Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (5 page)

“She has most certainly combusted spontaneously,” he said, the passion of his testimony calling sweat to his brow. He took a medical journal from his bag, and the jurors watched him, jaws slack with amazement, as he began to translate an excerpt from a recent Dutch study. The reported victim had consumed four pints of sherry, he read, and soon thereafter combusted, leaving only a fatty, yellow-gold substance on the walls and floor.

The sailors nodded, their recollections of the cellar confirming the article's descriptions.

“This man must not hang for a crime that is no crime at all,” the doctor concluded, and the magistrate accepted the doctor's statement with a thoughtful nod.

Richard turned to Clementius, years of small resentments — lost revenue and loosely shared secrets — torn from the dark cove where he'd harbored them. For a moment he felt even love for the doctor.

R
ICHARD RETURNED TO
the King's Inn the next morning, a free man, though the brief time in prison had lent his features new angles, and he seemed older by some years. He poured two cups of cider and slid one across the table to Clementius.

“To justice,” Clementius said. “And soon, very soon, I shall publish my findings.”

Richard nodded, tossed his drink back and poured a second. Empty of customers, the tavern felt as if it hadn't been occupied for years. Daylight lit the room, illuminating only the unclean tables and the tracked mud covering the floors.

The servant girl would not return to the inn, and Richard surveyed the room with hours in mind: four to scrape and mop the floor, two to clean the dishes, three to prepare an evening meal. The tasks piled, too many for his weary hands.

“Aye,” he said, deciding that one more drink might help.

By evening, he'd done no more than light a fire and wipe the rim of his own cup. He leaned against his wooden bar, resting a throbbing forehead in the palm of his left hand. The night sky stretched clear and cold, whiskey weather, and on past nights, the inn would have burst with customers. That night only Clementius arrived, forced to dine upon the crusty remains of a loaf of bread, which he found in the kitchen and sliced himself.

“Too much ale tonight?” he asked, and Richard glared at him. “Round town they're saying this place has a ghost.” Clementius laughed, about to comment upon the ignorance of his fellow man, when Richard turned and unsteadily made his way to the kitchen.

“A ghost!” Clementius called after him. “Imagine!”

But Richard did not need to imagine. He clearly heard Gardenia's shrill cry, and when he closed his eyes, he saw her: coarse hair tangled, skin rough with unwashed dirt, eyes moist with an uncomprehending fear. He knew she lay in the cellar. She'd fallen again. She wanted ale, bread, and molasses.

“Yes, darling,” he whispered. And he knew, for the first time since the burning, that he had not killed — could never have killed — Gardenia.

“Death is certain, since it is inevitable, but also uncertain, since its diagnosis is sometimes fallible.”

—J
ACQUES
-B
ÉNIGNE
W
INSLOW
, 1740
from
Buried Alive
, by Jan Bondeson

H
APPY
E
FFECTS

Constable Morris, already burdened with New York's most conspicuous gut, carried Nicolas into the Heathcote home on Bridge Street. Pale and limp, the cradled youth looked more like an unwashed linen than an eighteen-year-old merchant, though the boy did oversee the family business, counting wooden crates of sugar — white gold — as if they were already hard pocket currency. He'd left for the docks at sunrise, as his father once did, with a smile and a promise to return before sundown.

The clock struck one, the fine mahogany case vibrating slightly, and the boy's mother lay in bed dreaming of fur and brocade silk as she did most afternoons. She'd spent the morning bent over a metal tub pouring cups of strong tea and lemon water through her hair, a process that made
her dizzy, but which the ladies assured would straighten the tight curls that had troubled her since childhood.

“Sarah Heathcote!” The Constable's voice roared through the parlor, reaching Sarah with an unwelcome harshness. Where was the servant girl? Why was the Constable, whose rasping breath was so well known throughout the South Ward that she recognized it from her bedchamber, standing in her front parlor?

She rose hastily, fastening her dress without her usual hooped petticoat and, pausing only to powder her face and apply a drop of rose oil, which she was certain made her seem youthful once more, stepped out to receive the Constable.

“My dear Mr. Morris,” she began, but at the sight of her son draped limply in the large man's arms, she silenced.

The Constable brushed past her, laying the boy on the settee reserved for company.

“Nicolas!” She realized her voice had risen — she may have shrieked — her curls as unruly as the servant girl's. “Nicolas!” she called again, but the boy did not respond.

She took her son's hand between her palms. He had no visible injury, a few patches of black soot on his sleeve, nothing the servant girl couldn't brush away. And where was that girl? Why wasn't she here to bring water? That was all the boy needed. A glass of water.

“Nan!” Sarah cried. “Nan!”

Young Nan, hair fastened back in a tight white kerchief, dark skin covered in dust, emerged from the back of the house. Her cheeks were heavy, despite her lithe form, and she moved with the slow step of a much older woman. “I's sweeping the cobweb —” she began, but she stopped when she saw Nicolas stretched out on the settee.

“I'm very sorry.” The Constable placed a hand on Sarah's shoulder. “I'm very sorry. He died in the fires.”

“Mister Nicolas!” Tears streaked Nan's face, and she threw herself on the floor beside the body. “He pass, he pass!”

