The Fatal Flame (33 page)

I held up a hand. “Tell me about this print order you commissioned. Now.”

Gage’s chest puffed out proudly. “I’d kept up with my fellow tailors after landing this wretched farce of a job where I produce
nothing
requiring skill
,
make
nothing
of value, and Mr. Symmes was decent enough to lend me his ear on the subject. I was an
expert tailor
, my boss knows it, and he knows that this modern system is tearing fine men apart. He asked if any of my friends had ever written about the nobility of labor.”

“And that didn’t strike you as a touch odd.”

“The alderman is a civic leader who wanted to know how his voters felt,” Gage growled. “Mr. Symmes approached me asking—as a businessman and a gentleman, mind—whether I’d like to see my own side represented in print. And then Mr. Symmes recommended your press to me, Miss Woods. He took an interest. He took . . . pity, perhaps, after the strike. I thought it a . . . a noble-hearted gesture of forgiveness toward you.”

Miss Woods answered this remark with a furiously clenched jaw rather than words.

“I did! You printed the broadsheet yourself—I know you found our points about the degradation of labor apt! Mr. Symmes asked merely that a short piece another friend of his wrote be placed within the rest of the material. As it fit, we were glad to include the tale for distribution amongst freemen. I always supposed the commission was meant to aid his former sweetheart in your new line of work.”

“Oh, the
hell
you did!” Miss Woods cried.

“He might have,” I objected. “He idolizes one of the very manufactory barons snatching the bread from the tailors’ tables. He’s an idiot.”

“True enough.”

“Go on, Mr. Gage. Anything else you’d like to tell us about your part in a ruthless criminal conspiracy?”

“Criminal conspiracy be damned! I did take out insurance policies for Mr. Symmes,” Mr. Gage wheezed, loosening his collar. “And I did create the Venerable and Distinguished Brotherhood of Tailors at his urging, because I was told that it would accomplish some
good
in this upside-down world where women work and men are penniless.”

“Symmes paid for the initial print run?” I confirmed.

Gage nodded sullenly.

“And when you asked about producing more issues?”

“He . . . he’s very busy just now.” Gage’s voice dropped, and he scowled at the wall clock. “Mr. Symmes is a generous man, a good and decent employer. He needn’t—that is, I’m not surprised he hasn’t repeated the favor so soon. Maybe after the elections.”

We were quiet for a moment.

“I want a list of the eleven buildings whose insurance payouts you raised,” I declared.

“But—”

“Sorry, I didn’t mention I wanted that
now
.”

The foreman rose, selecting files from a drawer. Twice, droplets of nervous sweat rolled from his shiny brow to land
splish
on the pages. But he obeyed. Gage passed the documents over, eyes pinched.

“Thank you for your time,” I said, standing.

Sally Woods made no objection as we quit the building. Nor did Simeon Gage, for that matter. He collapsed back into his chair as we exited, hand fluttering over his breast. When we’d reached the street, Miss Woods’s startlingly dark eyes darted to me, bruised and thoughtful, and I took her arm once more.

“Oh, no, I’m arresting him,” I vowed. “I’m just not certain on what charge, and I need my hands free at the moment. Anyway, you know as well as I do this wasn’t his doing. As I mentioned . . .”

“He’s an idiot. Correct.”

“You’re free to return home, Miss Woods. Meet me tomorrow at the Tombs first thing, seven in the morning. Go straight to the chief of police’s office and speak to no one on your way. I’ll be there.”

She brushed a hand through her tousled hair, dismayed. “What in hellfire can you be doing right now that’s more important than this matter?”

“You know that Robert Symmes is running for alderman against my brother.”

“Of course,” she answered. Curious.

“I have to take care of my brother’s closest friend. He’s been . . . injured.”

Her eyes shifted away from me with a swift flinch. I saw depthless pain in her mouth, in the set of her shoulders. The sort of grief that could have ridden us both on a rail, straight out of New York City and into the wide unknown. Where maybe people are kinder to one another in some cleaner, emptier land.

“The alderman wanted to make a point,” she whispered. “But he didn’t attack your brother. He thought of a far worse punishment.”

I tilted my head in the affirmative.

“I’d not have put it so neatly,” I answered. “But yes.”

