The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  Speechless with delight, I spread my arms wide, leaned forward over the table, and grinned at Mercy Underhill.

  She smiled at me with one side of her too-tender mouth. Pleased with herself. As well she should have been. The woman who makes my blood sing isn’t simply a talented wordsmith but apparently an investigative genius to boot. I shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d given me the decisive clue to the kinchin murder tragedy years ago, when by dint of her charity work she’d introduced me to Ninepin.

  “You see why I thought you might take an interest?” she ventured. Letting her blue eyes slide sidelong.

  “Indeed I do. Miss Duffy, is the square you speak of in the Five Points?”

  “O’ course.”

  “And the tower is an enormous brick building, once painted white but now filthy? With a pair of pointed rooftops? Between the taller peak and the front door below there’s a great crumbling arch with three gaping windows, all the glass smashed and then blocked up with oiled paper in tatters? And the doors are always flung wide to the plaza?”

  “Oh, aye, ye know it well, then,” Miss Duffy agreed.

  “I do. Mercy, you’re a wonder.”

  She angled her head at me, smoothing down the curl at her nape.

  “Miss Duffy, would you describe what the Witch looks like?”

  “Grey hair coarse as a brush, all a-leapin’ off her head like, though she ties it back wi’ a red kerchief. She has seven queer devil candles what reek like hell itself. Them’s what got me in trouble.”

  I leaned over to retrieve my hat from the bench. “This is too flash to waste any time over. Thank you, I’ll make it up to you both somehow. Now if you’ll excuse—”

  Standing with a steely edge of determination, Mercy pressed Miss Duffy’s shoulder warmly. “I shall see you at supper, I hope, Dunla. I found a book on flowers in the parlor, and it’s filled with the most beautiful picture plates. I left it on the table for you.”

  No, I thought.

  “Going for a walk, Miss Underhill?” the dwarf called out.

  “Of sorts,” she agreed as I opened my mouth in violent protest.

  “Oh, don’t dream of going unescorted, Miss Underhill. I’d hate to think of you encountering any ruffians. Do say you’ll not go alone!” cooed the flaxen-haired actress.

  Kindling’s face was reddening to a shade not unlike his hair, a laugh trapped in his chest. “Your star-police friend here would oblige, surely? To save us both the worriment over your safety?”

  “He’d oblige, I think,” Mercy answered serenely. My fingers twitched in helpless mortification as she headed for the door. “He’s very kind.”

  “Do you know, he seems so, and I’ve an extraordinary sixth sense in these matters!” agreed the actress. “Enjoy taking the air, my dear. If you go down the shilling side of Broadway, there’s the most marvelous display of engagement rings in the window just south of—”

  The performers collapsed in chortles as I made a hasty departure from their dining hall. Not because I was shades of embarrassed I’d never known existed in the pantheon of human humiliation, but because Mercy Underhill was walking calm as you please in the direction of the Old Brewery, the most lightless hive of human wretchedness in all of Ward Six.

  —

  You needn’t be so flustered, you know,” Mercy advised, her small hand on my arm. “It isn’t as if I’ve not been here previous, once to distribute medicines and once to help a group of charity workers give a tour to some British reformers—or didn’t I tell you about that before?”

  “You didn’t tell me much,” I couldn’t help but return in my profound consternation. “Before.”

  Stifling a sigh, Mercy returned her eyes to the hulking blot of architecture we stood contemplating. Traveling to the Old Brewery in the heart of the godless Five Points had been a mere matter of walking down Centre Street for eight or so blocks, watching hectic sparks fly from the great wheels as the New York and Harlem Railroad was dragged northward by straining, marble-eyed horses, and then turning east on Anthony Street. A stroll of ten minutes had taken us there.

  “It hasn’t changed,” Mercy mused.

  “Apart from acquiring a few score more residents? No, I don’t imagine it has.”

