Authors: Beverly Swerling
At 4
P.M
. on that September Friday, the British fleet on Lake Erie—two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop—struck their colors. Commodore Oliver Perry, USN, now flying his blue and white battle flag aboard the
Niagara,
accepted the Royal Navy’s surrender and scribbled on the back of a letter a hasty message for General William Henry Harrison: “We have met the enemy and he is ours.”
Chapter Two
New York City
Monday, November 15, 4
P.M.
T
HE SNOW FELL
in large flakes that lasted a moment then melted to nothingness, but the air was cold and getting colder. Early for it, but there was a real storm brewing. Joyful smelled the tang of it on the afternoon air.
The smells of good cooking as well. Most folks had their dinner about now, not at three the way it was in the old days. An extra sixty minutes to work. That was always the way of things in New York. Do more, do it faster, get richer. But even here a man had to quit at some point to fill his belly. Ann Street—a jumble of shops and residences like most thoroughfares in the oldest parts of the city—was closed up tight, so silent Joyful could hear the ring of his boots on the cobbles.
The house he was headed for was at the end of the road, built of wood like most of its neighbors, and like them it was four windows wide and three stories tall, with a dormered roof and two chimneys. There was a sign beside the front door:
ANDREW TURNER, M.D., PHYSICIAN
. Below, in smaller letters,
SURGERY ALSO PERFORMED
. Joyful hesitated a moment, then lifted the knocker.
The servant who opened the door was the same woman who had let him in sixteen years before, when he was barely seventeen and newly sent home to New York from China. She had been an indenture back then, but ten years was the usual span to work off a passage; she must be earning a wage by now. “Afternoon, Bridey. How are you?”
“All the better for seeing you, Dr. Turner.”
Like most servants, Bridey knew everything. She was bound to have heard the fierce argument Joyful had with Andrew the month before when he returned from Lake Erie to the hero’s welcome New York gave the veterans of the September battle, but neither of them acknowledged it. “I’m glad to see you as well, Bridey. Is he in?”
“Indeed, and expecting you.” She held out her hands and Joyful slipped out of his greatcoat and handed it to her, along with his stovepipe hat and his right glove. Bridey waited. “Will you not be after leaving the other glove as well, Dr. Turner?”
“No, Bridey.” Joyful held up his left arm. The week before he’d had a blacksmith make him a shoulder harness attached to a black leather glove stuffed with sand. Stupid vanity. He should simply let the stump hang out and be damned.
Bridey flushed. “I forgot, Dr. Turner. It’s that sorry I am.”
“Not to worry, sometimes I forget as well.” Maybe if he said it often enough, it would be true.
The maid knocked lightly on the door to her right and opened it immediately. “Dr. Joyful Turner, Dr. Turner.”
Joyful stepped inside. “Cousin Andrew,” he said formally.
“Cousin Joyful.” The men nodded warily at each other. “I appreciate your coming on such short notice,” Andrew said. “Had your dinner?”
He hadn’t, but he’d eat later. Just now he was too curious to be hungry. The note that summoned him to this visit had arrived at his lodgings on Greenwich Street an hour earlier. It spoke of a matter of urgency. “I’m well enough fed, sir, thank you.”
“Good. Leave us then, Bridey. We won’t need anything for a time.”
The room they were in served as both Andrew’s study and his consulting chamber. Sometimes—spread with oiled cloths to protect the furnishings from spurting blood—it was where he performed his surgeries. Square, paneled in oak that had mellowed gold over the years, it had one wall lined with cupboards and drawers that held the medicaments, bandages, and instruments for blistering, bleeding, and cupping that were the arsenal of a physician, as well as the flutes and probes and straight and curved knives and big and small saws of the cutting trade. Andrew Turner was the only medical practitioner in the city to also advertise a surgeon’s skills, much less sometimes encourage his patients to submit to the knife. Joyful had never believed there was room for two such hybrids in the city. That’s why he went to sea.
Andrew had not quarreled with that choice. It was Joyful’s recent decision to stop doctoring altogether—
God’s truth, Joyful, what will you live on?
—and take a room in a boardinghouse on Greenwich Street rather than continue to lodge with his cousin as he had in the past, that caused the trouble between them.
