City of Dreams (29 page)

“She’s coming! Red Bess is coming!”

The cry came first from those standing at the intersection of the Broad Way and Wall Street, crowded ten deep on the bit of fenced grass at the rear of Trinity Church. Though Devrey and the other shipowners fancied themselves the economic backbone of the city, the small brownstone-and-brick church dedicated to saving the souls of the English elite gave them its backside. Trinity looked west, across the open countryside between the Broad Way and Hudson’s River. Indeed, Queen Anne had recently granted the church ownership of a wide swath of that rural landscape, but today all that was of interest lay in the opposite direction.

“Red Bess is coming!”

She’d chosen to wear a black shawl and a black dress, and to cover her red hair almost entirely with a black straw bonnet. Bess walked up the Broad Way at a leisurely pace, acknowledging no one and looking neither right nor left. She wasn’t in any hurry. They would not start without her.

Governor Robert Hunter was a man who understood the importance of ritual. Red Bess had taken her mother’s place: if it concerned slaves, she had to be there.

Sometimes Sally had actually put herself between the lash and a slave who was to be whipped. At least for as long as it took for her to look into the slave’s eyes, then shake her head and turn away. Bess was sometimes equally bold, but during the hangings she’d done nothing, nor had she done anything when they broke the three on the rack. And she hadn’t gone near the Ibo they’d gibbeted. Everyone hoped for better sport at the burnings.

The crowd fell back to make room for her. Bess turned the corner and walked undisturbed half the length of Wall Street. When she faced the execution site she had her back to her brother’s mansion. She swung around, raised her head toward Will and Susannah’s windows, then turned again and looked at the governor.

They’d made a special place for Governor Hunter on the porch of the halfbuilt City Hall, an elevated stall draped with a cloth of state and a cushion for him to lean on. Hunter had come to it the way he went every Sunday to church, with the gentlemen of his council behind him on foot, and following them half a company of red-coated musketeers and a drummer beating the march. The mayor, the sheriff, and the aldermen had all been there to welcome him and were standing beside him now. But as she knew he would, Hunter had waited for Red Bess.

She looked up. He looked down. The governor did not quite nod, but their eyes met. After that he lifted his hand.

A contingent of redcoats broke ranks and trotted into the building. Though the debtors’ cells planned for the attic were not yet built, the criminal dungeons below City Hall were already stout and secure. It took only a few moments for the soldiers to reappear with the last of the condemned, Quaco, Peter the Doctor, and Bess’s boy, Tom.

All three were manacled and shackled. They marched to the waiting stakes with a clanking of chains that could almost be heard above the hubbub of the throng. They were chained to the posts.

Everything was ready. The crowd was a single creature drawing one expectant breath.

This time Bess did not disappoint. She pushed through the ring of guards and walked toward the black men. A collective sigh was released. This was what they’d been waiting for. It was exactly what crazy Mistress Sally would have done.

A member of the militia, a boy brought over from the long island who knew nothing of the city, stepped into Bess’s path and raised his musket.

“Hold your fire!” A redcoat snapped out the order, then looked toward the governor. Hunter nodded. “Let her pass.”

The boy stepped out of Bess’s path. She approached the black man chained to the central stake and for a few seconds simply looked at him. Finally she spoke. “Why, Tom? Tell me only that, why?”

He’d been beaten so badly his face was distorted almost beyond recognition. All his teeth were gone, and his lips were swollen and cracked to the point where speech was difficult. But not impossible. “To make me free.”

Tom’s body was crisscrossed with lash marks. Bess reached out and touched his shoulder. “I never … You were never beaten under my roof. Never abused. Wasn’t that enough?”

“Free,” Tom whispered. “Free.”

The crowd had begun jeering her on.

“Give him the evil eye, Red Bess.”

“Talk to him the way crazy Mistress Sally did. Tell him the secret.”

“C’mon, Red Bess, tell him whatever it is your mother used to tell ’em. Loud enough so’s we can all hear.”

The usual remarks, laced with catcalls and whistles, except that this time was not like any other. The hatred had never been this intense.

“Get out of the way, Bess. Let him get what’s coming to him.”

