The Fatal Flame (17 page)

That doesn’t mean that news of Captain Valentine Wilde’s extended amorous liaison with James Playfair wouldn’t spell disaster of the highest order. On the contrary.

“Right,” I retorted sardonically, “of course you’re not a molley. Symmes actually said
sodomite
, but no, you’re not breaking the law, you’re merely canoodling
with a
man
nine nights out of ten, perfectly respectable seeing as actual buggery doesn’t enter into it.”

No one answered. James continued staring through the gap in the curtains as a faint blush rose over the tips of his ears. Valentine didn’t say anything either. Just pulled up his braces as if he’d not previously been aware he was wearing them. In fact, the pair said nothing at all so loudly just then that what they weren’t saying was perfectly . . . audible.

My mouth dropped open and shut again
.

“Don’t tell me,” I begged, closing my eyes and raising my palms in supplication. I did my best not to look unfriendly as I took a step back. It was only a signal. An
urgent
one. Nothing personal. “God, just
don’t
tell me.”

“Timothy,” Jim attempted, sounding mortified, “I—”

“
Not
telling me is what you’re doing. Right?”

“For heaven’s sake, I didn’t say anything!”

“I know, but now we’re past that, keep cracking on with the not saying anything, would you?”

“Why in Christ’s name are your
eyes
closed, you mutton-witted runt?” Val’s voice demanded.

I opened them, newly furious. Then I strode up to my brother and got a good handful of his shirt. “Maybe it’s so I don’t have to watch you glibly dismissing my concerns when Symmes could try to
send you to prison
.”

Val, notwithstanding my grip, tossed his face ceilingward as he laughed over the top of my pate. “
I
am not the molley in this room. Nor the bright young copper star with the panic problem. I am equally not the nut-shriveled politician who doesn’t realize that the Party will
never
allow a ward boss to be slandered as a lace-festooned debauchee. Your concerns are—”

“Justified,” I snapped.

“Severely understated,” Jim said in a low moan.

“Irrelevant,” Val insisted. “I have an entire ward’s worth of Irishmen in my pocket, rabbits that I see are fed and clothed and kept in brown liquor. Symmes smears me, we
all
lose them
.
He won’t smear me.”

“Right, I am going to depart before you lot start up the fisticuffs, and do recall that last time it garnered only a matched set of black eyes and was thus spectacularly unhelpful,” Jim announced, rising.

“It felt good, though,” I muttered, dropping Val’s shirt.

“Damn right it did,” Val hissed. “James, just where do you think you’re going?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jim answered with a too-bright smile that wavered at the edges. “To the bathhouse to steam away my sorrows, to my flat to drown them in gin, to hell, it really isn’t any concern of yours, and you can expect to see
very
little of me until after the elections.”

“Christ on a mule,
why
are you acting like this?” Val groaned, pressing his forefinger and thumb hard into his ancient-seeming eyes.

“Maybe he’s concerned Symmes might make public the fact you’re fucking your best friend?” I posited.

“Wait, wait,
you
can say it out loud, but
we
can’t say it out—”

“Well, there we have it, and I shan’t take up any more of your time,” Jim said desperately, making haste for the front door.

“Jimmy, to put it another way, it would kittle me muchly if you didn’t swan off on the very day I’m about to start a run at the office of alderman and could use your wits, instincts, and company,” my brother bit out when Jim’s hand reached the doorknob. “Stop diddling about and come back.”

Jim paused, huffing a laugh that sounded more like he’d been punched in the solar plexus than it did an expression of mirth. “Why?” he asked.

“Holy Lord, what do you mean
why,
you limp-wristed tit?”

“I should like to know the reason that action would please you, and I thus inquired.”

“Because I want you
here.
”

For an instant, Jim looked about ready to cry. He’s in love with my brother, after all. But the brightness in his eyes might have been a trick of the light. I honestly couldn’t say, since less than a second later he’d slammed the door behind him.

—

M
y business with my brother and his long-suffering friend having been conducted to the satisfaction of no one, I went south to Thomas Street to speak with and probably arrest Sally Woods. Natural inclination urged me to instead go straight to Mercy Underhill’s new residence, both to question Miss Duffy further (a note from Piest assured me that she’d been readily welcomed by the object of my devotion) and to study the curl that refuses to be included in Mercy’s hair arrangements and rests, a single whorl of feathery black, at the nape of her neck. Since that’s what I wanted to do, rather than learn that Miss Woods was a murderess, my duties to Manhattan clearly lay in the opposite direction.

The Thomas Street landlady with the unfortunate mumps affliction appeared unsurprised to see me, merely making a humming sound when she answered.

“Might I go through and speak with Miss Woods again?”

She glanced at my star pin. “Police roaming the streets, meddling with perfectly decent folk. It’s not Christian, dear.”

“Agreed,” I answered as I passed through into the hall.

The little greenhouse in its wild habitat had taken on a decidedly more sinister air since the Pell Street fire and the collection of violent threats in my frock coat. The grimy glass house I’d once thought charming now called to mind a sorceress’s cottage, nestled in the depths of a wood where crooked paths change their patterns in the dappled sunlight, leading kinchin ever farther into the gloom of gnarled trees.

My knock was answered with an energetic “Come in!” and I entered. Miss Woods was at her printing press, setting type. When she saw me, she brushed her fingers together and pulled a nearby tarp over the machine.

“Liberal as you are, that’s a right fiery piece written by one of my former classmates for the
Working Man’s
Advocate,
and I’m really not financially stable enough to be fined just now,” she said, smiling nervously. She wore trousers again, but this time her chemise and matching fitted jacket were blue, and she’d added a mauve neck stock fixed with a small pearl pin. Her chestnut hair with its streak of white midsummer-lightning bolt was even more helter-skelter on this occasion, only the front half pinned up and the rest scandalously left falling down her slim back. “Morning, Mr. Wilde. What can I do for you?”

