by Lyndsay Faye
What exactly do they expect him to do about the city exploding?
“You’re well and truly buttered, my boy. Get to the nearest dispensary,” Valentine ordered. “I’d cart you up to the hospital, but it’s too far and the boys need me. The whole stait’ll burn if we—”
“Get to it, then,” I coughed bitterly. Maybe if I went along with him for once, he’d see reason out of pure contrariness. Nothing makes me more furious than my brother’s obsession with open flame. “I have to stop home, and then I’ll—”
“Don’t rig with me,” my brother snapped. “Get to a doctor. You’re hurt worse than you think, Tim.”
“Wilde! Give us a hand, it’s spreading!”
My brother was swallowed by a bedlam of red shirts screaming orders at one another and sending feathers of spray from their hoses to slice midair through the lazy pincurls of smoke. Looking away from Val purposefully with a hard jerk of my neck, I could see the bloated figure of Justice George Washington Matsell shepherding a clutch of whimpering females away from burning apartments toward the Custom House steps. Matsell is no mere politician; he’s half legend to locals, a highly visible figure, not least because he weighs about as much as a bison. Following a trusted civic leader like Justice Matsell seemed a likely direction to head for safety.
But I, either because I was infuriated or because I’d been knocked in the head, staggered toward my home. The world as I knew it had gone mad. Small wonder I had as well.
I walked south through a snowstorm in which the flakes were the color of lead, feeling reckless and unmoored. Bowling Green has a fountain at the center—a glad, gushing fountain, rivers tumbling over its lip. The fountain burbled away, but a man couldn’t hear it because the surrounding brick buildings had flames pouring like waterfalls out their windows. Red fire raged upward and glassy red water pounded downward and I staggered past the trees with my arms around my stomach, wondering why my face felt like I’d just stepped out of the salt water at Coney Island and turned in to a cold March wind.
Stone Street, when I reached it, proved a battlement of fire, my own house disintegrating into the earth even while it was being carried away on the updrafts. Just the sight of it pulled me to pieces a little. In my mind’s eye, as the wasted runoff from the fire engines began to trickle past my feet, soon gushing with chicken bones and bits of trampled lettuce, I imagined my molten silver coursing along the cobble cracks. Ten years of savings looked like a mercury river, painting mirrors on the soles of my boots.
“Only chairs,” sobbed a woman. “We had a table, and he might have grabbed the linens. Only chairs, only chairs, only chairs.”
I opened my eyes. I’d been walking, I knew, but they must have been shut. I was at the southmost tip of the island, in the middle of Battery Gardens. But not as I’d ever seen it.
The Battery is a promenade for those who have time for recreational walks. It’s blanketed with cigar stubs and peanut shells, yes, but the wind from the ocean carries the care right out of my bones, and the sycamores don’t stop my view of the New Jersey forests across the Hudson. It’s a grand place, and locals and tourists alike lean on the iron rails in the afternoons, all staring off over the water alone together.
But the Battery was now a furniture warehouse. The woman rocking back and forth over her chairs had four of them—while to my left, a small hill of cotton bales had been rescued from the fire. Chests of tea were mounting like a dizzying Tower of Babel above a gigantic pile of broomsticks. The air that had been foul with summertime half an hour earlier reeked with the cindery dust of burning whale oil.
“Oh, my dear God,” said a woman carrying at least fifty pounds of sugar in a neatly stamped sack, peering at my face. “You ought to see a doctor, sir.”
I barely heard her. I’d slumped to the grass with the rocking chairs and sacks of flour. Meanwhile thinking the only thought an ambitious fellow from New York would’ve indulged in as he lost consciousness while the city was erupting.
If I have to save for another ten years, she’ll pick somebody else.
When I woke up a pauper, nauseated and disoriented, my brother had already picked a new profession for me. Unfortunately, that’s the sort of fellow Valentine is.
“There you are. Bully,” my brother drawled from the chair he’d pulled up to my bedside and then sat in backside front, dangling his thick blond arm and half-chewed cigar over the sanded cedar. “Some of New York is still standing, by the way. Not your ken or your workplace, though. I checked. Those look like the inside of my fireplace.”
