Lake in the Clouds

by Sara Donati

  If she could talk to one of them in the language they shared maybe she could make sense of all of this, understand how it had become necessary to go against the things they had taught her. But all the guidance she had now was this paper.

  When Manny gave it to her, she had expected nothing more than a description of the child he was looking for, Selah’s daughter. To her surprise and great unease she found something very different: a carefully copied letter addressed to the director of the Almshouse, Mr. Furman—a man she had seen only once, and who, as far as she could tell, spent as little time as possible in the building.

  I hereby inform you that my Negro wench Ruth was brought to bed the fifth day of July 1799 with a female child called Connie. I do therefore hereby give you notice that I do abandon all my right & title and all responsibility for the care of said female child in accordance with the Gradual Manumission Act signed into law by the Legislature and do hereby pass the child into the care of this City. This Certificate of Abandonment made & provided by my own hand the 6th day of June 1801. Albert Vaark, Merchant, Pearl Street

  The names Ruth and Connie had been crossed through and over them were written Selah and Violet, in Manny’s hand.

  Hannah read the words a dozen times and a dozen more trying to make sense of it, and then she realized that the other side of the paper was not blank. He had copied the letter on the back of an advertisement.

  It was a notice like a hundred others she had seen nailed to doors and posts throughout this city and at every tavern and inn between here and Johnstown. Each was very much like the last: a name, a description, the circumstances by which a slave had slipped away, the promise of a small reward, of hell-fire and eternal damnation and whippings.

  But this notice was different: there was a drawing of the runaway, a woman with a witchy, feral look about her—Selah, Hannah reminded herself. This is meant to be Selah Voyager. And there was the reward, the unheard-of reward of five hundred dollars for the capture of the escaped slave woman Ruth who had murdered her rightful owner on the Newburgh dock. To be paid by the inconsolable widow, announced the poster. To render this city safe.

  Hannah ran her finger over the words on the page. A woman with dark skin was not entitled to take revenge on the man who stole her child. A woman with white skin was entitled to revenge the death of a husband, but she must call it something else, find some excuse to call for blood.

  All up and down the Hudson people would be studying this drawing. Women would shudder righteously and denounce the savagery of Africans; men would speak of the law and of justice and all of them would be thinking of the money, a fortune, enough to buy a small farm and keep a family for years. Shelter and food and peace. Men would be headed north in the hope of winning such a prize. None of them would ever see the letter Vaark had written to the Almshouse, or know the name of the child who had been taken from her mother because she was not profitable enough to keep.

  Hannah felt the anger rising in her, filling her as water filled an empty jar. She put Manny’s note back in her pocket and left the office, closing the door behind her.

  At the porter’s desk she found the first thing she must have: a group of boys tossing pebbles against the wall and wagering on the way they would fall. She pulled one of them aside and showed him a ha’penny. The bargain was struck that easily: he would deliver her note to Whitehall Street, and if he returned within a half hour, the porter would have another ha’penny for him.

  When he was gone, bare heels flashing as he ran, Hannah went to the one place in the Almshouse that required all her concentration and strength of will.

  The nursery was a room without windows and crowded with cots, and in each cot were two or three or even four babies, the youngest newborn and the oldest no more than two. Yesterday she had counted fifty-three of them, most undernourished, many sick, all of them left to the care of the city, abandoned or orphaned or lost.

  Today somewhere between five and ten of those fifty-three would be gone, one or two old and strong enough to be sent to the children’s ward. The rest would be buried in a common grave in the paupers’ field; the empty cots would be filled again before the day was out. Thousands of babies had passed through here, and Selah’s little girl had most probably been one of them.

  She opened the door to the stench of unwashed swaddling cloths and tallow candles that did little to lighten the dimness. The two matrons who worked in the nursery overnight nodded to her, both of them far too glad of another pair of capable hands to take any issue with the color of her skin. This was one place where Mrs. Graham never came to read her bible; none of the society ladies who visited the wards trailing servants and silk shawls spent time here.

