Alexander C. Irvine

by A Scattering of Jades

  “You haven’t heard?” Mike’s eyes gleamed in his srubbled face and a frantic grin bared all of his teeth. “We’re headed for Wall Street. Tonight we make a haul.”

  “What, from a fire? Taking bets on what burns, are you, Mikey?”

  Mike shifted his weight impatiently. “Not just any fire, Archie. The whole bloody First Ward’s gone up. Situation like that, it’s every man for himself, know what I mean? Police won’t do nothin’.”

  The black on Archie’s hand started to make more sense. “You’ve been there already?” he asked wanly. If Mike had, it was cerain that Bennett had as well.

  Mike had started to run again, but he stopped long enough to shake his head. “No, this is from a little blaze we have going right at home. Pickings are better down south, though.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “See you there.” Mike shouted a laugh and sprinted off after the mob.

  A police wagon careened around the corner at Mulberry, and bells rang distantly over the clamor as more and more rival fire crews converged on the blaze. They would do more brawling than firefighting, and then the police would arrest them, but come morning they’d boast about having been there all the same. The racket had also roused a few of New York’s ubiquitous pigs, who braved the numbing cold to nose among frozen garbage and mutter porcine threats over fresh horse manure. Mules and dray horses, even a few oxen pulling carts, pushed through ragged clots of people on foot, and standing in the middle of the street was getting dangerous. Getting in these people’s way down on Wall Street would be dangerous, too, Archie decided. Not a night to be a policeman.

  Fire bells sounded again, nearer this time. Looking back to the west, Archie saw bright flames leaping over the jumbled rooftops of the Five Points. There were always bonfires going in the courtyards of the shabbier tenements, but this was much too large for a barrel fire.

  A little blaze we have going right at home, Mike had said; it was on Orange, from the looks of it. The thought got Archie walking again, peering intently at the peculiar shapes brought into vivid relief by the flames. For a moment, they’d seemed oddly like faces. Women’s faces.

  In a few steps, he broke into a trot, and then he was running, fighting against the tide that flowed from the slums down toward Wall Street.

  The four—story building on the corner of Orange and Franklin Streets had been one of the first tenements constructed in the city of New York. Archie had watched it being built in four frenzied days during February of 1832, knowing that when it was finished, he and Helen would finally be able to leave her parents’ house and begin a life of their own after six months in the stifling Brooklyn gentry. They had rented a corner apartment on the third floor before the building was completed and moved on the first of March, meeting Udo when they hired him to move their things from the Brooklyn ferry docks to their new home. Jane was born on April third, midwifed by an old Mexican woman who lived alone in the attic.

  Originally the ground floor had been home to small merchants, but they were gone and their place taken by starving, cholera-ravaged squatters. Before being built over, the area had been a swampy pond called the Collect, drained because of its threat to public health. But even with the Collect Pond gone, disease persisted in the Five Points. Its victims lay in courtyards until city crews removed them for burial.

  Now Archie stood rooted to the cobblestones of Orange Street, helplessly gaping at the burning, blackened ghost of his home. The roof of the Destiny tenement, called by its tenants the Destitute, tilted and collapsed, crushing the rest of the building beneath it and uncoiling a flattened mushroom of fire into the icy December night. Showers of sparks and embers twisted and danced on the frigid currents of the north wind, whirling away south as the gathered crowd scattered to the other side of the street, away from the building’s roughly carved cornices shattering on the frozen ground. The piles of refuse choking the gutters ignited in the spill of wreckage, and the few fire companies not gone to the financial district gave up, removing their wagons and horses to safety.

  As the street cleared, Archie saw a line of bodies laid in a row on the stones of Franklin Street, scarcely six feet from the mounds of burning rubbish and the collapsed innards of the tenement’s rooms. He walked slowly toward them.

  Behind him, firemen shouted warnings and someone called out “Suicide!” Archie moved from body to body, peeling back the threadbare coats and blankets covering dead faces. The heat from the fire hung on him like a living thing, steaming the blown snow from his back and shoulders. He lifted the next makeshift shroud, glanced at the tiny form huddled next to it, and sank to his knees.

