Prologue
July 4, 1863, Gettysburg in Pennsylvania
"So you’re
here, Dr. Turner."
"I am here, Mr. Whitman. No,
don’t touch that."
Whitman withdrew his hand from
the table spread with a towel on which lay a scalpel
and an array of needles threaded with catgut. "I
apologize," he said. "It looked as if you were
ready for the next ligature..."
"You have a
good eye for surgery. I am." Turner leaned forward and
procured the threaded needle himself, and began carefully
stitching the final flap of skin covering the soldier’s
elbow. There was no longer a forearm, "But I
doubt, Mr. Whitman, that you washed your hands before
you came to find me."
"Ah, yes. Your little microbes.
What do you call them?"
"Germs."
"Yes. Germs.
I remember now." The tent, pitched in the middle of
the now silent battlefield, was hot and sweaty and
stank of blood and putrefying flesh. Bodies—most
missing one or another appendage, all with some part
of their person bandaged, some in blue uniforms, more
in gray—were lined up as far as he could see.
A few on pallets, most on the ground. Two black clad
women moved among them. ""It hardly seems
I could add anything more distasteful to this atmosphere."
"Indeed,
in a general way you could not. But germs are particular,
not general. Those ligatures were dipped in carbolic
acid. Your hands were not."
"The surgeons in Washington,
that hospital where I’ve been helping out, they
don’t believe in your germs. They say you’re
a darned fool."
"Just as well. Otherwise you’d
probably be soliciting money on their behalf, not mine.
Not so good for their patients, however. What have
you brought me, Mr. Whitman?"
Whitman held out the small
leather satchel in his left hand. "Soap. More
of your carbolic acid. More chloroform as well. Though
it looks as though you’ve enough of that." He
nodded toward the man on the table, the one who no
longer had a left forearm. No part of him twitched
as Turner finished stitching his flesh.
"Wrong
for once, Mr. Whitman. I used the last of it for this
one."
"The Washington surgeons say chloroform’s
immoral. Against the law of God to interfere with pain."
Turner stopped stitching and raised
his head. "Do
they, now? And what do you say to that, Mr. Whitman?"
I will go to the bank by the wood
and become undisguised and naked
I am mad for it
to be in contact with me.
Not poetry they said.
Obscene. About Greek love. Should be banned. "Some folks talk a lot about the law
of God. Doesn’t mean they know much about it."
"Yes,
that’s what I think as well," Turner said mildly.
He again bent his head to his task. "As for the
chloroform, we’ve made an excellent job of killing
vast numbers here in Pennsylvania these last few days,
but I expect we’re not done with murdering each
other. I am enormously grateful for all the supplies
you bring."
Back in Fredericksburg, first time
he was ever in a field hospital, they were sawing
men into pieces with nothing to deaden the pain
at all. And no thought for Christopher Turner’s talk about
microbes, for all he and his germs were famous. That’s
what started it. All that screaming he heard back in
Fredericksburg. Made him take that government job so
he could be in Washington, closer to the war. And start
visiting as many of the wounded as he could manage
to see. And raise money to buy supplies for the doctors
working on the battlefields. Mostly Dr. Turner these
days. Because of the quiet. Turner’s patients
moaned as they came round. They didn’t scream.
And he treated them all. Yankees and Confederates alike. "There
are some as gave who wouldn’t be pleased to think
their contributions would be used to ease the enemy’s
pain." Turner’s inert patient wore a gray uniform.
"Then
we will refrain from telling them." The surgeon looked
up again, meeting the other man’s gaze full on. "That’s
correct, isn’t it, Mr. Whitman?"
"It’s
entirely correct, Dr. Turner."
He figured the surgeon
was some fifteen years older than himself. Call
it late fifties. He looked older. Exhaustion had
hollowed his cheeks and made dark circles around
his eyes. Even his considerable height seemed diminished
by the necessity to stoop beneath the low slung
canvas ceiling. Red hair—no gray at all as far as Whitman could see—was
plastered to his scalp with sweat. "Truth to
tell, sir. I don’t tell them exactly what the
money’s for either. Not about the carbolic or
the chloroform, I mean." Help save the lives of our
boys, he told them. Never said whose boys exactly.
They were all someone’s. And soon as he made
his little speech about how their contributions would
help the war, he switched to reading his poems. Even
if they hated them, it was a distraction.
One of the
nursing women slipped out of the tent. Another
arrived to replace her, and came at once to stand
beside Turner’s
operating table. "Are you finished, Doctor?"
"Yes.
You can take him away now and... Oh, it’s you,
is it? I didn’t know... We should speak, my dear.