  In the middle of the room an old man sat on a low stool. Hannah knew him only as Jakob; she had never had a conversation with him because, as far as she knew, he had learned no English in the twenty years he had been in the Almshouse. He spent all his time in the nursery, day and night, and it was more his place than anyone else’s.

  While Hannah paused at the door, Jakob began to sing to the three babies in his lap. A new quiet came over the room at the familiar sound, the same old lullaby he always sang, for the way it quieted the infants or maybe just because he knew no other. His gaze shifted constantly while he sang, sliding past Hannah without interest or concern and reminding her, as he always did, of an old sheepdog with eyes for nothing in the world but his charges. The babies in his lap would be the sickest, and he would hold them until they needed to be held no more.

  Hannah closed her eyes and thought of her grandmother Falling-Day, who had known how to comfort a hurting child. She heard the familiar voice at her ear: What cannot live must die.

  She went to the nearest cot and picked up a newborn, yellow of skin and eye, all tendon and bone and slack muscle, too listless to suckle the little finger she put in its mouth. Its skull was misshapen, with a tracing of blue veins as insubstantial as cobwebs. Each of the infants had a piece of paper pinned to its swaddling clothes. This one said: Unnamed female, number 174. Born 25 May, mother dead in childbed. Brought to the Almshouse on the same day by a neighbor who would not give her name. In sorrow shall ye bring forth children.

  Hannah concentrated, but she could detect nothing of the child’s spirit. What she held in her arms was an almost empty cocoon, without animating force. After a moment she crossed the room and held out the child to Jakob, who paused long enough in his song to look, the creased mouth surrounded by a gray bristle puckering as he studied unnamed female number 174.

  When Jakob had made room enough on his lap for one more, Hannah went back to the cots.

  She stayed in the nursery feeding and washing and rocking one infant after another until the church clocks scattered throughout the city began to strike seven and she knew that the doctors would all be gone. There was no more time to waste.

  She said this to the child in her arms, a little boy with skin the color of coffee, but she said it in her own language. The bright eyes blinked and then he opened his mouth to coo at her with great seriousness. He was one of the strong ones, sturdy enough in body and spirit to survive this place. He would live to move to the children’s ward and from there to one of the workrooms, where he would be trained to groom horses or burn charcoal or make buttons. Maybe someone like Amanda Spencer would claim him in a few years to train him as a house servant, if he was lucky. If he left this nursery before the next round of lung fever or croup made short work of them all.

  “You’re here late tonight.”

  Hannah drew in a sharp breath and reminded herself to smile. The woman who stood next to her had a thin face made lopsided by the fact that she had lost all her teeth on one side. She was the youngest of the nursery matrons, the one who had not yet been overwhelmed and hardened by sorrow. Once in a while Hannah had heard her laugh.

  “I lost track of the time.” It was the truth, but not the entire truth.

  “A young lady must have better things to be doing.” The mat
ron held out her arms for the boy. “Best get along home now.”

  I do have something else to do, Hannah thought of saying. And wouldn’t you be surprised to hear what it is.

  Stealing the key to the records office was the easiest part. It hung in the caretaker’s little cubbyhole, in a row with a dozen other keys, each carefully labeled in Mrs. Sloo’s even, blockish hand: kine-pox office, apothecary, storeroom, records office. It seemed such a small thing to take one key and replace it for a short while with another. Mr. Magee himself would take no note; he was already in bed. For a moment Hannah listened to him snoring on the other side of the wall. His ability to sleep through every kind of commotion was legend in the Almshouse.

  Sometimes a doctor would come to look in on an interesting case in the evening, but even this threat had been removed—to Hannah’s relief and uneasiness both—by the fact that an autopsy was scheduled to begin at the hospital at exactly seven. A woman bloated and heavy with child, found dead on the docks with nothing to identify her. Dr. Simon would wonder why Hannah had missed such an opportunity, but she wouldn’t be here to explain.

