by Lyndsay Faye
After an hour more of silence and occasional shivering, she fell asleep. Heated through at last, with her head on my shoulder and her three pairs of breeches falling over my knees. Very, very beautiful. No less so for the frozen cracks on her lips or the blisters all over her hands.
When I went back into the study to check on the reverend, none of the new facts came as any surprise to me.
I never told Mercy how loose I’d tied those bonds. How easy I’d made it for Thomas Underhill to free himself.
I’d done it for Mercy, after all. So that isn’t the sort of thing I can mention to her. That I sent the reverend to hell a bit quicker, if there is one, rather than subject her to visiting him at the Tombs.
Thomas Underhill had hanged himself weird and savage, his spine badly broken, face both purple and swollen, neck stretched an inch at least though I’ve never studied anatomy.
People who slit kinchin open out of mad hate and bitter memories ought to get worse than their own nooses around their necks. They ought to be served with jail time. Communion with the rats they’re so fond of comparing actual people to. I think that when those sort get a chance to visit with real rats, they begin to forget the comparison to words like Irish and black and thief, maybe even whore. And they deserve every minute of it, to my mind. But it wasn’t about me.
I left Mercy well blanketed by her stove as the heat dwindled. I left the reverend locked in his own chapel’s gardening shed. Twisted up with the shovels and rakes, for the moment. Not wanting Mercy to find him, I took the keys.
Breathing deep, steadying myself, I looked out across the churchyard at the peaceful gravestones. An amber hue hung over everything. The sun wasn’t quite setting by then, but I could feel its tug. It would be an autumn light almost, I imagined, swiftly falling. August suns linger for the worst news generally, but that sun showed better charity. I needed charity. I was tired enough to feel dead.
When I’d closed the garden shed door, I went looking for someone whose time could be purchased. That took forty seconds, and ended by being a hot-corn girl with a very slight harelip. Paying for her entire stock with Party money, I sent her to bring Dr. Peter Palsgrave, whom Mercy clearly trusted, to the Underhill residence.
Then I set off to confront the coldest killer I could ever have imagined. The reverend was mad, after all, and my new quarry owned no such convenient excuse.
TWENTY-SIX
Now let it be remembered, that Popery is the same thing at the present time, that it was in the Middle Ages. The world has altered, but the popish creed, feelings, avarice, and ambition, are all the same.
• American Protestant in Defence of Civil and Religious Liberty Against Inroads of Papacy, 1843 •
Silkie Marsh wasn’t at her establishment, more’s the pity, so I was sent on to the theater within Niblo’s Garden on Prince and Broadway—the establishment Hopstill spent all his time building fireworks for, though I doubt he’d ever seen an actual show.
By the time I’d arrived there, the yellow had left the air. A clear fall blue bloomed in the sky above the lush plant life and the lusher crowds packing the brass-fitted saloon. Brushing by candied apple vendors and the great green blades of the landscaping, I walked into the theater. It was to be a vocalist that night, a break in the endless parade of acrobats. I gave a coin to a boy in a cocked paper hat who was selling peanuts, and I asked where Silkie Marsh was sitting that night. He told me readily enough. Flashing my star in place of a ticket, I walked up the stairs.
Silkie Marsh was perched within a gem-stand of a box. Herself the crown jewel, of course. Brittle as cut stone, and about as likely as diamonds to crack. Clear and cold and perfect-looking. And the only thing I could count on, the one weapon at my disposal, was the fact that I could see clean through her.
“Gentlemen,” I said to the pair of swells seated in the box. They were all oiled moustaches and artfully tailored sleeves, pretty as pictures and just as flat. “You’re taking your leave.”
“Mr. Wilde,” Silkie Marsh said sweetly, eyes blazing hot with annoyance, “you are of course welcome to join our little party, but I can think of no earthly reason why my friends should depart.”
