Lake in the Clouds (53 page)

Hannah said, “How kind of you to share your superior knowledge and understanding of the world.” And she started off again at a much brisker pace, to the sound of his soft laughter and a new sound, a distant shouting undercut by the high piercing of a constable’s whistle.

She stopped and turned back toward Dr. Savard, who had also turned in the direction of the noise. More whistles now, and the shouting more distinct.

“Is Dr. Simon safe?” Hannah was embarrassed to realize that she should have asked this question earlier.

“I expect he’s safe enough by now. We had best press on.”

A few minutes later he said, “So I take it you had no luck in your search in the records office?”

Beneath the brim of his hat Hannah could make out nothing of his expression. “No, I did not.”

She lifted her face to the night breeze, glad of its cool touch.

“You are planning to leave the city very soon, as I understand it.”

Hannah said, “We will leave before the end of the week, yes. Mrs. Todd is no better and her husband wants her to come home.”

“Mrs. Todd is Dr. Ehrlich’s patient, I believe. He has mentioned her now and then.”

It was not really a question, but Hannah made a sound of agreement. She could not think of anything to say about Dr. Savard’s colleague from Philadelphia that might not give offense, but to her surprise she did not need to.

“The man whines and buzzes like a mosquito,” said Dr. Savard in a conversational tone. “If only he were half as intelligent.”

She hiccupped a laugh, pressing a hand to her mouth. The doctor looked at her impatiently. “He is a disaster as a physician and you know it.”

After a moment Hannah said, “Mrs. Todd is much worse now than she was.”

“How very diplomatic of you. You could call him a pretentious charlatan and have done with it.”

“I might,” Hannah said. “If I weren’t so worried about Kitty.”

“Give me her history, then,” said Dr. Savard. “We might as well talk of that as anything else.”

Hannah slowed. “Do you mean it? I have been wanting to discuss her case with someone, but Dr. Simon seemed reluctant.”

“Then you should have asked,” he said brusquely. “Get on with it, you’ve got fifteen minutes.”

He let her talk, asking questions now and then for clarification. Hannah told him what she knew and what she only suspected. The simple process of reciting Kitty’s history was enough to strip away the last of her optimism.

“I fear she will not live out the summer,” she ended.

They had come to the beginning of the park at Bowling Green. The gardeners had been at work; the smell of cut grass was heavy in the air. The park was quiet but all around it the houses pulsed with light and movement like a halo. Down the street a line of carriages waited in front of the Delafields’, where a party was under way. Amanda and Will would be there, and Kitty with them, if she was strong enough today.

“Miss Bonner.”

“Yes?” Hannah was startled out of her thoughts.

“Let me ask you this. You have seen how much work there is to do among the poor of this city. You are already an excellent medical practitioner. Will you not consider staying on to see to the needs of those who really need you?”

Hannah stepped back from him, awash in surprise and irritation and a strange satisfaction. He was looking at her with such intensity that she had to turn her head.

“You have nothing to say?”

She pressed a hand to her throat, felt the thundering of her pulse. “I’m thankful for your good opinion.”

He waved this away with his bandaged hand. “No, no. I am not looking for thanks. I am offering you an opportunity to do what you were born to do. The poor of this city need you. Will you stay for them?”

The thought of living and working in this city felt so wrong to Hannah, so far from the way her world was meant to be, that she could hardly think of how to answer him politely, or even give any real credit to the compliment he had paid by suggesting such a thing.

You might as well ask me to fly,
she thought of saying. Instead she said, “My people need me too, Dr. Savard. If I stay here I will be turning my back on them.”

He shook his head impatiently, as if she were a dull student who refused to take his meaning. “Are you speaking of the people of Paradise, or of your people? Of the Mohawk?”

“Some of my people are in Paradise, and some are not. Does it matter where they are, or what they call themselves?”

“Yes.” He looked away over the park, the muscles in his jaw knotting. “It does matter. A village of a hundred people hardly needs two doctors. There is more important work to be done. On the other hand, if you are speaking of going to live among the Mohawk—”

“Dr. Savard,” Hannah interrupted. “Your idea of what is important and mine are worlds apart.”

