The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  I might have mentioned already that the potatoes in Ireland were rotting. It seems worth mentioning again. There was a problem regarding the edible nature of the tuber on Irish shores that directly affected our general welfare.

  So of course there were too many girls lining up to be raped to accommodate the man who wanted to rape them. But generally when circumstances set my blood stewing so hot, terrible things happen.

  That day was no exception.

  “Ready to lock this worm underground?” I questioned.

  “Always a pleasure, Mr. Wilde,” the eccentric Dutchman replied.

  When our grandfatherly Pied Piper had assembled his elite band, ignoring the pleas of those left behind, he set off, and we followed at a good easy distance. We weren’t any too leery that he could speedily change direction with so many girls in tow. Nine of them, by my counting, six special-ordered by Connell and Kildare. He turned left on Cherry Street, which curves into Pearl as the nautical-supply stores fade along with the smell of sharp vinegar blasts from the billowing water.

  I’d figured McGlynn for chaffey enough to parade the whole merry troop right through the main door at Rose Street, but I underestimated him. Sliding the sign beneath his arm, he started making a god-awful racket. This is New York—that’s the way to instantly stop people from listening to you. I made a show of pulling a newspaper from inside my greatcoat while Piest pretended interest over the advertisement I pointed at.

  “Applications for manufactory work with mandatory sewing skills, speed test this way!” McGlynn boomed, beaming at the women as he waved at the more discreet service entrance. “Step right through! Training is provided at all aptitude levels, ladies!”

  “I’m going to feed this man his own bollocks,” I mentioned behind the paper. Meaning the sentiment, if not the literal activity.

  “We’ve only to wait until they are cloistered with Mr. Kildare and Mr. Connell, and then I will gladly assist in the . . .” Mr. Piest’s voice trailed off as he spared a glance above the page.

  “What?” I whispered. Not daring to look up, when from the rigidity of his limbs I knew that Mr. Piest was staring intently.

  “Erm, very likely the most innocent of misunderstandings and nothing that ought to cause you the remotest alarm.”

  “Jakob,” I said forcefully.

  “It’s just that your brother . . .”

  My attention snapped like a whipcord up to the front door of the Queen Mab.

  And yes, there was Val, walking tranquil as you please up the front steps of a clearinghouse. My brother, Valentine Wilde, the captain of the Ward Eight copper stars and the neighborhood’s Party boss, the legendary hero of more fires than I care to ruminate over and the undisputed bane of my existence, carrying a leaded walking stick twice as dangerous as his tongue—and that is saying something—shut the door of the Queen Mab without a backward glance.

  “Did—”

  “He didn’t see us,” I assured Mr. Piest.

  “Then what—”

  “Oh, Christ,” I interrupted him for the second time.

  For Val wasn’t the only visitor I recognized entering the Queen Mab just then.

  The man following close after my brother—not a sinister shadow, just a fellow arriving at an appointment—was also known to Piest, for he stiffened again. The newcomer was tall and superficially dashing. I didn’t know him well, and I didn’t want to know him better. At all. In fact, I’d once known him only as Pocket Watch. That was on the occasion, of course, when he’d volunteered to kill me. His real name was Robert Symmes.

  I might as well have introduced him, though, as Tammany Hall.

  2

  . . . an old lady called, asking aid in reclaiming a grandchild who had been led astray at the age of fourteen, by a married man, a father, Superintendent of the Sabbath School to which she belonged! She had been under his deadly influence for more than a year. . . . They fear, young as she is, she is so contaminated, that nothing but coercion and a long confinement will avail anything. The House of Refuge was recommended as the most suitable place for her.

  —THE ADVOCATE OF MORAL REFORM AND FAMILY GUARDIAN, 1852

  JAKOB PIEST AND I STOOD outside the Queen Mab on the languidly brightening morning of Wednesday, April 19, 1848. Wondering what was best, or in fact possible, to do.

