The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she offered.

  Elena shook her head, for some inexplicable reason giving me a small smile. “It was a long time ago. If one is to lose everything one loves, one might as well be comfortable about it, yes?”

  To my shock, Mercy laughed heartily. Elena, chuckling, refilled everyone’s gin.

  “Are you going to ask me?” Mercy inquired, eyebrows quirked in my direction.

  “Are you going to answer me?” I returned. Much harsher than I’d meant to. “I’d never press you,” I hastened to add. “But—”

  “But I didn’t warn you before arriving on your doorstep.” Mercy took a mouthful of gin that could hardly be called delicate, even in Ward Six, and cocked her head at me. “There isn’t a polite way of saying I’m suddenly much wealthier than I was. That is, however, what I ought to have done. I apologize. Just because I don’t know where my efforts will bleed into offense, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try them out first. I have a backbone—I ought to make use of it occasionally.”

  “You have had an inheritance?” Mrs. Boehm questioned.

  Mercy stared deep into her glass, reflecting. “I’ve been staying with my kin, running their curiosity shop. Antiquities, books, that sort of thing. An old gentleman whom I’d often helped knew of my work in the East End soup kitchens, and we struck up a— I’d say a friendship, though there may possibly have been more to it on his part. I found him books on botanical subjects. He seemed to feel as if flora was God’s living art crafted specially for him, you see, and one day I gave him a fern preserved in glass that someone had sold us. He said it was just the sort surrounding the tiny cottage where he grew up. He was always very shabbily dressed for all that he was well spoken, and when he passed away, I discovered that he was the richest old miser who ever slept on his pile of coin.”

  “That’s amazing.” I shook my head, smiling at last. “Congratulations. It sounds like something from one of your stories.”

  She smiled in return. “It does, doesn’t it? I think of late that the difference between what is real and what is not real isn’t so stark as we suppose it to be. I dream electric thunderstorm squalls, cataclysms if I’m honest, and somewhere in other worlds I know the tempests exist in truth, because I wake gasping as if running for shelter from howling winds, and my sheets are like ice, and I can taste the sweetness of the lightning still on my tongue. Have you ever felt that way?”

  I wedged a hand over my mouth. Concerned—deeply concerned—about whatever would come out of it next.

  “Hasn’t everyone?” Elena attempted.

  Mercy sighed dreamily. “I thought so. Though what was I just saying? I can’t always recall when I’m tired. And the journey was so long. There were angels, good angels, keeping the monsters clear of the ship this morning. Under the water, of course, their wings covered with the most beautiful fish scales rather than feathers. But it was still quite exhausting. Sea voyages always are, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.” Elena cast me a worried look. “Yes, I do.”

  It bears mentioning that my letters from Mercy had grown . . . erratic is too light a word. She’s a poet, always has been, but the imagery had turned wildly abstracted of late. Worse even than in the months immediately after her father died. Sonatas and star systems and demons and birds of painful flaming brilliance rising from charcoal.

  I likewise found it distressingly relevant that—by the end of his life, before he hanged himself—her father was wholesale insane.

  “Why did the inheritance compel you to leave London?” I inquired when I was capable. “You’ve always wanted to live in London.”

  “I did, yes,” Mercy whispered, pulling her fingertip along the tabletop. “But I didn’t want to die there. The ground there is too ancient. It was far too old, the ground in London. Already filled with corpses. No one should die there. It would be so crowded. You’d never get any rest.”

  She stood up, finishing her drink as she smiled at us once more. “Thank you for the company. I’m . . . too tired to be here, I think. I apologize if I’ve been too tired. Have I been very tired, does it seem to you? I hadn’t quite realized how much the journey taxed me. I’ll get a hansom on Broadway back to my rooms. It was a welcome homecoming, and I’m grateful.”

  Mercy rapidly donned her hat and gloves while we stared, dumbstruck.

  “Should I take you back?” I asked, rising.

  “Oh, no, I’ll be fine—I was raised in New York. Don’t you remember?”