  Once upon a time, as Mercy might write, the place where we stood had been a woodland pond reflecting the preening sun’s face back to it as if the waters were a handheld mirror. I don’t know when Manhattan began its slow creep outward like a cancer, but sometime about fifty years back, a brewery was built on the edge of the sparkling waters. Add a dozen or so other filthy industries wanting a water source to the landscape and we had ourselves a fetid swamp. So we paved over the surface, and the swamp went away. Except it didn’t, not really. It festers under the entirety of the Five Points, which is why all the buildings here sag into rot and ruin about a month after they’re constructed. As for the Old Brewery, as it’s called, it’s an ancient nightmare of a place.

  And since no one can be bothered to knock it down, people live there.

  Hundreds of them. Irish, blacks, and other indigents—like penniless outworkers, I took it—swarm the wreck. Dunla Duffy had been right to be warned away. There’s no better place to develop conditions like a shiv in your neck or a constellation of smallpox on your belly. As for witchcraft, she’d been describing the place after sunfall, when human locusts flutter around great scavenged iron pots and cauldrons on the ground floor with fires kindled in them—anything to keep warm whilst keeping the flames from licking at the walls, doors flung wide to the night sky to prevent the meager hearths from smothering every last occupant.

  If the woman called the Witch could live someplace else—an oozing cellar, a sweltering attic, a populous apple barrel—she would. But lacking lodgings so suddenly and recently, I’d every hope she might be found there.

  As did Mercy. Apparently.

  “Are we venturing inside,” she wondered, “or admiring the view?”

  “This way,” I said, turning us aside. “Miss Duffy was right about one thing—there’s no way we’re walking in there without our own light.”

  It took me five minutes to convince the corner grocer to lend a copper star a bull’s-eye lantern, followed by the selfsame proprietor charging me double the fair price of oil to light it, which struck me as pretty fine style. In we stepped over the threshold of the Old Brewery, its gloom reaching for us like the maw of a descending predator. The front room is cathedral cavernous, designed to house vats of ale. Now it houses dozens of the drunk, the sick, and the simply poor. Hints at upper levels emerged in smudged charcoal lines, echoes of snores and of whimpers reaching our ears. But even in broad daylight, the paper over the windows means the place is too shrouded in midnight to make much of a visual impression.

  No, what strikes you first is the smell. Unwashed bodies, unclean refuse, unadulterated woe—sweat and shit and sex and every other uniquely personal scent signaling Get out.

  “Why do you want to be here?” I asked Mercy, toeing an impressive insect carcass into the piles of broken glass and moldering rags along the walls.

  “Because I discovered after my mother died that if I don’t do this sort of thing continually, I’ll become frightened of it. And I don’t want to be the sort of girl who’s frightened.”

  I couldn’t answer her. My mouth was too full of Please, would you please just let me tear off a string of your heart and wind it around my finger? Anyhow, I was distracted.

  The rag piles had started moving. Blinking at the lantern’s harsh, concentrated glow. A family of Africans—or at any rate four sets of red-rimmed eyes mounted within skeletons pasted over with black skin—peered back at me from a little heap on the obscenely filthy floor. They’d covered themselves in burlap coffee bags.

  “All right,” I said to Mercy lowly. “I’m not glad you’re here, but I’m . . . glad you’re here. I�
��ve only been within the doors of this place once, during the riot over the copper stars’ forming three years ago. You’re more familiar with this terrain.”

  “Not in any valuable way.”

  “You’ve explored it twice?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “If you were an outworker living in this sort of hell, you’d need somewhere between seventeen and eighteen hours’ work per day to keep your blood pumping, yes?”

  She considered. “Supposing even that effort proved enough.”

  “Where’s the light?”

  “Pardon?”

  “This woman seems to have nearly taken Miss Duffy’s head off for working from the light of her candles. If there are seamstresses here, they’d forsake warmth preferring free illumination.”

  “Of course,” she exclaimed. “But God, Timothy, I don’t . . . Wait, let me think.”

  “The cellar is out, of course,” I reasoned. “The staircases here are a hazardous business?”

