The Golden Cross (4 page)

“I have no need of an assistant.” The line of the doctor’s mouth tightened a fraction more as he thumped his desk for emphasis, then waved the parchment in his hand. “But never let any man say I turned away another in need. You may stay with me a day or two, Sterling Thorne, but know this—I need no help from you or anyone else. I am as fit for service as I was when I arrived in Batavia.”

Sterling shook his head slightly and gestured to the window behind the doctor. “The town I walked through was a busy place, Dr. Carstens,” he said, smiling. “Surely there are more people who need a doctor than there are physicians to tend them. Why, the native population on this island alone must require a great deal of your time, and I saw a great many beggars and lame at the wharf.”

“I don’t tend savages or riffraff.” The doctor dropped Sterling’s letter to his desk. “If you wish to spend your time among that sort, that’s your affair. My nature does not induce me to mingle with harlots and shysters.” He looked across the desk with an expression of complete indifference. “I shall have my housekeeper show you to your room, then I suggest you look for a place of your own.”

“I will.” Sterling struggled to maintain an even, conciliatory tone. “And I am certain I will find patients enough no matter where I look. This is certainly a large enough place to support two doctors.”

Carstens’s lined lips puckered in annoyance. “The decent folk already have a physician, Dr. Thorne. As to the others—well, Batavia is not like Europe. For one thing, the warm climate makes common people take leave of their senses. Tempers are short, and morality is in small supply, particularly among the idlers and beggars. You should stay away from the docks and the wharf; the people who live there practice immorality that is not tolerated among decent and respectable people. If you fancy yourself a gentleman, you might as well take yourself back to a more gentle country.”

“I don’t fancy myself much of anything,” Sterling answered, irritated by the doctor’s mocking tone. “But I am a good physician, and I believe God himself commands us to look after those who are weak.”

He retrieved his letter from the desk, glanced pointedly at the empty chair he had not been asked to take, then pressed his hat to his chest. “If your housekeeper could show me to a basin, I’ll wash up and take myself to the streets. I would like to be as little trouble as possible, and am reasonably certain that a willing man of my skills can find a suitable position without too much trouble.”

“But not among the respectable folk of Batavia,” the doctor snapped, wagging a finger in Sterling’s direction. “I’m their physician, and I intend to remain so until the Almighty himself prevents me.”

“Then I give you good day,” Sterling said with another bow. “Until the Almighty prevents you, sir, I suppose I’ll have to look after folk who aren’t respectable.”

He spun on his heel and moved through the doorway before the old man could protest further.

M
oving through gauzy veils of evening, Aidan danced upon the beach in her bare feet. Her partner, a stranger whose face remained shadowed by a cloud shrouding the moon, moved with her, his graceful steps matching her own. A starry sky swirled above her, the diamond pinpoints of light reflected in the bright satin of her dress. The glorious burgundy gown moved like a whisper in the darkness, its shimmering softness a delight to her senses. The wet sand was firm beneath her feet, the steady crash and roar of the sea a wonderful accompaniment to the song of the stars.

Her companion smiled in appreciation of her beauty, his teeth gleaming through the mask of shadow, and Aidan’s heart surged upward as her hands gripped his.

This is but a dream, but it is yours to enjoy
. Sonorous music reverberated from some celestial place, filling the night with warmth and emotion and feeling. Aidan danced without thinking, feeling the music, the warmth of the sea breeze, the pleasure of her companion. This was no sailor who’d spent too much time in his cups; this was a man who admired her, who appreciated her, who thought her special and worth seeking. She knew without asking that he had not come from the tavern; she must have found him as her heart wended its way to the sea.

A sudden flash of light seared the back of her eyelids, dispelling the ocean, the man, and the music in one bright slash.

“Ow!” she yowled crossly, bringing her arm over her eyes as she squirmed on her pallet. “Shut the door!”

“Get up, Aidan, the merchants are already stirring. Orabel, comb your hair and wash your face. Is that mud on your hands?”

Lili’s voice. Always Lili’s. She was a mother hen to all of them, though Aidan was the only one to have been carried in that expansive womb.

Aidan lifted one eyelid enough to see her mother’s stalwart form moving through the small chamber that served as home to Lili and six other women. In exchange for one meal a day and a roof over their heads, the girls contributed 50 percent of their earnings to Lili, who passed the money on to Bram. Bram asked no questions about where the money came from; he only insisted that the girls bathe at least once a week and not pick any pockets while they were inside the tavern.

All the women but Orabel and Aidan had already rolled up their pallets and stashed them in the corner; they were undoubtedly outside by the rain barrel, trying to tidy their faces and knot their hair. Bram wanted his barmaids to look approachable.

Aidan sat up, stung by a sudden bitterness. Why did morning have to come so soon? Why did it have to come at all? Life had become a series of endless mornings on this seasonless island. One day was much like the next, bringing the same chores, the same inane flirtations, the same prayers that some sailor would pass out in the alley with enough money in his purse for the girls to buy a decent meal or a badly needed pair of shoes. Only in her sleep had Aidan found any sort of peace or pleasure, and morning came all too soon when she’d been forced to stay up half the night listening to some young seaman blubber about the friend he’d lost off the coast of Spain.

She leaned forward and hugged her knees, knowing that at any moment Lili would appear at her side and issue her usual dire warnings. If Aidan didn’t get up and clean her face, she wouldn’t draw any man’s attention. And if the men wouldn’t look at her, how was she supposed to gain their trust? Without their trust and interest, how was she supposed to catch a husband?

