The Fatal Flame (12 page)

“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—”

“And that is why,” Valentine concluded, “I hereby announce my candidacy on the Barnburner platform to humbly serve my betters as the alderman of our very own Ward Eight!”

Blithe shrieks erupted from the women, shouts of approval from the granite-eyed men. Jim released my arm with a horrified slump against the piano while I shoved my knuckles against the cracked fault line of my scar.

This,
I told myself unhelpfully,
is a very unfortunate development.

As the cacophony increased, my brother delicately removed his frock coat and passed it from the raised dais down to the wonderfully plump blonde creature in the pink dress. He next proceeded methodically to remove cravat, collar, waistcoat, shirt, and undershirt, as most of the attendees hooted in wholesale enthusiasm. By the time my brother was bare from the waist up and walking in the soundless steps of a tiger with meat on its mind toward the other edge of the platform, Alderman Symmes had turned faintly magenta.

“Thanks for coming. I’m throwing down the glove, Symmes,” Val declared. “What say you?”

Robert Symmes smiled—an incensed baring of teeth beneath a bristling moustache. But he made no move to join Val. He pulled out his pocket watch and studied it as if it were an oracle.

“As your present and future alderman,” he called out, “I cannot endorse a farcical bout that would only serve to confuse my ward.”

“They don’t look any too queered to me.” Valentine made a fist of his right hand and idly examined it.

The laughter grew, if anything, bolder. Symmes made a bow toward the small, quivering herd of Hunker loyalists. “I beg your pardon for departing in haste, but this proposed match is a direct affront to Tammany! To legitimize it by complying would—”

“I’ll
be
Tammany in two weeks’ time, you sorry son of a bitch,” Valentine snarled with both hands on the rope guard.

The room exploded into a caterwauling bedlam of sound. It occurred to me that Symmes, with his lofty wealth and low wages and priggish disinterest, was something less than popular. He won his ward perennially because of the man ridiculing him. Fleshy male fists clenched. Women booed openly. Pithy insinuations were made as to the nature of Symmes’s character, the marital status of his parents, and whether his genitalia were entirely intact.

Symmes stood there, quite still. Maroon face swiftly paling. It was a stillness like a cocked pistol on a table.

“What’s it to be?” my brother demanded. “Do you think you have the stuffing to serve me out?”

“You want a war, Valentine?” Symmes growled. “A war’s what you’ve earned yourself. May you enjoy it as much as I will.”

He turned on his heel and departed. Maybe a dozen guests followed him. The rest of the firehouse screamed ovations in a congratulatory display I’d never dreamed possible. Not barring the return of George Washington from the grave, that is to say. Valentine threw his shirtsleeves back over his muscled shoulders but went no further, in fact failed to even button the garment, swinging down into the welcoming embrace of his fire gang, sweeping the blonde with the pink gown into a low dip and kissing her. To the vocal approval of all who bore witness.

Save for two.

“Fuck,” I said. Meaning it.

“There are no words.” Jim actually sounded frightened. “But that one approaches the point better than any I can think of.”

Troubled beyond my capacity to describe it, I made for Bird Daly. She was in a cul-de-sac where the newsboys hovered like summer gnats around a punch bowl. Bird watched the proceedings with eyes like pewter platters, dividing her attention between my kinfolk’s sobering follies and being doted upon. Ninepin held her lavender cloak as if he’d been asked to help lift the train of a queen crossing a swampish roadway. It endeared him to me.

And then again, it didn’t.

“Ninepin,” I said, “if you’ve given her more punch, I’m—”

I stopped. Having glanced toward where my brother’s back was being heartily slapped by his allies.

And there—gazing upon the triumphant revelry in the mouth of the wide engine-house door—was Madam Silkie Marsh.

Shall we yield? NEVER. God forbid! Are we so tame, so servile, so degenerate, that we cannot maintain the rights of a free soil, and a free people? Where is the spirit of our fathers? Are we slaves, that knowing our rights, we dare not maintain them?

