The Gods of Gotham

by Lyndsay Faye

  Then I noticed that she was wearing a night shift, and it was soaked in either tar or blood. A lot of it.

  “My God,” I murmured. “Are you hurt?”

  She didn’t answer me, but her square face was working on something other than words. I believe she was trying not to cry.

  Maybe a professional policeman, like the ones in London, would have marched right back to the Tombs and delivered her for questioning even though he was off shift. It’s possible. Maybe a professional policeman would have rushed her to a doctor. I don’t know. It ought to be clear by now that there wasn’t much in the way of professional policemen in New York City. But even if there had been, I was through with them for good and all. Aidan Rafferty was being buried by that time, so was his mother at the Tombs in another sense; I was a man used to pouring gin in a glass for double the money, and the copper stars could go hang themselves.

  “Come with me,” I said. “You’ll be all right now.”

  Gently, I lifted her up. I couldn’t get to my key with her in my arms. But by chance Mrs. Boehm had seen me out the window by that time and stood with the door open. Her dressing gown was wrapped tight around her bony frame, her face a study in blank surprise.

  “Dear God,” she breathed through her widely drawn lips.

  Mrs. Boehm ran for the fireplace next to the ovens and stoked it furiously as I entered with the limp little kinchin, reaching with her other hand for a pail to draw water at the pump.

  “There are rags in the corner,” she said while flying at the door. “Clean, for the loaves.”

  I set the girl down on a flour-smeared footstool. Mrs. Boehm had left the lamp sitting on the broad kneading table, for the moon was high and the pump just outside the house. In the better light, it was apparent the huge stain on the child’s dress couldn’t have been anything other than blood.

  Her grey eyes shifted about so skittishly that I moved back a little when I’d settled her on the stool. I went for the clean slop rags in the corner and brought back several soft cotton ones.

  “Can you tell me where you’ve been hurt?” I asked quietly.

  No answer. A thought occurred to me.

  “Can you speak English?”

  That stirred her a little, her jaw angling quizzically. “What else would I speak?”

  Unaccented English. No, that was just to my ears, I corrected myself. New York English.

  Her arms started shaking. Mrs. Boehm returned making long strides and began to heat the water. Muttering to herself, she lit another two lamps, bathing the bakery in caramel light. As she did so, and I looked the girl over more carefully, I noticed something peculiar.

  “Mrs. Boehm,” I called.

  Careful and slow as we could, we pulled the dress off the girl. She didn’t object. Didn’t move a muscle save to help us. When Mrs. Boehm gripped a warm, wet rag in her hand and brushed it over the child’s lightly freckled skin, my instincts were proven correct.

  “She isn’t hurt physically at all,” I said in wonderment. “Look. It’s all from her dress. Covered in blood and not a mark on her.”

  “They’ll tear him to pieces,” the little girl whispered, eyes brimming with tears. And then I caught her for the second time, arms tangling with Mrs. Boehm’s, for she slipped into a dead faint.

  FIVE

  When Potatoes are attacked with this disease, the first thing that is observed is a drying-up or shriveling of the tuber… . We have lately received communication from our correspondents complaining of their Potatoes, and in some instances we make little doubt that they are suffering from the disease we have just described.

  • Gardener’s Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, March 16, 1844, London •

  Mrs. Boehm helmed the task of getting all the blood off the poor girl while I held her limbs steady. Then Mrs. Boehm found an old, soft blouse, dressed the child in it, did up the plain shell buttons, took all the pins out of her dark auburn hair, and deposited her in a trundle pulled out from under her own bed. Queerly methodical about all of the chaos, which made me grateful. When she quit her bedroom on the second floor, closing the door behind her, she met me coming up from the bakery carrying a small plate of sliced day-old bread with two cuts of salted ham and some cheese I’d found in a little pot of brine.

  “I’ll pay for it, every cent,” I said, trying to sound gallant. I think I sounded ill. “I thought you might join me.”

  Mrs. Boehm made a clucking sound. “Wait,” she commanded, ducking back inside her bedroom. When she came out again, she held a bit of wax paper of the sort used to wrap chocolate.

