by Lyndsay Faye
“My God,” I said softly. “Did she see what they were about?”
“Didn’t want to get caught, did she? So she kept her distance. Whenever they appeared, she and Ben turned tail.”
“What else?”
“Just one thing. The carriage had a picture on the side. She said it was an angel.”
“An angel?”
“Sure as taxes, an angel. That’s why Matsell wanted us. It truly is a religious nutter, Tim. Which means last night was only a taste. We’re buggered if we can trace him, and buggered if we can’t.”
“No,” I said on a tiny, hushed little breath. “It doesn’t mean that at all. I know what’s happened. Right down to brass tacks.”
It’s a good job Val hates my coffee and is downright snobbish about it, or I think he’d have spit it out. Meanwhile, I felt like I was flying and free-falling at the same time. It’s not a bit pleasant.
“How?” my brother demanded.
I pointed dumbly at the sheet of butcher paper.
“Mother of God. Then what are we doing here, young copper star? And are you going to leak?”
“Will you get uppish if I don’t tell you yet?” I asked, rising.
“Yes. No. Christ, Tim.”
“I have to see someone.” I was buttoning my vest, casting about for my boots, tying the thin strip over my scar. “Can you do one thing for me? Please?”
“When I can stand,” Val said judiciously, “and when you’ve poured me a whiskey. You rankly inhospitable cow’s teat.”
I went for the liquor. “Can you ride at once up to Harlem and find a farm called Boehm? Marthe Boehm. My landlady is there, and Bird Daly. They plan to come back to the city today, but they need an escort. If you’re on the muscle, I’ll know nothing can go wrong.”
“Is anything likely to go gammy where you’re headed?” he asked pointedly.
“It’s all bob, Val, trust me,” I said, assuring him of my safety. “Just one or two people I need to speak with.”
“I’ve taken orders from bigger flats than you, I suppose.”
Cocking his head in a measuring sort of way, my brother poured himself a second glass of whiskey. Bigger than the first. I’d my frock coat on and was nearly out the door when I turned back.
“Why didn’t you just tell me you had nothing to do with Bird’s being dragged off to the House of Refuge?”
“Because you go deaf when I talk, Tim.”
He said it in the same tone as he’d say, “Why not, if the weather’s fine?” or “Because you can’t add lemon to milk that way, tit-brains, it’ll curdle the sauce.” Didn’t meet my eyes either, just pulled out his tiny appointment book and began jotting down Boehm with a pencil stub from his frock coat. I hadn’t much liked having my heart broken by cruel chance the night before. This new crack through it seemed fair, though, because I have apparently been an instrument of merciless punishment for seventeen years and because Valentine Wilde does not ever—despite his habits, never needs to—write anything down in order to recall it. Which meant that risking a glance in my direction seemed long odds to him just then.
“I thought so,” I said when I could manage to talk at all. “Val, I’m sorry for it. Please don’t go to Turkey. Promise me.”
He did look at me then, and his eyebrow twitched with dark amusement. “The life of a sea-crab has lost its sheen.” Val paused, tucking his appointment book away again. “You won’t go charging up against the Party half-cocked? They’re dangerous. I’ve been trying to tell you so.”
“It’s not them I’m fighting, turns out,” I called back as I left him, settling my wide hat over my brow. “I’m thick as cream, just like you said. It’s absolutely everyone else.”
TWENTY-FOUR
They gather the sons and daughters of Protestants, and even of some professors of religion, into the schools, and gradually accustom them to the worship of Catholics… . I could give some facts corroborative of these remarks, which have occurred here, had I room.
• a correspondent of the “Home Missionary,” 1843 •
I quit the hack at the intersection of Chambers and Church streets. The combined house and practice shone, a beacon of good health in the form of housing. About as far a cry from Five Points as you could imagine. Its steps newly scrubbed by his servants, and the knob on his door flashing merry arcs of light in the sun. Glancing over the brass plaque announcing dr. peter palsgrave, physician to youth, I rang the bell.
A butler appeared, looking parched and skeletal.
