City of Glory (26 page)

Reverend Fish had sent Joshua to guide Joyful to where he was needed. The boy darted into an alley between the church and a rickety wooden building. Joyful had no idea where he was, but his guide apparently did. The boy stopped beside a door painted bright yellow with a large green cross splashed across the top half. Joyful remembered hearing tales of the gangs of Five Points, how they identified their territory with symbols of one sort or another. “Mr. Burney,” Joshua said, “he be in here.”

“Thank you. Joshua, you must wait. I’ll never—”

“No fear, Dr. Turner. The lad will wait on ye.” Burney had magically appeared at the door, opening it only a crack and motioning Joyful inside before he slammed it quickly shut, throwing a pair of bolts and sliding a large bar into place. “Upstairs,” he said.

Joyful followed him up three flights of creaking stairs, the passage so narrow his shoulders brushed the walls either side.

“She’s in here.” They had reached what seemed to be the top of the house.

“She?”

“My daughter Brigid Clare. She’s three.”

Burney threw the door wide open and stood aside. Joyful knew what to expect. The child would be burning with fever, suffering from one of the many illnesses that beset the young, whether they lived in a slum like this or in a mansion like Astor’s. Damned little he’d be able to do for her; cupping and bleeding and administering tincture of mercury, but they never cured anyone of anything as far as Joyful knew.

They were in an attic with barely enough headroom for Burney and not enough for Joyful. The child lay on a pile of rags in one corner of a room that had been created by erecting three walls under the eaves. The smell of dirt and damp was overwhelming. There was something else as well, something dead and rotting swiftly in the heat.

Joyful crouched and went to the child. Every muscle in his body ached after the hours of surgery. “Hello, Brigid Clare.”

He put a hand on the little girl’s forehead. She was cold, remarkably so, considering the sweltering heat. And clammy. Shock? Joyful lifted one of her eyelids. The whites were bluer than they should be. She was covered with an assortment of rags, and he reached beneath them for the hand closest to him. There was no resistance. He pulled the hand free. The pulse was faint, thready, and he noted the nail beds were blue as well. Definitely shock. And no damage apparent to the parts of her body he could see. Joyful lifted the blankets. Both legs looked normal. He turned to Burney. “How long has she been like this?”

“All morning. Ever since she got bit.”

He should have guessed. “A rat?”

“Yes.” Burney nudged something with the toe of his boot. “This one here. I bashed him stone dead while he was still on her.”

“Where?” Joyful opened his satchel while he waited to be shown the wound.

Burney stepped forward and moved the coverings aside. “Her backside. Right here.” He rolled the child on her side; she made no protest. “Did what I could, but it weren’t much. Sucked out some o’ the blood, and put a bandage on the place where the flesh was torn. Then, when I heard there was doctors next door, occurred to me…”

“Yes. I understand. Let me see.” Joyful leaned over to study the wound. It was ragged, and oozing but not gushing blood. “You say you sucked blood from her when it happened?”

“Right away. That’s what we did in the old country. Me ma, she always sucked the poison out o’ rat bites.”

“Mine did the same,” Joyful said. Irish common sense, Roisin would have called it. “You did the right thing.” He was probing the wound as he spoke. The child moaned once. “I’ll clean this up, cut away the ragged edges, put in a few stitches,” he said. “You’ll have to help me. I’ve only one hand.”

“I know,” Burney said, kneeling beside him. “Not to worry.”

“Not to worry indeed. You’ve already done the best that can be done for her.”

Ten minutes and he was done. Brigid Clare had sniffled a bit and gasped once or twice. Now it seemed to Joyful she was warming up, and she looked more alert. “There’s a good chance she’ll recover.” He stood up as well as he could in the low-ceilinged space, feeling the blood race back into his legs, making them tingle. “Most important thing is not to let the injury become septic.” Joyful had shaken a generous amount of powdered yarrow into the wound before he stitched it. Now he reached into his satchel, retrieving an ampule of a thick dark green oil. “It’s a cleansing balm,” he explained. “You should change those bandages morning and night. Put a little of this on each time.” Peppermint and sumac steeped in camphorated oil. Roisin had never given him any formal training in her Woman of Connemara skills—that wasn’t permitted—but some things he’d learned simply by being around her.

