The Fatal Flame (19 page)

“This spell . . . did they call it a
strike
?”

She snapped her fingers. “Aye, ’tis the very word.”

Here was progress, the sudden lightening of my heavy bones told me. For strikes are rare enough, strikes by women practically unheard of. Dunla Duffy performed outwork for—of all places—New American Textiles. The picture in my mind, as yet the merest suggestion of an outline, gained a new brushstroke.

“It reminded me of a spell me cousin tried on the potatoes afore she died,” Miss Duffy continued, “so I didn’t favor it, spells bein’ wicked, sir, and the potatoes as rotten after as before. But they said as it weren’t the wicked sort o’ spell, and I were that hungry, so I thought the saints would nay see the harm?”

“They don’t see any harm at all in the strike sort of spell, Dunla, I assure you,” Mercy said, a brittle weariness sharpening her tone.

“I trusted the starry-eyed girl when she said so,” Miss Duffy agreed. “She’d nary lie t’ the likes of us outworkers, she were always so gentle. We’d nay trusted her friend—the one as is marked by the devil, she frightens me—but we trusted her. It were that disappointin’ when the spell didn’t work after all.”

My head pulled back, the motion echoing through my sore skull like a hammer blow against a great iron bell.

“Does the girl with stars in her eyes have a lovely complexion and very pretty ash-brown hair—about five foot two, plump, amber-colored eyes?” I asked carefully.

Miss Duffy’s innocent face sparked with triumph. “That’s her.”

“And the one with the devil’s mark—she has a handsome face and dark brown hair with a great white streak at the temple?”

Grinning, Miss Duffy nodded. “Just so.”

“Timothy, are you all right?” Mercy asked urgently.

“No,” I admitted, newly sick to my stomach. “If what she says is correct and I’m hearing it aright, Miss Ellie Abell attempted to warn Miss Duffy here of Sally Woods’s desperate intentions. The note clearly indicates the house in Pell Street, since it was given to a resident. Then I handily allowed Miss Woods to bash me in the cranium and disappear.”

Eyes wide, Dunla Duffy commenced rocking a little. I figured it for a fair reaction. She was young, I reminded myself, so very young yet, no older than fifteen, and navigating a faraway land with neither kith nor kin to guide her. Anyway, I was half set to try rocking myself, and the rest be damned. But Sally Woods wanted fast catching, so I sucked in a breath and carried on.

“Miss Duffy, can you remember any strangers visiting the Pell Street house before it burned?”

She only rocked harder. “Nary strangers.”

“The other outworkers must have fled with or without their piecework. Can you think where any might have gone?”

“The Witch would ha’ gone back to her tower,” she whispered. “Back where they hover over their cauldrons. She said when I offered to pay her later fer the light, she’d have us all roasting over a spit by then, said as tomorrow wasn’t good enough, and so the others chucked me out.”

“She sounds terribly frightening,” Mercy said soberly.

“She’d seven devil candles, just that ’twas enough to make you afeared o’ her, sure enough.”

“Right,” I sighed. “Excepting witches in towers, did you know any of the residents well enough to help me find them?”

“I’d not lived there long. I’d been ousted from me old digs when I could nay pay them weekly, and the rent in Pell Street were by the night. I’m a good girl, I work honest. Some said as there were other ways o’ bein’ paid, but I wouldn’t. They weren’t my friends, those other lasses, though I’d ne’er want them burnt.”

Mercy took her hand with an expression that tore a sizable hole in my chest, she having once been in the unspeakable position of facing ruin or exchanging intimacy for a hefty sum of money. I’d caught her at it and turned a private nightmare into a public spectacle, one I can’t think of without wanting to eradicate myself. I can still hear her shouting at me three years later, still see unshed tears gleaming in the moonlight.

Stop looking at me like that, it’s horrifying. I am the only thing I have, a man can’t ever understand that, I have nothing else to sell, Timothy.

Wrenching myself out of the past, I questioned, “Can you tell us aught about your employer, Robert Symmes?”

Dunla Duffy stared, mute.

“The man with the pocket watch?” I attempted, faintly amused.