“Dr. Palsgrave cannot be disturbed.”
Polishing the copper star with my coat sleeve did the trick. He sighed, looking grieved at the sad pass New York had finally come to.
“Very well, then. Dr. Palsgrave is lecturing at New York University. You will find him there,” he droned while the door was shutting.
By the time I’d arrived at Washington Square, it was nearly midmorning. The sun was perched high over the trees, and students streamed from place to place like ants in their brightly colored hose and squashed hats. Fresh-cheeked and worried ill over nothing whatsoever. The third one I hailed pointed me to the medical lecture hall and public dissection forum. I set off, feeling about thirty years older than him and not the more probable five or six.
The door to the hall creaked when I pulled it. Light gushed through the opening, glancing wildly off the dust in the air. Down in the central lecture pit it was pretty dim, though the twelve-foot windows hadn’t any curtains over them and a number of lamps glowed. A few wigged heads turned to glance at me, but soon shifted away again. Dr. Palsgrave stood behind a corpse with a hole drilled in its head and a metal hook screwed into it, the hook tied to a rope with a pulley. He tugged, raising the body’s torso upright from the head. The ribs were already spread wide, skin peeled off like an orange rind, mouth grinning in unlikely good will.
“And so you see,” he continued as I descended, “that the thoracic cavity does not end abruptly at the height of the uppermost rib. It allows the thymus, trachea, esophagus, and the longus colli muscles to extend higher, for one, but we shall continue to focus upon the left common carotid artery’s progression upward into the skull for the moment.”
“I need to speak with you, Doctor,” I said at the bottom of the stairs.
The little man looked up. Golden eyes molten, corseted spine crackling with annoyance. Then he returned his full attention to science and science alone.
“I am busy at present. Can you not see that? As if enough trouble has not come of this so-called police force—”
“It would be very, very much better,” I insisted, “if you took me someplace private.”
“Out of the question! I would be wasting a very valuable speci—”
“Get one of your fellow doctors to take over the lecture. I’ll wait.”
Seething, Dr. Palsgrave did as I asked. With an angry flick of his wrist, he led me out of the lecture hall and into another interior corridor. His posture balletic, his white whiskers mad as a cat’s, his formal coat very brushed and very blue, muttering infamies at me all the while. When we’d reached the end of the passage, he threw open a door—which also, I noted, had his name engraved above it.
Dr. Palsgrave had a second alchemy lab at the school, I realized when we entered the office. And he was in the midst of an experiment, an assistant wearing a robe hovering over the delicate equipment. Retorts were burning away, little fires dancing with the liquid metal above them. There were bits of tissue pinned to boards, vials filled with mysterious poisons. I hadn’t the slightest notion what Dr. Palsgrave was about, but it all looked to be so wonderfully full of promise. As if he could see a future where some as-yet-undiscovered substance made a fraction of a child whole again. I dreamed—just for a moment—that I was the very person to watch him do it.
It wasn’t true. But I wanted it to be.
“Please leave us, Arthur,” the doctor sighed.
When his assistant had quit us, I turned to face Dr. Palsgrave. Fe
eling pretty awkward about procedure under the circumstances, but not able to waste any time either.
“I know,” I said quietly. “About the kinchin. The burial ground outside the city is yours. I need to talk to you about it.”
A puppet with cut strings would have been a kinder sight. His eyes flew back to me and I could see whole civilizations, cities that he’d built and cherished and planned for, like the model of an entire world, all crumbling. Dr. Palsgrave turned white. And then he started panting, his hand over his heart shaped into a claw.
“Stop,” I gasped, lurching toward him. “I never meant to say it like that. If I could have done the same, with your education— I just need to know I’m right, Dr. Palsgrave. Tell me I’m right and stop shaking so.”
It took several more seconds, but he did. I’m not in any particular sense good at lying. But I’m extremely good at telling the truth, so he believed me. He shuddered a few more times, and then out came a toxic-green kerchief worth ten dollars as he wiped the sweat off his neck. Quickly, I set myself to extinguishing all the open flames, and then returned to stand before him.
