The Gods of Gotham

by Lyndsay Faye

  “Yes,” he said readily, very near to smiling. “I’d never before viewed her in the sunshine, which was a treat.”

  “Did you mention seeing her in my company to Madam Marsh?” I asked. Slow and careful.

  “Oh, yes, I believe so. I recall saying that she looked very well, very healthy, since she had left Madam Marsh’s employment. Not a great deal more.”

  I smiled without thinking. It was likely a godawful cold one, because Dr. Palsgrave looked perplexed. So I wiped it off. For his part, the doctor was fading to grey a bit around the cheekbones, rubbing two fingers nervously over the shawl-collared waistcoat, just about in the region of his heart. And I knew his mind at once. There had been a single death unaccounted for, an abomination that he could never have authored, ripped open and nailed to a door with mad crosses painted all around him like a sickly white swarm. Marcas, who had not died for science. Marcas, who had not come from the Marsh establishment.

  “I know,” I interrupted him. “I can’t tell you what happened, but I will see to it personally that the culprit pays.”

  “Has it to do with the letter I gave you? I can hardly bear even to think of—”

  “And you needn’t any longer. I’ve got it well in hand. Doctor, there’s one single thing more.”

  “Yes?”

  “A small boy who went by the name of Jack Be Nimble once took a keek inside your carriage as you were disposing of a corpse. He was about to open the sack when you interrupted him. In front of Silkie Marsh’s ken. What did you say to the boy?”

  “Incredible. You’re really quite incredible, Mr. Wilde, I—yes, I do recall it. Not his name, I never knew that. And you’re right, he’d not yet opened the bag, only the passenger door, though he gave me such a start as took ten years off my life. He was quite underfed, I believe. Used to wild living, the barbarous ways these boys have. I gave him a coin and told him to ask the mistress within for some good chicken stew. Madam Marsh’s profession is entirely repellent, but she keeps a very fine table, that I’ll never deny.”

  I stood up, holding my hand out. “Thank you for your honesty, Dr. Palsgrave. Sorry for mentioning it so harsh, but you need to stop. No more corpses from Silkie Marsh’s brothel. Not ever again.”

  He shook my hand, likewise rising. “I couldn’t, anyhow. My heart would fail me. Mr. Wilde, wait—you truly mean to do nothing against me?”

  “Truly.”

  “No, please, I must know—you said that Mercy Underhill gave me away? How is that possible? She knows nothing about this, I swear it.”

  A smile crept onto my lips, a warmer one. “She was seen quitting your carriage yesterday, by kinchin who’d reason to believe you a smoky character. You must have been tending to some sick little ones together. But she told me that the man who owned that carriage didn’t believe in God, or politics. It reminded me of you ready enough.”

  “I see. Yes, I see.” Dr. Palsgrave wavered, shoving down his natural pride. “Mr. Wilde, stay for a drink at least, as I cannot ever repay you in kind.”

  “I’ve urgent business,” I answered, putting my hat back on.

  “Of course. I’ll be grateful to you another time. But how will you ever begin to solve what happened at St. Patrick’s? Only a savage would do such a thing.”

  “By returning to the scene,” I told him.

  “And then?”

  “I’ll ask one question.”

  “One question? But what do you suppose will happen after that?”

  “Then I’ll have an honest-to-God murderer to call on,” I said, gravely tipping my hat to him as I shut his office door.

  By the looks of St. Patrick’s as I reached its corner, nothing unholy had happened during the riot. All was clean. A needful, thorough, frenzied sort of clean, from the granite steps to the red stones to the three wooden doors. I’d not have been half surprised if Father Sheehy had scrubbed down the oak in the side yard, and I’d not have blamed him either. A changeable, pleasant breeze blew over the strangely quiet street.

  Inside the cathedral, an altar boy dusting the pews sent me straight to the priest’s sacristy. I knocked at the door and heard a gentle cue to come in. Father Sheehy wasn’t working, though, or didn’t look it. He stood with his hairless head cocked thoughtful and still at a religious painting. The artwork was old and pictured a man of about sixty, with white hair and a kind face, holding a staff leafed in gold.

