City of Glory (38 page)

“Oh, yes, Miss Higgins. Plenty. Do it mostly by feel, I do. After all these years.” It had never been her intention to do it at all. She’d hated growing up in a house where mama and mama’s sister were never through with ladies who first wept and begged, then when they got what they wanted, screamed the very roof off the place.

Delight took her customary place at the top of the narrow bed, slipping one arm below Felicity’s shoulders.

Lucretia waited until the other woman was in position, then spread Felicity’s sex with one hand, and used two fingers of the other to withdraw the wad of seaweed Delight Higgins had inserted the previous day. A right miracle that was. Opened the ladies up so wide it made it almost easy to get the nail in and do the job. Seaweed, who would have known? Mama and Auntie certainly had not. “Seaweed, Miss Higgins. I do declare.”

“Yes, Mrs. Carter. You do.” Every single time I come, you do declare. But you’ll go to your grave knowing no more than you know now. It does what it’s meant to do. Never you mind that it was Roisin Campbell Turner who taught the secret to her daughter, and Clare Turner Devrey who used to send me to every beach in New York looking for the special orange seaweed. And once I had the temerity to bring back not orange but brown…
Switch the skin off your back I will, you little fool. How would you like it if it was you lying with your legs spread and your womb was so tight nothing could get in
…

Lucretia reached for the longest and thinnest nail.

Delight put a hand over Felicity’s mouth to stifle the inevitable screams of agony. It was easier with the seaweed and the laudanum, but never easy. Never that. And all so a girl could avoid starving to death, and men could have their pleasure whenever they wanted it. “Go ahead, Mrs. Carter. Get it over with. We’re ready.”

Good God, what if Gornt Blakeman were to make good on his offer and she really were given charge of every prostitute in the city? A license system he’d said, to promote good order.

Lucretia inserted the nail. Felicity’s first shriek fought its way out despite Delight’s restraining hand, and she struggled to tear herself out of her employer’s grip. Delight made the usual soothing noises while tightening her hold on the girl’s head and shoulders. “Do be quick, Mrs. Carter.”

“I’m doing my best, Miss Higgins. Quick but thorough.”
Scrape up, down, and side to side, Lucretia. Otherwise you can’t be sure you’ve got it all.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of prostitutes in the city. How could Gornt Blakeman come to hold that much power? But if it did happen…Delight saw a selection of houses, different standards in each one, each meant for a different class of custom. Better to get even the hookers under a roof. She’d need half a dozen Mrs. Carters, and every scrap of orange seaweed the beaches of New York would yield.

“There, that’s it. You’re all done, Miss Felicity. That wasn’t so bad, was—”

“Save your breath, Mrs. Carter. She’s passed out.”

“Just as well, isn’t it?” Lucretia held out her hand and Delight passed over the two shillings she was due. “She’s sure to bleed some tonight and tomorrow,” Lucretia said. “You will be sure to keep her abed until the flow stops. And no…no gentleman callers for at least three weeks.”

“I will do exactly as you say, Mrs. Carter.” One reason the Dancing Knave had the prettiest whores in the city—if you had to be scraped out, Miss Higgins herself looked after you and you got an entire fortnight to recover from the procedure. Delight told herself that’s why she took the trouble to use the seaweed, and allowed her ladies such a luxurious amount of time before they must again entertain customers. Because it insured that she always had the best girls in town. Nothing to do with being softhearted, or knowing all too well what drove women to whoredom.

Delight went to the window and tapped on the glass. Preservation Shay heard the signal and nodded. She saw him come into the building and began drawing on her lace gloves as she went back to the table where Felicity lay. “I’ve no doubt we’ll see each other again soon, Mrs. Carter.”

“No doubt, Miss Higgins.” Who would have imagined that she would talk to a half-nigra woman as if she were a social equal? Mama and Auntie always refused to perform their services for nigras, but if Lucretia Carter turned away the custom of Delight Higgins, she and Mr. Carter would be in a sorry way. All the same, hard as things were, Lucretia was not comfortable with the story Mr. Carter had told her last night. Wormed it out of him, she had, when he came up from downstairs half an hour after her lovely Sunday dinner had gone stone cold, and he could barely force himself to eat three bites. Having their prosperity restored by going back on their word to the rest of the states—it didn’t seem right.

Preservation Shay, who had been sweet on Felicity since the first day he came to work at the Dancing Knave, came into the room and lifted the girl as if she were a precious bit of porcelain and carried her down the stairs. Delight Higgins said goodbye, and Lucretia Carter wished her a good day and looked forward to their next meeting.

Imagine, a whore being treated like a princess. A mulatto no less, and one who wore a frock Lucretia herself couldn’t afford if she scraped the unwanted babes out of the womb of every woman in New York. The modern world was surely an extraordinary place.

Chapter Fifteen

New York City, the Woods Above North Street,
Holy Hannah’s Cabin, 8
P.M.

W
U SAT ON THE GROUND
,
leaning his back against a tree and watching the woman called Han-nah draw a bucket of water from the cistern. Watching the
yang gui zhi
who spoke the language of the Middle Kingdom. Ahyee! The most dangerous foreign devil in this place.

He and the foreign ghost woman were speaking their own speech now. Wu could overhear only a few words and understand no more than half of those. Easy to move closer, but that would put the rest of his plan at risk. Some distance away the two boys were playing a game that involved throwing a knife so its tip stuck in the ground, showing off the various ways it could be done. He had seen boys in China playing a similar game. Not him though. Never games. Never games. Third Son Wu—he could not now remember any name he’d been given before he became Thumbless—had always worked on the junk with his father. The gamblers came by night and by day, and his earliest memory was distributing the mahjong tiles to the newcomers. Eventually he learned to count the money. Then to gamble himself. Until he paid a debt with both thumbs and decided to forget everything he’d learned and start over again. Not on the junk, on land.

