by Lyndsay Faye
I shook my head, still tongueless.
“Then do please escort me to Mulberry Street, and after that … please talk with me. I fear I’m all out of sorts for conversation just now. Will you go?”
She may as well have asked whether I’d any interest in a holiday from a stint in hell. So I nodded. With my hand on her arm once more as we hastened down the road, after the usual rush of quiet joy, everything looked closer, focused. Seen through a gently curving lens. I almost forgot why I’d come for a moment. I wouldn’t get to have her, so Today, I thought, is better than all the days stretched in front of it will be, because today we’re seeing the same view.
Nearby, Mulberry Street was sweltering. Blackened produce melting through its crates into the pavement outside groggeries, buildings swooning against each other in the heat. Packed with people, and nary a man there by choice. Seventy-six was a wooden structure—built of matchsticks and twice as flammable, to my eye. We entered and without pause climbed to the second floor. Going to the end of the hallway, Mercy knocked at the door on the right. When a low murmur answered her, she pushed it open, nodding at me to wait in the passage.
I could see three-quarters of a bare room that smelled cloyingly of illness and had an oily human texture to the air. For about the dozenth time in my life I stopped myself from hauling Mercy bodily out of a strange sickroom. But I know precisely the sort of agony that churned through the mind of the reverend that morning. Because every time, it feels like being pulled in half.
Three children sat on the bare floorboards. The youngest maybe two years old, though he could have simply been underfed, naked, and sucking on four of his fingers. Two other girls in streaked cotton shifts, eight and ten by the looks of them, hemmed handkerchiefs. From the bed, a reedy voice sounded. American, for my money, though she could easily have had Dutch grandparents. Mercy set the little sack of flour in a teakettle, as there wasn’t a table or cupboard in sight.
“The temperance tract women were here again. I’m to clean the floor and wash all the linens before they deliver the potatoes, but I haven’t any vinegar. Nor ash, nor turpentine.”
The woman speaking, blonde hair plastered to her brow and flushed with ague, didn’t look game for standing, much less scrubbing floors. Mercy pulled a blue bottle and a little glass vial out of her basket.
“Here is turpentine, and I’ve an ounce of quicksilver for the bedbugs. If you share both, will Lacey Huey help you to clean?”
“She’ll do it,” sighed the sick woman in relief. “I did her washing last month when her gout was bad. Thank you, Miss Underhill.”
“If I’d any potatoes today myself, I’d leave them, worse luck.” Mercy made a wry face that tugged one side of her lips down.
They spoke for a few moments more, of the woman’s fever and her kinchin and what exactly the temperance tract ladies had demanded be done to the wretched chamber before its occupants deserved any food. Disease, the clergy and the scientists agree, is caused by weak living. Rich foods, bad air, rotten earth, lazy hygiene, liquor, drugs, vice, and sex. The sick, therefore, are generally supposed something lower than angelic and thus not to be directly associated with by virtuous charitable workers. Mercy and other radicals flout that system gleefully, and—despite the terrifying danger to her—I do see her point. I don’t know what causes illness. No one does, really. But I’d been sickly more than once as a child, and Valentine, who can’t be accused of owning many virtues, has the constitution of a draft horse. It doesn’t quite wash.
“Thank you for coming,” Mercy said to me after warmly bidding the kinchin farewell and closing the door. “We’ll take this staircase back down; the other is rotten in three places.”
Sunlight dazzled my eyes as we regained the street. Recalling with a jolt just how foul my errand truly was, I prepared to warn her that I’d a terrible request to make. But Mercy spoke first, as I angled our feet toward St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“My father had the most grotesque nightmare,” she said. “I came down this morning and there he sat in the parlor, with a pen and paper and a book. Not reading or writing or notating, only sitting, before he attended to his duties. He could hardly speak to me. It made me quite worried for your own recovery. Are you well?”
It took me a second or two, but then I realized she wasn’t speaking of the fire. She meant Aidan Rafferty.
“It was a hard day,” I admitted.
