The Fatal Flame (9 page)

“How long have you known Miss Woods?”

“Oh, I went to seminary with her, you know. Mount Holyoke. We were thick as anything there—went to picnics and concerts, played Schubert duets half the night long. We were practically sisters. But she’s always been . . .” Miss Abell sampled words on her tongue, made a careful selection. “Headstrong. And of
course
I think women ought to study, and work, and maybe . . . maybe even vote someday. Only if we’re schooled well enough in politics, naturally. An ignorant vote is as undemocratic as an absent one.”

She stopped. Checking whether I was shocked at the concept of females stuffing ballot boxes. The answer was that Frederick Douglass wasn’t and neither was I, never mind that most New Yorkers would figure both myself and Mr. Douglass for legally insane. So I crooked my mouth up and leaned forward with my elbows on my thighs.

Miss Abell blew out a little gust through her lips. “But she’s . . . ugh, I can’t stand
shocking
decent Christian people to make a point, it’s . . . undignified. No,
indecent.
Who does she think she
is
? She isn’t helping the cause in the smallest by making people
hate
her. After school everything changed. It was as if all the radical principles she’d heard there had . . .
stuck
to her somehow. It was bad enough when she wore petticoats and stirred up trouble, and now I hear she’s printing all manner of freelance trash and dressing like a
man.
It sets the female-rights movement backward in the public eye every time she leaves her house.”

“Can you tell me why she lost her position here?”

“The strike, of course!” Miss Abell lurched upright, bosom heaving as a dawn blush rose over her cheeks. “
Everyone
savvies that.”

Here was a point of interest. Manufactory work hasn’t been common in these parts for long, so neither have strikes. But the Lowell girls struck in 1834, and again in 1836, and the entire state of Massachusetts called them plentiful ugly names,
whores
being the most popular, before they trudged back to work following threats of blacklisting and far, far worse. The newspapers warned us all uneasily that a shameless “gynecocracy” threatened. I’d never lit eyes on the term before, and damned if I fully comprehended the dire consequences of a gynecocracy, but it didn’t take me long to determine which side should actually be diagnosed with hysteria and dropped in an ice bath.

“Tell me about it,” I requested.

“She went and made up a workers’ manifesto, didn’t she, Lord knows that must have been what gave her the notion to go into printing after she was fired . . . she tacked it on the door of the manufactory as if she were Martin Luther. Oh, so many of us went along with her lay that I blush to think about it, I really do. She’s always been that silver-tongued.”

“She struck me so too.”

Ellie Abell gazed at a memory rather than the wall. “We were all out in the midsummer torrents last summer, marching in circles with painted signs. Caroline has the best voice, so she organized the choruses, and Patience made badges, and I even wrote a
poem
to contribute to the local papers. None of them took it, of course. They thought us all noddle-headed for demanding higher wages when the tailors detest us working in their field at all. But Sally wanted rates closer to the male cutters and double the chink for the outworkers, so there we were with rain in our boots.”

“And how did you fare?”

“How do you think? Poorly.” She glanced at her lap. “It was awful. Just . . . I felt like such a goose for joining Sally, picketing and all. That little minx even convinced a good many of the outworkers to join us, and God knows they can’t afford to lose so much as a penny’s wages. When I think of people jeering and throwing rotten food at us and the outworkers
actually picking it up
to
eat
 . . .”

She waited to see if I was shocked. I’d like to have been.

“Sally swore that they’d never hold out against all of us together—the cutters
and
the outworkers. But they’d no intention of raising wages.” Her pale brown eyes glinted with betrayal, hurt. “I just . . . It was
selfish
, Mr. Wilde. She meant to make a name for herself. Well, she did, and may she have the best of luck with it.”

Miss Abell sat back, tugging her sleeves down emphatically.

“Is she dangerous?” I asked. I’d suspected so myself, after all.

“Socially, perhaps.” Miss Abell refolded her kerchief and returned it to the pocket of her dress.

“Lawbreaking?”

“God, yes.
Enthusiastically.
Did I mention the trousers?”

“Violent?”

Her face tightened. She shook her head. “I don’t . . . Oh, I couldn’t ever tell you for certain. I pray not, Mr. Wilde.”

That was about as comforting as a spilt basket of snakes.

