by Lyndsay Faye
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not? It’s your name. Could I have sold my book to Harper Brothers after it burned to cinders? Should I have stopped the charity work I love, stopped tending the children, and sewn men’s shirts instead? I do as much as I can, on my life I do, and it will never be enough. Should I have married an old fool with a bank account and lived as a whore every second until he died? I couldn’t stomach that. Doing it once, for a princely sum and with a friend, seemed … easier.”
If you look at it right, almost everyone is a whore in these parts, one way or another, I thought madly. It’s a question of degree. Women who troll the back alleys of Corlears Hook in search of their next shilling aren’t generally doing it out of preference, but they aren’t the only ones who sell bits and pieces of themselves. There are friendly lasses who stargaze when they need a new pair of boots, mothers who spit into their palms only when the little ones are sick and the doctor an easy sort of man, lady birds who yearly survive the dark, dark winters by letting men under their skirts. There are thousands of debutantes who marry bankers they don’t love and don’t intend to. Girls who’d done it once for a lark and thin-skinned bats who’d done it a thousand times. Pretty molls who rented rooms when they felt the urge to, just as Mercy had. Common enough practice. All too common. I’d never thought to blame them for it, for needing money more than they needed dignity. And it wasn’t a fair picture of women, I knew that even as I was thinking it, that plenty of girls could never countenance such a choice. That I was being revoltingly cynical. Heartless, possibly. But I couldn’t be sure in that moment which nauseated me more—the fact of Mercy’s being paid or the fact of her pleasure coming from anyone on earth apart from me.
Meanwhile, what I ought to have noticed just then was how upset she was, how her fingers wound tight in her skirts to keep them still. The way her breathing wouldn’t even out. The fact that watching your novel burn while you stand there helpless to save it might feel a bit like watching someone slice off your finger. After the humiliation she’d just suffered, I ought to have treated the most charitable woman of my acquaintance in a thousand charitable ways that hellish night.
The fact that I didn’t can still sicken me, when I let it.
“How could you?” I asked numbly. “And here of all places, here where kinchin disappear into black carriages—”
“No, that’s wrong,” Mercy choked, her voice breaking. “I’d not been here since … since all that began. Your investigation. Don’t think that of me, I’m begging you. I’d never glimpsed a hint of trouble here beforehand, not an inkling, I swear on my life, I only used a room now and again, and anyhow I’ve precious little contact with her children save when they fall ill, months go by without my ever seeing them. Over a year in Liam’s case. But when Papa found my savings yesterday, I panicked, and I had to make one last effort to get away. I was so desperate. I didn’t want to come here, see her again, wonder what she knows. It was ghastly, Tim. Please believe me. I hadn’t any choice.”
“There’s always a choice. How could you do this to me?”
“But it has nothing to do with you, I tell you, it—”
“It has everything to do with me!” I cried, taking her hard by the arm, harder than I’d meant to. “You aren’t stupid, the last fucking thing you are is stupid, you’ve watched me for years trailing after you, the way I look at you, it’s obvious to the entire goddamned world, you can’t stand there in front of me and claim not to have known it. How dare you say it has nothing to do with me? It’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever heard. Everything about you has to do with me, and you’ve known it for years. Are you stupid, or are you simply a liar? How can you pretend not to know I once had four hundred dollars in silver and marrying you was all I ever thought about? I’d have gone to London. I’d have done anything.”
I let her go and Mercy’s perfectly imperfect face softened. Relented a bit, like she’d remembered now who I was and not simply what I’d just done.
“I did think you might have matrimony on your mind.” She turned toward the dressing table, beginning to put up her hair. “And I could have done worse than marrying my closest friend. But did you ever ask me?”
“Not after— Look at me. How could I? I hadn’t any case to make.”
“How can you say that about yourself?”
“I hadn’t anything. I still don’t have anything. Just a mad brother and twenty little corpses.”
