The Fatal Flame (16 page)

Rape is criminal and despicable. And about as easy to prosecute as it is to reach out and pluck the chime of a bell from midair. A rich woman attacked by a low brute was nearly sure to see justice done if she took the reputation-killing step of admitting to the assault in the first place, and I could convict McGlynn on brothelkeeping charges without violation even entering into the matter. But a woman of Sally Woods’s station against an alderman? When she was a trouser-clad deviant? And had already given herself to him more than once? He could have kept her locked in a garret and tormented her for weeks and I could still never punish him for it this long after the fact. Every lawyer in Christendom claims “lack of feminine virtue and salacious signals led to confused circumstances” when defending a client against rape charges. In the case of Miss Woods, the crueler and more religious among us—who are sometimes the same people—would have said she deserved no better.

So I simply stared at Symmes, the sickeningly happy tilt to his lips and the callous mirth in his eyes, and thought,
Whatever you did, I will see that you pay.

“Something ended it,” Matsell said flatly. “What?”

“She went so far as to organize a strike for higher wages, the jezebel. I fired her so fast her pretty head must have spun. Oh, I showed mercy to the dim little sheep who’d followed her, but I could hardly have extended Miss Woods the same generosity. She is a completely unprincipled woman, the sort who is not only infamous for wearing obscene clothing in the amoral cause of destroying the balance between the sexes but is apparently capable of setting my property aflame.”

Matsell arrowed a grey eye at me.

“She’s a radical who favors unconventional dress,” I admitted.

“She’s an offense against the natural order and thus presents an active threat to our system of values even if she weren’t a crazed firestarter,” Symmes shot back.

“As if you have any idea what values look like,” I snapped.

“Mr. Wilde, control yourself,” the chief growled.

The alderman half rose, showing his teeth. “The good people of New York have chosen
me
to represent their interests, their principles, and yes, their
values
, you unbearable prick. Keep a civil tongue in your head when addressing your betters and arrest that madwoman before she can do any more damage to the metropolis and to
my life.
I’ve an election to win.”

Best of luck with that
,
I thought acidly as Matsell stood to depart.

“All necessary steps, including arresting Miss Woods should her arrest be what’s called for, will be taken without further delay if my staff knows what’s good for them,” Chief Matsell said, stabbing a riled finger toward my nose. “If we require further cooperation on your part, Alderman, I trust we have it. Wilde, you’re settling this business and settling it now.”

“I need to keep these.” I reached for the stack of letters.

“Take them and be damned.” Symmes sighed as the pocket watch made yet another appearance.

“Do you have some other appointment at bloody six-thirty in the morning?” I demanded, having expended my small store of patience.

“Yes, including but not limited to ruining your disloyal worm of a sibling.”

“We’re through here,” the chief called, flapping a flipperlike hand as he lumbered out the door. I’d pocketed the evidence and taken two steps after him when Symmes rounded the desk and gripped me by the arm.

“A word of warning,” he said in my ear. His classically handsome features had twisted into a dog’s brutal snarl. “If your brother withdraws his candidacy by the end of the day, publicly apologizes, and throws his support behind my own election, I will consider—
consider
, mind—showing him clemency in thanks for his previous years of service.”

He returned behind his desk about half a second previous to finding himself punched in the jaw.

“And if he doesn’t?” I wanted to know. “What then?”

Descending into his chair, Symmes looked up with a smile. “If Valentine Wilde doesn’t withdraw, I will so utterly destroy that arrogant, ungrateful sodomite that he and everyone close to him will wish they had never been born. Think carefully on that, Mr. Wilde. And a very good morning to you.”

The spirit of opposition between the barnburners and hunkers waxes warmer and warmer every day. So great has the gap between them become, that they have entirely forgotten the principles for which they have been fighting, and are each trying now to oust the other from Tammany. . . . The barnburners go in strong for free soil, and are determined they will not yet give up old Tammany, where they have so long reveled in the pride of their physical strength.

—
THE NEW YORK HERALD
, JULY 27, 1848

I
DIDN
’
T SET OFF TO
arrest Miss Woods. Though I should have. Instantly.

No, I marched straight for Val’s lodgings several blocks away from Symmes’s residence, selecting choice words for him as I traveled. It was too early for him to occupy his police captain’s office at the station house in Prince Street, and considering the way they’d left matters, the odds were against his having slept at Jim’s elegantly furnished digs near Washington Square. By then the sun had risen, illuminating the dress buttons of prim Irish housemaids walking to market and the lacquer of sweat on the brows of black laborers hauling bricks
.
Sure enough, when I reached the trim row house in Spring Street, there was movement in the parlor window of the second story, the floor that Valentine has kept for more than a decade.

Making double time up the stairs, I knocked twice at Val’s door. Upon entering, I discovered that I wasn’t the first person to conclude my brother needed immediate sense pounded into him.

“What in God’s name is going on?” I questioned.