Never gamble. Never gamble. Only make a place where others can let the tiles and the money run through their fingers. Thumbless Wu became an important man, a rich man who would be an ancestor. Then the British brought the white smoke from Calcutta to Canton, and he watched others become even richer.

Ahyee! Great chests of wood, each one packed with forty big balls of the sticky black stuff that miraculously became white smoke. Forbidden. Forbidden. The emperor says so. Never mind. The chests are sold on a secret island in the River Pearl, and the buyers, all civilized men of the Middle Kingdom, pay the English traders in silver, which the traders take to Canton to pay the hong merchants for tea—ahyee! always so much tea—and silk and porcelain. Everyone happy. Except the emperor. Except Thumbless Wu.

Men, it turned out, would pay more and sacrifice more to be allowed to draw in white smoke than to gamble, and when their brains had drifted away with the smoke, they had no money left for other pleasures. But when Thumbless Wu formed a secret society to oppose the hidden places where those who once gambled went to suck in white smoke, the men who bought the chests that came from Calcutta made every man of the Middle Kingdom who traded with them for the precious black balls swear that Wu Thumbless would have none of what they bought. Those who defied the rule they killed. So. So. When the last of the traders who dared to do business with him was dead, it was clear. To be the richest man in Canton, to be an ancestor, Thumbless Wu must first become this filthy thing reduced to begging for rice. Until here in New York he could find his own source of white smoke.

Good plan. Good plan. In Canton he had met men who had been to Calcutta, and he learned that the black balls began when the special red flowers dropped their seed. But how to make the seed into the sticky stuff that could be sucked into the lungs as white smoke, no one could tell him that. Then he heard the American sailors brag that in New York there was everything that could be desired on this earth. Since men without number desired the sticky black stuff that made white smoke, it followed that the red flowers could also be found in America, as well as someone who knew how to make them into the precious black balls and pack them forty to a chest and send them on a ship to Canton. The rest would be done by Thumbless Wu and his many brothers and cousins and uncles, and their junks that stretched end to end in the Bogue and sailed up and down the coast of the Middle Kingdom.

He had come far and suffered much. He would not give up everything he had gained merely to satisfy his curiosity about what the redheaded barbarian with the civilized tongue was discussing with the foreign ghost woman.

Wu moved, slowly and cautiously; each little bounce along the earth took him nearer the trees. Soon the voices of the
yang gui zhi
were only a distant noise that sounded to him like throat clearings.

“Look down there, Joyful Patrick Turner,” Hannah said. “Tell me what you see.”

The cistern was not very deep. “Water,” Joyful said, peering over the mixed jumble of boulders and pebbles that surrounded Hannah’s hole in the ground. “And some leaves, and possibly a drowned animal or two that had the misfortune to fall in. What’s this to do with me?”

“Told you, I did. Something shining. Very valuable. Coming over the water.”

“That’s as may be, but not from this filthy cistern.” Joyful turned aside, took off his hat and tucked it under his left arm, and found a handkerchief with his right to wipe the sweat from his forehead. Something shining coming over the water. The Great Mogul? But how did Holy Hannah know about it? And what did she know? He had no answers to those questions, but he was sure that wherever Manon’s diamond came from, it was not this rat hole of a cistern. “We’re on an island, Hannah. The sea’s all around us. Why does your something shining have to come from these few inches of standing water?”

“The Holy One, blessed be He, told me to ask. What do you see?” she repeated.

“Nothing,” Joyful admitted. “I see nothing shining and nothing valuable. And if Almighty God is speaking to you, I respectfully suggest He could be a damned sight clearer.”

Hannah shrugged. “Then the message don’t be for you. And as you’d do well to remember, Joyful Patrick Turner, ‘the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain.’ Book o’ Exodus. One o’ the holiest books.”

“The one that tells about the Children of Israel going forth from Egypt, isn’t it, Hannah?”

“Aye.”

“And the Egyptians chased the Children of Israel, and they wandered forty years in the desert. Never been easy to be a Jew, has it? So why would I be told the Jews had something that belonged to me?”

“The Lord parted the sea to let the Israelites pass, and drowned the Egyptians that came after them. That’s all in Exodus as well. And don’t matter what you was told. Not unless the teller had some sense in him, and whatever it was really belonged to you, not someone else. Look into the cistern, Joyful. Tell me what you see.”

“Nothing, Hannah,” he said, sighing. “Nothing different than I saw before.”

“Not meant for you then.” There was an air of finality to her words. Joyful didn’t think he could change her mind with argument or cajolery.

She bent over to heft the jug she’d filled with water. It was a great brown thing that held twenty gallons at least. Mighty heavy for an old woman. Joyful took the jug from her. “Jesse or Will should be doing this for you.” He glanced over to where the two boys were playing mumblety peg.

“The lads do their share,” Hannah said. “And mostly they work from dawn to past dark. Ain’t many chances they get to play.”

“Thumbless then. Where’s he got himself to, by the way?” The man had been sitting on the grass a few minutes before. Now Joyful couldn’t see him.

She shrugged. “Thumbless don’t be strong enough to lug around jugs o’ water. Once he is, then he’ll go. As for where he is right now, probably went to do his business out in the woods behind. Does that often enough. Less, mind you, since he been eating that rice you brung.”

“It’s what he’s accustomed to. Agrees with his digestion.”

“Did you bring more?”

“Not yet.”

“Said you would.”

“Yes,” Joyful agreed. “I’ll try and get more and bring it back.” Tomorrow perhaps, or even the next day. Let Wu build up enough of a hunger for the stuff to make him more cooperative. Knowing that the man had convinced Finbar to allow him to stow away on the
Canton Star
was not the same as knowing why he’d come.