The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  “Really?”

  “It’s all bob, but it’s awfully tiresome. I mean, she hasn’t anywhere else to go or she wouldn’t be there. I don’t grudge her the space, Mr. Wilde. But her feet are cold. And she naps my stockings whenever she hasn’t any clean ones. And she thinks Liberia is the answer to the Negro problem. I don’t know which end she’s talking from half the time.”

  A smile tugged my lips at the implied obscenity. Bird noticed, of course—she notices everything—and thereby robbed me of an opportunity to implore her not to be coarse. She’s rapped on the knuckles for it at school and thoroughly indulges in flash patter whenever in my company. It seems to kittle her, though, so I can’t object too strenuously. Besides that, I’ve started to notice her talking abolition and female rights and (Christ have mercy) politics. I’d be a turnip not to mark that she tends toward my views a touch. And simultaneously be delighted and horrified over it.

  “Duck into the kitchens and borrow some hot pepper powder. A little at the fingertip ends of gloves does wonders.”

  “Mr. Wilde!” she exclaimed, gently slapping my arm.

  I inclined my head to her ear. “Listen quick, now. It’s flash of Father Sheehy to let you come to the benefit, seeing as you and Val and I are mates, and I’d never miss a chance to see you.”

  “But . . . ?” Bird asked, glancing quickly up at me.

  It was still up at me. For now. I wondered what I would do when I was staring her right in the face and then wrenched myself back on topic. We’d been a mere three blocks from the Knickerbocker 21 at the orphanage, and now I could see it down Mercer Street, its great doors thrown wide like the mouth of a volcanic cave. The engine itself had been polished to a high gleam and moved outside. It looked like a vision of a mechanical future, a weird and glorious contraption. The thing was crawling with tattered kinchin while two of Val’s firedogs looked on, calling friendly gibes and drinking from hip flasks, occasionally swatting an urchin away from a sensitive mechanism.

  “There’s nothing to fear, all right? These are all dyed-in-the-wool Party rabbits who know where their bread is buttered. But apparently my brother is boxing with the alderman. And my brother is . . . not on good terms with said alderman.”

  Bird examined me worriedly. “You think there’s to be a dustup even beyond the match? I heard Billy tell Liam the odds are dead square since Mr. V threw his hat in the ring, and even if it were weighted toward Bob the Bonecrusher, I’d still—”

  “You savvy more than I did this afternoon,” I complained. “How?”

  “Billy heard it from the boys who rake the grounds, who heard it from a news hawker, who—”

  “Right, bully. What’s our lay to be, then?”

  She lifted her face, the brightening glow tracing fine hairs at her temples. “Keep close and keep leery. Any way it ends, if we listen keen enough as we walk about, we can be whiddlers for Mr. V when it’s through.”

  “Aces. It’s a plan.”

  As we entered the Knickerbocker 21, Bird’s liberally freckle-dotted china complexion flushed pink with pleasure.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, pausing in the door.

  They’d done a princely job turning an engine house into a dance hall. They always do, and it always awes me. Silk ribbons in red, white, and blue swooped from the half floor high above our heads, where the firedogs bunk. Democratic posters screamed from every wall not hung with leather helmets and hoses and polished brass nozzles, assuring attendees they supported GOD’S AVENGING RIGHT HAND FOR THE FREE CITIZENS OF NEW YORK and THE TRUE PARTY OF THE PEOPLE. Every corner of the room save that reserved for a small orchestra was crawling with dead rabbits, Bowery girls, firedogs, Irish, Germans, natives, convicts, news hawkers, leeches, panderers, and stargazers, the stargazers wearing marginally more clothing than was typical. All drinking knock-me-down from giant crystal punch bowls. Every so often a sparkling tumbler would drop. But they’d carpeted the cavernous place in a noxious cacophony of Turkey rugs, which diminished glassware casualties nicely.

  “It’s beautiful,” Bird whispered.

  “It’s something akin,” I amended.

  The center of the room boasted a raised, square, roped-in area—presently employed for dancing, a rainbow array of skirts swirling and spotless black boots gleaming in jig time. As for its later use, I didn’t want to cogitate over that yet.