Andrew seemed to want to pretend the argument had not happened. “Perishing cold out there.” He thrust a poker into the mix of logs and coals in the fireplace. A funnel of sparks rose up the chimney.
“A storm coming, I think,” Joyful said.
Andrew grunted. “My joints say the same.”
His cousin had still seemed young and vigorous when Joyful first met him. Now, seventy-three, with his hair gone entirely white, Andrew looked fragile and gaunt with age.
He gestured to a decanter of brandy on a small table between the windows. “Pour us each a tot, Joyful. Then come over here and warm your bones.”
Joyful covered the bottom of two bulbous snifters with spirit, but carrying two glasses at the same time was beyond him these days. He brought one to his cousin, then went back to claim the second before returning to the leaping flames and offering a toast. “Your health, sir.”
“And yours.”
Joyful took a long swallow, enjoying the flash of warmth that went from his throat to deep in his belly, then set the drink on the mantel. He had to consciously resist the urge to extend his hands over the coals. Instead he put a foot on the brass fender surrounding the hearth.
“Let me see that.” Andrew reached out and lifted the arm that ended in the black leather glove. “Wound giving you any trouble?”
“None. It’s well healed.”
“I’d expect as much. Managed to leave plenty of skin for the final closure, eh?”
“Exactly as I was taught.”
“The glove’s clever.” Andrew ran his hand along the sleeve of Joyful’s black cutaway coat. “Got straps keeping it on, have you?”
“Yes. I had the rig made by a blacksmith a couple of weeks ago. Taking a while to get used to the weight of the thing, but all in all, it seems to work quite well.”
“Considered a hook? It would let you do some things. Not as good as a hand, but useful.”
“No hook,” Joyful said. “Make me feel like a pirate.”
He expected Andrew to smile at the weak joke. Instead the older man frowned. “Your father was a pirate for a time.”
“A privateer,” Joyful said. “That’s not exactly the same.”
“Perhaps,” Andrew said with a shrug. “Are you still determined to give up the practice of medicine?”
“Yes. As I’ve already said, I don’t believe I have much choice.”
“There’s a great deal of doctoring can be done with one hand.”
“But not,” Joyful said, “a great deal of surgery.”
“You took off that boy’s arm with one hand, didn’t you? And from what you tell me, that was the most difficult sort of amputation.”
“Yes, I did, and yes, it was. But Jesse Edwards was a captive patient. He had no choice in the matter. Convincing the gentlefolk of New York to go under the knife of a one-handed cutter is a much more daunting prospect. Particularly when they can find the best surgeon in Christendom right here on Ann Street.”
“You flatter me.”
“No,” Joyful said. “I do not.”
This time Andrew did smile. “Very well, you do not. But I shan’t be the best much longer, lad. I’m getting old.”
“Hold out your hands,” Joyful said.
“There’s no need—”
“Next to mine,” Joyful extended his good right hand. After a moment Andrew stretched out both his beside it. Joyful let a number of seconds go by. “Not a tremor,” he said after almost a full minute. “Rock steady as you’ve always been. And if we stayed this way for a while longer, I daresay mine would be the hand to start trembling first. I know my place in the hierarchy, Cousin Andrew. In New York, with two hands, I was the next best after you. In the service, far and away the best. Now…” He shrugged and allowed his arm to drop to his side.
“I still wish you’d reconsider, lad.”
“I know you do, Cousin Andrew. But I won’t.”
“And you won’t come home? This is your home, you know.”
“I know that it was my home, and I am forever grateful for that. But I can’t live off your charity—” He held up his good hand to forestall Andrew’s protest. “I know you’re going to say it isn’t charity. And I know you mean it. But I have to make my own way.”
“And that’s the end of it?”
“That’s the end of it.”
“I assumed as much, but I felt I had to make a last try. I take it then that you’re still decided on becoming a Canton trader.”
“I am. I was raised in the Canton trade. It’s the one thing other than medicine I know.”
“Have you talked to your Devrey cousin about the fact that you mean to go into competition with him? I fancy he won’t like it much.”
Joyful tossed back the last of his brandy, and shook his head when Andrew motioned toward the decanter. “No thanks, not just now. And word is that Bastard Devrey has too many problems of his own to be worried about me.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that too. But this China trade business—there’s nothing you can do until after the war is over, is there?”