“Oh.”
Miss Duffy made a frantic sign of the cross. “He’s an awful bad man, sir.”

“Can you tell us why you think so?”

“Because o’ the girl with the stars in her eyes. After the strike she were gone fer another week entire, and when she came back, he’d smile every time he spied her. He’d touch her arm, her cheek. It weren’t decent, sir, even after the stars had gone.”

“What do you mean by stars, Miss Duffy?” I asked in despair.

She appeared offended by the question. A mulish cast suffused her features.

“I think I know,” Mercy mused, touching her bottom lip introspectively with her teeth. “Miss Duffy, have
you
ever had stars in your eyes?”

“No,” she gasped, scandalized. “I
told
ye, I were raised proper.”

“You see?” Mercy asked me, smiling sadly.

For a moment I didn’t. Then I did, and that was much worse.

“You think that Miss Abell was with child, Miss Duffy?” I questioned.

Dunla Duffy furiously clapped both palms over her ears.

“He’s sorry for being so crude, Miss Duffy.” Mercy gently reclaimed the nearer hand. “Can you tell me, between us womenfolk, and meaning her no harm, how you learned that she’d stars in her eyes?”

Dunla Duffy dropped her voice conspiratorially. “At work when I were after pickin’ up more pieces, I stopped to freshen myself, and she were in the lavatory, nine sorts o’ sickly, and I petted her hair and said as no matter what the circumstance, it were God’s gift t’ her, but the sickness were makin’ her muddled in the head, fer I could nay understand her answer.”

“What did she say?” Mercy asked as I leaned forward.

“Well, ’tis true enough that I don’t always follow folk when they’re speakin’,” Miss Duffy replied slowly. “But this weren’t the same, fer she looked me clear in the face and she said,
This is all Sally’s fault
.”

—

I
nterrupting Miss Abell inside the manufactory again seemed neither prudent nor profitable. At six o’clock when the sun sank westerly, I could catch her if I timed it well and discover just what razor-thorned entanglement had perhaps produced a child by another woman’s doing—and a lost child at that. So after stopping at the Tombs to order an immediate guard set over Miss Woods’s eerie greenhouse, I headed for the Catholic Asylum to patch up one of my few friendships.

My trek to the orphanage passed as if in a dream. Because I wasn’t walking, not really.

I was cataloguing moments.

Moments of quiet glances at Mercy, her bird’s-egg irises cupping black pupils that seem to stretch for miles in the distance. Me thanking them both, Mercy’s
We will see you soon, in that case?
and how it left no room for refusal, only my
If you’d be so kind,
and then her
Can selfish wishes be kindnesses simultaneously?
—which was admittedly the enigmatic Mercy but her saying something marvelous, ending with a press of her hand, which I didn’t kiss because it would have been too soon, too much, and far too little all at once.

I arrived at the orphanage during lunch hour, but I’d no luck in the dining hall, standing in the arched stone entryway searching the tables for a dark red head. Thankfully, though, I know a great many of Bird’s pals. And they know me, because if I’m willing to compliment myself on any of my meager victories, it’s this one: I’d put them there. Having found them somewhere else that doesn’t bear writing about. So when Ryan and Neill and Sophia spied a copper star with a wide black hat standing under the keystone, they ran up to me.

“What the devil’s happened?” Neill asked, in the brogue that’s lessening every time I hear it. “Bird said she’d be in her room finishing a
love letter
.”

“I—she
what
?”

“She won’t even tell me about the ball,” Sophia—who was eleven, and newly enamored of balls—complained. “Will
you
tell us about the ball, Mr. Wilde? Were there cakes? She was very pretty in her cloak, didn’t you think so?”

“I did think—”

“She looked like an angel, she did. I ain’t half surprised she’s found a beau,” Ryan added with a shy smile.

My mouth worked at speech. It failed despite thirty years of steadyish practice.

“There was a newsboy, this morning.
Loitering
,” Neill said meaningfully.

“A
handsome
one,” Sophia confided, “wi’ fine manners and blond hair and spectacles—”

“I’ll be back soon, and with more time to spare, all right?”

