City of God

by Swerling, Beverly

  The other female in the tent came over, and the pair of them hoisted the soldier off the table and carried him away.

  “Strange place for ladies,” Whitman said.

  “Perhaps. But more and more of them are nursing these days. Ever since that Nightingale woman over in England.”

  Whitman said he’d be going. Turner walked with him as far as the flap serving as the tent’s door.

  A carriage was parked a few feet away. Any number of gawkers and thrill-seekers had come by to observe the aftermath of carnage, but this was a brougham of the better sort, with all the windows tightly curtained, and a driver who sat up front staring straight ahead and keeping a loose grip on the reins.

  While they watched, one of the curtains was pushed aside and a woman peered out. She looked as if she had stepped off one of the ceramic plates or vases or bowls that were so much a part of the China trade. Her black hair was upswept and threaded with ribbons and her face was painted and utterly unlike anything to be seen on Broadway or Fifth Avenue, much less on this blood-soaked battlefield.

  “Sweet Christ,” Turner murmured, “what is she thinking of coming here?” He turned as if to summon someone, but there was no need. One of the black-clad women—Whitman thought it to be the one Turner had spoken to and called his dear—pushed past them and climbed into the rig.

  Her black dress was filthy and covered with blood and bits of flesh and bone. She had never, she thought, been quite so tired. Sitting, even for a moment, was a relief.

  Outside, clusters of blue-clad soldiers were digging an endless succession of graves. How could they bury so many? Talk was of twenty, thirty, even fifty thousand dead. More gray uniforms than blue this time.

  “This-place-red-hair yi is here. I saw him.” That’s how her mother had always referred to Nicholas Turner. This-place-red-hair yi, which was the Chinese word for “doctor.” Mostly, however, he wasn’t the one she talked about. “He said I would be princess,” the older woman said. Her daughter knew who she meant and that it was not Dr. Turner.

  “He said many things, Mamee. Most were not true.”

  They spoke in the formal Mandarin that was the daughter’s first language until at the age of four she was released from the three rooms that had been her entire world and discovered that outside, on the streets of New York, people did not look as she looked or speak as she spoke.

  “He lied almost always. This-place-red-hair yi sometimes also. That is correct,” her mother agreed. “But here you will find truth. I wrote it for you to know.” The book—rice paper pages bound in silk—was offered by a hand deformed by rheumatism, the joints swollen, the fingers bent into claws.

  The daughter grasped her mother’s wrist. “Have you been soaking your hands and feet every day the way I told you?” Her mother’s feet had been bound at age three. She was forty-seven now and her feet were three inches in length. The beautiful and elaborate silk wrappings covered horned and calloused flesh and deeply ingrown nails, a source of constant pain. “The powder I gave you will help, Mamee, but you must use it regularly.”

  The older woman was called Mei-hua, plum blossom, a delicate and exquisite flower. Once it had suited her. “There is no reason. Nothing will change. I will not be young again.”

  The daughter’s given name was Mei Lin, a Chinese phrase meaning beautiful grove. For a time she had taken another and then a third. None were what she was called today. “The soaking powder is to ease the pain, Mamee. Not to make you young.”

  Beyond the window of the carriage two of the women walking the battlefield pulled a body free of a stack of corpses and carried it towards the hospital tent. The daughter drew in a short, sharp breath. Dear God, they couldn’t possibly find them all. The ones with a spark of life left in them but not the strength to crawl from beneath the piles of dead would be buried alive. “I must leave now, Mamee. I must return to my work.”

  Mei-hua leaned back against the red velvet upholstery and smoothed the silk of her long, slim skirt and her short jacket, both green silk shot with gold. Old, yes, but she looked better than her daughter. Ugly black bonnet. Ugly black dress. Ugly work to be picking and prying among the bloody dead. There was a rising stink about the place. About Mei Lin too if she stayed here. If those around you have fleas, soon you will itch. She had told her daughter that many times. Too late now to say words into deaf ears. “I am tired. Take me home.”

  “I will tell the driver, Mamee. I cannot go with you now. You know that.”

  “This-place-red-hair yi will not permit it?”

  “He has nothing to do with it. I really must leave, Mamee.”

