by Lyndsay Faye
If Mercy had been descending from the carriage owned by the man in the black hood, then she was in danger. That was all there was to it.
“The autum was Pine Street Chuch, yes?” I questioned.
“It was,” agreed Tom Cox, face flushed with the readiness to send Ninepin starry-eyed and bleeding into the ground.
“Stop scrapping, then. Miss Underhill’s in trouble.”
Everyone stopped.
“Thank you. You’re all dead flash rabbits. Stay here tonight, and off the streets,” I ordered, letting Ninepin go as I turned toward the exit.
That she hadn’t known whose carriage she was in, I was certain. There are things a man is right about, things he knows. Things like Mercy needs my help. I whistled for a hack on the first street corner good enough to encounter one, and told the driver to deliver me to the Pine Street Church.
TWENTY-ONE
How many people of the United States are probably aware of the fact that the Pope considers the Crusades as still in existence, and issues a bull every two years, inviting soldiers to engage in them?
• American Protestant in Defence of Civil and Religious Liberty Against Inroads of Papacy, 1843 •
Darkness was gathering her thick skirts around New York as I pulled up at the corner of William and Pine. My breath came easier as the minutes rolled past, which was a blessing, though now that I could breathe I couldn’t see a damn thing. Streetlamps in these parts are left for dead when the glass cracks. I stepped down, paid the hack. My world seemed muffled. The carriage ought to have made more sound as it drew away.
Nothing would have happened the way it did if Mercy Underhill hadn’t stepped out her own front door seconds later, out of the little brick house under the trees by the Pine Street Church. And nothing would have happened the way it did if she’d seen me standing there under a broken streetlamp. A man without any light.
But I did see her, and she didn’t see me, and something in my mind slotted into place like typesetting. It wasn’t a conclusion, though, which only goes to show how paper-skulled I truly am. No, it was a question.
Where is she going?
So I followed her.
She walked rapidly for the first few blocks west along Pine, wearing a light summer hood in pale grey over her hair. I can stay quiet when I want to, so she didn’t hear me. I walked close enough to defend her if she met an enemy. Far enough to linger behind if she met a friend.
Mercy hailed a hack when she reached Broadway. So did I, urging the driver quietly to follow as the moon broke through the cloud cover. By that time, I didn’t need the newsboys to have told me that the latest atrocity was in the afternoon editions—I could read it clear in the pedestrian traffic patterns. For every local walking clean and brushed and satin-buttoned in front of shop windows, there were two speaking together with trim lips and faces stretched like canvas drying. Dandies and swells and stockbrokers of the type I’d used to listen to, distracted for a moment from their clothes and their money. I knew which words they were saying without even bothering to read their lips.
Irish.
Catholic.
Outrage.
Savage.
Nuisance.
Danger.
When Mercy alighted from the hack at Greene Street, within sight of Silkie Marsh’s bawdy house, I was already convinced she was headed straight inside it as I paid my own driver from half a block back. They were known to each other, there were a hundred reasons for her to visit. But then she stopped under a striped awning before a tea shop and waited. Hood pulled low, eyes glancing back and forth to either street corner.
About two minutes later, a man walked up to her. Not known to me. Handsome, his waistcoat sporting more embroidered flowers than Valentine’s and his swallowtails tight across the chest, brushed a clean blue-black. I disliked him immediately. The moon shimmered along the curve of his beaver hat. I couldn’t hear Mercy speak as she approached him, but I saw her face in the spider’s-silk glow, and so I didn’t have to.
I’ve been so frightened, she said. It hurts to be this frightened. Quick, quick, or I’m lost for good.
His reply was unknowable, as his face was turned from me. They set off down the moonwashed road about ten inches apart.