—DAVID WILMOT, BARNBURNER, 1847

I
DIDN
’
T THINK
when I saw Madam Marsh. Her lips fragile as peach blossoms. Her flawless frame in its black silk dress with the beaded wrap over her shoulders. Her pale champagne-spray corona of hair. Her expression, which tends to read like a polite invitation to stick my neck under an ax. Considering the company I was keeping, I didn’t think when I spied Silkie Marsh at all.

I moved.

My arm was around Bird’s shoulders before a single second had etched its mark, and I swept her cloak out of Ninepin’s arm.

“Mr. Wilde,” he protested, “I were—”

“Ware hawk,”
I mouthed back at him.

Ninepin turned to the doorway at my warning, and a stifled gasp sounded—him knowing Silkie Marsh by sight, as I’ve made sure he does. Madam Marsh doesn’t hire kinchin as mabs any longer, no more than she still sells their hushed corpses to anatomists or enjoys being Valentine’s mistress, all of which deeply needle the woman. Child whores were a lucrative business for her. Both alive and dead. And to the desiccated extent she can love anything, she’s in love with my brother. But better safe than deceased when it comes to Selina Ann Marsh. I couldn’t fathom what had possessed her to enter Val’s station house. Silkie Marsh has her hands in up to her shoulders where graft, cronyism, and Party politics are concerned, granted. But she isn’t stupid. And showing her angelic face at Val’s unofficial headquarters seemed sure enough witless to me.

“Mr. Wilde!” Bird exclaimed as I bustled her across the crowded room. “What the devil—”

“It’s been a brief evening, and Lord
knows I’m sorry for it. But Alderman Symmes is a menace, and my brother might be objectively insane.”

“Mr.
V?
” she protested, nettled. “Mr. V is twice the man of anyone in this room saving yourself, Mr. Wilde. That lily-liver was
afeared
of him and ran like a spooked hare—”

I dropped to one knee behind a small knot of roisterers and took Bird’s face lightly in both hands. She peered back, startled.

“Do you trust me?”

Hot anger flashed over her freckled skin. “How could you ask me—”

“Pax, please,” I said. “But you’re leaving. Now.”

Fuming, she allowed herself to be towed in my wake. I strode arrow-direct for the piano, that object now standing forbiddingly silent. And for the pianist, his cutting blue eyes scraping furrows down my brother’s back even as Jim finished a monumental tumbler of knock-me-down.

“Bird, you remember Valentine’s friend Mr. Playfair. James, you know Bird.”

Jim wrenched his attention off my brother. When he did recognize Bird, he rallied admirably, making an efficient bow.

“Miss Daly, what an unexpected pleasure. Are the gentlemen behaving to your satisfaction?”

“They’re bully, Mr. Playfair. Ready with the rum punch, and . . .” She smirked at me when my ears flattened against my skull. “And I said no. The first drink was pretty flash, but I didn’t much like the taste of it.”

“No lady possessed of a civilized tongue could possibly enjoy the taste of knock-me-down,” Jim said smoothly.

“Take Bird back to the Catholic Asylum. I’ll owe you worlds over,” I requested softly.

“No,
don’t
take me back,” Bird protested.

Jim’s lips twitched in stifled displeasure. “I hadn’t actually planned to—”

“Jim,” I said, pulling him aside as I palmed him a dollar, “please take her out the back exit, and
now.
Go to a late-night concert, an ice-creamery, a bowling hall, so long as she ends up at the orphanage. I’d not ask unless—”

“Timothy,” Jim interrupted, returning the money with a resigned nod, “say no more.”

He approached Bird. Far more gracefully than anyone she’d encountered that night. When she took Jim’s hand, he leaned down and murmured, “I don’t believe these fellows are paying sufficient attention to us. Do you?”

Bird tossed me a smoldering glance and shrugged.

“Let us no longer force our society upon those who fail to appreciate our charms. Have you ever bet upon a dog race, Miss Daly?”

“Never!” she gasped, square face brightening.

