The Gods Of Gotham (43 page)

“About five years, in the first case, since I was seventeen. And about five minutes, in the second. Since I was ruined.”

“Ruined,” I repeated numbly.

“I don’t suppose when you were reading
Light and Shade in the Streets of New York
that you ever suspected you knew the author.”

I didn’t mean to turn, but in my shock, I couldn’t help it. Of course, she was breathtaking. Skin like fresh-fallen snow on a frozen river, eyes shining pale blue as she gathered up her dress. Every curve subtly beautiful, hair impossibly black and caressing the swell of her breast before falling past her hips, center of gravity wonderfully askew. I looked away, actively hating myself, forcing myself to hear what she had just told me.

“
Light and Shade
,” I repeated, picturing Mrs. Boehm’s magazine and her embarrassed blush. It was tales of wicked social scandals, acid Wall Street tragedies, the plight of emigrants, and the stifled rage of the poor. One had told the story of an Indian wrongly suspected of stealing chickens who had been stoned through the streets, another the saga of a morphine addict who sold his winter coat for a dose. They were wildly sexual, sharply heartbreaking, the finest sort of melodrama, and I’d read every one. “By
Anonymous
.”

“Such a boring pseudonym, really,” Mercy answered, in the dullest of cottony murmurs.

Passing a hand over my eyes, I pulled air into my lungs and then forced it out again. That she’d written those stories didn’t surprise me. She’d probably seen most of them lived in the flesh, at one time or another.

What surprised me was that I hadn’t been able to tell.

“But—wait,
ruined
?” I stammered, getting a fraction of my brain back.

“I’m lost now,” she affirmed. “It’s hopeless. But God, it was a near thing. I’d almost six hundred dollars saved up yesterday morning, before Papa found it and caused something of a …” The memory stopped her cold for an instant. “There was a scene. Now I’ll never find another place to hide any store of coin, never, nor be able to write another phrase in that house without supervision, and my … actually, my father’s opinion doesn’t bear speaking about.”

“And so your answer was to—to
sell
yourself?” I cried, entirely repulsed.

“There wasn’t any alternative,” Mercy answered dully as the new friction of her cotton dress rubbing against itself trembled in my ears. “I have to
leave here
, I can’t possibly stay in New York, I have to get away, you don’t know what it’s like at home, I— Why did you
do
it, Timothy?”

I turned around once more. Mercy had more or less donned the green dress, though it was askew as ever. Her eyes, when I met them, were despairing. Blue pools a man could drown in.

“I wanted so to get to London,” she said. “To live there. To make my own way. The entire state of New York could have been lined up to stop me and I would still have— Everything is different in London, can’t you understand that? None of this disgraceful Puritan
hatred.
There are reformers in London, and Bohemians, and philosophers, people like my
mother,
and— Here I try to save children, and they tell me that poor children don’t
matter.
Here I try to live my life, including romantic attachments, as I please, but God forbid I ever openly walk from one street corner to another with any man other than
you
, Timothy Wilde. Here I have a desk and paper and ink, and Papa from the time I was small kisses me and tells me he’s proud I want to write, compliments my nature poetry and my hymns and passion plays. And then I finish scores of short stories and twenty-three chapters of a novel, and yesterday he finds the novel sitting on my desk. I was stupid, distracted, my mind on the children, on your investigation,
so stupid,
I never never leave it out, and there it was in plain sight when he came up to tell me he’d fried us both some rashers and a pair of eggs. And now I may as well try swimming to London. It would be better than dying
here
.”

Physically biting my tongue, I told myself,
Wait. Don’t talk. Wait.

Listen.

I could well believe that she had kept
Light and Shade
secret—no lady of my acquaintance could manage to admit
reading
it without blushing. Less excusable but also comprehensible was that her father might be dismayed at Mercy’s producing highly secular material. But it was a shock to learn that London crooned her name from across the ocean so, beckoned her more urgently than I’d ever perceived.

Not the biggest shock I’d had that night, though, not by half.