  The door to the records office presented itself; a door like any other. On one end of the hallway, doors led to the main building, and on the other to the infirmary. Hannah waited for a moment, listening for footsteps. Then she turned the key in the lock.

  Overfilled as it was from cellars to attic, the Almshouse was never a quiet place. Hannah stood very still for a long time in the middle of Mr. Eddy’s office and listened. The familiar wails and conversation and squabbling worked to calm her galloping heart while she looked around herself. The room was crisscrossed with evening sunlight from a single window, and each shaft of light was heavy with dust. She pressed both hands against her face until the urge to sneeze had passed.

  Paper enough to bury a man standing, Mrs. Sloo had said. Looking around herself, Hannah saw what she had meant. It was a neat room with a large desk and a chair as the only furniture, but deep shelves reached around the entire room, interrupted only by door and window. The shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, with a ladder that ran on a track to reach the highest ones. Every shelf was filled with half-boxes and every half-box with record books facing spine out. To Hannah’s great relief, all of them were labeled.

  She climbed the ladder to the top in the far corner of the room and began to work her way down, starting at every new sound in the hallway. It was far busier than she had ever imagined, and she realized now how lucky she had been to even get this far without being noticed. It took considerable effort to focus on the records before her, which turned out to be very dull: correspondence with the city council and mayor, minutes of meetings of the trustees, records of monies spent on food and raw wool and timber, gifts received, accounts with merchants all over the city.

  Most of the boxes had not been disturbed in a very long while and Hannah was sometimes forced to use her handkerchief to wipe dust from the cards. It took a half hour to work her way down one wall, and still she had failed to find a single reference to orphans or abandoned children or slaves of any age. She began to move more quickly, listening with only half an ear as people passed by. Hannah’s worst moment was hearing Mrs. Sloo’s voice, but it turned out that she had no interest in the records office; she had collared one of the weavers and brought him into the relative silence of the hallway to quiz him about a loaf of bread that had gone missing from the kitchen. The traffic did not stop until the charwoman came by with a sloshing bucket and began scrubbing the floor.

  She sang as she worked in a language Hannah didn’t recognize, the melody underscored by the rhythmic movement of the brush over the floorboards. By the time she was finished the light was almost gone and Hannah had found the apprenticeship records: names and trades and the terms on which a ward of the Almshouse was sent to live and work for a carpenter or a ropemaker or seamstress. Hundreds of names filled these books in a small, cramped hand, but none of the children listed here were less than ten years old.

  In the last of the light, Hannah climbed down from the ladder and stood considering the stub of candle that sat in a dish on the desk when a familiar voice shouted just outside the door.

  “Christ on the bloody cross!”

  There was the sound of glass shattering and, following it, the thud of a body hitting the floor.

  Hannah stepped off the ladder and into the shadows with one fist pressed against her chest. Three things occurred to her all at once: Dr. Savard was back early from the autopsy, he had made a mess of some kind and fallen perhaps because he was drunk, and she would be trapped here until it was all cleared away. From the smell of distilled alcohol that was filling the air it seemed that he must have dropped a specimen jar; by the sound it had been a very large one.

  “Mr. Magee!” he bellowed. “Mr. Magee, I need you!”

  There was no chance at all that his voice would carry so far as Mr. Magee’s bed, something the doctor knew himself. A shiver ran up Hannah’s back at the tone in his voice: even in the most extreme moments she had never seen Dr. Savard lose his composure. Just as that thought came to Hannah he stopped shouting and said in a much lower voice, “Goddammit, if I bleed to death it’ll be on your sorry head, man.”

  Dr. Savard was bleeding; he had cut himself. He needed help, but how badly? She stepped back again and brushed against the shelves, dislodging a cloud of dust.

