The Fatal Flame (30 page)

“It is only a guess, Mr. Wilde,” Mr. Piest reminded me breathlessly as we dove streetside out of the prison in the direction of Ward Four.

“It is a very bloody good guess,” I shot back, waving frantically at a free hacksman. He pulled to the side, horse whinnying at the sudden change.

“What are you hoping to find?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe energetic materials. Maybe in the walls, maybe in the cellar, so long as we learn how she’s doing it.”

Regarding the “she” I referred to, I was no longer certain of anything, I realized as we lunged into the hack. The journalist’s voice echoed between my ears. Louder than the cries of the costermongers, louder than the blunted roar of the traffic as we turned onto Broadway.

Miss Woods is too keen to make such a dull play.

Miss Abell is affectionate, trusting, and well intentioned. I can’t possibly think of a person who would be more easy to manipulate.

“Mr. Wilde?”

Feeling the first hint of pain, I discovered I was staring blankly out the window with my knuckle in my teeth.

“Nothing.” I tucked my hands under my arms, suddenly self-conscious. “No sign of life at Miss Woods’s greenhouse?”

“I fear not, Mr. Wilde, or so the ever-stalwart Mr. Austin and Mr. Clare assure me.”

“The copper stars watching the alderman’s buildings since Miss Woods escaped me have seen nothing suspicious?”

“They have not. But, regrettably, we haven’t the resources to guard all his properties on a twenty-four-hour period. Searches for incendiary materials have been made but thus far have revealed nothing.”

“If Miss Woods truly wanted to harm Symmes, why hurt his buildings rather than his person?”

“A woman, however resolute, would fear attacking a powerful man physically,” Piest reasoned.

He’s right,
I thought.

Then
I’m missing something
clanged like a clock chime inside my head.

Streets passed. Duane, Reed, Chambers. Why should a highly intellectual woman take such risks? I asked myself. And alternately, how could a highly suggestible woman for all her intelligence hatch them in the first place? They couldn’t be working in tandem, as they didn’t even speak to each other. Supposing that assumption correct, of course.

The hack pulled to a halt, wheels grinding.

Mechanically, I stepped down as Piest paid the driver. I took in the street where everything had started. The chipped bricks, the blocked windows, the vibrant decay of a place devoted to the worst varieties of vice.

“Come,” Mr. Piest urged.

We entered the Queen Mab. The hallway with its tragic-seeming pornographic décor was dark and grotesquely quiet. An oppressive, glowering silence. I was struck by how very
empty
the place was. Deserted, in fact, in the absence of Ronan McGlynn. Finding an oil lamp on the table, I reached into my waistcoat for matches. We made for the sitting room where Symmes had presented his offer of fleshy compensation to Valentine. One that, in retrospect, seemed as bizarre as it was cruel.

“My God, Mr. Wilde, I can hardly credit it, though it makes perfect logical sense.”

“What?” I turned back to him.

“You were right,” Piest replied, on his knees at the edge of the room.

I brought the light closer. My friend Mr. Piest is abnormally good at seeing things. He’d pulled a loose baseboard from the wall to reveal a small gap. Little chunks of a white material lined the space along the floorboards, yellow-tinged and horridly eerie. White phosphorus, it seemed clear.

“How did you see that?” I marveled.

“The dust.” He waved his bony hand at it. “This place is in the most egregious state of disrepair, but here the filth was displaced. I look for such things often, you understand, finding so many stolen items lodged in traps and under paneling.”

“You’ve still the finest set of eyes in Manhattan. This means . . .”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know,” I realized. “I don’t know what it means.”

Thump-thump-thump
sounded shoes on the ceiling above our heads.

It was a good job I’d set the lamp on a table, or I might have dropped it. My eyes met Piest’s instantly.

“A squatter taking advantage of an empty house?” I whispered.

“It could be absolutely anyone,” Mr. Piest agreed.

Lifting the lamp again, I headed for the upper rooms. I can be pretty stealthy when I like, but Piest’s crab legs and ten-pound boots are guaranteed to make a racket, so I didn’t bother softening my step. Anyway, the pair of us blocked the exit. As soon as our feet hit the boards and the light streamed up ahead of us, the movement in the chamber above stopped.