  “Where’s Mrs. Boehm?” Bird wanted to know.

  “She was meant to be here, but she sent me a note at the Tombs to say she couldn’t make it.”

  “Damn and blast.”

  “No swearing.” I willed myself not to smirk. Unsuccessfully. “Flash is fine, but no swearing.”

  “Anything else?” she questioned, rolling grey eyes to the gaudily beribboned ceiling.

  “Leave my sight for so much as five seconds and I’ll get plenty anxious over it.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” she promised, face softening.

  “Mr. Wilde!” exclaimed a familiar voice. “Best out-and-outer your kin’s produced yet! Introduce me to the dimber-mort on your arm, if you please?”

  Ninepin sauntered up with a pair of half-full punch glasses. He passed one to Bird, bowing nearly to the floor. He’d made the addition of a gold-painted temperance-pledge pin to hold his cravat in place. It was aesthetic if not sincere.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I sighed.

  Bird cast a pleading look toward my mazzard.

  “One cup,” I answered. “One only. Do you hear me, Ninepin?”

  “Like trumpets, Mr. Wilde.”

  “Ninepin, may I introduce Miss Bird Daly.”

  She smiled, curtsying. Then she took a sip of the lush and suppressed a cough.

  “Might I take your cloak, Miss Daly, and introduce you to a few of my sundry associates?” Ninepin inquired.

  I studied Bird for signs of reluctance. Not wanting to fret her if she was disquieted. Ever. Nor smother her if she was keen. Ever. She stared up at me, the prettiest silvery question marks flitting across her irises.

  “Have a good time,” I said.

  She started off, grinning from ear to dainty ear. I seized Ninepin by the elbow as he turned to follow. Hard enough to mean it.

  “Behave like a spotless gentleman or I will tell Zeke the Rat who chalked the drawing of him and the donkey in a romantic interlude on the side of the Herald offices.”

  “That’s as much as my life’s worth, Mr. Wilde,” the kinchin whispered, aghast.

  “Think about it.”

  The orchestra crescendoed to a mighty flourish and ended the jig, prompting a savage roar of laughter and curses. It took me only half a minute to discover my brother’s whereabouts during the break, for he’s distressingly large. He’d seated himself next to the pianist on the polished oak bench, facing away from the instrument as the musician idly ran his fingers over the treble clef. Laughing with his tawny head thrown back and his face in its familiar glad grimace. He didn’t seem any too amused, though. It looked like a laugh to stanch a hemorrhaging gap in sound.

  “What in the name of Holy Christ were you thinking?” I greeted Val. “Hello, Jim, how are you?”

  James Playfair, or Gentle Jim as my brother often calls him, delivered me a fleeting but warm smile. He’s a slim, chiseled, impeccably handsome fellow of London extraction, with arches everywhere a face can produce them, black hair, and deeply blue eyes. Deeper even than Mercy’s, though it shames me to say so, eyes just about as blue as his blood. He wore a subtly cut swallowtail coat, every muted sartorial detail contrasting with Val’s aggressively turned-down shirt collar and ludicrous rose-patterned waistcoat. To my eye—and after arduous practice I can read Jim pretty fairly—he’d something on his lips he was busy not-saying. Of a quarrelsome nature. Jim has every reason to quarrel with Valentine, since they’ve been sleeping together for three years. But I suspected this was a spe
cific complaint, not You are a profligate miscreant.

  “Timothy, what an unparalleled pleasure,” Jim drawled. Then I knew him for peppery. Jim is as arch as he is clever, but he doesn’t often play the visiting earl for my health—I know him to be banished from his homeland for his bedroom habits, so it wouldn’t be fooling anyone. “As to your first question—‘What in the name of Holy Christ was Valentine thinking?’—I have not been able to determine the answer to my personal satisfaction and thus cannot advise you.”

  “Ah,” I answered.

  “As to the second, I am at the peak of good spirits and thrilled to be present for this occasion. A boxing match. Next we ought to chain a bear to the back wall and set the mastiffs on it. Oh, wait, that distinctive pleasure can be had a quarter of a mile east of here, so carry on with the pugilism.”