“No? I can conjure two, actually. First off, I’ve a burning need to interrogate them on the subject of New York’s brothels down at the Tombs. That might take hours, I’m thinking. If they don’t scurry off before I even notice they’re gone, that is. And second, they might enjoy occupying children at your establishment, but I’ll bet even if they’ve a taste for kinchin-mabs, they don’t want to palaver about dead ones.”
They were a memory after another five seconds. My tone had all the while been friendly, measured. A pretty tune with dark words set over it. I needed her off balance, angry enough to make a single mistake.
Silke Marsh didn’t flex a muscle when I sat down in one of the newly emptied velvet chairs. Didn’t even spare a blink. And that’s not what unnerved me. No, what unnerved me, with a prickling tingle of disgust along my lower back, was that she didn’t spare a glance after her companions either. Once gone from her immediate view, it was as though they were really gone: small and lifeless as chess pieces, and just as disposable.
“I’d grown to think of you as somewhat brutish, Mr. Wilde, but now you seem to have entirely forgotten how to behave around people.”
Leaning forward toward a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, she poured us a pair of drinks. She wore a red satin gown of watered silk that made the blue ring in her eyes look much bluer, and her flaxen hair was pinned up with a black velvet band. Everything as rich as it was tasteful.
“Tell me,” she said softly, leaning back as light sparked off her champagne flute like shattered prisms, “are you here to inform me finally of what happened to poor Liam? Have you caught the culprit? I would be most grateful to know that when you speak of dead kinchin so graphically, it tends to some purpose.”
“It does. Why don’t you tell me how many of your kinchin you purposely hushed before selling their bodies for autopsy to Peter Palsgrave?”
Shock on most people looks like fear. On Silkie Marsh, it looks like pleasure. Her mouth dropped open and her head tilted back as her pale eyelashes fluttered. I wondered if she’d cultivated that. It can’t have been easily mastered.
“That’s a lie,” she gasped.
“No, it’s a question. I just want to know how many it was. I haven’t a scrap of evidence, so here’s all my cards on the table. I can’t prove a thing. I’m bust. Tell me.”
Tell me.
You told me you grew up a kinchin-mab, and you didn’t mean to, hated the confession afterward. So tell me this. I’m honest, and you’re a remarkable liar, so we’ll each play to our strengths until one of us wins.
“I think you ought to tell me what you accuse Dr. Palsgrave of doing,” she said with another scared fluttering motion, switching topics. “This is all too vile to countenance. He’s a very good man, a philanthropist at heart, the sort who isn’t satisfied unless he’s giving back to the human race.”
“And he also admitted to me that he paid you fifty dollars a corpse. I’ve evidence enough against him to put him under the ground, but I want to know how many of the chits you sold him died natural. You put them to sleep, didn’t you, poisoned them maybe? Scores of poisons wouldn’t have been traceable, even by Dr. Palsgrave, and anyway the bodies have long since decayed. The proof has rotted away by now. It can’t hurt you to answer.”
Arcing her torso forward as if it were a knife blade to my throat, Silkie Marsh brought her glass up to her lips. Just touching it to the lower one, subtly and flirtatiously.
“If you know nothing,” she said, “I can’t imagine why you think I’ll tell you.”
“I’ll know just how clever you are. Won’t that be satisfying?”
“Whyever would I want to kill my own employees, Mr. Wilde?”
“I never said you wanted to. I said you did.”
“This is so very tiring,” she sighed. “Even
supposing I did allow the good doctor to dispose of the bodies incurred by illness—and I don’t deny it, he wanted them very badly, Mr. Wilde,” she added in a caressing tone, like a viper’s tongue flicking at my skin. “He wanted all the corpses he could lay his hands on, and what position was I in to tell him no? I a bawdy-house madam and he a renowned physician on whom I relied for medical help? He insisted upon my cooperation, and how could I refuse him when he had such power over my household? It was tantamount to blackmail.”
I eyed her critically. It didn’t wash.
So after a pause, she concluded, “I like you knowing nothing, Mr. Wilde. I think I prefer to keep it that way.”
“You’ve murdered two for a fact. That’s not quite the same as knowing nothing.”
