who goes so frequently to the hospital to care for the stinking vagabonds brought there to die. Your sister is how old, Lucas?”

“Twenty-five,” he admitted. “Nearly twenty-six.”

“Yes. And she’s a dried-up old prune. It is long past time you found her a husband.”

“We can’t afford a dowry. And I promised Sally I wouldn’t—”

The footsteps of the butcher were heavy on the stairs. “Marit! Damn you, woman, where are you? Marit!”

Heart pounding, Lucas ran from the storeroom to the front of the shop and positioned himself in front of the wooden counter.

Marit was right behind him, adjusting her skirt and smoothing her hair as she took her place on the other side of the chopping block. “
Ja
, I am here, Ankel. I am talking to a customer.” Her red mouth sent Lucas a silent kiss.

Ankel Jannssen shoved aside the burlap curtain and peered into the shop. He was a big man, as tall as Lucas and twice as broad. A lifetime of meat-eating had packed flesh onto his frame. He filled the doorway. “Listen, woman, I want— Who’s this?”

“The barber, Ankel. Lucas Turner.”

“
Ja
, Turner. The English. So what are you doing here, barber?”

Lucas thought his mouth too dry for speech, but the words came. “Your good wife provides me with sheep’s intestines and pig bladders for my trade, butcher. I was hoping she had some put by for me today.”

“Not today. We have nothing like that now. Everything but the smell, they eat. Pretty soon even the sawdust from the floor.”

Jannssen stepped up to the chopping block, leaned on it, and looked hard at Lucas. The stench of stale drink came off the man in waves. It almost overcame the reek of his unwashed body. He had small close-set eyes, pig eyes. “Ja, Turner the English.” He sounded as if he’d been thinking a lot about it. “Don’t come any more here, barber. Go somewhere else for your guts and bladders. There are butchers closer to your place. Plague them. Even though their wives don’t have tits quite so big.”

Marit flushed dark red and turned away from her husband. Lucas looked directly at him. “It will be exactly as you say, Mijnheer Jannssen. Good day to you. And to you, mevrouw.”

Lucas turned and walked out of the shop. He heard the unmistakable soft thwack of a fist striking flesh before he’d closed the door. And Marit’s voice. “No, Ankel. No. I told you … you are imagining—”A second blow cut off her words.

Lucas froze in the doorway. There were at least a dozen other people on the short street. More than enough to rush to the butcher’s aid if they heard him being beaten to pulp by the much younger and stronger barber, Lucas Turner. Plenty of respectable witnesses to testify that Ankel Jannssen had been exercising his legal right to discipline his wife when the Englishman, for no good reason, turned on him.

God alone knew what suspicions Ankel Jannssen would testify to in a court of law, but Lucas didn’t need any messages from God to tell him what would happen to Marit if she were branded an adulteress and divorced.

He turned and walked the length of Hall Place, past the tidy wooden houses with their calico curtains and their small pots of flowers standing either side of every front door. Until he cleared the large open space in front of the fort he was sure he could hear the sound of Jannssen’s fists pounding Marit’s soft, yielding flesh.

Lucas didn’t go to the butcher shop on Friday or Saturday. On Sunday he considered attending church, but decided against it. Unlike New England, Nieuw Netherland imposed no penalty for nonobservance. The wrath of Stuyvesant and the burgomasters was reserved for those who attempted any form of public worship other than that prescribed by the Dutch Reformed Church. Even the Jews were known to conduct their rites in a room above the mill on Beaver Street. As long as they made no public show about how they prayed or to whom—and as long as no Christian children were reported missing—they were left alone.

For his part, Lucas had no particular beliefs. God knows he was no Jew, but one sort of Christian or another seemed to him to make little difference. He’d felt safe from God’s wrath and Stuyvesant’s when—only to get a look at Marit—he’d gone a few times to the Sabbath liturgy at the Church of St. Nicholas. But the Sunday after Ankel surprised them, he contrived to arrive when the service was almost over.

The church was within the walls of the fort. A brutal wind whistled cold and icy across the parade ground, carrying the promise of snow. Lucas sheltered in the doorway of a storehouse a few steps from the church. He heard the last notes of the closing hymn, the drone of the minister’s final blessing. A few moments later the worshipers began to leave the building. Everyone moved swiftly, anxious to get home to their fires. Marit and Ankel always occupied a pew toward the rear. They were among the first to appear.

Lucas huddled in the shadows. The butcher and his wife got closer. Ankel was talking to the man on his right. Marit was on her husband’s left, the side closer to Lucas. She walked with her head down, one hand clutching the hood of her gray duffel cloak tight beneath her chin. When she drew level with Lucas, she turned her face in his direction.

Lucas gasped. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut. There was a cut on her right cheek, and her left was black and blue. And Jannssen had added shame to Marit’s punishment by making her go to church so everyone would know she had done something to displease him, and he’d given her the discipline she deserved.

Lucas had to make a conscious effort to keep from lunging forward and throwing the butcher to the ground.