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

you, my little friends?”
    The face of the Widow Kulik began to emerge from the curtain of leeches. Her skin was ghostly white, her eyes open and staring, her mouth relaxed. Lucas put his hand on the woman’s chest. “She’s dead.”
    “ Ja, ja. I thought so already.” Van der Vries was intent on gathering up the leeches. It was not difficult; they weren’t only stiff with blood, they were stupefied with it. They tumbled happily into the glass jar and made no effort to attach themselves to the Dutchman’s pudgy hands. “Her case, as you just admitted, was well advanced. Nonetheless, it is the duty of the true physician to try all possible remedies until the very end.”
    IV
Having known her naked in the woods, Lucas found it difficult to once again have Marit only in the storeroom of the butcher shop.
    Still, any way was better than no way. Over a year now, and their lust hadn’t cooled. Marit still moaned and gasped in delight when he entered her, and trembled like a leaf in a tempest when finally she was overcome by ecstasy. Seeing her that way had always made Lucas feel like a god. It still did. But it was not the same.
    Sometimes when he thought about the things they had done to each other in the cave—a mere twenty minutes’ walk from Wall Street—he blushed. Both of them naked as Adam and Eve, surrounded by nothing but the forest, bathing naked in the cool fresh water of the Collect Pond.
    Lucas desperately missed the freedom of those precious hours. So did Marit. While he was deep inside her in the storeroom, she would whisper her memories in his ear. “Ah, yes, do that, Lucas. Put your fingers inside me there and rock them back and forth. When we went to the cave you used to put your cock inside that place. Do you remember, my darling Lucas, putting your cock in my arse? Do you remember?”
    When she said those things he went wild. Who would imagine a woman would speak such words? Not a whore—a respectable woman who had a husband and went to church on Sundays, and sometimes caught his eye when she came out of the service, and just from the way she looked at him made him know what she was thinking. What she would say aloud as soon as they were together in their secret cave. I want to suck your cock, Lucas. I want to take it in my mouth and suck it dry.
    No more. They dared not risk it. Aside from the threat posed by Ankel Jannssen asleep upstairs, there were the customers, more of them than ever before.
    Normally Nieuw Netherland was a place of incredible plenty, much of it free for the taking. Now, with overland access to the farms and the surrounding countryside cut off, all the town’s provisions had to arrive by ship. Stuyvesant inaugurated a rationing system. It should have meant less business in Jannssen’s shop.
    But the atmosphere of danger bred rumors faster than maggots on a dung heap. A story made the rounds that Ankel and Marit had a secret supply of meat hidden in the cellar beneath their house. That it would have long since become putrid didn’t stop people from coming and asking to buy some of the hoard. They seemed to think if they could just catch the mistress butcher on her own and offer her a bit of extra money, she’d find them something over their ration.
    Marit turned them all away. “Even if I had extra meat, which I do not, I wouldn’t dare sell you more than your share. The fine for cheating on the rationing is a fortune, three guilders.”
    The first time Lucas heard her say it he was hiding in the storeroom, his still-unsatisfied cock stiff as a broom handle inside his breeches. When he thought about the penalty for what they were doing—far worse than a three-guilder fine—he marveled at their foolhardiness. But he didn’t leave. And he didn’t stop visiting the butcher shop at every possible opportunity. Neither did the customers who continued to believe the rumor because they wanted it to be true.
    It was rare that Lucas and Marit could be together the way they