  Valentine scowled. “Timothy, he’s been like this all night. You tell him.”

  I nearly laughed. It was a close thing. “Tell him what?”

  “That I’m as prime on the muscle as any professional milling cove.”

  “Do speak English, my dear man. My regrettably limited vocabulary can scarce follow you,” Jim suggested in a voice narrow enough to turn coal into jewelry.

  My brother, I thought, was in for a bad night of it. “Val wants me to tell you he’s as good a boxer as any.”

  “Which is why his odds are precisely even against a man who enjoys the sobriquet Bonecrusher.”

  “For God’s sake, Jimmy, this is sport, not assault. Besides, how many back-alley squalls have you seen me walk away from?” Val pushed his fingers through his hair in considerable annoyance.

  “Apologies, I was not aware that liquor-fueled daybreak tussles with men who either admire you, are afraid of you, or are your physical inferiors were quite on a par with a public match against our alderman. I shall subside at once.”

  “I wish to Christ you would,” Val snapped.

  James Playfair ceased softly teasing at the piano, turning his body toward Val with a smile that could have kept butter solid through July. “Do you mean to win, in that case? Or do you mean to adhere to Tammany’s wishes, and later I can congratulate you upon throwing the match?”

  Valentine’s jaw spasmed, rage mingled with offended honor pressing his mouth into a line like a crowbar. Then his active green eyes lit upon something behind me. He stood, pulling the ridiculous waistcoat down neatly.

  “If you were anyone else, I’d fight you for that,” he said to Jim clearly. “It’s a dirty thing to ask a cove all the same, and if you meant it, I can’t imagine why you’d tolerate my company.”

  My brother departed. Leaving behind him two deeply dissatisfied individuals.

  “God, Timothy, please kill me and thereby spare me future trials,” Jim moaned, collapsing against the music-stand portion of the grand piano. He didn’t need it for any other purpose, certainly not for sight-reading. Every ditty I’ve ever heard Jim play lives in his capacious head.

  “I take it he didn’t consult you over this plan?”

  “It’s a plan? No. And you?”

  “Ditto.”

  “Good heavens, what are we coming to?”

  My lips tilted up in sympathy. Some might suppose I’d be sore at the chap who spends the lion’s share of his days—pardon, nights—indulging in alarming sexual practices with my only sibling. However, Jim is an honorable, artistic, quick-witted individual, and my brother is a narcotics fiend for whom “scruples” apply only to rules such as keeping fish alive until seconds before frying them or never adding unheated milk to coffee. Apart from culinary practices, my brother is inexcusable and James Playfair is . . . James Playfair is a molley.

  It occurred to me, like turning a page to reveal an illustration, that Val’s steadiness of late—the livid sacks under his eye sockets shrinking and his new tendency to end up with his boots off when he loses consciousness—might be Jim’s influence. The theory was worth examining further.

  Then I saw who Valentine had targeted across the room, and icy claws bit into my spine.

  “Oh, bugger,” I breathed.

  Robert Symmes had entered the ballroom-cum-firehouse, top hat in hand and pale hair neatly oiled back, moustache waxed to a merry flourish, laughing like a new-elected senator.

  “Have you any idea how dangerous that man is?”

  I glanced at Jim, who was chewing his lip in consternation. And yes, I did. I remembered being tied to a chair in a library in Tammany Hall, after having been given the twin gifts of chloroform and a concussion, and Symmes’s reaction when his fellow Party officials suggested relieving themselves of my pesky convictions.

  One of us should get rid of him the quick way, the powerful man—the reasonable if implacable one, the one I’d called Scarred Nose—had said.

  I’ll take care of him, Symmes had answered. As if murder were on a par with a trip to the Patent Steam Ice-Cream Saloon in Chatham Square. Jim had no need of reminding me what Symmes and his cronies were capable of; the alderman’s lackeys had slit his throat because he objected to their kidnapping me. I’m not very likely to forget that occasion. He has a picaroon-worthy white streak of dead tissue slicing along his body from left shoulder blade to opposite collarbone. I’ve had nightmares about it. Repeatedly. It generally snakes itself into a thin ivory cord and strangles him to death.

