The Fatal Flame (26 page)

Mercy nodded. “At first I thought it a fruitless corridor to venture down, but she looms so powerfully in Dunla’s head that I can’t help feeling we’re being led to her by some force. And of course the rest of the residents have scattered, but since, as Dunla says, witches quite naturally are to be found in their towers with their cauldrons, she’ll be easily discovered.”

Swallowing my toast presented fresh challenges of a sudden.

“Timothy?” Mercy’s lips pursed.

“Do you really . . . think she’s
that
sort of witch?”

“Of course. Dunla told me so.”

“Yes,” I said. The word somehow acquired additional syllables.

“Oh, here she is herself!” Mercy exclaimed. “The poor thing, now she is allowed a little sleep, I can never bear to wake her. Dunla, dear, come sit with us after you’ve filled your plate and explain to Mr. Wilde about the witches.”

And please, in the process, assure me that the love of my life isn’t insane,
I begged some faceless deity as the sewing girl scouted the buffet.

Miss Duffy sat down, weirdly round eyes pinned to her plate. She’d taken several kippers and three pieces of toast that were now as much piles of berry preserves as they were bread. It struck me with a little jab twixt my ribs as a melancholy business, that she’d so seldom had access to such things. Not to mention the fact she was likely as much preparing for the grim future after she left Mercy’s rooms as she was making up for lost meals.

“What about the witches?” she asked with a rather large amount of toast—or preserves, rather—in her mouth.

“You were afraid of the Witch because the other girls said she was mad, granted. But why else were you afraid of her?”

“Oh, sure enough because o’ the spells she were after a-casting within the tower.” Morning light glinted from the odd mossy-copper braids Miss Duffy had worked into a small bun atop her head.

I confess that this explanation did little to aid my understanding.

Mercy’s eyes were twinkling. “Why don’t you tell us exactly what that looked like, as you told me yesterday?”

Miss Duffy, between bites, explained in her peat-thick Irish brogue that when she’d first arrived in Manhattan six months previous, staggering into the New World like a shipwreck victim, she’d been greeted by an Irishman at the docks. My neck prickled instantly, but this greeter was no Ronan McGlynn. It was instead a member of the Irish Emigrant Society, which has for a few years now sought to lessen if only by needle-thin degrees the barbarity of our welcoming system—and by welcoming system I mean the process of ships spewing newcomers from the whale’s belly to fend for themselves. The Society fellow (she couldn’t recall his name but believed he was an angel in disguise) took Miss Duffy to his offices in Ann Street after asking where her kin were and what her plans might be and discovering her slate blank on both counts.

And anyway, after he’d spoken with you, he knew you for a loose-limbed lamb on the slaughterhouse floor,
I thought, silently thanking the anonymous gentleman.

Upon arriving at the Irish Emigrant Society, Dunla Duffy was given a bowl of barley broth containing “sure enough real beef and turnips” and a map of the city. As she ate, she was taught that St. Patrick’s Cathedral was on the corner of Prince and Mott and made to memorize the address lest she need help. She was told not to bother seeking assistance at Protestant churches (Mercy’s cleft chin twitched in familiar repulsion at this). She was admonished that the only respectable trades for Irish girls included sewing, servitude, or—if she was very lucky and personable and quick—serving food in a Catholic-friendly eating house. She was to ask the literate to read employment notices to her from the
Herald.
The cheapest of desperate housing could be found in Ward Six, but there was one address she was to “avoid at all costs as a churchgoer, as it was sinful and perilous.” Miss Duffy’s savior described it to her.

“And when first I passed by the place, I found he were ne’er slaggin’ me neither, fer all the witches live there and huddle over their cauldrons, sure enough,” Miss Duffy whispered. “I saw them through the entrance, whenever I dared t’ pass it by. But I were that dead on me feet sometimes, so’s I had to go through the square or faint dead away, and then ye can’t help but see the tower and the hell flames. The door bein’ always open and all. The Witch lived there afore Pell Street. I saw her specific-like.”

Speechless with delight, I spread my arms wide, leaned forward over the table, and grinned at Mercy Underhill.

