by Lyndsay Faye
“This implies that more murders are planned,” I realized. “God, Val. Do you credit it? That he’s going back to work? That an emigrant with a broken mind is to blame for these deaths? Is that what’s troubling you?”
“Whoever wrote that is cracked as an egg. Whoever thinks ripping guts out of kinchin is high sport is brainsick as well. The police are allied with the Democrats and the Democrats are allied with the Irish. You figure out what troubles me, Timothy, you’ve eyes in your head.”
“All the more reason for me to solve this, then, and quick as possible. Isn’t it?”
“How do you manage to get up in the morning, lifting that bloody thick skull of yours? Right. Suppose these letters are real. Suppose you collar the twisted sod. Suppose you do lay hands on an Irishman who’s been busying himself hushing kids—just how do you think this city would react to that bit of gossip?”
Much as it irked me to admit it, my brother was right. I was beginning to suspect that I’d disbelieved the first letter was from an Irish madman not because it wasn’t credible, but because it would be very, very bad news.
“It would be chaos,” I agreed. “This particular letter, though—need we concern ourselves over the newspapers?”
“Where do you think I got it from? We’ve paid off the newspapers, flush enough to hold them for a month or more. Any more letters, they turn them over to us. A clerk at the Herald found this somewhere in their mail pile this morning. Bastard must have been so chaffey at seeing his name in print, he fired off another.”
My brother held a hand out. I knew what he was after and hesitated. But it was beginning to seem that burning evidence might be a grand policy. Val flicked a lucifer against the desktop and watched, intent as ever, as the paper wove itself into cinder. I watched him in my turn, planning out a move. Any move better than the ones I’d played so far. But Val, as so often happens, prevented me.
“Continue this investigation,” my brother said in a voice as frozen and clear as the ice block beyond, “and I will be selecting the flowers for your funeral.”
“Is that a threat?” I choked out.
“Think of it that way, if it helps. You know best. Or think of it like a prediction, Timmy. It’s all aces to me.”
“That’s flash, then. I’ll remember. Now, give me the money that Matsell sent me here after, or I’ll tell him that firedogs don’t care to take orders from the chief of police, Captain Wilde.”
“Bully,” he said cheerily. “If you’re keen on getting yourself croaked, may as well go out in style. It’s the new Democratic funds you’re after, the ones yet unmarked? How much?”
“Ten dollars ought to do it. No, eleven. I nearly forgot.”
“You nearly forgot a single coachwheel?”
“The coachwheel is Bird’s, rightfully. She bet that Finerty wouldn’t stuff the box.”
“She’s sharper than you, then.”
I let that pass. Val went to a blank, useless-looking box sitting atop a leaden safe and pulled out three ten-dollar gold pieces of unknown provenance and a dollar coachwheel, thumbing them singly in an arc to me behind his back.
“This is too much,” I argued, catching them.
“Oh, but we’re at high tide, my Tim. Buy your own coffin with the extra and save me the trouble.”
I thought about saying I hated him, but it was probably pretty clear from my face. If he’d been looking at me, that is.
“Silkie Marsh paid me a call. I gave her your compliments.”
Val’s head swiveled back to me in real surprise. His teeth came together tightly for a moment.
“You stole three live valuables from her, and then she came to see you? You’re dying quicker than I thought.”
“How nice for you. Do you mind telling me why a visit from Madam Marsh is such a bad omen?”
“Not at all, young Timothy, I simply recognize the circumstances,” he hissed through a steady pressure around his square jaw. “She’s tried to make me easy too, you know. Oh, yes. I didn’t mention she’d once been keen to hush me? Never told you she nearly managed it, too?”
Bird threw open the door without knocking. She’d found a little satchel, claimed it, and stuffed her old togs inside. My friend now wore an ivory cotton summer dress with a scooped neck and a high falling waist, covered in orange poppies at the seams, sleeves just capping her speckled arms. A much better dress than I’d expected, though probably not a finer one than she was used to for going out. This one was hers, though, and she was saturated with joy over the fact. Fairly dripping with happiness over not wearing a nightdress in the afternoon.