  “Mr. Wilde,” Father Sheehy greeted me. “Have you been enjoyin’ much in the way of progress, then?”

  “Not enjoy, no. Who’s that you’re mulling over?”

  “Saint Nicholas has always been a man after my own heart, and lately it often seems to me best to have a word with him, on account o’ his being the patron saint of all children.”

  “Is he?”

  “Indeed he is.”

  “That seems a mighty heavy job,” I couldn’t help muttering.

  Father Sheehy only nodded, understanding my meaning. “He’s the proper choice, though the work must be endless. You see, there’s a story, Mr. Wilde, in which Saint Nicholas visits a famine town. Nary a crop flourishin’ there, all dead as dust. Terrible sufferin’ falls on the village, then worse sufferin’ still, day after day, such as I’m fearin’ might be faced in my homeland in the year to come. Until one mornin’ a man driven mad wi’ hunger and poverty slaughters three kinchin and butchers them. All along plannin’ to sell the meat, you understand. But our Saint Nicholas, having been blessed of God and a holy man, sees through the ruse. And exposes him.”

  “That’s a terrible story.”

  The priest smiled sadly. “And yer thinkin’ it’s too familiar a one. But Saint Nicholas did go one further—he raised all three from the dead. And so I’ve been sayin’ to him that we’d be much appreciative of his prayers on our behalf. Delivering the message that, as he isn’t here to work his miracles, we are doin’ the best we can.”

  “What happened to the butcher?” I asked as Father Sheehy went to his desk, waving me into the chair across from him.

  He looked surprised, passed an active hand around the top of his pate. “ ’Tis the best question I’ve heard in some time, Mr. Wilde, and thus a pity that I can’t go far after answerin’ it. When Bishop Hughes returns, I shall inquire. I was forced to send him word of the recent tragedy, and I believe him to be makin’ the journey back from Baltimore. But can I do better by you some other way?”

  “I’ve just one question,” I replied slowly. “The night before Marcas was found, you’d a meeting. About educating New York’s Catholic kinchin in Catholic schools. Irish kinchin, that is to say, in Irish schools.”

  “Aye.” His tone was dry as nails and just as pointed.

  “It didn’t go well?”

  “I wonder, Mr. Wilde, if ye’ve ever read a tract called Is Popery Compatible with Civil Liberty?” he questioned with an entirely humorless smile. “If not, have y’ ever explored a rippin’ tale from Harper Brothers called The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery? Nay? Well, then, perhaps ye’ weren’t yet aware that priests make a holy practice o’ rapin’ nuns and then buryin’ the tiny products of those unions in holes in the basements of monasteries. Naturally there are concerns.” The last word was spat so hard, a grown man might have flinched from it.

  “I know you’re angry at being slandered. You’ve a right.” I paused. “But do such things ever actually happen, Father?”

  His teeth set. “They do. All over the world, and every day, among Hindoos and Turks and Anglicans and Protestants and Catholics. I’ll stop such revoltin’ acts nae faster by denouncin’ my God, Mr. Wilde, for without my God on my side, how will I ever succeed at anythin’?”

  I sat up, leaning my forearm on the edge of his desk.

  “After that meeting, as the men were all dispersing. Did any one of them make a donation? To the orphanage or to the church?”

  The priest’s eyebrows lifted. “That one o’ them did, and the result of many, many friendly overtures on my part, a
s well as the bishop’s.”

  “It was clothing or food, a large sack of some kind? And it was late, and you were talking to important people. You thanked him. You were happy he’d come around. You were pulled in all directions and left it to be sorted later.”

  “Aye,” he said. A helpless, confused flutter crossing his kindly face.

  “Is the sack still here?”

  The priest went as white as if he’d been erased, a hand rising to cover his mouth. As if the answer was poisonous, and he’d absorb it through his tongue once he spoke it. I felt for him, but hadn’t the luxury of waiting.

