The Fatal Flame (25 page)

“Well, I think that’s as much as we can accomplish this afternoon,” Kane said to my brother, who stared in an unfocused fashion at his trouser leg. “Dinner, Captain? We’ve matters Democratic to discuss, and the chief and I have a table at the Astor. You may want a change of collar first.”

“I’ll meet you there,” he agreed as they rose.

“I want that police report when he finishes,” Kane added to George Washington Matsell.

Hastily, I resumed writing.

“Assuming he ever does finish, it’s all yours,” the chief returned with a martyred sigh.

Then they were gone, and it was only my brother and me, Val now sitting at the edge of the desk reading upside down as I finished the goddamn buggering police report.

“I don’t hate you,” I said tightly.

He raised his eyebrows, skeptical.

“Your apology is accepted,” I added through my teeth.

My brother’s response to this was a derisive snort.

“The scar, I . . . I’d help it if I could,” I stammered, furious with myself. “You know I don’t mind when you rag me about my size.”

“Of course you don’t mind that.” Val sounded surprised. “Your size is my fault, after all.”

Bewildered, I looked up from my writing. “What?”

“Your size.” He scrubbed a hand over his stubbled jaw. “It was my doing, so it was my job to make you used to it.”

These sounded like plain American words, but the sequence made no sense. “What the devil can my size have to do with you?”

A weary ripple of impatience crossed my brother’s brow. “Have you honestly not cottoned to this? Christ. How old were you when we met the Underhill family?”

The mystery deepened. “Fourteen.”

“We dined there plenty often afterward, didn’t we? When the reverend took a liking to us, asked us to supper or tea three and four times a week?”

“Yes. I don’t savvy a word you’re saying,” I protested, shoving the pen and paper aside.

“Timothy,” Valentine snapped, exasperated, “what exactly do you think the effects of severe malnutrition between the ages of ten and fourteen
are
?”

Time slowed to a tortuous trickle as I stared at him. Recalled all the many ways my brother is capable of making a moldering potato palatable, remembered cast-off bread like clay bricks and rare, precious stolen beefsteaks and the memorable occasion the cat that haunted the halls of our wretched boardinghouse went missing and that we ate a passable stew the next day.

Val’s eyes drifted sidelong as he coughed into his fist. “I tried. While I was still proving myself to the Party, it didn’t always fadge, but. I tried. Anyhow. Enough of this, fill in the gaps over the Symmes debacle for me, I didn’t quite savvy everything we just palavered over. I’ve been busy.”

Dead silence. I shook my head, floored. I didn’t want this information,
didn’t want it,
didn’t want any part of knowing my brother considered himself responsible for my runty stature nor that he was probably correct. It hurt unbearably in locked places I couldn’t afford to open just then.

“You napped a crate of oranges off the back of a wagon once,” I offered hoarsely. Desperate for any way to fix the pair of us and knowing the task impossible. “We were kings for a whole week. Remember?”

After a silent, pained laugh, Val shook his head. It didn’t mean he didn’t recall. It meant he’d no wish to speak of it. “You dwell on the oddest things. Come on, some of that just now was a surprise to me. Chant the rest of it.”

With an effort that just about cracked my skull open, I numbly reached for the pen and drew the paper back to myself. Returned to the subject at hand.

“It was phosphorus both times,” I told him. “That doesn’t quite explain what the Neptune Nines were doing there earlier, though Symmes paying them to save his holdings is plausible, since they’re based in Ward Two near his biggest commercial ventures. They certainly seem convinced you’re not inclined to douse Symmes’s properties.”

“That’s a pile of political rat droppings,” he said calmly. “Next?”

“Miss Abell is plenty keen to prevent fires, but I wonder why Symmes trusts her so far.”

“I wonder that too.”

“I’m after a reporter named William Wolf, who I hope can shed light on the strike.”

“It all started there, or seemed to. Can’t hurt us. And?”

“Bird Daly thinks I told her she’s not pure enough goods for a beau.” My already tight throat was sore after that admission.

“You
what
?” Val demanded.

I took a deep breath, rallying. “I didn’t. I was trying to tell her that falling in love with James Playfair would prove a bit of a wrench.”

“You . . . oh,” he concluded lamely. “You could . . . ah, make that argument.”

“Mercy Underhill is back and living in a boardinghouse off Broadway.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“How about send her a welcoming meat pie and leave her the hell alone?”

“I’ve been visiting her. My landlady is furious with me.”