James Playfair stood in my brother’s kitchen amidst the shining glass jars of dried herbs and spices and the pot of Harlem honey and the dish of rendered pork fat for egg fry-ups. He glared into my brother’s mazzard with the expression Alexander the Great might have worn when he decided that acquiring more personal property might make for an engaging hobby. Jim could have been sitting on the back of a war elephant. He sported a neat claret cravat and a matching wine-red waistcoat, and his wiry chest heaved in anger. I’d never seen his graceful features twist so. Nor seen Val so alarmed by a mere facial expression.

Val was in the state he usually endures following Party sprees—haggard, half dressed in an undershirt and trousers with braces hanging, eyes bloodshot above bags that might have carried a month’s post across the Atlantic. He sat in the kitchen chair he uses when peeling potatoes or plucking a fowl, and if Jim had just kicked him, he’d not have looked any less pleased.

“What do you
think
is going on?” Jim snapped, and then paused, shaking his head.

“How’s Bird?” I ventured with better caution.

“I apologize, Timothy. Good morning. How are you faring? Bird is fine, and four dollars richer thanks to the greyhound which won the final contest at Vauxhall Gardens.”

“Oh, aces, you’ll apologize after you mouth it at
him
,” Valentine noted cuttingly, slouching as he uncrossed his legs. Size being a natural advantage to the activity, no one can sprawl like my brother. Even when his complexion is the color of sperm-whale wax.

“Do you know something, you’re right, Valentine, I am more than happy to apologize to you,” Jim hissed. “I sincerely apologize for suggesting that you intended to lose a boxing match for the benefit of Party solidarity, and I hereby express my sorrow that I did not sooner reach the conclusion you meant to risk your entire career upon an egotistical whim. Forgive me.”

“You’re about
this close
,” Val reported, holding up an unsteady thumb and forefinger, “to actually angering me. I don’t calculate that’s a goal you’d feel chaffey over achieving.”

“If it wasn’t a whim, then what was it?” I dropped my wide hat on the kitchen table. “Because it sure as hell is summery wasn’t a good idea.”

“Symmes has been a thorn in my hindquarters for long enough,” Val spat. “He’s as gammy a politico as he is a fund-raiser, the Hall will ignore me if I lose and slap me on the back if I win, and anyway, the notion I’d go in for abusing a poor Irish chit in exchange for lioning some kate he sacked was the last straw.”

“Symmes offered a carnal reward in exchange for Val’s assistance,” I explained to Jim’s baffled eyebrows. “Not the . . . ah, mutually agreeable variety.”

“He’s a barbarian,” Jim concurred, appearing neither surprised nor any less livid. “I was playing for a benefit given at the Astor House and discovered Symmes meddling with one of the chambermaids when they sent me in search of more champagne. She’d obviously been struggling, and when I deliberately knocked over a mountain of soup tureens, she ran, and I departed with similar haste.”

“So he’s a barbarian, and you’re still keen to vote for him and not for me as alderman?” my brother protested.

“Yes, because now he is a barbarian
who
loathes you
, Valentine
.
”

“Flash.” Val yawned luxuriantly. “I’d hate to think my feelings were one-sided. Hell, I’ve wanted to torch his property myself.”

“Well, now you needn’t,” I retorted, “because by all appearances our Miss Sally Woods has that task firmly in hand. Energetic materials were used to destroy one of his houses in Pell Street yesterday. Two people are dead.”

“Oh, my God,” Jim gasped.

Pulling the letters from my jacket, I shoved them at my infuriating sibling. “Look familiar?”

Valentine sifted through them quickly and whistled. “Two people croaked, you say? For the love of Christ, Tim, any reason you’re not off clapping her in darbies?”

“Because Symmes wants me to tell you that if you back him for alderman again by the end of the day, he’ll refrain from destroying you.”

Jim shifted from foot to foot. “Valentine—”

Val aimed a finger jab at his friend with such vehemence it would have broken skin had it made contact. “You’re about to suggest I hand over my bollocks to a peacocking prig who thinks slave states will disappear if only we shower them with enough commerce and compliments, and when I’ve already announced before the free republicans of the Eighth that their ward boss—who is also their police captain and the senior engineman of the Knickerbocker Twenty-one—will serve them better than a reprobate landowner who thinks shoving his cock where it isn’t wanted makes for a spruce hobby. Save yourself the breath.”

Reaching into his coat for his small pipe, James sensibly turned on his heel and retired to the parlor.

“Jimmy!”
Val called after him in a voice equal parts fond and fuming.

I settled, half leaning, against the table. Val crossed his arms with an operatic flourish and shot me a green-eyed glare. It desired me to answer the question
How do you people expect me to tolerate your nonsense?
I’d no ready answer, because now, for the first time within the tempest
of my anxiety over Val’s sticking his neck out, I realized that he had a point. Which was unhelpful.

“You’ve always been good about women,” I mused quietly instead. “Some of the rabbits you run with wouldn’t know the difference between a rape and a dead flash night on the Bowery.”

Val lapsed into thought, absently scoring his scalp with his fingernails. “Well, at the end of the day, there’s coves as have served time in the House of Refuge when they were squeakers and coves as haven’t.”

