The Fatal Flame (27 page)

“I’d never risk it, no!” Mercy assented, understanding me. “This front room admittedly boasts the most windows, but it’s claimed by the most long-standing occu—”

“Is there a problem here, little sunbeam?” a sinister voice rasped out of the gloom. “Some of us are trying to
catch a wink of sleep
.”

In a flash I’d averted the lantern and steered Mercy—to my deepest reluctance—farther into this sable sea calling itself a building. Not one of the placeless people surviving in the Old Brewery could outfight me.

But all
of them at once? Should a brawl commence? With Mercy on your arm?

As we drew away from the front steps where the sunshine bled through, the Old Brewery grew improbably more grim. I tried not to trouble anyone with the lantern, but few of the sots sprawled along the walls owned the strength to object. Anyhow, my type wouldn’t bustle them—copper stars often lead tours of this pit. Rich foreigners hug their arms tight to their waists and mutter deprecations about Americans and feel generally more pleasant about their own slums and pay us bright coins to watch people starve to death. Charles Dickens famously tried it when I was twenty-four. At least he didn’t enjoy it. Being . . . well, Charles Dickens and all.

“If I’d only paid more attention,” Mercy hissed, following the lantern beam with her eyes. “I could have— Wait, wait, stop.”

Avoiding the slumbering bodies flanking an aisle so as not to be trampled, we’d rounded a corner and reached a parallel corridor making a right angle along the wall.

“This way,” Mercy gasped.

Dropping my arm, she took my hand.

Through we plunged, and out again into another room stacked with bodies, and then yet another, nearly as large as the one before. Mercy led me with fingertips warm as Bird’s rosary beads against my palm toward a little room along the back side of the structure. When my lantern glanced off the entrance, I saw that its door had long since been torn off for firewood and the hinges pawned.

But even so far across the chamber, I could see that a diffuse glow of light emanated. A light made all the eerier by the pitch darkness in which it then drowned.

“The office,” Mercy said in my ear. “This was where the brewers did accounts. So they wanted daylight, long ago. Before we were born.”

We stepped slowly toward the hole of a doorway. Crossing the threshold felt like passing into another world. But we did it. Hand in hand, heart in mouth.

The room contained the following, as I later made note:

—heaps of snipped thread, gathered in a corner for later salvage, presumably for kindling

—piles upon piles of unfinished pantaloons, sleeves, drawers, and handkerchiefs

—fifteen sewing girls in various states of malnutrition

And a single woman with billowing iron hair tied down under a red rag, face deeply scored and tongue thrust between her teeth, working at the cuffs of slave trousers, several unlit but unique candles resting beside her outwork.

“Who in blazes are you?” the crone demanded in a voice like a knife being sharpened on a stone.

She was right to be peevish. I hadn’t introduced myself. But I knew, sure as Mercy’s hand rested in mine, that I had just encountered Miss Duffy’s Witch. And I suspected—as would later prove correct—that, as so commonly follows encounters with witches, events of great magnitude and ugliness lurked behind the horizon of my immediate future.

O! Men, with sisters dear!

O! Men, with mothers and wives!

It is not linen you’re wearing out,

But human creatures’ lives!

Stitch—stitch—stitch,

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

Sewing at once, with a double thread,

A Shroud as well as a Shirt.

—THOMAS HOOD, “THE SONG OF THE SHIRT,” 1843

“I’
M
T
IMOTHY
W
ILDE,
copper star one-oh-seven,” I said.

Silence. Bony hands continued stitching, ever stitching, actions rote and mechanical, red eyes pinned to the seams before them. Just as I’d surmised, they’d torn the paper from the two large windows, and though houses are packed thick as lice in Ward Six, a golden midmorning glow yet permeated. Tender and innocent-seeming.

Unlike the women.

Not that they seemed ignoble. The mere fact of them being there meant they’d chosen
not
to be somewhere else, as Dunla Duffy had likewise decided. They weren’t smothered in chalky powder and crimson rouge, walking arm in arm through the docksides and the boulevards, calling out propositions in stark detail. They weren’t covered in spangles everywhere save for their bare breasts, leaning out of windows in Ward Four. Neither were they poured like cream into sheaths of satin with lace overlay, waiting to be chosen from a line in a brothel resembling a mansion.

They were sewing. As if sewing were breathing, and in a way it was. But life had been crueler to them than words can convey and, there in that lowest den in the Five Points I saw more fully what Val was talking about when he insisted we couldn’t go on as we were.

One of the girls was crowned with blood-crusted gouges along her dark hairline. When I realized that was because she’d fallen asleep with her head uncovered, and she’d been too weary to awaken when a rat started gnawing her mazzard off, I thought we’d do best to build an ark, flood this cesspool of a city, and start it over fresh. No furnishings were visible, though I spied empty grain sacks on which the girls sat, and I presume under which they slept. Outwork lay in colossal folded piles on either side of each laborer. Their lips were chapped, expressions numb, fingers steady as the clock in the cupola of City Hall.