“Your landlady is not alone, you bottle-head. You should be giving Miss Mercy the berth of a pox ward.”

My brother is one of several men who have engaged in casual relations with the love of my life. That fact makes me want to rip my own skin off, so I refuse to ruminate over it. Meanwhile, he’s less than fond of her. Seems to think she unduly influences my moods.

“That’s not going to happen. You’re right, though.” Dropping the pen, I pushed my knuckles into my eyelids, seeing multicolored blood pulse starkly against the bone. “I can’t think. Or not about . . . any single thing for long enough to make sense of it. I’ve never felt this rattled. Val, something terrible is going to happen, I know it.”

“Look at me.”

I did. His lips were pushed into a concrete line.

“Not to
us
, all right, my Tim? I know you’re ketched over this Symmes business, but I won’t let it touch us. Keep your nets in the water and send me word if you snag anything. Now, finish that blasted police report. And I’m dead serious—stay clear of Mercy Underhill if you know what’s healthy for you. Which you obviously don’t.”

I’d have said,
That makes two of us.
But I hadn’t the strength.

He fetched his hat and his heavy stick from his chair. Gave me a brief nod. Quit the room and presumably the building.

Timothy Wilde, Star 107,
I signed the report ten minutes later.

I returned the pen to its stand. For a moment I listened to the ticking of the gilded grandfather clock in the corner, stretching my right hand backward with my left. Then a pheasant carcass scavenged from a restaurant’s rubbish bin crossed my mind. Unripe apples, tea made from mint weeds and lemon rinds, tomatoes stolen from a churchyard.

Breath faltering, I folded my arms and placed my head on them, and I stayed there. A small man slumped across a large desk in the middle of Tammany. For far longer than I like to recall.

We are many in the city

Who the weary needle ply;

None to aid and few to pity

Tho’ we sicken down and die;

But ’tis work, work away

By night and by day;

Oh, ’tis work, work away,

We’ve no time to pray.

—NED BUNTLINE, “THE SEWING GIRL’S SONG,”
MYSTERIES AND MISERIES OF NEW YORK

I
WAS FORCED TO POST
notes to my colleagues at the Tombs the following morning indicating that I’d be missing our scheduled parley. Not because I didn’t need to see them but because Mercy Underhill doesn’t generally slip unfolded sheets of foolscap without any envelopes under Mrs. Boehm’s front door reading:

I would like to speak with you. If it’s nothing then it’ll come to nothing as everything else does in its due time but if it isn’t nothing you’ll want to know about it even though one day it will fade just the same. Meet me at my lodgings for breakfast. No one will think anything of it I assure you and anyhow there’s nothing to think exactly is there and the best kippers and toast I find are to be had at nine o’clock, God not having granted our proprietress the gift of early rising.

—Mercy

I’d descended the stairs at seven in the morning on April 26, freshly shaved and washed, to find Elena Boehm seated at the ever flour-grainy and butter-smeared table. No matter how many times a day she scrubs that piece of furnishing, it’s always blessed by her most recent culinary effort. I’ve never minded it. The kitchen table smells
comfortable
, in a way nothing else does.

Elena was making a list. I’ve always liked that she’s left-handed, though I’ve no idea why. Well, I’ve a hint of one, perhaps. It indicates she isn’t a normal person, which makes me that much more easy in her presence.

“She still sounds not very well, your friend,” Elena said hesitantly. After I’d gawked like a looby for ten or twelve seconds too long at Mercy’s note. I couldn’t blame her for reading the thing—it wasn’t even folded in half.

“She was better, before . . . Just recently, I mean.”

It sounded a miserable protest even to my own ears. Elena squeezed my wrist and went back to jotting down items.

“For dinner. Tonight. Forgot, maybe?” she asked without inflection.

“God no.” I dragged myself from the mire of my thoughts. “Bird is coming over for dinner. If she still agrees, mind. She thought I said something terrible to her yesterday.”

My landlady waited for me to elaborate. Arms crossed, fingers latched tight over her blue dress sleeves and her strangely colorless eyes pinned to my wreck of a face. I elaborated.

“Ach!” she exclaimed fondly, creasing her wide brow. “The poor thing. No, no—don’t think that. It might have been clumsy, but not ever would I suppose that you would
think
of such untruths, let alone speak them to Bird. You will fix this between the two of you. Bring some things back for dinner?”

“Of course. Which things?”