Burney put out a hand to take the balm, then pulled back. “I’ve no money to pay ye.”

“Doesn’t matter. Take it. For Brigid Clare’s sake.”

The Irishman snatched at the vial. “Good of ye. And good to help Reverend Fish.”

“Do you know him well?” Listening to Andrew and the minister, he’d have thought the Irish and the blacks to be deadly enemies.

“Well enough.” Then, as if he could read the thoughts of the other man, “Don’t make a lot o’ sense nigras and whites hating each other, not when we’re all poor and jumbled in together here.”

“No sense at all,” Joyful agreed. He started down the stairs, and Burney came after. They’d reached the last landing before the barred door when Joyful felt the other man’s hand on his shoulder. “I know who you are,” Burney said.

Joyful wasn’t sure he knew what the man meant. “Yes, well…”

“I mean I know you were with Perry. One of the heroes of Erie.”

“There have been many battles since then and many other heroes. Besides, I didn’t fight. Just patched up those who did.”

“Still,” Burney said. “Are we going to win, do you think, Dr. Turner? Will we stay independent?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Sure, that’s what I think as well. Glad to hear an educated man like yourself agrees. The United States for all time. That’s why I don’t exactly see why they’re formin’ the regiment.”

“What regiment is that?”

“The one as is going to be the army of the new country. I reckon ’tis a daft notion. But they’re payin’ three coppers when you sign up, and promisin’ there’ll be ten per day when the army is fully established. Brigid Clare’s ma died when she was born. Me and me little girl, we’re alone here. A man does what he must, Dr. Turner.”

“Yes, he does.” Burney was no longer looking him straight in the eye. “I understand. Still, it would be useful to know who it is raising this regiment.”

Burney looked up the stairs, as if he thought someone might have appeared to overhear them.

“I was christened Joyful Patrick,” Joyful said. “We Irish have to look after each other, especially when something’s downright foolish. Like talk of a new country. A name, Mr. Burney.”

“Can’t say for sure. Could be the same man who said as how you had to be watched.”

Joyful managed to conceal his surprise. “Gornt Blakeman. He’s the one who’s raising the regiment, isn’t he? And the one who said I should be watched.”

“Not him exactly; it were F.X. Gallagher. Comes to the same thing.” Burney turned the small bottle of oil over and over in his fingers. “And he said to keep a lookout for the lady as well.”

“What lady? Damn it, man, I need to know.”

“This stuff’s going to help my daughter get well, isn’t it?”

“It is. What lady?”

“The goldsmith’s daughter. Mistress Vionne.”

Anger made the blood at his temples throb. Joyful yanked on Mary Jane’s reins and headed her south. The horse obediently turned onto Broadway, but not before casting a reproachful look over her shoulder. Joyful patted her shoulder. “Sorry, old girl, it’s not your fault.” They were far enough north so he could give the mare her head after that, bend forward and let her run out. In minutes they were in the ever increasing crush of carriages and wagons and pedestrians of the churning city at the tip of the island, and he had to rein her in while his thoughts still raced. The bloody bastard. If he harmed Manon, Joyful would take him apart with the one hand he had left.

It was getting on to one o’clock, and Hanover Street was thronged with people. Most were crowded round the countinghouse door below the sign that said
BLAKEMAN COACHING
.

The fury born in Five Points was a thing of ice now, cold enough to allow for calculation. If Gornt Blakeman was in his countinghouse or in the private rooms above them, Joyful would confront him and have the whole thing out right now. He and Bastard had the majority shares of Devrey scrip and would buy him out or force him out. As soon as he’d done that, he’d talk Delight into letting him raise a mortgage on the Knave. Someone at the Tontine was bound to like that investment. He might even be able to get enough to finance the
Lisbetta
’s voyage to the Caribbean.

