by Lyndsay Faye
“It doesn’t surprise me,” I managed. “But I’m deeply sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter how sorry you are,” she said in a dead-of-winter undertone. “But thanks all the same. Anyhow. It lasted a week, and I never want to cogitate on it again.”
Sitting back, I contemplated her. The frozen shoulders and the neutral expression. The hot pulse of living hurt beneath the carefully hammered armor.
“Miss Abell, I can’t help but think you’re still leaving out the . . . the most important part,” I ventured gently.
“The most important part is that Sally organized the strike, and that it did not go well,” she said, voice ringing. “Afterward we returned to work, all save for Sally. I lost touch with her completely. She never so much as sent me a letter. I wasn’t worth her while, apparently. That hurt more than . . . more than the rest of it.”
My pulse thrummed uneasily. “But you were friends for such a long time before. Weren’t you in the aftermath keen to find out why—”
“No.” Her tone was dry enough to cure beef. “Sally had delegated me too many . . . hopeless responsibilities. Anyhow, sometime after she was sacked, Mr. Symmes came to me—as her closest friend—with some remarkably disturbing letters. He asked me how he should handle her, and I told him to let her alone. I’d used to care for her so. I tried to protect— I clearly shouldn’t have done. I’m sorry, but I’ve nothing more to say.”
She did, though. About an illness she blamed Sally Woods over, one that Miss Duffy was convinced was a pregnancy. About just why in hell she’d delivered a warning to Dunla Duffy of all people, when Symmes owned scores of properties and Miss Duffy could comprehend writing about as deftly as she could tact and economics.
So I took a gamble. Speaking as softly as ever I could.
“Miss Duffy mentioned you’d been indisposed after the strike ended.”
Ellie Abell rose, adjusting her skirts. Appearing to me, under all the rest of it, lonely. Wholly, despairingly lonely. I’ve always had a brother. Even when I didn’t want one. But there is ordinary loneliness and there is a hollowed-out loneliness like a grave fresh dug. Miss Abell—in a way that sent a pulse of grief through me—looked as if she suffered the latter.
“All the fresh goods will be gone if I dally any longer. Yes, Mr. Wilde, I was ill with a bad case of ague.”
“I wish you’d trust me,” I pleaded.
“I wish you’d let me alone,” she begged, bending with the table between us, close enough so I could feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek. “And I need hardly remind you that Dunla is half in her wits and half out of them.”
Jumping after her, I stood with my arms spread. Not touching her. But sure enough blocking her, and not proud of the fact. Her eyes gleamed in the spectral light as her hands fisted in her skirts.
“Answer me just one single question more, please, Miss Abell. You warned the Pell Street residents specifically that Miss Woods meant to burn them alive. How could you have known? Miss Duffy certainly seems afraid of your old friend—she called her devil-marked only this afternoon.”
“If so, that’s the most sense Dunla’s ever shown,” Ellie Abell hissed. “Dunla was one of several physically struck before we finally dispersed. Sally didn’t give a dried fig, kept telling us to stay in the circle and the men would stop. She actually said, It’s to be expected people will be hurt in a war. As if we were an army. Can you imagine? Needles versus brickbats.”
“Was she always so callous?” I lowered my arms.
She shook her head, eyes swimming. “I hadn’t thought . . . Oh, I don’t know about before. Or what changed her. If she changed. But it oughtn’t to have bustled me—she was furious at Dunla over the gammy publicity that ended the strike. Sally never could abide thickheadedness—it had always infuriated her when the rest of us couldn’t keep up. If women are to be allowed autonomy, what’s to become of the stupid ones?”
“I don’t know,” I realized. “The same as what happens to stupid men?”
“Maybe. Anyhow. When Mr. Symmes showed me the note about setting outworkers afire, I thought of Dunla at once. He agreed Pell Street may well be at risk, so I did all I could. She and Sally hated each other.”
“Enough to set an entire house aflame?”