She smiled amiably. “Which two of my beloved brothers and sisters did I murder, then, Mr. Wilde?”
“Liam, for one. He’d had pneumonia. But he’d also recovered. I don’t know if you needed the money or if it was your usual practice, but you made him sick again.”
Silkie Marsh was starting to look, of all the wrong expressions, bored. She was watching the admirably small bubbles in her champagne flute. I suddenly knew why Val had been fascinated by her. She was probably the only person Valentine had ever met whom he couldn’t figure out.
“The musical program is just about to begin. I wish you good night, Mr. Wilde, though—”
“The one I know you killed a bit more viciously went by the name of Jack Be Nimble.”
Her eyes flashed to mine instantly.
And that was all I needed to continue. That look was as good as a confession.
Why should she know the name Jack Be Nimble if she hadn’t rid herself of him the same night they met, when Jack had poked his head into Dr. Palsgrave’s carriage and then gone indoors for a plate of hot chicken stew? Whether she’d tried to employ Jack first was anyone’s guess. But dead he was, and by her hand. She couldn’t possibly have allowed him to live, once she’d learned he associated her with Dr. Palsgrave’s carriage and a dark, silent bundle on its floor.
So I stopped playing by my own rules.
“You’d have to have buried that one without Palsgrave,” I mused. “He’d have been too suspicious, a healthy newsboy like that suddenly falling ill in your establishment. I’m sure you only hushed the chronically sickly so as never to arouse the doctor’s suspicions, and I’m sure you were unspeakably careful. Jack, though, he needed fast solving, having keeked in Palsgrave’s carriage, seen a man in a black hood outside your door. Where did you bury him? I’m not surprised you got away with hiding the body—you’re cunning enough, and anyhow there weren’t any copper stars.”
“You’ve no proof,” she whispered. “And I’ve not said a thing either.”
“I told you already that I’m through being merciful, Madam Marsh. That means I don’t need one single piece of what you call proof. I could shut you up on any charges I like tomorrow. Just so long as you’re a whore and I’m a copper star.”
“And that is meant to convince me confession is the best policy?” she cried. “The fact you’re keen to bury me alive in that dungeon you call the Tombs?”
“I’d like nothing better. But if you tell me how many,” I answered, leaning forward, “I won’t.”
Bribes generally set my teeth on edge. I wanted so badly to understand, though. Like I’d never wanted anything. I wanted Mercy, but that was written on the underside of my skeleton. Everyone wants money and comfort, but those were too vague to feel by comparison. I wanted Valentine to live better than he did, and that want lived in a part of me that couldn’t be touched.
But this—I suddenly wanted facts as if they were clean water. Pure, cold, storyless facts.
Silkie Marsh set her champagne glass down. The animated doll was gone, replaced by a creature a bit resembling … well, a stockbroker. Measuring odds and looking for patterns and taking a long shot. It was artful.
“I killed seven of them, and yes—they had been chronically sick. They’d each cost me a fortune in medical procedures. Bleedings, sweatings, poultices, cordials, and yet the little parasites couldn’t quite manage to die. It was a kindness, stopping their pain. The rest passed without any help, unexpectedly. Part of the money always paid for decent food for the others, you ought to know. And anyway, why should I have cared about their deaths when I made their lives so much easier than mine was? I’d have liked my fish to be fresh when I was their age and in the same line of work.”
Not knowing whether any particle of her own history was true or meant to play me, I kept my peace. I suspected it was honest, though. How else could she ever have learned to exist so?
“Thank you,” I said. “My curiosity was getting out of hand.”
“I should say so. Though why you want the number so badly, I’ll never know.”
“You’ll know right this minute, actually. Seven of them. That’s three hundred and fifty dollars, isn’t it?”
“Why?”
“Because I want every cent of your blood money. In cash.”