“Have a care,” I murmured.

“The same to you.”

We reached the second-story corridor. The first room was the bedchamber where Caoilinn had held a knife to Kildare’s neck. I stepped inside.

Sally Woods stood within, staring at a baseboard likewise pulled from a wall lined with malevolent chunks of white phosphorus.

“Miss Woods, I take it?” Mr. Piest gasped.

“The same,” I marveled.

With a startled shout, she ran for the window. But the place had been designed to keep just such creatures locked within, and when she tore the dark covering away, she found it both latched and barred.

“There’s no way out,” I warned. “We won’t hurt you. But you’re coming—”

One would think, as I am widely considered reasonably intelligent, that being knocked senseless once by Sally Woods had taught me not to underestimate her.

One would be wrong.

Seeing no possible exit save for the doorway, she rushed at us. When I moved to catch her, she used her momentum to shove herself against me as Mr. Piest snatched at her with long arms.

I don’t know if it was Mr. Piest or Miss Woods who knocked the oil lamp from my hand. I only know that the fuel spilled into a little pool that instantly transformed into a glowing puddle of fire.

All three of us froze in horror.

“Oh, no,” Miss Woods breathed, trembling under my fingers where I clutched her fitted jacket.

“Keep hold of her,” Mr. Piest commanded, “and go downstairs.”

“Jakob—”

“Do as I say, Mr. Wilde! I have this situation well in hand, and you
must
escort the lady out of danger! Whatever she may have done, we cannot risk her life. Go!” he shouted, rushing down the corridor after God knows what.

I did as I was told. Miss Woods, now I’d a solid grip on her, struggled to keep pace with me as we hurtled toward the ground floor.

“What is he planning?” she gasped.

I couldn’t say, couldn’t even open my mouth for fear my stomach would fall out. Every ounce of determination I possessed was devoted to keeping Sally Woods captive without actually hurting her. In a blessed instant of sanity, I tore the tie from a window curtain before hauling her outside.

“Mr. Wilde?”

The smoke-drenched panic didn’t ebb when we reached the street. Not with Piest still in the building, not with the obscene amount of incendiary material within. We crossed the cobbled road, heedless of traffic, ducking between a cart loaded with beer kegs and a gentleman’s stately carriage and four.

“Face away from me, please.”

She did, arms quivering. I tethered her wrists at the small of her back in an unyielding bind and then wrapped the tasseled rope several times around my hand. We attracted plentiful stares from pedestrians. Though whether that was due to my carefully restraining a beautiful woman’s hands or the fact the beautiful woman was wearing men’s duds, I couldn’t have guessed. I could tell from her pressed trousers she hadn’t been sleeping rough, but she seemed thinner. She’d been in a boardinghouse—one chosen for economy and lacking in decent peck.

“Ward Six or Ward Four?” I asked.

“Four. A wretched den on Oliver Street. It isn’t what you think, I swear to Christ it isn’t. Mr. Wilde? I know it looks—”

“It looks like you started a failed strike, had your heart broken by a despicable man, sent him threatening mail, and then started setting fire to his properties.”

Slumping against the building opposite the Queen Mab, I gripped the end of the curtain cord and stared at the house that was about to explode with my closest friend in it and tried not to fall into a thousand sharp-edged pieces. Because I don’t like to think of myself as a coward—cannot bear cowards, in fact—and I realized I’d just been expertly manipulated.

Of course he would tell you to get the girl out of danger, of course he would say the one thing that would make you leave him there, of course he—

“Are you arresting me?”

“Of course I am.”

Come out,
I thought wretchedly.
For the love of God, come out of there and make ludicrous statements about honor that no one save you believes anymore, and next week drink gin in my office with Connell and Kildare until none of us can see straight, and then pop up spry as a jack-in-the-box the next morning.

“Mr. Wilde, I was looking for answers myself just now. You have to credit me—I thought if I could only solve it, then I could go back to my ken. I’ve no livelihood without my press. I’m not a criminal.”

“Miss Woods, you hit me over the head with a liquor bottle.”

“If I hadn’t, you’d have collared me then!” she cried. “I was sorry to do it, never wanted to do it. Robert has plentiful enemies, if only you’d listen—”

“I’ll listen if you tell me something useful for once. Miss Abell was summoned to a meeting with Symmes after the strike ended.” Glancing at her, I hesitated. “What happened?”

