Lake in the Clouds (41 page)

“I look to the details of funding and support so that these good men can go about their business without distraction,” explained the reverend, and he waddled back to his chair while Will introduced Dr. Simon.

Hannah’s first thought was that Richard Todd and Will had not told her what she really needed to know about Dr. Simon. Of middle age and dressed in Quaker gray, he had the kind and intelligent expression that had been described to her, but there was nothing soft about him at all, and without knowing exactly why, she was reminded of her uncle Bitter-Words, who had been Keeper of the Faith at Barktown, before the last of the Kahnyen’kehàka had left Trees-Standing-in-Water.

Will went on with the introductions: Mr. Furman, superintendent of the Almshouse; Dr. Hosack; Dr. Benyus, who bowed deeply from the waist; Dr. Pascalis, who had some paralysis on the left side of his face that dragged down the corner of his eye and mouth both. The last of the men, the one who had taken his place to write, turned out not to be a doctor at all, but a journalist.

“Mr. Henry Lamm, of the
New-York Intelligencer.
I hadn’t been expecting you today, Mr. Lamm.” Will Spencer was always polite, but there was an unusually sharp edge to his tone.

Mr. Lamm inclined his head and sat down again to write. “Dr. Wallace invited me,” he said, without looking up from his notes.

“Let’s get started, shall we?” This from Mr. Roberts, who sat far back from the table to accommodate his girth.

Hannah cast a questioning look at Will, but he looked as puzzled as she felt.

“Gentlemen?” Will sent the question out into the room, but it was Dr. Simon who responded, clearing his throat first.

“My colleagues are very interested in Miss Bonner’s background and training,” he said. “If she has no objection, they would like to ask her a few questions.”

“There was no mention of this—” Will began, but Hannah held up a hand to stop him.

“I have no objection.”

Will hesitated. “As you wish.”

He thought she was being foolish or foolhardy or simply stupid to agree to such an inquisition, but Hannah was far more angry than she was anxious. These men had come to see her as the boys went to see the orangutans, to satisfy their curiosity. Most of them meant no harm and would ask her simple questions about fevers and broken bones, but not all of them.

By his expression she could see that Dr. Ehrlich was here to expose and embarrass her, and the journalist was here to see what news could be made of it.

But Hannah was overcome with a sudden and complete calm. For three years she had endured Richard Todd’s impatience, the endless questions designed to distract from the obvious, his poor tempers. She had treated sore throats and set broken bones and dosed fevers; she had helped many and saved a few and watched others die, her little brother and her grandmother among them. All of it she had recorded in her daybook, every step she had taken on this journey.

Let Dr. Ehrlich—let all of them—do their worst.

Hannah woke the next morning to find Ethan standing next to her bed in his nightdress. He was turned toward her open window, his head tilted to one side as he listened to a creaky deep voice raised in a singsong.

“Do you hear it?” Ethan asked her.

“Yes,” Hannah said, rubbing her eyes. “I hear it. It’s only a street vendor, Ethan. You know, like the man who brings the milk or the woman who sold you boys some gingerbread yesterday on your way to the theater.”

He turned his face to her, blinking slowly. She reached out to touch his cheek, and he stepped back a little, shaking his head. Then he raised his chin and echoed the song that they could still hear, faintly, as the vendor moved down Bowling Green.

“‘White sand, choice sand, lily white sand.’ He’s singing about Lily. Is Lily in the white sand? Is she lost in the white sand?”

Gooseflesh rose on Hannah’s arms, but she forced herself to move slowly so that she would not startle him out of his walking sleep. Very carefully she folded back the covers.

“Come, Ethan, sleep here a while. Come lay your head. Lily is at Lake in the Clouds safe and sound in her bed. She is asleep, and so should you be. Sleep.”

He let out a great sigh, of relief or weariness or sadness that he had not made her understand, but after a moment he climbed up on the bed and closed his eyes. Hannah lay awake next to him, shivering in spite of the warm bedclothes and thinking of her sister. Lily white sand. Lily white. Lily.