And then my heart nearly stopped.
It came of stating the two facts next to each other, I think. As if I’d taken a picture and torn it in bits and rearranged it.
Val. Valentine.
My mind spun right off its tracks.
That the two spiteful letters from the Hand of the God of Gotham had been the work of a rabid Nativist copper star had always been likely. More than likely. That third letter, though. The one both disturbed and disturbing.
The one under the influence of … of something.
Of morphine, maybe? Mixed with whatever else was ready to hand? Lye fumes, hashish, laudanum?
I felt sick.
But it can’t be, I insisted desperately, my blood crawling backward through its vessels and my brain reeling. Just because he’s trying to kill you doesn’t mean … He’s trying to kill you for the sake of the sodding Party, and dead little ones are the last thing they need. He took you to see Liam in the first place, damn it. And Bird. Bird trusts him, Bird …
Knew him from the days when he’d frequented Silkie Marsh’s house and had been dragged off to the House of Refuge hours after seeing him again.
Was he capable of questioning Madam Marsh, with me in the room, and the pair of them weaving a tale to utterly blind me? Had I understood nothing that day, and my own brother the blankest void of all?
My hands were shaking so badly that I laid them flat against each other, palm to palm. I tried out the list again, Val’s list of dubious pastimes, in my head.
Narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion, sodomy.
Ritualized child murder.
“It can’t be,” I said out loud. “No. It can’t.”
“What can’t be?” Mercy questioned, still doing up her hair.
“My brother. He’s been on my back to quit this investigation, but it can’t be because he’s afraid it’ll lead me to …”
“To what?”
“To him.”
Mercy caught her lip in her teeth, shooting me a scrap of pity from under her eyelashes.
“Val would never hurt kinchin. You do know that about your own brother, don’t you?”
I stared back at her.
Mother of God.
I don’t know whether I couldn’t breathe for the next five seconds, or if breathing no longer seemed like a very practical hobby.
People tell me things they don’t mean to. I’m a walking confessional in the form of a square-jawed, wiry-limbed, short-statured star policeman with green eyes, a dirty blond widow’s peak, and a partial face, and I might as well be a walking coffin box for all the good it’s ever done me.
“You just called him Val. The first time was him, wasn’t it?”
The silence I’d expected to hear fell between us.
The one that meant yes.
“We were always there, at your house,” I added idiotically, simply to shatter the screaming quiet. “When you thought it was love, you meant Val.”
Mercy didn’t answer me. Her hair was finished, save the tendril on the back left side that never agrees to go anywhere.
“Why are you so against Valentine?” she murmured. “Enough to suppose him capable of child murder?”
“He did just try to kill me.”
Scowling, Mercy pulled on the grey cloak. It was a kindly scowl, if that’s possible.
“Your brother did no such thing. Someone is playing you for a fool. Who was it that came after you?”
“Scales and Moses Dainty, Val’s twin lapdogs.�
�
Mercy laughed. “You mean Silkie Marsh’s lapdogs, though she pays them well enough to keep quiet about it.”
Of course, I’d been dead wrong. Silkie Marsh had seen the nightdress and wanted Bird back. Silkie Marsh had wanted me to stop wondering why her kinchin-mabs turned up in trash bins, and Val had warned me that she’d try to quiet me. That she’d once out of spite tried to quiet him.
“Do you think it matters now?” I questioned, voice thin as a honed blade. “Knowing you wanted him and not me?”
This time when she didn’t answer me, her lips parted. She tried, bless that tender spirit of hers, no matter how her life had just exploded. She tried. Mercy just couldn’t think of a damn thing in the world to say.
“I wonder if you think it’s better this way,” I added. “Is it better that I’m going to try to kill him and not the other way round?”
Her breath caught.
“Tim,” she attempted. “You mustn’t—”
“When you were in a carriage this afternoon, the one that let you out before your door in Pine Street … That coach belonged to the man in the black hood. You were with him.”