  I did remember. I remembered every detail, from the cherry-printed dress she wore at the dinner celebration her father threw the night she turned eighteen to the exact proportions of her elbow as I’d helped her avoid a noisome patch of Canal Street.

  And I’d loved every second of her. Even the ones that had been hideous for us both.

  “I’ll call again, if you like?” Mercy questioned. Suddenly uncertain.

  “Of course I’d like,” I vowed.

  “Oh, good. Here is my address, should you want to find me. Calling for reasons is much more generally accepted, I think. But I’ve always preferred calling for no reason at all, so you are more than welcome to treat me in kind.”

  Handing me a card with the details of her new lodgings scribbled nearly illegibly upon it, she smiled wistfully once again as she shut the door.

  “What was that?” Elena asked. Sounding as dazed as I felt.

  “I’m not completely certain,” I replied, studying the card. “But I suspect it might have been my worst nightmare.”

  5

  If woman under the present system of female servitude can exercise so much influence, what more do they want?

  —OHIO STATE JOURNAL, NOVEMBER 19, 1850

  THE NEXT MORNING only sheer sheets of spring fog beyond my windowpane greeted me, as no one slumbered in the crook of my arm. Lacking Elena there, I found I missed her. But no matter how unattached you are, floating like a kite torn from a kinchin’s hand, introducing the woman you love to the woman you are making love to is a curious affair. Because it had never been distasteful, what was between me and Elena. It was warm as the skin just behind her ear.

  I’d kissed her thoroughly and said I needed to think. She’d nodded and poured another gin. And I’d taken myself off to my room, unease flickering like a tremor under my ribs.

  Blinking at my chamber, sun seeping through my curtains in a waxy haze, I appreciated the mere fact I had a sanctuary. Women who find themselves similarly alone, as Mercy and Elena had done, were expected to procure magical establishments where they could genteelly refrain from all corrosive male contact, including such perverse activities as eating in male company and living off the same corridor as a man. Small wonder that Mercy had found such a stroll through the wolf’s maw terrifying. After the strain of her voyage and her housing search, maybe it was only natural that . . .

  Stop thinking about Mercy’s mind before you lose your own, I admonished myself sternly as I sat up in bed. I’d been half sick over it for hours the night previous.

  If she’s here and she’s financially secure, then by God you can fix the rest of it.

  I’ve arranged my upstairs rooms atypically. The walled-in “sleeping chamber” I use for a library, not being overkeen on sleeping in matchboxes. But it hasn’t proved quite sufficient. So I’ve supplemented with shelves in the main room, the one with the window essential to my sanity, and the place thus resembles a library of tomes young and fresh and used and cracked and bought and received as gifts.

  But with a bed in it.

  The rest of the walls, unfortunately, are obscured by my charcoal drawings. I say “unfortunately” because ever since the worst fire, the first fire, the one that stole our parents, I’ve sketched vistas and portraits and eager flames and lashing storms when my mind is uneasy. I’ve a certain facility for it, actually. And it helps order my thoughts when a c
rime needs untangling. But there are . . . scores of them, and those only the ones I keep.

  If I could manage a happy enough month to scribble only ten charcoals, that would be a sun-gilt, face-skyward occasion.

  Elena, I discovered after a duck in my washbasin and a shave, was out making a delivery. So I snatched up my usual day-old roll rather than molest her bread pudding (which was half gone by then, and it barely seven) and elected to pay a call on Miss Sally Woods. The bluestocking whom Symmes had accused of itching to turn firestarter.

  What sort of woman would write such a threat?

  A bitter, dry-lipped spinster, I supposed, or an actress whose petals were drooping. Both desperate for a spotlight.

  I could only have been more wrong about Miss Woods if I’d surmised that she was probably a performing bear.

  Walking up Greenwich Street through Ward Three, I was suddenly enveloped by springtime. Springs and autumns aren’t given more than a finger snap around here before fleeing from blazing jungle summers and frigid moonscape winters. But that day, after the clouds broke, gleamed vivid as the inside of a watermelon. A lovely colored woman with a berry-bright head scarf brushed past me, her basket teeming with muddy carrots and a fresh-killed chicken slung over her coppery arm. Our streets seemed alive as they hadn’t been seconds before, omnibus drivers now free of the bone-chilling mists shrugging off oilskin capes to feel the daylight on their necks. I wasn’t fussed by the discarded leaky kettles in the gutter or the trimmed-off rotting lettuce leaves or the brownish laundry suds underfoot as I drew nearer the East River.