  Briefly, I assured myself that Val’s personal roster of less-than-desirable habits—which so far as I was definitely aware included narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion, sodomy, spying, forgery, and lying—could never lead to the sort of debased vice indulged in that place. He’d always been especially infuriated by the notion of the gentler sex being bullied, come to that. I pictured his bold, cynical, morphine-strained face when he discovered just where he was and realized we were in for a hearty serving of warm trouble.

  As is pretty usual practice for me.

  Folding the paper, I peered at the Queen Mab. Three stories, some of its windows ominously boarded over. Built before the population explosion and thus sturdy if obscenely crumbling. Carpenters these days will lean a pair of uncured planks against each other in the wildwoods north of Chelsea, spread a welcome mat in front, and call it a town house. That would be amusing, supposing humans didn’t actually live in such places.

  “It’s to do with the election, it must be,” I conjectured.

  “I question this choice of meeting place in the strongest terms,” Piest replied gloomily.

  Robert Symmes was about to be reelected, which meant he needed my brother. Val is a police captain by virtue of wit and nerve, a fireman by virtue of tragic history, and a deity to countless Irish by virtue of feeding them. Or if not feeding them directly at the Knickerbocker Engine Company Number 21 on charitable Sundays, then setting them up with the work enabling them to buy cabbage. They’d have plenty to palaver about, the Tammany politician and the Tammany legend who’d deliver him the election on a scrollworked platter. Especially considering the recent splintering of the Party along Hunker and Barnburner lines. But whatever was afoot, it muddled our own ploy.

  “I don’t like this at all,” I confessed. “Trust Kildare and Connell to keep the girls safe in the meanwhile . . . but we can’t very well start a raid in the middle of a Party meeting.”

  “I cannot see that we have any alternative choice in the matter,” Piest observed worriedly. “We ought to tip a hat to our betters, take the lay of the land, and then I propose it’s on to McGlynn.”

  He was right to be anxious. The neophyte police force has always been loathed by the Whig Party, which makes us a pretty squarely Democratic affair. Thus, copper stars who cross Tammany tend to be summarily transferred to the bottom of the Hudson. Grasping this fairly relevant principle had proved one of the nastier lessons of my none-too-peaceable lifetime.

  “Right, then,” I said, and we strode across the street.

  I eased open the unlocked door. We found ourselves in a dank hallway decorated in the style typical of bordellos inhabited by the semistarving. Someone had taken a pornographic magazine, the sort one seeks in dusky alleyway racks, framed all the moldering pages, and hung them from the plaster. It was not an inspiring display, in light of circumstances.

  Voices drifted through a crack in a nearby door. This time I did knock. Though I didn’t wait for an answer.

  “. . . the reason I knew you could be counted on,” Symmes continued. “Oh, here’s your brother. I’d no idea you wanted to bring him in, Captain. But it’s genuinely rewarding to see how Party-minded you’re becoming over time, Mr. Wilde.”

  Had Symmes seen my true mind, he’d have read printed along the inner circumference of my skull the motto DAMN POLITICS, DAMN THE DEMOCRATS, AND DAMN YOU FOR THE LOW WEASEL YOU ARE. But admittedly I’ve spent the past few years at intensive training in keeping my mouth closed when necessary. The hard way. So I touched t
he edge of my broad hat and nodded, saying, “This is my colleague, Roundsman Jakob Piest.”

  Robert Symmes sat with a glass of brown liquor in his hand, smirking at nothing specific. He seems always to be wishing he could be better occupied or in flasher company, compulsively checking his heavy silver pocket watch. This might flam the foolish into thinking he’s powerful, but to my mind he’s impressive only in the way inert solid-gold bars are. He’s tall and broad-shouldered and blue-eyed and blond, with fairer hair than my brother and a sharper face—all angles and edges in a way that makes him look strong, even thoughtful. He isn’t thoughtful, though. He wears an artful moustache, brilliant waistcoats, turned-down white collars, and a smug expression, and if he’s ever done a good thing for Ward Eight other than to leave it alone, I can’t imagine it.