I was so glad over it myself that I almost missed my brother’s reaction. He was grinning boyishly from one side of his face while the other stayed partly eroded, about as pleased as he ever is. It beggared me of language for a second.
“If that isn’t dimber, I’m no judge,” he said to the question in Bird’s eyes.
“About as pretty a dress as I’ve seen,” I agreed.
“Tim, you’ll do as I said,” Val added abruptly, turning to a stack of childishly bright posters and lifting them. “I think I’ve told you what’s like enough to happen otherwise. Farewell. I’ve mounters to train. Why a native ought to be expected to teach Irish to hold their liquor is past all sense. They might as well have set me up with hoops and brained dogs.”
Valentine stormed out, breezes whirling weightless and confused in his path. Bird turned to look up at me. She truly was a different person—not a kinchin-mab, not a hot-corn wench in pilfered nankeen trousers, but simply a little girl, furrowing her brow in a way I was growing used to.
“What’s happened? Mr. V doesn’t really mean that. He likes the Irish.”
She was right. And I would have answered her, too, if I’d known what had just happened. And if Dr. Peter Palsgrave had not at that very moment slammed through the door, corseted and gasping, mopping his brow with flimsy electric-blue silk, causing us both to dart back defensively.
“I require Timothy Wilde,” he breathed. “I’ve had a letter.”
“How did you come to be here?” Bird Daly exclaimed.
Dr. Palsgrave blinked, heart visibly fluttering in his rib cage. He sank faintly into the room’s only chair. “I— How did you come to be here?”
I stood there, looking from the one to the other of them. Bird smiling broadly, her hands clasped before her, apparently delighted to see two old acquaintances in a single quarter hour. Dr. Palsgrave tremulous and startled, but seeming no less gratified to have encountered Bird. And I feeling more than a little upside down, watching as each of them cast about for a reasonable explanation of the other’s presence at a Democratic Party rehearsal luncheon.
SIXTEEN
It is ascertained that in civilized communities, one-fourth part of all the human race who are born, die before attaining their first year; more than one-third before arriving at five years of age, and before the age of twenty, one half the human race, it is supposed, cease to exist.
• The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York, January 1845 •
The conversation seemed to have hit a rut, and I didn’t want Bird doing much storytelling, that being a risky venture. So I took the reins myself.
“You know Bird?” I asked Dr. Palsgrave directly. “She’s from—”
“Madam Marsh’s house,” she interrupted with her chin jutting boldly. “The … the downstairs maid.”
Amazing what a change of togs can do for a person. As for Dr. Palsgrave, he blinked his alert amber eyes twice and then huffed out a breath, standing up again. His spine was now straight and his chest swelled out, a man molded into the shape of a bantam rooster with a shawl-collared waistcoat. He leaned stiffly over to stare down his nose at the openly smiling girl with the dark red hair. A visible fondness came into his eyes and then flickered away again.
“Was it Marsh’s?” he questioned, righting himself. “I suppose you would know better than I.”
“But you recogni
zed her only a moment ago,” I said, puzzling.
Palsgrave waved his hand in the air, pacing queer little circles in the cramped room. “I treated her for something once. I can’t be expected to remember names; I see far too many faces, and they all grow so quickly when they manage to grow at all. It must have been a bad case, whatever it was, for me to know her.”
“Chicken pox,” Bird said happily. “You gave us lard and stewed onion poultices. I hardly itched.”
“Ah! Good, good,” he exclaimed, equally pleased. “That’s wonderful. So you—”
“Asked how you came to be here,” I interrupted.
“I received a letter,” he explained, white side whiskers flaring like a hissing tomcat’s. “A most disturbing correspondence, regarding the recent … the rumored child deaths. Is the Herald to be believed, are they merely a hoax? You and your insolent brother were the first to introduce me to this sordid affair, and so I at once sought you out at the Tombs, having now been personally engaged. I wish to help you. Chief Matsell directed me here.”