“I confess myself sorriest of all for my father,” she said with a painted-over look. “I suppose the infant is in heaven, and maybe you do as well. Or in the cool earth, perhaps. Only my father imagines it in hell. Who do you pity most, Mr. Wilde?”
The mother, I thought. Sitting in the Tombs with a fogged mind, and only rats to talk it over with.
“I don’t know, Miss Underhill.”
Mercy isn’t surprised very often—and so I watched this second instance like the collector I was. At the sound of her name, her lips fell open, and then she bit the lower one gently.
“Haven’t you thought about it, then?”
“I try not to.”
“Why have you come to find me, Mr. Wilde? Here I thought us old friends, and you disappeared without a word, following a great disaster. Do you imagine us heartless, not the sort to wonder where you’d gone?” she added, her eyes ricocheting to the side.
“If I caused you or your father any stray anxious thought, please forgive me.”
“Surely you see that it isn’t like you?”
“I’m wearing a copper star and living in the Sixth Ward. Do I look like myself at the moment?”
Mercy’s black brows drifted apart. Contemplating her equally, I lost my bearings for an instant. When we resumed walking, she’d inexplicably found something to smile about. It teased at the edges of her mouth, more audible in her breath than visible on her face.
“I’m sorry for your recent misfortunes,” she said softly. “All of them. I learned of them only yesterday, from Papa, of course, and wish I’d known sooner.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling ungrateful. “How’s the book coming?”
“Well enough.” She sounded almost amused. “But I find it difficult to credit that you’re here without reason, from the sound of you. Are you about to tell me what it is?”
“I am,” I replied reluctantly. “Dr. Peter Palsgrave thought that you could maybe help the police identify a deceased boy. If you don’t wish—”
“Peter Palsgrave? My father’s friend, the doctor working on an elixir of life?”
“Is he? I thought he only tended children.”
“He does, which is how Papa and I came to know him. And yes, he is. Dr. Palsgrave has long been after the formula for a cordial capable of curing any illness. He vows it’s science, but I find it all rather impractical. Ought one focus so very hard on a magical cure-all while so many are dying for want of perfectly simple cures like fresh meat? But why should he think of me— Oh, I see,” Mercy sighed, shifting her basket up her slender arm. “Is the boy native?”
“If you mean were his parents born here or have they the accents and money to pass for it, I don’t know. But he seems Irish.”
Mercy gave me a brief smile like a darting kiss on the cheek, one corner of her mouth sweeping toward me. “In that case, I will certainly help you.”
“Why should his being Irish make you help us?”
“Because,” she answered, and the needle had crept back into the elegant weave again, “if he’s Irish, no one else in this city would dream of it.”
Viewing the body—by that time clean and shrouded, I assumed, and only yards distant at St. Patrick’s on Prince and Mulberry—was more difficult than we’d imagined it would be. There first was the problem of my reluctance to approach the rough stone wall of the five-windowed side entrance with Mercy on my arm, knowing I was about to show her a corpse. More important, though, there were the thugs.
“We’ll burn Satan’s palace to the ground!”
A giant of over six f
eet with thick black side whiskers, who couldn’t possibly have yet reached twenty-five years in spite of those facts, stood before a small knot of workingmen wearing fierce faces. All their wrinkles etched deeper than they ought to have been. Men of honest work who’d just finished butchering swine or pounding nails and had donned their best coats to pelt a cane basket full of river rocks at the Irish. They resembled Val in their tight black swallowtails and careful breastpins. Val wanted Irish votes, though, and Nativists wanted Irish deaths. They were men with hard lives, showing as much in their cold eyeblinks and their readily clenched hands.
“I’ll see to this,” I said to Mercy, nodding at the corner to tell her to wait.
“You inside-out niggers don’t dare to face down a single freeborn American! Come out and play, you cowards. We’ll drown you like a sack of pups!” the boy giant shouted, all teeth and carefully combed bear’s fur.
“Not today,” I suggested.
Eyes swept in my direction like vermin to a carcass.
“And you are, my sweet little skip-kennel?” the huge young fellow questioned in a voice that could only have come from New York.