“Nothing much,” Joyful agreed.
“And as I recall, you supported this misbegotten military adventure.”
“I thought it imperative that we not let Britain continue to treat us like a colony.”
“So you did. Talked about it at the time, didn’t we?”
“We did, sir.” Joyful was well aware of Andrew’s strong Federalist leanings and that his cousin considered President Madison and the Democratic-Republicans a pack of radicals.
“Thing is,” Andrew’s voice was milder than his meaning, “you shouldn’t start a war with incompetent officers, and an army of mostly militia who refuse to carry the fight beyond our borders.”
Joyful shrugged. “I’d have thought that would please you. I remember you telling me once that a standing army that answered to the president and Congress rather than the states would be a threat to civilian government.”
“Did I? Well, I’ve said a lot of damn fool things in my day. What’s one more?” Andrew stood up and went to the window. The short winter day was ending, the dusk deepening. “Come over here, Joyful.” His tone had changed. “Look out and tell me what you see.”
“Houses, Cousin Andrew.” The view held no surprises and he answered before he actually reached the other man’s side, though once at the window he obediently peered into the street. “The homes of up-standing Americans like yourself. But I warrant a good many of them are republicans, as they call themselves. Rabblerousers, as you would call them.”
“And I warrant you are correct. But beyond Ann Street what do you see? Not just with your eyes, with your mind and heart.”
Ah, perhaps that was what this was about. “The Manhattan forests and streams and hills you and your damnable Common Council mean to destroy with a grid of streets and avenues,” Joyful said. “Fit for a population as great as China’s.”
Andrew chuckled. “Not quite that many, but nearly.”
“You don’t sound upset by the prospect.”
“I’m not. And given your present state of mind, neither should you be. More people means more business. That’s what you’ll need for this new venture of yours, isn’t it?” Andrew reached up and took hold of the curtains but didn’t pull them shut. “Light that oil lamp over there, lad. And the one by the fireplace.” He waited until Joyful had thrust a taper into the fireplace and did as he was bid, then the older man continued, “I risked my skin for the Revolution, Joyful. “Now…” Andrew’s voice trailed away as he pulled the curtains closed and turned to face the younger man.
“Now what, Cousin Andrew? Your note said a matter of urgency. I admit I’m curious.”
“Yes, I expect you are. But you’ll have to be patient a few moments more. Let’s sit down.” And when they were both in the chairs beside the fireplace: “Tell me what you know of the
Fanciful Maiden.
”
“Only that she was a fine sloop, and a very fortunate privateer back in the 1750s. And that my father captained her.”
“Nothing specific about the voyage of 1759?”
Joyful thought for a moment. “Nothing specific, no.”
Andrew sighed. “I rather hoped Morgan had told you. It would have made this easier.” He reached inside his breast pocket, withdrew a small, much folded piece of paper, and put it on the low table between them. Dark now, the room full of shaded corners where the ghosts of the past could lurk, but enough light from the lamps for Joyful to see that a faint red stain indicated that once there had been a wax seal.
“This is for you,” Andrew said. “It’s your legacy.”
“From you?” Joyful was surprised. “I’d have thought Cousin Christopher…” Andrew had one surviving child, a son a dozen years Joyful’s senior, also a physician. Christopher lived in Providence, and father and son were not particularly close, but he’d never thought they were estranged.
“My son will have what’s justly his. This belongs to you. It’s from your father.”
“I don’t understand. I had my father’s legacy some years past.” A trunk of personal effects and a pouch containing coins worth two thousand pounds, put into his hands in 1809, seven months after Morgan Turner died, by a merchant captain called Finbar O’Toole.
Fourteen years old I was when I fought in the Revolution, and if it weren’t for your da looking after me I’d o’ been dead in a month. Told him I’d bring you this. He gave it me night afore he died and t’ain’t a gram lighter now than it were then.
“This bit made a detour,” Andrew said. “Go on, take it. It’s yours.”
Joyful leaned forward and used his right hand to unfold the paper while it still lay on the table—he’d learned many such tricks over the past two months—then picked it up. The creases and the ink faded to the color of rust made it difficult to read, but there was no doubt it was written in his father’s hand.