by Abra SW
William only remembered bits and pieces from when the disease swept through the slum and killed his da, but he knew how tight his mam’s face grew when it was talked of, and how memory shadowed her eyes.
He remembered other things, too. How tired his mam was when she got back from the factory. The few times she’d come home without her basket or with a new tear in her sleeve, though she’d shrugged it off as, “Rowdies too drunk to know what they’re doing.” How the noise and the heat and the smells of the tenement house wore on her.
“The whole city’s rotting,” he said. His arm ached.
He looked at the narrow warren of rooms that had suffocated the dreams of so many. “Burn it.”
“Burn the bodies?” asked Patrick. “They’re too close to the walls. The buildings would catch fire.”
“The slums?” Valentine said wonderingly. “Well, now, I think the lad has a most interesting idea. They cannot force us back here if there’s no here to force us to. And it’s not like there’s much here worth, ah, retrieving.”
“It’s no proper burial,” Tommy protested.
“The Church makes allowances,” Valentine said. “And since when have you worried about your every action being right with God?”
The other men looked uneasy, too.
“Would you let them sit out and rot like meat gone bad?” Valentine demanded.
Their faces went from uneasy to queasy.
“There are corpses in the better part of town to see to, too,” Patrick said.
Why help the rich?
“Not near so many. And the rich will take care of their own.”
Why should the rich be spared what the poor suffer?
“Not just the slums. Burn it all,” William said, his eyes sharp and glittering with unshed tears.
Valentine frowned. “That’s a harsh thing to say, lad. And think of all the fine houses and all the fine things in them.”
“Fewer fine things than there used to be,” Tommy said, residual guilt lingering in his tone.
Valentine pulled William aside a bit, and squatted down to talk to him face-to-face. “William, we’ve fallen into hard times. My lads believe you’ve brought us luck. You, ah, persuaded us to help those folk yesterday, and last night, well, we fared far better than most others on the street. Casting bread upon the waters, like. Your presence was why Dr. Fallon agreed to help us, and she’s the one who told us of our fine new house. You couldn’t bear to look at the chandelier, so I told the lads not to light it up. If we had, it would have sliced us to bloody ribbons. Since surviving that storm of death, we’re all a mite more superstitious. If you say we should burn the city, they’ll give it a serious try.”
William glared, his face hot and hard. “You think the rich deserve better?”
“Dr. Fallon’s in a rich part of town. She’s tending to your mam. Would you burn her house, too?”
“I—”
“Mind you, I think burning the slums is a fine idea. We live packed in here, and any who stay here now will be cheek-to-jowl with their neighbors’ corpses. That’s not a healthy thing for a body. Think on it, though, before you goad the lads on.”
William reluctantly nodded.
“Good lad.” Valentine patted William’s shoulder. “Don’t fret. We have plenty to do here—helping people, right?”
Valentine stood and walked back to the others, with William at his side. “Right, then, lads! We’re going to help William gather his mam’s things—and then we’re going to burn the North End to the ground!”
The men cheered. How could they resist the appeal of burning something right down to the ground?
“We’ll need to go through each tenement house room by room to make sure all the survivors are out before we burn it.”
“What will we do with them?” Patrick asked. “Dr. Fallon’s home is full.”
Valentine cut his eyes at William. “Let’s ask our luck. Where will they be safe from burning, William?”
William’s stomach tightened and his skin heated, but he kept his voice level when he said, “The Common.” Boston’s central park was large enough for everyone to have a patch of ground to spread their blanket out on.
“A good choice. Patrick, go back to Dr. Fallon’s house and see if you can get volunteers to help us: some to herd survivors away, and some to aid the injured. And don’t spend overmuch time chatting up the clever doctor,” Valentine added dryly.
Patrick nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to escape.
Valentine, Tommy, and the other lads went down the hallway of the tenement house. William walked ahead, shouting, “Fire!” It was the one thing that slum-dwellers feared even above rent-collecting bullyboys.