We were both alive, then, which seemed pretty favorable. But where? The windowsill a few feet from me hosted a series of herb pots and a bowl of cheery upright asparagus, either decoration or future dinner. Then I spied a huge, glorious painting of an American eagle bearing arrows in its talons on the far wall and winced inwardly.
Val’s place, on Spring Street. I’d not been there in months. It’s the second floor of a fine cozy row house with hysterical political posters and the usual strapping patriotic pictures of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson blanketing the walls. Firemen are New York’s heroes, and the heroes make an actual living by way of politics, as they aren’t paid for running headlong into blazing infernos. So their days break down thus: for recreation, they douse fires, beat the good nature out of rivals from other engine companies in organized gang brawls, and drink and whore their way up and down the Bowery. And for work, they get their friends elected or appointed to city jobs, so that they all manage to elect or appoint each other. People would object louder to this system if they didn’t worship the firemen. Who’s against a flash-man when he’s dressed in red cotton and you’re handing your baby out a window?
I haven’t the stomach for any of it. Politics or prolonged exposure to Val.
Valentine is a Democrat, in the identical way some men are doctors or stevedores or brewers, and his goal in professional life is to crush the hated Whigs to powder. The Democrats don’t worry much over the few scattered Anti-Masonics, whose only aim is to convince America that the Freemasons intend to murder us all in our beds. Nor do they lose sleep over the Liberty Party, because as glad as New Yorkers are that slavery here was abolished entirely in 1827, joining an entire political engine dedicated to the welfare of blacks is extremely unfashionable. What chafes Val’s hide are the machinations of the Whigs: they’re merchants and doctors and lawyers generally, most of the well-to-do and everyone with pretensions in that direction, gentlemen with clean hands who make a tremendous racket about raising tariffs and modernizing banks. The accepted Democratic response to Whig arguments is to praise the natural virtue of the peasant, and then to throw the ballot boxes coming from Whig districts into the Hudson.
The main difference between them isn’t political, though, to my mind. As I grasp the matter, the Democrats would like every last taxpaying Irishman to vote for them, and the Whigs would like every last taxpaying Irishman to be deported to Canada.
It all repulses me. I’ll own that my brother lives pretty comfortably, though. And for a man who always neglects the top two buttons of his fireman’s shirt and thinks of morphine the way most people think of tonic water, he’s laughably clean in domestic habits. He sweeps the floor every morning and polishes his andirons with rum every other month.
“Thirsty? Water, rum, gin, or small beer?” My brother went to rummage in the kitchen and deposited two mugs on the table next to me when he returned. “Here, have your pick of the first pair. Would you believe that thirty-eight Broad Street, apart from the saltpeter, had its basement stuffed with French cream? Barrel after barrel of brandy, Tim. Worst streak of luck I’ve ever seen …”
As he continued, I squinted, focusing my vision. Val wore a halfhearted attempt at his typical Bowery Boy glory, sporting a fine white shirt and black trousers with a silk waistcoat covered in peonies only half done up. Clean and healthy, but clearly exhausted. My brother is the living spit of me on a thirty-percent-larger scale, with a boyish, dimpl
ed face, dark blond hair with a deep peak at the brow, and pensive bags under his bright green eyes. They aren’t much to do with deep thinking on either one of us, though. Particularly not Val. No, Val is more the type to stagger out of a bawdy house having just knifed someone, with an adoring moll under each gnarled arm, lush with gin and laughing like the bass clef of a pipe organ, the very living definition of an American dead rabbit. When my brother laughs, he flinches, as if he shouldn’t be laughing. And he shouldn’t. A darker-minded gentleman never stalked the festering city streets in brushed black tails.
“It was a sight, Tim,” Val concluded with a one-sided grin. “And the light-fingered sort at work within seconds. Damned if I didn’t spot a clever old toast of seventy years who’d hooked so many cigars he had to carry’em in his togs. Tied the canvas of his trousers with two strings at the ankle and filled on up.”