“Your father made a scene and it ruined you?” I demanded at last. “He made a scene, and you—”

“My savings are now
gone
,” she snapped. “Gone. He took them. Gone. As for my novel, he called it
trash,
and it ended its days in his fireplace.”

My mouth fell open idiotically as I tried out a number of things to do with my hands—hanging them still, cocked on a hip, drawn over my lips. Nothing worked particularly well.

“No,” I said softly, for it was wrong to picture such a thing happening. Thomas Underhill causing his daughter any pain. The reverend can’t bear to see Mercy with so much as a scraped knee. She’d cut herself on the left thumb peeling potatoes once, after her mother died—just once—and he’d permanently taken over the mindless task himself. “No, he couldn’t have. That’s horrible. He loves you.”

“Of course he loves me,” she choked out. “And yes, he
could.
He
burned
it, every page of it, all my words, my—”

Mercy stopped, pressing her fingers against her throat, forcing herself to calm as her voice came to a strangled halt. “I know that none of that is your fault,” she continued when she was able, “but I lost all my money, and Robert was going to pay—”

Sad as it is to confess, I lost the trail of the conversation about then.

I’d listened to every heartbroken word she’d said up to that point; however, it’s difficult to claim I’d absorbed it very well. My eyes fell shut.
I’ve been going the wrong way about it
, I thought as the sickness curled luxuriously in the pit of my stomach.
Thinking her a prize and not a person.
I’d have cut off my hand for her if that was what she cost, and she’d never bothered to tell me that in fact she cost—

“Who is he?” Why I wanted to know, I can’t imagine.

“A merchant trader who gives a great deal of support to reform societies. We’ve been friends for ages, and he’s always had his eye on
me. I wasn’t interested before, but he’s kind enough, and I didn’t know what to
do.
”

“This is how Silkie Marsh knows you,” I realized. “Not because of charity at all. Isn’t it? When you started, did someone like her hurt you, did they make you—”

“I don’t have to answer any of this.”

“Answer anyhow, damn it.”

“The first time, I did it for pleasure, though I thought it was love. It was beautiful in its way, but it didn’t last, so it couldn’t have been love, could it? Afterward … It was always by choice, I
liked
them, Timothy, I liked feeling desirable, liked being wanted for something other than a source of ipecac and turnips,” she hissed at me. “So I arranged to be introduced to Silkie, and whenever I need a private space to share with a friend, that friend rents one of her rooms. She’s glad of a little extra income. And I hate her, but she’s so very practical about these matters that I knew that she’d never give me away to Papa, and there you have it, the entire tale, every so often she allows me use of one of her bedchambers and I come and go precisely as I please. It isn’t as if I can be seen entering a hotel with an unmarried gentleman, is it? Or his rooms? But here, anyone would assume I was making a charity call. And this was the first occasion when …” Her jaw set suddenly, wrath blazing through the hurt. “Stop
looking
at me like that, it’s horrifying.
I
am the only thing I have. A man can’t ever understand that, I have
nothing else to sell,
Timothy.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why not? It’s your name. Could I have sold my book to Harper Brothers after it burned to cinders? Should I have stopped the charity work I love, stopped tending the children, and sewn men’s shirts instead? I do as much as I can, on my
life
I do, and it will never be enough. Should I have married an old fool with a bank account and lived as a whore every second until he died? I couldn’t stomach that. Doing it once, for a princely sum and with a friend, seemed … easier.”

If you look at it right, almost everyone is a whore in these parts, one way or another,
I thought madly. It’s a question of degree. Women who troll the back alleys of Corlears Hook in search of their next shilling aren’t generally doing it out of preference, but they aren’t the only ones who sell bits and pieces of themselves. There are friendly lasses who stargaze when they need a new pair of boots, mothers who spit into their palms only when the little ones are sick and the doctor an easy sort of man, lady birds who yearly survive the dark, dark winters by letting men under their skirts. There are thousands of debutantes who marry bankers they don’t love and don’t intend to. Girls who’d done it once for a lark and thin-skinned bats who’d done it a thousand times. Pretty molls who rented rooms when they felt the urge to, just as Mercy had. Common enough practice. All too common. I’d never thought to blame them for it, for needing money more than they needed dignity. And it wasn’t a fair picture of women, I knew that even as I was thinking it, that plenty of girls could never countenance such a choice. That I was being revoltingly cynical. Heartless, possibly. But I couldn’t be sure in that moment which nauseated me more—the fact of Mercy’s being paid or the fact of her pleasure coming from anyone on earth apart from me.