  Meanwhile, my brother was fighting the lingering effects of a spree. His bright green eyes shone feverishly, and the sporadic twitch of his chin meant nothing good. I’d used to spend my nights wondering with a spear in my belly whether, if Val survived the amount of morphine he’d swallowed, it would merely mean he’d die fighting a fire the next day. Rendering the lucky recovery moot. The man thinks he killed our parents in the leaf-crisp brown autumn of 1828 when our home in Greenwich Village tragically went up in cinders. Thus the firedogging, and the narcotics, and the not-very-bearable fact that I can’t change any of it. I’d have better luck requesting in a stern note that the British Parliament stop shipping us Irish peasants than I would persuading my brother to forget what happened the year he turned sixteen and accidentally dropped a lit cigar end in our stable. Or so I assume. There are things, 1828 foremost among them, that we absolutely do not discuss in English. Occasionally in blistering silences. In quick-shuttered looks. Nothing more.

  But lately Val, though he hasn’t changed, has mellowed. He’s more inclined to break a scoundrel’s nose than his leg. Lose consciousness in a dazzling white fog of liquor and opiates on the floor of the Liberty’s Blood saloon rather than in a ditch. It’s . . . nice. Sort of domestic, I suppose. If baffling. He wore the same cut of rich Bowery duds as Symmes did, tailored black trousers and a tightly fitted emerald jacket over a morning-glory-patterned waistcoat that was equally expensive as laughable.

  “Tim,” Val grunted, electing not to be surprised. “Mr. Piest. Well, since you both savvy what I do already, the podium’s yours, Alderman. Keen to report a crime in a private way, I take it?”

  It was smoothly done. The pair of us sat on the molding settee across from my brother and his alderman, by now plenty fretful over our own designs. I reached down to tug at a bootlace and tapped at Mr. Piest’s skinny calf en route. Understanding me, his scarecrow limbs popped upright again.

  “Alderman Symmes, I wished merely to pay my sincerest personal respects, since I’ve another, unavoidable engagement. Rest assured that my esteemed, nay, my renowned colleague Mr. Wilde here will inform me in the greatest possible detail how it is we may assist you, and to that end may I wish you a very good day.”

  The door clicked shut behind us. Which muffled the direction of my friend’s clamorous boot soles, thank Christ. I leaned forward with my fingers linked, all attention. Val ran a finger over the semicircle etched in his chin.

  “Well,” Symmes sniffed. “To begin with, Mr. Wilde, as you may know, I am the owner of a considerable amount of property, ranging in description from housing for our newest voters to estates north of Thirty-fifth Street to modern textile manufactories.”

  My brain readily translated, Slums, rectangles of woodland, and human gristmills.

  “You could call me a rich man without being a liar, Captain,” Symmes continued. “And I’ve earned it too, every chipped penny—my manufactories are the universal pride of Ward Two. It’s to do with one of them I called you here.”

  The manufactory girls who work downtown and populate the Bowery are the least terrible sight in a legion of piss-poor vistas of late. They’re bizarre creatures, to be sure, outlandish as elephants. We’ve never seen their like. They live in all-female boardinghouses empty of fathers and husbands, walk to work sharing secrets and grainy ripe apples. They wear scarlet vests over yellow frocks and cry “Bully!” at the drop of a hatpin when they’re pleased. Their hours are long, I hear tell, and the labor both difficult and tedious. But they throw “check-apron” dances at the Red House come January. Feast on charred pigs and hot cider. Smile when a fellow like me dares to look them in the eye and then laugh at me when I nod back. It’s disorderly, confounding, and—for a man who sees starving women on an almost daily basis—downright pleasurable. The Bowery girls own a frankness that looks like pride, and it’s mesmerizing.

  The outworkers, though, the emigrant women. The ones who aren’t whores and aren’t American and still sew clothing. They’re another story entirely.