I clapped their shoulders and made for Bird’s room as hastily as my pounding head allowed. Startled but optimistic as to my prospects. Continuing the established theme of my day, however, our meeting did not go according to plan.

“I
don’t
want to see you,” said Bird Daly when she opened the door, regarding me as if I were a less desirable species of bedbug.

“Bird, I’m sorry, but that benefit was getting downright dusty.”

She’d stepped back from the threshold, so I walked inside. The nuns ensure their charges’ sleeping areas are kept virtuously tidy, but this one seemed overpopulated beyond its occupants’ control. Hats stacked atop trunks. Boot tracks crisscrossing. Crude rag dolls with woolen hair, limbs akimbo, keeping company in a neat line along the wall with a single horsehair pony that Elena had given Bird two years previous. Hair ribbons lurking under bed frames and dangling from bureau drawers. One too many pillows in Bird’s bunk. And there it was—a letter in Bird’s floridly dramatic hand, drying cool as you please on the desk in a barrage of midday sunlight.

Sidling closer to the writing surface, I sifted through and selected words for her. “You’ve every reason to be annoyed, but—”

Smash.

Bird stood before me, chest heaving, having just fragmented her own inkpot in preventing me approaching the desk.

I gaped in dismay. Not at the inkpot. She’d used to shatter things when she felt she was shattering herself, when the world around her tilted unbearably and she struggled to navigate the tempest, would test gravity by destroying ornamental knickknacks and mugs of tea and on one memorable occasion an actual window. It devastated me to think she could still feel that way, its being a year and more since the breaking things stopped.

“Bird—”

“You should have
told me
!” she cried, walking through ink to press a livid finger against my chest. “That she was there, that the
Madam
was there.”

“Holy Christ,” I managed, no longer concerned over profanity. “How—”

She reached into a pocket of her simple brown charity dress and thrust a poorly penned communiqué into my face.

Dear Miss Daly,

I write at the conveenyance of my frend Matchbox as hes learnd of his letters and I an unskooled News Hawker but plenty Rich for all that. Your pressense at the bennifit was much wellcome and I hope later to see You maybe by the fountain in this here cort yard maybe else wear but I’ll be there to meet You at seven of the clock every night till the nights stop coming. Don’t be ketched about Silkie Marsh at the fight or that you missed the rest. There was no fight and its a damn shame Val Wilde wuld have won that bout twenty ways from nohow it wuld have been a particular smasher you bet your last dime. I love you.

—Ninepin

“Bird, I’m . . . I’m so sorry you found out this way. But why would I have wanted you to know that—”

“You wouldn’t,” she interrupted, tossing her head and pretending there wasn’t ink on her shoes. “But I
ought
to have known. You ought to have savvied that I’d have cut out properly if you’d chanted the truth to me and not treated me like . . .” She lost English for an instant, fuming. “You thought I couldn’t manage seeing—”

“That’s not true, I didn’t
want
you to—”

“I ought to have known!”

“I’d have been a cad to tell you.”

“You don’t savvy she’s in my head anyhow?” she all but shrieked.

We were quiet for a few seconds. I didn’t know what to say. And had I known, I wouldn’t have been brave enough to say it.

Bird’s small frame was practically thrumming with rage. “You don’t think it matters to me whether or not
you
tell me the truth? Get
out
.”

As I was pushed unceremoniously out the door by a thirteen-year-old girl, I attempted, “Bird, I’m truly sorry. Forgive me. I’ll be back by later. And meanwhile please be careful about writing Ninepin love letters. He’s a genteel sort but rough living, and he gets enthusiastic over beautiful—”

“As if I would ever write that silly newsboy a love letter!” she cried.

I took a moment. Caution seeming appropriate. “Neill thought you were writing—”

“Yes, indeed I was. It’s none of
your
business, though, and it’s
nothing
to do with that newsboy. I am writing a letter to Mr. James Playfair, and you’ve a great deal of nerve, and I’ll thank you to
get out
and allow me to get back to my own affairs.”

She slammed the door in my face.