“Have you ever seen what a woman obsessed with vengeance looks like when her dreams are obliterated, Mr. Wilde?”
“Yes,” I replied. Seeing Silkie Marsh’s face before me, smiling like that other breed of angel—the ones who are said to live below us rather than above.
“Then please stop hounding me and find Sally Woods,” she admonished, drawing her shawl about her shoulders and stalking into the cadaverous twilight.
Seconds later she was untraceable. I’d have had as much luck tracking the smoke that had left the torches five minutes prior. I wanted to follow, sweetly chip and tenderly hammer the truth out of her. But I’m not that man, so I departed the market. Very nearly as ignorant as I’d entered it.
And therefore doing no one in the saga the smallest bit of good.
—
I headed for my office at the Tombs, planning on taking the proper action of a responsible copper star who’s feeling better than half checkmated. I’d used to ignore this key principle in favor of pestering game pieces until they made sense to me. But people have died that way. And I’m a fast learner.
So instead, I asked for help.
“’Tis a waiting game now,” Mr. Connell offered, his bluntly plain face troubled. “Now Sally Woods is away from her lair, lackin’ the means fer daily coin, she’ll buy her last chestnut, get peckish, get careless. . . .”
Connell sat before me where I listlessly presided. Mr. Piest reclined on my desk’s edge, sipping the Dutch gin we keep in my cave for ruminative purposes. Mr. Kildare leaned against the wall next to my stacked record books, smoking with his arms crossed. Kildare’s eyes appeared a shade more glazed, his beard a tad less kempt.
Love, I thought, is extremely unhealthy. And then recalled seeing Mercy that morning with a sensation like my heart flapping great feathery wings within my chest. Thereby proving my own point.
I sat with a strip of butcher paper before me, listlessly sketching. Later I’d write dust-dry facts about April 21, about suffering Symmes’s ire that morning and getting my pate cracked by an incendiary and harassing a beautiful woman. But in the meantime—colleagues at either elbow. Charcoal in my hand. Shapes shifting gradually into the sweet drape of Miss Abell’s hair, the daring line of Miss Woods’s trousered knee, the pleasant sphere of Miss Duffy’s face. Swirls merging into sense, like a sandstorm in reverse.
“Whatever else I think of this abhorrent business,” Piest said, “and mind you all that I hold no crime lower than inflicting terror upon innocent bystanders, innocent New Yorkers no less, remember, remember the fifth of November after all—”
“We might be rememberin’ Catholics trying to blow up the British Parliament a wee bit differently, like,” Kildare remarked coolly. “Meanin’ no offense t’ ye and always bearing in mind that there’s more than a bit o’ ketchup on yer sleeve there.”
“Oh! Please forgive any unintentional offense perceived, my fellow peacekeeper,” Piest said hastily, scraping at his coat with his thumb, “but surely—”
“Surely ordinary folk need not be martyred fer some daft notion o’ justice, even inside your sad, sorry pate, Ian.” Connell shook his head at my ceiling. “Never mind Kildare, he’s that addlepated after the Queen Mab. You lot could tweak his nipples clean free and he’d ne’er make a peep save for a lusty sigh.”
“McGlynn plays a bigger role in this than we savvy yet,” I mused, not looking up from sketching Bird’s ear. I didn’t know how long I could live with my small friend not speaking to me but felt like I’d mere hours before expiring.
“I’ll question him,” Connell offered.
“Allow me t’ do the honors. I’ve better cause,” Kildare snarled.
“Don’t break McGlynn too much,” I advised.
“Just enough.” Kildare smiled. “And a wee bit extra, like, fer Caoilinn.”
“God help us,” I sighed. “We break him later, if we have to, when we must.”
Seeing the point of this, the others made no answer.
“As for Mr. Wilde and my humble self . . . we will separately question all involved and comb the streets in search of Miss Woods, in the name of our fair city,” Piest concluded.