Her boldly featured face with its high coloring and strong lines, already pale, faded to chalk. She shook her head.

“Come out,” I whispered at the Queen Mab. “Come out, damn you.”

“Mr. Wilde,” Miss Woods said unsteadily, “in the course of your investigation, have you seen Ellie since I . . . How is she?”

“In fine health and poor spirits. She— Oh, thank
God
.”

Mr. Piest, looking not the smallest bit singed, strode out of the Queen Mab on gangly legs and stopped to blink at the sun. Spying us, he scuttled across the road, rubbing his hands together as a man will do when he has accomplished a worthy task. He was one of the most gorgeously ugly sights I’d ever clapped eyes on.

“Do not, and I repeat, do
not
play me for a goosecap like that ever again,” I snapped, pushing myself away from the wall.

“Mr. Wilde, I have not the smallest notion of what you are referring to.”

“Yes you do, you lunatic. The fire is out?”

He nodded, grey wisps floating around his shoulders. “What an ingenious use of a curtain sash, Mr. Wilde. Yes, one cannot douse an oil fire with water, so I simply had to find their washbasin and deposit it upended over the flames. Smothering took a matter of a minute afterward, as I expected. It was hardly a taxing effort on my part.”

“I’m going to the nearest pawnshop and buying you a bloody medal of valor,” I said seriously.

“Oh, come now, I was merely taking the most obvious practical steps—it was nothing so valiant as all that, surely,” he protested, ears pinkening.

I felt a tug at the rope wrapped five or six times around my fist and turned to view Miss Woods. She looked, from the white streak in her hair to the soles of her riding boots, the picture of miserable guilt. That’s not mere misery, mind. I’ve seen it at the back of my brother’s eyes a thousand times. It was just as terrible on a comely anarchist. The things she’d done were terrible too, I reminded myself, and I’d all but caught her red-handed.

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked.

Unfortunately, it was a question with a single possible answer.

—

T
he women imprisoned at Sing Sing do sewing outwork, their negligible earnings paid over to the State of New York. The molls imprisoned at the Tombs sit on hard pallets, shivering in the winter and sweltering in the summer, praying or singing or screaming as suits their fancy. Struggling not to succumb to despair or something swifter, like dysentery or pneumonia.

I didn’t like shutting the cell door on Miss Woods—I wasn’t even then entirely convinced of her wrongdoing, despite staggering evidence against her. My conversation with William Wolf had rearranged the puzzle pieces, scattered the fragments of a half-completed board. But I knew she was dangerous, and that she frightened Robert Symmes, and that I needed to keep her close.

So shut the door I did, her eyes boring into me like rapiers.

“I haven’t set fire to any houses, Mr. Wilde,” she said through her teeth as I turned the key in the ponderous lock.

Slinging my fingers around the bars, I leaned in. “But you did threaten the alderman.”

She swallowed. “Repeatedly.”

“And you attacked me.”

She nodded, wincing. “I’m sorry. People get hurt in a war.”

“People
die
in a war. Two women died when you torched the Pell Street slum.”

“Mr. Wilde, I’ve never clapped eyes on the building you’re referring to, but if the deaths of two women could end the battle of the sexes and free my gender from slavery, I’d count the cost light. Because plenty more than two will be hushed before we can walk in the midday sun without fear of men,” she hissed.

“You’re not helping your case, Miss Woods.”

“What does it matter,” she said flatly. “You don’t believe me anyhow.”

Needles versus brickbats,
I thought, remembering Miss Abell’s account of the strike and Miss Duffy’s injuries. I wondered whether the reason Miss Woods unnerved me was that the eyes of a colonel fresh returned from the war in Texas stared out of a woman’s face—accepting of tragic losses to the point of being mistaken for callous. She ought to have been the queen of an ancient empire, and here she could do no better than cutting slave clothes or printing heretical screeds.

Which brought another item of interest to the front of my mind. “How do you explain this?”

I passed her the only note remaining to me, the only one she hadn’t taken from her greenhouse and presumably destroyed. The initial message that had sent the alderman to seek Valentine.

We will not be cowed by those who think us less than human.