  “Rich man, you say. By Christ, can you imagine I’d guessed as much? And just which bit of velvet is feeling coarse against your delicate bits, Mr. Symmes?” Val inquired testily.

  Symmes drew a much-folded piece of paper from his frock coat. “As a boss who manages many sets of laborers, I’ve identified certain . . . types. Malcontents who are only satisfied by dissatisfaction, for instance—eager to slander authority but sluggish over actual exertion. Of course you must have combated such slow rot yourself, Captain, within your copper stars.”

  My brother showed a lightning glimpse of canines that has never boded well for anyone. “Truth be told, I’ve a pack of fly-cops posted under me, and the only hicksams honest heavy lifters.”

  “In English, if you please, I refuse to endure common flash cant.”

  “I trust my men, and I like them,” Val drawled. “So you’ll have to touch on the specific.”

  Lifting an eyebrow, Symmes offered the crumpled document.

  Valentine took it without any theatricality whatsoever and spread it on his thigh. Something in his face changed from dismissive to intrigued.

  “Specific enough?” Symmes sniffed as the pocket watch made an appearance.

  “Not that Tim here can always tell east from elbow, but he might help shine a lantern on this.” Val snapped the paper against his knee, passing it to me.

  The scrap of foolscap read:

  Women across the nation are on the rise. As strikes don’t move you, we’ll see whether vengeance might. Improve the hateful conditions of those who wield the needle as a sword or watch your outwork go down in flames. We will not be cowed by those who think us less than human. You might not weep over the martyrs we will create in the name of justice. But you will mind about your lost pantaloons when they burn.

  This was enough to give pause.

  Our gunpowder keg of a local workforce has been shrieking itself dumb of late over multiple thorny questions, two topics trumping all the rest for volume and bristling hostility. First, I don’t think announcing a “right to work” and then proceeding to slaughter one another as they’re currently doing in France is a very sensible proposal. But reading about the catastrophic scope of dead Frenchmen in the Herald excites the appetites of our equally ravenous laborers, their callused and empty hands itching for doughy capitalist necks.

  Second, I don’t suppose targeting female workers—who constitute the next ax on the workingmen’s grinding stone—any too practicable, since they haven’t any wealth to redistribute in the first place. Though the Married Women’s Property Act just allowed them marginal safety as regards inheritance, they’re still about as well-off, legally speaking, as your more pampered stock of Georgia house slave. When once married, they don’t own their kinchin, they don’t own their wages, they don’t even own their own hides if the master of the house is inclined to regular doses of the belt.

  As women have recently begun to point out. To vigorous and near-universal ridicule.

  So the note was genuinely worrisome. Meanwhile, Val had indirectly asked me to play my little saloon-keeper’s parlo
r trick with it. So I set to.

  “This was wrapped around a small brick or stone. The wrinkles radiate from four points. Thrown through your window, maybe?” I asked, eyeing the alderman.

  Symmes blinked in surprise and then shrugged the insight off. “It was, at that. I suppose next you’ll pinpoint the perpetrator?”

  “I’m not a magician. But the author probably has access to a printing press. Maybe an apprentice at one of the smaller journals, though a man who does small batches from home isn’t impossible. Whoever made this wanted it to resemble a major newspaper, but that’s hocus. The Herald, the Tribune, they’re all printed double-sided. This is printed on one side only—a special order, then. From the tone I’d figure the writer for educated and plenty familiar with foreign politics.”

  Symmes sat with a smirk hastily scrawled over his face, trying to decide whether to be mocking or bored. Valentine merely coughed in contentment, running a pugilist’s knuckles down his costly waistcoat.

  “Threats of this sort are common enough,” I reasoned, keen to escape upstairs. “People borrow wild language from the morning editions, lay ideas that never hatch.”

  “Granted, I suppose many locals are corrupted by the writings of foreign anarchists and Yidishers,” Symmes owned, yawning.