  It wasn’t a very loud sneeze, she told herself. And then she sneezed again.

  Outside the door there was sudden silence.

  “Who’s there?” barked the doctor.

  As he rattled the doorknob Hannah entertained the thought of climbing through the window. She sneezed again.

  “Miss Bonner?” His tone was dry and completely neutral.

  Hannah cleared her throat. “Yes?”

  “What a fortunate coincidence. I need your assistance, if you’d be so kind as to come out here.”

  “It will take ten stitches or more to close it,” Hannah said sometime later. She was bent over Dr. Savard’s hand, working by the light of hastily lit candles. “It could have been much worse. You’re lucky.”

  “Oh, very fortunate indeed,” he replied. There was a swipe of blood on his cheek and dribbles of it all down his shirtfront, as well as a line of sweat on his brow, but his expression was as mocking and detached as ever. “Be so kind as to pass me the bottle in that bottom drawer, I will need some distraction from your needlework.”

  Without looking up from his hand, Hannah said, “When the last of the splinters are out.”

  “Of course,” said Dr. Savard. “I wouldn’t dream of inconveniencing you.”

  Hannah dropped another glass shard onto the examination table. “My stepmother says that white men use sarcasm to hide something they would like to say but may not.”

  He grunted. “As you well know, I am not inclined to withhold my opinion on anything. Speaking of hiding things, what exactly were you doing in the records office?” After a while he said, “You resort to silence, and I resort to sarcasm. To each the weapon of his own choosing, Miss Bonner.”

  Hannah brought two candles closer to improve her view of the injury. The doctor had interrupted his fall on the wet floor with his hand, which landed on a piece of the broken jar. The cut ran in an angle across his palm from the base of his little finger to the juncture of the thumb and wrist. It was deepest in the pad of muscle below the thumb, and in fact if the angle were only slightly different he might have done himself more serious injury by cutting into the artery.

  With the tips of her fingers she pressed along the edge of the cut to be sure that there were no more glass shards. Dr. Savard looked away and said nothing at all.

  “No more splinters,” she announced.

  “Then if I might remind you—”

  Hannah avoided his gaze as she opened the drawer and retrieved the bottle he had asked for, the candlelight sparking hints of red in the deep brown of the brandy. It was half full, and it made a little clink
ing sound when she put it down before him.

  “I should think you’ve already had enough.” She wondered at herself, that she should make such a comment to him when she knew how it would be received.

  But he was more curious than offended. “And how do you know how much brandy I’ve had to drink, Miss Bonner?”

  Hannah was preparing the suture needle, but she looked up to meet his gaze. “The more formal your speech, the more you’ve been drinking. When you are completely sober your language would make any lady faint.”

  He blinked in surprise. “You’ve made a study of my habits, I see.”

  Hannah said, “I’m ready to start. If you are going to drink, then you had best go ahead with it now.”

  “You would prefer I take laudanum?” he asked, reaching for the bottle with his uninjured right hand. “Or should I take nothing at all and sneer at the pain, as your Mohawk warriors are trained to do?”

  She glanced up at him and saw the challenge in the dark eyes. He was embarrassed and ill at ease and in pain, but Hannah was not inclined to humor him by entering into the argument he wanted. She said, “You must please yourself, Dr. Savard. As you always do.”

  He snorted softly, the corner of his mouth twitching.

  Hannah began to stitch. From the corner of her eye she saw how his right hand tightened on the unopened bottle.

  “You needn’t take such small stitches,” he said finally. “I don’t mind the scar.”

  “It will heal faster this way,” Hannah replied calmly. “Unless that was an order?”

  He exhaled loudly, as if she were a stubborn student and he a poorly used teacher.

  Hannah worked as quickly as she could, and after a minute she was so focused on the work that she forgot the man attached to the hand. The flinching of his fingers at every movement of the needle meant only that there was no nerve damage; the sounds he made now and then were irrelevant.