Color flamed into her face and then faded fast as a scrap of cheap paper burning. What was queerest about the expression was that I’d seen it before. Like an inner bomb, everything shifting and everything fiery and everything flying, and then watching the dust settle back. I’d seen it on Bird’s face last, when I’d rescued her from the carriage careening toward the House of Refuge.
“I wasn’t,” Mercy gasped. “No, I wasn’t.”
“The newsboys saw you. Tell me who he is.”
“No,” she cried, shaking her head wildly. “No, no, no. You’re wrong. They were wrong, there must be two carriages. That’s it! There are two, of the same manufacture.”
“You truly want to shield him from me? A lunatic kinchin murderer? Why, Miss Underhill?”
Mercy put two white, trembling hands on my waistcoat. “Don’t call me that, it’s so ugly coming from you. It’s impossible, you must believe me, the lads were wrong, I know it. The man who owns that carriage doesn’t believe in God at all, and he doesn’t give a damn about politics. I tell you it’s impossible.”
“Are you going to tell me his name next? I am going to make him pay, you know, one way or the other. If I have to kill him myself.”
“No, telling you just now will only make it worse, you’ll make a horrible mistake,” she whispered as I gently pulled her fingers away from my plain black vest.
“Let me hurt him—you know he’s earned it. I’ve earned it, for God’s sake.”
“You’re frightening me, Tim. Don’t look like that. I can’t tell you when you look like that.”
I thought over one or two ways of making her tell me, but nothing was workable. Mercy is the sort of woman who walks past mad Irish bruisers to free a colored fellow she scarcely knows, so I’d have needed to break her in a number of pieces, and even if that was remotely possible for me, I was pretty sorely distracted. There was someone else who needed killing.
“Maybe you’re right,” I muttered. “Yes, you’re right, I think. At least I know about Valentine, and you certainly shouldn’t have told me that.
“I’d have warned you sooner, if I’d known,” I added as I walked out the door. “No one ever ought to tell me anything. I’m sorry about your book, on my word I am.”
“Don’t leave like this, please … Timothy!”
I left her there, wearing a slate-colored hood with her hair up, reaching a hand out toward me. I had a brother to grind into the pavement, and I wasn’t going to lose any time in finding him. As I swept back past the front saloon, Silkie Marsh interrupted me, her face all guilty concern.
“Are you all right, Mr. Wilde? I feared, you see, that the exact … situation between myself and Miss Underhill was not entirely clear to you.”
“You said just what was needed to send me straight through that door,” I reminded her through my teeth.
“But that isn’t true. Please don’t, I said.”
Please don’t, for Mercy’s sake.
It had been her name, not a plea. This sad, disgraceful thing I’d just uncovered—the knowing it was entirely my own fault.
“But perhaps you misunderstood me?”
By now, Silkie Marsh was smiling. The identical smile I once saw a much uglier woman wearing as she informed a friend of hers in a coffeehouse that her cousin had developed an incurable cancer.
“That whorish little hypocrite,” she lilted prettily. “You love her, I think? Yes, it’s obvious, though I can’t see why. You cannot imagine the way she has looked at me, time and again, when tending to children I feed and clothe, and in my very own home. I’d not wish misfortune on anyone, Mr. Wilde, but perhaps it will lend that slut a fraction more human sympathy, now that she knows what the rest of us feel like when our legs are open.”
I’d seen a similar expression once, but not in a human. It was in the eyes of a yellow dog turned evil with hydrophobia seconds before a civic-minded hydrant inspector bashed in its head.
“I’ll tell you something about mercy,” I said as I strode to the door. “I’m not arresting you for sending that pair of idiots to hush me. That would be ridiculous. But this is the last shred of mercy you’ll ever get from me. And you’ll need it, mark my words.”