  “The only person I can think of with fewer virtues is Silkie Marsh, and that’s only because I know her better,” I admitted.

  Worriment etched a line above Jim’s patrician nose. “You don’t want to know him better. Symmes is a degenerate. A preposterous assessment coming from the likes of me, I realize, but—”

  “Sons and daughters of liberty, welcome to the Knickerbocker Twenty-one!” bellowed the voice that I imagine insults me whenever I’ve done something dense. “Thank you for being here—on my behalf, on that of my engine house, and on behalf of Tammany Hall!”

  We shifted to view the dance floor, where my brother now stood with his mast-thick arms spread wide. His high brow was beading with sweat, his posture a mix of Welcome to our shores and to our very bosoms on behalf of the Irish and I can lace a man down to ruby ribbons for the Party thugs. Not that Val needed to win over his own station house—every firedog there would have walked in front of a cannon at my brother’s lightest suggestion.

  “You all imagine we’re here to raise some cole for the Party that’s given us so much in return for our mere support—our jobs, our kens, our comrades, even our dignity,” Valentine called out to the captivated assembly. “You suppose we’re after a bit of your chink—as well as your votes a fortnight from now, when the Whigs will remember the meaning of the word trouncing.” He flashed the gleaming shark’s-tooth smirk that makes sane men follow him into burning buildings and women drop their frocks to the hardwood. “Well, I would like your votes, sure as gravity, and donations boxes are set up in all four corners of the firehouse.”

  Laughter eddied across the room in a gleeful ripple as the scoundrels tugged their wasp-waisted sweethearts to their sides. My attention was on Symmes, listening with his hands in his pockets—smug, impatient, inscrutable.

  Underneath the rest, furious.

  “But there’s another reason you’ve been gathered here,” Valentine continued, accepting a tumbler of punch from a stunning fair-haired Bowery girl with breasts I was concerned might pitch out of her candy-pink gown onto the carpeting. He bent to kiss her hand, prompting a profusion of wolf whistles. “As you know, in February the Barnburners picked a pack of stout coves to send to the Democratic Convention. And as you know, there’s those who are fixing to fill Texas with slave plantations.”

  Hisses erupted. I couldn’t tell whether the sound was produced by the revelers or the viper that was suddenly coiling round my stomach.

  “I want you all to think on the state of this country,” Valentine boomed, eyes tracking
slowly across the assembly. “About Albany, and the Capitol, and the way the North has been showing its tender white belly to the tyrant South every time they flap their tear-soaked kerchiefs and kick up a fuss. ‘Our slaves have escaped—find them for us and ship them back,’ they tell us. And we fold. ‘Abolitionists keep mailing us tracts that prick our tender feelings—police the post office for us,’ they demand. And we fold. ‘We’ve made a shit-arsed mess, and there are too many slaves now, and we’re afeared of them—give us more land so’s we can spread them around,’ they suggest. And we fold.”

  A slim hand gripped my forearm. Jim, now cotton-white and breathless. “This isn’t happening. At any moment this will cease hap—”

  My gaze flashed to Symmes, and my liver gave a weak flip of dismay. He’d unbuttoned his frock coat and stood with his hands in fists upon his torso. The surface of his face, the polish on the cauldron, openly jeered at my brother. The interior bubbled over with Hunker rage.

  “Well, when I look out over this crowd, do you want to know what I see?” Valentine cried. “I see a pack of honest working coves—working molls too, by God—taxpayers who take their lumps along with their wages and would die rather than show the white feather.” Unabashed applause erupted. “I see steel-spined Party loyalists sick enough to hash their guts out over being told, We’re too occupied shaking hands with slaveholders to hoist you out of the mud when you fall.” Louder cheers and the stomping of boots. “I see a brotherhood of patriots who would take up their rifles rather than surrender to a tribe of fat parasites who derail our Northern government, shit on our proposals, offend our good graces, and think hard work doesn’t merit decent wages—or any wages at all!”

  The atmosphere, stifling and roaring as a breaking June thunderstorm, registered its approval. Jim had a vise grip on my arm by then.

  “Don’t,” he said tightly, and not to me. “Don’t, please, stop—”