by John Smolens
“It’s always a question of money, Doctor.”
“There’s nothing to be done until we are assured that the men on that ship are—”
“I will give you what is required and you can distribute the funds to the proper authorities, as you see fit.” Enoch tossed back his brandy. “I want those goods offloaded as soon as possible.”
“I have been compensated by Fields for my house call, per usual. Though it’s unnecessary, Mother insists upon it. I require nothing further.” Giles began to turn toward the door, where Fields seemed to stand guard, but he paused and looked back at Enoch. “I am given to wonder about the ship’s captain, though. Mr. Frothingham?”
Enoch got to his feet, causing the dog to bark. He shut it up with another slap, and then hobbled toward Giles, favoring his left leg. “What about the captain?”
“He wasn’t aboard ship—someone named Delacourte has taken command.”
Enoch stood close and Giles held his breath, for though his brother gave off the scent of perfume, it was overpowered by his body odor. His eyes, too, were bloodshot, and his brow creased. “Our dear mother, I fear, is getting worse—her latest delusions concern the honor of the family tree. Bloodlines, and all that. She sees bastards and bitches everywhere. You’d think our fathers were in perpetual rut. No wonder they both died so young. Certainly I try to live up to his name, but here I am nearing fifty, so I must not be as prolific as our fathers. I suppose it’s a question of stamina.” Enoch leaned close and exhaled slowly. “Doctor, you should tend to the madame’s physical ailments but ignore her addled ruminations.”
“I will attend to a patient without restriction,” Giles said.
Jonathan Bream, in his seat, made a high peeping sound of joy. “Oh, that’s rare, indeed,” he said, gesturing with his hand. “Here stands the good doctor, dedicated to healing those in need.”
“If my method is unsuitable,” Giles said, “you are welcome to engage another.”
Enoch glared at him for a moment, but then he began to laugh—a loud, cackling emission that caused him to double over as though gripped with pain. Soon Bream joined in, and then the dog commenced to bark, as well. Enoch tried to speak, but he could hardly catch his breath. “Our dear mother … won’t let any other doctor … lay a hand on her!”
Bream found this so funny that he tumbled from his chair and writhed on the carpet. “Come back to see your fair patient soon,” he said. “Because your bedside manner doth make Madame swoon!”
Enoch howled as he staggered back to the window seat, where he collapsed next to his yapping mongrel.
“My dear Doctor!” Bream cried from the floor. “It is as though you had removed a malignant tumor, the way you have returned Master Sumner to his customary good humor.”
Giles went to the door, which Fields, absolutely stone-faced, opened just in time.
PART II
Quarantine
Four
LEANDER ALWAYS HELD HIS SISTER’S HAND WHEN THEY LEFT the house. Sarah’s hand was a delicate, tiny thing, which she entrusted to him, soft and warm in his fingers. She had enormous eyes, and their mother often told her they were as blue as the Atlantic on a summer morn. It seemed impossible that such large, beautiful eyes failed to see anything. Leander sometimes wondered if the silence between his mother and father had been caused by the fact that his sister had been born blind. His mother could barely let the girl out of her reach, and when she did allow Leander to take her with him from the house, it was always with a sharp warning that he mind his sister. At times his father seemed to resent Sarah, as though her existence were a form of punishment he did not deserve.
“It’s going to rain,” Sarah said. “I can smell it.”
They were walking along Merrimack Street, and Leander looked up at the clouds above the river. “You’re right.”
The afternoon’s chores had been done. He had split wood for the fireplace and filled the water bucket at the cistern in Market Square. Taking Sarah for a walk was often the last responsibility before supper. They had purchased flounder from Mr. Ault, the fishmonger, and on the way home they paused to visit with their cousins the Brimleys, who had seven children, one of them, Amy, about Sarah’s age. There were relatives all over Newburyport, mostly in the South End, but some up around Tyng Street in the North End too, where the houses tended to be bigger and farther apart. They were families with large broods—six, eight children, at least. The Laphams had eleven, and the Cloughs had nine, with one on the way. Leander and Sarah were always welcomed by relatives, but there was something unspoken, a reservation, or perhaps it was even a form of pity. Leander used to think it was because his sister was blind, but their cousin Jonas Lapham had a withered hand, and Annie Clough had a birthmark that made the right side of her face the color of a blueberry. Leander had come to suspect that his family was considered the runt of the litter—Only two children!—and there would always be some lingering doubt and suspicion that was intended to make him feel ashamed.