A sick, inside-out feeling struck me when I reached the street again. Leaning over, I propped my palms on my knees, breathing as if I’d just been pulled from a torrent half drowned. I’ve never been good at feeling lost. When I’ve been brought that low, I don’t know what to do with myself, whether to erase my sorry life with a quart of whiskey or to let fly at a wall until I’ve broken my own hand. Both are vivid distractions, I’ve tried them, but neither is permanent.
I’m very skilled, however, at feeling angry. At rage, I’m a bloody professional.
And since I couldn’t hurt Mercy, and she wouldn’t give me the man in the black hood, and I’d made a promise to Bird that precluded me from walking into the forgetful Hudson just yet, killing my brother seemed just about the only good idea left to be had.
TWENTY-TWO
Last day of the election; dreadful riots between the Irish and the Americans have again disturbed the public peace. The Mayor arrived with a strong body of watchmen, but they were attacked and overcome, and many of the watchmen are severely wounded.
• From the diary of Philip Hone, April 10, 1834 •
Silkie Marsh’s brothel was a five-minute walk from Valentine’s station house, and it was nine o’clock at night. My brother would be in his office. And if not there, then at the Liberty’s Blood. I got halfway to the police station before I knew something far worse was wrong with the city than my evil temper: our pathetic attempts at secrecy had come to nothing at last. The afternoon edition of the Herald had ruined us.
People along Greene and Prince streets had pulled their front curtains across their windows, and some had even shuttered them despite the noxious heat. A foul aguey sweat glimmered on the closed panes. Every few brownstone and red brick rowhouses, I could see nervous fingers twitching draperies back, so as to stare out into the road. One man, well-dressed enough to be a clerk but muscled enough that I knew him for a Party rabbit, sat on his front steps smoking a cigar with a cudgel propped between his knees. Waiting for the thunderclap. And from the looks of things, the wait wouldn’t be a long one.
I knew what it all meant before I’d been told, so I changed my direction, veering right into the jungle. When I saw a group of star police approaching from a side street, most of them familiar enough members of Valentine’s engine company, I stopped short. They carried torches and elegantly tapered leaded clubs. A few of them walked with pistols slung from their belts. But none of them proved quite mountainous enough in silhouette to be my brother.
“Is that Timothy Wilde?” one called.
“Something like him.”
“Fall in with us, we’re wanted. Every copper star.
We’re the last of Ward Eight, your brother’s already on the muscle.”
“Where’s the riot?” I asked as I made an about-face, taking a heavy club from a stout Irish fellow who’d seen fit to bring two of them.
“Where it’s least necessary, as ever,” spat the policeman. “Five Points. The only sinkhole on this island that couldn’t get any worse.”
“That’s my ward you’re riding,” I pointed out.
“Sure, and Captain Val told me. God help you.”
Not so far today, I thought.
The shouting reached us first, before the stench of burning trash winnowing through the air, before the sparks. Glancing into the sky, I saw that at least the patchwork summery sheet of low-flying storm cover was yet grey, no darker stain marking a building afire. The moon appeared and disappeared like a restless spirit. A pair of respectable Yidisher secondhand shopkeepers hastened past us nodding, glancing behind them, doing their best to keep out of the way. At almost the same moment, a pack of tiny kinchin, howling like pups, raced down Anthony Street toward the sinister glow, doing their best not to miss anything. I thought of Bird in Harlem, where the stars are clearer even when the sky turns stormy, and tightened my grip on the club.
“Looks like a hell of a spree,” I remarked. “Do we know who started it?”
Whatever the newspapers and journals say about riots springing up like wild mushrooms, they’re mistaken. I know two facts about riots: they are always about the same thing, and they are planted. Always. Riots are farmed, and then when they bloom, the farmers get to smash their bitter fists into the face of an entire city.
“Seems to have been Bill Poole.”
“I’ve met Bill Poole,” I said, picturing the drunken thug whose eye I’d blackened outside of St. Patrick’s. “We didn’t get on. He’s to blame for this?”