  I didn’t even mind the squat ruffian pasting up posters that screamed BARNBURNER TRAITORISM MUST PAY THE ULTIMATE PRICE! And that’s saying something.

  The house at 130 Thomas Street proved to be damaged by salt spray but far sturdier than the reeling shanties of my ward. My knock was soon answered by a stooped, lantern-jawed woman with a bad case of the mumps, for she’d wrapped a long flannel rag several times beneath her jaw and tied the bow over her head.

  “Yes?”

  “Does a Miss Sally Woods live here?”

  “Oh, yes,” she agreed, adding a small humming sound I wasn’t sure she knew she was making. “But not in the house, you understand me.”

  I didn’t.

  “In the cellar?” I hazarded.

  “Oh, mercy no, dear, I’d not subject anyone to my cellar, the house is that large. Hmm.”

  “But she . . . doesn’t live in it?”

  She cast red-rimmed eyes over the woefully unpolished copper star pinned to my chest. “Are you a policeman, then?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

  “Sometimes,” I agreed. “Where can I find Miss Woods, outside the house?”

  “Oh, yes, straight down this hall and into the rear yard, and do behave yourself, dear. Hmm. Policemen are never to be entirely trusted.”

  “Not even the best of them,” I said with a sigh, pulling my black hat off as I stepped into the hall.

  Somewhere above me a bugle was being practiced in the usual manner—that is to say, unpleasantly—and the rusted-gate smell of a ripe sheep’s liver frying filled the corridor. The once-delicate pink wallpaper was peeling in shreds as if the foyer suffered from leprosy.

  When I stepped into the back area, expecting an anterior shack erected by the unforgivably greedy, I entered a strange and wondrous new world.

  I stood in a tiny meadow. Not the sort you’d have seen on the huckleberry hillsides of my youth in Greenwich Village, and not the sort at the tiptopmost edge of Manhattan around Fortieth Street. No, it was only a small rear yard. But it had been allowed to blossom into a paradise. I trod through thorny grasses and dandelions big as cabbage heads, scuffed my boots against wild roses. Most of our parks are either cesspools or walled-in odes to money. This was Nature, and Springtime. This was exploding columbine spring, spearlike violet lupine spring. Plants I couldn’t name and had never seen survive our boot soles bursting with tiny white flowers. It was bred of pure laziness, not keeping chickens in the back area or the yard trimmed.

  It was marvelous. And just at the far end of the tiny tanglewood was a large, mud-smeared greenhouse.

  Fortunately for courtesy, the glass was filthy enough to be opaque. And I’d seen far stranger living arrangements in swollen-to-bursting New York—people live in derelict train carriages, there’s an Irish tent community or twelve in the woods, folk are flooding to Brooklyn of all places, and I once arrested a man who lived in the meat cellar of a chophouse. Even had his mail delivered there.

  This was . . . unusual, however. I knocked.

  “Come in,” a brisk voice answered.

  I’d expected a cot, plus maybe a stove or a washbasin. At most.

  Instead I discovered a large room, glass spotless on the interior side, with a wooden plank floor covered by two knotted rugs. A neat bed in the corner, lamp and newspaper resting on its side table. A writing desk. Three tall bookshelves half collapsing with volumes. A few pictures atop the furnishings, propped against the glass walls, mainly popular woodcuts of opera stars and concert vocalists. Four mismatched armchairs surrounding a dinted hardwood table, where one could sip and chat as if in a coffeehouse.

  But the chamber was dominated by the printing press.

  A dwarfish metal contraption by comparison to some, but still it loomed large, with its great wheel and the thick arms through which the paper was fed, its heavy tray and the pervasive clean, inky smell of the previous typeface project. A pile of blank broadside sheets rested compactly next to the thing, awaiting the whim of their owner.

