by Lyndsay Faye
Chief Matsell did smile then, tapping his quill feather against his lip once. Only once.
“All sorts of people comprise a metropolitan city. Unfortunately, the ones with the least respect for law and order are also the ones who’ve developed their own singular language, its origins lost in the fog of British history. What you see before you is the beginnings of a flash lexicon. A rogue’s lexicon, if you will.”
“You won’t need my help for that, knowing the ways of rogues so thoroughly yourself.”
He laughed. I looked at his writing, firm and a little arrogant and upside down. It was an inspired idea to record crime’s language, I thought reluctantly. But what good was knowing flash if the actual solving of a crime didn’t line up with the Democratic agenda?
“I don’t need your help with the lexicon, Mr. Wilde. I’d like you to spend your time in another way entirely, as a matter of fact. Now that I understand just how strongly you feel about this matter. I did wonder, you know. How you felt.”
“Only the way I figure a man ought to feel about dead kinchin,” I replied coldly.
“I understand you. What I would like you to understand is the fragility of this particular organization. Are the copper stars universally well liked, would you say, from your experience on your beat?”
I shook my head grudgingly. For every man grateful for our watchfulness, there was another ranting about free streets and the spirit of the Revolution.
“Harper’s Police were useless,” Matsell continued, “and that is why they failed. Not because this city does not understand deep within that we require law enforcement, but because New Yorkers eat incompetents for breakfast and because our criminal population couches their arguments in the language of patriotism. I am not incompetent, Mr. Wilde, but I have been placed in an impossible position: it is extremely difficult to solve crimes of any significant age. Nigh impossible. A day passes, a week, and all trace of evidence the culprit may have left behind is gone. Here we have a series of crimes the nature of which would rock the city, perhaps threaten the voting base of the entire Democratic Party. And if we publicly fail to solve these murders, if we prove to be as inept as those blue-coated slackmouths we replaced, a future Whig victory and the dissolution of the copper stars would not surprise me in the slightest. They like their money funneled toward banks and industry.”
“The goddamned Party is all you people think about,” I hissed.
“It gave you this position, didn’t it?”
“That’s not exactly an honor. Any scoundrel who can swing a leaded stick is good enough for you.”
George Washington Matsell tapped his fingertips together with a frown. “We both know that isn’t quite the way of it. There are different kinds of police officers, same as with any set of men. Some wanting to guard the streets, and some wanting to gain an advantage on those same streets by wearing the copper star. I’ll be the first to admit there are scoundrels in my employ, but for the sake of the Party it can’t be helped. I argue that tolerating a few useful rogues is better than lacking a police department entirely. So there are dead rabbits, and decent men, all of them walking the rounds. Then there’s you.”
“And what am I?” I didn’t try to hide the scowl on my face. It felt permanently stamped.
“The rest of them are preventing crime, you see. The roundsmen, and the captains as well. But preventing crime is another matter from unraveling it once it’s been committed. I suspect that’s where you come in, Mr. Wilde. The solving after the fact. Not everyone can attempt such a thing, you see. So by God, that’s what you’ll do. Solve the riddle, and report back to me and me alone.”
“Solve which riddle?”
He spread his hands out amiably, leaving them lightly touching his desk. “Is there another on your mind?”
I glanced at Matsell’s map, thoughts glinting hard and in every direction like a knife fight. Staring at the point where the city ground to a halt, where the kinchin had been hidden beneath the wordless trees. I wanted to know how they came to be there like very little else I’ve ever wanted, and I’d never felt so about a puzzle before. It was Bird, partly, along with all the others, but it was simpler than that. Tending bar is a line in the dust drawn repeatedly, the same transaction over and over again, with daydreams of your own ferryboat and a piece of land on Staten Island so you can stomach it. Mind games built on common sense are also required to keep you interested enough to make any money, but no matter what you guessed right about a patron, you’d forget it an hour after locking up, the next day’s tracks erasing the ones that came before. But this was a single goal, a mountain to climb and see the top with your own eyes, and I needed to know.
