City of Dreams (33 page)

Tamsyn watched him in silence for a moment or two, then found her voice. It was a whisper, hoarse with pain. “How could you do such a thing?”

“With more ease than I imagined, if you must know.” He was removing the needle from Bess’s vein while he spoke, packing a soft scrap of cotton sprinkled with stanching powder into the small wound he’d opened to receive it. “I have known for some time that blood transfusions were possible. I have, however, only today proved that success lies in using human blood.”

“No,” Tamsyn whispered. “No.”

For the first time since she came into the room, Christopher turned to look at her. He was prepared to argue his case but she did not seem capable of listening. Tamsyn was swaying. He wasn’t finished with Bess’s wound, and for the moment she had first call on his skills. “Amba,” he said coolly. “Catch Mistress Tamsyn. I believe she is about to swoon.”

His words had the effect of revitalizing her. Tamsyn shook off the arm of the black woman. “No, I am not going to swoon.” Her voice was charged with rage. “How dare you submit my mother to such abuse? What gives you the right to—”

“Bess herself gave me the right. For the love of God, Tamsyn, do you imagine I came here and knocked her down and proceeded to work my will upon her? You’ve a brain, woman. Use it.”

“Whatever ill feeling you bore her because of me, I cannot imagine—”

“You prize yourself more highly than is perhaps warranted, my girl.” Christopher grabbed up the pail with Bess’s breast and covered the distance to where Tamsyn stood in two long strides. “Here, if you can do so without retching, take a look at this. It’s the part of your mother’s body that was rushing her to an early grave. I cut it off and saved her life.”

He thrust the thing under her nose. Despite herself, Tamsyn looked. The stuff in the bucket was recognizable as a breast only by the nipple that remained upstanding. And next to that was a noxious lump that clearly was not a normal part of a woman’s body. Tamsyn gagged. She again put both hands over her mouth. And began to sway. This time she truly might have fainted had Amba not cried out.

Throughout the exchange between Christopher and Tamsyn, Amba’s attention had remained riveted on Bess. When she suddenly let out a piercing scream and lunged toward the bed, Christopher’s heart sank. Before he ran to Bess’s side, he knew.

Unlike every other corpse he’d seen, Bess was not white and drained. Her face was almost the color of her hair, the effect made more dramatic by the whiteness of the pillowslip. Red Bess indeed. Dead Red Bess. Christopher put his hand over her heart, but he knew what he would find. “Sweet Christ!” He could not keep himself from crying out. “How did this happen?”

“How could it not?” Tamsyn trembled with rage; her voice shook with the power of her feeling. “Answer me that, you butcher! How could any human being survive the tortures you put my poor mother through? I’ll see you hanged, Christopher Turner. Damn me for eternity if I do not.”

Christopher sat by the fire, staring at the smoldering logs and ignoring the book on his lap. Four days since Bess’s death and he was still drained, still considering what he might have done differently, why, when success had been so close, he had failed.

The door from the hall opened. “Mr. Craddock to see you, Christopher.” Jane’s voice was as soft and as temperate as ever.

In all the years he’d known her—and they’d grown up side by side—Christopher had never heard his wife sound any other way. Even when he bedded her it was no different. When he was done she sighed a little sigh and bade him goodnight in much the same tone she now used to inquire if he would like her to bring some mulled wine for himself and Zachary Craddock.

“I do not think the doctor has come to drink my health,” Chris said. “Come in, Craddock. Jane, leave us, please.”

Her curtsys were awkward with her belly so large, but Jane did her best, then withdrew. The Scotsman stood in front of the door she’d closed behind her, staring at Christopher.

“I’d suggest you come closer and take advantage of the fire,” Christopher said. “It is a bitter evening, is it not?”

“No more bitter than the pain my wife and I feel at the loss of her mother, Turner. But I don’t imagine you can understand that.”