I followed. They went into Silkie Marsh’s house after ringing her bell. Lights blazed from every windowpane. I could see the bits of mirror and candle and carpeting that tempted men inside, all the tugging shine of the hardwood and the crystal. For maybe as long as ten minutes, I only waited. If I followed Mercy into Silkie Marsh’s brothel, then that was exactly what I was doing: I was following Mercy, no two ways about it. In the end, I simply forced my feet to move. Mercy going abroad at night was unusual but could be explained with a bit of effort. A kinchin with scarlet fever, a poor man thrown from a horse, a midwife who needed another pair of hands. Mercy meeting a strange fellow hours after being seen in the carriage of the man in the black hood, though—I couldn’t possibly have conscienced not learning what it meant.
I told myself that, anyhow.
When I dove across the street at last, I didn’t bother with knocking. The front door was unlocked, and I burst through. My eyes took in the empty foyer, gleaming with rich color. I brushed past it all, past the oils and the ferns, and invaded the parlor.
There were about nine of me in the floor-length Venetian mirrors, all looking as if I’d barely survived an encounter with Cow Bay. And about nine of Silkie Marsh, too, who sat perched in her amethyst velvet chair mending a stocking, of all things. She looked up at me, momentarily startled. Seeming very young and petal-like for an instant, the sweetness of her face fairly glowing above the severity of fashionable black satin. Silkie Marsh is right to wear such things, for they don’t suit her and make her seem a girl trying out an elder sister’s ball gown. Black satin, unlikely as it sounds, makes you suppose she isn’t dangerous.
“Mr. Timothy Wilde,” she said. “You look very near to collapse. Might I offer you a drink?”
I said no, but she ignored me. She set her stocking and her needle on the chair and went to the sideboard by the piano, pouring a pair of neat whiskeys, sipping hers as she handed mine over.
Finding I needed it after all, I bolted the drink and passed the glass back to her. “Thank you. Where is Mercy Underhill?”
“I don’t know whether that is any of your business, Mr. Wilde,” she said sweetly. “In fact, I am sure it isn’t.”
“I know she’s here, and I need to speak with her. Tell me where she’s gone.”
“I don’t like to tell you. It’s an ugly matter. Please don’t make me, Mr. Wilde, you’re not a forceful man in that way. You’ll think still worse of me than you already do.”
“You needn’t worry much over that.”
“I don’t like betraying secrets, as I’m a woman of my word, Mr. Wilde. But if you must insist, she’s just down the hall there, through the door next to the Chinese vase. I know you’ll never find it possible to like my company, but don’t try to speak with her at the moment. Please don’t, for mercy’s sake.”
I’d crossed the hallway in under five seconds, I think. The Chinese vase rested on a pedestal with a pretty shaded lamp hanging on the papered wall above it, the pale amber shine making a circle.
Shoving the door open, I entered.
The small chamber’s lights were dim, more shade than shape. But there was a startled sound, and a quick, frantic little thrashing. I saw figures on the bed, one of them bare from the waist up, face twisting to look at me with eyes wide and unfocused. And the man was there too, above her but half under the coverlet, glancing backward, wearing nothing at all. His hand covered Mercy’s pale curve of breast and his smallest finger traced the line of her rib.
“This room is occupied,” he drawled. “Kindly—”
I hauled him off of her, which shut him up.
“However you’ve hurt her, I’ll pay you back triple,” I vowed, with one hand bruising his forearm and the other nearly teari
ng out his hair.
“He isn’t hurting me, you fool,” Mercy gasped. She’d sat up in the bed, pulled the coverlet more fully over herself. “Does it look like he’s hurting me?”
I let him go, and the dandy staggered back.
“Mr. Wilde,” Mercy began. Her eyes closed now, breathing fast through her nose. “You need to—”
“Oh, bugger this, it’s all off now,” gasped the stranger flailing helplessly about the room for his fine clothing. “What do you think me? I’m a sensitive man, I could not possibly—not after—and you know him?”
Mercy’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. She clutched her fist into the coverlet, kneading it ruthlessly. My back encountered the wall, and I slid down it to sit on the bare boards. Watching the stockbroker—no, exporter-importer more likely, his accent was all New York but his shoes and watch and the silk of his waistcoat foreign—regain what was left of his dignity.