Meanwhile, what I ought to have noticed just then was how upset she was, how her fingers wound tight in her skirts to keep them still. The way her breathing wouldn’t even out. The fact that watching your novel burn while you stand there helpless to save it might feel a bit like watching someone slice off your finger. After the humiliation she’d just suffered, I ought to have treated the most charitable woman of my acquaintance in a thousand charitable ways that hellish night.

The fact that I didn’t can still sicken me, when I let it.

“How could you?” I asked numbly. “And
here
of all places, here where kinchin disappear into black carriages—”

“No, that’s wrong,” Mercy choked, her voice breaking. “I’d not
been here since … since all that began. Your investigation. Don’t think that of me, I’m begging you. I’d never glimpsed a hint of trouble here beforehand, not an inkling, I swear on my life, I only used a room now and again, and anyhow I’ve precious little contact with her children save when they fall ill, months go by without my ever seeing them. Over a year in Liam’s case. But when Papa found my savings yesterday, I panicked, and I had to make one last effort to get away. I was so desperate. I didn’t want to come here, see her again, wonder what she knows. It was ghastly, Tim. Please believe me. I hadn’t any choice.”

“There’s always a choice. How could you do this to me?”

“But it has nothing to do with you, I tell you, it—”

“It has
everything
to do with me!” I cried, taking her hard by the arm, harder than I’d meant to. “You aren’t stupid, the last fucking thing you are is stupid, you’ve watched me for years trailing after you, the way I look at you, it’s obvious to the entire goddamned world, you can’t stand there in front of me and claim not to have known it. How dare you say it has nothing to do with me? It’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever heard. Everything about you has to do with me, and you’ve known it for years.
Are
you stupid, or are you simply a liar? How can you pretend not to know I once had four hundred dollars in silver and marrying you was all I ever thought about? I’d have gone to London. I’d have done anything.”

I let her go and Mercy’s perfectly imperfect face softened. Relented a bit, like she’d remembered now who I was and not simply what I’d just done.

“I did think you might have matrimony on your mind.” She turned toward the dressing table, beginning to put up her hair. “And I could have done worse than marrying my closest friend. But did you ever ask me?”

“Not after—
Look
at me. How could I? I hadn’t any case to make.”

“How can you say that about yourself?”

“I hadn’t anything. I still don’t have anything. Just a mad brother and twenty little corpses.”

And then my heart nearly stopped.

It came of stating the two facts next to each other, I think. As if I’d taken a picture and torn it in bits and rearranged it.

Val. Valentine.

My mind spun right off its tracks.

That the two spiteful letters from the Hand of the God of Gotham had been the work of a rabid Nativist copper star had always been likely. More than likely. That third letter, though. The one both disturbed and disturbing.

The one under the influence of … of something.

Of morphine, maybe? Mixed with whatever else was ready to hand? Lye fumes, hashish, laudanum?

I felt sick.

But it can’t be,
I insisted desperately, my blood crawling backward through its vessels and my brain reeling.
Just because he’s trying to kill you doesn’t mean … He’s trying to kill you for the sake of the sodding Party, and dead little ones are the last thing they need. He took you to see Liam in the first place, damn it. And Bird. Bird trusts him, Bird …

Knew him from the days when he’d frequented Silkie Marsh’s house and had been dragged off to the House of Refuge hours after seeing him again.

Was he capable of questioning Madam Marsh, with me in the room, and the pair of them weaving a tale to utterly blind me? Had I understood nothing that day, and my own brother the blankest void of all?

My hands were shaking so badly that I laid them flat against each other, palm to palm. I tried out the list again, Val’s list of dubious pastimes, in my head.