“And why wouldn’t I understand it? I too have known loss, sir. And for all our differences over the years, I admired many of Red Bess’s qualities.”

“Might I ask why, then, you performed such atrocious acts upon her?”

“I do not accept the description of my actions, but I did what I did because she was dying. Because I was her only hope. And I deeply regret, sir, that it was a hope unfulfilled.” A small table with a glass decanter half full of brandy stood beneath the window. Christopher walked to it. “I told my wife you had not come to drink my health. Perhaps you will, however, take a tot against the cold.”

Craddock waved away the offer. “I was treating Mistress Bess. She was my patient. I alone was in a position to decide if she was indeed dying.”

“Good God, sir, did they teach you nothing in that famous school of medicine in Edinburgh? Have you ever seen a Scirrhus so hard and deep respond to any simple known to man? Have you ever lanced a thing so huge and had it discharge nothing but a drop of clear liquid and not realized that it was not a boil of the usual sort, but—”

“I know exactly what sort of growth plagued my mother-in-law. I do not question your diagnosis, surgeon. It is your cruel insistence that your precious scalpels are the answer to everything which fills me with rage. Have I not seen enough corpses carried into the churches of this town with the mark of your knives hidden in their coffins to know how fallacious that prescription is?”

Christopher poured himself a pony of brandy. He turned to Craddock and lifted the small pewter cup in his direction. “Are you quite sure you won’t join me?”

“I bloody well will not. You’re a barbarian and a mutilating heathen to boot. God forbid I should drink with a man who after he butchers a patient puts his own blood into her. You’re a practitioner of evil sorcery, Turner. Burning is too good for you.”

“First, I must ask you to keep your voice down. As you saw, my wife is soon to give birth. It is not good for her to be upset. Second, I am for what it’s worth, a baptized Christian like yourself. Third, there is no sorcery whatever in the matter of blood transfusion. It has been used by men of science in both Paris and Rome. Finally, as to the corpses you mentioned, there are, I believe, more New Yorkers who carry the marks of my surgery on their living bodies than have taken them to the grave. Now, sir, have you said everything you came to say?”

This time Craddock spoke without bluster. “You’re a cool one. I’ll say that for you.”

“I daresay I’m warmer than you, for all you’ve not removed your cloak, nor taken advantage of my brandy or my fire.” Christopher tossed back the last of his drink and turned to put the empty cup on the mantel. “Since you’re obviously not interested in my hospitality, are we done?”

“Not quite. I came to tell you I intended to bring an action for murder.”

Christopher swung round to face him. “You’re entirely mad. The magistrates would refuse to hear your case. There could be no healing done in this town ever again if a surgeon were held to a charge of murder when his patient died.”

“If it made you cutters less quick to cut, then it would be an act of Christian charity to prove you wrong in a court of law.” Craddock pursed his lips. “But it is not within my power to do so. I said I
intended
to bring an action. I have discovered I cannot.”

Despite his scoffing Christopher felt some relief. Mad as the notion might be, if such a case were actually tried and went to a jury of ordinary men, there was no saying how it might come out. “I see. Well then, it seems pointless to discuss the matter. Though I admit, I’m curious. If it’s not the fear of ridicule that stops you, why can’t you bring your preposterous suit?”

“Because the final clause in my mother-in-law’s will plainly states that it was her choice to submit to your inhuman ministrations. And that you are to be held in no way responsible for the outcome.”

“Good Bess,” Chris said softly. “After all that had been between us. That was kind of her.”

“Far kinder than you deserve.”

“I will say it one more time, Craddock, and then we are done with this discussion. In the case of a Scirrhus tumor as large and deeply embedded as was hers, removal of the part of the body wherein it is lodged is the patient’s only chance of survival. And mark my words, before too much longer, blood transfusion will be recognized as the savior of hundreds.”

“That is utter rubbish, an unspeakable libel on decent humankind. But I have not come here to argue with you.”

