by Lyndsay Faye
“It’s unsigned,” I said, clearing my throat.
It was a shabby attempt at a clever observation. But my eyes didn’t quite fit in my head any longer. Palsgrave scoffed at me, rightly, but it ended on a shudder. Robbed him of his point scored a bit.
Staring at the thing, I tried to make a better go of it. I’d read the letter in Val’s company that morning much too quickly, the first one at my digs in Elizabeth Street slower. Had I still possessed them, I could try to match up papers, handwriting maybe, ink color, because the sentiments within were largely the same. As it was, I’d a rum job in the physical sense to compare the first documents to this new, differently painted piece of dementia. I could find the first in the Herald if I liked, but in type. Not much use when it came to studying appearances. But I did my best to mull it over from memory.
I cast my mind back. Both original letters had been poorly spelled, of a purpose maybe. This was mad but highly articulate. The others had been done in large, clear, blockish writing such as a beginner might scrawl, writ entirely in capitals, revealing nothing of personality or character—perhaps because the author was capable of naught better. But perhaps he meant his script to be masked. This had been done with an educated but badly palsied hand, in parts barely readable. As if the writer was terrified of his own words. Under the influence of liquor or a drug, maybe, shying back from phrases full of a sad venom that hurt his eyes. Finally, the others had been suspiciously gleeful, melodrama ripe enough for me to suspect them sensationalist nonsense. To hope they were nonsense, as I now admitted to myself. For the city’s sake, for the Irish, for the copper stars, maybe even for Val’s bloody Democratic Party. There was dread here, though, not gloating, and the dread sounded genuine.
“I don’t suppose you know this hand?” I ventured.
“It’s nearly illegible, you imbecile, and why should I?”
“This person obviously knows of your work.”
“Everyone knows of my work!” the strange little man cried. “That is why this—this—malignancy was addressed to me! I am a physician who works exclusively with children, I am the only one, I— Put that down!” he thundered, the skin around his silver whiskers flushing with lively pink rage.
Bird dropped a sinister knife blade with some sort of herbal residue yet clinging to it. Clasping her hands again, in front this time, penitent.
“I won’t hurt myself, I promise.”
“Oh, God. Thank you,” he breathed gratefully. “I would consider it a tremendous boon.”
“Will you go to the Tombs and examine the bodies?” I questioned. “Matsell, when you’ve found him, will show you personally. You must speak to no one else.”
“I’ll go at once.”
“May I keep this?”
“Mr. Wilde,” he hissed, “if I never see that piece of depravity again in all my days, I will be a man who ends on a note of satisfaction. Get it out of my home. Come along now, you—you child. Quick march. Mr. Wilde, you imply that you do not intend to accompany me.”
“I’ve another line of investigation,” I explained as we quit the building. “If you’re game, I’ll stop by here tonight. See what you’ve learned.”
“If you must, and I suppose you must, mustn’t you,” he sighed. “Farewell, then.”
“Good-bye, Dr. Palsgrave,” Bird said.
“What does she want? Ah,” Palsgrave huffed fondly, pulling a wrapped caramel from his pocket and tossing it to Bird. “Kinchin. Such alarming creatures, really. Good day to you.”
“That man is mad,” I noted as the ramrod-spined gentleman waved for a hackney with his bizarre blue kerchief.
“Fit for a cranky-hutch,” Bird agreed as she unwrapped the candy. “He’s grand, isn’t he, Mr. Wilde?” Her face darkened as she looked up at me. “Is that letter you have from … from the man in the black hood?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, turning back from the road to help Bird up into the hack I’d just flagged down. “But I will find that out if it is the last thing that I do.”