  “What? Oh, yes. The coming down is hardest. One sometimes feels as if one can climb anything, challenges oneself to put a hand on a rotting banister here, a foot on a creaking stair there, but returning . . .”

  “Which is just what I mean. Would you so much as attempt it if you were stitch-blind? Or even partway there?”

  Ellie Abell and Sally Woods had been doing cutters’ work—hardly a fortune involved, but reasonable hours with a weekly pay. Plenty of other females in the textile industry could labor hemming difficult cloth or sewing on buttons or adding fancy stitchwork with no ill effects for decades.

  The outworkers, though . . . The only reason Dunla Duffy’s eyesight remained keen was that she hadn’t been here long enough. Toil enough fruitless hours in meager light, allow hours to bleed into dusky days and then months and then years, and the sense of sight itself revolts against tyranny. Withers and dies.

  “I’d never risk it, no!” Mercy assented, understanding me. “This front room admittedly boasts the most windows, but it’s claimed by the most long-standing occu—”

  “Is there a problem here, little sunbeam?” a sinister voice rasped out of the gloom. “Some of us are trying to catch a wink of sleep.”

  In a flash I’d averted the lantern and steered Mercy—to my deepest reluctance—farther into this sable sea calling itself a building. Not one of the placeless people surviving in the Old Brewery could outfight me.

  But all of them at once? Should a brawl commence? With Mercy on your arm?

  As we drew away from the front steps where the sunshine bled through, the Old Brewery grew improbably more grim. I tried not to trouble anyone with the lantern, but few of the sots sprawled along the walls owned the strength to object. Anyhow, my type wouldn’t bustle them—copper stars often lead tours of this pit. Rich foreigners hug their arms tight to their waists and mutter deprecations about Americans and feel generally more pleasant about their own slums and pay us bright coins to watch people starve to death. Charles Dickens famously tried it when I was twenty-four. At least he didn’t enjoy it. Being . . . well, Charles Dickens and all.

  “If I’d only paid more attention,” Mercy hissed, following the lantern beam with her eyes. “I could have— Wait, wait, stop.”

  Avoiding the slumbering bodies flanking an aisle so as not to be trampled, we’d rounded a corner and reached a parallel corridor making a right angle along the wall.

  “This way,” Mercy gasped.

  Dropping my arm, she took my hand.

  Through we plunged, and out again into another room stacked with bodies, and then yet another, nearly as large as the one before. Mercy led me with fingertips warm as Bird’s rosary beads against my palm toward a little room along the back side of the structure. When my lantern glanced off the entrance, I saw that its door had long since been torn off for firewood and the hinges pawned.

  But even so far across the chamber, I could see that a diffuse glow of light emanated. A light made all the eerier by the pitch darkness in which it then drowned.

  “The office,” Mercy said in my ear. “This was where the brewers did accounts. So they wanted daylight, long ago. Before we were born.”

  We stepped slowly toward the hole of a doorway. Crossing the threshold felt like passing into another world. But we did it. Hand in hand, heart in mouth.

  The room contained the following, as I later made note:

  —heaps of snipped thread, gathered in a corner for later salvage, presumably for kindling

  —piles upon piles of unfinished pantaloons, sleeves, drawers, and handkerchiefs

  —fifteen sewing girls in various states of malnutrition

  And a single woman with billowing iron hair tied down under a red rag, face deeply scored and tongue thrust between her teeth, working at the cuffs of slave trousers, several unlit but unique candles resting beside her outwork.

  “Who in blazes are you?” the crone demanded in a voice like a knife being sharpened on a stone.

  She was right to be peevish. I hadn’t introduced myself. But I knew, sure as Mercy’s hand rested in mine, that I had just encountered Miss Duffy’s Witch. And I suspected—as would later prove correct—that, as so commonly follows encounters with witches, events of great magnitude and ugliness lurked behind the horizon of my immediate future.

