by John Smolens
In Market Square, Giles helped the high sheriff Thomas Poole as he organized the dozens of men who had volunteered to address the issue of standing water. There was much discussion about where to begin. Poole was of a mind that certain sections of Newburyport were beyond rehabilitation, the waterfront, in particular, and it would be a waste of time and effort to work there. His inclination was to concentrate on the North End, implying that it was populated with truly God-fearing Christians who led clean, moral lives. He bridled at the doctor’s suggestion that it was the wealthier section of town where there were more land-owning men who were qualified to vote. Ultimately, a compromise was struck, whereby the men were divided into two groups, one to work their way north from the square, and the other to move south, their shovels and picks shouldered as though they were marching off to battle.
The doctor then walked down Water Street, which meandered along the riverbank. The road was crammed with ordinaries, grog shops, boarding houses, and brothels which catered to the constant ebb and flow of sailors whose ships passed through the harbor. The neighborhood was remarkably quiet. There was little of the music and banter that usually issued from tavern doors. Occasionally, a cart or wagon would rattle by, conveying more fever victims—some alive, though prostrate, and others already wrapped in canvas or linen or, in one case, a crudely built coffin made of whitewashed clapboards.
He stopped in front of Madame Juniper’s Hotel, a two-story house with a balcony where women usually sat (when the weather was agreeable) and enticed men who passed by in the street. This balcony, commonly referred to as the Widows’ Walk, was empty, despite the fact that it was proving to be a warm day. Giles entered the lobby, where an old Indian named Joseph sat behind the desk, playing a harmonium. He was a member of the Pentucket tribe, and his eyes were shelled in a weary triangulation of creases. When he stopped playing, Giles could hear sounds from upstairs—moans, not an uncommon sound to be heard in this house, but these seemed not to be of an erotic nature.
“The Madame has more sick?” he asked Joseph.
“She cares for them all,” Joseph said. “They’s most all sick, and girls from other houses have been sent over. Madame Juniper has turned the place into a hospital.”
“You feel all right?”
“I had the fever long ago. Miss Juniper say she has never been sick a day in her life.”
The doctor climbed the stairs to the second floor. The hallway was narrow, lined with doors that ordinarily would be closed; however, now all the doors were open and the sounds of suffering coming from the rooms were all too familiar. He found Madame Juniper in the second room on the right, where there were three girls lying ill. Two occupied the bed, and the third lay on a ticking mattress on the floor. The smell was overpowering, worse than at the pest-house, where tent flaps could be thrown open to allow some passage of air.
Madame Juniper had a leather fire bucket full of black vomit. She carried it out of the room and led Giles to the back end of the hall. She was a small woman, and now in middle age had turned stout and dowdy. She herself was part Indian and she had glossy black hair, streaked with gray, which fell to the small of her back. When she reached the open window at the end of the hall, she threw the contents of the bucket out into the alley behind the house.
Turning, she looked at him with moist, tired eyes. “I told myself that when the second girl came down sick I’d start sending them up to your pest-house, but they were so afraid to go—believing it was the place that would assure their deaths. So I let them stay. And then more and more got sick, and the competition started sending their girls over, so now I’m charging a dollar a day to house sick whores.”
“How many have you lost?”
“Three. If this fever keeps up, all my girls will be killed off. Same too for the competition. Newburyport will at last be rid of sins of the flesh.” One girl began screaming, but Madame Juniper didn’t seem to hear her. “You know about the apothecaries?”
“No.”
Thankfully, the screaming ceased, descending into whimpering. Madame Juniper led Giles back down the hall. “They were robbed, I hear, during the night. All three of them.”