Just as suddenly as the intensity had come into his expression it fell away, replaced by the man she had worked with for the past weeks: detached and cool and unknowable. A teacher, and a good one; never a friend.

He inclined his head. “Of course. I beg your pardon, Miss Bonner.”

The silence that fell between them was heavier now, fraught with things that Hannah could hardly name. She said, “The house is at the other end of the park. Thank you for seeing me this far.”

“I’m dismissed, then.” His old half-smile was back, and she was relieved to see it.

“If you insist,” Hannah answered in the same tone. “You will remember the willow-bark tea for the pain?”

“How could I forget it?” He held up his injured hand in a salute. “Good evening, then, Miss Bonner.”

She had walked on a few steps before she stopped and turned back. “You never gave me your opinion on Mrs. Todd’s case.”

“You never asked for it.”

“That has never stopped you before, Doctor.”

She could see only part of his face, but she knew that he was smiling by his tone. “Ah, but she’s your patient, isn’t she?”

Hannah hesitated. “I’m asking for a consultation, then.”

He turned his face up to the trees as if they had some wisdom to share. Of the stars he asked the question she should have anticipated.
“Ubi est morbus?”

“The uterus,” said Hannah. “The source of her disease is some weakness or unhealed rupture of the uterus following the delivery of a dead child. But how to heal it?”

He was looking at her with his usual irritation and urgency. “Miss Bonner, I ask you again:
ubi est morbus?”

“The source of her disease is not in her uterus?” Hannah asked, astounded and unsettled and provoked. “But where, then?”

“The source of her disease may not be in her uterus
alone,”
said Dr. Savard. “You have been blinded by the obvious. What Mrs. Todd requires is something or someone to worry about besides herself, Miss Bonner. Distract her mind and you will have a chance of healing her body.”

“You believe the hemorrhaging to be hysterical in origin?”

He shook his head sharply. “Your patient is not some lady with vapors complaining of chills and aches. The physical damage is real enough—”

“But the healing process begins elsewhere,” finished Hannah for him.

He smiled at her, and touched his hat with his bandaged hand. “You begin to think like an anatomist, Miss Bonner.” It was the highest compliment he had to pay, and with it he turned and left her.

Mrs. Burroway was the senior matron in charge of the nursery, dry as old bread and hard to rattle. Presented with Hannah’s proposal, she refused to be surprised or even to question her motivations. She simply went to the desk in the corner and wrote out a few sentences. Hannah signed the paper and fished a few coins from her apron pocket.

“I’ll send young Michael along shortly,” said Mrs. Burroway. “You can trust him not to drop her.”

With that lukewarm reassurance Hannah was free to walk away from the Almshouse, empty-handed as she was. Cicero had collected all her own things as well as the trunk of books, medical supplies, and vaccination materials Dr. Simon had assembled for Richard Todd. And she had already taken leave from the doctors and patients and from Mr. Magee, who enclosed one of her hands in both of his own and wished her well in awkward, overly formal language that he must have learned by listening to the doctors.

“We’ll miss you,” he had said finally. “Even Mrs. Sloo will miss you, mark my words. She likes a good fight, does Mrs. Sloo, and you gave her what she likes.”

“She wouldn’t like it if I were to stay on,” Hannah said.

He lifted one bony shoulder in disagreement. “I wouldn’t be so sure. She’s a woman determined to be vexed, is Mrs. Sloo.”

And so Hannah left the Almshouse smiling. She was looking
forward to the walk back to Whitehall Street, her only chance to be alone today. Once she stepped through the door there would be all the furor of packing, the household as full of motion and unease as an anthill before a storm. The boys would be occupied with their most recent and involved plot to smuggle Peter and Marcus onto the sloop bound up the Hudson. Their hope was to join Daniel so that the four of them could establish a boys’ paradise on the mountain. Amanda and Will kept thinking of one more thing to send to Elizabeth or the twins, Curiosity or Nathaniel, so that the pile of luggage waiting in the hall had already grown to tremendous proportions.

And there was Kitty, distraught at the idea of leaving and full of last-minute demands.