Lifting both his hands, Dr. Palsgrave dragged them down his white side whiskers. “How did you find me out?”
“Mercy Underhill gave a piece of it away, though she never meant to. You told me the rest yourself. And you were seen.”
“Seen? By whom?”
“By a girl who lives in a nearby cherry orchard. She never spied your face, but she saw your carriage. I’m afraid she’s already told the chief of police that it carries the insignia of an angel. But it doesn’t, of course. It’s the staff, the snakes with the wings. A caduceus. What else would you paint on your coach?”
I hold Dr. Palsgrave in the highest regard. And so I don’t wish to dwell over the moments just after he was found out. He really isn’t a dignified man, apart from the corset. And I wish that his version of the world would come true quicker. So I’ll just report the first sensible thing he asked me after I’d fetched us both chairs and he’d collapsed into one.
“When did you begin to suspect me?”
“Honestly, I never suspected you until about three hours ago. But I’d started asking myself why any man would do such things, and I’d several other … pointers. When did you start performing autopsies on recently dead kinchin?”
“Perhaps five years ago,” he murmured. “I never lied to you when I did the autopsy on the children from the common grave. They ranged from five years dead to recent, and somehow you fathomed—”
“That you knew each and every one of those kids, having first cut them open and taken which organs you pleased,” I supplied for him. “Your reaction to the very first corpse ought to have posted me. Liam. You were terrified that we’d called you in to examine him on purpose, you thought it a ruse meant to force a confession. The reasons you suggested why someone would saw a body open were ridiculous, Doctor. Swallowed a valuable? You an anatomist and giving every reason save for an autopsy. I’ll grant your autopsies don’t look a bit like most I’ve seen—they’re wider, yes, along the rib cage? The cut below the breastbone? They let you see better?”
He nodded exhaustedly.
“They were never meant to be the symbol of the cross at all. But for all they look so foul, you couldn’t expect me to believe they were cannibalism, or—”
“I didn’t know what to tell you. It was all so sudden, so horrible, and putting the body of that child in a … in that trash bin … was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he whispered. “I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
“Tell me from the beginning,” I asked him calmly. “I’ll start it off for you. Bodies are extremely scarce. Bodies of kinchin specifically, and the fresh deceased sort you needed for your studies still more rare. What sane parent would ever hand their dead kinchin over to you to be hacked open? But in the bawdy houses …” I paused. “They fall sick pretty often.”
Dr. Palsgrave passed a hand over his mouth, wincing. “The bodies of kinchin are anatomically very different from those of adults, and when I could not obtain the materials for study I needed, I grew … morose. I had lost so very many already, Mr. Wilde, and so very long before their time. I could not erase brothels from New York, but I thought I saw my way to a solution five years ago when a little girl under my care passed away due to a severe heart defect. Her madam in life, Silkie Marsh, asked me whether I had any use for the remains, as she was in poor straits and could not afford to bury the girl herself.”
Dr. Palsgrave had protested that he’d no right to the body, and that the university would surely demand answers if he tried to dissect an unidentified corpse there. But Silkie Marsh was quick on the trigger with a solution. He could return that night, masked or hooded. She would clear out a space and a tarp and put a table in her cellar. All for just fifty dollars. Dr. Palsgrave could bring whatever other equipment he required, and spend as long as he liked at his work.
“I suppose when you cautioned Madam Marsh that you would need a way to dispose of the dissected remains without anyone getting peery, she offered another compromise,” I ventured. “You’d supply the carriage, for who would question a doctor, and she’d summon the manpower.”
“Their names were Scales and Moses,” Dr. Palsgrave answered. “They were most efficient about the burials outside of town. It was good work, Mr. Wilde, I vow that it was good work. Finally I could perform dissections that meant something to me, to the children.”
It went on for five years, all told. When a kinchin-mab died, Dr. Palsgrave was summoned back. He paid his fifty dollars. He performed his life’s work. He saw that the child was given a burial, each and every time, no half measures. He thanked them aloud as they were being put into the shallow ground. It was no shallower than any other pauper’s grave, after all. And they were doing good meanwhile, all in the meanwhile, every sin atoned for during that meanwhile. Dr. Palsgrave never doubted it.