“Never? How shocking. We must lose no time in remedying this regrettable oversight in your cultural education. Good night, Timothy,” he added, before setting off at a pleasingly brisk pace toward the rear alley exit.

Breathing again, I made a slow turn. Coral and jade and daffodil frocks danced across my vision, near blinding me. But no onyx gowns with the hard glimmer of polished jet slung across white shoulders, no stony hazel eyes with a queer circle of blue in their centers floating above a slender neck. I imagined she’d been and gone already.

That was before the rich scent of violets met my nostrils and a warm hand touched my elbow, and I spun to face her.

“Mr. Wilde.” Silkie Marsh looked me up and down as if hailing an old acquaintance returned from abroad. Curious, enthusiastic. “I gather that Valentine has just taken rather extraordinary political measures against Alderman Symmes.”

“You could call them extraordinary. You could use several other words.”

“Valiant?” she suggested, dimpling. “Audacious?”

“Madam Marsh, what in hell are you doing here?”

She pressed her rosy lips together in a striking combination of smile and pout. Lacking natural human expressions, she feels free to invent new ones, and the results are occasionally spectacular. “Mr. Wilde, simply because the two of us embarked on the wrong foot years ago, must you be so
very
uncivil? Mustering such outrage whenever you see me must be quite exhausting to your constitution.”

“Not really, no. Not when you hushed your own stargazers, sent free blacks to live as slaves, tried to see my brother hanged, tried to have me deported, told Tammany that I was running an illicit—”

“You hold such grudges.” She sighed, adjusting the sparkling wrap. “It isn’t precisely Christian of you, nor does it look well on an officer of the law.”

I waited. Not eager to waste more air on the woman who has sworn to ruin me before dispatching me like a prize turkey. And almost managed it on multiple occasions.

She slowly passed her tongue over her lower lip. “Have it your own way. I shall be brief, Mr. Wilde.”

“Too late for that. What do you
want
?”

“You,” she said calmly. “If you’ll escort me back to my establishment at Greene Street, we can have a discussion. Can your Valentine spare you for as much as ten minutes, Mr. Wilde?”

It wouldn’t take ten minutes to reach her gorgeously appointed brothel, which was on Greene Street a mere three blocks south of the Knickerbocker 21. It would take two. But she was right—Valentine had no need of me. He lounged on the staircase, the buxom moll perched on his lap, declaiming with his shirt open as his lackeys treated him like a gilded demigod. They ought to have brought grapes and palm fronds for the occasion. The pink-clad girl seemed an amiable sort, for all I’d ever see of her again. I don’t think Val has ever bedded anyone twice, save for Silkie Marsh and James Playfair—the former because he didn’t understand her and the latter, I think, because he does.

Meanwhile, I was achingly curious. Silkie Marsh is a chess player in a world of dice burners, and she owns fewer sentiments about shifting human pieces than a master strategist would in lifting a brass pawn.

“After you,” I said, gesturing.

Madam Marsh swept away. I followed. A few heads turned, curious—any donor with her level of chink would be infamous, even if she hadn’t seduced half of the Democratic Party’s insiders. Seconds later we’d passed the fire engine, still crawling with emigrant kids as the volunteer engine men looked impassively on. We turned south under a moonless sky—blank as a slate and strangely expectant. Ward Eight is one of the best in the city. It’s mostly sedate residences of brownstone, hedges and trees, quiet brick chophouses. And a line of discreet brothels in Greene Street, amber windows aglow and violet curtains drawn nearly to, where women ply the only profession open to them not requiring a sixteen-hour workday.

“It comes as no shock to me that Val rebelled against Robert’s leadership, for lack of a more apt term,” Madam Marsh began. “Robert’s . . . presence? He is hardly a commander of men.”

I wasn’t surprised that she knew her own alderman intimately, nor that she’d mapped out the battleground between Symmes and the object of what passes for her affection. “Tammany won’t be best pleased.”

“Perhaps not. But between us, though I know there is neither trust nor regard lost in that chasm, Robert is not a good alderman,” she reflected, the sullen glower of a gas lamp outlining the picturesque waves of her pinned-up hair.