  “Very well. Go,” Mei-hua said, waving a dismissive hand. “Tell the yang gwei zih to take me home.”

  The driver had been with Mei-hua for half a dozen years, but he was not Chinese and so was a yang gwei zih, a foreign devil. “I will tell him, Mamee.”

  The daughter leaned forward and kissed her mother’s cheek, then she opened the door and climbed down to the world of dead bodies and suffering flesh. She paused just long enough to tuck Mei-hua’s book beneath the short cape of the black habit of Mother Elizabeth Seton’s Sisters of Charity. In moments it was safe and hidden. Just like her.

  Except that Nicholas Turner still stood outside the hospital tent, watching both mother and daughter. And Nicholas Turner, the this-place-red-hair yi, knew everything.

  Book One

  1834–1835

  Chapter One

  MEI-HUA LAY CURLED next to him in the glow that followed love, her back against his chest, his arm around her waist, their breathing synchronized. Everything was perfect. Or so it seemed to Samuel Devrey.

  After a time she moved just enough so one foot caressed his calf. The silken wrappings of her golden lily, the foot that had been first bound when she was three—excruciating pain inflicted and endured for him, indeed at his behest—were exquisitely erotic. Sam felt the sap rise in him yet again but he resisted. “There isn’t time.” He breathed the words into the jasmine scent of her hair.

  His Mandarin could be understood, but it had been learned too late to be perfect. His tones were never exactly right. He spoke always the speech of the yang gwei zih, the foreign devil. Mei-hua would die a slow death before she would correct him. “My lord not need do much. Quick and easy. See.”

  She arched profoundly, one of those supple adjustments of her body that always astonished him, and her hips realigned so that he could take her effortlessly, in an act of possession as natural and undemanding as a whisper. It would have been against nature to refuse a generosity offered with such elegance. He moved the hand that had stroked her belly so it gripped her thigh, pressing her more closely to him. Both golden lilies were touching him now, wrapped around his legs. She was a silken splendid butterfly, tiny but exquisite, cocooned in his bulk. Her sigh of pleasure—more a vibration than a sound—thrilled him as if it were again the first time, three years earlier, when she was thirteen.

  “You are astonishing,” he said when he could speak.

  She gently pulled away, then settled back against his body and pulled his hand back to her belly where it had been before. “What do you feel, lord?”

  “Samuel,” he corrected. “If I have to tell you again, I will spank you.” Her smile was hidden from him, but he knew it was there. “For real this time.” He attempted to sound severe. “You won’t be able to sit for a week.”

  “I am sure I will deserve it. You are right in all things, lo—Samuel. But you cannot spank me now.”

  “Why not?”

  “It maybe…” He heard the hesitation though she hurried to cover it. “Maybe disturb harmony. Your tai-tai never lose harmony. Never.”

  Repetition was the way the Chinese conveyed emphasis. Tai-tai meant not simply wife but senior wife, she to whom all other wives—if such there might be—owed allegiance. Devrey knew both things, but he seldom remembered to repeat a word he meant to strengthen. As for the rest, it wasn’t practical.

  He h
ad married Mei-hua in the room beyond this one, in a ceremony he remembered as a bewildering shimmer of gongs and incense. Afterward she had been brought to this bed on its raised red satin platform hung about with quilted red velvet to perform her first duty as his wife, to sit absolutely still for hours and demonstrate her inner harmony. Meanwhile Devrey had been taken downstairs to eat and drink, and only occasionally remind himself that if he stepped out the door he would be not in this exotic Chinese world but on Cherry Street in New York, a few steps from the busy waterfront. Four hours later, when he had returned to the bedroom to claim what was his, Mei-hua was exactly as he’d left her. Except for her smile of joyous welcome.

  “You could never be disharmonious,” he said now.

  His voice was steady, the words without any hint of anger or disapproval, but she could feel his fury in the heat of his skin and the coldness of his breath. “I try never displease you, lord.” Not true. She had tried very hard. For many months now, as soon as he left her after lovemaking, she lay for long, boring hours with her feet above her head so his seed would find the son-making place deep inside. She had eaten only son-making food, though it was not always her favorite. Only the gods knew how hard she tried. And Ah Chee.