There had been nineteen dead, all told, the results of pneumonia and of fevers and of pox and contagion. Then one day Dr. Palsgrave had arrived in his black hood, the kinchin had all been bid to stay in their rooms, and he and Silkie Marsh had gone to carry Liam’s body down to the cellar chamber. When they entered the room, it looked like a slaughterhouse.
“Liam suffered from pulmonary trouble,” Dr. Palsgrave explained, “and I was performing alchemical experiments using blood. I still am, the results have been …” He trailed off, abstracted and achingly hopeful momentarily, and then snapped back to earth. “But no matter. I bid Madam Marsh that—should the unfortunate child fail to recover—she should inform me as soon as possible, for I wanted to drain the blood. There are French researches suggesting that blood contains elements of metal, and I wanted to see if I could distill it into the rarefied essence of itself. The notion of purifying blood is very promising. I was duly informed, raced to the brothel when the boy met his end, and siphoned the unfortunate child’s blood into a bowl. So hurried was I, I extracted it in his sickroom rather than using the basement. But then I found that I had stupidly forgotten the vessel I meant to carry it away in, and so I rushed back to the carriage.”
“The room was left dark when you did,” I said. “Why?”
Amazement and fear vied for control of his features. “How can you know that? I took my lantern with me. I tried to be as discreet as possible upstairs, whenever I was forced to do any research in proximity to the other children. I came back within three minutes, but—”
“But you walked into a butchery. Someone had found you out, someone who’d spilled the blood everywhere.”
“Madam Marsh stifled a scream, and I fear that I myself experienced a severe palpitation.” Dr. Palsgrave pinched his fingers over his nose regretfully. “It may have played a part in my actions. I cannot say. We tracked footmarks into another bedroom and found the window open, a makeshift ladder tied to the catch. Madam Marsh ordered me to dispose of the body, without making any other employment from it, just as she demanded that I h
elp her scrub the blood from the floor. Moses and Scales were in the house within twenty minutes.”
“But then you rebelled.”
“I could not do it,” he gasped, clenching his fist upon his knee. “To waste a child’s shell that way, the blood being lost, and I needed a spleen. I am sorry I told you it was rats. I demanded use of the cellar. Silkie Marsh refused at first. But then I told her I would never darken her door again if she failed to give me ten minutes, that our entire arrangement would be off for good and all, and so she allowed it.”
“Go on.”
Dr. Palsgrave’s mouth turned down, hiding something sour and pained and weary-seeming. “I took the organ. We bundled the poor kinchin into my carriage. We were headed north to the burial site, but I freely confess that we had gotten only as far as Mercer Street when the most awful panic overtook me. I had spent ten additional minutes that Madam Marsh had claimed could be disastrous. The evidence was at my very feet, and a witness—God only knew who, I never was told precisely how many children she employed at any given moment—was at large, and probably frightened to death, the poor creature. I stopped by a trash receptacle outside a chophouse.”
He stopped dead.
“I … it will never leave off haunting me, Mr. Wilde.”
I believed him, too. It’s no easy lay to look that stricken over a point of honor when you’re not honorable.
“Silkie Marsh learned what you did from Moses and Scales. Did she object to how close the body was to her ken?”
“No, or if she did, she never mentioned it. Next morning, she informed me that the missing child had been found. She told the kinchin that Liam had gone through a bloodletting before he peacefully passed, and the child believed her, thank heaven. She’d handled the situation, and all could go back to normal, Madam Marsh said.”
“Knowing all about the deaths, the letters must have confounded you even though they did deflect attention from you,” I hazarded. “The only one printed publically, the Hand of the God of Gotham message in the Herald, you managed to keep quiet through. But then you were sent something very sinister in tone. Addressed to you personally, and you the man behind it all in fact. It gave you a scare. You couldn’t imagine what to make of it, so you sought me out, knowing you couldn’t destroy the thing and keep a clear conscience. Then you saw Bird Daly.”