—

S
topping at the Tombs on my way home, I scratched brief instructions to Chief Matsell:

All is not as it seems. The details are too sensitive to discuss save in person, to which end I suggest meeting at a quarter to seven tomorrow with another key player in your office. In the meanwhile, please place copper stars at the enclosed listed addresses, as they are at high risk of combustion.

Hesitating, I twirled my pen. But I was almost certain. No, very certain. So I added:

Here is a sketch of the incendiary. Advise your star police to be on the watch for her, and if they should see her approach a Symmes property listed here, to bring her in for questioning. Lacking physical proof, her capture on the scene will prove most useful. Please instruct them not to hurt her unduly.

Sketching the culprit took me about ten minutes. Hand steady, fingers flying. As if I could use the false image to conjure her presence within the prison walls, could place her safely behind the bars that had once held Miss Sally Woods captive with a few bold vertical stripes of black ink on white paper.

A woman is nobody. A wife is everything. A pretty girl is equal to 10,000 men, and a mother is next to God, all powerful. . . . The ladies of Philadelphia, therefore, under the influence of the most serious and sober second thought, are resolved to maintain their rights as Wives, Belles, Virgins, and Mothers, and not as Women.

—“THE WOMEN OF PHILADELPHIA,”
PUBLIC LEDGER AND DAILY TRANSCRIPT,
1848

“T
IMOTHY
, I really cannot imagine what you are doing down there.”

What I was doing was half dozing on my bedroom floor on top of a quilt that early evening. And Gentle Jim, as Val calls the fellow, was keeking over the edge of my bed at me. A bit muzzy from the laudanum, for my money. I’d sure as hell given him enough of the stuff.

“I’m thinking.”

“Ah.”

“Not effectively.”

I’d returned home late that morning and helped to peel Jim’s bandagings off, replaced them, and curled up, following the previous night’s sleepless watch, wrapped cocoonlike in Elena’s quilt. Watching the swollen shadows as they crept inexorably along the floorboards. Jim was making a bold play of it, but every movement was a torment. My own ancient injury by comparison seemed a fancy I’d invented and not a true hardship at all. As if I’d constructed a paper Timothy, scribbled a scarred phiz on him, and set him up starring in pageantries like one of Bird’s dolls. I’d have indulged in shame over that, shame thick and hot and dark as good coffee, if I’d had the energy.

Meanwhile, I marked Jim breathing very shallowly above me.
In-out, in-out, in-out
against my pillow. The notion of leaving him again scared me witless. I’d thought plenty over what he meant to Val.

I’d never noticed what he meant to
me.

“James Anthony Carlton Playfair, if you die, I will
kill you.
On my honor.”

“I’m making an earnest effort not to.”

I was up immediately, pressing my palm to his brow. He was feverish, but not dangerously so, not to my paltry knowledge. I wanted so to ease him, to say,
I’ll fetch your mother and your sister,
whom he loved more than almost anything else. But his mother and sister were in London presiding over high teas and entertaining parliamentary officials, and none of the many letters James has sent them in four years have merited replies, thanks to his father’s wrath—God knows whether they even receive his correspondences—and so I stood there. Useless.

“It hurts,” I said. Knowing it true.

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. Knowing it untrue.

A thought occurred. “Shall we get you as high up in altitudes as Val generally is?”

“Timothy.” Jim’s bloodshot eyes gleamed, that electric understanding I’d always found fascinating about him. “Are you proposing to raid your own brother’s morphine supply?”

I was.

After dusk had seeped like a spill of violet ink across the firmament, after breaking into my brother’s blessedly empty digs, I arrived home with all of Val’s morphine tonic in a heavy satchel and a resolute smile on my face. Tapping briefly at my bedroom door, I entered following an indistinct welcoming sound. Jim’s face was drawn. Frost white and just as delicate.

I sat next to him, careful not to jostle my straw-tick mattress overmuch. “Thank you, that was a spree.”

“Delighted you take such joy in sneak thievery,” he murmured.

“Most fun I’ve had in days.” I opened a bottle of morphine. “For God’s sake, never take to this habitually.”

Jim cast an ironic look at me as if I were a mysterious troll lodged under a bridge, unsure of the ways of humans. Next he shivered and then winced at the constriction of his skin, stopping himself from audibly suffering by taking his lip in his teeth. Shaking like a leaf all the while.