As I exited the prettily worked stone corridors the way I’d come, I concluded with grim reluctance that I’d slender chance of success at any of the tasks Gotham’s gods had seen fit to bestow upon me. Through an open streetside window, a baby was shrieking, as unwanted tiny creatures tend to announce their continued existence to the world.

Were she, scorning the opinions of that world which scorns her poverty, to cast herself into the hot-house of vice, she might get along very well as regards mere food and clothes, for a winter or two; but let us rather hope to see her freeze, starve, die in misery, with purity still in her soul, than to yield to the fatal step which would engulf all that is precious and beautiful in her character.

—NED BUNTLINE,
MYSTERIES AND MISERIES OF NEW YORK
, REGARDING THE POOR SEWING GIRL

A
T FIVE MINUTES TO SIX
O
’
CLOCK
, daylight ebbing sluggishly into gunsmoke clouds, I lurked in a doorway in Nassau Street across from the New American Textile Manufactory. My hat pulled low, my head pounding like a brass band. The painted metal windows where the cutters labored over slave togs showed row after row of beribboned heads and Simeon Gage’s stalking shadow.

When six o’clock pealed stridently from the church towers, the manufactory girls rose as if one. It took a few minutes to collect their belongings, store their unfinished efforts, don their bonnets of white chip and elaborately worked straw. Then they poured out of the great building, some arm in arm and some swinging tin lunch pails, a rainbow-hued stream of feminine labor.

Then a man who’d likewise been idling in a doorway burst out of it. He’d a bucket in one hand, a paintbrush in the other. And when the first of the Bowery girls drew near, he dipped the brush and slashed across the front of the moll’s dress a lurid streak of blood-red paint.

She screamed, and quick as a viper he’d progressed to the next girl, swiping at her with a murderous look in his eye as she ducked away in terror.

“Harlots!” he was shouting. He was a small man, a sallow-cheeked and an underfed one, with clothes that had been perfectly cut to his shape but made from the cheapest possible cloth. A tailor if I’d ever set eyes on the breed. “You filthy, selfish, heartless—”

I was nearly across Nassau by then. Dodging hacks and wagons, half slipping on dung and straw, hands curled into fists. Other men stopped, turning to see what the shrieks were about. While several appeared plenty alarmed, a hatchet-faced brute started up whistling while a lout selling trinkets from a harnessed box clapped in approval.

“Stop that
at once
,” I ordered, flapping the lapel of my coat with the copper star pinned to it.

“They’re
vultures
!” he cried, wielding the brush in my face. The savagery of the gesture made it seem a bloodied knife. “Jezebels, the lot of them, stealing bread from the mouths of honest family men.”

“You’re an honest family man, I take it?”

“And a Bible-fearing Christian who respects the
natural
order. Get the hell out of my—”

He stopped talking after that. Mostly because, after a planted left foot and a short but merciless spin, I’d pinned him to the grimy sidewalk with his arm twisted behind his back and my shin against his spine, winding him. He spluttered, his face keeping closer company with bird droppings than usual, thrashing under my leg.

“If you don’t want a lacing, you’ll settle, and I mean
instantly
,” I suggested, grinding my knee into his ribs. My temper had passed scorching into molten. The girls formed a half circle. Staring with white faces, a few of the molls paint-smeared and weeping softly.

“You’ve obviously never watched your kinchin go hungry so a pack of whores can live in sin, you pig!”

“I’ve also never been arrested for assaulting ladies in the street, so you’ll have the advantage of me there too.”

“You smug little—”

“Excuse me—sir!”

A chap with muttonchop whiskers—a tanner from the smell of him and the looks of his mottled hands, who’d been observing proceedings with consternation—stepped forward. “Aye?”

“There’ll be another star police coming up Nassau on his rounds any minute now. Would you flag him down for me? Head south until you see the copper pin.”

“Gladly,” he agreed, striding away.

“Whores,” the man beneath me moaned. “Bloody
whores—
”

“Shut it,” I suggested with feeling.

“My work has dried up, my son hasn’t eaten meat in a week, and all so these uppity bats can keep themselves in perfume and flounces. It’s
wickedness.
”

“My wages go to my mum in Connecticut,” one of the paint-smeared women protested, her lip trembling, “and I’ve never—”

“Ma’am, this one doesn’t merit your life story,” I observed. “Are any of you hurt?”