“Brought your lady friend to the zoo, have you?” the Witch sniffed.

She didn’t look up, but neither did her companions. There was something almost threateningly
alive
about the Witch, despite her smallness. As if she’d dared the universe to put her out of her misery and the universe wasn’t proving up to the task. Her hair was indeed a grey blizzard, barely controlled by the oily kerchief, her face weathered enough for her to have been born during the Revolution. But the bones beneath were strong, even handsome, even vaguely familiar, as if I’d seen her likeness once in a classical painting or a portrait of a beautiful debutante. Her eyes remained a shocking blue. She’d been forced to sell some of her inventive candles in the desperate circumstance of finding new digs, for Dunla had mentioned with all her native superstition
seven.
I spied five.

Finally, her outwork’s quality—compared to that of the other molls—was rather appalling. She stitched willy-nilly, tacking down the edges of kerchiefs as if no one had ever dared to tell her the job hadn’t been executed to his liking. I suspected the lax overseer to be Simeon Gage of New American Textiles, since I’d first heard of the Witch living in a Symmes-owned building. But whoever the weak-handed boss, I could scarce blame the cove.

She was terrifying.

What sent you to this hell?
I thought wonderingly.
What deliberate crimes, what accidental mistakes?

“My name is Mercy Underhill, and I often perform charity calls,” Mercy answered her readily. “Though I hate the necessity of visiting the hardworking in times of distress. What is your name, if you please, madam?”

The Witch, for we still hadn’t any more polite term to employ, dropped her piecework into her lap and
howled
with laughter.

I could see why the Pell Street girls said she was mad. The mirth was so unbridled, galelike in its force, that Mercy took half a step back, and I felt my right hand drifting as if to shield her.

Tears forming, the Witch subsided into gusty chuckles. “What finishing school did this pious seminary bitch come from?”

After that the room turned rather deafening.

“Want to see a lass wi’ open sores on her bum from sitting?” an Irish girl drawled from the corner.

“Won’t you sit down for a cuppa?”

“Oh, stop, the lot o’ you, they dasn’t mean no harm.”

“Buy a bloody ticket, there’s a sporting girl.”

“Are we meant to
appreciate
you realize we’re working?”

“And more to the point,” the Witch continued, nodding her head, “why should I feel any better about her staring at me than I should about a reporter here to make a dollar off my life story?”

“I didn’t go to finishing school, and the difference is payment,” Mercy replied evenly. “If you’ll speak with us, I’ll give you this lantern my friend is holding.”

Everyone froze. Me especially.

“We’re not—”

“People
live here
, Timothy.” Mercy was quiet but radiating force—a white coal at the still center of the hearth. “We can exit a building without a lantern. What say you, madam?”

The Witch’s eyes had fixed ravenously on the lantern, as if the object were real victuals. The rest of the girls hadn’t stopped sewing, not for a moment, never dropped a stitch for me or for Mercy’s sake.

“Ask your questions,” the Witch said.

Then she drew out a longish carving knife.

“And if you don’t leave the lantern afterward, I’ll make your face look like your beau’s.”

Miss Duffy was right to be frightened,
I realized, flexing my hand.

“How long had you lived at Pell Street when the fire broke out?” Mercy asked.

The tongue appeared again, thrusting between the Witch’s lips as if she were a lizard. “A month, maybe more.”

“Did you do outwork for Symmes or just live in his building?” I questioned.

“Both. He’s a man of importance. I’d call him ‘Alderman’ if I were you sorry lot.”

“How did you come to know him personally?”

“Never said I knew him,” she scoffed. “That doesn’t mean I’m witless enough not to know he owns half the city. I
work
for him. Lived in Pell Street, before it burned. That’s the whole story, Copper Star one-oh-seven.”

“Did you take part in the strike last year?”

“Do I look simpleminded to you?”

“No. But the organizers were hardly simpleminded either.”

The same laugh erupted, slicing through the stench. “You think not?” the Witch hissed. “You think that women who defy power are smart? I’ll tell you about how smart I was once, so you can kiss my arse and get out of my office. Would that tie a pretty little bow on your outing? Since you’re leaving the lantern, you ought to get your money’s worth.”

“We’d like to learn all you’re willing to tell us.”

“I was a maid once.” The Witch arrowed her eyes at Mercy. “Was I a pretentious, guilt-ridden, coddled smear of dung like you? I was not. Could I say no to the master of the house? Yes. But I
didn’t want to
—I supposed he’d throw over his wife for me, you see. Does that sound smart to you? So eventually my belly swells and I’m chucked out after the master blames one of the groomsmen for my trouble. Do you know what’s funny about that?”

We said nothing. I shook my head.