“Well, whether you know him or not, I am sorry to be of such poor service to you and the proposed transaction, as—I don’t—oh, confound it, best of luck, Mercy. You’ll come by the money somehow or other. As for me, well … another time, perhaps.”
With that, he was out the door, shutting it behind him. I shuddered. Standing up, I turned to face the window, away from Mercy.
“I don’t know if you realize what you’ve done,” came her voice from behind me, “but will you tell me please why for heaven’s sake you’ve done it?”
“He was going to pay you,” I whispered. “And he paid Silkie Marsh for the furnished room.”
A rustling of fabric as she rose from the sheets.
“How long?” I attempted. “Tell me. Please. How long has this been happening?”
A dark chuckle emerged from the bed. It ended in a gasp, as if she were drowning, and it sent a frigid chill through my gut.
“How long, you ask? How long have I known the company of men, or how long have I been paid for it?”
I couldn’t answer her. So she continued regardless.
“About five years, in the first case, since I was seventeen. And about five minutes, in the second. Since I was ruined.”
“Ruined,” I repeated numbly.
“I don’t suppose when you were reading Light and Shade in the Streets of New York that you ever suspected you knew the author.”
I didn’t mean to turn, but in my shock, I couldn’t help it. Of course, she was breathtaking. Skin like fresh-fallen snow on a frozen river, eyes shining pale blue as she gathered up her dress. Every curve subtly beautiful, hair impossibly black and caressing the swell of her breast before falling past her hips, center of gravity wonderfully askew. I looked away, actively hating myself, forcing myself to hear what she had just told me.
“Light and Shade,” I repeated, picturing Mrs. Boehm’s magazine and her embarrassed blush. It was tales of wicked social scandals, acid Wall Street tragedies, the plight of emigrants, and the stifled rage of the poor. One had told the story of an Indian wrongly suspected of stealing chickens who had been stoned through the streets, another the saga of a morphine addict who sold his winter coat for a dose. They were wildly sexual, sharply heartbreaking, the finest sort of melodrama, and I’d read every one. “By Anonymous.”
“Such a boring pseudonym, really,” Mercy answered, in the dullest of cottony murmurs.
Passing a hand over my eyes, I pulled air into my lungs and then forced it out again. That she’d written those stories didn’t surprise me. She’d probably seen most of them lived in the flesh, at one time or another.
What surprised me was that I hadn’t been able to tell.
“But—wait, ruined?” I stammered, getting a fraction of my brain back.
“I’m lost now,” she affirmed. “It’s hopeless. But God, it was a near thing. I’d almost six hundred dollars saved up yesterday morning, before Papa found it and caused something of a …” The memory stopped her cold for an instant. “There was a scene. Now I’ll never find another place to hide any store of coin, never, nor be able to write another phrase in that house without supervision, and my … actually, my father’s opinion doesn’t bear speaking about.”
“And so your answer was to—to sell yourself?” I cried, entirely repulsed.
“There wasn’t any alternative,” Mercy answered dully as the new friction of her cotton dress rubbing against itself trembled in my ears. “I have to leave here, I can’t possibly stay in New York, I have to get away, you don’t know what it’s like at home, I— Why did you do it, Timothy?”
I turned around once more. Mercy had more or less donned the green dress, though it was askew as ever. Her eyes, when I met them, were despairing. Blue pools a man could drown in.