Some might have hesitated if a harsh-sounding man tried to get them out of their rooms, but nobody suspected a child of lying. And he wasn’t, not precisely.
The few surviving inhabitants fled their rooms clutching whatever was most precious to them. Facing hard men who still bore the marks of recent battle, they chose not to argue about leaving.
At first, Valentine and the lads checked every room carefully, making sure that no survivors hid inside. Despite the mounds of dead outside, corpses yet lay concealed behind flimsy doors: a man face-down in his bowl of soup; a woman sprawled across her mending; an old man who’d been abed with his liquor bottle when he was stricken; a half-clothed child whose dead mother still held its dress; a couple entwined together whose lovemaking had ended in death spasms; and other, more pedestrian corpses.
Some few they found injured or unconscious. It didn’t take close inspection to tell the difference between the softly crumpled insensate and the rigor-locked dead.
As with the corpses on the street, not all had died on the fire.
William looked in the first room they found that had a kicked-in door. He gulped. He hadn’t liked the woman who lived there much—she’d been able to afford a whole room to herself, for one thing, which seemed terribly greedy—but nobody should die like that. She’d survived the storm, but not the other survivors.
After that, he didn’t look.
No man among them was hardened enough to remain unaffected. They went from careful searches to glancing looks that could catch the essentials—dead or alive—without absorbing the details.
In that way, they worked through the tenement house until William stood in front of the door to the room he shared with his mam and the Tienken family. He cleared his throat.
“Fire,” he tried to say, but it came out a squeak.
“Do you want me to go ahead and check?” Valentine asked.
William shook his head, his throat too tight to speak.
The men broke down the locked door as gently as possible.
Best get it over fast, William thought. He charged into the room—and halted. Another boy had charged forward at the same time and stopped as abruptly. Now he stood, staring, the knife in his hand hanging down by his side.
“William?” Robert Tienken said. His spaniel dodged past him and jumped up to lick William’s hands. “You’re alive!” Robert sat down abruptly. The knife fell from his grasp. “I didn’t know what was going on, and there were the most terrible noises.”
“How—how are the others?” William asked.
Robert pressed the heels of his hands hard against his eyes. “It’s just me and Lena now.” His sister crept out from her hiding place in the corner and curled up beside him. The spaniel wagged his tail and licked her tear-stained face.
William swallowed hard. He had guessed Mrs. Tienken dead when he saw Robert alone, with a knife in hand. That he’d lost one sister and his little brother too—
William felt about two feet tall when he remembered how much he’d teased Robert’s brother about his unfortunate reaction to cabbage.
“They’re in the bed,” Robert said, pointing. A green quilt (“the color of Irish grass,” his mam had called it) covered three mounds.
“Come with me,” William said. “My mam will be happy to see you and L
ena. Choose what you want to take and these men will help us.”
“This is home.” Robert hugged his sister closer to him.
“We’ll burn it down once the people are out. Too many died here.”
“Mam has to be buried proper in consecrated ground!”
Valentine stepped into the room. “The church gives dispensation for special circumstances. A priest will say a blessing over the ashes, and the ground will all be consecrated. Lad, you must look out for your sister, and the way to do that is to go to William’s mam. Choose what you wish to take.”
They took the little money they had and the things that held good memories or family history, but little else. The grass-green quilt they left.
They were last out of the house. A handful of survivors huddled together in a clutch. Others began walking to the Common, their belongings knotted up in quilts and slung over their backs.
Grinning, Tommy sloshed the contents of an unmarked brown bottle onto the wall. The reek of cheap alcohol filled the air. He struck a lucifer and poised it on his fingertips, ready to flick into the puddle of alcohol at the base of the wall.
“Not yet, you daft fool!” Valentine seized Tommy’s arm. “It’ll catch the other houses on fire before we can clear them!”
Too late.