  17

  O! Men, with sisters dear!

  O! Men, with mothers and wives!

  It is not linen you’re wearing out,

  But human creatures’ lives!

  Stitch—stitch—stitch,

  In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

  Sewing at once, with a double thread,

  A Shroud as well as a Shirt.

  —THOMAS HOOD, “THE SONG OF THE SHIRT,” 1843

  “I’M TIMOTHY WILDE, copper star one-oh-seven,” I said.

  Silence. Bony hands continued stitching, ever stitching, actions rote and mechanical, red eyes pinned to the seams before them. Just as I’d surmised, they’d torn the paper from the two large windows, and though houses are packed thick as lice in Ward Six, a golden midmorning glow yet permeated. Tender and innocent-seeming.

  Unlike the women.

  Not that they seemed ignoble. The mere fact of them being there meant they’d chosen not to be somewhere else, as Dunla Duffy had likewise decided. They weren’t smothered in chalky powder and crimson rouge, walking arm in arm through the docksides and the boulevards, calling out propositions in stark detail. They weren’t covered in spangles everywhere save for their bare breasts, leaning out of windows in Ward Four. Neither were they poured like cream into sheaths of satin with lace overlay, waiting to be chosen from a line in a brothel resembling a mansion.

  They were sewing. As if sewing were breathing, and in a way it was. But life had been crueler to them than words can convey and, there in that lowest den in the Five Points I saw more fully what Val was talking about when he insisted we couldn’t go on as we were.

  One of the girls was crowned with blood-crusted gouges along her dark hairline. When I realized that was because she’d fallen asleep with her head uncovered, and she’d been too weary to awaken when a rat started gnawing her mazzard off, I thought we’d do best to build an ark, flood this cesspool of a city, and start it over fresh. No furnishings were visible, though I spied empty grain sacks on which the girls sat, and I presume under which they slept. Outwork lay in colossal folded piles on either side of each laborer. Their lips were chapped, expressions numb, fingers steady as the clock in the cupola of City Hall.

  “Brought your lady friend to the zoo, have you?” the Witch sniffed.

  She didn’t look up, but neither did her companions. There was something almost threateningly alive about the Witch, despite her smallness. As if she’d dared the universe to put her out of her misery and the universe wasn’t proving up to the task. Her hair was indeed a grey blizzard, barely controll
ed by the oily kerchief, her face weathered enough for her to have been born during the Revolution. But the bones beneath were strong, even handsome, even vaguely familiar, as if I’d seen her likeness once in a classical painting or a portrait of a beautiful debutante. Her eyes remained a shocking blue. She’d been forced to sell some of her inventive candles in the desperate circumstance of finding new digs, for Dunla had mentioned with all her native superstition seven. I spied five.

  Finally, her outwork’s quality—compared to that of the other molls—was rather appalling. She stitched willy-nilly, tacking down the edges of kerchiefs as if no one had ever dared to tell her the job hadn’t been executed to his liking. I suspected the lax overseer to be Simeon Gage of New American Textiles, since I’d first heard of the Witch living in a Symmes-owned building. But whoever the weak-handed boss, I could scarce blame the cove.

  She was terrifying.

  What sent you to this hell? I thought wonderingly. What deliberate crimes, what accidental mistakes?

  “My name is Mercy Underhill, and I often perform charity calls,” Mercy answered her readily. “Though I hate the necessity of visiting the hardworking in times of distress. What is your name, if you please, madam?”

  The Witch, for we still hadn’t any more polite term to employ, dropped her piecework into her lap and howled with laughter.

  I could see why the Pell Street girls said she was mad. The mirth was so unbridled, galelike in its force, that Mercy took half a step back, and I felt my right hand drifting as if to shield her.

  Tears forming, the Witch subsided into gusty chuckles. “What finishing school did this pious seminary bitch come from?”

  After that the room turned rather deafening.

  “Want to see a lass wi’ open sores on her bum from sitting?” an Irish girl drawled from the corner.