That was when I realized what was wrong, apart from actual injuries: I was up to my eyebrows with laudanum. My brother had dosed me so high after the doctor (so I hoped) departed that the image of a man’s trousers overflowing with cigars seemed pretty nightmarish. Valentine is careful about how much vinegar goes in his fish gravy, and careful about boiling the milk for his coffee, but a man with so many drugs in his veins is apt to miscalculate opiates. Meanwhile, a mysterious pain gnawed at the side of my head with burning reptile fangs. I wanted to feel it. Identify it, maybe.
“Never mind cigars. How did I get here?” I asked with a thick tongue.
“I found you on the Battery in a fortress of Holy Writ. One of the fire-boys had spied you keeping company with the Bible Society, flat on your back with all your lights out—I told you to find a sawbones, you incarnate tit—but of course, any Party man would know you for my brother, and they sent me word straightaway. These autum-bawlers were standing guard over your lifeless hide and their one thousand, two hundred and sixty-one Bibles salvaged from Nassau Street.”
Autum-bawlers. Churchmen, then. I had a vision of three fellows in drab clerical tweeds outlined against the murky starlight. Arguing over the safety of leaving one man behind with me and the stacks of Bibles, sending two to fetch parts of their press. Then one had suggested fetching a doctor instead, and the others told him not to be ridiculous. God would give me strength provided they saw that His presses remained unscathed. I hadn’t been in a position to argue at the time.
“When I arrived, they handed you over,” Val continued casually, picking an errant piece of tobacco off his tongue. “You have two nasty bruised ribs and … well, nothing else that’ll keep you down long.”
“Sorry you missed any of the fire.”
“Anyway, I’ve set us both up easy,” Val announced, as if getting back to a topic we’d accidentally left behind. “We’ve both a new occupation, my Tim. One you’ll take to like a bird to air.”
I wasn’t minding him.
I was fiddling with my fingertips at the oily cotton wool bandaging over the upper right-hand quadrant of my face. My eye was fine, I knew, for I could see clear as church glass, though the drugs glossed everything. And by Val’s own account, it was miraculous that the worst of my injuries had been a couple of bruised ribs. So I couldn’t have been brained too badly. Could I?
I kept hearing my brother’s words, though, bitten out regretful but hasty as he’d turned away to pull people out of disintegrating row houses. He’d sounded dry as sandpaper. A voice I’d not heard in years. And so, picturing myself suddenly made my blood run slick and slippery as an eel.
You’re hurt worse than you think, Tim.
“I don’t want your setups. To run for state senate or work as a hydrant inspector,” I grated out, ignoring my own thoughts.
“It’s plumper than oyster pie, I’m telling you.” Standing, Valentine began doing up buttons, leaving the wet cigar end at the side of his expressive mouth. “Got us both appointments only this morning, through the Party. Course, mine is … a bit higher up. And in this district. You, I only managed to post in the Sixth Ward. You’ll have to live there, find a new ken, since roundsmen are required to live in the same ward they patrol. But that’s no matter. Your house is getting hosed off into the river by now.”
“Whatever it is, no.”
“Don’t get so peppery, Timothy. There’s to be a police force.”
“Everyone knows that. Anyhow, I saw your poster. It didn’t endear them to me.”
Despite my misgivings or maybe because of them, the police saga had been the first political tale I’d closely followed in years. Harmless citizens were shrieking for a system of constables, and less harmless patriots were bellowing that the freemen of New York would never stomach a standing army. Legislation passed in June, a Democrat victory, and the harmless citizens had won out at long last thanks to tireless thugs like my brother—men who liked danger, power, and bribes in equal measure.
“You’ll come round soon enough, now you’re a policeman yourself.”
“Ha!” I barked bitterly, sending a twinge of suffering through my pate. “I call that nice. You want me trussed up in a blue strait-waistcoat for the real men to throw rotten eggs at?”
Valentine snorted and somehow managed to make me feel even smaller than I normally do in his company. No easy trick. But he’s an expert.
“You think a free republican like me would be caught walking around in blue livery? Dry up, Tim. We’ve a real police now, no uniforms, and with George Washington Matsell himself at the head. For good, they’re claiming.”