  We set plates at the table with a pair of lit tallow candles, turning down the lamps to save oil. Mrs. Boehm disappeared and then returned carrying a stone jug of table beer, and she poured it into two mugs from the cupboard. I noticed her looking at me a bit keenly, even for her, and in another moment I swept my hat off obligingly. It was like taking off my underclothes. Obscene somehow.

  “Fire downtown?” she asked softly. “Or accident?”

  “Fire downtown. It doesn’t matter.”

  She nodded, the corners of her broad mouth twitching. “Tell me. The girl was outside, on the street, and to bring her in is what you decided?”

  “You object?” I inquired, surprised.

  “No. But you’re police.”

  The implication was clear. What were police for, if they didn’t take blood-covered children to the station house and learn what had happened to them? I nodded, feeling about six inches to the left of myself ever since I’d taken off the hat. I hadn’t noticed I’d been relying on it quite so heavily. Meanwhile, I could hardly admit to my own landlady that I was abandoning my only steady source of income.

  “When the poor kinchin wakes up, we’ll find out what’s wrong—where she lives, where the blood came from. There’s no point in policing with her asleep.”

  Ravenously hungry, I reached for a slice of thick rye and tore a piece of the cheese curd away. Mrs. Boehm just pulled a cigarette from a pocket of her dress and lit it with one of the candle flames. The dusty dull wheat color of her hair flickered for an instant, and then the taper was back on the table. I noticed a periodical lying open where she had been reading a short story, an installment of the hugely popular series Light and Shade in the Streets of New York, and smiled inwardly. It’s a very keenly written collection—but equally lurid as lyrical, and the author hints ripely at sex whenever possible, which I suppose is why it’s penned by “Anonymous.” I liked my landlady better the more I knew of her. Meanwhile, when she caught me reading upside down, she blushed along the edge of her cheekbones and flipped the cover shut.

  “Children like that are trouble,” she noted in a regretful voice.

  “Irish children?” I wasn’t surprised she thought so. Even if the girl talked American, her hair and her skin dappled like a plover’s egg marked her as first generation. And living in the Sixth Ward, Mrs. Boehm had certainly seen plenty of them, and sometimes they were trouble. Often enough taught that private property is a myth.

  “Not Irish children.”

  “Runaways?” The question puzzled me. Wouldn’t Mrs. Boehm run if someone covered her in blood?

  Mrs. Boehm shook her head with her bony arms crossed and her cigarette at her lips. “Not runaways. You didn’t notice.”

  “Notice what?”

  “She is a … what do they call it? Kinchin, you said. A kinchin-mab. The little girl is a kinchin-mab.”

  The bread stuck in my craw. Taking a sip of Mrs. Boehm’s house brew, I set the sweating mug down and then leaned my elbows on the table, carefully running my fingers over my brow. How could I have been so blind? Being exhausted and hungry and three miles past horrified was no excuse for having the perception of a puppy.

  “Her hair,” I muttered. “Her hair, of course.”

  Mrs. Boehm’s weirdly broad mouth curved into a dark smile. “You look at people close. Yes, her hair.”

  “It could be a mistake.” I leaned back, le
tting my fingers trail along the grainy wood. “She could have been playing with an older sister earlier today.”

  Mrs. Boehm shrugged. The gesture had all the weight of a beautifully penned argument.

  For who in their right mind would do up a little girl’s hair like that of a woman of eighteen and then allow her to run, shoeless, out into the streets? Grown whores leave their hair down as a rule, trying to look as young as they can. Parade with their flimsy shirts open to their navels, their parched, brittle locks trailing behind them like brushwood twigs, hoping at least in appearance to shave off a few years’ worth of being poked with knives and cudgels and every other tool known to man. The children, though. Kinchin-mabs are most often hidden away indoors. But when they do walk abroad, they’re painted to look like tiny society women. Hair pinned up like the belles of a ghastly miniature ball.

