The Fatal Flame (37 page)

Part of the first floor was ablaze, dainty yellow and sultry crimson flames licking upward like dragons’ tongues from the windows of the receiving room I’d visited on too many grim occasions. People darted hither and thither, shouting for an alarm to be raised, though every volunteer fireman in Manhattan that night must have been neck-deep in lush and seeing in triplicate, delaying their arrival.

Which is why it nearly killed me when Valentine continued walking toward the building.

“Don’t,” I snapped, following.

“I told you, I’ve not seen Silkie all day.” Val paused, looking up. Perfectly calm. I’ve always loathed him for that, though I know it’s wrong. “I can’t smell white phosphorus, so that’s to the good.”

I myself could hardly breathe, for all we were still safe in the road. “But you don’t have any of your gear, just a walking stick. You—”

“I’m the senior engineman of the Knickerbocker Twenty-one for good reason, do you savvy that? I’ll be fine. Leg it on the double to the station house for help.”

“You can’t risk yourself for her of all people!”

“This isn’t a question of who
she
is,” my brother mentioned while shedding his frock coat, as if we were discussing the weather conforming to everyone’s best expectations.

“No, it’s about you, it always has been about you, and I know exactly who you are, and you will
not
do this to me,” I attempted in desperation. “I realize she doesn’t glut on torment like the alderman did, she simply doesn’t give a damn one way or the other what people suffer, so long as she profits, plays vicious games for amusement. But this isn’t bravery, it’s
suicide.
Without any tools—”

“Without any tools, waiting until the blaze spreads doesn’t fadge, does it? When the Knickerbockers arrive, tell them they owe me a champagne toast.”

Val marched up the short flight of stairs, tried the unlocked door, and disappeared in a sickening gush of smoke.

Had the circumstances been different in the smallest degree, I’d never have managed it—knees knocking as they were, sweat beading along my spinal column, more frightened than I’ve ever been. And I am frightened shamefully, unmanfully often.

Nevertheless.

I retched at the ground. Shook my palsied hands out and breathed into them a few times. Dropped my coat on the ground next to Val’s. Closed my eyes and counted to three.

Then I walked inside a burning building.

It was every bit of the nightmare I’d imagined, unfortunately.

The familiar front hall with the portrait of Silkie Marsh was empty save for a suffocating screen of charred air. I entered the front saloon, where the smell of a hundred gaslights being ignited assaulted my nostrils. Flames skittered along the walls like devilish insects, reflected a thousandfold in the Venetian mirrors. I hadn’t made it two feet into that hell before my brother shoved me out again.

“Are you completely brainless?” Val demanded in a ragged voice. “Get the living fuck out of here, Timothy.”

“Either you come with me or I come with you.”

Pressing his lips together, Val strode for the staircase. The icy sweat down my neck was now a sweltering stream, rank fear resting at the back of my throat. When my brother knelt to examine the carpeting, he swiveled toward me with a pensive expression.

“I thought it was just the front room. But this entire place is soaked with lamp oil.”

I ignored the cowardly throb this caused in my chest, ignored the ash settling into our skins as the temperature skyrocketed and the hideous crackling behind us grew louder.

Val rose to his full height. “Walk out that door,” he ordered, pointing. “Now.”

Gripping the staircase newel as a wave of dizziness threatened, I shook my head.

Val muttered a lavish string of curses and cut past me. Our boots squelched in the fuel-doused carpeting as we hurried up the stairs. The lights in the seemingly empty house were all weirdly ablaze, but despite that I could scarce see five steps ahead. Already nauseous, I catalogued new sensations—a lance like a spitted fowl through the back of my pate, a gong pulsing behind my corneas.

When we reached the hall, we found a chair propped against the knob of a door. Val threw it aside as if it were made of matchsticks and tried the handle. Locked. Kneeling, he deftly pulled his knife from his pocket.

“That won’t work.” I coughed.

“Why not?”

“It’s the wrong size. Bird picked one of these doors with a hairpin.”

I watched Val approach a portrait on the wall and smash it with the head of his stick. He wrapped his untied cravat a few times around the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, picking up a slender shard of glass.

“Breathe through your shirtsleeve. It’ll help.”

Shoving my nose into my elbow, I complied.