  Mei-hua could not see the bedroom door from her present position, but she knew beyond doubt that her servant was near, probably listening. “I do nothing to displease my lord. Never. Never.” Big lie, but never mind.

  “Samuel,” he corrected again, delivering at the same time one slap to her buttocks. Light enough to be playful but hard enough to sting.

  Mei-hua stiffened and rolled away, clasping both hands below her waist as she did so. “Husband is correct. I deserve beating.” She jumped off the bed, got the bamboo stick they used to close the red velvet curtains, and brought it to him, kneeling on the platform and leaning her head on her folded arms on the mattress. “I stay like this and husband beat back and shoulders until they bleed, only no part below waist. Then I will never—”

  “I have never beaten you, Mei-hua. Why would I start now? Above or below the waist.” He got up and put the stick back by the window, then drew her to her feet, kissing her face all the while, little soft kisses.

  “Because husband is displeased with me.”

  “No, I am not. I understand you.” The silk robe, the long lung pao he’d worn earlier, lay on a nearby chair, splendid green satin with dragons embroidered in silver thread. Samuel passed it by in favor of his western clothes, carefully hung in an elaborately carved wardrobe. He pulled on the tight black trousers and black boots and high-necked white shirt and tied his stock. “I must go.”

  “It is early. Useless old Ah Chee made soup you like, with duck and pumpkin.”

  “Perhaps tomorrow. You rest now.” He picked up her pale yellow silk robe and draped it over her shoulders, lifting her back into the bed as he did so. “Sleep, Mei-hua. Stay beautiful for me.”

  The room beyond was as exotic and foreign as the bedroom, if not as sensuous. The furnishings—rosewood, ebony, ornaments of luminous porcelain and glowing brass—had all arrived from Canton when Mei-hua did, part of her dowry, along with the servant woman.

  Ah Chee’s skin was creased leather and her hair white, but she seemed to Samuel ageless. She stood by the front door, eyes cast down, hands folded, ready to usher him out. Hard to say if she knew he was leaving by the way he was dressed or if, as he suspected, she listened regularly to everything that happened in the bedroom. “My lord stay a little stay,” she urged. “Maybe take some of this old woman’s poor soup. Stay.”

  Samuel walked straight to her and slapped her hard across the face. She did not move, seemed barely even to flinch. He slapped her a second time. He knew she wouldn’t react, but it calmed some of the rage in his belly. “When did tai-tai bleed last?” And when she didn’t answer, “Tell me. If you lie, I swear I will cut out your tongue.”

  “In Last month, lord. Before start of Water Sheep year.”

  He did the calculation quickly. Last month was January, and this year, 1834, was Water Sheep. “When did she stop taking the special drink?” He bought the powder himself from a Mrs. Langton on Christopher Street. Guaranteed to prevent conception as long as a woman drank it dissolved in ale every morning before sunrise.

  “Never, lord. Never. Never. Every day I wake up tai-tai and she drink.” Ah Chee did not say that the girl hated the taste of ale with a rare passion, and spat it out almost as soon as the mixture touched her mouth. Anyway, the powder was probably useless. What did a yang gwei zih woman know of such things? Ah Chee, whose job it had been to look after this plum blossom since the day she was born, got make-no-baby powder from Hor Jick the apothecary—the closest thing to a proper doctor, a yi, in this place—and sprinkled it on the girl’s food, and twice a day rubbed excellent lizard skin cream on Mei-hua’s beautiful flat belly. Until, that is, she had judged the plum blossom to be ready and stopped sprinkling and rubbing. “Never, lord, never,” she repeated. “Tai-tai drink every day.”

  “Still? Even after she missed two monthlies?”

  “Yes, lord, yes. Drink. Drink.”

  “You are a lying old witch.” He itched to slap her again but knew it would make no difference.

  Mei-hua, her ear pressed to the door, heard the latch click, signaling Samuel’s departure. She ran from the bedroom in a whirl of yellow silk and flung herself at Ah Chee, fists flying, pounding out her rage. “You tell. You tell. Old woman say I do not bleed already two months. You tell.”