“Not a footman. A copper star,” I said, translating skip-kennel. I needed a gesture, so I flicked my thumbnail over the badge the way I’d all too often seen Val do with mere buttons. For the first time, I felt something about that star other than rage or annoyance. “Find some pups who want drowning and leave the church as it is.”
“Oh, a copper star,” sneered the giant rough. “I’ve been meaning to give a copper star a beating for weeks now. He talks big though, don’t he? Seems to savvy flash.”
“That’s all just smoke,” slurred a drunken sort whose face seemed to have been mistaken for bread dough and rearranged. “There’s but one of him. And he don’t understand us.”
“Smack on the calfskin, I understand you. And I don’t need more than one of me,” I replied. “Get out of it or I’ll see you to the Tombs.”
As I’d predicted, the lanky monument they all looked to stepped forward. With his hands curling into their natural shape.
“I go by the name of Bill Poole.” He breathed downward, the gust tangy and ripe. “And I’m a free native-born republican who can’t abide the sight of a standing army. You’ll be flat as a sounder in a strammel when I’m through with you, copper star.”
Whether he was capable of beating me flat as a caged pig, I couldn’t tell. But I could tell he was drunk and loose in the limbs. So when he swung down at me, as a taller man will do when overconfident, I stepped in close past his fist and felled him with an elbow snapped up into his eye socket. Bill Poole dropped like a sack slung from my shoulder.
“Practice makes all the difference,” I advised candidly as his followers scrambled to get him upright. I touched the star again, wildly pleased with it now. “Get away from here before more of me arrive.”
Maybe there really is something to enduring hundreds of brawls with my older brother, I thought, if it helps me fight low and filthy for good reason. The roughs, meanwhile, dragged their leader and their rocks away. I adjusted the cloth over my face while hope pulled hard and insistent at my spine. Mercy was behind me, after all. Mercy was …
Not behind me. The door, prettily curved at its top, was open.
Hope, I’ve discovered, is a sad nuisance. Hope is a horse with a broken leg.
Inside the cathedral, twelve enormous pillars like the roots of mountains supported the distant roof, each ringed at the top with four globes of muted light. Dim despite the glow, and the air thick with incense and ritual. When I spied Mercy, she stood earnestly listening to the priest I recognized from my visit to Mulberry Street in search of lodgings only weeks before. He must have struck me at the time, for I remembered him though we’d never exchanged either words or money. His head wasn’t bald, to start with; it was spherical and hairless, as if hair had never grown there. The features below that sphere were cut strong and bullish and intelligent, however. His eyes flicked to me, interested.
“Mr. Wilde, I take it.” The prelate offered me the steady hand of the man who presides over the walls and the roof. “They told me you’d be payin’ me a call. Bishop Hughes is in Baltimore at the moment, in conference with the archbishop, and I’m servin’ as administrator. I live just adjacent to the cathedral in any case, and oversee the grounds. Father Connor Sheehy, at your service.”
“Thank you. The Bowery types have left your doorstep, you might want to know.”
“Sure, and they leave every afternoon about this time, afore the Catholic day laborers are through with cartin’ manure and want a dust-up.” He smiled. “We pay them no mind, Miss Underhill and myself. I get the feelin’ you humiliated them, though, which is all to the good o’ the copper stars. No, I do charitable work in Five Points with Miss Underhill here, and … your brother Captain Wilde seems to have sent me somethin’ grave. You’ll be wantin’ to see the lad. He’s in one of the side chambers. Come this way.”
The room’s trappings were so different from the police station’s that I couldn’t quite get my head around its being the same corpse. I could see the boy better in the free-flowing window light from high above, and here equally still pictures of saints surrounded him, keeping fit company. He wore a white gown now, facing the freestone ceiling, a cloth pulled up to his breast. You couldn’t take him for sleeping, though, not when you’ve seen death before. Dead things look heavy. Earthbound in a way living things don’t.
Mercy went right to him, setting her basket down. “Yes, I’ve the feeling I’ve met him before, but I can’t place him,” she said. “I take it you don’t know the boy, Father?”