“Aye. We’ll help t’ search everywhere she e’er was or planned to be.” Kildare rallied himself to his full height.
“And we watch this Miss Abell, and this Miss Duffy, and this unholy Mr. Symmes, may Christ grant yer brother all fairest weather,” Connell said quietly.
I nodded. “Thank you.”
Not with any reluctance. I agreed with them, mind.
But I knew, having learnt my own brains more thoroughly than when I’d first started police work, that legwork and muscle weren’t what was wanted just then. If they had been, Val could have punched someone in the phiz already and sent the secret spilling, ruby red and precious, out of that person’s mouth.
And so I peered at the shapes floating on the butcher paper like the pale scraps of visions. My dreams tend to dissolve within seconds upon my waking—fade into a color or a mood or a whispered word. That sense of reality losing its edges was apparently infecting my daylight hours. Partially realized monsters lurked behind vaporous curtains, hinting at tragedies I couldn’t understand.
I stayed in that sorry state of poor spirits and worse police work for nearly four days’ time. Clutching at straws, knocking on boardinghouse doors. More or less waiting, for all I tried everything I could think of, for all that my weary feet were afire each night when I blew out my candle and fell into an almost-sleep as torturous as the almost-waking.
It was the second fire that snapped me clean out of the dumps.
14
The factory girls of Amesbury have had a flare-up and turned out. . . . The girls were told they must tend two looms in the future, by which they would weave double the number of yards that they now weave on one loom, and this without any advance of wages.
—BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT, MARCH 25, 1836
SO MANY DISTASTEFUL OCCURRENCES plagued me during the four days between my parting with Ellie Abell and the second fire, it behooves me speak of them only in brief.
When I arrived back the night of April 21, none too pleased with myself, Elena Boehm left off crushing fresh salted butter into loaf sugar for frosting. She then deliberately smeared my cheek with a streak of it she’d scooped onto her forefinger. The tail end of the stripe landed at the outer edge of my scar.
“What are . . . ?”
She shrugged, returning to her mixing bowl. “Nothing to do with love it has, no great announcements.”
“Still,” I insisted.
“You mark me on paper with charcoal, I mark you with creamed sugar. Do not worry yourself.”
“So you’re marking me because . . .”
“Because you finally did the same, marking me on paper and leaving it for me to find, and I am glad, because that is what people who know other people and touch them and talk to them do to each other,” she snapped. “Mark them. Go away. I am working.”
Mr. William Wolf, I discovered on April 23, after scouring Manhattan for traces of Miss Woods and getting predictably nowhere, wasn’t merely the author of the New American Textile Manufactory strike article. He was also a ruthlessly intrepid professional who nosed after every crusting blood trail like a prize hound and had recently returned to his incognito work. He’d thus remain impossible to find for the foreseeable future.
“You say you’ve nil notion of where Mr. Wolf might be holed up?” I demanded of Ninepin. Again at Buttercake Joe’s, though absent the half-promised Mercy Underhill. Plenty of reasons existed for me to be testy at the kinchin. “And I’m meant to believe you?”
“You truly figure me for a cross-cove?” Ninepin tore his dainty spectacles off and regarded me with the full ire of the New York news hawker. I’m man enough to admit it was daunting.
“No, of course I don’t—”
“Because I ain’t never once played you for a paper-skull.”
“I’m sorry, the case is just that much of a manure pile.”
“You think I’m a whipster after all, then. Not just some trumped-up lullaby-kid.”
“You’re fully aware that I respect—”
“But you think I ain’t crumey enough nohow to court Miss Daly, is that what’s after pestering your pate?”
Opening my mouth, I found it better sport to close it again. Ninepin rose to his full five feet five inches of fifteen-year-old manhood—which admittedly is an inch taller than I am—and shot me a glare that could have felled a six-point buck.
“I’ll have the Wolf for you by this time next week,” he said bitterly, adjusting what I suspected to be a transformed county-fair first-prize ribbon he was employing as a cravat.