“It’s funny because I lost this game
once.
And ever since, I’ve been winning, because I’m not stupid enough to ask the world to revolve in the other direction. I left the baby at the door of a church. I worked at tailoring fashionable undergarments for years. When I lost that job, I kept on as an embroidery specialist. When the detailing dried up, I started outwork hemming. I won’t outlive every last person who spat on me,” the Witch concluded. “But I will spit on them, I will
spit on you
, until my corpse is dropped in an unmarked hole.”

Murmurs of approval filled the room and flew, like a horde of stinging insects, out the open window.

“When you lived in Pell Street,” I said, at every kind of loss, “did you notice anyone suspicious?”

“No one. Not a single person.”

I balked at this certainty. “You sound pretty sure.”

“I am
pretty sure
, you oaf. I lived in the downstairs front room, and how many hours of sleep per night do you think I allow myself? The answer is three, and I sleep light anyhow.”

“None of the cutters ever paid a call?”

“What business would that pack of uppity hens have visiting us? You suppose we’d tea cakes to offer?”

This was troubling. Sally Woods could, admittedly, have somehow planted the phosphorus months earlier—but the odds were against it, to my mind. Too much risk of its being discovered, too much time spent between planning a heinous act of vengeance and setting it alight. A week or two, I figured, would be the longest gamble she’d have countenanced.

We were getting nowhere at admirable speed. So in a last-ditch effort, I asked, “Have you
any
information that might help us find the person who burned down your home?”

The Witch stopped sewing. Her eyes lifted. They cut right through a man, sliced the meat from his bones and left him there to bleed.

“My
home
?” she spat. “My
home
, the fellow says. If that was a home, I’m the belle of the ball. Christ, get out of my sight, the pair of you. I didn’t think it could get any worse in here. I was wrong.”

Aching with disappointment, I stepped forward and set the lantern down. The Witch cackled in glee and dragged the bull’s-eye closer, as if it had been a treasure chest.

“What are the candles made out of?” Mercy asked as we went to the door.

“Turned animal fat, the sort that’s well past eating.” The Witch flicked her eyes up at us. “Why, you want a sip? Jesus, if I could send all so-called
reformers
to Liberia instead of the Africans, I could maybe die with a smile on my face.”

Leaving that abyss was a nerve-wracking feat. For all the hugeness of the space, the sounds of countless people waiting to die made it seem as if the walls were closing in. It probably took us three minutes, stepping carefully, moving faster as our eyes adjusted. It felt like a lifetime, though. And when we’d made it through the front door, still blessedly hand in hand, we gasped the marginally fresher atmosphere as if we’d come up from the depths of an inky ocean.

Mercy pulled away and, with her back to me, retrieved a small kerchief from the pocket of her black-and-white day dress. Tugging at her elbow didn’t work, so I stepped around her. She’d nearly dried her eyes by then, but a single track remained, and I wiped it away with my fingertips. She smiled shakily.

“Were you frightened?” I asked.

“Yes, but . . . that’s not what I . . .” She bit her lower lip, hard enough to hurt. “She was wrong, in a way. About me. But I wish . . . I wish she hadn’t also been right.”

“No.” I cupped my other palm to her face, willing her to look at me. “She was wrong. About every single word.”

“How can you be certain?” she asked, fresh tears welling into blue pools.

“Because
I know you
.”

You don’t remember,
I didn’t say,
when you were thirteen and you lent me a little green chapbook of poems you’d written, poems you wanted back when I was through, and you don’t know that whilst you were at church, I sat at your father’s desk and stole his ink and paper and copied the entire collection out line by line. I know everything there is to know about you, and I’m still here.

“Yes,” she said in a whisper like autumn reeds. “Yes, I think in spite of everything perhaps you do after all.”

—

Y
ou comprehensively brick-brained lunatic,
I thought when I arrived at my office an hour later.

Collapsing behind my desk with a large glass of gin, I drained the liquid and deposited my head in my hands. I just sat there for long moments. Feeling the liquor sweetly buzz through my veins like bees. Rubbing at my temples absently. Harder on the side where my scar rippled, unsightly and utterly unchangeable, across a quarter of my face.

Why in hell didn’t you just kiss her senseless?

Mercy would have let me, I thought. Before I brushed away the last of the tears and skimmed my lips lightly along her hairline. Before I offered my arm and walked her back to the theatrical boardinghouse. Before I left her at the door, half smiling and composed again.

Anyone would think you’re coward, a virgin, or a fucking eunuch.

I slumped forward, the heels of my palms grinding into my eyes.

Knock-knock-knock.

“Come in.”

The door swung open. Ninepin stood there with a short, square-shouldered, well-dressed gentleman wearing quiet plaid trousers and a matching brown swallowtail coat, a man with whom I was not familiar. The stranger swept his hat off as they stepped into the room.