City of Glory (13 page)

Papa’s visitor was still staring at her. She scared back. Dear God, she would move heaven and earth to discover what Gornt Blakeman wanted with Papa if it would further Joyful’s business interests and thus her chance to be his wife.

Blakeman broke the locked glance first. “Your daughter, goldsmith?”

“Indeed. A great comfort to me since her mother died.”

Blakeman leaned over and whispered something Manon could not hear. Then the visitor left and Papa closed and locked the door behind him. “What a strange man,” she said. “Whatever did he want with you?”

“Business. Nothing to concern you. I thought I heard someone else leave the shop. Had you a customer?”

He must be worried. Papa was always short with her when he was worried. “A gentleman, Papa. He saw the light on despite the lateness of the hour and came to ask about sapphires. I had to tell him we had none, though you were hoping for a shipment of jewels from Paris and Antwerp as soon as the blockade is lifted. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

“You know it’s correct. Who was the gentleman? Perhaps I can interest him in pearls. I’ve two fine strands left.”

“He did not give his name. But I don’t think a pearl necklace would interest him. Definitely sapphires, or perhaps emeralds. Did your visitor have something like that to sell, Papa? I’m sure the gentleman will return sooner or later.”

“And the blockade will lift sooner or later. And it will snow sooner or later. And it may rain diamonds sooner or later, but I don’t think so. You should have made him consider pearls, Manon. Pearls are what we have.”

Ann Street, 11
P.M.

Bridey had long since gone to bed, so Andrew Turner answered the bell himself. His heart sank when he saw the black man standing on his doorstep. He was tired, and getting too old for these midnight adventures. “Mother Zion needs me, I take it, Absalom.”

“Yes, Dr. Turner, sir. Twice over. One be a man, the other a boy. His grandson.”

“Have you stopped the bleeding?” Andrew pulled on his cutaway and reached for his hat as he spoke. His black leather satchel was always packed and ready and waiting by the door.

“Best I could with that turn-and-kit thing like you showed me.”

“Tourniquet, Absalom. One word. Good for you. Let’s go then. Mother Zion calls and we can but answer.”

In most New York churches black worshipers had to sit in the Negro pews, the back row of the gallery. The Methodists, however, had condemned slavery and integrated their services in 1787, but that didn’t mean that every member of their various congregations made nigras welcome. By 1801, with the blessing of the appropriate bishop, a number of New York’s blacks formed themselves into the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The congregation was called Mother Zion, and the members built their church where they lived, at the junction of Cross and Mott streets, in the section of the city known as Five Points.

The neighborhood got its name from the convergence of Orange, Cross, and Anthony streets, an intersection located over what had been the remains of the old Collect Pond. Time was when the Collect was the only source of sweet water on the island—nearly every well dug on Manhattan yielded a brackish, murky flow—but people said it gave off malevolent vapors that caused yellowing fever. Andrew argued against the theory, but his was a single voice. In 1802 the city fathers filled in the last of the Collect Pond with what they called “good wholesome earth.” That left the town at the mercy of a privately owned waterworks, the Manhattan Company, a nest of profiteering vipers who brought shiploads of water from other parts of the state, but laid hollow logs rather than proper pipes and refused to supply water to flush the gutters or clean the markets. Meanwhile epidemics of yellowing fever continued with terrifying regularity, and nothing was done with the broad gutter that had been dug to allow the Collect’s overflow access to Hudson’s River.

Officially known as Walker Street, the path the gutter traveled became the northern edge of Five Points and was called Canal Street by most New Yorkers. It was a cobbled road running either side of a grass-banked ditch, and for most of the year a small stream of water still trickled through on its way west. People living nearby tossed their garbage into the Canal Street gutter, or dug cesspools that seeped effluent into it. As a result, on a hot night like this one, the ditch sent up a stench that drifted, miasmalike, over all of Five Points.

The horse pulling Absalom’s wagon knew the way by itself. The young man kept a loose hold on the reins, and the horse trotted through the star-shaped intersection called Paradise Square though it was no vision of paradise to which Andrew subscribed. The clatter of the wagon’s iron wheels on the cobbles cleared a path for them through the crowd of people. Looking for a breath of fresh air, no doubt, and finding instead the stink of Canal Street. Still, it was better than the hovels they called home.

Speculators had bought the little wooden houses of the tanners and free blacks who once lived in the area and strung them together to form boardinghouses for wage earners who couldn’t afford better. Built on the swampy land around the old pond, most had started to sag and now hung like brooding hags over twisting alleys and lanes partially paved with broken bricks. Blacks—many free, the rest claiming to be so—lived in the basements. Above them lived the Irish immigrants who had been flooding the city since the 1790s. It was a combustible mix but profitable. The landlords included the mayor and most of the city fathers, but no one made any effort to limit the number of tenants who could crowd into a single room. In Five Points the residents made their own law; still, the district wasn’t as dangerous as people said. That was a fiction promulgated by wealthy whites who despised the blacks and the Irish equally, even as they lived off their labor.

Andrew had come for the first time a decade earlier, when these lanes were already crowded but less rowdy. He’d been treating a patient on Chambers Street, and when he left the house, a black man was waiting for him. “Be a blessing o’ God if you be coming with me for just a bit o’ time, Dr. Turner. Cissy Fish, she be needing you real bad.”