And here it seemed the chief burned to know too. Despite the Democrats.
“There’s one on my mind, all right,” I said quietly.
“You’d better keep this, then,” he suggested, handing me back the copper star and managing somehow not to look smug.
“You turned me back into a roundsman just to see what I’d do?”
“It was much more clarifying than even I had expected.”
Thumbing the pin out, I shoved the star back into my lapel. It felt much better to have it there. “I need a little money,” I admitted. “I’ll use it honest, on my word. I need to bribe the news hawkers.”
“Very clever of you, too. Get funds from your brother, if you would. He’ll have a Party donations cash box at the committee meeting tomorrow morning that won’t have been recorded in the ledgers as of yet. Say nothing of this to anyone save for Captain Wilde, and Mr. Piest if you should need another ally. The man who wrote to the newspapers is a lunatic. There are no dead kinchin, there never were. Do you understand me? And if it was a copper star behind that disgraceful piece of trash, I’ll have him by the bollocks. Before you leave, write out a report regarding that powder keg you stopped going off this afternoon.”
“Good luck with your lexicon,” I said apologetically from the door, touching my hat brim. “It’s really a very useful idea.”
“It’s the most useful idea I’d ever had before the idea of assigning a specific copper star to detect a particular criminal,” he returned placidly. “Get out of my office, Mr. Wilde. And say not a word.”
I wrote out the report. Very intently penning “assault with intent to kill,” “threatening life,” “public drunkenness with disorderly conduct,” among other things. That went a fair way toward making up for spelling the word turnip. Then, not having the funds yet to bribe the newsboys, and wanting pretty badly to speak with Bird, I walked home to Elizabeth Street, the brim of my hat blocking the heavy spears of late-afternoon August light. Within twenty yards of my steps, I met a keen surprise.
A very fine carriage, such as would never stop in front of Mrs. Boehm’s bakery, waited outside my front door. Silt from the road dulled its perfect black paint.
I stopped, sizing up the object. The seated black driver hadn’t caught sight of me, for his sweat-drenched back was to the west. Standing on my toes with my neck craning, I peered inside the vehicle. Expecting a doctor’s bag, maybe—Peter Palsgrave come by magic to help us. Or the owner of a newspaper, there to drag a story out of me, leaving his notes for the morrow’s edition in a case on the seat.
Instead I saw nothing. But mixed with smells of the street and the hot leather upholstery, a hint of violets drifted sluggishly in my direction. Turning cold, I wheeled around, diving into the bakery.
No sign of Mrs. Boehm. Nor of Bird, for that matter, and my muscles by then had a death grip on my bones. There Silkie Marsh sat, however, angelic and smiling with her soul a perfect blank, sipping a cup of cooling tea at the bread-making table. Smelling of violets and wearing the most ingratiating shade of green imaginable.
“I apologize for calling unexpectedly, Mr. Wilde,” she said with a look of practiced shyness. “I hope you don’t think it too rude, but I was … I was very much disturbed in my mind. Your landlady was called away on a delivery, but was kind enough to mak
e me some tea first. Shall I pour you a cup?”
I needn’t look friendly, remember, I thought, and it’s natural to look surprised. Treat it as an opportunity, play close to the vest, and pray God that Bird has been upstairs all this while.
“I haven’t much time, Madam Marsh. And I confess myself a bit abroad. I’d have thought my brother would be the man you’d want, if you were … unsettled.”
Silkie Marsh poured me a cup of tea, molding her rosy lips into a regretful curve. To my horror, I registered what was folded neatly and sitting on a chair near the flour sacks behind her, scrubbed into cleanliness again by Mrs. Boehm: Bird’s nightdress. It ought to have been either saved as evidence or burned, but had instead fallen victim to good housekeeping habits within a tub of lye and stone lime. I’d no means of learning whether Silkie Marsh had glimpsed it, no way to ask without giving myself away.