“The bloody bastard would have watched us all murdered in our beds. Get out of the way and let him burn.”

Bess ignored them. “I can’t believe you’re a murderer,” she whispered. “Not you, Tom.”

“Didn’t kill nobody.” The words were a faint whisper that only Bess could hear. “Wanted to, but couldn’t.”

Bess smiled. “I didn’t think so. Swallow this.” Her hand moved quickly; in less than a second she’d shoved the ball of pine resin mixed with the powdered seeds of nux vomica into the back of his mouth. “Strychnine,” she murmured. “Not easy, but easier.” Bess saw the thanks in Tom’s eyes. More important, she saw him swallow.

“What’d she do?”

“Gave him something. Some bloody witch thing.”

“Red Bess gave the bastard some potion. He’s going to disappear.”

Bess ignored the shouts and turned and walked back to her place. The people closest to her began shoving and pushing. Someone made a grab for her bonnet.

The governor raised his hand. The militia men started bringing the logs, piling them at the foot of the poles.

Quaco began to sing.

Amba, his woman, had been tied to a fourth stake a little distance apart. Not to burn, only to watch. Against the wishes of practically everyone, Hunter insisted she be spared because she was so heavily pregnant. Her voice joined Quaco’s.

Peter the Doctor didn’t know their chant, but he could feel it with his belly. He keened along with them.

And from the gibbet, knowing how much longer he must hang there and how much worse it was yet to be, Kinsowa began his Ibo death chant.

It was enough of a diversion. The crowd turned its attention from Bess to what it was they’d come to see.

One of the redcoats poured a little pitch over a few logs in each pyre, just enough to get things going. A second brought the torch.

Bess watched only Tom. She held her breath. The first flames were licking at his shins when she saw him begin convulsing. Minutes later she knew he was dead. No one else seemed to notice. Perhaps because that was about the time Peter the Doctor stopped singing and began to scream. Quaco’s chant continued for another thirty minutes. Then he, too, began to whimper, and finally to howl.

Kinsowa stopped chanting after five hours. The heat of the fires and the terrible thirst took his voice away. Amba alone sang the slowly burning men to their deaths. It took nearly ten hours for first Quaco, then Peter the Doctor to die, and she didn’t stop once in all that time. Not until they came and untied her and led her away.

Much of the crowd had long since left. Bess stayed until the end. Finally, when it was only she and the few redcoats detailed to guard the slaves who’d been sent to clean up the mess, she walked over to the soldier who was in charge. “Tell the governor Red Bess wants to buy the woman. He won’t get any kind of a price for her as she is, especially not considering what she is, but tell him I’ll pay whatever he asks.”

The soldier said he’d pass on the message. Bess walked home through the pall of greasy black smoke that hung over the town and filled it with the stench of burning flesh.

Chapter Five

T
HE WINTER OF
1713-1714 was the harshest in a long time. There was a dispute between the city and the colony’s agricultural land to the north, and far less grain than was needed reached New York’s mills. Flour was so scarce that bakeries charged a shilling a loaf for bread.

Such exorbitant prices strained both the resources of the churches, and the paupers’ relief fund established by the city to supplement them. Even the deserving poor went hungry.

The situation was exacerbated by worse cold than any but the oldest could remember, and so much snow the oyster banks between Manhattan and Long Island became inaccessible. Oysters were normally a steady source of free food for the indigent. Without them times were hard.

It was snowing yet again on the Friday night in February when Bess left her house. She’d wrapped herself in one of Sally’s old duffel cloaks and pulled the hood over her head, but the cold penetrated even the thick gray wool. No matter. The weather couldn’t compete with the bone-deep chill she felt inside.

For the first time Bess could remember, there were paupers in plain sight along the road. She counted eleven on the short walk between Pearl Street and Hall Place, huddled in the doorways and leaning against the lampposts. A few were still alert enough to watch her passage with hungry eyes; others were too wretched to bother. Two she judged to be already dead. Bess was too troubled to care, too intent on her own pain to be sensible of theirs, and given the sort of woman she was, certainly not afraid.