I poured him a morphine tonic in a small glass. I poured myself a whiskey. And we drank.

—

T
he next morning, the morning of the elections, I arrived at George Washington Matsell’s desk clean and orderly in appearance at a quarter to seven. When I sat down, he regarded me with weary walrus eyes, and I momentarily disliked inconveniencing him. There was nothing for it, though. He could see fresh news bulging out of me. Worms gnawing through an overripe pear.

“Do you have an inkling why Abraham Kane is letting me go about my business?” I questioned.

He nodded. Seeming tired, seeming . . . no less powerful, simply deflated. As if a bit of air had been vented from the balloon of his person and now he was sinking, skimming the tops of the trees.

“Alderman Symmes has arranged to light his own least profitable buildings on fire to collect the insurance and presumably erect better ones,” I reported. “We’ve already kept the incendiary out of the papers, and the insurers are based out of town, so I presume he means to keep mouse over the white phosphorus unless they question him—and if they do, paint himself the victim of a monomaniacal firestarter. Easier far than evicting tenants and paying for demolition. Also about twice as profitable, supposing you need a fistful of ready screaves to pay for reconstruction.”

“Excuse me a moment,” Matsell said, baritone cool as a submerged anchor.

Opening a drawer, he pulled out a manuscript—his dictionary of flash patter, meant to assist coltish copper stars with the local jargon before they found themselves in serious linguistic difficulties.

“Screaves, you said?” George Washington Matsell asked, flipping to a page at the back marked
NOTES AND ADDITIONS
. “Which I take to mean ready cash?”

“Paper money specifically. Yes, screaves,” I admitted, embarrassed.

“Spell it.”

I did.

“Thank you.”

My chief closed the unfinished tome and returned it to its resting place.

“You’re not surprised that Symmes has been torching his own properties,” I observed.

“Mr. Wilde, I am about to share with you several personal opinions. Said opinions are not those of our Party. They are mere musings, as if you and I were sitting in a coffeehouse sharing a pot and mulling over the human condition. You’ll not repeat them.”

My elbows landed on his desk with my fingers linked. “Post me.”

Chief George Washington Matsell smiled. A full one, such a smile as I’ve never seen from him before. It hocused me momentarily. He generally considers smiling at a fellow, decides against it, and the fellow counts the rumination a high privilege.

“There was a time when you’d have been sharp as nettles over keeping mouse for Tammany’s sake. You’ve grown, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

I imagine—extrapolating from his deep chuckle—this remark turned my expression moldy.

“Oh, come. You were a man in the first place, but now you’re a better one—the needs of the city itself must be taken into our accounting, as well as the needs of its individual citizens. But enough of this. Mr. Wilde, I’d like you to ponder the subject of Robert Symmes and his greed.”

I wasn’t meant to say anything. So I reflected, and the word that emerged was
bottomless
, and I held my tongue.

“Now,” the chief continued, “please mull over the subject of his cruelty.”

Insatiable,
I thought. Briefly, I cursed myself for listening to a piano-playing pacifist and not sending word to Val. But I’d solve that as soon as I could, I figured, and anyway I’d been pretty heavily occupied at keeping James Playfair alive.

“Finally, reflect over his intelligence.”

George Washington Matsell saw comprehension and the morbid sort of awe on my face, the kind of concentration that folk direct at graphic carriage accidents. Crazed incendiaries and dirty politics weren’t the half of this sordid affair. Because Robert Symmes was brilliant in a single field: he was merely and only creatively heartless.

“What tipped you?” I asked quietly.

“I knew something smelled heartily of fish following the meeting with Mr. Kane and Madam Marsh. I couldn’t put my finger on it. But when you asked yesterday that I divert more copper stars to specific addresses, I compared it to a second message from Mr. Symmes, ostensibly thanking us for collaring Sally Woods. He suggested ‘calling off the mongrels haunting my properties now the danger is past,’ but I trust your opinion rather further than I do the alderman’s.”

Of course he’d resented the roundsmen attempting to help him. Symmes wanted those properties gone. Never concerning himself over two charred stargazers who probably knew only a quarter hour’s kindness in their lives and then left the world in flames.

“I’d have sent you word, but first I went to Mr. Kane for guidance, and he suggested waiting until after the elections for a full briefing. How did you figure it out?” the chief wanted to know, passing his fingers over his great belly.