“And what is her relationship to the owner of your manufactory, Mr. Robert Symmes?”

She was out of her chair as if launched from it, hands smoothing her skirts. “Oh, that’s none of my business. None whatsoever. Heavens, think of the time, and I’ve not even washed my lunch pail, the whistle will blow at any—”

“Miss Abell, I must insist that—”

“No, no, no, you’ve already sent Mr. Gage into a temper, and I was a
bit
slower than usual this morning, but I can make it up—”

“I want you to answer the question. Please.” I rose to my full if inglorious stature.

“And I’ll never put myself at risk for
her
again!” she cried.

Clapping a shocked hand over her mouth, she stumbled backward, her other fingers over the V of bright yellow shawl tied at her waist. “Oh, Mr. Wilde, I’m sorry. . . . I believe you, you know, that you’re honorable. For the love of mercy, leave it alone.”

Ellie Abell fled. Minutes later, yet lost in sinister reflection in Simeon Gage’s office, I heard the shrill one-o’clock whistle signaling the employees to return to their stations until their shifts ended at six, and the girls of the Bowery streamed out into the lengthening evening shadow play. Figures casting scarecrow-thin silhouettes upon the pavement, swinging clasped hands as they walked north and home.

“Bugger,” I said decidedly, putting my hat on after giving my scar a mean-spirited squeeze.

When I quit the manufactory, all the molls cutting cotton and Simeon Gage looming over them like a stone-lipped gargoyle, I spied out where Miss Abell sat. Her lowered face was writ thick with prophecies. Anxious and expectant. As if cruel events would follow upon the heels of my visit.

She was right. I knew it even as I stepped back into the afternoon sunshine. I still made every fool’s effort, meanwhile, to suppose that she was wrong.

I strode north, approaching my workplace at around two p.m. It’s a monstrous hollow rectangular building with an open gallows yard in the center. Worthy of ancient pharaohs who’d as soon kill as pardon, a gloom-draped monument to punishment, with Egyptian detailing and double-height windows set deep in the massive stone walls. The place is horrid on every level. But although horrid it’s also
mine,
mine in a way no other place of occupation has ever been, which strangely endears it to me. Rapacious skinners with neat frocks and smart cravat pins stood on the wide steps at the southern Leonard Street entrance, passing coins to the colored men who run within the lockup to question whether any fresh arrivals can afford a lawyer. Several of the flint-eyed barristers nodded to me as I approached, though whether due to my familiar if grotesque face or to the fact that I admittedly deposit a great many profitable rogues in that dungeon, I couldn’t say. Nodding in return, I gained the front stairs.

I’d take a sip of gin in my neat little office, I thought. And put my pen to paper. And think it through.

It seemed a fair enough plan. Except that someone familiar was hurtling out of the prison-courthouse on skinny crab’s legs, bug-eyed and frantic, a tattered red muffler flapping behind him.

“Mr. Piest! My God, man. Where’s the fire?”

He scraped to a halt, gasping. “Thank all the stars! When you were not in your office, I was
most
distressed. But how did you hear with such speed?”

“What
happened
?” I demanded, gripping the noble old crackbrain’s coat sleeve.

“Well, you’ve heard, obviously,” he returned. “The fire is in Pell Street. Come along with me, or Robert Symmes will suppose we’ve much to answer for!”

—

F
ires lend me the sensation that electric eels reside in my pelvis. And by the time we’d reached the leering nightmare of Pell Street—leaping over the manure-heaped iron path that was the New York and Harlem Railroad tracks, skirting the rum-drenched netherworld of the Five Points, ducking into a despair-tinged corridor three blocks east of the Tombs—I’d learned a bit more about this stir in particular.

Robert Symmes, as he himself had boasted, owned buildings that could be characterized as “highly saturated with tenants” and might better be called slums. One of them had burst into flames at about twelve-thirty that day—and its immediate proximity to the Tombs meant that Chief Matsell was able to alert Mr. Piest as he walked his Chatham Street rounds.

“Is the fire out, then?”

“To my knowledge, yes, Mr. Wilde, thank Providence and the ready assistance of a redoubtable fire company. But Symmes was apparently furious—that ignoble brute told the chief he held the star police personally responsible for its failure to protect his private interests. Thus I would gather the damage is palpable.”