“A leg of mutton,” she said, noting the request with a check mark on her slip of paper. “For the hash. If you can find any fresh parsley, that I would like. I have the dried mushroom powder for roasting. Wine we have, in the pantry. Maybe please some fresh butter? We are low on butter.”

“Butter, parsley, leg of mutton. That’s all we need?”

“Would not that be a rare blessing.”

I smiled. “Anything else?”

She shook her head, wordless.

Something undisguised about her face struck me just then. I realized that never, not a single time in my life with her, had Mrs. Boehm deemed me unworthy of her secrets. On every occasion I’d asked after them, she’d answered me. Hesitant, maybe. But ultimately unguarded. And I understood that her explanations had been caresses, her confessions intimacies. Despite the fact I’d scarcely told her anything, unless I was unspooling like a skein of blood-red ribbon. It ached, when I saw it plain, in a part of me I hadn’t known was dedicated to Elena at all. She’d said that people mark each other, and I owned by happy accident a stunning collection of Mrs. Boehm’s anecdotes. Meanwhile, I’d never so much as wondered if she wanted to know where I’d been born.

“I want you to know everything, but I keep it from you because I don’t want you to be frightened,” I said all in a rush.

“Why on earth would I be frightened?” she replied, surprised.

“You think I don’t like talking to people, talking to you, but it isn’t that.”

“But you
don’t
like talking to people,” she said softly. “People tell you too much. And then you walk away from them with a full mouth and closed lips.”

She was right. But she was also mistaken.

“I’m not talking about
people
, I’m talking about
you.
My life is very ugly. I don’t want you to be frightened. Not ever, and especially not due to my needing someone to listen to me because I’m already afraid.”

I’d her face in my hands before I knew what I was doing, and her jaw lifted for my mouth, and then I was tasting
vanilla
,
cinnamon
, all along the edge of her throat and only hoping that the things I did and the truly stupid things my brother did would lead her to no harm.

She took me by the throat with the flat of her palm and pushed me back. In a friendly manner, smiling. Nothing but warmth in her pale eyes and amusement lifting her pronounced cheeks.

“You like being told to buy fresh parsley,” she conjectured. “Or maybe you like me not to be worried?”

“The latter,” I said at once, trying to press my nose back into her neck. The act on my part wasn’t studied, nor even driven by romantic inclinations. When I think about it, it was affection. A simple thing, the
simplest
, affection.

Or shouldn’t it be?

“You go now,” Elena said, laughing as she put her arms around me. “You go to this Miss Underhill and see what it is she means to say.”

“All right,” I sighed against her neck.

Then I let her go. Elena tucked a wisp of hair about the density of a spider’s web behind her ear, waving her hand in a comradely farewell. We couldn’t have known what would happen that night, read the future in the flour grains on her table. But it’s been years since April 26 of 1848, so many years, and when I think about what I ought to have done differently, among all my great errors I nevertheless remember that wave, and that I ought to have kissed her before the gentle creak of the door and the thud of my boots in the dirt marked my departure from what had been—for all its many singular silences—a happy home.

—

H
alf an hour later, after leaving an apologetic note to Piest, Connell, and Kildare tacked to my office door, I was seated at a low bench in the public dining space of Mercy’s lodging house. It was a longish kitchen, really. A normal one, strung up with neatly braided garlic and onions, flour stacked in the corners. Except that the farthest wall, where not hung with cast-iron pans, was littered with pinned-up theatrical notices on corkboard—calls for actors, playbills, congratulatory notes, flyers as raucous as Tammany propaganda tacked helter-skelter above the cutlery.

As was decidedly not the case with Party publicity, it made for a nice effect, I thought.

The room was done in simple blue and white tiles that made one think of sharing a fresh crust or pouring a beer for a friend. I’d expected the lateness of the designated nine-o’clock hour to mean we would monopolize the meal hall. But a space was warmed by the dwarf at the far corner of the dining bench—Kindling, I recalled—and the waifish blonde with the perfectly rounded-off lips sat across from him. When I entered with Mercy, they waved quite unabashedly, then started up a quiet symphony of whispers and giggles over bowls of hot porridge. It would have been charming had I not known dead to rights the gossip was about me.

“We help ourselves over breakfast, though luncheon and dinner are served to us,” Mercy said as she and I collected plates and toast and preserves and some admittedly handsome kippers that lay in a skillet. A carafe of coffee rested on the table, and we sat on either side of it. “I admit, I much prefer it so. Papa and I always did for ourselves or each other, and when I was in London, I supped with my cousin. You can trust cousins, the food they pass you. Here I feel such a stranger that something always looks wrong about meals, the colors and such, though I don’t suppose it’s very lucrative policy to poison one’s lodgers. Is it?” she added anxiously.