Mott Street near to the Five Points just south of Bayard gives a man the impression an infection is running rampant through the road’s sewers. And in August the fever worsens, paint peeling and wood cracking like skin in a hospital ward, the hot, wet air shivering before your eyes. The pale glassy cast of the windows making the houses look stupefied. The smell of it. Every open casement vomiting chicken guts and trimmed vegetable leaves that are already spoiling, thrown down from kitchen bowls three stories above. I don’t know that Bird had ever walked through such a hellhole, for she stuck close, eyes wide and careful. She passed the time glancing at blacks sitting in doorways, straw hats in their hands and jugs on their knees, wasted with loss of sweat; Irish leaning their elbows out of windows, smoking mindlessly, starved for honest work. The bone-deep ache in that road rises up from the very cobbles, seeping into your own tired feet.
Hopstill resided in an attic at number 24 Mott Street, or so Julius had told me. So when we reached the cancerous wooden structure, I walked right up to the door to make for the stairs. A boot caught my ankle as I stepped over the threshold, and I swiftly looked down. Following the stocking to the grime-saturated skirts, I discovered a woman, everything about her gone grey as dust, peeling potatoes with her fingernails.
“What do you want, then?”
“Edward Hopstill,” I answered the strange gatekeeper. “He’s in the attic, I take it?”
“He’s nary,” she sniffed, letting a shard of potato skin fall to the floor. “Moved to the cellar, didn’t he. A month back.”
Thanking her, I stepped over the bowl, Bird keeping close. Hopstill had lived hand to mouth even before the fire ruined our homes, I knew as much. And yet … a cellar. I’d never even been overly fond of the scoundrel, and still my feet dragged, afraid to see anyone I knew personally lowered until they were under the very ground.
The stairs I found didn’t have a door at the top, but I could see one at the bottom, blank and sinister. We tramped down. I knocked. The door opened. Hopstill’s face appeared, its fleshy curtains badly shaved, his hair dank and possibly moldy, his sallow skin going ashy already. The acrid stench of gunpowder, burning lamp oil, and whatever stews underneath New York’s houses met our nostrils.
“What on earth do you want?” Hopstill growled in his annoyed English cadence.
Boom.
The explosion wasn’t a big one. But it was enough for me to throw a protective arm over Bird, for her to start like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, and for Hopstill’s scowl to burrow a bit deeper into his face.
“Perfect. Thank you, Wilde. How am I to test whether a new sort of bombshell is properly colored when I don’t even see it go off?”
Tentative, we followed him in. It was another laboratory, but the sooty workplace of a craftsman rather than the bright playground of a scientist. The lamps brooded a sulfur yellow, revealing an unmade bed, a single grated air shaft with flies buzzing around it, two large tables, and a small cookstove. Mortars and pestles, stacks of firecrackers, sparking sticks, and corked bottles of lightning powder were everywhere. The walls were planked and exhaling some sort of foul earthy moisture, forming an ooze where the wood met the packed dirt floor. Either the chamber pot was full, or the rear tenement (I never doubted there was a rear tenement) used a school sink for sewage. It was altogether the most unlivable chamber I’d ever keeked into. Except for the striking fact that only one person lived in it and not ten.
“It’s because of the fireworks, isn’t it?” I asked.
“What?”
“You have to live alone. Because of the lightning. You have to rent an entire ken, and this is what you can afford.”
“What the devil business is it of yours, what is that young person doing following you, why are you wearing a copper star, and what are you doing in my home?”
I told him as much as he needed to know, which was practically nothing. A thirty-second tale of how I’d come to work on the force. We were
in a hurry, and Hopstill benefits from being dealt with abruptly.
The lightning-maker stood hunched angrily over his work. And I knew the man: sick at being caught out in a cellar. Since he figures God sends poverty to the unworthy, I didn’t blame him a bit for being ashamed. He hovered above an iron retort, checking its hot contents, darting back to the mortar and pouring powdered red dye into it, siphoning off gunpowder, generally loathing our presence. And now, of all things, I wanted him to teach children how to make lightning. I claimed that, in return, they would work in a vague way as my spies. From his perspective, I was a pretty comprehensive arse.
“If you can convince me to do such a mad thing, I’ll nominate you for governor,” he snapped. “Get the hell out of my workshop, I haven’t the time to grant favors.”