  “You think she escaped from a disorderly house,” I said. “If she did, she’s for a religious charity if she likes and back on the streets if she doesn’t. Never the House of Refuge. Not if I have a say in it.”

  The House of Refuge is an asylum for orphaned, half-orphaned, vagrant, and delinquent children, just north of the populated city at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. Its aim is to remove homeless kinchin from the streets, where they are visible, and set them on an enlightened path from behind closed gates, where they are not visible. The main sticking point being less about the enlightenment and more about whether the self-satisfaction of New York’s upper classes is in any way threatened by the sight of starving six-year-olds huddled in sewage troughs. I happen to be unimpressed by the establishment’s precepts.

  Nodding in agreement, Mrs. Boehm set her rib cage against the wood, unwrapping the wax paper and then breaking off a piece of the dark chocolate she’d revealed. She ate it pensively, pushing the small treasure toward me.

  “What do you think she meant by saying, ‘They’ll tear him to pieces’?” I asked.

  “Animal, perhaps. Into the backyard she goes, she has a favorite pig, the pig is killed, she runs. Blood from slaughter, I’m thinking. A cow, even, or a pony with broken leg sold for glue. Yes, her beloved pony. Of course they would tear him to pieces. We will find out tomorrow.”

  Mrs. Boehm stood up, lifted a candle.

  “Tomorrow I’ve only a half-shift,” I lied to the friendly little knobs of bones running down her back under the dressing gown. “You needn’t bother waking me.”

  “Very good. I am glad you are a police. We need police,” she said thoughtfully, collecting her magazine. Then, after a pause. “It was only her pony, I am thinking.”

  Mrs. Boehm was a practical woman, I told myself. And she was right: the blood could have come from anywhere. Only a pony’s, or even a dog’s, run down by a carriage and then promptly swarming with rats. I relaxed a fraction.

  But the thought of rats left me sick and shaken again, staring uselessly across the room at a hairline crack in the plaster. I wondered, when carrying the other candle up to my chambers, just what it would take after a day like that to get my usual self back.

  Next morning, I awoke from a dead slumber to a pair of grey eyes examining me.

  I stared, not comprehending. Still flat in bed and yet thrown off balance. Sunlight streamed through my window, which never was the state of things when my eyes opened. My straw tick was still up against the wall, for the thought of bedding down in the sleeping-closet depressed me beyond words, and I’d have been pretty shocked the day before to think I’d ever be entertaining any company. Yet here I was. Wearing only loose drawstring smallclothes that stopped well above my knees, with enormous ash-colored irises pinned to my frame.

  The little girl wore the lengthy blouse Mrs. Boehm had given her the night before. It hung to mid-thigh, and under she boasted a small boy’s set of nankeen trousers. Interesting, I thought. Her rosewood-colored hair was down now, tied back with a piece of kitchen twine.

  “What are you doing in here?” I asked.

  “I’ve been looking at your paintings. I like them.”

  There weren’t any paintings, but I could see what she was getting at. Ever since I was a young kinchin I’ve scrawled things on any spare paper I could find when my brain wants quieting. And every day before the start of police work I’d drawn something. Going out in the heat made my face burn, and I hadn’t wanted people. I’d taken the Madison Line omnibus to the northeast frontier of the city, to Bull’s Head Village at Third and Twenty-fourth, where all the pens, cattle yards, and butchers migrated when driven off Bowery. It reeked of recent death there, and the animals screamed a good deal. But they had thin brown paper to wrap meat in for next to nothing, and I bought a pretty huge roll of it. Then I took a sack and filled it with spent coal from an abandoned brazier near the sheep yard.

  Shortcuts. I know how they’re done.

  “You need to leave, so I can dress.”

  “This one,” she said, walking up to a brown swath tacked to the wall depicting the Williamsburg Ferry leaving Peck Slip beneath a lowering July thunderstorm. Just precisely as I like to think of river travel, the way it still echoes in my mind—a boat cutting through a wide, placid river, seconds before a delirious collision of sunlight and rain. “I like it particular. This one is flash. How’d you learn?”

  “Hand me my shirt,” I commanded. “There’s one by the washbasin.”