I was—"
"There’s no need."
She cut
him off abruptly. Her voice calm, cool even. Turner’s
had sounded as if he were pleading. Not like him at
all. And he appeared to be in some consternation. As
for the woman, Whitman could tell nothing about her.
She wore a black bonnet that mostly shaded her face.
Widow’s weeds of some sort. The other one was
dressed the same. Those ladies he’d seen on the
battlefield roaming among the dead, following behind
the soldiers on burial detail, they were all widows
as well. Or so they looked. Black crows.
The other
nursing woman came over to the operating table,
and together the pair of them hoisted the still
comatose Confederate 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."
"Yes,
but..." Whitman stopped speaking. The two men had moved
to the flap serving as the tent’s door. A four-in-hand
was parked a few feet away. It was the most elaborate
carriage imaginable. Red and gold, and painted with
strange symbols and designs. The horses were matched
blacks, with red harnesses edged in gold, and arching
red feathers rising from the gold headstalls.
Whitman’s
jaw dropped, but Turner seemed not so much surprised
as agitated. "Sweet Christ," Turner murmured. "What’s
she doing here?" He turned as if to summon someone,
but there was no need. One of the black clad figures—Whitman
thought it the one Turner had spoken to and called
his dear—pushed past them and climbed into the
rig.
*****
There were bodies and parts of
bodies as far as she could see. Mangled, bloody.
Herself as well, filthy and covered with blood
and bits of flesh and bone. None of it seemed real
from within the gilded confines of her mother’s carriage.
"He
said I would be a princess." The voice was weary, but
the mind as strong as ever, and as totally focused
on her own drama. The daughter studied the clusters
of blue-clad soldiers digging in the blood soaked earth.
How could they bury so many? She’d heard there
were ten, twenty, even thirty thousand dead. More gray
than blue this time.
"The other one, he’s
inside? In that tent?"
"Yes." That’s how
her mother had always referred to Christopher Turner.
The other one. Mostly he wasn’t the one she talked
about.
"He said I would be a princess," the older
woman repeated. "I was, but not until the very
end. And no thanks to him."
The daughter did not have
to ask whom she meant. "He said many things,
Mama. Most were not true."
They spoke in the Hakka Chinese
that was the daughter’s first language, until
at the age of four she was released from the two 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. The other one as well. That is
correct," her mother agreed. "But here you will
find the truth. I wrote it for you to know." The book—rice
paper 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-eight
now and her feet were four 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, Mama.
If you use it regularly."
The older woman was called
Mei-hua, plum blossom. Delicate and exquisite.
Once it had suited her. "There is no point. 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. Neither were
what she was called today. Not even in her own mind. "The
soaking powder is to ease the pain, Mama. Not to make
you young."
"I will tell you what will ease my
pain. Take this. Read it." Mei-hua leaned forward, suddenly
anxious. "You can still read and write civilized
words? The way I taught you?"
"I can, Mama. I
have not forgotten." That Mei-hua, born on a pirate junk
in the Pearl River, could read and write Mandarin Chinese
was only one of the many oddities of both their lives.
The daughter took the book and started to tuck it away,
anxious to return to her place among the fallen. While
she watched two of the women walking the battlefield
pulled a body free from beneath a stack of corpses
and carried it toward the hospital tent. Dear God,
they couldn’t possibly find them all. The ones
with a breath of life left in them, but not the strength
to crawl from beneath the piles of dead, they would
be buried alive. "I must leave now, Mama. I must
return to my work."
"Wait. Show me," Mei-hua commanded. "Read
something. Read the last page."
Faster and easier to
comply than to argue. A lesson learned over many
years. It took a moment for the characters to come
into focus and the words to take shape. When they
did Mei Lin read softly, "War is promised. The coins say
the promise is true."
"In the year of the rat
I wrote that," Mei-hua said triumphantly. "Before
any of this." She nodded in the direction of the bodies,
the first time she had acknowledged the carnage. "See,
it is as I told you. Everything in the book is true.
Do not believe the other one. None of the rest of them
either. They all lie. The other one, he could not save
my son, your brother."
"It wasn’t his fault,
Mama. You know that."
Mei-hua shrugged and said nothing.
A different war. Their own. Played
out in Mei Lin’s
flesh and the two halves of her soul. She looked down
at the book. "I will read every word, Mama. I
promise."
"Good." Mei-hua leaned back against the
red velvet upholstery. Conscious of the fact that her
black hair was perfectly coifed in a thick coil on
top of her head, and that her cheongsam was of 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 repeat it to deaf
ears. "I am tired. Take me home."
"I will
tell the driver, Mama. I cannot go with you. You know
that."