After a good while she realized that no amount of O’seronni sensible reasoning would allow her to ignore what a dream-walker had come to tell her. She got up, lit a candle, and wrote a letter.

Will was the only one up and about to see her off to the Almshouse for her first day of work with Dr. Simon. She left the posting of the letter to him, and resisted the urge to tell him why it was important. He had many fine qualities, but Hannah wasn’t sure that Will’s open-mindedness would extend
to dream-walking. She must trust him to see that the letter found its way home, and quickly.

Just before seven, Cicero delivered Hannah to the Almshouse, a rambling, shabby building that sat across from the beautifully kept city hall park like a boil on the nose of an otherwise elegant lady.

Cicero started the long climb down from the driver’s box, but in her eagerness Hannah opened her own door and jumped lightly to the ground.

“That’s not the way we do it, miss,” said the older man, dropping his chin to look at her through overgrown eyebrows, divided by a deep and disapproving furrow.

“I’ll try harder, Cicero, really I will, but—” Hannah sidestepped two old women who shuffled down the street with arms twined together like branches. “I don’t want to be late.”

His nose twitched in distaste as he looked at the Almshouse. “I’ll be back at four sharp, right here. Don’t you make me come in that place to find you, miss.”

“Four exactly,” Hannah echoed, and waited until Cicero had climbed back on the box and clucked to the team. He seemed to have assigned himself the role of her protector in the city, and Hannah was both touched and irritated by his concern for her, but she was also very glad when the carriage had disappeared into the traffic on the Broad Way and she was free to study the Almshouse.

It was three stories high and far bigger than the fine homes on Bowling Green, but it had been hard used in its short life and it seemed almost to sag in the middle. There were faces at many of the small windows, children and old people mostly. One face was so old and its expression so vacant that Hannah couldn’t be sure if it belonged to a man or a woman. Sometimes the very old gave up on this world to concentrate on the next, and it was that kind of waiting that Hannah saw in the face that was watching her now. Wanting nothing, expecting nothing.

A building this big, filled with people too poor or old or sick to feed themselves, with no families to claim or care for them; such a thing was almost beyond comprehension. She wondered if it had to do with the city itself, so many people crowded together. Whatever the cause, the city was full of people who were so desperate for help that they might be
willing to overlook the color of her skin. That was what she would find out today, for better or worse.

When she walked up the steps and opened the front door she was greeted by the smells of porridge and boiled onions, too many bodies too close together, chamber pots waiting to be emptied, flesh gone foul, sour stomachs spilling over. A little boy came hurtling past her and bumped into her bag so that she had to steady herself with one hand against the door frame, or begin by falling on her face.

“Watch yourself, little bugger!” screeched a voice nearby. Hannah wasn’t sure if this was meant for her or the boy, but she decided it was better not to find out.

The entryway was filled with people, most of them elderly, all of whom studied her openly.

“Look, Josie.” An old man wrapped in a striped blanket turned to his neighbor. “An Indian princess come to the poor-house. Maybe she’ll want to share your bed, eh?” And he let out a huffing laugh that quickly turned into a cough.

There was a raised desk at the far end of the room, and next to it a row of children standing patiently with bundles clasped to their chests. The oldest of them, a boy, held a crying baby that seemed to be covered from scalp to toe with a scaly rash. The porter was making notes on a pile of papers with a ragged quill, and he didn’t look up until Hannah stood directly before his desk.

He was maybe thirty, with a shock of greasy hair that fell forward over his brow. His fingers were ink stained and so was his chin with its few dark hairs, which he was stroking in a distracted way. When he looked up at her he smiled with only one side of his mouth, drawing attention to the cleft in his lip, poorly hidden by a feathery mustache.

“May I help you?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the crying baby.

Hannah introduced herself and asked for Dr. Simon.