“I was just with Mr. Poole and some of the constabulary, and there was no mention—”
Madame Juniper looked over her shoulder, her brown face almost gleeful. “That only confirms my suspicions, my dear doctor. It’s the constables that are often behind theft and robbery in this town, and now I fear they will be emboldened by this fever. There’s talk of gangs of men roaming the streets last night. I ask you, who truly benefits from the services I offer? The high sheriff and the constables. They are sent around on a regular basis to collect payment—tithing they likes to call it, as though my girls were the congregation and the high sheriff was the reverend.” She smiled warmly. “Crime and the law go hand in hand. I have said so for years, but nobody listens to this old whore.”
“Medicine was stolen?”
“Of course, Doctor. Laudanum. Quinine. Emetics. Whatever else you might use to assist these miserable souls. My guess is that if this fever does get worse, you’ll have to apply to the high sheriff himself for medicine—at prices many times higher than … well, you understand.”
“What you say may be true of some constables,” Giles said, “but Thomas Poole, he’s an honest man. I don’t believe he’d be a part of such a scheme.”
Madame Jupiter only shrugged. “Don’t talk to me of honest men in this house.”
The girl began wailing again. From another room there came the guttural sounds of someone throwing up. Madame Juniper paused in the doorway and watched as one of her girls laid more blankets over a girl lying in bed; then after a moment, she led the doctor downstairs.
“Joseph,” she said when they reached the lobby, “please continue to play. It drowns out the sounds of their misery, and more than one of the girls has said they appreciate the music.”
Joseph began pushing the harmonium back and forth between his hands, wheezing out an approximation of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
Madame Juniper took the doctor by the arm and they went into the saloon, which was empty. “I conducted a little experiment,” she said, as she went behind the bar, took a bottle of rum and two glasses down off the shelf, and poured drinks. “Tell me, do you prefer to sweat someone with the fever, or do you chill them?”
Giles stood across the bar from her and gazed into the glass she had placed before him. “At the pest-house we’ve been sweating them. In part, it’s a matter of practicality. We have no means of cooling them down in such weather. On the other hand, blankets are growing scarce.”
“Just as I thought.” Madame Juniper drank off her rum and leaned her elbows on the bar. “Well, I have had a little ice from Mulgrew’s icehouse—though I’m out now. So I chilled several girls and sweated the rest.” She poured herself another dram. “This is not exactly the ideal place to conduct experiments of a scientific nature.”
Giles drank his rum, and she refilled his glass. “What were the results?”
“Hard to say. All three girls died—the two hot ones and the cold one—so you tell me what conclusion you would draw.”
“My conclusion?” Giles raised his glass. He loved the color of rum. He drank the gold liquid off. “We are all at the mercy of God.”
Madame Juniper laughed. “You’re starting to sound like the Reverend Cary.”
“Hardly. The reverend sees this as divine retribution, and he would question why any of your girls would be spared. He would condemn any intervention—yours and mine, Madame. He’d say we were doing Satan’s work, trying to save the lives of sinners who are eternally damned.”
Madame Juniper raised her glass in a toast and whispered, “To Reverend Cary.”
“Amen.”
Twelve
LEANDER REMAINED IN THE HOUSE FOR MOST OF THE DAY, stoking the fire, but the smoke became too much, and by late afternoon he was sitting on the back stoop where the air was clear. His eyes watered ter
ribly. He expected his father to return home soon, hungry and tired, so when he heard the call of the fishmonger pushing his cart down Orange Street, he got some coins from the jar on the mantel, went out into the road, and purchased a haddock. He cleaned the fish, laying the fillets out in the iron skillet, and after preparing the potatoes and carrots for boiling he returned to the back stoop and waited. If his mother were here, she would insist that he pray—not for his losses, but for what he had: the house over his head, the meal waiting to be cooked, the cooling air of an early evening in June.
But he could not pray.
Last night, while rowing Colin Thurlow’s skiff back down-river to Joppa Flats, he had cried, and he had sworn he would never do so again. Now he realized he was through with prayer, as well. This frightened him a little. For prayer was sustenance. His grandfather had often quoted the Bible as they dug clams in Joppa Flats, his mother had insisted that they read the Bible every night, and it was always the time of day Sarah looked forward to most, for she could not go to sleep without a story.