"The other one will not permit it?"
"He
"He has nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with me. I
really must leave, Mama."
"Very well, go." Mei-hua’s
voice was weary now that her errand was accomplished. "Tell
the yang gwei zih to take me home."
The driver had been
with her for at least twenty years, but he was
not Chinese, and so a yang gwei zih, a foreign
devil. "I
will tell him, Mama."
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
this other, larger, conflict. She paused just long
enough to tuck Mei-hua’s book into the front
of the black habit of Mother Elizabeth Seton’s
Sisters of Charity. In moments it was safe and hidden.
Just like her.
Except that Christopher Turner
was still standing outside the hospital tent. Staring
at her. And he knew everything.
Book One
1832 -
1837
1.
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
perfectly synchronized. Or so it seemed to Samuel
Devrey. Perfect. Everything.
After a time she moved,
but only slightly. Just enough so her 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, quite literally at his behest—was
exquisitely erotic. He felt the sap rise in him
yet again, but resisted. “There isn’t
time." He breathed the words into the jasmine scent
of her hair.
“Ah,
but you do not have even to move very much. 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 proffered
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, a silken
splendid butterfly, tiny but exquisite, cocooned
in his bulk. Her sigh of pleasure—more a vibration
than a sound, the butterfly fluttering its wings—thrilled
him as if he experienced it for the first time.
Three years before when she was thirteen.
“You
are astonishing," he said when he could speak.
She
moved again, disengaging this time, and pulled
his hand back to her belly where it had been before. “What
do you feel, Lord?"
“Joshua," 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 might..." He heard the hesitation
though she hurried to cover it. “It might
disturb my harmony. You would not want a wife who
was disharmonious."
He had married her in the room
beyond this one in a ceremony that was a bewildering
shimmer of gongs and incense, followed by Mei-hua
being brought to this bed on its raised red satin
platform hung about with quilted red velvet shot
with threads of gold. Here she would perform her
first duty as his wife. She would sit unmoving
for hours, so demonstrating her inner harmony.
Meanwhile he was 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 harbor. Four hours later,
when he 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 gave no hint of
anger or disapproval.
All the same, she knew her
defiance was exposed. She could feel his fury in
the heat of his skin and the coldness of his breath. “I
try never to displease you, Lord." Her words were
calm, giving away nothing of the lie. She had tried
very hard. Lying on the bed for long boring hours
with her feet above her head so his seed would
find the son-making place deep within. Eating only
son-making food, though it was not always her favorite.
Very hard.
“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. “My
husband is correct. I deserve to be beaten." She
jumped off the bed and got the bamboo stick they
used to close the red satin curtains and brought
it to him, kneeling on the platform and leaning
her head on the mattress. “I
will stay here like this and my husband will beat
my back and my shoulders until they bleed, only
no part below my 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
you are displeased with me."
“No, I am not.
I understand you." The silk robe 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 black trousers and black boots and white
shirt as he spoke. “I
must go."
“It is early. Ah Chee, useless
old wretch that she is, made the soup you like
with duck and pumpkin."
“Perhaps tomorrow.
You rest now." He picked up her robe, pale yellow
silk today, 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. So too the servant woman
they called Ah Chee. Her skin was creased leather
and her hair white, but she seemed to him ageless.
She stood by the 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. “Will my Lord
stay long enough to take some of the poor soup
I—"
Joshua
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 she bleed last?" And when she didn’t answer, “Tell
me. And if you lie I swear I will cut out your
tongue."
“Two
full moons past, Lord."
“When did she stop
taking the special drink?" He brought her the powder
himself. Got it uptown from a Mrs. Somers, a widow.
Guaranteed to prevent conception as long as a woman
drank it, dissolved in ale, every morning before
sunrise.
“Never,
Lord. I swear. I wake her every day and she drinks
it." Ah Chee did not say that the girl hated the
taste of ale with rare passion, and spat it out
almost as soon as the mixture touched her mouth.
Anyway, the powder was probably useless. What did
a white woman know of such things? She herself,
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—that existed
in this place, and sprinkled it on the girl‛s
food, and twice a day rubbed the proper lizard
skin cream on Mei-hua’s
belly. Until she had judged the plum blossom to
be ready and stopped sprinkling and rubbing. "Never,
Lord," she repeated. "She drinks every day."
“Still?
Even after she missed two monthlies?"
“Yes,
Lord."
“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. Then only silence.
She ran from the bedroom in a whirl of yellow silk
and flung herself at Ah Chee, fists flying, pounding
out her rage. “You told him. You told him.
You said I had not bled for two months."