“I need to have a few more words with you, Miss Woods. There seem to be . . . conflicting accounts.”

Sally Woods pressed her lips together, complexion fading to an uneasy ivory. “You’ve been plenty square with me, please don’t suppose I can’t savvy that. But it’s . . . any angle you ogle from, it’s a painful subject. Can I decline?”

“Not this time.”

“Is Ellie all right?”

There was such fear in the rising plea at the end of that question that I couldn’t help but feel for her all the more. “She’s fine. But she painted an interesting picture of you, Miss Woods. Might we sit down?”

“I’ll get the whiskey. Sounds like we’ll need it.” She sighed, nodding at the circle of chairs.

When she was seated across from me with the bottle of spirits between us, swirling pretty copper liquid on her provocatively crossed knee, I set to.

“Miss Abell mentioned that you were at Mount Holyoke together—that you were pretty thick there, the pair of you, like sisters.”

Sally Woods looked sure enough heartbroken, glancing sharply away from me with her chin up as if telling herself to be brave, and I hadn’t even come to the
difficult
questions yet. That mightily troubled me.

“I adored Ellie.
Do
adore her. She’s passionate and clever and warm, and God knows I’d seldom enough met a girl who shared my interests before the seminary. We’re kindred spirits.”

“She’s charming.”

“Ellie is plenty more than charming, though she’s that as well. She’s got an incisive mind matched with great gentleness. A combination of qualities I lack, so I admire her all the more. She can tell a rig sharp as any fishwife’s, but with no one the butt of the joke—I’ve always been biting, aggressive. I thought that was what strength looked like. It doesn’t. Strength looks like Ellie. She’s oak as you please. I love her very much.”

“She seemed well bustled over the strike business.”

Miss Woods took a small sip of liquor, eyes downcast. “She lost her respect for me. I’d have done the same. She’d used to think me a pretty fine specimen before I flew too close to the sun. I’d grand ambitions and grander still intentions, Mr. Wilde, those of reshaping our society for the better, but failure leaves a stink. And then she blamed me for stirring up trouble, getting myself sacked, ruining it all. I don’t blame
her
a bit for refusing to speak with me.”

Tracing the ragged edges of my scar, I pondered tacks. Dive in too quick and she’d snap closed like a clamshell, even supposing she
was
innocent. Dip my toe in too slow and she’d likewise grow peery.

“Miss Woods, I don’t relish asking you questions I know will pain you. But Robert Symmes has accused you of threatening him again, and it’s come to light that you knew him . . . intimately?”

Her breath came fast and fearful through her delicate snub nose. When next she lifted the whiskey glass, I’m sorry to say her hand shook. But she swallowed, and looked at me as if through a pistol sight, and nodded.

“Robert and I caught each other’s eye when I was hired at the manufactory,” she bit out. “Remember how I told you I’ve superb taste in whiskey and in nothing else? Well, that goes for my taste in men too. Ellie was hired on day one, same as me, and she warned me to steer clear of him—I’d always been mooning after married professors and the like, the more untouchable the better.
Every
morning I wake up wishing I’d listened to Ellie and not tried to bag myself a powerful alderman. Though that makes me sound a brazen opportunist, and really I was halfway in love with him in about the space of a sneeze. I thought him handsome and aloof and mysterious rather than handsome and conscienceless. He’s a complete smirk. It was my own blunder, and Ellie and I are paying dear for my mistake.”

“You discussed the female-rights movement with him?”

“I thought, hell, why not use his affections for everyone’s mutual benefit? Wouldn’t that be civic-minded of me? Of all the stupid, self-obsessed notions. He was never fond of me, only fond of what we were about.”

The phrase
inventive little slut
flashed through my pate against my will. Miss Woods carded her fingers through the tangle of hair lying over her shoulder. Talk of Symmes looked about as pleasant as cutting out her own tongue.

“You weren’t afraid of children?” I wondered.

She paled still further, seeming almost faint for a moment, but shook her head. “I’m a modern and an educated woman, Mr. Wilde. I’ve a sponge I soak in vinegar. You’ll be wanting to see it, I suppose.”

“Of course not.”

I tried not to sound scandalized. It didn’t work. Mrs. Boehm has a similar pessary she washes in herbal tea, as she isn’t remotely interested in bearing my kinchin. But Sally Woods was practically a stranger, and Mrs. Boehm was . . . not. I realized, as if a curtain had been swept aside, just what alarmed me about Miss Woods. I know formidable women, dozens of them, women who fight and who win, women who have killed in self-defense or deliberately died for their loved ones. Noble women. Heroic ones. But I’d never met a woman previous who was completely uncaring as to my opinion of her—who’d sleep equally well if her new acquaintances thought her a freak or a marvel. Even Silkie Marsh, for all she’s a paper-doll version of a female, preens when she’s raking me over the coals. Miss Woods—hair cascading in a tangle, trousers tailored, drinking whiskey with a deftly bent wrist—gave a damn how she looked and sounded. But she didn’t care how she looked or sounded
to other people.
Only herself, maybe her loved ones or romantic conquests.

I wondered how deep the divide went, whether it could render her deaf to innocent screams.

“So you initiated the sewing girls’ strike, which drew rotten vegetables instead of higher wages, and everything changed between you and Miss Abell,” I suggested.

“Robert was not pleased.” She winced, agonized. “I thought if he could only see the depth of my sincerity on the subject, it would overwhelm him, supposing he cared for me. . . . He’d never openly objected to my talk of female rights. I was a spooney little fool.”

“And then?”

“And then he took his own version of revenge, and no, Mr. Wilde, I will
not
talk about it.” