The Fatal Flame (43 page)

When I’m in a certain humor, I think he’s a better man than I ever was. In other moods I think myself a saint compared to that scoundrel. But Mercy was right, as I always suspected her to be.

None of it was real until I’d written it down.

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

—MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT,
A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN,
1792

E
IGHTEEN
FIFTY
-
FOUR
, I reflected in April of that year, scowling at my thirty-six-year-old reflection in the glass as I struggled manfully with my green silk cravat, was new-minted as a fresh golden eagle and already about as capricious as the tossing of that selfsame coin.

I’d three hours previous copped a gang of palmers—as we star police call thieves who make a great show of selecting fine jewelry and then quietly napping a display item or two. Chief Matsell had been ragging me to collar them for weeks, but a solid conviction couldn’t be had unless their cache was discovered.

It was bully Mr. Piest and Mr. Connell and I stormed their lair down Vesey Street area. It was even pretty marvelous that Mr. Kildare hadn’t joined us, being distracted by his wife, Caoilinn Kildare, giving birth, heaping invective on the lucky fellow whilst breaking every finger in his hand for the fourth time. That was all aces. But Kildare’s absence meant it was three against five, and the palmers hadn’t been particularly eager to visit the Tombs. And while Connell is a man on the muscle, Piest is about as good in a fight as a tinned herring. Which meant that my right eye beneath my scar was now a bulbous, eggplant-colored mass.

Just in time for the wedding that afternoon.

The
wedding.

The wedding that turned my palms watery and sent my pulse clacking away like a train. The wedding that just now made me unspeakably clumsy as I wrestled with the slippery sodding cravat. The wedding that was probably going to cause me to collapse like a wet kitten the instant I crossed the church’s threshold. Supposing I ever made it there in the first place.

Snarling, I undid the blasted neckerchief and made a fifth attempt.

It had to be perfect.

Well. Saving my face, which was never close to perfect but was generally slightly less terrifying than at present.

I heard a distant knock from the ground floor followed by the door of the café opening and quick, sure steps hastening upstairs.

“Do forgive my tardiness! My tailor was making a few last-minute alterations, and the estimable chap simply couldn’t
manage to—oh,
Timothy.
”

A very finely clad James Playfair stood in my bedroom doorway, holding a brown paper package I knew contained a spray of flowers for my lapel. Slender lips wide, dark brows aloft. He seemed to me, underneath the shock produced by my truly spectacular black eye, to be making a valiant effort not to laugh.

It turned me peppery, I’ll own as much.

“This is the most important day of my life and you’re going to stand there sniggering over the fact I took a slim in the daylight?” I growled.

Jim folded elegantly against my doorframe, covering his mouth with his hand. Realizing he was hiding nothing, he pulled long musician’s fingers down the back of his neck. “Of course not. That is . . . a
little
sniggering. If
slim in the daylight
means a walloping great punch in the eye, then I sincerely regret to say yes.”

“You are a deeply unfeeling person,” I announced with dignity.

This remark caused Jim to burst into such a fit of mirth that I soberly considered matching his face to mine.

“I take it back. You’re a pitiless cad.”

“Wholly callous to the finer sentiments,” he gasped, bending as he rocked with laughter. “Everyone says so. The deficiency has caused me no end of trouble as a musician.”

“I’m sick to my stomach, my head seems twice its usual size, don’t ask how my eye feels, and I’ve now tried to tie a cravat
five
times,” I snapped, tearing the damn thing off again. “If all you can contribute to the proceedings is mockery, Jim, leave the flowers on my table and I encourage you to jump out that window there.”

Breathless with amusement, Jim set the box down. He crossed to where I stood before the mirror and plucked my cravat from my hands. Still chuckling, he passed it round my paper collar and commenced tying it himself.

“I don’t need—”

“Oh, but you
do
,” Jim purred. “You most certainly and emphatically do, bright young copper star.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Timothy, cease fidgeting, I beg. I am making an effort to execute a Napoleon knot backward, which is a business for neither the fainthearted nor the distracted. You are welcome.”

Sighing, I rubbed at the edge of my scar. A short time passed with Jim fussing over silk while I contemplated severing all personal ties and emigrating to India. Then he took me by the shoulders and spun me toward the mirror.

I looked . . . I looked like a thug from one of the nastier East River gangs. But my cravat looked outstanding.

“Thank you,” I said belatedly.

“Not at all.”

“What flowers did you choose?” I asked by way of apology.

Smiling, he retrieved the package and unwrapped it.

Whatever remaining pique I’d felt toward my brother’s friend vanished. The miniature bouquet was beautiful . . . delicate, perfectly arranged.

“Lilac, which translates to first love. Honeysuckle, love’s enduring bonds. And trefoil, which I grant isn’t typical for weddings, but I thought the yellow accent would look so well with your coloring, and it stands for life, which I find appropriate to both you and to the occasion.”

“The possibility exists,” I said, pinning it to my dove-grey swallowtail coat, “that you are not a pitiless cad after all.”

He winked at me in the mirror.

My front door below us flew open without preamble and slammed shut again.

“Light a fire under it, my Tim!” Valentine’s voice boomed. “Or are you planning to stand the poor girl up?”

“Yes, thank you, eighteen fifty-four, that is exactly what I need just now,” I hissed under my breath. Snatching up my hat, I headed for the landing.

Val stood at the bottom of the stairs holding a frothing champagne bottle, a cork fixed between his teeth, grinning like a privateer. When he spied my mazzard, he spat it out. Howling with laughter that made Jim’s earlier outburst seem like a weak smirk.

“It isn’t fucking funny,” I snarled as I descended the stairs two at a time.

Wrenching the champagne bottle from his careless grip, I drank what probably amounted to a quarter of it in a single swig. I needed it. Badly. Valentine wore a new waistcoat inhabited by a populous cote of embroidered turtledoves done in silver thread.

I desired keenly to slap the man.

“Yes it is.” My brother could scarce speak and was wincing as if splayed on a rack. “It is very,
very
funny.”

“Are you
already
drunk?”

“Of course I am, you witless little titmouse.”

“I honestly have no idea what you see in him.” I passed the bottle to James Playfair, who cheerily took a long pull.

“I don’t either, I assure you,” he said fondly, handing it back to my horrible sibling. When Val could manage to drink, he tilted it down his throat and made an about-face.

“Oh, I needed that.
That
smeared the icing over the cake. Thank you for taking a punch in the face, Timothy, it brightened me considerable. Our chariot awaits, hop to it.”

As we rattled along in the hack, Val and Jim gently ribbing each other while I stared fretfully out the window at the passing strangers and slums, I couldn’t help but reflect over the peculiar miracle my life had turned into.

If the 1845 fire hadn’t incinerated my hopes and dreams, I’d likely be long married by now, I considered. Supposing Mercy had said yes all those years ago. I’d certainly been about to pose the query. Maybe I’d have kinchin of my own, kinchin with midnight-black hair and sweet, sideways smiles like hers. Maybe I’d be tending bar at Nick’s Oyster Cellar with a Julius Carpenter who was still alive, maybe owning my own ferry boat just as I’d dreamed in those days. Standing at the helm with the scent of seaweed flooding my nose and waves slapping my prow, smiling into the indifferent sun.

I thought about the star police forming the same year I’d lost everything, about the flowers Jim had chosen for me. About life and Kildare’s new baby, all the infants born so thick and heedless around the globe, and that when I’d started there wasn’t a name for my singular profession, but nowadays people were calling me a
detective.
A child born in the year 1854 could not only grow up to do the same sort of work I seemed so inexplicably to excel at but could now put a name to the occupation. Maybe even be proud of it.

Who could say?

And I realized that despite tragedies both minor and monumental, I didn’t regret the fate that had befallen me.

Not a single second.

“Stop brooding, you look like a cow.” Valentine slapped my arm so hard I’m sure it left a mark. “We’re there.”

Stepping down from the hack, I peered up at the familiar church spire, blinking in disbelief at what was about to happen. The weather was cool for April, chill enough to be bracing, a grey-and-blue sky watching with detached interest as I took an enormous breath.

“Ready to face the cannonade?” Val asked, dropping a large paw on the back of my neck.

Swallowing, I nodded.

“Forward march, then,” Jim decreed, adjusting his tall black hat.

“There you are,” Ninepin hissed as I entered the dimly illuminated door. “You’re late, Mr. Wilde, and I was that ketched, I thought— Jesus Christ, who’s given you a fibbing?”

“No one you know,” I sighed.

“A national hero,” Val drawled, finishing the champagne bottle and setting it behind a vase.

“Get your arse in that pew,” I snapped, pointing furiously. My brother and his friend obligingly disappeared.

“She’s here, I take it?” I asked Ninepin lowly.

He nodded his flaxen pate, looking about twelve varieties of sickly. I figured I looked the same, but with an eye swollen shut. The lad was dressed in the better of his two sets of togs, the solemnity of the attire marred somewhat thanks to the monocle he’d adopted when someone finally told him his spectacles were designed for a moll, and by the most hideous Bowery necktie that had ever blinded me. It would have been uncharitable to criticize his tastes, however.

“You’ve seen her?”

Ninepin shook his head, resting his palms on his kneecaps. His real name is Francis Garvey. Exactly zero people call him that—not his old paper-selling mates, not his fellow journalists at the
Herald
, not the tutors he bribed to teach him to read when he learned ambition, no one. But the pomp of the occasion would certainly call for it today.

At the front of the half-full cathedral, I saw Father Connor Sheehy emerge from a side door I knew well. He lives behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Tends to its grounds and its flock with equal care and a liberal dose of Irish sagacity. Smiling at us, his bald head crowned with a formal velvet hat, he waved a hand.

“I’m going to hash my guts out,” Ninepin groaned.

Feeling no better, I gave him a small push. “All men on deck.”

“No, honest to God, I—”

“Ninepin,
get up there
,” I growled, shoving the poor fellow harder.

He made it to the dais without fainting, though I’d have called the odds dead even he’d keel over before the end of the ceremony. He’d not been in position two minutes, meanwhile, shifting restlessly from leg to leg, when I heard the small
snick
of the door behind me opening.

A head keeked out, wearing a woven diadem of spring blooms.

Bird Daly was dressed all in white lace. The gown had a round neck, and she’d tied a red velvet ribbon about the gathered waist. Her wine-colored hair was pinned up like a lady’s. Now, at age nineteen or thereabouts, it suited her. Perfectly. Her square face had grown with her, every chiseled surface still dotted with reckless freckles, and I loved every one of them, each spot and speck that made Bird herself.

Love like a weight in my chest, a painful press of devotion.

“Mr.
Wilde
,” she gasped softly, covering her mouth with her hand.

“You have my abject apologies.”

“What for?”

Making a vague gesture of reproach at my face was the only response possible.

Unexpectedly, Bird giggled. She emerged from the door’s shadow and put her arms around me, still sufficiently shorter that I nearly got a mouthful of blossoms. Instead I kissed the top of her head and held on.

“Don’t speak flash on your wedding day,” I advised hoarsely. “And remember your fiancé’s actual moniker.”

“It’s Ninepin,” she said, pulling away. “But I’ll behave, Mr. Wilde.”

“I am completely terrified just at the moment,” I admitted to my friend ruefully.

Bird smiled, one of her dimples appearing. She owns several smiles—all of which are precious to me and several that do not look like happiness but rather separate feelings woven over and under one another. This one was an open book. Print-clear and joyful. The rarest of her expressions. She couldn’t have given me a better gift if she’d conquered nations in my name.

“Lean on me, then,” she said, taking my arm as I readied myself to walk her down the aisle. “I’m not afraid.”

—

I
’ve tied all three of the manuscripts about my time as a star police with kitchen twine. They’re bulky objects. Marred by crinkled edges as I hastily turned the foolscap during some periods. Gritty with dust on what was once the topmost sheet when I couldn’t bring myself to look at them during others.

I’ve decided they don’t belong to me any longer.

This afternoon at four o’clock, I’m due at Dr. Peter Palsgrave’s residence. He’s an old man now, alive despite his ailment, though he must be pushed about in a wheeled rattan chair these days. His nurse, Arthur, one of his former students, attends to the task when Mercy Underhill cannot.

But she’ll be herself today, sure-fingered and contemplative. I’m certain of it.