“Casualties?”

“I cannot say, Mr. Wilde,” the mad Dutch roundsman gasped, nearly breaking his neck when his boot met an eroded pit in the roadway. “We’ll know soon enough.”

Pell Street leans inward from both sides, like knob-boned crones hunched over soup bowls in a workhouse dining hall. It’s all topsy-turvy pine structures divided into innumerable apartments, with rear buildings erected in the anterior yards to serve as fertile generators of misery and sewage. But even through the twin stenches of poverty and overflowing school sinks, I could smell brimstone by now.

It clogged, greasy as bad porridge, in the back of my treacherous throat.

A fire engine and hose—beautifully maintained but covered in soot—sat before a building sending a noxious miasma of white steam and black smoke from its exposed bowels. The tall spoked wheels of the chassis rocked, as the dappled mare didn’t much care for its situation. I could sympathize. The contraption was of very modern design, as most of the hose carts are. This one must have arrived with explosive speed. It had been attached to the nearest pump, the long arms of the engine’s pressure device shining with wet black paint, its leather hose uncoiled, its pair of brass lanterns and great brass drum gleaming through the reeking haze.

NEPTUNE ENGINE NUMBER 9
was inscribed in ornate characters on the side of the carriage. Apart from the presence of fire, the pretty apparatus didn’t quite belong. Not surrounded by grime, gawked at by the rag-clad Irish.

Craning my neck, I examined the building.

All the while thinking,
It isn’t a fire anymore. Now it’s a heap of charred wood that can’t hurt you, your scar is only burning because you belong strapped in a strait-waistcoat, you liverless addle-cove.

The structure had been gutted something ferocious. Thankfully, the surrounding houses were untouched. There didn’t appear to be any rival firedogging gangs on the prowl, so the Neptune Nines had accomplished their objective without the added felicity of brass-knuckle brawling. If there’s one thing that kittles the fire rabbits more than walking into charnel houses, it’s beating one another crimson over the privilege.

My stomach writhed a bit more. Recalling the words:

As strikes don’t move you, we’ll see whether vengeance might. Improve the hateful conditions of those who wield the needle as a sword or watch your outwork go down in flames.

“Stout work, fellow defenders of the metropolis!”

Mr. Piest addressed a pair of rascals in red flannel shirts and fitted black trousers, patent belts pulled tight as corsets, emerging from the soaked front steps. The rest of the gang swept smoldering rubble into piles, sharing swigs from rum flasks.

“Would you be so kind as to tell us what you can about this conflagration?” my companion continued. “It seems that the building’s owner has been the target of scurrilous threats.”

The taller of the two, a thin-faced rascal with a long white scar at the edge of his eye, stopped short and grinned. “Well, I’ll be ketched—look, Archie, it’s Val Wilde’s kid brother. Drake Todd, at your service.” He slapped me on the arm hard enough to leave a friendly purple reminder.

“I’d heard Valentine’s brother had turned pig, but damned if I believed it.” The one called Archie, squatter and burlier, with a twice-broken beak, repeated the limb-numbing gesture. “Archie Vanderpool, a pleasure. A copper star, my God. What, Wilde, all the sewage-inspector jobs full up?”

They cackled, pulling congratulatory cigars from their shirt pockets. I thought about being annoyed and found I couldn’t be arsed. Unfortunately, these were the sort of dusty thugs Valentine ran with.

No,
I corrected myself wearily,
this is the sort of dusty thug Valentine
is.

“Fine work.” I cast my eyes over the grim husk. “Any dead?”

“Two.” Drake Todd’s mouth twitched. “Couldn’t get ladders to the third level in time. A pair of stargazers, already carted off to the land-broker. I’m guessing sixteen if not younger, and we almost had them too. Sodding death-trap tinderbox,” he added, spitting.

He meant it religiously. All the firedogs do. They rove in feral gangs, by turns giving each other knife wounds and practicing filthy politics and pulling folk from incinerators. It’s the maddest breed of human on earth. And Val is their goddamn king.

“Occupancy at the time?”

“We were lucky there,” Vanderpool answered. “A hundred or more at night, God knows, but only about thirty at midday.”

“A most fortuitous chance.” Piest angled a weathered hand on his hip. “The residents consisted mainly of female outworkers, I imagine?”