The porter’s stained fingers stopped wandering through his chin hairs while he looked at Hannah more closely, taking in the plain gray wool work gown and apron in an old-fashioned cut, the cloak of boiled wool and her medical bag.

“The new assistant?”

“Yes. For a short time, anyway.”

The oldest of the children raised his voice to ask a question
in a language Hannah didn’t recognize. He had eyes the same shade of gray as Elizabeth.

“Irish orphans,” said the porter. “Both parents died on the passage over. They want to know if you have a war club in your bag.” He translated this question as if it were perfectly reasonable, but not especially interesting.

“You speak Irish, Mr.—”

“Chamberlain. I do. My mother is Irish.”

“You can tell them that I carry no weapons. Tell them that I’m a doctor.”

One corner of his mouth jerked, but he did as she asked and got in return another, much longer question from the boy.

“You’re the first Indian they’ve ever laid eyes on, miss, and the first woman doctor. You can see by the look on his face that it will take more than my word.”

The boy was looking at her expectantly, and so Hannah opened the bag to show them that it contained nothing more than her medical instruments, her notebooks, two full-length aprons, and the food that Mrs. Douglas had packed for her when she refused breakfast. The smallest of the children put his head so far inside that his hair fell forward and Hannah could see the lice crawling on the back of a dirty neck. When he looked up again his eyes were perfectly round.

“Arán.”

Hannah gave the porter a questioning glance.

“It’s the bread he’s looking at.”

“They’re hungry?”

He nodded. “They always are. As soon as I get the paperwork finished they’ll go off to the bathhouse and then the kitchens. And then Dr. Simon will want to see them in the Kine-Pox office.”

Hannah took out the bread wrapped in a piece of linen and handed it to the oldest boy. “Tell him to divide it evenly. Now where do I find Dr. Simon?”

The children had fallen over the bread and paid no more attention to Hannah.

“Somewhere in the sick wards, most likely.” He reached under the table and a shrill bell rang twice, once short and once long.

“Mrs. Sloo will show you the way.”

A small woman had appeared at Hannah’s elbow, as quick
and silent as a shadow in spite of the fact that she was easily as wide as she was tall. Under a startling white mobcap perfect iron gray curls were lined up in a row across her forehead. Dark brown eyes huddled close around a tiny fist of a nose, and below that was a full-lipped mouth perfectly shaped, but no wider than a spoon. Both sides of that astonishing mouth were turned up in a smile that showed a line of perfectly white and even teeth, as small as a child’s, in gums the color of ripe cherries. It was a face of contradictions, but with a quick, intelligent, and clearly impatient expression.

“The new assistant, I take it.” Mrs. Sloo looked Hannah up and down. “I’m the housekeeper, twenty years now, old place and new. Mr. Sloo’s the keeper of the bridewell, not the gaol, mind, but the bridewell. Expect you passed by there on your way uptown.”

Then she was off, walking at a rolling pace that defied her size, her skirts snapping around her.

“You’ll want to know your way around,” she said, putting back her head to throw her voice up toward the ceiling. “This is a big place, easy to get lost. Mr. Furman’s office there, the superintendent. A devil for detail is Mr. Furman. Mr. Cox, purveyor. You’ll want to stay out of Mr. Cox’s way of a morning till he’s had his coffee. He’s a right bear without his coffee, is Mr. Cox. This hallway takes you out to the kitchens and bake house. Breakfast at six, dinner at noon, supper at six is how we working folk do it. I expect you’re used to breakfast at eleven and dinner at four, but you’ll adjust or go hungry, like everybody else. That way to the washhouse and beyond that’s the workhouse, that’s where you’ll find all the able-bodied men from seven till six. The able-bodied work here or they don’t eat. Cobblers, hoopers, what have you. Two carpenters do naught but make coffins. Most of them we use ourselves and the rest Mr. Cox sells or barters. A fierce man in a barter is Mr. Cox.