I was about to make him an offer, but Bird squealed in delight all of a sudden. The happy sound tugged at a piece of me, something lightly tethered to the back of my neck.
“This has a little handle,” she said. “I’ve seen fireworks, over the river, but never held one. Is that what it’s for? To hold it while it fires? What’s the color?”
Hopstill’s deep-seated loathing of kinchin seemed to retreat a fraction. “It’s silver.”
“However do you make it silver?”
“Powdered metal. I use the cheapest I can find.”
There was a small silence. One that could have dragged a bit had I wanted to make a point. But I didn’t.
“For teaching the newsboys how to make lightning for their stage effects, I’ll pay you enough to get out of this cellar,” I offered.
“Ridiculous. How much do you suppose that is, then?”
“Twenty dollars.”
His eyes sparked like crackers and then dimmed just as quick. Hiding the smoldering brimstone look of total desperation. I set the two golden neds on his table, twenty dollars in coin.
Hopstill blinked at it ravenously, mouth melting into a lost shape. “I had never really thought to associate with anyone from the old neighborhood again, and now here you’re getting me out of this tar pit. Pardon my skepticism earlier. But I’ve been sorely tried, and no familiar faces to speak of it with.”
“Julius seemed glad enough to have seen a former neighbor himself, and I’m grateful to him for telling me where you’d got to.”
Hopstill looked up from a bag of shining blue dust. “Julius? Oh, yes, the colored fellow from Nick’s. I did see him.”
“Who did you think I meant?”
“Miss Underhill, of course.”
I shuffled bits of my thoughts to and fro, tried out new patterns. None of them sensible. “Why?”
“Well, she’s everywhere, isn’t she?” he muttered. “In the dead of night, when all Christian folk are abed. In any event, I’ll teach these lads to make a sheet of fire fit to terrify the popular theatergoer.”
“I’m grateful.”
Hopstill’s head dropped into his palm in rank exhaustion. “God, and I thought I’d likely enough die here come winter, when I’d need extra money for fuel,” he said to no one in particular. I wondered when last he’d eaten. There was no food on the shelves such as I could see. “I was planning out a grand finale of all my stock over Battery Park. Better than pawning it for a few more miserable weeks, to watch all those sublime explosions. But I can forget that now. Sometimes things turn out all right after all.”
“Sometimes,” agreed Bird gravely.
When all Christian folk are abed, I thought, the phrase like an itch in my skull.
“Sometimes,” I said out loud.
Just then, for instance, a great deal was going right. I’d money to spare from the elections fund, and my time was my own, and Hopstill would gain me the aid of the news hawkers.
Of course Mercy went abroad at night; sickness and want abide by no schedule.
What a splendid day.
I gave Hopstill the address of the Orange Street newsboys’ theater, and he gave me his promise to pay them a call that evening. The trick is to keep pushing, I thought as Bird and I surfaced into the sunlight once more. If you push hard enough, it won’t matter that you haven’t the smallest inkling of what you’re doing.
After leaving Bird with Mrs. Boehm (who’d assured me that if she so much as glimpsed Silkie Marsh, she would lock every entrance and scream in her native tongue for the Germans next door), I went to the makeshift morgue in the Tombs, hoping to find Palsgrave still poring tirelessly over medical evidence. He wasn’t there. But George Washington Matsell was, standing rotund and dignified in the wide cellar. Viewing what I was now viewing, lined up on hastily built tables. Not saying anything about it.
There wasn’t much to say.
“Dr. Palsgrave tells me that the letter he gave you is a nice stroke of madness,” he commented. “It might make a difference to us.”
“I don’t know how, but I hope it does.”
“Study it, then. Dr. Palsgrave put this report in my hands, said if you needed him to explain any of it to you, to call around at his practice. But it isn’t medical reading. More like something from that Poe lunatic.”