“I’m about as likely to catch a husband in Bram’s tavern as I am to find gold in the sewer,” Aidan murmured. She squinted her eyelids tightly, trying to conjure up the image of the mysterious stranger who had danced with her by the sea, but the noise and distractions of the street outside were too great. Bram had already thrown open his doors, and the first wave of thirsty seamen would soon flood the tavern. Anxious for whiskey, wine, and women, the men had little else on their minds.

She’d leave it all if she could. Cory O’Connor had never intended for his daughter to become a barmaid. She had been well educated in London; her father had employed a governess to teach Aidan how to read, write, and sew. But when the Black Plague swept London in the summer of Aidan’s fourteenth year, Cory had decided that he and his family would flee to Batavia, a more settled and less dangerous colony than the wilds of Virginia. Loyalty to the Crown had lured many Londoners to Virginia, but Cory and Lili were Irish, and felt no particular affection for King Charles.

And so they had boarded a ship … and her father had died a month after they left England behind. With only a trunk and the clothes upon their bodies, Aidan and her mother had been set ashore at Batavia, left to find their own way in the world.

Well, Lili had found hers, Aidan mused. She turned and leaned her head against the cold wall, where the rough planking prickled her cheek. Despite her protestations, Lili seemed to actually find fulfillment in her role as guardian of the young women who came to Batavia and found themselves in a desperate situation. The tavern was a sort of life raft for women who were uprooted, displaced, or evicted from their former places in society. With no other means of survival, they assumed working nicknames and entered the peculiar wharf-world, where outcasts catered to the needs of seamen far away from home. As brutal and degrading as life in the tavern was, it was far better than starving in the streets.

And life was not completely hard. Aidan knew her mother
held a certain fondness for Bram. She also took pride in her reputation as the tavern hostess, especially when sailors first arrived in port and walked into the tavern demanding to meet the famous Lady Lili.

But Aidan was not like her mother. Not much like her father, either, though the passage of six years had clouded her memories of him. He had been an outgoing sort, quick with a joke and of a ready wit, with an Irishman’s love of poetry and song. But though he had no ties to English aristocracy, Cory O’Connor was a gentleman descended from the ruling O’Connors of Ireland, a man who would have been readily accepted into almost any house in London. Even an artist like Schuyler Van Dyck would have touched the brim of his hat in respect as he passed by Cory O’Connor, for he was respectable, a decent man with a fine reputation.

“Respectable,” Aidan murmured, raking her sleep-touseled hair from her forehead. Respectability was the thing she missed most. No one had looked at her in pity or aversion in London. No one had crossed to the other side of the street as she approached. The fine ladies of Batavia, however, scattered like rats on those rare occasions she happened to leave the immediate area of the wharf and venture into the city beyond.

Once, at sixteen, she’d left the wharf and encountered the most terrifying nightmare of her life. She was arrested by one of the sheriff’s constables and ordered to serve in the workhouse—and all because Aidan had picked up a child’s fallen purse and tried to give it back. The child’s mother had taken one look at Aidan’s worn dress and flowing hair, then clutched her child to her and screamed for the
baljuwen
. The constable who answered her cry was not one of those assigned to the wharf, and therefore paid to ignore the petty crimes that only injured outsiders. He grasped Aidan by the arm and took her to the workhouse, where she was assigned a mandatory six-week sentence for thieving.

The workhouse, designed to turn idlers, beggars, and other assorted ne’er-do-wells into industrious members of society, only
served to humiliate Aidan. For fourteen hours each day she performed whatever menial labor was assigned her—mostly cutting and binding sheaves of straw which would become brooms for industrious Dutch housewives—while the
ziekentrooster
, or curate of souls, recited daily prayers, catechisms, and instruction in the rudiments of the faith from a lectern in the front of the workroom. For this mindless, grueling work she earned eight and a half stuivers a day, a meager wage that might buy her a loaf of white bread when it was offered on Saturday. But by far the worst aspect of the workhouse occurred on Sunday. After the inmates listened to an obligatory sermon, the general public, for the price of a copper coin, was admitted to gawk at the inmates busy at their labors.

After her release from the workhouse, Aidan resolved that she would never again venture into the “civilized” part of Batavia unless her life depended upon it. She could not deny that life was low and immoral down at the docks, but was life with the “respectable” people so much better? To all outward appearances, the leaders of Batavian society were clean, thrifty, and industrious, but Aidan recognized several of the gawkers in the Sunday workhouse crowd as men who regularly visited the tavern in search of whatever “entertainment” Lili could provide.

Since her fifteenth year, Aidan had quietly despised her life. She hated the crime, drunkenness, and coarseness of the wharf, yet she also despised the hypocrisy of that other world. A permanent sorrow seemed to weigh her down, and she could find no way to escape it.

She doubted that she would ever be respectable again, even if she followed Lili’s advice and found a husband among the seamen. Only those who had accomplished great things or won great fortunes found true respectability. Though hard work and virtue were expected from the gentry, the gentry seldom recognized or rewarded those qualities in people who lived near the wharf. As proof of this notion, Aidan had only to look at the native villages.
The Javanese, who had been conquered by the Dutch when they arrived more than twenty years before, were simple folk who planted rice and flowers and kept to their own villages, yet they were held in contempt by the newcomers.

“Aidan, are you going to sit there all day?” Lili stood in the doorway, her hands planted firmly on her wide hips. “Bram sent me to fetch you—there’s a new sailor at the first game table, and Bram thinks he’ll take a liking to you. Brush your hair, dear, and take him a pint or two. Today could be the day you find a husband!”

“Didn’t you tell him about the curse that leaves men cold?” Aidan asked, her tongue heavy with sarcasm. “Or perhaps he’s heard it from Bram. No one will want to marry me, Lili, if you keep spreading that story.”