City of Dreams by Beverly Swerling Read Free Book Online Page B

off the black fingers for her?”
    Lucas hesitated only a moment. “Why not? But it will have to be here in the cabin, not at my shop in town. We were lucky last time. I don’t want to chance it again.”
    “Chance what?”
    “Being seen operating on a squaw brat.”
    As it turned out, Lucas needn’t have worried. Sally went to the village. Tamaka’s aunt appeared. “Tamaka,” Sally said, “please, I must see her. My brother has agreed to help her. It’s very important that she—” The Indian woman lifted her finger and put it over Sally’s lips. Then she turned and walked away.
    Another week went by and Tamaka didn’t appear. Finally, Sally screwed up her courage and returned to the Indian village. At first no one came to meet her. She stood at the edge of the cluster of bark-covered huts and waited the way she always did. A couple of the women glanced toward her on their way to work in their fields, but no one approached. Sally could think of nothing to do except stay where she was and wait. Eventually an old woman walked over to her. “Tamaka,” Sally said, pointing to her own hand. “How is she?”
    Apparently the woman had been chosen as emissary because she had a few words of English. “Tamaka dead,” she said.
    III
“Good afternoon, barber. I am Jacob Van der Vries.”
    Lucas looked up and saw a thickset man, not tall, but with an air of importance. He had startlingly red hair, a small red beard, and an exceptionally full red mustache. And though he’d spoken in English, his accent was plainly of the Low Countries. “Good afternoon, mijnheer. I presume it’s shaving you were wanting?”
    “No, not shaving.”
    “Delousing, then?” Lucas rose from the stool beside the fire—it was a dark day in early December and he’d been using the light to write by—and carried his journal to the surgical table.
    “Not delousing either,” the Dutchman said. “What do you have there?”
    “Some notes on various ailments. Nothing for you to worry about, I imagine. You do not look ill.”
    On the contrary, Van der Vries looked particularly healthy. Rich, as well. The cuffs of his shirt were ruffled lace. His belt was buckled with polished silver and strained to keep his coat together over his well-fed paunch. “I haven’t seen you in the town before,” Lucas said. “Does that mean you’ve just arrived?”
    “A few days past. And you are right, I am not ill. But your notes do interest me, barber.” Van der Vries held out his hand. “May I see?”
    “No. They are simply notes, so someday I can make a fuller account of what I’ve observed in two and a half years in Nieuw Amsterdam.” Lucas locked his journal away. “Now, if you don’t want shaving or delousing, and you don’t need bleeding, what brings you to me, Mijnheer Van der Vries?”
    “Actually, I am Jacob Van der Vries, Practitioner of Physic.”
    “Ah, I see.” Lucas pocketed the key to the drawer in the surgical table. “A physician.”
    “Indeed. I was apprenticed to the most fashionable practitioner in The Hague. And for a time I served the sick in your fine city of Cambridge. Now I am in the employ of the Dutch West India Company. So we shall be seeing quite a bit of each other, barber. I shall call on you when my patients require bleeding. And now that there is someone to oversee your activities here, you will perhaps no longer feel it necessary to make notes of—”
    The door swung open so hard both halves thwacked against the wall. “Business for you, barber! Bring ’em here, lads!” Four soldiers trotted behind the sergeant, carrying two stretchers. “Savages—attacked the Bronck bouwerie and the little plantage of old man Heerik. Burned them to the ground. Left seven dead. Fortunately one of our patrols happened to be passing. Ran the bloodthirsty animals off Heerik’s land before they finished the job. Two of the wounded seemed worth bringing to you.”
    One of the stretchers carried a young woman, unconscious, an