Mere seconds passed, moments thin and destructible as paper, before Val had the door open. All the while I saw my friend Bird before my stinging eyes as she’d been at age ten—terrified, setting lies adrift as if they were toy ships and watching them founder, freckles blooming all over her square face.

I vowed to myself,
If you live to see her again, you will make her understand that no one is good enough to marry her, and not the other way round.

The comfortable bedchamber Val revealed was likewise suffused with light. Silkie Marsh sprawled on the corner of a disarranged mattress, dressed in a rich black gown, gagged with a strip of linen, both wrists bound behind her to the bedpost. Her eyes gleamed through the haze like a feral cat’s, golden hair wrecked with the force she’d been using to attempt escape.

“Hello, darling old shoe,” Val said dryly, throwing the splinter of glass away and whipping out his pocketknife again.

A rolling, roiling sound like the tide of the ocean rumbled beneath us as the ambient temperature began to sear the inside of my nose. Valentine cut her bonds and unloosed the gag from her delicate mouth, which released a single spat invective. I briefly noted blood crusting under her fingernails, bruises along her bare forearms.

“My heroes,” she said, equally mocking as grateful.

“Anyone else in the building?” I wheezed.

“No. I was alone.”

I strode back the way we’d come, scouting our escape. When I reached the railing, my heart turned over.

A golden midsummer field of flame had sprouted between the parlor and the entrance, continuing its rapid growth along the fuel-saturated carpeting. Whirling, I returned to the bedroom.

“Not that way?” Val questioned, eyebrow raised.

It was growing difficult to speak. My mind felt corroded, blasted with the poisonous heat. “That window, there. Bird tied stockings together and—”

“Do you really think I didn’t have bars installed thereafter, Mr. Wilde?” Madam Marsh hissed, reeling past me. The firelight set all her edges ablaze at the room’s threshold, turned her into the silhouette of a beautiful devil.

We dogged her to another staircase. Another rooftop, another battle, only this house was but three stories tall and disintegrating like so much tissue, reports like gunshots sounding in our wake as the downstairs dissolved.

“What happened?” Valentine demanded.

“We were all engaged for the evening’s festivities at Tammany, and I gave the servants a holiday. When our escorts arrived, they sent my sisters along in the carriages while another begged a private word. After lashing me down, he appears to have set my home on fire.”

The three of us crested the staircase, chests heaving as if we’d run a mile in the desert. It felt like I’d hot sand in my mouth, sand in my throat. The physical flames hadn’t yet crawled voraciously into the upper floors, but they would.

Very soon.

“Valentine, find something to serve as a rope and meet us on the roof,” Silkie Marsh commanded, waving a white hand down the hall at two blank doors. “Mr. Wilde, you’re with me.”

As if I wasn’t already trapped in a loathsome enough hallucination, we now appeared to be taking orders from our mortal enemy, for Val turned on his heel whilst I pursued her in the opposite direction.

Silkie Marsh threw open a plain wooden door to reveal an attic, steps in its corner leading to a hatch that fed onto the rooftop. We were surrounded by boxes. Stray trunks. Cloth-draped chairs meant to be mended but ultimately forgotten. The usual detritus accumulated by dozens of people living in a single residence over a number of years. Crossing the room, Madam Marsh snatched a piece of burlap off a massive chandelier. Its crystals were missing, its brass unpolished. She’d obviously replaced it with a finer one, and here the original lay.

“I can lift it, but I can’t carry it very far,” she breathed, nodding at the trap leading to the roof. “You can, though.”

Seeing her mind, I dove for the thing. It was indeed light enough for her to hoist with a single effort, but far too unwieldy for her to haul up to the roof. My body was so weakened by then, skin dripping like a midsummer glass of iced tea, that I borrowed a trick from my brother and tore my cravat off, wrapping it around my damp palm before clutching a branch of the fixture.

“Get the hatch open,” I husked, nearly suffocating.

When she’d thrown it wide and scrabbled topside, I breathed a fraction easier. Knowing that hesitation meant none of our ashen corpses would even require headstones, I set one hand to the stair rail and dragged the metal beast up after me.

My fingers were numb when I’d finished the task, my breath coming in parched gasps. But I managed it, depositing the chandelier at the roof’s edge next to the little decorative fence that all the town houses in this row featured.