“I wanted so to get to London,” she said. “To live there. To make my own way. The entire state of New York could have been lined up to stop me and I would still have— Everything is different in London, can’t you understand that? None of this disgraceful Puritan hatred. There are reformers in London, and Bohemians, and philosophers, people like my mother, and— Here I try to save children, and they tell me that poor children don’t matter. Here I try to live my life, including romantic attachments, as I please, but God forbid I ever openly walk from one street corner to another with any man other than you, Timothy Wilde. Here I have a desk and paper and ink, and Papa from the time I was small kisses me and tells me he’s proud I want to write, compliments my nature poetry and my hymns and passion plays. And then I finish scores of short stories and twenty-three chapters of a novel, and yesterday he finds the novel sitting on my desk. I was stupid, distracted, my mind on the children, on your investigation, so stupid, I never never leave it out, and there it was in plain sight when he came up to tell me he’d fried us both some rashers and a pair of eggs. And now I may as well try swimming to London. It would be better than dying here.”
Physically biting my tongue, I told myself, Wait. Don’t talk. Wait.
Listen.
I could well believe that she had kept Light and Shade secret—no lady of my acquaintance could manage to admit reading it without blushing. Less excusable but also comprehensible was that her father might be dismayed at Mercy’s producing highly secular material. But it was a shock to learn that London crooned her name from across the ocean so, beckoned her more urgently than I’d ever perceived.
Not the biggest shock I’d had that night, though, not by half.
“Your father made a scene and it ruined you?” I demanded at last. “He made a scene, and you—”
“My savings are now gone,” she snapped. “Gone. He took them. Gone. As for my novel, he called it trash, and it ended its days in his fireplace.”
My mouth fell open idiotically as I tried out a number of things to do with my hands—hanging them still, cocked on a hip, drawn over my lips. Nothing worked particularly well.
“No,” I said softly, for it was wrong to picture such a thing happening. Thomas Underhill causing his daughter any pain. The reverend can’t bear to see Mercy with so much as a scraped knee. She’d cut herself on the left thumb peeling potatoes once, after her mother died—just once—and he’d permanently taken over the mindless task himself. “No, he couldn’t have. That’s horrible. He loves you.”
“Of course he loves me,” she choked out. “And yes, he could. He burned it, every page of it, all my words, my—”
Mercy stopped, pressing her fingers against her throat, forcing herself to calm as her voice came to a strangled halt. “I know that none of that is your fault,” she continued when she was able, “but I lost all my money, and Robert was going to pay—”
Sad as it is to confess, I lost the trail of the conversation about then.
I’d listened to every heartbroken word she’d said up to that point; however, it’s difficult to claim I’d absorbed it very well. My eyes fell shut. I’ve been going the wrong way about it, I thought as the sickness curled luxuriously in the pit of my stomach. Thinking her a prize and not a person. I’d have cut off my hand for her
if that was what she cost, and she’d never bothered to tell me that in fact she cost—
“Who is he?” Why I wanted to know, I can’t imagine.
“A merchant trader who gives a great deal of support to reform societies. We’ve been friends for ages, and he’s always had his eye on me. I wasn’t interested before, but he’s kind enough, and I didn’t know what to do.”
“This is how Silkie Marsh knows you,” I realized. “Not because of charity at all. Isn’t it? When you started, did someone like her hurt you, did they make you—”
“I don’t have to answer any of this.”
“Answer anyhow, damn it.”
“The first time, I did it for pleasure, though I thought it was love. It was beautiful in its way, but it didn’t last, so it couldn’t have been love, could it? Afterward … It was always by choice, I liked them, Timothy, I liked feeling desirable, liked being wanted for something other than a source of ipecac and turnips,” she hissed at me. “So I arranged to be introduced to Silkie, and whenever I need a private space to share with a friend, that friend rents one of her rooms. She’s glad of a little extra income. And I hate her, but she’s so very practical about these matters that I knew that she’d never give me away to Papa, and there you have it, the entire tale, every so often she allows me use of one of her bedchambers and I come and go precisely as I please. It isn’t as if I can be seen entering a hotel with an unmarried gentleman, is it? Or his rooms? But here, anyone would assume I was making a charity call. And this was the first occasion when …” Her jaw set suddenly, wrath blazing through the hurt. “Stop looking at me like that, it’s horrifying. I am the only thing I have. A man can’t ever understand that, I have nothing else to sell, Timothy.”