And what if Blakeman was somewhere else? According to Manon, the Great Mogul had not been left with her father, so either Blakeman kept it on his person, or he’d hidden it here on Hanover Street, probably in his private quarters on the upper floor. What a coup that would be: steal the bloody thing right out from under the poxed bastard’s nose, and use it to fix an alliance with the king of traders himself.

Joyful pushed his way into the countinghouse and was instantly immersed in the hubbub. One clerk was shoving away a clutch of people who seemed intent on crawling over his tall desk while another was shouting, “Told you already, Mr. Blakeman’s not here and we don’t know when he’ll be back.”

One question answered, and more of an opportunity than he might have imagined. The countinghouse was chock full of supplicants who knew that, as of yesterday’s sale, Gornt Blakeman had become a man with a great deal of ready coin.

“It’s my little one as needs…”

“Worth his while, no doubt about that. Shells peas with one touch. Greatest invention since…”

“Married to his third cousin, I was. He’ll want to see me right now.”

The clerk standing at the desk in the back of the room raised his voice above the tumult. “Get out, all of you! He’s not here and we’ve work to do.”

An old woman with one side of her face eaten away by the pox shoved her shawl clear of her head so her disfigurement was more easily seen. “How would you feel if this was you? Wouldn’t you try and ease your way a bit with a few coppers a rich man wouldn’t miss?” At least a dozen voices shouted agreement.

“A few coppers. He’ll never know they’re gone.”

“He’s not here, I tell you. Why won’t you…”

Joyful sidled along the edge of the room, skirting the chaos. A heavy velvet curtain hung six feet to his right, and logic said the curtain shielded a stairway to the private quarters overhead. If Blakeman had really stashed the diamond on Hanover Street, the stairs would be well guarded.

He’d taken his medical satchel with him when he tethered Mary Jane on the street; it was his excuse for being here if he was challenged. He’d been summoned to a sickbed. Sorry, he must have mistaken the address.

At the curtain now, and still no sign of the guard he was sure Blakeman must have posted. Joyful used the stuffed glove to sweep aside the curtain and slipped quickly behind its folds, every sense alert, waiting to be challenged. There was no sound except for the incessant demands of the throng in the countinghouse, somewhat more muted now, thanks to the thick curtain. Dark as night as well. He sensed rather than saw that he was in a narrow passage facing a flight of stairs.

He started to climb, moving slowly, alert for a squeak that would summon the watchdogs Blakeman had set to guarding his huge diamond. Unless, of course, it wasn’t here. On his person then. Or—The creak he’d anticipated came. Sounded to him like all the gunpowder in creation going off at once, though he knew it was only a small noise in the darkness. Joyful froze, waited. Nothing. Could be no one was here because the diamond was hidden somewhere else. Or it was nowhere within thousands of miles. It might well be that Manon had misunderstood, and the fabulous Great Mogul, diamond of the ages, was in the court of some sultan or pasha on the other side of the world.

Another stair. Christ, how many were there? He stretched the glove straight ahead of him, counting on the extended sense he’d developed these last months. He wasn’t disappointed. He knew that he was one step from the top landing, and that he’d encountered yet another velvet curtain. Joyful took a deep breath, listened carefully, and heard nothing. He pushed the curtain aside. A sliver of light came from below a closed door. He reached for the handle; it turned easily and the door opened without a sound. Holy Jesus Christ, it could not be this easy.

Joyful peered into a gloomy room. One window faced the street. The other on the opposite wall. Both were heavily draped. He listened to the steady rumble of noise from the countinghouse below—no change of pitch to indicate that anyone had raised an alarm—and something else. He’d wager his soul it was the sound of a stream of piss hitting a china chamber pot, stopping and starting. As if whoever was relieving himself was having difficulty.

Blakeman’s private quarters were a single room, stretching back into deep shadows. The front end was dominated by a surplus of heavy furniture—chests and tables, and a bed hung with still more velvet. By the bed he saw the man obeying the call of nature: Vinegar Clifford, wearing his working outfit of black singlet and leggings. He was hunched over a delicate-looking chamber pot painted with bright pink roses. It was the first time Joyful had seen the whipper without his weapon at the ready.