Sarah seemed unaware of these things—or perhaps she didn’t care—and she hummed to herself as she and Leander walked home. Finally she stopped and said, “Tell me what’s green.” She never tired of this, her fascination with color.
“Well,” Leander said, looking out at the river. “There are a few here. There’s the pale green of the willow trees along the bank. There’s the green of the salt grass acrost the water. And there’s the darker green of these maples overhead.” He reached up and plucked a leaf off the nearest branch and placed it in her hand. “And there’s the green in your eyes.”
She turned her head toward him. “Momma says my eyes are blue.”
“They are, sometimes. Depends on the light. Your eyes, they change colors just like that. Today they’re more green—green with some yellow.”
She blinked several times as though she were trying to feel the color in her eyes. Then she lowered her head and ran a finger along the jagged edge of the leaf. “I can feel green—it feels like a leaf. But I don’t understand blue.” Her voice was small, disappointed. “You’ve told me water was blue. Whenever my hands get wet, I think blue. But then you say that when the sun shines, the sky is blue.”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you see how it can be confusing? When the sun is hot on my face, that’s blue, but it’s completely different from water blue.”
“There are a lot of blues, yes,” Leander said. “The world is full of them.”
She dropped the leaf, and said, “There’s only two colors. Night and day. You say they’re black and white. That’s what I see.”
“You think I’m making the others up?”
She didn’t answer.
“Well, I’m not, Sarah.” He looked at her. She didn’t seem to be getting pouty. She was listening—not to, but for something. “What is it?” he asked.
“Can’t you hear that?” she said.
“What?”
“Thunder—it’s coming from upriver.”
They stopped walking, and then Leander heard the faint distant rumble. “You have the ears of two people,” he said. She laughed. “And the nose of three.”
“I smell your farts, even the silent ones.” She laughed louder. “But Papi’s are the worst. Particularly after we eat clams. And he’s very proud of them.”
“I know. He’s a wise man—he believes in a good fart and the Bible.”
Sarah laughed—until there was the sudden crackle of lightning, followed by more thunder, causing her to squeeze his hand. “It’s coming fast,” she said. “The air is still. And the bugs, they always fly about my face before a storm.”
“We’ll be home soon.”
“We won’t make it before the rain.”
“Are you sure?”
She lifted her head toward him. She seemed to be looking at something on his forehead. Her eyes were wide open, astonished. Then he saw the first drop of water splash on her chin. Again, she laughed. “I’m sure.”
He felt the first drops in his hair. And
then raindrops began to pat the dirt in the road, leaving large round spots of mud. The shoulders of his shirt began to feel damp and heavy. “You’re right,” he said. “Shall we run?”
“Carry me.”
“All right—you’re a sack of potatoes.” She squealed as he picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, and then he trotted to the other side of the road and stood against the wall of Mr. Poe’s stable, where he put his sister down and held her close to his side. The rain fell straight down, and they were dry as long as they kept their backs to the shingled wall. The road quickly turned to mud. A sheet of water came off the roof, pounding the earth inches from their feet. Sarah held out one hand, catching water in her cupped palm.
Lightning forked down from the clouds with a sizzling crack and a flash so bright that for a moment Leander himself was blinded. He blinked several times, seeing a black image of the fork in his mind. The sky seemed to break open angrily, thunder rumbling so loud that the ground shuddered. Sarah screamed, and he held her closer. Then the wind came up quickly, tossing the hanging vines of the willow tree next to the stable. The rain swept in on them, and in a moment they were drenched.
“Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s get out of this.”
The stable door to his right was ajar, and he pulled his sister inside where the dry air was close, smelling of manure and hay. Horses moved nervously in their stalls, their hooves clopping on the packed earth floor. With the next crack of lightning, the thunder followed almost immediately. Throughout the stable, horses whinnied and snorted.
Then the wind slammed the door shut, causing Sarah to scream again. It was almost pitch dark—the only light coming through gaps in the wall high up by the loft beams. Sarah put her arms around Leander’s waist.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Just a little thunder and lightning. When it passes, we’ll get home.” But she was trembling now. She always did, because though she rarely showed fear she was petrified of thunder and lightning. He realized he could never imagine what it would be like to live in perpetual darkness. “It’ll be over soon,” he continued, dismayed that he couldn’t sound more convincing.
Her arms tightened about his waist, and she pressed her face into his ribs. “I know,” she whispered. “But there’s—it’s something else.”
“What?”
“Here, in the stable. We’re in the Poes’ stable, right?”
This was another thing that often amazed him. They would walk hand in hand about Newburyport and he would purposely not say where they were, and yet she would tell him they were on Liberty Street, or that they had just passed the apothecary on Pleasant Street. When he asked her how she knew this, she would only smile. It was much like when she was in their house, and she could move about almost as freely as though she could see. “Yes—we’re in the Poes’ stable,” he said. “And we’ll stay here until the storm moves out to sea. Then we’ll run home and give this flounder to Mother.”
But she was having none of it, and her fingers tugged at his shirt. “Leander, we’re not alone—there’s someone else in here.”
“It’s just the animals. They’re frightened by the storm and—”
“No,” Sarah whispered. “There’s a man. I know there is.”
Leander looked toward the back of the stable. The doors there were closed, pale light coming through the spaces between the boards. Then the door squealed on a hinge and opened slightly. Lightning cracked overhead, and for a moment Leander saw—or thought he saw—the silhouette of a man. A naked man. He must have been imagining it: a naked man who had opened the door and stepped outside as the lightning flickered.
Leander closed his eyes. The image was there: the gap in the door, the man, his back hunched. When he opened his eyes he saw no one, and asked, “What do you smell?”
“It—” Sarah hesitated. “It smells like the outhouse.”
“Shit.”
He wasn’t supposed to say the word, but he did sometimes—though rarely around his sister. She let go of his waist and stepped back from him. “That’s right,” she whispered. “Shit.” He couldn’t tell if she was still frightened by the fact that there was another person in the stable with them or that she had said a word that she had been taught never to utter. Then she said, “I smell his shit.”
“I saw him leave.” Leander couldn’t bring himself to say anything more—to suggest that the man was naked was, in some way, more of a transgression than saying a forbidden word.
“We must have scared him off?” Sarah asked.
“Yes.”
“Let’s go now, Leander.”
“First—” He placed the wrapped fish in his sister’s arms and moved away from her. “Hold that, and you stay right there. Don’t move.” He started walking toward the back of the stable.
“Where are you going?” Her voice was full of panic.
“Just stay put. I’ll be right back.”
Leander walked slowly toward the back doors. Horses thrust their heads over the walls as he passed. When he reached the back door, he pulled it open just enough so he could peer out into the yard. He could see the Poes’ house and hear chickens in their coop. There was no sight of the man, and the rain had let up.
“Leander,” Sarah called.
He turned to look back toward his sister, but then something came over the stall to his right—the long-eared head of a mule, which brayed with such force and anger that Leander took a step backwards and slipped, his right boot gliding on something soft and slick. He fell to one knee, and to keep his balance he placed his right hand on the ground—and he gasped, “Shit.” It was warm and it covered his hand, and as he got to his feet there was another bolt of lightning, and in the flickering glow that came through the cracks in the boards he saw it: vile black shit laced with blood, dripping from his fingers.