She smiled at me with one side of her too-tender mouth. Pleased with herself. As well she should have been. The woman who makes my blood sing isn’t simply a talented wordsmith but apparently an investigative genius to boot. I shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d given me the decisive clue to the kinchin murder tragedy years ago, when by dint of her charity work she’d introduced me to Ninepin.

“You see why I thought you might take an interest?” she ventured. Letting her blue eyes slide sidelong.

“Indeed I do. Miss Duffy, is the square you speak of in the Five Points?”

“O’ course.”

“And the tower is an enormous brick building, once painted white but now filthy? With a pair of pointed rooftops? Between the taller peak and the front door below there’s a great crumbling arch with three gaping windows, all the glass smashed and then blocked up with oiled paper in tatters? And the doors are always flung wide to the plaza?”

“Oh, aye, ye know it well, then,” Miss Duffy agreed.

“I do. Mercy, you’re a wonder.”

She angled her head at me, smoothing down the curl at her nape.

“Miss Duffy, would you describe what the Witch looks like?”

“Grey hair coarse as a brush, all a-leapin’ off her head like, though she ties it back wi’ a red kerchief. She has seven queer devil candles what reek like hell itself. Them’s what got me in trouble.”

I leaned over to retrieve my hat from the bench. “This is too flash to waste any time over. Thank you, I’ll make it up to you both somehow. Now if you’ll excuse—”

Standing with a steely edge of determination, Mercy pressed Miss Duffy’s shoulder warmly. “I shall see you at supper, I hope, Dunla. I found a book on flowers in the parlor, and it’s filled with the most beautiful picture plates. I left it on the table for you.”

No,
I thought.

“Going for a walk, Miss Underhill?” the dwarf called out.

“Of sorts,” she agreed as I opened my mouth in violent protest.

“Oh, don’t dream of going unescorted, Miss Underhill. I’d
hate
to think of you encountering any ruffians.
Do
say you’ll not go alone!” cooed the flaxen-haired actress.

Kindling’s face was reddening to a shade not unlike his hair, a laugh trapped in his chest. “Your star-police friend here would oblige, surely? To save us both the worriment over your safety?”

“He’d oblige, I think,” Mercy answered serenely. My fingers twitched in helpless mortification as she headed for the door. “He’s very kind.”

“Do you know, he
seems
so, and I’ve an extraordinary sixth sense in these matters!” agreed the actress. “Enjoy taking the air, my dear. If you go down the shilling side of Broadway, there’s the most
marvelous
display of engagement rings in the window just south of—”

The performers collapsed in chortles as I made a hasty departure from their dining hall. Not because I was shades of embarrassed I’d never known existed in the pantheon of human humiliation, but because Mercy Underhill was walking calm as you please in the direction of the Old Brewery, the most lightless hive of human wretchedness in all of Ward Six.

—

Y
ou needn’t be so flustered, you know,” Mercy advised, her small hand on my arm. “It isn’t as if I’ve not been here previous, once to distribute medicines and once to help a group of charity workers give a tour to some British reformers—or didn’t I tell you about that before?”

“You didn’t tell me much,” I couldn’t help but return in my profound consternation. “Before.”

Stifling a sigh, Mercy returned her eyes to the hulking blot of architecture we stood contemplating. Traveling to the Old Brewery in the heart of the godless Five Points had been a mere matter of walking down Centre Street for eight or so blocks, watching hectic sparks fly from the great wheels as the New York and Harlem Railroad was dragged northward by straining, marble-eyed horses, and then turning east on Anthony Street. A stroll of ten minutes had taken us there.

“It hasn’t changed,” Mercy mused.

“Apart from acquiring a few score more residents? No, I don’t imagine it has.”

Once upon a time, as Mercy might write, the place where we stood had been a woodland pond reflecting the preening sun’s face back to it as if the waters were a handheld mirror. I don’t know when Manhattan began its slow creep outward like a cancer, but sometime about fifty years back, a brewery was built on the edge of the sparkling waters. Add a dozen or so other filthy industries wanting a water source to the landscape and we had ourselves a fetid swamp. So we paved over the surface, and the swamp went away. Except it didn’t, not really. It festers under the entirety of the Five Points, which is why all the buildings here sag into rot and ruin about a month after they’re constructed. As for the Old Brewery, as it’s called, it’s an ancient nightmare of a place.

