The Fatal Flame (38 page)

Tilting my head backward, I glimpsed Silkie Marsh upside down about eight feet distant. Worlds away.

She raised a mocking eyebrow.

I kept going.

The slickness of my palms was worse than physical torture, the cloth’s groans like shrieks in my ears. But I managed it. When I reached the other side, I faced the same struggle as Silkie Marsh had in wrangling myself onto the roof. Save that a slender, ashen hand helped to pull me up.

“I’m pretty sure I dreamed this entire day,” I gasped, landing on my back. I saw the first arcs of Croton water spraying, heard the yells of the firedogs.

“Whatever else you think of me, surely you’ll own I comprehend the concept of favors for favors,” she retorted. Gradually, her expression shifted to one resembling triumph. “And you . . . reported my landlord’s demise, shall we say? Come on, Valentine,
move
.”

Val’s walking stick landed to our left with a thunk. He eyed the rooftop, rubbed his hands together.

Valentine weighs over two hundred pounds if he weighs an ounce,
I thought.

Shifting on limbs reluctant to do my bidding, I flung my arms at the chandelier. Pressing it, as Silkie Marsh was, into the solid iron. It wouldn’t do any good, wouldn’t stop a knot from slipping or a hand from losing its grip. It was a prayer, nothing more.

But it was all I could do.

My mouth, under the charred taste, turned sour with dread.

Valentine caught at the rope and twisted round, ready to pass hand over hand as we had done. When his feet left the opposite rooftop, the thin line sagged mightily, and I turned for several moments into stone.

But it held, and then Val swung an arm up, deftly pulling himself across.

Watching my brother perform the high-wire act I’d accomplished seconds previous was one of the worst sights I’ve ever been subjected to, but it proved thankfully brief. The sheer length of his limbs more than made up in speed what the impromptu rope lacked in tensile strength. And when he’d reached the edge, Madam Marsh and I leaned over and dragged his massive bulk up to safety.

Slowly, I lifted my burning eyes.

The brothel was still standing, but its interior was a furnace. I could see ceilings falling in operatic descents, rapturous coils of smoke ascending.

We lay there, the three of us. Watching in awe.

“I have to help them keep it from spreading,” Val coughed, rolling to his feet.

He offered Silkie Marsh a hand, but she didn’t take it. She slowly rose, brushing at her soot-drenched skirts. Staring at her life going up in flames.

“Why should Symmes have switched accelerants?” I asked, thinking more clearly now that cool wind ruffled my hair.

“I don’t like it either.” Val broke the padlock on the door to the attic with a savage tap of his cane. “Who lives here, Silkie?”

“A family of Presbyterians who are less than endeared to me,” she answered with satisfaction. “Let us allow them to bless God by assisting the least of these.”

The Presbyterians—all wearing homespun nightshirts and thick dressing gowns and knitted caps in their downstairs hall, arguing over whether to flee—were startled to see three cindery strangers walking down their stairs and out their front door. But we didn’t pause for conversation, so I’ll never know what they thought about it.

When we’d reached the road, however, a fresh shock awaited. I’d supposed my stockpile of anxiety drained entirely by then. But a thrill of paralyzing alarm shot through me nonetheless, and my brother and his former mistress froze at the same instant.

Across the roadway at a safe distance, a pair of men stood placidly smoking cigars. Adding tender little curlicues to the reek of incineration.

Mr. Abraham Kane and Mr. Cornelius Villers.

Think it no hardship, ladies, that public opinion excuses you from appearing on the arena of political conflict, or from saying at the ballot box who shall be our rulers, or from standing forth as God’s commissioned ambassadors to treat with a dying world. . . . It belongs to you to form the characters of those who are to occupy these high places.

—ADDRESS DELIVERED BY WILLIAM B. SPRAGUE AT THE OPENING OF THE BROOKLYN FEMALE ACADEMY, MAY 4, 1846

T
HE
QUEEREST
THING
about seeing Abraham Kane and Cornelius Villers standing on that sidewalk, mulling over the fire that raged before them, wasn’t that they didn’t belong there.

They did belong there. Clearly.

But it’s not the usual way of the world for the puppet masters to emerge from behind the curtain. Addressing their audience with subtle smiles and practiced bows.

“Miss Marsh! So you’ve made it out after all!” Kane exclaimed.

Pasting a look of perfect neutrality on her face, Madam Marsh approached them. My brother hung back as if he’d other business. Which was true enough, but neither did he want to confront the unquestioned dictators of his Party just then. He raised a confident hand in greeting toward Villers and Kane whilst muttering, “You talk to the Democrats, I douse the stir.”

“But—”

“You just walked into a house fire. I’m pretty sanguine you can handle Tammany Hall.”

Valentine strode toward his engine company. Red-shirted men swarmed about the doomed building, quelling the rogue sparks that threatened to expand the blaze. They’d already drenched the surrounding structures, and the brothel now better resembled a monstrous manufactory engine vomiting smoke and steam.

“You’re enjoying yourselves, gentlemen,” Silkie Marsh observed with clinical dignity to the Party leaders. “Would you care to tell me why?”

Kane smiled—not maliciously. But with a certain satisfaction. He was clad in hearty election-day finery, broad shoulders squared under a blue velvet swallowtail. His partner was dressed, as ever, in a black fitted tailcoat that conveyed the impression he’d just either murdered or buried someone. I’d not seen Cornelius Villers in months, had been overjoyed to miss the man, who stared down his clifflike nose at Silkie Marsh, pince-nez obscuring ruthless eyes. The lenses glinted with cunning and reflected firelight. Neither man paid me the smallest particle of attention.

“It’s not personal, Miss Marsh,” Kane began.

“Surely it cannot be termed
impersonal
precisely,” Villers corrected his counterpart, tapping the ash from his cigar with a long finger.

“Oh, come, Cornelius, it was always a possibility that one of our more daring fire laddies would intervene, and surely we’ve made our point.”

“Robert Symmes didn’t set this fire,” I said as understanding brushed its pointed nails along my neck. “He’d been using white phosphorus, probably had a tidy stock of it. Your emissary used the first thing he could lay hands on, which turned out to be lamp oil.”

“But
why
?” Madam Marsh thrust the query at the politicians as if wielding an ice pick, cheeks coloring beneath the grey residue coating us. “Dear God above, what can you possibly mean by it? I’m a major source of campaign funding, of information, I’m a charming hostess, I’m—”

“Dear me, Miss Marsh, this isn’t about what you are at all. Please put the thought from your head!” Kane exclaimed.

“Quite so.” Villers angled his hooked nose at her. “You’ve approached the problem from the wrong end. This is about what you are
not
, you see.”

“And what
aren’t
I?” she cried, stunned.

“You aren’t Tammany Hall.”

Swaying on small feet, Silkie Marsh regarded the men who had ordered her tied to a bed and her house set aflame. Her eyes were wide with shock, the blue circles within the hazel of her irises shrunk to nothing save a band of hammered steel in the moonlight.

Villers ground out his cigar on the brick wall behind him. “Robert informed us of your . . . assistance over the regrettable Sally Woods situation in which he found himself entangled. He
thought
you most helpful. But we were well aware that you had been materially
unhelpful
, and Robert was simply too impressed by his own schemes to realize the fact. Now we no longer care for Robert Symmes or his rather elaborate insurance concerns.”

“God no,” Kane echoed with a rueful sigh. “Not when he deliberately failed to include us in them. Did he honestly suppose we’d not discover his intentions?”

“I cannot imagine, but wherever he is, I look forward to his concession.”

“And please do convey our well-wishes to
Alderman
Wilde,” Kane said to me with a friendly wink.

“But we asked ourselves—or I asked myself, owning the more suspicious nature—whether it was quite safe to include you so deeply in our designs when you could betray us at a moment’s notice, Miss Marsh,” Villers declaimed. “Since you so blithely sabotaged our friend Symmes . . .”

“Not that we blame you for that exactly,” Kane amended.

“I asked myself whether you were capable of drilling further holes in the ship of state. And reached the conclusion . . .”

“The
regrettable
conclusion that you were not to be trusted entirely, since you can hardly argue with the fact that you are
not
Tammany Hall.”

“Know. Your. Place,”
Villers snarled savagely, snatching the pince-nez off his nose and tapping them thrice against Silkie Marsh’s slim shoulder.

The grotesque two-headed god of New York fell silent, eyes drifting back to the now-hollow house. Abraham Kane thrust his hands into his pockets with an air of finality. Cornelius Villers returned his pince-nez to his Roman nose, a calculated smile sharpening the edges of his thin lips.

“You meant to murder me,” Silkie Marsh said numbly.

“Well, there was always the happy chance that wouldn’t happen,” Kane concluded, “and relations between us can continue cordially now we understand each other. Are we through, Cornelius?”

“I am content.” Sweeping his tall hat off, Villers made an abbreviated bow to the two of us, a cruel scythe of reflected light gleaming from his hairless pate.

“Mr. Valentine Wilde’s presence is much desired over at the hotel, but he can hardly be accused of shirking his duty under the circumstances.” Tapping the side of his scarred nose twice, Kane gave me a nod as he followed his departing partner in crime. “Tell him he’s expected, would you?”

Silkie Marsh and I stared after the Party leaders as they exited.

The hubbub from the firedogs quieted, and the cinders made themselves known, powdery and vile, prickling in the damp pores of our skin. Breathing yet presented a challenge, so I tossed my ruined collar away and unbuttoned my shirtfront a little. Uncaring of appearances, still sans frock coat, taking the air with a ruthless murderess after having voted fifteen times while dressed as a Bowery monkey that afternoon.

There seemed nowhere lower to sink.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

Silkie Marsh contemplated the remains of her brothel as if identifying a loved one at the morgue. A smear of charcoal marred the architectural line of her cheek. I found myself madly wanting to pass her my handkerchief. The world had reversed itself, a dizzying inversion—stars sparkling at our feet in the clean water runoff and filthy earthen ashes strewn across the sky.

“I’ll live,” she said quietly. “I’ve accounts at five of the best banks in Manhattan, my sisters and servants were spared, and I’ve a new and entirely preferable alderman. That isn’t the question you ought to be asking.”

“What is, then?”

“Is this over, Mr. Wilde?”

She indicated the two of us with a graceful flick of her fingers—dancers who’d been locked in a bloody waltz for nigh three years.

“Could it be?”

Silkie Marsh smiled. A silken-soft curl of her lips as if a pink ribbon had been tugged.

I’d never forgive her, I knew. For what she’d done to Bird, to me, to my brother, to my friends. But the events of that night had exposed the workings of my heart for dissection—I couldn’t throw a man from the roof of a building, nor could I tie a soulless woman to a bedpost and set her aflame.

Here was an alternative. One I might not be offered again.

“I do want something of you,” I informed her.

“Oh?” The smile disappeared, replaced by a businesslike expression of interest. “What might that be, then?”

“Never,” I said clearly, “bring Bird Daly into this. Ever again. You said favors for favors. That’s what I want.”

Silkie Marsh pursed her lips in thought. Gave a little laugh, tucked a fallen lock of hair back into her irreparably damaged coiffure with one of its remaining pins, and nodded a single time.

“Then she is yours, to do with what you will. Good night, Mr. Wilde.” Madam Marsh retreated, smoothing her skirts. “We shall see more of each other, no doubt. As to the nature of those encounters . . . well, that depends upon our own best pleasures, does it not?”

She walked away with her disarranged crown of golden hair held high. I’d no notion whether we’d ever stop trying to destroy each other. Nor if I wanted to or not. But she was the reason my brother and I were still alive, and whether that counted for a week or a year or a single night . . . it still counted.

I watched Silkie Marsh depart Greene Street, my lungs burning in my chest.

When I approached the remains of the fire, Val’s cronies were already clearing debris. One wall had crumbled, spilling bricks into the adjacent corridor. My brother’s pal Jack whistled as he wielded a great shovel, more Knickerbockers shooting streams at the quelled beast as if ensuring the fire wasn’t merely sleeping.

“Was that what I think it was?” Valentine jumped down from one of his engine’s rails.

“If you think it was a lesson, yes. Their hired thug is off nursing his wounds somewhere, if Madam Marsh’s fingernails are any indication. And of course we could never trace it back to them.”

Val blew out a vexed puff of air. “The lamp oil wasn’t the only hint. My rabbits tell me they were tipped just after we entered the place. For better reasons than the Neptune Nines were posted, it seems clear, though I can’t say as I’ll sleep any snugger for that.”

I nodded. The tipped-off Ward Two fire company had served conspiracy, not altruism, and Kane and Villers had meant their example to be an isolated one. Still. When I considered Tammany’s capacity for wanton destruction, a shiver ran through me.

“Can we do anything about it?”

“Other than keep our mouths shut and bide our time? Not if we want to live aboveground.”

“In that case, Val, you’re wanted at the hotel.”

Wincing, my brother drew a flask from his pocket and took a sharp pull, returning it to his waistcoat.

Had it been liquor, he’d have offered me some. Thus it was morphine or laudanum. He doesn’t usually indulge when he’s about Party business. But then he hasn’t usually just murdered anyone.

Suddenly I couldn’t bear it anymore. The not-knowing.

“Did you start because of me?”

“What?”

“Poisoning yourself.” Another person was talking. One about a hundred years older than me, with a voice like the creak of a moldering coffin lid. “Did you start poisoning yourself because I was a merciless bastard to you for seventeen entire years after you—”

“No,” Val answered, eyes wide.

“If it was because of me—”

“I said
no
, it wasn’t.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?”

“You don’t,” he said fiercely. “You’ll never know, because I’d go to my grave before telling you a thing like that. It’s true all the same.”

Knuckles bruising my lips, I nodded. It had been a fair answer.

It had hurt nevertheless.

I’d long supposed the only fatal flames to be the physical variety—the sort that destroyed my parents, ruined my livelihood, snuffed the life from the stargazers trapped in the Pell Street tinderbox. But there are plentiful killing phrases, I was learning, words that sear a man and leave snakelike scars, I’d been an idiot not to realize it, and whether we’re perishing instantly or by inches, the results are the same. The worst death New Yorkers have ever managed to come up with is slow burning, a fate reserved for rebellious black rioters and traitors to the natural order. And I have said
I hate you
to Valentine more times in my life than I have said to him
Good morning
.

How my brother has managed to survive me for so long, God only knows.

Val took half a step away. “Listen, my Tim, I’m about to make the shortest, most inspiring speech in the history of the National Democratic Party, and then . . . I’ll visit your ken, if you don’t mind.”

“Let’s be off, then.”

“Aren’t you for the Tombs?” A line formed above Val’s nose.

“Whyever would I go there?”

The line vanished, replaced by an intrigued twitch in the bag under Val’s left eye. “The lads just told me—police arrested Symmes’s firestarter when she broke into the Queen Mab tonight. In the act of setting a fuse. They want you to question her.”