  She carried it over, smiling. A genuine smile, I thought, but double-purposed: it was real charm coated on top of a measuring device. How was I going to respond to simple friendliness? Did I like that? I’d sized people up so myself, but I was better at it. Inwardly, I shook my head. This girl had been soaked in gore not eight hours previous, been subjected to God knows what beforehand, and I was worried about my apparel.

  “I’m Timothy Wilde. What’s your name?”

  “Everyone calls me Little Bird,” she said with a tilt of one shoulder. “Bird Daly. I can say the real one for you if you’d like me to, though.”

  I said certainly, go on ahead, as I pulled on my shirt and wondered with an increasingly mortified feeling where my trousers had got to.

  “Aibhilin ó Dálaigh. I didn’t used to be able to say it proper, so I called myself Bird because Bird is easier. But they mean the same thing exactly, only different languages, so Bird is just as good as the other, is what I think. What do you think?”

  Trousers, I thought. I now owned two pairs, and they’d never seemed so very important. Finally, my bare foot hit black worsted and I pulled them on quick as I could.

  Now Bird was staring at a large sketch of a cottage in the forest, obviously and violently on fire. The woods surrounding were a blackly burned-out no-man’s-land, a dreamscape, and the whole thing smelled of incineration. I’d done it in spent fuel, after all. Whatever den she hailed from, she’d peered at paintings before. Her eyes were comparing new art to art she’d already seen. Not a Five-Pointer, then, from our blackest pit of all, and not from the saltwater East River dives either. Too well fed, expensively dressed, and critical of charcoal studies.

  “We need to talk about yesterday,” I suggested gently. “About what happened to you, and your nightdress, and where you belong.”

  “Did you do this one when you were younger? It looks different.”

  “No, they’re all pretty new. We’ll go and find Mrs. Boehm, see about some tea while you tell me what upset you last night.”

  Bird paused before another patch of paper-covered wall, frowning. It was a simple portrait of a pale woman with black locks and a scholarly air, her cleft chin in her hand, looking off with wide-set eyes. Just Mercy, caught in a brown study.

  “You like her,” Bird announced darkly. “You probably kiss her quite a lot, don’t you?”

  “I … as a matter of fact, I don’t. Why—”

  Pondering the sketch, I realized that the feelings of the artist toward his subject were, indeed, apparent to a ten-year-old. It didn’t aid my flusterment much. Meanwhile, Bird’s brooding face slipped into anothe
r—agreeable, pliant, erasing the trail of her mistake. “Not everyone likes kissing. Maybe you don’t? Anyhow, if you like her, I’ll go on and like her too. Since you brought me inside and all.”

  “You won’t be seeing her. She’s a very … admirable lady, though.”

  “She’s your mistress?”

  “She is not. No. Listen, part of what we need to talk about is where you lived before. Because they’ll be wanting you back, and if they don’t deserve to have you back, well, we must find you a fresh start.”

  Bird blinked. Then she smiled again, it having been safe the first time.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she admitted. “But I’ll try if you want me to, Mr. Wilde. I think I’ll cap in with you from now on, you see. So I’ll try.”

  “You will tell me,” Mrs. Boehm said in a very kind voice, “what last night happened to your nightdress.”

  Bird, sitting at the wide bakery table with a cup of heated currant wine mixed with water and a lump of sugar held prettily in her small hands, looked down at a wisp of steam. Her face colored hotly, then faded again. I was reminded of being asked by my father long ago whether I’d finished polishing the tack in the stables with whale oil, being suddenly terrified because I hadn’t, and then catching Val winking at me reassuringly from the corner of the room in a rare moment of rescue. It was the same quick flash of panic I’d just seen in Bird’s eyes, the sort that steals your breath.

  “It’s a very pretty nightdress,” I mentioned from my seat on a chair in the corner.

  The compliment rolled right over Bird, pulling her eyebrows up a fraction. I was grotesquely reminded that, while some children gobble encouraging remarks like gingerbread, Bird Daly had probably been subjected to flattery. And far worse obscenities.