I took the papers, eager for the elusive fact that would make it all sane. I stopped, though. Took a breath. Because nineteen corpses, or the remnants of corpses, were laid out in front of me on wood tables. It was such a far sight from the beautiful imagined vision of health Dr. Palsgrave had laid before me earlier that I could scarce bear to look. There were too many of them—God, how very many—and they were much too small. And no one’s body should ever be bared like that—ripped open and displayed for all the world to see. I thought of my own inner organs, heart and spleen and kidneys, invaluable to no one save myself. And I wanted nothing greater than to lower our sole hard evidence of wrongdoing back under the ground, where what had once been tender and vulnerable could rest quiet.
“Surprise me, Wilde,” Chief Matsell said as he left the room. “I’m waiting.”
How scattered they look, I thought. A white flap of skin, a clump of red hair, the sheen of exposed bone.
I opened the report. It had been hard to write, I supposed. Once I’d read its contents, I certainly hoped so, anyhow.
These nineteen bodies range from five years dead to very recent, but causes of individual death are impossible to confirm. All nineteen evidence severe violence enacted postmortem—specifically, breastbones are no longer intact, and the rib cage has been pulled asunder in every case. I can only suppose that the miscreant had intended to reach the organs. Aside from natural decay: in two cases, the heart is missing entirely; in three, the liver; four, the spleen; twelve, the brain stem; two, the spine. Whether animals did this before decomposition set in, or the murderer desired them, is open to debate, but I find it impossible to credit any circumstance apart from the latter.
When these deliberately carved crosses are taken into account, I cannot but wonder whether the letter published by the Herald days ago was perhaps genuine after all. The theory of a religion-mad Irish would surely fit the violence done to these nineteen dead.
Dr. Peter Palsgrave
“Finish your work and stop this,” I quoted in a jagged whisper. “Mend the broken things. Dear God, whichever of you invisible lot might be listening at the moment, just what in buggering hell am I supposed to do now?”
SEVENTEEN
The social condition of Ireland is at present moment distressing—painful—most deplorable. The physical destitution of the people impels them to crime. The disputes about land give rise to assassination.
• New York Herald, summer 1845 •
The only option left was to get back to work. In fact, I decided that hard, frantic work was the only route.
I turned out to be right, too. It just didn’t happen to have been my work.
For three days, I waited on news from the boys who made a career of selling it. I suspected that they were being very successful at learning how to make lightning and coming up dry when it came to sinister carriages. I pored over the only le
tter that hadn’t been burned. I avoided the morgue, and then the day before the bodies were to be secretly reburied, I went to the cellar with Mr. Piest and searched through every bone and hair follicle, gaining nothing but a lingering queasiness and an oily feeling that wouldn’t wash off my fingertips until I used lye. I visited the police guards at the north end of the city, who were bored thin-skinned at being stuck in the woods for sixteen hours a go. I earned some fairly ripe insults for my trouble.
By the end of the three days, on the morning of August thirtieth, I was so desperate I sat Bird down and told her to draw the man in the black hood for me.
“There you are, Mr. Wilde,” she said when she was charcoal-fingered and quite finished.
It was a picture of a man wearing a cape-backed cloak and a black hood which covered his head. I thanked her anyway.
Meanwhile, my brother’s paranoia—as it was perfectly logical—had infected me. I devoured the Herald every morning as usual, but now the mere act of reaching for the familiar periodical sent a tipsy feeling through my rib cage. Say nothing of kinchin, I would beg silently. Give me time.
And so I would read of the frantic labor downtown, of shipping schedules and the roar of unrest in distant Texas, dreading to move my eyes lest I set them upon my own name: It has been discovered that Timothy Wilde, copper star badge number 107, has been investigating the slaughter of Irish kinchin, and has failed in every way possible.
I couldn’t help but think that it was bound to happen. That it was only a matter of time.
Then on Saturday evening, feeling both wrecked and useless, and not knowing what else to do with myself, I returned to the Tombs. I encountered Mr. Connell in the open yard, leading a slender and richly dressed man wearing a green velvet coat, with his wrists tied behind him. There was a grim air to my colleague. I nodded, and he angled his head in return.