“About this letter,” I said slowly.
“I have it, if you—”
“Let’s look at it somewhere else,” I said emphatically.
Dr. Palsgrave tugged at his waistcoat, running his palm over his tightly constricted torso. “Follow me, then. My practice is only two blocks from here.”
Quitting the stone meetinghouse unnoticed, as Moses Dainty seemed to be occupied plying voters with coffee, we walked west along Chambers. It didn’t much surprise me that Dr. Palsgrave kept his office on the most prestigious street in the city for a medical professional and, as we approached the end of City Hall Park at Broadway, I was struck with an odd sense of time going the wrong direction. It was the route I’d traveled as a roundsman, only done backward. Then we passed the teeming, sweltering, pedestrian-packed intersection and were greeted by more stone houses, these with their flowerboxes nicely watered and their windowpanes slashing sunlight at our eyes.
At his own heavy oaken door, marked at the side with dr. peter palsgrave, physician to youth on a brass plate, Dr. Palsgrave pulled out his keys. Catching a glimpse of Bird as he did so, he frowned.
“Why, may I ask, is she—”
“I’d prefer if you didn’t,” I answered.
If Peter Palsgrave hadn’t thought much of copper stars before, I wasn’t making us any headway, for he glowered. Something about his swift shifts between innocent delight and bristling ill humor satisfied Bird extremely. Every time his lips pursed like a shutting clam, Bird’s tilted up at the edges. As the doctor stormed his way into his richly carpeted front hall, hanging his slick beaver hat on a peg, I nudged her arm.
“Friend of yours?”
She nodded as we trailed after the mincing little physician. “He always shams not to remember anyone. Always. It’s sweet, I think.”
“Why is that?”
“He likes to save kinchin, doesn’t he? He’s a flash doctor, you know, and if he diaries our names and later sees us … well, then we’re sick again, aren’t we? He failed. He’d rather forget, and never know us once we’re grown, than remember and lose out to whooping cough.”
I’d meant to answer her, since the insight was pretty handily reasoned for a ten-year-old. But the chamber we were led into, part study and part laboratory, froze my tongue a bit. For I’d never seen anything like it in my life.
The large room was divided in halves, in a sense. The side flooded with light from two garden-facing windows was a fully outfitted laboratory. Sparkling blue glass jars sealed with wax, copper kettles buffed to a rich coral finish, all manner of clever glass tubing. There was a hulking iron stove, a huge table on which rested vials and measuring instruments and open notebooks filled with crabbed doctorly handwriting. On these walls hung gaudily illuminated pages in careful frames, flowing Italian script marking out the properties and principles behind skulls and trees and wellsprings and hearts.
Meanwhile, the windowless side featured massive bookshelves—far richer than the Underhills’ library, and it struck me that it was for excellent reason that the very learned doctor and the very learned reverend worked so closely together aiding the Protestant poor. But these weren’t literature, nor holy scripts. These were medical tomes, gigantic and sober in their garb of cracked leather, gilt-edged chemistry textbooks, dozens of foreign language titles with gold leaf painted onto their spines, thick with strange symbols. Alchemy volumes. They had to be, for I’d just remembered what Mercy had told me Peter Palsgrave’s other project was, apart from healing sick kinchin.
“How goes the elixir of life?” I asked in a friendly way.
He whirled like a top, with his neat little boots and his thin-stockinged legs and his puffed-out chest in its rich blue coat. Bird’s smile cracked wider.
“How could you … oh, of course. Yes,” he sighed. “I sent you to Mercy Underhill. She must have mentioned my magnum opus. It isn’t the elixir of life, really, but a healing cordial. It is tremendously abstruse experimentation, not the sort of thing I can explain to a layman.”
“Try me,” I said, nettled.
Peter Palsgrave looked pretty set upon, but he told me all about it. And he was fascinated enough by his subject that even Bird was swept along for the ride, cocking her head and twirling a bit of reddish hair around one finger.