Leander sat on the stoop staring into the dooryard until the light faded from the sky. When it was dark, he went into the kitchen and cooked the potatoes and carrots, and one fillet in butter and salt. He ate at the table, barely able to see the food on his plate for the smoke. After cleaning up, he returned to the back stoop again and watched as the first stars appeared in the night sky.
He would not cry.
And he could not pray.
But at least he could still look at the stars, the one thing his sister said she had always wanted to do.
He wondered if she could see them now.
That night, Giles climbed the stairs to his rooms overlooking Market Square, exhausted. He and Dr. Bradshaw agreed that they would work alternate night shifts at the pest-house, which was growing in size and complexity at a startling rate. New tents, made from old sailcloth, were filling up with patients as soon as they were erected. More than two dozen people had been carted up the hill to the pit. Medicine was running low, and word of the burglaries in all three apothecaries had spread through the seaport. Clearly, these thefts were a concerted effort, suggesting a sinister intent that aroused fear and suspicion. In the late afternoon, Giles had walked downhill to the high sheriff’s office on Green Street, but no one was there except a clerk, who claimed all the constables were out working with the clean-up crews. Mr. Poole himself had gone into the North End to oversee the removal of a dead mule from a cistern.
When he returned to Market Square, Giles found an envelope under his door; it contained a single folded sheet of paper.
My Dearest Doctor Wiggins,
I respectfully request your Presence when I make a Visitation to my ship Miranda, lying at anchor under the Yellow Flag. It is my purpose to determine the Condition of my cargo, my new Horses, and the crew aboard said vessel. Please be prepared for the arrival of my Coach shortly after dawn on the morrow.
Yours, Enoch Sumner
Giles sat down at his desk, with the thought to open the bottom right-hand drawer, where he kept the bottle of rum and several glasses. But he was so tired that he merely sat there, staring down at the note, until he finally laid his head down upon his folded arms.
Miranda lay in her bed listening to the floorboards. It was still dark out—she guessed it was another hour before dawn—and this was often the time of night when she heard stirrings about the house, as though giant mice were making mischief. The floorboards and stair treads told all. They creaked, they groaned, no matter how softly someone stepped. By ear she could chart the movements of her son, his frequent guests, and the house staff, as they moved about in the dark like some barefooted game of chess. Bed frames, too—they often protested beneath their occupants, whose passions, no matter how muted, how muffled, could not avoid expression by worrying fine joinery.
Miranda threw back her covers, knowing she could not sleep now. She donned her robe and slippers and went down to the kitchen, where she brewed a cup of tea. She arranged herself on the settle so that her feet were warmed by the last smoldering embers in the fireplace. From this vantage point she could look out a window at the courtyard. The whorls in the glass panes provided interesting distortions in the orderly pattern of cobblestones, and as dawn approached, the stable door began to change from gray to white. The courtyard was as still as a still life. If she were a painter (something she had fancied for herself when she was young), this would be her subject: courtyard cobblestones, the whitewashed boards of a stable door, all suffused with that predawn light that suggests the possibilities of a new day. And that would be her theme: anticipation. She would paint her courtyard so that the viewer would feel the quiet but powerful sense of anticipation inherent in such a scene. The horses are just beginning to awaken in their stalls, eager to be harnessed; the mourning doves lining the eaves are starting to coo; and any minute the cock will crow, formally announcing the new day. What was lacking, what kept her awake half the night, listening for the patter of clandestine footsteps, was the fact that each day seldom offered her much sense of anticipation anymore. Her daily routines were as similar as the worn cobblestones, and useless and transparent as the faded whitewash that revealed the knots in the wide pine boards of the stable door. For years she had told herself that her duty, her role, was to oversee the proper operation of the household, but the simple fact was that if she were not to do so, the Sumner manor would continue to run with relentless if imperfect efficiency.