I blinked blearily. Justice Matsell, the equally infamous and obese civic figure I’d seen in the thick of the fire, shooing gawkers toward the oasis of the courthouse. I’d also heard from diverse sources that he was a degraded lump of blubber, that he was the righteous hand of God come to bring order to the streets, that he was a power-hungry troll, that he was a benign philosopher who’d owned a bookstore selling the sordid works of Robert Dale Owen and Thomas Paine, and that he was a damned dirty Englishman. I’d nodded at all accounts as if their gospel verity was unassailable. Mainly because I didn’t give a damn. What did I know about governance, after all?
As for joining the new police force, that was clearly a plot of Val’s to make me look ridiculous.
“I don’t need your help,” I declared.
“No,” Valentine sneered, snapping one of his braces.
With considerable calculation, I sat up in his bed. The room reeled around me as if I were a maypole, and a hot molten flash branded my temple.
Nothing is as bad as it seems, I thought with the last remnants of my dense optimism. It couldn’t be. I’d already lost everything once, I’d been ten, and so had countless other people I knew, and they all picked up and kept going. Or they picked up and went in a slightly different direction.
“I’ll go back to bartending,” I decided.
“You have any notion of how many people are out of work this morning?”
“At a hotel or another of the better oyster cellars.”
“How does your face feel, Tim?” Valentine snapped.
Sulfur drifted through the air now. A hot and grainy sort of rage tugged at my throat.
“Like it was slapped with a laundry iron,” I answered.
“And you’re supposing it looks sprucer than it feels?” he mocked me more quietly. “You’re in difficulties, little Timothy. You took a dose of hot oil where it’ll be noticed. You want to tend bar from behind a three-foot pine plank up the arse end of a vegetable grocery, I’ll drink to your fortune. But you’re likelier to be hired on at Barnum’s American Museum as the Man Who Lost Part of His Physog than you are to tend bar at a hotel.”
I bit the end of my tongue hard, tasting gunmetal.
I wasn’t thinking any longer about ways to earn money so I wouldn’t have to eat Valentine’s goddamned chicken fricassee. My brother can cook as well as he cleans. I wasn’t even figuring the odds of my being able to stand up long enough to punch him in the jaw.
No, I was ruminating, it seems that two da
ys back you had a pile of silver and a whole face.
I wanted Mercy Underhill like I wanted to breathe air, and then in the same heartbeat hoped she’d never see me again. Mercy could have her pick. And I’d gone from being a man with a great many things in his favor to another sort: a highly disreputable fellow whose sole possessions were a scar I couldn’t imagine seeing for myself without my neck flushing clammy, and an equally disgraceful brother who earned his bread giving concussions to somber swallowtailed Whigs.
“I hate you,” I said with very careful clarity to Valentine.
That was comforting, like bad whiskey burning my throat. Bitter and familiar.
“Then take the sodding job, so you don’t have to sleep in my ken,” he suggested.
Valentine dragged his fingers through his tawny hair, ambling over to his desk to pour himself a measure of rum. Completely, entirely unmoved, which so happens to be the most infuriating thing about my infuriating older brother. If he cares a rotten fig that I hate him, I wish to Christ he’d be more visible about it.
“The Sixth Ward is hell’s privy pit,” I pointed out.
“August first.” Valentine drained his spirits and then adjusted his braces with a second snap of impatience. His green eyes raked over me as he went for his beautifully shining black coat. “You have ten days to find a ken in the Sixth Ward. If you were political, I could’ve done better, settle you here in the Eighth, but you aren’t, are you?”
He raised his brows while I attempted to look properly defiant about my political shortcomings. But it hurt my head, so I relaxed against the pillows again.
“It’s five hundred dollars a year, plus whatever you can make by way of rewards or letting the flusher rabbits you nab grease you. Or you can always foist off the brothels. I don’t give a damn.”
“No,” I agreed.
“Like I said, I arranged it all with Matsell. You and I both start August first. I’m to be a captain,” he added with more than a touch of brag. “A respected metropolitan figure, and making steady chink at it, too, and plenty of time left for fighting fires with the lads. What do you think of that?”