His sudden movement sent the match flying. The world seemed to stop, holding its breath, as the match turned end over end. It struck the puddle with a hiss and a fizzle—and then the fire flared to life, crackling like the flames of hell.
The shoddy wood made excellent tinder. The fire ate the alcohol-soaked wood hungrily and climbed higher, seeking more food. The survivors stared at the flames licking their way up the building. One woman screamed. They started to run.
William grabbed Robert’s hand. Robert grabbed little Lena’s hand. “This way!” William shouted, tugging them toward Beacon Hill.
“Wait!” Valentine said. He stared at the fire. “I’ve burned—ah, that is, I’ve seen a fair number of fires, and something about this isn’t right.”
He picked up a wooden spoon dropped in the scuffle, narrowed his eyes, and strode forward to stand as close as he could get to the burning building. Heat burnished his skin a cherry red. He threw up one arm to protect his face, but he held the wooden spoon out until it nearly touched the fire.
And stood there.
“Madness,” Tommy muttered, but he waited to see what would happen, as did William.
The answer was—nothing. The fire didn’t lick out to swallow the spoon.
Valentine backed away. “The fire is sticking close to what it burns.” He brandished the unscorched wooden spoon. “It will not be jumping to other houses unless they actually touch.”
The men laughed with relief. Tommy ruffled William’s hair—as if he’d had anything to do with their narrow escape from becoming mass murderers.
William tried to recall his science lessons. “As if there’s not enough fire aether to let it spread?” He vividly remembered one demonstration. His teacher had lit a match, and a stack of kindling a foot away had exploded into flame. Only the tube of aether between them made the transmission of fire possible.
Patrick spoke up. “It’s all aether-related things that the storm damaged, Dr. Fallon says.”
Valentine nodded slowly. “If the aether surged, it could explain the torrent of water that killed Conrad, and the exploding chandelier.”
“Dr. Fallon thinks the dead might have been killed by their own bone aether, too.” Patrick cleared his throat. “Er, she hoped we’d bring her a body to examine.”
Valentine raised his eyebrows. “Oh, she did, did she? There are enough dead on Beacon Hill that if your ladylove wants a special gift, you can get it and wrap it up for her closer to home.”
“I didn’t—. She’s not—. It’s not—.” Patrick stuttered until Valentine laughed hugely and relieved him of the need to answer.
“What about the bodies in the alley?” William asked. “Will they still burn?”
“Most of them touch the wall. As far as the others,” Valentine grinned, “we’ll set every tenement house in this cursed slum afire! Burning timbers, stones, falling embers … the bodies will burn.” Valentine narrowed his eyes. “When you strike a match, things burn. While you’re back up on Beacon Hill with your mam, you be thinking about that before you say something to my lads that will start a fire you won’t be able to put out.”
~ * ~
Jonathan Matzke, the Man So Thin He Wears a Wedding Ring As a Belt!
Boston Harbor, Boston, Massachusetts
The circus members stared out across the city and watched it burn. A thick pillar of dark smoke billowed up from Boston’s North End, and thin rivulets straggled up into the sky from elsewhere in the city.
The skeleton man swallowed hard against the lingering bite of acid in his throat. Jonathan hadn’t looked forward to returning to Boston, but he’d never imagined anything like this!
Lacey Miller, the equestrienne, squared her shoulders and touched her hat quickly, as if to be sure it sat at the perfect angle. A fine time for her to be concerned with fashion! “The situation calls for us to keep level heads. Perhaps this Mr. Roderick White can advise us as to our best course. There must be a reason his name was on the ringmaster’s list.”
In that moment, her unshakable upper-class composure made Jonathan hate her a little. Stiff upper lip and noblesse oblige be damned, the situation seemed to him to call for some old-fashioned screaming and running around waving your arms in the air.
Lacey turned to the fortune teller. “Mrs. Wershow, who do you think we should send to speak with him?”
Good choice, Jonathan admitted. The old witch always had a suggestion or six ready for anyone who asked. Uncanny accurate they were, too, based on things she had no business knowing.