  Helen’s dress was nearly gone, a bit of its high collar and bodice all that remained other than a cuff on one blistered arm, and the laces had burned out of the boots he’d bought her the Christmas past. Her hair was burned away, the skin of her neck and scalp split and blackened, but her face was marred only by singed-away eyebrows and its expression; there was no real fear in it, or pain, but a deep and searching shock, as if something at the very end had surprised her more than burning to death in a dirt-floored tenement privy. Whoever had laid her out had tried to cross her arms over her breasts, but one hand still clutched at the singed collar of her dress as if she’d been choking on something.

  Archie stood, wanting to touch her but horribly afraid that she would feel dead, that a single touch would strip away the last veneer of disbelief that kept him from walking straight into the firestorm. He couldn’t look again at the little girl, at his little girl.

  He turned to the fire, feeling his skin redden under the blast, wanting absurdly to say something to it. I could have been here tonight, he thought. I could have been bathing my daughter instead of swilling beer and handicapping faro. He swiped a sooty hand across his eyes, tears streaking black on his face. Now she’s lying naked in the street with ashes falling in her eyes.

  The wreckage that had fallen farther away from the main hulk of the building was burning down, settling into sullen embers, and among them Archie could pick out debris of peoples’ lives—a teapot, the charred rectangle of a box spring, the base of a kerosene lamp, a knife.

  As if borne by the fire, the smell of lavender washed over Archie, the smell of Helen’s parents’ home and the goose they had eaten the Christmas before, when he had given Helen the boots she died in. Helen’s mother had given her a set of flatware, and a companion set of knives.

  With a hoarse cry Archie ran toward the fire, leaping over the piles of smoking rubbish. A few shouts went up from the crowd, sounds without words. What were the firemen doing with their fancy new steam engines?

  He kicked the knife out of a pile of glowing ashes, and sparks flared up, caught in the fire’s insistent updraft until the north wind bore them away. Archie’s hair singed, curling white over his forehead as tears evaporated from his cheeks. Wrapping the hem of his coat around both hands, he picked up the knife and dashed back to the opposite side of the street. Another cheer went up from the crowd.

  Archie dropped the burning knife and crouched there sobbing, his gaze drifting through the fog of his breath until it came to rest again on the dancing sparks. They seemed to be flying, not just drifting but dipping and weaving amongst themselves like playful birds, all eventually shooting away on the steady howl of the wind.

  Women’s faces, he thought. Earlier the flames looked like women’s faces. Helen’s face, saying goodbye, and I didn’t know to look.

  The wind shifted and gusted violently, the sparks diving at once back into the roaring flames as if suddenly fleeing the cold night. A soft rain of tiny cinders fell around Archie, and with a booming rumble the rest of the Destiny tenement collapsed into its foundation, timbers falling outward to crush the row of covered bodies. A blast of scorching air knocked Archie off balance; he sat hard in the packed snow, the knife between his feet.

  Nothing even to bury, he thought numbly. At least they aren’t naked in the street.

  Then the bone-chilling northerly gale returne
d, and he huddled over the knife, his eyes blank as he stared at burning timbers like shadows in the depths of the blaze.

  “I thought you would run straight in.” The voice had a Spanish inflection. Archie nodded dully, then started as he realized who was speaking. The fire had died down, and when he shifted his weight, the cold groaned in his knees. How long had he stared into the flames? The crowds has dispersed, the firemen gone south. The knife at his feet was dark with soot and cold to the touch.

  He gathered it up as the old midwife spoke again. “It would not have helped, you would only have damned yourself,” she said quietly, and Archie heard the click of rosary beads flicking through her fingers. “Everyone you lost tonight, you will see again if God wills it.” She paused, hitching her breath in the middle of a sigh. “Helen and little Nana—Jane, too.”

  Archie stared at bare cobblestones where the hot knife blade had melted away the snow. “It was Jane, wasn’t it?” he said. He thought he was crying, but the fire had dried his eyes. “I couldn’t tell for certain, she—she was too—” He waved one hand limply in the direction of the fire.