“Thank you. I’ll bring—”
“You keep Miss Underhill. I’ve always said she’s an iron insider, and I’d never take it back. But I’ve other fishes to fry. And I mean that honorably, Mr. Wilde,” he amended hastily.
That was a thoughtful clarification. But it didn’t make me any more endeared to the poor lad as he strode out of Buttercake Joe’s.
As for Bird, she ignored every opportunity I presented her to forgive me my churlishness and go back to being fast mates. But she granted me other concessions. Brief, grave smiles. Allowance of comfortable silences. That is, until April 25, when we were ensconced on our bench outside the Catholic Asylum, sun brushing our faces in passing like an absentminded grandmother, and she asked me a question.
“How do you know if you’re in love?”
So close, I thought, so close and now this.
I actually considered baldly changing the subject. I’ll be ashamed of that cowardly urge until the day I’m a meal for a lusty earthworm.
“There’s a mutual . . . connection,” I attempted helplessly.
“What sort?”
“Different sorts, depending on the person. People, rather.”
“What sort for you, then?”
It was a fair question. “I’m not exactly sure. The sort that feels as if . . . as if they’re a part of who you are. If they were gone, you’d miss them like a missing limb.”
“That’s just as I thought,” she declared quietly.
I’ve never claimed to be a brilliant man. But the following conversation will irrevocably sound the final chip in that tombstone carving.
“Bird, you don’t know James Playfair. And without knowing a person, you can’t really love them the way you might think you do. Trust me.”
I was met with a chiseled-ice stare just as I patted myself on the back for not saying to a former kinchin mab—one who’d known men since she was eight, though I don’t suppose conversations about the nature of love are ever easy—anyhow, my point is I didn’t say, You’re too young or He doesn’t suit you, because when did any of her other suitors fucking suit her? Or God forbid, He’s too old for you, when she’d had far older.
Nor, He’s in love with my brother.
“I don’t know him, fair enough. But that’s easily solved,” she reasoned.
“How so?”
“I’ll get to know him.”
Pinching my nose between my fingers, I said, “Ordinarily, that would be a flash lay.”
Bird’s pale face turned ivory hard beneath the freckles. “But?”
“But . . . not in this one.”
“And?”
“This isn’t something I know how to tell you. It’s a touch on the . . . indelicate side.”
“Oh,” she said softly. A breeze whipped a tendril of mahogany hair against her chin, and she pulled it away. “It’s not something a cove would normally talk about with . . . with a kinchin, is that what you mean?”
“Yes.”
“But you figure you need to tell me anyhow?”
I gnawed my lip, registering the faintly prickling sensation that I was about to botch it all spectacularly. God knows I am absolutely incapable of botching things in a niggardly fashion.
“You’re acting so gingerly because you don’t want to tell me that he’d never want someone who used to work as I did,” she whispered. “Aren’t you?”
Twenty kinds of horrified, I caught her by the hand. “No, God no, that—”
Pulling away, she stood up. There’s an almost statuesque sadness to her calm, square face at times, a timelessness like a marble figure. But this sorrow was messy. It could have felled me, nearly did, in fact. And I’ve plentiful practice at grief.
“I don’t lie to you anymore—I don’t want you to have to lie to me either,” she said hoarsely.
Bird used to be a remarkable liar. A masterful painter of alternate scenes, vistas blazing to life as she filled her canvas with near-truths and brazen falsehoods. They were often better stories than the truth would have made. They were often kinder.
“You’re entirely mistaken,” I pleaded.
“Then what the devil were you going to say?”
“He’s a molley,” I blurted out. “Bird, that’s what I was going to say. Not—nothing like what you thought.”
The tears in her grey eyes spilled over. Brushing them away with her sleeve, face still as a doll’s, she shook her head.
“You’re not as good a liar as I am,” she managed, turning away.
“Bird, it’s the truth. Now, for God’s sake—”