  An uneasy feeling stirred.

  Sally Woods looked up from her writing desk with an efficient smile. “Copies of ‘A Digression Upon the Subject of the Female in the Book-Folding Workforce’ are a penny apiece. Two bits will get you thirty,” she announced.

  I’d have pegged Sally Woods, with her artlessly brazen gaze and her straightforward speech, for a Bowery girl of about twenty-five. The manufactory sort, and Symmes had admitted to firing her. Except that she wasn’t one. She’d a large-featured face with a rounded chin and a flat nose that suited all well. Most would have justly referred to her as “handsome,” and her hair, which was a thick chestnut brown with an arresting silver streak at the right temple, was loosely piled as if she didn’t own quite enough hairpins—unlike the molls of the Bowery, whose curls tend toward the scientifically impossible.

  Meanwhile, dark brown eyes can often seem coaxing; hers were rifle sights. Sally Woods’s entire appearance would already have been remarkable for its complete lack of inhibition.

  Even if she hadn’t been wearing trousers.

  I’d glimpsed such women before. One being ticketed for public indecency as I dragged a killer to the Tombs, and I’d cast the unpracticed copper star a dark look. We’ve better tasks to be going about. One at the Minerva, pretty face powdered into oblivion, singing and strutting for errant nickels in dress blacks. One in a private club, the variety where my sex is neither useful nor desirable, posing in a panorama as an unlikely Davy Crockett.

  But as for one sitting at a writing desk like a businessman—that hocused me pretty thorough. The trousers were striped in charcoal and black, tucked inside well-worn black riding boots, the ensemble complemented by a crisp white shirt, buttoned about as carelessly as Val’s tends to be, and a black velvet waistcoat. Over all she wore a grey ladies’ monkey jacket, the sort that falls in a graceful curve down to midthigh, cloth cut as tight against the waist and shoulders as if the garment had been plastered to the wearer.

  It was enough to give a man pause.

  “I’m not here to buy a broadside. But I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Oh, you’re a copper star. Sorry, the light in here is dreadful. Are you arresting me for my taste in fashion?”

 
; “Like I said, only questions.”

  “No objection here to questions.” She rose, nodding at the configuration of chairs. “Step into my parlor. You want a drink?”

  “If you’re joining me.” I selected the armchair done in faded red brocade, setting my hat on the table.

  “Oh, bugger all, I’m out of scotch. Um. Whiskey, gin, or pine beer?”

  “Whatever you’re having,” I replied, smiling.

  She returned with a pair of whiskeys and sat opposite me, crossing her trousered legs. “To your health.”

  Our glasses clinked optimistically. “Cheers. That’s what I would have chosen, by the way.”

  “Oh, I can tell.”

  I cleared my throat and lifted the tumbler. The whiskey was excellent, even dare I say costly. “You have good taste in spirits.”

  “And in absolutely nothing else,” she returned, grinning.

  “Well, your living arrangements are pretty spruce.”

  “Thank you. The old bat who owns the place found herself in hatches after some bogus investments didn’t pan out. I needed new digs around then, and though she wouldn’t let me stay in the house with her men boarders, she agreed to let me fix this place up. It’s cold as anything in the winter, and once I left the door unlatched and ended up with a raccoon in my bed.”

  “Wait, you made all the alterations?”

  “Flooring isn’t that difficult.” She shrugged. “Getting the fertilizer smell out was, but I’m not bellyaching. It’s a nice place to entertain.”

  “I take it you’re a printer, Miss Woods?”

  Her chocolate eyes gleamed. “I do odd jobs—particularly the ones nobody else will touch. Socialism, anarchism, anticapitalism, anti–Mexican War pamphlets. A good many articles on the rights of women.”

  There was such a candid way about her, easy leaning posture and sweetly unkempt hair, that it was almost possible to forget that Sally Woods was dressed like a man. Almost. But I suspected I liked her anyhow. Which only charged my anxiety over the threat I’d guessed came from a printer—one named by Robert Symmes, one whose social causes were scandalous if not obscene.