Murmuring to each other, blinking damp eyelashes, they answered in the negative. Then Ellie Abell, her lovely features taut as a tightrope, edged her way to the front of the crowd.

“Oh, Mr. Wilde,” she breathed. “Whatever are
you
doing here?”

“Just now, arresting a scoundrel. But might I speak with you? When my hands aren’t full,” I added, glaring at the villain’s back.

“I, I really haven’t the time,” she stammered. “I must be getting to—”

Thankfully, the fresh copper star materialized, led by the tanner. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t recognize him. Unsurprisingly, he recognized me. He was a burly fellow with a plug of chewing tobacco in his mouth and enough healed-over breaks in his face to qualify for state congress.

“Mr. Wilde,” he grunted. “Post me.”

“Deliver this to the Tombs and I’ll owe you one?”

“I’d been yearning for a little exercise.” He knelt, holding a Bowie knife before the bulging eyes of my captive. “Give me any trouble and I’ll slit your nostrils. Savvy?”

I’d have harbored concerns over this remark had it not been both typical and beyond my control. So instead I watched the tailor being dragged off by his shirt collar.

“Are we in any trouble, sir?” one of the paint-smeared girls whispered.

“Of course not. You needn’t even bring charges. I saw the whole thing. Good afternoon, ladies—Miss Abell, I need a word.”

The trembling Bowery girls dispersed northward, casting curious looks at Miss Abell but keen to fly away home. It was a Saturday, I realized, and thus they’d just been paid their weekly wages. Dress pockets with dollars tucked into them muttered papery whispers, eager to be emptied at dance halls and oyster saloons after the bills had been paid and the cash sent home to kinfolk. A single night of pleasure before the treacle-thick drag of mending and washing and housework to be accomplished before Monday.

I offered Miss Abell my arm. “Might I escort you, wherever you’re going?”

She took it, hesitant but smiling a little. “After that arrest . . . I reckon so. Thank you.”

“My pleasure. Destination?”

“I’m going to Catharine Market for groceries.”

So I turned us east on Maiden Lane, then north on Water Street, where the masts of the ships thrust skyward above the rooftops. Not speaking at first. Letting her grow accustomed to me. Women lit lamps in the windows of low public houses, wiping callused hands on their aprons, watching the swelling flood of workers. The edges of the sky tinted like a slow-rising bruise, shadows strengthening Miss Abell’s cheekbones and dulling the soft curls of her hair. Sally Woods, warped as she clearly was, had been right about one thing—Ellie Abell was exceptional in her way, open as a meadow and every bit as lovely.

I cleared my throat. “I saw Miss Woods.”

“Oh?”

The sound was pitched high enough that I could practically taste the fear in her throat.

“Yes.”

“Did you . . . find out anything?”

“Yes. Then she knocked me cold with a whiskey bottle.”

Ellie Abell gasped, covering her mouth with her hand. “I’m so terribly sorry, I never . . . My
God
.”

“I didn’t mean to ketch you.”

“No, I’m snug, it’s just . . .” She made an effort to steady her breathing. “Well, it’s
dreadful
, isn’t it?”

“You’re the one said she might be violent,” I observed mildly.

She shook her head. “I mean, I didn’t
know
it before, not for absolutely certain, and heavens, to think she was my closest friend and now it’s come to—oh, Mr. Wilde, you seem like an honest sort, and that’s awful. Are you all right?”

“Hale enough. I wondered if you could help me with something, though.”

“If I can, of course I’ll try.”

I reached into my frock coat. “Do you know a Miss Dunla Duffy?” I asked, passing her the note.

She stopped walking. Swayed, paper in hand, and I steadied her. Her caramel irises glowed—a fox’s eyes, one cornered by hounds.

“Where did you get this?” she whispered.

“From Miss Duffy. We’re acquainted. Her house burned down, you know.”

“Yes. I do.”