“So kind of you to ask an old woman, dearie!”
Jonathan carefully didn’t snort. Her ears were far too sharp, her movements far too quick (when she wanted them to be), and her eyes were far too keen for her to be that old. He rubbed his arm, remembering The Fried Chicken Incident. His elbow had been a reliable barometer of bad weather for six months after. She might act old if she pleased, but nobody could tell what she really looked like under all her scarves and shawls and paste jewels, and her veil concealed her face.
“You should go, for one,” the fortune teller told Lacey.
Lacey’s eyes widened. “I? Surely we should send someone with authority in the circus!”
“Hmm, yes. Dear, you’re so achingly genteel that sometimes you make my back teeth hurt. Isn’t that what we need to speak with someone close to the mayor?”
“I—I shall do my best.”
Jonathan coughed to conceal a laugh.
“And for the second person—” the fortune teller’s eyes gleamed through her veil, “Jonathan Matzke, the skeleton man.”
Jonathan tried to swallow his laugh, but it went down the wrong way and wound up as an all-too-genuine coughing fit.
“Not me!”
“You were raised in Boston, and you still keep contact with some of your old friends. You’ll have a much better idea of what’s really going on.”
Jonathan glared, but the fortune teller’s veil foiled his attempt to stare her down. He’d never told anyone that he grew up in Boston, much less that he still wrote letters home. What else did she know?
“There’s another important question that we must consider,” the fortune teller added. “Who will act as ringmaster now that Mr. Loyale is dead?”
Chapter 4
~* * *~
Who’s Running the Show?
Jonathan Matzke, the Man So Thin He Wears a Wedding Ring As a Belt!
Boston, Massachusetts
When Jonathan and Lacey disembarked from the ship, they descended into chaos. Children and women climbed aboard ships or held up their arms, pleading to be taken away. Sailors’ wives and favored dockside tarts got equal treatment. In at least one case, the same
sailor pulled both aboard. Even the chickens and geese stacked in crates on the wharf squawked hysterically, as if begging for passage.
Men wheeled handcarts back to their ships, the contents piled high and hidden with tarp or sheet or tablecloth. Jonathan’s eyes gleamed. It was a lovely opportunity for a little look-see around the cargo to be loaded. If only he weren’t with the equestrienne.
No hackney cabs waited near the docks
“We shall have to walk,” Lacey said, her tone slightly dismayed. “Fortunately, I decided that walking dress would be the most appropriate attire, since we didn’t know what we’d find.”
“Oh, aye, couldn’t have you wearing the wrong dress,” Jonathan agreed.
“We shall need an escort. I would bring the strongman, but the appearance of a free black might cause trouble with things so unsettled.” She gave Jonathan an assessing once-over.
“I may not be the strongest—” Jonathan began, but he spoke to empty air.
Lacey walked up to a burly man heading back into Boston proper. “Excuse me, kind sir,” she said.
Jonathan edged closer, fascinated by the bemused expression on the sailor’s face. A strong smell of saltwater and fish came off the man, but the long voyage back from India had left them all well-acquainted with the scent of seafarers.
“Um, yes, miss?” the sailor said hesitantly, after a glance around to make certain he was the one being so addressed.
“My companion and I find ourselves in need of an escort to City Hall. On School Street?” she added hopefully.
“I know where it is,” the sailor admitted.
“Thank you so much! You are a true gentleman.” Lacey leaned in and placed a gloved hand delicately on the sailor’s arm. “I shall feel so safe in your company.”
Still somewhat confused, the sailor puffed up his chest nonetheless.
“And of course, we will compensate you for your trouble,” she added.
The presence of a lady and the promise of compensation seemed to reconcile the sailor to being shanghaied.
Jonathan soon grew glad of the larger man’s presence. A prickling feeling along his back warned him that not-so-friendly eyes watched their progress. Men roamed the streets in packs, eying each other like dogs deciding whether to fight.