“Fair enough. And not, if I correctly understand you, to tell me you are taking me to court for murder. So perhaps now we truly are done.”

“Not quite yet.” Craddock had left his hat in the front hall. He had removed his gloves; now he began pulling them on. “Before I go there are two pieces of information I wish to pass on.”

“Very well, I’m listening.”

“First, you are discharged from your post as surgeon in charge of the paupers’ hospital on the Broad Way. I have been able to convince the governor that it is scandalous to allow such a proven incompetent, not to say a vicious madman, to continue in that responsibility. I’ll thank you, sir, to give me the keys to the place.”

Christopher walked to the large square table in the middle of the room and pulled open a drawer. He lifted out the ring of keys and dropped it into Craddock’s outstretched hand. “Pity. I shall miss the old duffers. I was on occasion able to restore one or another to a semblance of health. Perhaps I will have a word with Hunter about this, now that you’ve had your say.”

“Frankly, unless you fancy humiliation, I would not advise it.” Craddock closed his gloved hand over the key ring. “You have been much discussed of late among the powerful of this town. I sit, as you may know, on the committee seeing to the arrangements for an almshouse. We have reached a decision. We are to build such a place, and to incorporate under its roof a substantially larger hospital for the indigent. My colleagues and I have, however, passed a resolution forbidding you from entering the premises, much less treating the patients.”

III

Parliament permitted no mint anywhere in America; but the colonists created wealth in plenty. In the province of New York it grew in the holds of the singlemasted sloops and twin-masted brigantines that sailed in and out of the harbor.

Thousands of miles south, in the West Indies, the English and Dutch settlers had covered the land with the greatest cash crop the world had thus far seen, the thing Europe craved beyond surfeit: sugar. Cane ruled on the Caribbean islands. As a result, virtually every morsel of food the islands’ residents ate—grain, vegetables, meat—was shipped from the English colonies. Moreover, the tending and harvesting of the cane in the tropical heat was a job so hellish no white man would do it. A steady stream of black slaves hauled west from Africa were required. The Triangle Trade—New York to the islands to Guinea and back—had made men like Will Devrey and John Burnett enormously rich.

The right to build a new wharf beyond what had been the old East Gate of Wall Street had been granted to Burnett and Devrey in 1708. A ten-yard extension of the land was to be achieved by sinking ships to act as cribs for rubble and scree. That meant progress waited on the pair having ships they were willing to scrap. Since both men ran their vessels until the last possible moment of seaworthiness, it was not something that happened often. It took them nearly two years to build the wharf. In 1710 they at last got the job done and each wondered why he’d been so foolish as to tolerate the other’s delay.

The new wharf—it became Burnett’s Key when Burnett won the toss after an evening at the Blue Dog Tavern—had space for six ships to lie alongside: three berths for each partner. As for the newly created land behind the moorings, the pair rented it to the grain merchants for sixty pounds a year. The place became still more profitable when another set of tenants joined the Meal Market. In 1711 a consortium of the owners of Guinea ships opened the Slave Market on Burnett’s Key. After that Will Devrey had only to walk a hundred yards from his elegant Wall Street front door, to the now widened place where Wall Street and Pearl Street met, to see his ships riding at anchor, and their cargos being sold.

On the tenth day of March, 1714, Devrey had other business to attend to: the final disposition of his sister’s estate. Bess had written her will the day before she died, but she’d taken no legal advice in the matter and it turned out only some of the provisions were lawful. The now famous final clause holding Christopher Turner harmless was the talk of the town for some weeks, but none could see any way around it. The rest of the provisions were, with one exception, more or less what had been expected.

“To my beloved daughter, Tamsyn, I leave my house, all my furnishings and personal effects, and the entire contents of the simpling room and apothecary shop. I call to her particular attention her obligation to impart the skills she has learned from me, and by indirection from her grandmother Sally Turner Van der Vries, to her daughter, Sofie Craddock.