Confused, I glanced at him. Many years ago—when our parents were yet living—Val had briefly disappeared. His devoted delinquency led to a stint at the House of Refuge, a remedial establishment for vagrant kinchin located in the untamed countryside at Twenty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, and one that favors hearty floggings as an aid to character development. My brother’s character had not, I need hardly say, been improved, and when I think about the copper-wire smell of dried blood emanating from his back and the reckless smile he’d worn when he staggered home with his hair shorn off, visibly thinner after less than a week, a smoldering hatred burns in my gut.

This new information, though—when I’d managed to process the remark, my blood froze. Val noticed my horror and shook his head.

“Not
me.
Though right you are, my Tim, there’s bastards there as fancied the young lads particular. No, but . . . there was a little miss. Thin face, blonde plaits, had a haunted look to her. When I told her I was fixing to escape, she asked me either to take her with me or cut her throat. She’d a piece of glass saved for the purpose. I couldn’t manage either, you mark me. Bad business. I was only twelve, but I always wished I’d done the one or the other.”

Eyes shutting briefly, I nodded.

I remembered in a flood all the many, many occasions Val had interacted with Bird Daly, brought her oranges and cast-off frippery from the Party’s charity trunks, called her
little cat
and laughed, wincing, always wincing, as if the fact of his laughing at all were somehow a crime, when she either made an apt observation or ribbed me over my plentiful faults. I remembered when I’d yet hated him, first informing Val that Silkie Marsh kept ten-year-old stargazers. Morphine-crazed as he’d been, my own eyes blinkered with spite, I could still recall the warped spasm of revulsion that flickered across his face. Then I recollected I’d actually imagined that he’d sent Bird to the House of Refuge over Party obligations. And that he’d tried to have me permanently hushed for the same reason.

Unfortunately, my version of guilt is a bitter pill gracelessly swallowed. And so I needed in an urgent fashion to change the course of the dialogue. Before I’d nauseated myself any further.

“I need to know how serious you find Symmes threatening your candidacy and possibly your life. You’re reckless and morphine-addled as a general practice, but hardly suicidal. Well, on the days when you aren’t fighting
fires
,” I couldn’t help but add meanly.

It’s a fundamental difference in logic. Val thinks of fighting fires as a holy penance set against the balance of burning our parents alive. I think of it as a self-destructive compulsion designed to remove the burden of living from his shoulders altogether.

Wanting an ally, I marched from the kitchen into the comfortable—if questionably decorated with framed Tammany propaganda—front sitting room. Jim’s brooding pipe smoke had filled the air with clove and warm, bitter walnut. He angled clear blue eyes at me as I landed in the striped armchair. As I’d expected, Val followed me into the meticulously clean parlor so he could continue attempts to needle me into submission.

“How worried
should
I be over a goddamned Hunker when the hardworking men of this ward would sooner spit in a plantation owner’s eye than shake his hand?” Valentine leaned against the doorframe. Jim resolutely ignored him.

“There are plenty of popular Hunkers in the Party,” I argued.

“No, there are plenty of
rich
ones, and your knowledge of inner-circle Tammany dealings wouldn’t top up a thimble.”

“It isn’t as simple as all that.”

“Of course it is, and you are being a blue-ribbon horse’s arse. Symmes and his ilk, all these new garment-industry bosses who pay their workers chicken feed and drive down wages, they manufacture
slave clothing.
The pantaloons, the cotton shirts, the linsey-woolsey gowns, the linen aprons, the pantalets thin enough to see your hand through—”

“The South sends us the cotton, the North turns it into cloth, then we turn the cloth into togs and sell it back to them. Yes, I’m not political but I’m not
stupid
either,” I groused.

“You sure as taxes had me fooled.”

“I’m not the one who deliberately called down hellfire and brimstone from his own alderman!”

“Can the two of you
hear
yourselves speaking?” Jim queried under his breath. “It’s like a pair of schoolchildren scrapping over a marble.”

“What the devil could that flea-brain Symmes
possibly
do to me?” my brother growled, hands now propped against his hips where the braces dangled like unanswered questions. “Other than bore me to death when he makes speeches about Southern conciliation? Because—”

“He might have mentioned that you’re a molley,” I fired back, thoroughly flummoxed. I stood to face him. “And that he could severely harm your reputation by implying such.”

“Oh, of all the prattling nonsense,” Val scoffed. “I’m
not
a molley. That was easy, wasn’t it? Next?”

James Playfair, who was attempting to appear not even mildly interested and failing miserably, directed his attention to the light bleaching the edges of Val’s white curtains. Sodomy is punishable by a decade’s stint at the Tombs, I should mention—but only sodomy. So we copper stars arrest people for affectations about as often as we turn down illicit reward money. What would be the point? What if we did collar a slender-limbed aesthete, down where they loiter beside the defunct City Hall fountain that since March has forborne the giving of aesthetic pleasure in favor of dribbling green ooze from its spigot? Which partner sheltered in the shadows of the park’s trees would be the witness to the crime and which the criminal? The one on his knees or the other? And who would give a damn?