The Fatal Flame (10 page)

“By a Texas-sized margin, aye. Threatening letters, you said?”

“Precisely so. Did you discover anything of note?”

Drake Todd coughed meaningfully. Archie Vanderpool, shrugging, bent to scrape charred material from his boot with a pocketknife.

A cold feeling ran down the length of my arms.

“Who sent you here?” Todd wanted to know.

“Chief Matsell,” I answered.

He inclined his head, satisfied. “White phosphorus, and plenty of it from the burn pattern. You can probably smell it.” And yes, something harsher stained the woodsmoke aroma, scraped my nose like the reek of concentrated urine. Grinding out his cigar on his belt buckle, Todd took a step away. “Come see for yourself, lads.”

An alarming moment transpired when no one spoke. Or moved. I swallowed hard, my throat attempting to close to a thread’s breadth.

Move your worthless feet. It’s a smoldering skeleton, not a goddamn fire, and if you’re keen to prove an actual
man
at the ripe age of thirty, you’ll—

“I wonder if you might escort me within whilst my colleague Mr. Wilde questions the neighbors?” Mr. Piest interjected. Not even sparing me a concerned glance, proving him the most compassionate man on Manhattan Island. “He is a master at gathering anecdotal evidence, none finer, and I’ve an excellent pair of eyes. No objections? Quick march, in that case! If there is aught within to see, sirs, by the good old streets of Gotham, we shall see it!”

After the three had vanished, I felt less like I was being garroted. An enthusiastic surge of self-loathing and a hearty yearning to send my fist through a wall promptly followed.

It was distracting.

So when I discovered that a girl stood gaping goggle-eyed at the ruins, mouth working like a trout’s, I confess myself taken aback.

The young moll facing the wreck of Symmes’s hellhole was so emaciated that a breath could have shattered her. Her face was pie-round and pasty, with flaking lips and royal violet semicircles under her eyes that reminded me of Val after a positively operatic morphine spree. She was too tall to be a child, too lost to be a woman full grown. Starving to death as she was, dressed in rags and filth, the poor wretch looked as if she were already decomposing. She was in considerable distress.

“Is this your home?”

She blinked mechanically, gulping in air. Her much-pinpricked fingers clutched a piece of paper. Her state reminded me painfully of another seamstress from what feels like a very long time ago, when I first started police work, a mother I found in a closet starved for light and air whose senses had tragically leached away into the grime surrounding her. Gently, I reached for this new stranger’s closed fist.

“Do you know someone who lived here? Tell me how to help, and I’ll—”

After prying the note from her hand, I lost my train of thought.

Because it was fair to state that reading the words
I fear that my friend means to set your house aflame and burn you all alive
made a powerful impression on my mind.

It is ridiculous to ascribe this sentiment to the jealousy of the stronger sex. It is not from fear of competition, but from fear of losing the charm of the world; from love of woman, not from jealousy, that man so earnestly contends she is now in her place. He knows himself and the world well enough to thank God that woman is not like him, or exposed to his lot. It is tenderness to her, and an enlightened self-love, that unite to make him disgusted with the first signs of a metamorphosis of women into men.

—
NEW YORK CHRISTIAN ENQUIRER
, NOVEMBER 2, 1850

F
OR A MAN WHO TYPICALLY
culls information from his subjects like sap from a swollen maple, the next interview I conducted was mightily vexing.

I’d told Dunla Duffy—her name, she’d managed to recollect following serious effort, was Dunla Duffy—to stay put. She froze. I’d called into the burned house, telling Piest to meet me at Buttercake Joe’s a few blocks east on Pearl and Elm. He agreed. I’d led Miss Duffy to the cellar eatery, unmarked streetside save for a camphor lantern sending delicate black soot flakes down its iron stand, expecting her to liven at the scent of fresh biscuits. She did.

Thus I sat elbow to elbow with Mr. Piest across from Miss Duffy at a low wooden table, its surface scraped with zodiacs of initials and obscenities and discourteous sentiments regarding strangers’ mothers. Between us reposed three chipped mugs of steaming black coffee and a plate of threepenny buttercakes, which are dense biscuits with a generous dollop of butter wedged between flaking halves.

Miss Duffy, now that she was silhouetted in the smoky gloom of Buttercake Joe’s, had lost her grip on speech entirely. She kept reaching for the refreshments, glancing up as if I’d thwack her hand with a cane, and then eating after I’d smiled encouragement. When I comprehended I was ravenous myself, I tucked into a buttercake.

“These objects are strangely addictive for the . . . ah, hearty nature of their consistency,” Mr. Piest observed, smearing glistening fingers on his trouser legs.