“Valentine would have been the first man I’d dream of running to under such circumstances, long ago. But you must have noticed that … it’s a painful subject.” She flinched, a real one this time. Artificial only in that she purposefully failed to mask it from me. “Val is a lover of novelty, Mr. Wilde. I can’t help but fear that my devotion to him now goes unnoticed.”
“Most people’s devotion to him goes unnoticed.”
Her patient look of suffering quirked into a knowing smile. A gift. A secret between us. “You know him better than I, of course. As devastated as the loss of his attentions makes me, you’re quite right—he is deservedly accustomed to being revered.”
“I don’t know about deservedly. Tell me, what vexes you?”
“I read the newspaper this morning,” she confessed in a far more hushed whisper. “It quite … I was very upset, Mr. Wilde. Afraid.”
If children were being carted off regularly from her bawdy house by a man in a black hood who liked cutting them open, I couldn’t rightfully blame her. Particularly not if she had something to do with it.
“What were you afraid of personally, Madam Marsh?”
She pursed her lips in pretended disappointment, blinking feathery lashes at me. “On behalf of our city, Mr. Wilde? Riots, perhaps. Chaos in the streets. On behalf of the Irish, and the future of the Democratic Party, to which I absolutely subscribe? Failure in the next election, of course. Or do you rather suppose that my interests are much more personal, since I am paying you a visit that must be awkward for us both?”
Confession, even partial confession, was a bold stroke. But people do tend to tell me things. I took a sip of the tea she’d poured, measuring the weight of the silence. The entire conversation had me balanced on the tip of a fishhook, but at least Silkie Marsh had learned somewhere that her voice was more persuasive when bright and forceful. Bird could hear us, surely, from upstairs. I hoped to God Bird could hear us.
“You employ kinchin as mabs, I turned up with Val and a dose of bitter news over Liam, and then carted off two of your youngest stargazers,” I summarized for her. “And you want to know just how that came about.”
She shook her blonde head decisively. “I don’t give a damn about what’s past. I want to know if my sisters, my employees, everyone who lives at my residence, need be frightened for our very lives.”
“I’d say that the kinchin ill-starred enough to live under your roof are frightened enough for their lives already. Such lives as they have.”
Her eyes sparked within the blue ring closest to her pupils. A glint that wasn’t calculated—just bitter and tired. The sort of calcified resentment too ingrained to hide.
“You’re not alone in failing to hold a high opinion of me, Mr. Wilde. But I live well, and so do the residents of my household. I am a rich and independent woman. I’ll not remark on the benefits of sewing piecework until one either starves or freezes, nor the joys of factory labor where favors are taken forcefully rather than paid for. But I own my establishment. I also own my time, which is far more valuable. It’s not too much to suppose that some of my charges, when they grow up, will prosper also. Here I sit before you, though I was also a fragile thing at age nine.”
I blinked, to be sure. Because if it was true, if she’d suffered the same, if she knew all about what made Bird smash ceramics firsthand … then there was nothing I could say to the purpose. Some sorts of scars I can’t see the depth of, not having the same variety myself. And if she was lying, well, then she wasn’t worth speaking to.
Sending our conversation off the rails appeared to vex her. Silkie Marsh straightened, passing her spoon once around her teacup as if to dissolve a stubborn lump of sugar, though she’d clearly—from the lack of steam—been awaiting me for at least a quarter of an hour. When she met my eyes, her mouth was buoyant again, her cheeks blushing petal pink.
“Please, what really happened to Liam?” she asked quietly. “Come to that, however did you learn who he was, where he resided?”
“A charity worker identified him in the end.”
“Ah. That would be Miss Mercy Underhill, I suppose.”
A startled jolt like burned coffee grounds hit my blood. I must have looked well bustled, for Silkie Marsh was suddenly very pleased. She tilted her chin at the same angle as my head.
“It wasn’t very likely to be anyone else, Mr. Wilde. I see her infrequently, but she is, after all, quite devoted to children. I cannot suppose anyone else would have recognized Liam after a brief acquaintance.”