“I do not. I wish I could say otherwise, seein’ what was done to him.”
“What was done to him?” Mercy questioned quick as thinking.
I shot Father Sheehy a glare fit to melt the ice blocks daily shipped down the Hudson. “Do you truly wish to know, Miss Underhill?” I asked. Willing the single word no.
“Are you reluctant to tell me, Mr. Wilde?”
“A very deep cross was carved into the lad’s torso,” Father Sheehy explained, adding a far too knowing glance of sympathetic apology in my direction. I ignored it.
“To what purpose would someone do such a terrible thing?”
My memory slid dizzily back to Dr. Palsgrave and his unspeakable three-item list of satanic spells, treasure hunting, food source.
“We’re working on it,” I said truthfully. “Every suggestion thus far has been ridiculous, from religious mania on down.”
Showing us the back of her slim hand as she brushed her fingers along her neck, a more stricken Mercy murmured, “He did not die of that, did he?”
“No, no,” I promised her. A half-formed thought was tapping at the back of my head. “He died of either pneumonia or else something less traceable. Miss Underhill, last year, did you treat any poor families who’d taken ill with the chicken pox?” I asked in a rush, snapping my fingers.
Lowering my head, I crossed to the body and pulled the kinchin’s gown down just an inch or two, at the shoulder. The nearly faded marks were scattered across the skin, less visible than his freckles but still clear.
Mercy frowned at one side of her mouth. “Last season was remarkably quiet regarding varicella cases. He could have had it without ever seeing me, of course, but I did go about for some two weeks with brown paper, soaking it in molasses, then plastering the children to reduce inflammation of the skin. There was a row of houses stricken, on Eighth Street between the Harlem Railroad and the cemetery. Those were poor natives, though. A patch in Orange Street, all dreadfully ill, but they were Welsh. Oh,” she said with a little start, “a few houses in Greene Street, where …”
Peering down at the body, Mercy’s blood began a retreat from her beautiful face.
“He’s from a bawdy house,” I said quietly, putting a hand on her elbow. I was reasonably sure in that instant I did it for her, not for me. I hope I did. “He’s a kinchin-mab, isn�
�t he?”
“How could you know that?” Mercy questioned, her lips slack and startled. She took a step away from me, falling silent—as if I knew things I shouldn’t, had patronized such places myself and learned their roster of fleshy distractions.
“No, God no, I’ve never visited a den like that,” I protested. “There are particular clues. Where does he come from?”
After a pause, she continued. “I met him in a vile brothel in Greene Street last year, one owned by a Madam Marsh. Silkie Marsh. How did you guess?”
“I didn’t guess. I’ve an inside source, and I’ll tell you all about it. What’s the address? I need to question this Madam Marsh.”
Father Sheehy, his arms calmly folded over each other with an air of quiet fortitude, cleared his throat.
“You won’t be findin’ it easy to question Silkie Marsh, for I can tell you that St. Patrick’s has tried to set the fear of the most holy Trinity in that woman before now, and to no avail. Irish orphans wander into her den from time to time, you see, and they find it a great task gettin’ out again. She has connections.”
“What sort of connections?”
“Political ones.” He raised his brows in my direction, polite but incredulous. “Is there another kind?”
Mercy touched her fingertips to the child’s hair. “No wonder I didn’t recognize him. I saw him a year ago,” she said to herself, her voice strained. “He’s … he’s so much older now.”
“Be very careful about visitin’ that brothel, won’t you?” Father Sheehy advised, angling his perfectly smooth head meaningfully.
“Should I be frightened of a madam who follows politics?” I scoffed.
“Not a bit of it. I only mention it because I wonder if you are aware of how very put out your brother, Captain Valentine Wilde, would be to know you’re harassin’ a major Democratic contributor of his.”
“A contributor,” I repeated. It stuck on something fishhook-shaped that had sprung into my throat.
“Oh, and a mighty large one.” Father Sheehy nodded, smiling darkly. “A benefactor. One might even say a very personal friend.”