Alchemy, he told me, was the science of creating processes that could turn one element into another. And alchemists, having sought long and hard after the wisdom required to achieve impossible things, had done just that. They’d distilled liquids so pure that they were merely one thing and not many—alcohol, for instance. They’d created glass so transparent that it was entirely invisible. But purification and refinement, he told us, were a means to an end. Intended by some villainous types to lead to such wicked achievements as turning lead into gold, which would destroy any healthy economy, he added in a weary voice.
The elixir of life, which had long been the Holy Grail of alchemy, was an impossible goal, he told us, with a light in his eye that couldn’t be dimmed by the lowliness of his audience. Man was created to return to dust one day. But a cordial capable of curing any illness in the living—that was an achievable dream. Children, he explained passionately, were so fragile. So vulnerable to contagion. But if one could only discover the perfect remedy by combining the latest advancements of medicine with the most ancient truths of alchemy and the noblest techniques of chemistry—there was a prize to be won not for the sake of wealth or of fame, but of humanity, the queer little man standing dapper and impassioned with his golden eyes and his corseted figure told us. The young and the helpless would no longer be subject to the evil whim of miasma. What form precisely it would take he did not know, though he’d long been following the threads of suspicions. Subtle but distinct clues.
It was mesmerizing.
Dr. Palsgrave was practically throwing off golden sparks, words clattering headlong down an iron railway, braking madly to keep himself in some sort of check. And what a goal it was. Of course it was utterly cracked, and yes it was wildly romantic and seemingly impossible. But what a goal. To take a desperately ill child and restore it to health, to die of old age one distant day. Improbably, I loved the idea. Without supposing with any hope it could be accomplished, but who knew? With all the magical discoveries already unearthed, what else in the world silently waited to be fully understood?
“I occasionally wish that my own condition were not so … precarious,” he concluded, waving his hand toward his rheumatic fever–impaired heart. “But perhaps, were I a sound man, I should not have been inspired to my calling with such fervor. And for the children, every discomfort is but a small price. Now, Mr. Wilde. Tell me.” He paused, smoothing his palm down his silk-covered rib cage in his queer self-calming gesture. “Have the police truly found, north of the city … have they—”
“They have,” I affirmed. “Nineteen of them.”
The fact seemed to offend him physically, a sentiment I hearti
ly respected. Dr. Palsgrave waved a vial of smelling salts under his nose. “Despicable. Monstrous. I must see the bodies at once, I may be able to help you. Don’t touch that, you foolish girl, it’s poisonous!” he snapped at Bird, who swiftly set down a small crystal decanter.
Once the potion was safely out of her delicate hand, he instantly relaxed. He gave Bird a warm smile of apology, his anger evaporating as if it had never bubbled up at all, and in that moment I could see why she liked him so well. The gruffness was wholly an act, the welfare of youth a genuine obsession. I liked him too.
“By all means,” I agreed. “Under condition of utmost secrecy, even from the rest of the copper stars. I’m the only one pursuing this. About your letter.”
“It nearly finished me,” he muttered, the electric-blue kerchief reappearing. “Take it, I never want to see it again.”
I glanced at Bird, still investigating the chemistry kit, but with her hands dutifully behind her back now. Then I sat down and read about the oddest thing I’ve ever come across:
I can see only it.
Once there was a man who did the work of his God and when that man saw what his work must be, he felt ashamed, though he knew it was his burden, and he hid himself, and he wept at becoming the Angel of Death.
I can see it and nothing else see it ever and ever amen only the body so small and so broken. Ravaged like that. And nothing else.
So small it’s an abomination no I’ve chased it away now for a moment but now there again, back at once, God help me, God save us, I’d tear out my eyes if I could but I would still see the body painted into the holes. And you, when you see the little ones with their eyes gone white and still as bone what can you do, how do you manage it? I can see only them. With their dead eyes like nothing. Like cold stars. Fish scales frosted over.
I am a broken jawbone.
Finish your work and stop this they have no sight any longer and they need you to finish it as do I finish at once. Mend the broken things. I must break another, and I will for it all to stop. No nearer, let me go no nearer.