Mercy wore a light off-the-shoulder day dress of black-and-white-checked cotton—it was neatly pressed, and the wide band of salmon-colored ribbon she’d passed through her thick black hair was artfully done. But her skin was pale enough to be faintly blue, and she’d been gnawing at her underlip to the point of leaving it raw. I remembered how she’d looked left in an ice bath to freeze to death by her paranoid lunatic of a father and fought the urge to take her heart-shaped face in my two hands and kiss her back to health.

“No.” I poured us both cups of steaming coffee. “Though if you want, I’ll come over every mealtime and taste your plate for safety.”

Idiot,
I thought when she smiled knowingly.

“Would you?” She stopped, brows pinching together as if she’d hurt herself. “I’m sorry. You so seldom say to me all of what you mean. It’s just . . . fragments, you see, smashed eggshells and broken teacups. So I formed the habit of questioning you further. But you needn’t answer that. I’ve always wondered if death by poison is painless or if it burns from the inside, little rivulets eating through your bloodstream until you’re hollow. If it were peaceful, like going to sleep, I’d not mind the idea so.”

A distant, unrelated titter from the dwarf followed by, “Oh, you naughty thing,” from the actress filled the silence as I absorbed this harrowing sentiment.

Mercy has always been morbid. Always. She’d once, for
Light and Shade in the Streets of New York
, written a short story about an emigrant mother whose child was starving, who’d served her boy black pudding as a last gift before dying. The source of the blood for the black pudding was never explicitly stated, but the doctor upon declaring the poor woman dead remarked how clumsy she’d grown in her last illness, with so many bandaged cuts on her arms.

But this was different. The empty way Mercy’s hands rested before her, palms-up on the table, fingers softly curved in over nothing at all.

Your father died by his own hand. He’d been broken by the weight of the world, and that is not allowed to happen to you, never to you, you are precious and living and—

“Anyhow,” she said, as if continuing a conversation, “I’ve been thinking. And talking with Dunla. That’s why I sent a street boy with the note before dawn.”

“You sounded distressed,” I hazarded.

“Did I? I can’t . . . It was a dewdrops-on-spider’s-silk sort of morning. Eerie. I can never remember those very well after they’ve passed over. Distressed, you say?”

“There was rather a lot of talk of nothing.”

“Oh!” She sipped her coffee, seeming much relieved. “I was reading Shakespeare last night. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ you know the speech. It must have gotten stuck. That happens at times now. I couldn’t get rid of the voice in my head reading ‘Now that the wind and earth and sky are silent’ for over a week once, though it was Chaucer reading me his translation and not Petrarch himself.”

Smiling, she fell quiet.

It was hardly comforting. But it was in line with her usual daylight madness, so I commenced breathing again. “How are you getting on with Miss Duffy?”

“Very well. She is fourteen, I’ve discovered, and hasn’t a soul left to her in the world. And she’s perfectly sensible once you come to know her, though I admit she owns a peculiar turn of phrase. She’s a bit like buying the yearly almanac and opening it to discover it’s only rather exotic illustrations and no prose to speak of. Eat your breakfast—it’s quite the safest meal, as I said.”

Only you,
I surmised as I sampled a kipper,
would call Dunla Duffy sensible and then describe her as a pictorial almanac.

“Here’s five dollars, by the way,” I said, remembering. Dipping inside my frock coat, I passed her the notes. “Courtesy of the star police, since I’m sure you didn’t expect a new bunkmate.”

She frowned. “Don’t you recall I’ve money of my own now?”

“That doesn’t mean you signed up for a half-simple Irish sewing girl.”

“You know full well I’ve always done charity work for the Irish. Anyway, I like her. She’s seen unspeakably ugly things and still doesn’t care for ugliness.”

“You’re right. But I’m in dire need of some answers.”

“And thus you need fresh Pell Street sources, I suppose?” Mercy dipped a knife into the butter pot and spread it delicately over her toast. It was such an ordinary action, so akin to the sort I wanted to share with her endlessly, it seemed of enormous importance. “Sources who may have seen something unusual and can phrase such things rather more prosaically?”

“Just so.”

“That’s why we are finding the Witch.”

I paused with my fork midway to my mouth. “The woman whose light Miss Duffy was so ketched over stealing?”