  Ah Chee stood calmly under the onslaught. Eventually Mei-hua’s anger turned to misery, and she retreated to huddle, weeping, in the elaborately carved red-lacquered throne chair, usually reserved for her husband, under the scroll depicting Fu Xing, the god of happiness, whose benign smile did not alter whatever happened in this room.

  For once the old woman did not rush to dry the girl’s tears. “You think Lord Samuel stupid? Soon tai-tai’s flat little girl belly get big and round. Will the lord not see? Will he think tai-tai swallowed a melon?”

  Such considerations were for the future. Mei-hua was concerned only with this terrible moment. “Now my lord will make you take me to the wretched Hor Jick devil yi, and he put filthy devil yi hands on me and make son jump out of belly and—”

  “No, not happen. Not. No devil doctor Hor Taste Bad,” Ah Chee said, using the nickname by which the apothecary was generally known.

  Mei-hua stopped weeping and looked up. “Why you think this? Why?”

  “Know definitely for sure. No Taste Bad. Absolutely.” Ah Chee did not wait to answer more questions. Instead she went to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of hot soup. “Tai-tai open mouth. I feed son.”

  “Wait—”

  Ah Chee did not wait. She spooned soup into the girl’s open mouth. It was so hot that it scalded Mei-hua’s throat, but she swallowed it quickly, turning her head aside so Ah Chee could not immediately force a second spoonful on her. “Wait, old woman. Wait. First tell why you are sure Lord Samuel not make you take tai-tai to Taste Bad devil yi.”

  “Because Taste Bad devil yi one of us, civilized person. Lord Samuel take tai-tai himself to white yang gwei zih. Make sure abortion done properly.”

  Mei-hua gasped in horror, and Ah Chee took the opportunity to spoon more hot soup down her throat.

  Cherry Street ran parallel to the East River, two streets back from the docks, a little above the mercantile southern heart of the city. Though George Washington had lived briefly in a house on Cherry when he was president—Martha complained that the ceilings were too low for the feathers in the ladies’ hats—the area was not the same. The wealthy had been fleeing the tumult of the lower town of late, deserting even their grand residences on Broadway and around Battery Park for the quiet of the numbered streets and avenues further up the island. These days, the grid adopted in 1809, a tight mesh of interlocking streets and avenues laid out across every inch of a Manhattan of hills and woods and streams, was closer to reality; it had been
implemented from Tenth Street to Fourteenth and from First to Eighth avenues. The grid’s virtue was that it allowed the greatest possible number of people to be housed on the island. It was a vision made inevitable because another had been realized.

  Opened in 1827, the Erie Canal ran from Lake Erie in the west to the Hudson River in the east, establishing a direct water route to New York’s magnificent harbor from the outer edge of the ever-expanding nation. There were twenty-four united states now, with Missouri the westernmost, and the far-flung territories of Michigan, Arkansas, and Florida bidding to join soon. The Erie Canal allowed the great city to open her mighty maw and swallow everything the industrious folk living so distant from the coast could produce, then spew it forth across the ocean. Such an increase of business was a racketing, riotous dream come true for the money men who had always ruled this town, but not one their wives wished to have clattering day and night outside their front doors. Uppertendom high society called themselves as they migrated north to the numbered streets above Bleecker. Cherry Street was no part of uppertendom’s world.

  A bitter wind blew off the river when Sam Devrey came into the street. Snow was coming down in earnest, and already the ragged roof line of the closely packed three-and four-story wooden houses was edged with a thick white border. The two buildings closest to the intersection of Cherry and Market Streets, numbers thirty-seven and thirty-nine, belonged to him personally, not to Devrey Shipping. Both were built of wood. Thirty-seven was three stories high, thirty-nine four, and each was three windows wide. Once private homes, they were now lodging houses like the others on the block, densely packed with laborers who paid fifty cents a week for whatever bit of floor they could claim. Devrey’s lodgings were even more tightly packed than the others. His tenants were Chinese, willing to tolerate any degree of crowding to be with their own kind. Mostly they were sailors who had accidentally washed ashore, and mostly from one or another part of Canton, because that was the point on the globe where Asia touched the West. The single exception to the allocation of space was that Mei-hua and Ah Chee occupied the entire upper floor of the corner house, number thirty-nine, an area that would have housed at least twelve of the Chinese men.