Toady—the taciturn and porcine proprietor—winked at me when I signaled for another platter. I’d discovered the establishment during my first investigation and frequented it thereafter, because there exist precious few twenty-four-hour grog shops in Ward Six offering baked goods garnished with butter and not thrice-used lard, a glass of rum a man can trust not to render him snoring and penniless, and a mug of coffee made with coffee beans rather than roasted acorns and potato peels. It was mostly empty in the yolk-yellow spring afternoon. But by midnight it would be swarming with newsboys. Fresh kinchin newsboys of five years to hardened ruffian newsboys of fifteen, keen to lift a well-earned glass before sleeping beneath the rubbish and starshine of City Hall Park.

When the second heaping pewter plate had landed with a salutary belch from Toady, I tried again.

“Whereabouts in Ireland do you hail from, Miss Duffy?”

She startled backward. “And how did ye know I were from Ireland, now?”

“Call it a lucky guess.”

Dunla Duffy aimed wonderstruck eyes at me. There were depths to those eyes, however, depths that the open, crumb-strewn lips couldn’t negate. Reaching up, she twirled a piece of mossy hair, which might have been blonde if clean. It wasn’t clean, though, and hadn’t been for months. I didn’t blame her for that. But Miss Duffy was just the sort of emigrant our charity workers—Mercy Underhill always excepted, ever let there be an exception for her raving, raging, radical compassion—would have declared the just casualty of God’s wrath against brute laziness and stubborn pope worship. (Charity in these parts isn’t pretty. It’s rarely even charitable.) Recalling that Mercy was less than a mile away rather than an ocean’s distance didn’t aid my concentration, meanwhile.

“Yer a lucky sort, all right,” Miss Duffy agreed, awed. “I could always tell.”

I severely doubted this remark’s value. Unless she meant I was lucky the way the Irish were lucky and could look forward to forever improving my strength of character by serving as Dame Fortune’s personal slop bucket.

“I come from . . .” Her eyes screwed tight with effort. “Clonakilty. Aye, that were the name. But there was naught to eat there. Here there’s victuals but no money t’ buy them. Ye have a
money famine
.” She nodded, convinced. “By rights ye should make more money fer everyone—’tis only paper, after all, not like tradin’ work for food back home.”

It held water like a sieve, speaking economically. But, God, when I thought of the lengths to which people go for sustenance, selling bits and pieces of themselves, I half agreed, and when I thought of Bird Daly, around thirteen years old now and living at the Catholic Asylum learning theology and arithmetic from Father Sheehy and growing prettier by the second, no more than a year distant in age from this Dunla Duffy if that, nearly an adult and yet so piercingly young, a familiar cold fear gripped my sternum. Just what was Bird meant to do when through schooling, without a cent to her name or walls to keep the wind away? Sew, as this near-skeleton so obviously did? Work twelve hours daily hunched over bookbinding until faint from the rabbit glue? Marry someone approaching tolerable in exchange for meat and cutlery? As Mercy had once forced me to question, is there any difference between trading offspring for security and trading mere copulation for the same? It can wake me in the small hours, the odds against Bird hewing a path for herself through the forest.

Terrible, I’ve always thought it, the way fierce enough love can make the future seem to ripple with nightmare.

“Eating is a bad wrench in these parts. I’ve suffered it myself,” I replied with feeling. “Miss Duffy, I need to know . . . did you
live
there in Pell Street?”

Miss Duffy swallowed the last of her fourth biscuit. “Aye. But I were told to live somewhere else. That’s sure enough less trouble now, seein’ as ’tis burned down.”

“An eminently practical sentiment, and I applaud your optimism,” Mr. Piest approved.

“Will you show my friend here the note you were holding?” I inquired.

I’d given it back, as she’d seemed off balance—well, more off balance than she was already—with the thing in my pocket. But she readily drew it from her skirts and passed it to Piest, whose bulging turtle’s eyes widened at the single line.

“Most disturbing,” he muttered.

“You were told to live elsewhere, you said?” I prompted.

Miss Duffy ducked her chin. “The Witch, she’d ha’ skinned me sure and certain else. So I ran, but then I’d nary other lodgings, y’ see.”

This was less than enlightening.

“You were . . . threatened by a witch who lived in the building?” I attempted.

She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. “It were me own fault. But I ne’er meant offense, on the Holy Cross I didn’t.”

“Fear not,” Mr. Piest commanded gallantly, flapping his frayed sable coat lapel with its woefully bashed star emblem. “We police are here to provide you with protection, citizen.”

Dunla Duffy’s perfectly spherical mouth widened in a horrified gasp.

That’s torn it,
I thought, shoving a thumbnail into the edge of my scar. For of course she hadn’t any notion of what our copper star badges meant.

“Police?” she squeaked, eyes flooding with tears. “
I’ll pay her back
. I ne’er meant to steal it. Oh, Mother Mary, the Witch must ha’ told ye the whole story, but I didn’t mean it,
I didn’t
—”

“We know you didn’t,” I cut her off, thinking,
Facts be damned.
“All right, Miss Duffy? You never meant to steal . . . ?”

“The light,” she said on a helpless sob.

“The light?” Piest repeated, baffled.