And since no one can be bothered to knock it down, people live there.

Hundreds of them. Irish, blacks, and other indigents—like penniless outworkers, I took it—swarm the wreck. Dunla Duffy had been right to be warned away. There’s no better place to develop conditions like a shiv in your neck or a constellation of smallpox on your belly. As for witchcraft, she’d been describing the place after sunfall, when human locusts flutter around great scavenged iron pots and cauldrons on the ground floor with fires kindled in them—anything to keep warm whilst keeping the flames from licking at the walls, doors flung wide to the night sky to prevent the meager hearths from smothering every last occupant.

If the woman called the Witch could live someplace else—an oozing cellar, a sweltering attic, a populous apple barrel—she would. But lacking lodgings so suddenly and recently, I’d every hope she might be found there.

As did Mercy. Apparently.

“Are we venturing inside,” she wondered, “or admiring the view?”

“This way,” I said, turning us aside. “Miss Duffy was right about one thing—there’s no way we’re walking in there without our own light.”

It took me five minutes to convince the corner grocer to lend a copper star a bull’s-eye lantern, followed by the selfsame proprietor charging me double the fair price of oil to light it, which struck me as pretty fine style. In we stepped over the threshold of the Old Brewery, its gloom reaching for us like the maw of a descending predator. The front room is cathedral cavernous, designed to house vats of ale. Now it houses dozens of the drunk, the sick, and the simply poor. Hints at upper levels emerged in smudged charcoal lines, echoes of snores and of whimpers reaching our ears. But even in broad daylight, the paper over the windows means the place is too shrouded in midnight to make much of a visual impression.

No, what strikes you first is the smell. Unwashed bodies, unclean refuse, unadulterated woe—sweat and shit and sex and every other uniquely personal scent signaling
Get out.

“Why do you want to be here?” I asked Mercy, toeing an impressive insect carcass into the piles of broken glass and moldering rags along the walls.

“Because I discovered after my mother died that if I don’t do this sort of thing continually, I’ll become frightened of it. And I don’t want to be the sort of girl who’s frightened.”

I couldn’t answer her. My mouth was too full of
Please, would you please just let me tear off a string of your heart and wind it around my finger?
Anyhow, I was distracted.

The rag piles had started moving. Blinking at the lantern’s harsh, concentrated glow. A family of Africans—or at any rate four sets of red-rimmed eyes mounted within skeletons pasted over with black skin—peered back at me from a little heap on the obscenely filthy floor. They’d covered themselves in burlap coffee bags.

“All right,” I said to Mercy lowly. “I’m not glad you’re here, but I’m . . . glad you’re here. I’ve only been within the doors of this place once, during the riot over the copper stars’ forming three years ago. You’re more familiar with this terrain.”

“Not in any valuable way.”

“You’ve explored it twice?”

“Yes, but—”

“If you were an outworker living in this sort of hell, you’d need somewhere between seventeen and eighteen hours’ work per day to keep your blood pumping, yes?”

She considered. “Supposing even that effort proved enough.”

“Where’s the light?”

“Pardon?”

“This woman seems to have nearly taken Miss Duffy’s head off for working from the light of her candles. If there are seamstresses here, they’d forsake warmth preferring free illumination.”

“Of course,” she exclaimed. “But God, Timothy, I don’t . . . Wait, let me think.”

“The cellar is out, of course,” I reasoned. “The staircases here are a hazardous business?”

“What? Oh, yes. The coming down is hardest. One sometimes feels as if one can
climb
anything, challenges oneself to put a hand on a rotting banister here, a foot on a creaking stair there, but returning . . .”

“Which is just what I mean. Would you so much as attempt it if you were stitch-blind? Or even partway there?”

Ellie Abell and Sally Woods had been doing cutters’ work—hardly a fortune involved, but reasonable hours with a weekly pay. Plenty of other females in the textile industry could labor hemming difficult cloth or sewing on buttons or adding fancy stitchwork with no ill effects for decades.

The outworkers, though . . . The only reason Dunla Duffy’s eyesight remained keen was that she hadn’t been here long enough. Toil enough fruitless hours in meager light, allow hours to bleed into dusky days and then months and then years, and the sense of sight itself revolts against tyranny. Withers and dies.