“Fetch some water,” Sarah said, turning her head slightly, as if to brace herself against the girl's outpouring of sorrow. “We don't
know
he's dead. Not yet.”

Nan, still sobbing despite Sarah's assurance, rose and raced from the room.

“They set fire to the stables,” the Constable explained. “For days, the city has battled the blazes — one at the governor's house, another at the chapel, another at the Warren home, another at the docks. Only arson can account for them. And only one thing can account for the arson: the slaves are rising.”

“To think,” Sarah agreed. Her thoughts on the matter — that the Negroes had entirely too much freedom already and that the slave market on Wall Street, where all sorts of dark-skinned men entered New York, was too close to
her home for comfort — required no further expression to be understood. She wrapped a sallow arm around her son's chest. His head, balanced unsteadily on the edge of the settee, rolled sideways, turning his gray-blue gaze toward the Constable. She remembered when the boy, a pale, perfect child, climbed the lip of the well and tumbled down — not into the well, which was covered of course, but onto the hard cobblestone. She'd run to him then, just as now. And he'd lain just as deathly, even more so, as the impact had drawn blood from his nose. But he had risen.

“Call the doctor!” Sarah cried.

The Constable, who must have realized that he was far more able to call upon a medical man than the tearful Nan, who'd returned with a brimming pitcher of water, stepped forward.

“Nicolas moved,” Sarah explained. Nan, setting the pitcher on the side table and raising one sleeved arm to her nose, nodded her support. The Constable should know better than to make claims about life and its end. His job was to prevent death, not diagnose it. Medical matters were better left to medical men, and Sarah Heathcote knew exactly whom she needed. Not just any medical man would do.

“Fetch Doctor Steenwycks,” she said firmly.

D
OCTOR
S
TEENWYCKS RUSHED
through the front door of the Heathcote house, his rough-weave, floor-length
cape and round brimmed hat, oddities that made the ladies titter, alive with the speed of his gait. Tall and gaunt, he could easily have lit the chandelier without resorting so much as to tiptoes, despite the fact that his shoulders stooped and his arms hung forward like some exotic monkey's. His narrow, pointed chin was reminiscent of his father's — a little-known medical man who lived and died above a ramshackle tavern.

“Jan Steenwycks,” he said by way of introduction, nodding first to Sarah, then to Nan, who stood behind her mistress like a bashful child.

The doctor and Sarah had never met, though Sarah knew him from her Thursday night suppers. Since opening his practice two years earlier, and despite his dress and manners, he'd won the respect of the finest society. At dinner parties, he was known for his gracious toasts and long diatribes regarding the foolishness of his father's medicine. Witchery nonsense, he called it, not empirical science, and even old men whose only experience of doctors and medicine was the cures discovered in worn copies of
The Poor Planter's Physician
nodded. Doctor Steenwycks knew best. Only he could determine if a man were truly dead. Just last month the good doctor had pulled a drowned girl from the East River and brought her back to life with an air technique, the details of which the ladies were uncertain, though that did not stop them from vividly imagining the
event. These days, no gentleman or lady was buried without a visit from Doctor Steenwycks, who was doing so well for himself that he'd purchased a large plot of land near Ranelagh Gardens and constructed a two-story home with a triangular pediment for his wife and young children.

The doctor dropped his walking stick, mahogany with mother-of-pearl insets, and bent low over Sarah's shoulder to examine the patient. “How long has he been so?” he asked.

Sarah, who had not moved from her son's side, stretched to read the grandfather clock that stood like a watchful soldier beside the sideboard containing her good china. “Three hours,” she said, though it seemed only minutes ago that the Constable had set forth to fetch the doctor. Nan, who stood beside Sarah, addressed the doctor directly.

“You help Missus Heathcote now. It ain't right this.”

She must have known it wasn't proper to address a white doctor — Nan knew her place — but the words fell from her lips with such tender conviction that even Sarah was touched.

“I should have been summoned at once.” Doctor Steenwycks glanced about the parlor as if searching for a forgotten instrument. Satisfied, evidently, that he could discover nothing more from the room, he rested a thin, veined hand on Sarah's shoulder and not gently pushed her aside. With exacting precision, he placed an ear to Nicolas's chest and
probed the boy's neck with the fingers of his left hand. “There is an absence of arterial pulsations,” he declared without turning to address Sarah.

“He will recover then?” she ventured.

“Only if he is alive.”

“Yes, yes. He was caught in the fires. But he has no markings — no burns. It was the Negroes who did it.”

The doctor, who employed neither slave nor indentured servant and was rumored to frequent the taverns of ill repute on the outskirts of town where the black men congregated in blatant disrespect of the law, said nothing. For a moment Sarah feared she may have offended him, displeasing him enough that he would fail to treat Nicolas to the full extent of his wondrous abilities. Folding her hands in her lap and noticing the soot that had stained first her fingers and now her dress, she considered apologizing. Not a forthright apology, but a retraction, an acknowledgment that he might feel differently, though, really, how could people so black on the outside be anything other than black within?

“Have you a mirror?” the doctor said. Nan answered, her eyes on the floor. If Sarah's words troubled her, she showed no sign of it, except perhaps that she'd pulled deeper into her thoughts. “Yes, sir. I'll fetch it.”