“Is this about Valentine running for office, then?”

“In a sense. Your brother is a remarkable man, and one whom I have been proud to call my friend, even if a former friend. I passed some of the best months of my life in his company.” She dipped her chin, as if girlish humiliation cowed her.

“I’m not in a box seat at the Astor Place Opera House. Spill.”

Madam Marsh raised her head, annoyed. “You really are the most obnoxious creature ever to sully an otherwise charming family, you know. Robert Symmes is my landlord.”

My stride actually broke rhythm. Which kittled Silkie Marsh enough to provoke a pretty, trilling laugh like a cut-glass perfume bottle filled with vitriol.

“Now do you see the landscape plainly, Mr. Wilde, or shall I draw a better map for you?”

“No,” I said, understanding. “You’ve all ten fingers in the Party’s pies. So in the midst of this Hunker-Barnburner feud, it’s all you can do to back the right ponies. Symmes owns your ken, and thus your livelihood is in his pocket. Meanwhile, everyone knows you’re really in Val’s corner, at least when you’re not framing him for murder or trying to kill him yourself. Have I got it down fine?”

“Regarding about half the story, yes, you show an admirably apt comprehension of my unique difficulties.”

“What else is there?”

“The fire in Pell Street, for one. I know that Robert was the victim of a threat naming his properties as targets, and that said threat has unfortunately come to pass. My residence thereafter lost a significant percentage of its comfort.”

My thoughts darted hither and thither like mice. “Know anything else? Who Symmes might have hurt, who wants him hurt in return?”

Madam Marsh shook her head, the blue circles within her hazel irises glinting like ice shards. “Robert is a man who takes what he wants simply because others prefer
not
to give it to him. I cannot begin to imagine the enemies he has engendered. Though up until now he has been wealthy enough and powerful enough to erase the trail of his trespasses.”

“Plenty of these reprobates hide dirty deeds under American flags.”

A corner of her mouth curved ironically. “Do you know, I readily admit that you are a man who can string words together, Mr. Wilde. Though it is likely the only quality you possess other than a profound knack for barging in where you are unwanted.”

“Just why are you palavering with me, then?”

“Because I want you to barge in where you
are
wanted for once in your petty little life,” she hissed, showing the bile beneath the elegance.

“You’re trying to convince me to protect you,” I realized.

“No, I
know
you’ll protect me.” She gestured at the brothel we were fast approaching, its sedate exterior belying the perverse events that had occurred within. “You won’t
want
to protect me, as uncomfortable as that fact might be when placed alongside your tiresome notions of chivalry. But protect me you
will,
nevertheless.”

“Whyso?”

“Because you’ll be protecting fourteen other girls, Mr. Wilde, not counting me nor the servants, who make the total eighteen. And for one other reason.”

“There’s nothing in the world you’re capable of bribing me with, Madam Marsh.”

“No,” she agreed, laughing softly. “Quite right you are. By the way, who was your companion of the evening? Comely young thing, very poised. Potentially an unparalleled breaker of hearts, if you ask me.”

I didn’t answer her. My tongue reposed behind my teeth, a useless lump of flesh.

Silkie Marsh pretended to ruminate, affected the hazy-eyed middle gaze of a woman reflecting on better times. “She resembled . . . a frail sister of mine. One who was unrepentantly stolen away from our establishment. Why, they could have been cousins, the likeness was so uncanny.” Frowning, she adjusted the expensive jet wrap draped across her white shoulders. “I wonder whether she’s in want of ready coin—the poor girl’s clothing seemed
very
well worn.”

Stopping cold in the roadway in response to Silkie Marsh’s barely veiled threat at Bird Daly wouldn’t have served me. Where Silkie Marsh is concerned, best to keep one’s sentiments tight under the vest. As well as three or four jackets and a greatcoat for good measure. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a hatchet lodge in my gullet at the merest mention of my small friend being used as a bargaining chip. I gripped Madam Marsh tight by the elbow, and she stopped in exaggerated startlement.