  The wooden beads clicked again as she laid a gnarled hand on his shoulder. “Tuesday, Senor Archie,” she said softly, the lines in her craggy face deepened in the dying fire’s glow. “You know the day of the week. She waited a time for you, and they go downstairs and people outside shout fire. Those who got out were running, and she wouldn’t leave the little girl. Three men drag her through the window and her still holding your daughter. The firemen laid them together.”

  He stood, scuffing snow across the bare wedge of stone between his feet, “Lo siento, Señor Prescott. A beautiful child,” the old woman said, and then Archie stumbled away from her, the knife heavy in his pocket next to his last three dollars as he fled the crowd, fled the noise, the smoke, and the unbearable sorrow.

  Sun has already left me, has slithered away like a snake.

  My heart is like an emerald.

  I must see the gold

  My heart will be refreshed, man will grow ripe,

  and the lord of war will be born.

  You are my god,

  let there be an abundance of corn.

  The tender tassle of corn is shivering in the wind before you has fixed its sight on you, toward your mountains, worships you.

  My heart will be refreshed, man will grow ripe

  and the lord of war will be born.

  —Poem to Xipe Totec

  Book I

  Tepeilhuitl, 3–Skull — September 8, 1842

  The light from Stephen Bishop’s oil lamp seemed to fade as soon as it left the flame, swallowed by the domed ceiling, the pit that yawned at his feet, and his own black skin. He knew that it dimmed only because there was less surface reflection when he held it over the Pit, but it was always a good effect for visitors to the cave. The elderly Englishman behind him took a stealthy step back, his breath quickening into a shallow pant.

  “Bottomless Pit,” Mr. Tattersfield said to himself. He leaned forward, resting a hand on Stephen’s shoulder, and peered into the depths. “How deep is it?”

  “Never been to the bottom,” Stephen said. He pulled the light back and turned to face Tattersfield, aware of the emptiness that fell away just a step or two behind his booted heels. “Just from dropping rocks, I’d guess two hundred feet. Maybe more.” He knew it was an inch shy of two hundred twelve feet on the opposite side, in the right; he had plumbed it himself the week before. But it wouldn’t do for that to get out. Dr. Croghan was not as forgiving of unplanned excursions by his slaves as Mr. Gorin, the previous Owner of the Mammoth Cave and of Stephen himself. Gorin had recognized that while people came from all over the world to see the cave, many of them specifically came to be escorted through by Stephen Bishop. And one of the biggest attractions to being escorted by Stephen was the chance of coming upon virgin cave; dozens of rocks and rooms and stifling crawls already bore the names of visitors from the past two or three years. So Gorin had let Stephen explore when the tours were finished and the money made, let him seek out the next place that a tourist would make famous.

  Dr. Croghan, on the other hand, demanded that he be informed of every discovery as soon as it was made, and if there was any significance to it, he’d have signs put up all along the road to Louisville and Bowling Green. This brought people to the cave, but Dr. Croghan was slowly stripping the sense of mystery away from it: improving the hotel, hiring an orchestra, building a new road. Stephen shook his head; half the reward of experiencing the cave was that it was difficult to get to the truly magnificent places. Soon Croghan would want to blast entrances straight to anything he thought people would pay money to see.

  “How do you figure the depth by dropping rocks? I wouldn’t have guessed that a Negro boy in Kentucky would have had much of a chance to read physics.” Tattersfield was looking past Stephen and over his head, leaning his liver-spotted hands on the guideposts Mr. Gorin had sunk after someone nearly fell in the pit in 1839.

  Biting back a hasty reply, Stephen calmed himself by thinking of what the bewhiskered Englishman would be seeing: the wide passage curving ahead of them to the left, its floor fallen away into the sepulchral black of Bottomless Pit, the shadows growing and twitching on the walls as the lamplight reached its outermost limit, the grooved limestone roof barely visible in the glow of the overmatched flame.

  “Mr. Tattersfield,” he said evenly, “my name is Stephen. It is not ‘boy’; boys tend to get lost in caves this deep.” If you take my meaning, he added to himself.