A weird polish to her voice perplexed me still further. But once I’d got well past the fact of them knowing each other in the first place—and of course they did; Mercy couldn’t possibly have tended to kinchin-mabs without meeting their mistress—I couldn’t find much to wonder at in Silkie Marsh taking a profound dislike to the reverend’s beautiful, educated daughter. It certainly accounted for the dark tone bleeding through the faint smile.
“Can you tell me nothing else?” she coaxed. “I do wish to help, you see.”
“Because of my brother?”
“Whatever else you think of me, and you do give yourself free rein, I cannot let you suppose I care nothing for my own frail brothers and sisters.” There was deliberate heat in that statement, and I was meant to feel it in crackling, bitten-off consonants. “I didn’t build New York City, Mr. Wilde, so don’t ask me to remake it to your better liking. Can I be of any service?”
“No. But thank you. You’re here to work me like a hand pump for information, so it’s white of you to offer a trade.”
I’d thought to startle her, somehow knock the outraged smile from her ivory face. But the smile only widened.
“Valentine could have told you I’m very fair-minded. But I don’t take it that you listen to your brother nearly enough, nor quite know what to do with him.”
“And you’ve a better way of handling him, as I saw.”
That one accomplished what a direct insult couldn’t. Of course it did. Whatever heart she retained, she’d clearly lent it to the wrong person. So I regretted it when her eyes stopped seeing me and saw Val instead, saw whatever the first callous thing he’d done to her happened to be. Her lips reeled for an instant and then were forced back under control as she smiled as if her life depended on it. It likely had. More than once.
Gracefully, rustling green watered silk, she floated to her tiny feet. She glanced about for her gloves, which lay on the bread display counter.
And in doing so caught sight of the nightdress. Silkie Marsh’s head whipped back a fraction to peer at me.
“I couldn’t very well deliver Neill and Sophia to a church in that rigging, could I?” I said disgustedly.
“Of course not, Mr. Wilde,” she replied, all sugar and poison stirred together at boiling point. “But nevertheless I do hope that you paid them their due for having … stopped the night here. Having so obviously been a source of valuable entertainment. I do always guarantee in my own establishment that they are properly reimbursed for their time.”
“And if I find you’ve employed another kinchin, by Christ, stargazing—any
sort of stargazing, if done in your house—will seem of a sudden ungodly illegal.”
I’d known before meeting her that women were capable of writing murder across their eyelids and then sweetly blinking at a fellow. But I’d not seen it. It’s pretty daunting, when it’s done proper.
“It must be difficult, passing through life as Valentine Wilde’s runt brother. I don’t wonder that you seem a bitter man,” she said pleasantly on her way over the threshold.
“I’ll give Val your best greetings, then?”
The door slammed shut.
I felt pretty raw myself by then. Relieved and angry and hectic and wrung with quick, clever fists. The instant Mrs. Boehm returned home, I determined, I was going to inform her very courteously why that particular woman was under no circumstances ever to be allowed back in her house. Now that Silkie Marsh had been sitting at it, the floury table—which had been beginning to feel downright homelike—seemed angled wrong. The air was displaced, and I didn’t know how to put it back where it belonged. So I took my hat off, walked to the cupboard where I kept my few domestic items, and poured a flash ribbon of brandy in my tea.
A footstep sounded behind me—a bare one, only a ghost of a tread.
“I was never hiding,” Bird announced.
I turned around. She was tying the makeshift burlap belt around her waist, her hair all down and dwarfing the rest of her, grey eyes terrified and New York accent steady as the Hudson.
“Of course not,” I scoffed. “God, no. What I’d imagined you were doing—hoping, really—was spying. Away out of sight, like a regular paid nose.”
It was about time I took a fair turn at lying, the way I figured the landscape. My small friend’s hands were shaking.
Nodding exhaustedly, Bird padded over to the table.
“Yes, that’s it. I was nosing. Did you ever show her a back-hander or two.”
“Did I?”