And then she heard movement, her son’s uneven stomp as he descended the front stairs, accompanied by his hand gliding first along the banister and then the wainscot in the hall. When he pushed open the swinging kitchen door, he paused, startled to find his mother on the settle with her tea.
“Yes, well,” he announced, and cleared his throat. “Aren’t we up early.”
Miranda nodded toward the window. “I was admiring the still life of dawn.”
“Were you now? The still life.” His eyebrows tilted inward, two partners bowing in a quadrille. He gazed stupidly at the window as if he expected something, or someone, to suddenly appear there. Then, confused and a little agitated, he said, “You’re never awake at this hour.”
Her laughter rang off the iron pots hanging above the fireplace. “How would you know?”
He cleared his throat again. “Well, Mother,” he said, “you rarely make an appearance until Fields rings the bell for breakfast, and even then you often insist on having a tray brought up to your room.”
“On such days I cannot make it down the stairs—” and dramatically, she leaned back and placed a wrist across her forehead—“because I have been so thoroughly exhausted by my nocturnal passions.”
“Your what?”
“Dear, if you didn’t drink yourself into a stupor every night, you might have some idea of what goes on beneath your own vast roof.” She lowered her arm and put her teacup down beside her on the settle. “For all your revelry, you miss so much of the entertainment.”
“Entertainment?”
“Midnight assignations. Early-morning trysts. Lovers, scurrying along the hallways, ducking in and out of bedrooms. It’s transparent and, in its own way, quite innocent—like children at play.” She got to her feet, taking one more look out the window as the cock crowed.
“You duck in and out of bedrooms?”
She moved in his direction, causing him to retreat a step in defense. “Oh, no,” she said. “I find that too … prosaic. They need the poetry of the night.”
“The what?”
“It’s the maid’s folly, the cook’s compensation, this nocturnal poetry. But this is not to say that I approve. Such behavior is not to be tolerated, yet it does go on. And for the participants it’s all the sweeter for its clandestine nature.” She nodded toward the window, the courtyard now cast in the first ambient glow of sunrise. “No, I prefer more bestial entertainments.”
“Still life?”
“In my heart, there’s nothing still.” She t
urned and smiled up at his shocked face. “You know, like that Russian queen who has copulated with every stallion in St. Petersburg. Catherine—that’s why she’s ‘the Great.’”
Miranda lowered her head and moved forward. Enoch stepped aside, and like a matador, he swung his arm out, pushing the door open, and stood erect so that she might pass without his being gored.
Thirteen
AS PROMISED, ENOCH’S COACH PICKED UP GILES SHORTLY AFTER sunrise, and they proceeded to Sumner’s Wharf, where a skiff conveyed them downriver and into the wide basin. The Miranda sat at anchor, perched on its own image in dawn glass, her sides streaked and fouled. The constables’ two boats stood watch, one off her bow, the other off her stern.
“Sirs,” Junior Martins called from the nearest boat, “what be your purpose?”
“We are here,” Enoch answered, his voice booming across the water, “to inspect the conditions on board my ship.” When he spoke, the tassels at the ends of his enormous cocked hat danced on their golden threads.
Martins was another one of Giles’s wartime amputees—there were perhaps a dozen between Newburyport and Salisbury, to the north—and he looked at the doctor as though seeking rational explanation. “You wants to board her, sir?”
“You object, Junior?” Giles asked.
Martins glanced fearfully up at the ship. “Not iffen you think it be necessary, Doctor.”
“Has there been anything amiss?” Enoch asked.
“Amiss?” Baffled, Martins scratched the stubble on his chin with his remaining hand. “We hear barely a peep out of them all day, though at night some of them take up song. It appears they have plenty of grog on board. Doctor, remember how we used to sing when we was fightin’ the Brits?”
“I do.”
“A sweet, sad music it was.”