Ah Chee
stood calmly under the onslaught. Eventually Mei-hua
had expelled the anger spirit that filled her,
and retreated to huddle weeping in the lacquered
throne chair usually reserved for her husband.
For once the old woman did not rush to dry the
girl’s tears. “Do
you think he is stupid? What was the point of not
telling him? Soon your belly will get fat and round.
Will the Lord not see? Will he think you have 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 will put his filthy devil
yi hands on me and make my son jump out of my belly
and—"
“No,
he will not. No such command will come from the
Lord Samuel. 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. “You
do not think so?"
“I am certain." Ah Chee
did not wait to answer more questions. Instead
she went to the kitchen and returned with a bowl
of hot soup, standing over Mei-hua and urging her
to eat. “Open
your mouth and I will feed your son."
“Wait..."
Ah Chee did not wait. She spooned
soup into the girl’s
open mouth. It was so hot 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 upon her. “Wait. Wait,
old woman. First tell me why you are so sure my
lord will not make you take me to the Taste Bad
devil yi."
“Because
Taste Bad devil yi is Chinese. Lord Samuel
will take you himself to uptown white devil person.
Make sure abortion is 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. The wealthy had been fleeing
the tumult of the lower town of late, deserting
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
first imagined in 1809 was a reality from Tenth
Street as far north as Fourteenth Street, and east
to west from First to Eighth Avenues. The idea
of a city crisscrossed with a tight mesh of interlocking
streets and avenues—a system that allowed
the greatest possible number of people to be housed
on the island of Manhattan—had been made
inevitable because another vision was 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
from the center of this ever-expanding America
to New York’s magnificent harbor.
Now the great city opened her mighty maw and swallowed
everything the industrious folk of the heartland
could produce, then spewed it forth across the
ocean. It 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. Cherry Street was
no part of their world.
A bitter wind off the river
now, and snow coming down in earnest. 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 belonged
to Samuel Devrey. Not the company he ran, Devrey Shipping,
to him personally. Built of wood, one house was
three storeys high, the other four, each three
windows wide. No different from the others on the
block, and like them, Samuel’s buildings
were lodging houses, densely packed with laborers
who paid fifty cents a week for whatever bit of
floor they could claim. Samuel’s lodging
houses were more tightly packed than the rest.
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 most
frequently Asia touched the West. As for Mei-hua
and Ah Chee, they occupied the two upper floors
of the building nearest the corner, a space that
would have housed at least ten of the men.
None
of Samuel’s
tenants questioned the arrangement or in any way
encroached on the two women. Samuel Devrey was
a white man who spoke their language, held sway
over their jobs as well as their shelter, and could
be counted on as a source of rice when times were
hard. In this place he need answer to no one.
“You
are leaving, Lord?"
“Yes. My horse."
“Waiting,
Lord."
The man was one of at least four
called—in
the Chinese fashion, family name first—Lee
Yut. A good many were Lee Something-Else. Forty-two
tenants at this week’s count, and pretty
much all of them Lees or Hors or Bos, all from
little villages where everyone was related, and
second and third sons were sent to sea to be cooks
and stewards to the officers of the ships plying
the China trade. Nicknames helped sort out the
confusion. This particular Lee Yut was known as
Leper-face, because his skin was severely pitted
by the pox, the scars so close together in some
places his flesh looked to have been eaten away.
Leper-face disappeared into the
alley between the two buildings. A moment later
he returned with the horse. The mare snorted softly,
pleased to see her master. Samuel patted her muzzle.
Leper-face dropped to his knees and extended his
clasped hands. Samuel took the leg-up and swung
himself into the saddle. Horseback was not the
most appealing manner of travel on a cold night
like this one, but as he saw it, he had little
choice. A private carriage would attract too much
attention in these parts. There were hackneys for
hire in the city, but not as many as there should
be, and no chance of finding one on Cherry Street.
A horse-drawn omnibus ran on Fourth Avenue a few
streets to the west, but it was too public, and
since it was almost exclusively used by the men
of uppertendom traveling back and forth to their
downtown places of business, far too convivial.
The mare needed no urging to set
out on the familiar northward journey. After a
few seconds Samuel turned and looked back. Leper-face
had disappeared and Mei-hua’s
window was dark. Ah Chee was under strict instructions
always to keep the curtains drawn after sunset,
but once or twice he had seen a sliver of light
and known Mei-hua was up there watching him, already—or
so he fancied—counting the minutes until
he returned.
Not tonight. Darkness everywhere.
No gaslights in this neighborhood. Plenty to the
south of course, and recently as far uptown as
his own front door on fashionable Fourteenth Street.
2.