  “Father, please write down the name of the donor. Put it on a piece of paper and hand it over to me. Otherwise it’s just my word.”

  His hand twitched once before he was able to move it. But move it he did, reaching for paper and a quill, his face just as frozen as St. Nicholas hanging on the wall.

  Weirdly, as he sealed a man’s fate, and as I watched him, I didn’t think about what came next. About what I’d do, what that paper meant. I thought about what Mercy had said in Washington Square Park. That writing things down was a map after a fashion. And that she’d never learn her own inner borders without penning them—like a surveyor with a rope and an astrolabe, staring thoughtfully at a river. I realized, not being any dab hand with words, I do the same with butcher paper. Then I thought of her burned book and felt a shame at having left her the night before such as I’d never experienced.

  The priest passed me the name. But it wasn’t a surprise, so I just folded it and thrust it in my waistcoat pocket.

  “I’m new at this,” I said. “But trust me to set it right.”

  I shook his hand. I turned to walk away.

  “Saint Nicholas was barely five feet tall, Mr. Wilde, so they say. He was a very small man.”

  Glancing back at the painting, I said, “I don’t follow.”

  “God makes use o’ the right vessels.” He spoke quietly, staring down at his hands. “No offense meant, and beggin’ your pardon.”

  “Might I borrow that pistol of yours?” was the only sensible reply.

  I wondered as I quit the cathedral with his gun in my coat which God he’d meant, seeing as how I didn’t have a specific one. Every second of that whole wretched investigation had been built on my blood and my sweat and my brains and my need to know. But if there was an invisible force on my side, I’d have been a fool to cross it just then. So I let all that pass, let it go by with a silent thank you. To anything and everyone who might have helped me without my knowing it, right down to Maddy Sample and her healthy appetites.

  Half an hour later, I knocked at the Underhills’ door.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I sincerely rejoice to hear that you are still engaged for the good of the Roman Catholics. For a long time, the church considered that the conversion of the Jews was hopeless, and even now we seldom hear a prayer offered up for them. With regard however to both the Roman Catholics and the Jews, we may inquire, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”

  • Letter written to the American Protestant in Defence of Civil and Religious Liberty Against Inroads of Papacy, 1843 •

  No one answered. But the front door was unlocked. So I went inside, taking time and care to be quiet about it.

  Right off, I knew that something was wrong.

  First of all, a sound met my ears. A brittle stillness, something just beyond my hearing—as if, when I entered, something else had stopped.

  I listened harder, but nothing came of it. So I went on.

  When I walked into the parlor, there were the bookshelves, there the green carpet and the lampshades and all the trappings of a happy home. There the tomatoes hanging brilliantly red beyond the window. Not long for this world. Not with the cold coming, as everyone knew it would.

  It was all wrong, though. It was identical to how I’d left it.

  And by identical, I mean exactly the same. The papers the reverend had been working on when we’d had our last conversation were still on the table. Nigh deliriously tired, I pondered when that might have been. Five days back? I couldn’t recall exactly. The pair of sherry glasses rested next to them. One of them mine, one of them his. The sherry glasses and the silence meant their serving girl, Anna, was long gone. The papers meant I was right. It hurt to see a thing like that in person, when it was someone you cared for. Someone who’d once done you an irreplaceable kindness.

  I pulled the pistol out of my coat. There was already a bullet lodged in the gun, well packed with powder. I hoped beyond my ability to state the feeling that I wouldn’t have to fire the thing. But I was already more than glad I carried it, because of the smell.

  A whiff of kerosene had been my first greeting, I realized. Bone-deep unsettling wheresoever you encounter it. To me in particular.

  I went into the Reverend Underhill’s private study, and there I had my answer.