Andrew was accustomed to being recognized, and to the fact that the city’s poorest knew he never turned them away. He followed the man and was led to the basement of a church he later learned was Mother Zion.

The woman called Cissy Fish had fallen into a cesspool and been attacked by rats. Her face was pretty much eaten away, along with both her hands and one foot. Andrew knew at once that she was so thoroughly poisoned that no matter how carefully he cleaned up the wounds they would turn black and fester. She’d die in agony within a few days and there was nothing he could do to stop it, but she was pregnant, close to term, judging from the size of her, and when he put his ear to her stomach, he heard the child’s heart, strong and steady. He didn’t waste time talking about the options, simply grabbed a scalpel and cut the child out of her, allowing the shock and the rapid blood loss to make a quick and merciful end to the mother’s life. The baby was a little girl; she lived, and her father, Zachary Fish, Zion’s minister, named the child Andrewena for the man who had saved her life. Since then, whenever his scalpel might be useful to a member of the black community in Five Points, someone would appear on Ann Street and bring Dr. Turner to the cellar of Mother Zion. Never the sanctuary.

The entrance was low enough so he had to stoop to get in, half hidden on the church’s Mott Street side, and this night guarded by two burly black men he’d never seen. One swung open the door and Andrew stepped inside. A couple of lanterns made a splash of light in the corner where his patients, a man and a young boy, lay side by side on the floor. Zachary Fish stepped out of the shadows to greet him. “You’re a welcome sight, Dr. Turner. Thank you for coming.”

Andrew grunted a reply and dropped to his knees beside his patient. Not as easy to do these days. He winced, then forgot his discomfort when he examined the unconscious boy. Someone, Absalom perhaps, had covered him with a horse blanket. It was soaked in blood. Andrew peeled it back. A wad of bandages had been wedged in the boy’s groin. They were as bloody as the blanket. Andrew lifted them.

Absalom had come to kneel beside him. “Be no way I could get a turn-and-kit on that, Dr. Turner. Leastwise, none I could see.”

“Jesus God Almighty…No way, Absalom. You did everything you could.” Andrew put his hand on the boy’s heart. Much too fast, and thready. He was in shock, and barely alive. But he was young and strong, and the wound had clotted over before he bled to death. Might be he’d live, but doubtful that he’d give thanks for that dubious blessing. His testicles and penis had been removed.

The older patient, the boy’s grandfather, had lost the bottom half of his left leg. It had been roughly chopped off just below the knee. The tourniquet had stopped the bleeding and the man was awake, staring up at Andrew. “How be my grandboy?”

“As well as he can be. He’s strong. He’ll fight to live.”

The man looked to be somewhere around fifty. He had the ebony skin that marked him as a pure African black, probably from the Sugar Islands. Quite possibly an escaped slave. “Blackbirders?” Andrew asked.

Blackbirders were slave-catching gangs. Many of the members came from right here in Five Points, impoverished Irishmen who’d been recruited to look for runaway slaves they could haul back to their owners. The ringleaders, who generally lived elsewhere, paid the birders half the bounty and kept the rest. The Irish put up with this arrangement not because they were fools, but because it required the cooperation of a magistrate to certify that the nigra in question was indeed a runaway slave. Like most city officials, the magistrates were Protestants. They had, if possible, less use for Catholic Irish than for blacks.

The man didn’t reply to the question; he was watching Andrew prepare his saws and scalpels. Better to give him something else to think about. “I take it this was the work of birders?” Andrew repeated.

“Not exactly.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? They did it or they didn’t.”

The wounded man turned his face to the wall. Reverend Fish spoke for him. “Weren’t the birders this time, Dr. Turner. It were the man as organizes a goodly number of them. Francis Xavier Gallagher. F.X. Has a butcher shop on the Bowery, but he comes often enough to Five Points.”

“Too often by the look of it. A butcher…I warrant he did this with a cleaver.”

“Aye,” Absalom said softly. “Not the boy, though. F.X. be using a carving knife on the boy.”

Andrew continued preparing his instruments and attempted to keep his tone neutral. “You were there?” He did not pretend to understand the intricate loyalties and alliances that made life possible in this place.

“No, sir. F.X. and his leather-apron boys be over on Orange Street. Place they always meet. I be looking in the window.”

Leather-aprons were butchers’ helpers. They took their name from the ankle-length leather covering they wore to protect them from the blood of their trade. Other blood as well, from the sound of it. “Nothing you could do, Absalom?”

“Nothing at all, Dr. Turner. Too many leather-aprons with F.X. Only thing I could do be to watch, and make sure we could bring our folks back here to Mother Zion when the leather-aprons be done.”

“I understand,” Andrew said. He had been searching for a particular needle. He found it, and a length of catgut. He’d tend to the boy first; sew up what was left of his scrotum, being careful to leave a hole for the urethra. “We’ll clean up the wounds and do some stitching.” Jesus God Almighty, he sounded positively cheerful, but there was no point in letting on that however many times he thought he’d seen the worst, something like this could make the bile rise in his throat and required every ounce of self-control to prevent him retching. “May well be that both your patients will survive, Absalom.”

“I be surviving.” It was the grandfather. His voice was soft and weak, but his words were not. “I be definite to survive. But F. X. Gallagher…It not be so definite about him.”