City of God by Beverly Swerling Page A

took in two thousand, warding them in tents pitched on the shoreline. The dead house sometimes held as many as forty bodies at a time because no one was available to bury them.
    It was May, and spring was in full bud and blossom. If this summer of ’34 was to bring another feverish misery, Nick knew, it would soon be upon them. Maybe he should be thinking of a secondary off-loading place. “Is this yard new?” he asked, looking around.
    “Sort of. It belongs to Danny Parker. He and his father and grandfather before him have looked after Devrey ships for eighty years. Their big yard is south of here on Montgomery Street. This up-the-island location is an extension.”
    A few cows grazed peacefully in a nearby pasture, otherwise the landscape was empty. “Thirty-fourth Street’s pretty isolated,” Nick said. “Seems a fine place for a shipyard.”
    “Yes,” Sam agreed, “and the river’s deep here. Parker plans to put the ways just there in that cove.”
    “To build steamships, I imagine.”
    “Maybe,” Sam said softly. “Maybe not. We’ll see.”
    “I came down from Providence on a Black Ball steam packet,” Nick said. “Bellowed black smoke all the way and did the entire journey in fourteen hours. Under sail it used to take twenty-six in a stiff breeze. More if you weren’t lucky with the wind.”
    “Do you have any idea how much coal that required?” Devrey asked. “Or how many men to keep stoking the boilers? I know everyone says the future is in steam, but I’m not so sure. In theory, if you could raise enough canvas, clean, sweet wind would beat coal any day of the week.”
    Nick shrugged. Sam Devrey hadn’t asked him up here to talk about shipping. “Possibly. More your line of country than mine.”
    “That’s not why we’re here. I expect you know that.”
    “It occurred to me.”
    “Mei-hua—her name means plum blossom—is doing remarkably well. No ill effects at all that I can see.”
    “I’m glad to hear it.”
    Both men stared out at the empty river. It seemed to Nick that he was the more uncomfortable, as if he were the one who had been caught letting his appetites disorder his life. “Look here, Cousin Samuel, I’m not in the judgement business. It’s none of my affair what you do.”
    “But I involved you,” Sam said. “And Mei-hua is under my protection. She understands nothing of our ways, of life here in America.”
    “She has nothing to fear from me.”
    “I didn’t for a moment think she had.” That was not entirely true. It was one of the reasons he’d asked Turner to meet him here. If the man said something to the wrong person, the scandal could be ruinous. “I was in China for many years. I learned to appreciate their customs, how they do things.”
    The way Nick heard it from Cousin Manon, what Sam learned was how much opium Devrey Shipping could smuggle into China and how fast, and that ever since, he had been Astor’s creature. “Yes, I understand.”
    “No, I don’t think you do. In China—in all of Asia in fact—few men have only one wife.”
    “Good God. Are you implying…” One saw and heard a great deal in the practice of medicine, but a confession of bigamy was novel in his experience.
    “As far as Mei-hua knows,” Sam said, “she is married to me. Of course it’s not a Christian marriage. But—”
    “And she knows you have an American wife?”
    “No,” Sam said. “She does not. And Mrs. Devrey does not know about Mei-hua.”
    “Yet you’re telling me the whole story.”
    “As much of it as I think you need to know, Cousin Nicholas.”
    “Which makes me wonder why you believe I need to know any of it.”
    “So you will understand the need to be discreet. Why else?”
    “I’m not sure, since being discreet is part of the practice of medicine.”
    A man wearing a carpenter’s apron walked past them, tipped his cap, and went as far as the inlet where the ways were to be built. After a minute they could hear the sound of his