  He knew he’d spoken too harshly. Croghan might hear of it when they returned to the hotel, but the only consequence would be a verbal reprimand and slight loss of goodwill. Stephen knew he was too valuable to whip, and—to give Croghan his due—he wasn’t inclined that way in any case.

  Tattersfield blinked, clearly affronted, and looked Stephen squarely in the eye for a moment. But his gaze fell to the dust and mud on his shoes as Stephen looked calmly back at him. The doctor cleared his throat and stood up straighter, brushing at his herringbone trousers, and Stephen felt himself relax; the man was a kindred spirit, after all. Not many sixty-eight-year-old academics cared enough about their studies to hike and crawl more than a mile underground for an observation.

  “I read rhe physics in Mr. Gorin’s library, up in Glasgow Junction,” Stephen said. The silence had gone on long enough, and he had gotten what he wanted.

  Beckoning Tattersfield to follow, he walked out onto the bridge he’d helped build across the neck of the Pit. “He owned the cave up until three years ago. I picked up some Latin and a bit of Greek there, too, but you don’t need to tell anyone that.” He caught Tattersfield’s eye and winked. “Mr. Gorin’s a good man.”

  Seeing Tattersfield was still uncomfortable, Stephen stopped. “They say that wishing on a coin you chunk into the pit is good luck,” he said. It wasn’t true, but it sounded good, and he had something in mind. He turned out his jacket pocket and shrugged. “Want ro make a wish?”

  A sheepish smile broke across the old professor’s face, the expression of a man caught in a guilty pleasure who secretly can’t bring himself to feel guilty. He drew a gold coin from his vest pocket.

  “Turn your back on the pit and toss it over your left shoulder,” Stephen instructed. “Whoa—make your wish first.”

  Tattersfield closed his eyes and thought a moment, then flipped the coin over his shoulder. Both men imagined they could hear it spinning through the darkness, then came a sharp ping. After another few seconds, a series of more distant pings echoed off the walls and roof.

  “May your wish be granted,” Stephen said grandly.

  “There it lies until someone finds the bottom,” Tattersfield said, still wearing the embarrassed smile. “I do hope my wish is granted first.”

  Turning back, they skirted the edge of Sidesaddle Pit, climbing and walking in silence until they reached the narrow crack behind the leaning rectangular stone known as Giant’s Coff
in. Stephen paused to adjust his satchel before slipping through.

  “Stephen,” Tattersfield began, “let me—”

  Stephen waved the apology away. “No, never mind,” he said. “I’m snappish today.” He dug in his hip pocket and pulled out a pint flask that still held a few swallows of refreshment. Even in the near-darkness, Stephen could see that Tattersfield could use a rest; he was shuffling and using his hands more, and his breathing had taken on a forced slowness as he tried not to pant. “Nip of good cheer,” Stephen said, uncorking the bottle, “and all’s forgotten.”

  Tattersfield accepted the flask, sniffed it, took a drink. His face screwed into a puckered grimace and he shook his head, sputtering violently. “Whew!” he gasped. “God, what is that?”

  Stephen drained the rest of the pint in a long open-throated swallow. “Mmm, white lightning,” he said, grinning. “Grandma’s special.” He stoppered the flask and tucked it away as Tattersfield wiped tears from his eyes. “You take the light and go on through. I can do it blind.”

  Croghan was there to greet them as they walked under the out-thrust slab of limestone that overhung the cave’s entrance. He fell into step with them as they trudged up the broad path to the Mammoth Cave Hotel.

  “Professor Tattersfield!” he said expansively, vigorously shaking the academic’s hand as they walked. “I trust Stephen did not lead you astray or play any of the pranks he is known for.” Stephen walked a step behind the two, casually eavesdropping; here was where he would find out if Tattersfield was easily offended.

  “Not at all,” Tattersfield replied. He threw Stephen a wink over his shoulder, and Stephen’s opinion of him went up a peg; if he wasn’t taking the stage for Louisville the next day, Stephen determined to take him back to the Snowball Room. He and Nick Bransford had discovered it just a few days ago, and they hadn’t told Croghan about it. Tattersfield could take news of a new discovery back with him to England.