  He’d strung a rope up and through the slender iron arms of the chandelier, done in a noose knot. Well tied, too. The light fixture hung above and just in front of his desk, and below that on the simple braided rug was a pile of clothing. Done in pale dyes, dipped only for an instant, subtle blues and yellows that reminded you of birds’ eggs, fragile colors you can only truly identify outdoors in the sun. Dresses and chemises and stockings and shawls, all in a heap stewing in kerosene.

  Of course they were all Mercy’s and of course I knew every piece.

  It jarred me terribly. The first question I’d planned on asking hadn’t been What have you done with your daughter?

  A candle glowed on the desktop, and the reverend sat behind it. Staring at the scene he’d created.

  “I thought you’d come, Timothy,” he whispered.

  I’d like to say I’d never seen a face like that before. So hurt and so raw and so helpless. He was sitting there in only his shirtsleeves, staring with tired blue eyes at the candle, but he was repulsively open. His mind, the expression on his face. It was wrong to look at him, the way it had been wrong to look into the glistening innards of his single murder victim hanging there in St. Patrick’s. He’d looked half this bad the last time I’d seen him, narrow face pinched too small and his hands lost at the end of his wrists, and I cursed myself for not previously knowing what the beginning looked like. Because I had seen a face just like this one, finalized. On Eliza Rafferty.

  “Where’s Mercy?” I left the pistol at my side for the time being. “Why do you mean to burn all her clothes?”

  “Mercy is quite gone,” he said, voice rattling out from a hollow shell. “This is all that’s left of Mercy, I fear.”

  I went completely still about then. The gun very heavy in my hand.

  “Tell me what you mean by gone, Reverend. Did you hurt her?”

  “What’s this?” he muttered, looking up for a moment. “Why should I hurt my little girl? She was very feverish, burning in her skin. I did what I could, but it’s too late now.”

  If you’ve ever been on the deck of a ferry in stormy November, I don’t have to describe the seasick feeling that washed over me.

  You left her there. You cruel, cruel coward. You left her standing in the middle of the room wearing a green dress, calling after you.

  “She was well enough last night,” I said desperately.

  “These things happen so quickly. Everything always happens so quickly, Timothy. I meant to burn the way she did, you see, but perhaps now you’d be willing to bury her? To bury us? Would you? I’ll tell you where she is, but first we have to talk. I don’t imagine you understand quite yet.”

  I finally noticed what was sitting on the desk beneath the candle. A small diary. The pages I could see were scrawled with at least six different hands, most of them far from educated, and a single nicely worked sketch of a little flop-eared dog. Marcas’s journal. If I could have felt any more sick to my stomach, I might have done.

  “What do we have to talk about before you tell me where Mercy is?”

  “I didn’t like d
oing it, but no one would listen,” he went on dully. “Not even you, Timothy, even after I warned you in detail. And no one would print my letters after the first, and then what with the police discrediting them— I didn’t like doing it, you must understand that much.”

  All the letters, of course, had been written by the same man. The Hand of the God of Gotham, who’d first adopted a poor imitation of a cloddish emigrant. But all I had left to me physically was the final note, the brutally honest picture of a broken mind. I pulled the crazed rant the reverend had written to his friend Peter Palsgrave out of my inner coat pocket. We needed to be finished talking. When I put the obscene note on the table, phrases of it winked at me dementedly.

  “I knew it was from you when I’d looked at it hard enough,” I told him. “Just tell me where to find Mercy.”

  Silence.

  “You said, So small it’s an abomination. That was Aidan Rafferty. And it was, and far worse, but to think that it shattered you so—and then the rest of it. Dr. Palsgrave is your closest friend. Mend the broken things. That’s what he does, bringing kinchin back from near-death, though you aren’t aware of— Christ, it’s unspeakable. You wanted him to stop you before you committed murder. The same sort of murder you supposed all the others to have been, but this time in the public street. For all the world to see at last. And pinned on Father Sheehy, of all people.”

  The reverend dropped his face prayerfully into his palms.

  “It could only have been you. That was Scripture, wasn’t it? ‘I am a broken jawbone’?”