Five
MARKET SQUARE HAD LONG BEEN THE CENTER OF NEWBURYPORT commerce. The Congregationalist meeting-house dominated its center, surrounded by a labyrinth of vendors’ stalls and shambles which stood on trodden dirt, flecked with crushed seashells. Below the square, a row of warehouses lined the riverbank, and the wharfs were crowded with ships and fishing smacks of every description. In the narrow streets that ran out of the square, there were dozens of boarding houses, taverns, grogshops, and brothels, all designed to accommodate the ever-transient seafarer. With nearly eight thousand residents, Newburyport was the fourth largest seaport on the East Coast. Her ships traded throughout the world, and it was not uncommon to find shrubs and trees indigenous to faraway lands such as Japan gracing the yards of the Federalist mansions on High Street. In the wainscoted parlors and drawing rooms of such homes, one might find Turkish carpets and furniture made of exotic woods imported from Africa or South America. The distance from High Street, which ran the length of a ridge above the Merrimack, to Market Square, at the water’s edge, was not great—fifteen minutes on foot, briefer by coach and four—but the social distinctions represented by the two locales was immeasurable, some would say insurmountable.
And yet the four men who entered Giles Wiggins’s rooms overlooking Market Square might be considered unofficial representatives of the city’s entire population: Jeremiah Storrs was one of Newburyport’s wealthiest shipbuilders; Emanuel Lunt’s family had operated a coasting schooner since well before the British had been run out of Boston; Simon Moss and his sons tended one of the most productive farms in Newbury; and Caleb Hatch had been constable, high sheriff, and now harbormaster during his three decades of service to the city. That these four men would agree to meet in one place would be, to many Newburyporters, curious, if not inconceivable; that they would gather, in secret as it were, in the humble offices of Dr. Wiggins would be nothing short of alarming, which was exactly why they had agreed upon such an unlikely venue.
Giles had placed the decanter of brandy on his desk, as though it were a peace offering, and he poured each man a drink as they settled into the motley collection of chairs he had assembled
from his two rooms.
Jeremiah Storrs, who was well into his eighties, naturally assumed possession of the one worn leather armchair. “Word spreads faster than disease,” Storrs said. “The idea of closing the harbor has swept along High Street virtually overnight, and I can tell you that we won’t stand for it. Instead ships will enter Boston or, worse, Salem.” He tossed back his brandy and held out his glass so that Giles might replenish it.
“It’s one ship.” Emmanuel Lunt smoked a dudeen, a clay pipe, which caused him to speak through gritted teeth. “But there’s already a sense of panic up and down the wharves.” He had lost his right hand in action at sea, and the end of his forearm was sheathed in a thick piece of leather that over the years had been polished smooth from wear.
“Last time we had something like this,” Simon Moss said, “smoke houses were established on every road leading into the port. It was August—terrible heat, I tell you—and we couldn’t get our produce to market. I ended up with a barn full of garbage and fields left to rot. Poor farmers such as I can’t afford to sustain such losses again.”
“This may very well be true, gentlemen,” Caleb Hatch said. He stood behind his chair with one hand tucked in his vest, and spoke as though he were making a public address. “But I recall that more than three dozen people succumbed on Federal Street alone in a matter of days.”
All four men began talking at once, their voices scraping and clawing over each other. Giles went to the window behind his desk and looked down on the activity in Market Square. It seemed an ordinary summer’s morning. The air was particularly clear after the previous day’s thunderstorm and rain. His rooms were on the second floor, so that he could see past the meeting-house spire, across the roofs of numerous waterfront buildings, to the pale blue expanse of the river basin. The Miranda lay at anchor just inside the north tip of Plum Island; atop her mainmast, a yellow flag fluttered in the breeze.
The din of voices went on for a minute, rising in pitch and ferocity, until Jeremiah Storrs finally pounded the tip of his cane on the floorboards. When the others quieted down, he said, “Gentlemen, if you please. What have we here? Can someone tell us so that we may assess the situation? Good Lord, if we must insist on this grand experiment called democracy—a silly notion with no real future, I assure you—then I suggest we proceed in something of a democratic fashion.”