All the same, it was prudent to avoid the dark expanse of the White Hall wharf, where she was sure to come across still more loiterers. She walked, instead, up Dock Street, where a few of the old-fashioned wooden houses had so far survived the fashion for brick, and turned finally into Hall Place. Born and raised in the city, she could never remember being on this short and narrow street. Sally used to walk her children as far out of the way as necessary to avoid Hall Place. Bess had continued the custom. Until she saw the red-and-white-striped pole beside the door—it was just visible behind a thick veil of flying snowflakes—she wasn’t sure which house she wanted.

Useful as a landmark, the pole was in some ways an anachronism. Lucas Turner had erected it when he married Ankel Jannssen’s widow and moved into her house. It had stayed ever since, but strictly speaking Lucas’s grandson did no barbering. Christopher was too much in demand as a surgeon to bother with shaving or delousing or pulling teeth.

Word was that, busy as the town kept him with his knives, Christopher slept less than most men. True apparently. It was nearly midnight, but Bess could make out the shimmer of candlelight behind the ground-floor shutters. No matter, she’d have roused him from the sleep of the just if that’s what was required.

She took a deep breath. Normally she wasn’t much of a churchgoer. Sally stopped taking her children to any church after they refused to bury her husband. Bess had made her peace with the clerics when she married Moses. Now high days and holy days saw her in a pew at Trinity Church, singing the Anglican hymns with gusto. The rest of the year she minded her business and let the good Lord mind his. Still, before she lifted the brass knocker she whispered a prayer. It was something she’d done frequently of late. “Please. For the sake of Jesus Christ thy beloved son. Amen.”

Christopher himself came to the door, carrying a candle that he shielded from the wind with his hand. The masked flame did little to dispel the dark. “Yes? Can I help you?”

“It’s me. Cousin Bess. May I come in?”

“Bess …” Christopher was startled by the sound of the midnight bell tolling over the city from the high square steeple of Trinity Church. As if it would have been less extraordinary had Red Bess come calling at noon. “Yes. Well, I suppose … I mean … Is something wrong?”

“Of course. Would I be here otherwise?”

“No, you would not. I’m sorry. You startled the wits from me. Come in. Here, let me take your cloak.”

She shook the snowflakes from it before she gave it to him, and wiped her boots on the scraper beside the front door. Bess carried no muff, and he noticed that her hands were red and chapped with the cold. And she had lost considerable weight. “Tamsyn,” he said, turning to hang the duffel cloak from a carved peg set into the wall. “Is she well?”

“Very. Though the birth of the child left her tired. Bearing them’s an exhausting business, as you’re soon to discover. How is Mistress Jane?”

“My wife is well. And we’ve almost two months before the baby is due to be born.”

“I know.”

He smiled. “Yes, I expect you do. Come, let us go in to the fire. You look cold.”

“I’m perishing. It’s bitter out there. I counted a number of poor fools who’ll be lucky to survive until dawn.”

“There’s talk of building an almshouse where they might be looked after and taught better habits.”

“I know. My son-in-law Zachary Craddock sits on the committee considering the matter.”

Christopher opened the door to his sitting room, but Bess paused before following him. “That’s them, isn’t it?” She nodded to the pair of pictures on the wall. “Lucas and Marit?”

He raised the candle so she could better see the portraits. “That’s them.”

“He sold my mother to buy her, did you know?”

“I’d heard a version of the story.”

Bess sighed. “I expect they’re all ‘versions of the story.’ The family resemblance is hard to deny, whatever affection might be lacking. Willem looks much like him. While you …” She shot a quick glance from the pictures to Christopher, then back again. “You don’t look a thing like her. For all she was your blood grandmother. And if I didn’t know it wasn’t possible, I’d say you had Lucas’s eyes.”

“Sometimes,” Christopher said softly, “it has seemed to me you had forgotten that I’m a Turner only by adoption.”

“No, I never did. That’s not why I wouldn’t let you have Tamsyn.”

“Why, then?”

Bess glanced toward the stairs. “Your wife is asleep up there, I take it.”

“She is.”

“She’s a good woman, is Jane Bradford. I’ve known her since she was a child. Count your blessings, Christopher, and stop mooning over what was never meant to be. Now where’s that fire you promised me?”