“It wasn’t . . . I found the right story,” I attempted in some frustration.

My chief nodded. Not because that made sense. Because he knew me.

“As for the incendiary herself—”

“I’d rather not speak out of turn just yet,” I demurred. “Not until she’s caught and questioned.”

“She planted the energetic materials herself?”

“No. Ronan McGlynn did.”

I thought of how dimwitted I’d been over McGlynn, how unobservant. He’d been stupefied at the news the Pell Street house had burned when I’d confronted him in his cell. Or so I’d imagined.

He hadn’t been shocked. He’d been terrified.

Why didn’t you notice his reaction was wrong as was possible?
I asked myself for the dozenth time.
He might have been angry, yes. Livid? Naturally. But frightened to the point of panic? Of the sort of bluestocking he despises? Of fire, simply because it paralyzes
you
?

All McGlynn’s protests of his ignorance, his sobbed
I don’t know
, his inability to cope with the brutal treatment my colleague had subjected him to, the crushing fear—it hadn’t been due to his ignorance at all. The mental torment had stemmed from his knowledge. The key to end his suffering had rested in his hand—gleaming like a beacon, impossible to use. Telling us the truth after the shower bath would have meant confessing to firestarting—or at least to planting incendiary materials, which wouldn’t have exactly been greeted with a slap on the back.

Matsell’s grey head raised as a knock at the door reverberated. He called the visitor in, and Miss Woods appeared, in her usual attire. Hair pinned up in a great brown briar’s bush of waves with a froth of white at the temple, sleepless circles stamped under her eyes.

“Miss Woods, I take it,” Matsell grunted. “Chief of Police Matsell, at your service. Please sit down. I thought you were incarcerated.”

“I was, sure enough.” She sat, glancing at me.

“There exist a great many proofs against you.”

“And one proof in her favor.” I pulled out the single false threat that had been cut from the Venerable and Distinguished Brotherhood of Tailors periodical and the identical offset quotation in the pamphlet itself. “Symmes secretly paid for this to be printed through an intermediary—inspired by the other threats, no doubt.”

Leaning forward, Chief Matsell studied the documents. He steepled his fingers between the deep furrows down the sides of his nose and mouth.

“Very clever,” he admitted. “But it is not proof
against
the alderman unless we can show that Robert Symmes sent this to himself. Still. Excellent work, Mr. Wilde. Miss Woods, you certainly made a wide target of yourself.”

“Don’t I know it,” she said dully.

“Might I ask what you were thinking?”

“I was thinking I didn’t know how to punish him yet, was still planning what was best to be done, but I could still make him afraid to blow out his candle at night,” she replied, knuckles white where they gripped the arms of her chair. “I was thinking if I could teach him what it meant to be frightened, he might learn what it meant to feel sympathy. I was all alone in a greenhouse with a printing press, and I was thinking if I didn’t promise him that he’d pay, and promise him often and feelingly, I’d walk into the river.”

“His crime against you must have been brutal.”

“Brutal I could have managed better, I think,” she said thickly. “This was monstrous.”

“You’ve certainly suffered for your frankness.”

“I never implied it was
sound
thinking. Neither was bedding him in the first place, for that matter. I want to claw my eyes out just thinking on it.”

“Doubtless you own regrets on many fronts. I cannot help but contrast the fervency of your hatred toward him with the fact you restricted yourself to a letter campaign and grow puzzled, however.”

“He has something of mine,” Sally Woods confessed in a rasp. “Someone. In his power. That’s as much as I can say, but he . . . I couldn’t risk her. I was explicitly warned. The best I could do was haunt his nightmares and pray for inspiration.”

It was as I’d thought, then. I’d once, despairing of a solution to my earliest major assignment, created a list of things people would kill for.
God, politics, defense, money, madness,
and
love
ended up written in an orderly row down a piece of butcher paper. Maybe there are other reasons people slaughter one another, but in my career I haven’t encountered any. As for reasons people refrain from vengeance when vengeance is what’s called for—that, to my mind, made up a shorter list by far. Sally Woods, who witnessed violence with aplomb and thought nothing of braining star police, would have spit in the eye of threats against her own person. A single force existed in the world with power capable of binding her, locking her in a dim glass cage with her misery and her impotent rage.