Then I more or less collapsed on the roof of Silkie Marsh’s goosing-ken, sucking down air, as she sat with her fist tightly clenched before her mouth. Both of us staring at the roof opposite. Both awaiting Valentine, on whom our lives depended.

“Did Symmes confide in you, or did you tumble to his incendiary lay yourself?”

Not looking at me, Silkie Marsh wiped her fingers over her lips. “Robert may have suggested to me that Miss Woods meant to turn firestarter, and he may have shown me notes to that effect. I may have found the notion patently ridiculous after he’d boasted he was expanding his textile empire threefold, and it’s possible I reported my suspicions to Mr. Kane and Mr. Villers.”

“Symmes discovered you’d peached to his betters?”

“I can only assume so,” she answered, waving a hand at the floors below us.

“How long have you been plotting his downfall?”

Silkie Marsh didn’t even mull it over. The tale was perched at the end of her tongue. “I was short on rent about a year after moving in, and he found a convenient way for me to repay him. In my new parlor. In front of all my sisters. After I’d said no. As a—”

She stopped, turning to face me. Eyes blown black, grime coating her skin and hair as it did mine. Furious beyond any raw emotion I’d ever seen her produce.

“I hate you,” she said clearly. “Your kindly, sad,
interested
face, your knowing irony, your virtue, your . . . your everything. I
detest
you, Timothy Wilde.”

“I detest myself plenty often,” I admitted. “And I loathe you entirely.”

She inclined her head, as this was no surprise.

“Val is your new alderman. And Symmes is dead, by the way.”

Silkie Marsh’s lovely lips parted. For a moment she sat there quite still. Then delicately, she tipped her chin back and laughed at the stars.

“Mr. Wilde, how
marvelous.
I’d hardly dared hope for so much.”

The sound of Valentine ascending the narrow steps reached us. When his head emerged, he heaved great breaths of night sky as he escaped the cauldron into the witching hour. He’d taken a set of maids’ blouses and tied them wrist to wrist as he went. Seeing the chandelier, he smiled regretfully and pulled himself the rest of the way up by his forearms.

“Val?”

“I’m fine. Pass me the frilly grappling hook.”

Silkie Marsh and I shoved it to him. He tied one end of the makeshift rope to a brass arm. As the roof itself began to simmer beneath our skin, my brother eyed the structure fifteen feet distant to the east of us and hoisted our last chance in his fists.

The triumphant smash of broken prisms sounded as the fixture hooked itself to the opposite rooftop’s railing. Valentine—his face the color of moss, bags beneath his eyes eroded into craters—braced himself against the short iron barrier with his foot and began to tie the sleeve end to a sturdy finial.

“You first, Silkie,” he said.

Eyes streaming, I watched her as she traversed the thin line between the houses. Hand over hand with her small ankles fixed tight around the improvised rope. She faced a perilous moment at the opposite edge as she left the tether, but she clawed her way up and over the rail by hooking one arm around the chandelier.

Then Silkie Marsh was facing us, the fixture in her hands, eyes glowing like fireflies in the darkness.

She considered untying the rope and being done with us. Throwing the chandelier into the alley for good measure. I could see it. My tongue felt swollen and clumsy in my mouth, my lips parting on a
no
.

For several seconds she stared, panting.

You always knew the pair of you were going to die in a fire,
I thought.

Then she steadied the thing, pushing it into the rail, and shouted, “What are you waiting for?”

“You’re next,” Val ordered, exhaling hard.

Arguing would have been futile. I leaned over, swung myself around, slung my legs over the tiny bridge, and set to.

It was terrifying. A lifeline made of shirts, a drop to death or crippledom beneath me, Robert Symmes drowning in a lake of his own blood fresh in my mind. But I was heading
away from the fire
, and anyway I couldn’t afford to think about it. Not with my fingers nearly slipping on the sleeves, lungs straining for air.

Silkie Marsh doesn’t weigh nearly as much as you,
I thought about halfway across, when my ear caught the first hint of a creak emanating from one of Val’s knots.

I froze, numb with dread, and took a long breath. Swaying a little, the starscape dizzyingly far above me. The ground seemingly miles below.