Let me be perfectly clear: everything I’d said to her initially—that I hadn’t two solid face cards to keep each other company—was the God’s honest truth. I had no evidence against her, proof of literally nothing. I couldn’t even prove those corpses had ever set foot in her establishment while alive. As for Scales and Moses, the ideal witnesses, they were stone dead. Could I have jailed her for whoring? Yes, for a week or two, however long it took her to bribe her way out again. Judges, not unlike copper stars, have a difficult time caring much about stargazing. I would have been forced to track down the men who’d bought her and compel them to testify in court for a conviction to stick, which was about as likely as her making a full confession. Val might have testified, but Val probably hadn’t paid in the first place. My options, therefore, were limited. The way I saw it, in fact, I had two of them, since the notion of doing nothing was nauseating:
1. Wring her neck myself.
I couldn’t stomach that one either.
2. Make her pay in a way that matters to her. Tell the chief. And bide my time.
At the moment, Silkie Marsh was beyond the law’s reach. The person I could punish, the one whose carriage had been seen, was Peter Palsgrave. But jailing him would have been a cruel and fruitless spectacle without any meaning behind it. He’d fought so hard for them. He’d done his best. He’d keep saving more of them, over and over again, until the day he died. How many fatalities would be on my hands if I locked him away, how many more kinchin dead, and this time on my account?
As for Madam Marsh, I thought, I will watch her relentlessly from this day onward. Watching her will be my religion. And one day, the murderess of seven children is going to dangle from the end of a rope.
Silkie Marsh was on the verge of stuttering, but she spoke clear. “The day I agree to such an outrageous—”
“I have the ear of Chief Matsell and keys to the Tombs lockup. Who do you think you’re playing with? I don’t care about evidence,” I lied. “For God’s sake, I could plant mountains of the stuff and save myself any further trouble. I want money. Three hundred and fifty dollars.”
She must never have learned how to spit in a man’s eye. That was the only answer to why she didn’t. Madam Marsh only drew herself up a little straighter and smoothed the wrinkles from her long, lavish crimson skirts.
“Since you’ve given more than that to the Party, I don’t see the problem,” I added pleasantly.
“Of course not. You don’t seem to see much of anything,” she snapped. “Drink your champagne, Mr. Wilde, I’ve already paid for it and you’ve driven off my friends.”
I upended the shimmering glass and then set it back on the table.
“Why should you hate me so very, very much over things that don’t affect you?” she questioned in a final miserable-sounding bid for pity.
“They deeply affect me. You tried to kidnap Bird Daly and drag her back to the House of Refuge to be silenced.
Neat trick of yours, signing Wilde to the papers you tried to inter her with. And you paid Scales and Moses Dainty to kill me. You’ll not see them again, by the way. I made them both easy.”
Let her think I killed them myself, spread rumor of my violently unpredictable new status of dead rabbit, I thought. I’d a convincingly deadly brother to flesh out the picture.
She drained her own glass, looking downcast. “Even supposing you are right, I don’t know why you think you’ll live to make anything of it. A man can only ride so far on his brother’s coattails. Even with Scales and Moses to your account.”
“You’re threatening to kill me again,” I said, grinning. “But you’re not going to.”
“You suppose not? For what reason?”
“For the same reason you only tried to hush my brother the one time. It was once, yes? I’ll have to hear that story from him, it’ll kittle me. You only tried to hush Val once, Madam Marsh, because when he’d lived through the first time, you were glad of it. You’d like to have Val back, I think. Someday. And I plan to inform him that if anything ever happens to me, if I die anywise other than ninety years old and of pure placid boredom, it’s your fault. And I’m not very fair to him most of the time, but here’s a fair statement: if that happens, you’ll never have him. Not if hell froze in July.”
“You’re a monster,” she snarled at me.
“Well, then I’m a monster whose good health you ought to worry about. And I want three hundred fifty dollars in cash. Delivered by someone harmless, before dawn.”
Madam Marsh drew her fingertips down her neck and flung me a smile that reminded me of a fresh-honed razor blade.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m not going to hush you, though how you could suppose I’d ever dream of such a cruel thing is quite beyond my ken. I am going to do something else, though, because you are a thief, and thieves are the lowest form of filth.”
“What’s that?”
“I intend to ruin you.”