The poor girl’s entire frame shook with choked-back tears, making her seem a far younger kinchin trapped in midnight terrors. “I stole a wee dram o’ her light clean away, sittin’ near her candle . . . and I’m sorry. I’ve money t’ pay her back now.”

“And this witch, the one whose . . . light you stole. By
accident
, yes, I know. Someone who feared she might harm you all wrote the note?”

“I don’t understand, sir.”

Mr. Piest placed the communiqué delicately before her. “This scurrilous witch you’ve mentioned meant to wreak darkest vengeance upon you? And an ally in the house gave you this message?”

The rocking worsened. “Nay. That were from t’other lass. She’d stars in her eyes, before.”

“Can you tell us her name, miss?”

“The manufactory lass. She’s the one give me the note and four bits, the one as used t’ have stars in her eyes. Not any longer, though. I took the light sure enough, but I
didn’t
steal the four bits,” she whimpered, fresh moisture threatening to spill down her pale, round cheeks.

“No!” Piest exclaimed, holding his hands up in surrender.

“I never stole the pantaloons neither,
never
, not though they was trod i’ the mud and all and the foreman threw them out. It weren’t
my
fault they was trod in the mud.”

“No,” I protested, equally alarmed.

By this time she was gnawing her thumb bloody as she stared unseeing at the table. “They said not to trust star police. Said as police would fine us for bad women if they saw us on the streets wi’out a purpose. I never meant to steal the light, and now I’ve nothing to sew and the building burnt and all, and I know I were just standin’ there looking. But I’m
not
a bad woman,” she pleaded.

“No,” I said again, emphatically. “You’re not. Now, listen—”

“I’m a good girl. Me mam raised me proper.”

“Of course she did. I can see that for myself. But this note, Miss Duffy . . . what did the giver
mean
by it?”

Our distraught guest spared the note a quick flick of her eyes. Went back to rocking, gentler this time.

“I couldn’t tell ye,” she murmured. “What does it say?”

Biting my lip in frustration at my own slowness, I answered, “It says, ‘I fear that my friend means to set your house aflame and burn you all alive.’”

“It
does
?” Miss Duffy rocked faster.

“I’m afraid so. What—”

“Oh, wicked,
wicked
!” she cried. “Do those letters there tell ye who meant us harm? They must do. Read the rest o’ the note, sir, for God’s sake read the rest.”

Instead I tucked the paper into my black waistcoat, edged the buttercakes toward Miss Duffy, patted her hand, caught Piest by the sleeve, and retreated to the rear of the murky room. We wanted fast answers and weren’t getting any. None that could ease the cramp at the back of my brain insisting,
Sally
Woods is a radical and an educated woman, not a
mad incendiary, and, unlike most, you actually savvy the difference.
Anyhow, I was engaged that fast-approaching spring evening, upon a matter I fervently hoped could combine workplace efficiency with personal obligations.

“We need a less threatening interrogator,” I suggested when we’d ducked partly behind a dust-festooned burlap curtain. A group of newsboys done with selling their afternoon editions flowed through the cellar door beyond, their acrid cigar smoke trailing like proud parade ribbons. “But we
cannot
lose track of her.”

Piest frowned thunderously. “She’ll never trust us, and for excellent cause if we arrest—”

“God no, we’d neither of us dream of clapping her in the Tombs.” I pulled a pencil and a notebook from my coat. “Take her to this address and see whether the occupant is willing to assist us in housing her. On a
very
temporary basis, and she’ll be repaid for any expenses by Matsell. If Miss Duffy dissolves into the ether, I don’t like to think where this investigation is going.”

I didn’t like to think of that anyhow. But minus Dunla Duffy, I knew we were in a coffin with the lid half nailed shut—I’d no notion who passed her the warning, no clue who the girl with “stars in her eyes” could have been other than that she likewise performed manufactory work. So I handed Mercy Underhill’s new theatrical address to Mr. Piest and requested he take Miss Duffy there. I didn’t mean any harm by that—it was merely the best of all possible shit-poor decisions, and yes, I wanted to see Mercy again, and yes, I adore that she’s generous to a fault, and yes,
I wanted her to have a task.
Tasks, I know from personal experience, are remarkably fine bulwarks against an eroding mind.

“By all means, Mr. Wilde.” Piest took the address.

“I’m sorry about the burned house, earlier.”

“Why would you be—”

“Stop playing the slubber when you know perfectly well what happened back there, and tell me what the evidence inside suggested,” I snapped. Within a heartbeat I’d realized I was ragging the man who’d just rescued me from severe public embarrassment and experienced another warm wash of shame. “I apologize,” I added instantly. “God, Jakob, I beg your pardon, it’s not—”

“Mr. Wilde?”

“Yes, I know, I’m—”

“Allow me the freedom to speak, if you please, my esteemed colleague.”

Mr. Piest smiled in satisfaction after I’d managed to keep my trap shut for over five seconds. Admittedly, I’d have placed the odds against my managing the ordeal.