We resumed walking. Catharine Market was near enough to the Queen Mab to trigger scuttling, spiderish memories. And close enough to the docks that it’s populated by both the hardworking and the criminal, the stalwart and the damned. A ragpicker passed us with his obscenely long hook on a pole, a bag of scraps slung across his shoulders. Dead rabbits with teeth missing and cigars lodged in the gaps cast admiring looks at my companion. The scents of fish and fowl on the wind grew stronger as the light continued to fade.

“Dunla Duffy is an outworker for New American Textiles.” She spoke in an odd, untuned-piano tone. “The outworkers and the cutters don’t associate overmuch, but Sally’s mad scheme got us all . . . twisted. Oh, I don’t mean to imply that
I’d
any prejudice against the outworkers beforehand. I mean,
some
of the manufactory molls do. Against popery and such. I was raised Episcopalian, my grandparents were from Yorkshire, and we take a different view on these matters. These Irish lasses might be unenlightened, but how can they help they’re raised in ignorance? God, I can’t possibly . . . How I
wish
you’d never seen my note.” Her hand on my arm had begun to tremble.

“It is yours, then.”

She nodded, and a dewy sheen of tears flooded her eyes.

“Miss Abell, seeing as the house in Pell Street took two people up in flames and Miss Woods escaped me, I can only beg you to tell me plainly what’s happened.”

If I had her pegged for the right keyhole, moral obligation would open her lips when they might otherwise have remained a locked strongbox. And I’m more inclined to use keys than axes. Sure enough, she released a shuddering sigh, a prelude to a story.

“I didn’t want to believe it.” Her voice shook. “When I think of Sally at Mount Holyoke, all that time we were diarying sonnets and Scriptures and sums, it’s as if an
anchor’s
been attached to my heart when I try to fathom what she’s done since. Might we sit down, Mr. Wilde?” Miss Abell had turned an unlikely shade of ashen, a color so wrong on her perfect skin that I didn’t think I could forgive myself for painting it there. “I’m feeling a mite—”

“Of course.”

We’d reached the borderline of Ward Four and Ward Seven—Catharine Street. The market buzzed with Saturday-night wanderers flitting in and out of the torchlight and the few scattered gas lamps like so many mayflies. We passed eels in open barrels slithering, glossy and snakelike, over and under and over each other, passed mounds of salted mackerel and pyramids of leeks, to a vendor who boasted a table with benches. Once we’d seated ourselves beneath the lank-haired cook staring out of his booth, I realized I’d no notion when last I’d eaten.

“Two plates of corned beef with the fat, and mustard, and some rolls, and two glasses of whiskey. My treat,” I added. “And if you don’t want whiskey, Miss Abell, you’ll overlook my having two, I hope.”

“Oh! How generous. I
do
want it, though, I’m afraid.” She pulled a kerchief from her skirts, drying her still-quivering eyes.

I busied myself with payment and carrying plates, feeling about as ready to hear her tale as she was to deliver it to me. Which is to say less than entirely keen. Seating myself, I tilted my drink to her with a nod.

“Thank you. I think of Sally at school, and
oh
, the hijinks we’d get up to.” Cutting the corned beef and shoving it into a folded bit of roll, Miss Abell tucked into the peck like a first-rate Bowery girl.

“What kind?”

“Nothing too sordid, but she was the sort of person it seemed impossible to refuse. I mean . . . well, it certainly wasn’t
my
notion to sneak out of the dormitories at midnight to put indigo in the laundresses’ tubs where the linens were soaking and turn everyone’s drawers and petticoats blue, but I went along with it, didn’t I? Sally was a heroine for weeks afterward to all save a few stick-in-the-muds. None of us ever planned on being
literal
bluestockings, but . . .” She trailed off, smiling ruefully at the memory.

“Miss Woods implied she was considerably less refined than you.”

“Oh, she was decisive and clever in a way I’ve never dared to be—all her words were bullets and her sentences cannonballs.” As if seeing the imagery she’d just summoned, Miss Abell stopped with a haunted expression. “I never—”

“You couldn’t have known.”

I commenced smearing mustard on bread. Oftentimes when people suppose I’m not listening, the listening grows considerably more profitable. My graft is to sit there, scarred and sympathetic, whilst they shovel information like dirt onto a corpse.