She needs something or someone to worry about besides herself. Distract her mind and you will have a chance of healing her body.

Hannah was turning this over once again when she turned the corner onto the Broad Way to find the streets crowded with people as far as she could see, and none of them going anywhere.

She asked a passing shopgirl what was happening and got only a look of surprise and shock in response, as if a statue or a painting had suddenly spoken. It seemed that many people in the city had never seen an Indian at all, and most of those had the idea that the color of Hannah’s skin meant human language was beyond her. It happened so often when Hannah was out in the city that she had almost stopped being insulted.

One of the Almshouse boys caught Hannah’s eye, slinking through the crowd in a way that could mean nothing good at all. She stopped him for an explanation and got instead that look that boys reserved for very slow grown-ups. He told her what everyone else seemed to know already: the Tammany Hall parade was about to start. And then he was gone into the crowds.

Whatever Tammany Hall might be, it seemed that the parade was popular with the people of New-York. The whole city seemed to be here: washerwomen and merchants, tinkers hung about with ladles and pots and strings of forks looped around their necks, housemaids, ladies in elaborate hats and walking cloaks, chimney sweeps. People were crowded into doorways; they hung out of windows and peered down from roofs. Those who spilled into the street itself jostled and
poked, jittered and fidgeted in their excitement, so that each step forward was more difficult, and then it was simply impossible to go anywhere at all. Dogs howled and a pair of oxen raised their noses to bellow at the sky; the drover swore and slapped and pulled at his animals, desperate to move them out of the way of the coming parade. Children darted up the street and back again, screaming out progress reports.

Most of the street vendors had been caught up in the stream of people like timber caught in an ice jam: a knife grinder leaned against his cart, sound asleep with his head tilted back against the grind-wheel while the roasted-peanut vendor was surrounded by an eager and impatient public.

Hannah was tall for a woman, but no matter how she lifted up on tiptoe and craned her neck, she could see no way to escape.

At her elbow an old lady with a single clutch of small black teeth and a white crusting of sugar on a pendulous lower lip squinted up at her. She said, “Forget it, dearie, you’re stuck here until the parade is gone. Might as well enjoy the show, eh?” She peered up at Hannah, her eyes squinted almost shut. The grime in the creases around her eyes was so dark that it looked at first glance as if she had been tattooed.

“Miss Bonner!” A tall man raised his hand in greeting as he made his way toward her from the row of private carriages parked to watch the parade. “Mrs. Kerr asks if you’d like to watch the parade with her.”

Hannah raised a hand to block the sun. There was Mrs. Kerr waving a handkerchief so fiercely that the ostrich feathers on her hat—dyed orange and green to match her striped gown—swayed like branches in a strong breeze.

What Hannah wanted to do was to get home, but if she must watch the parade she might as well see it clearly. She let herself be guided to Mrs. Kerr, who fussed until she was settled among velvet cushions sprouting silk tassels three fingers thick.

“Isn’t this just fine,” said the old lady. “I was hoping to see you again before you leave for home. And see, here come the revelers.”

A procession appeared from around a corner, bursting in a roar of color and sound upon them.

Children came first, all of them boys, trotting in wild,
sweeping curves, bells and rattles on rawhide strings tied around their waists, bells swinging from hips and knees, bells sewn to sleeves. Some of them carried drums on leather belts, and they pounded out a heavy rhythm.

An old man with flowing white hair and beard trotted alongside them on a donkey that had been decked out in streamers of every color. He had a bucktail tied to his beaver hat and stripes of paint across each cheekbone, and he threatened the children who rushed up to him with great swipes of a rusty tomahawk, sending them screaming and laughing in every direction. A young boy bolted forward to grab at the saddlebag that hung low over the belly of the animal, but the old man captured him and dragged him over the donkey’s neck to whack noisily at his rump with the flat of the tomahawk.

“The elder Mr. Mason,” said Mrs. Kerr, raising her voice to be heard over the crowd. “His son is one of the sachems, and he dearly loves a parade.”

“The braves!” the crowd screamed. “The Tammany braves!”

Then the chanting began, and the skin rose on Hannah’s neck.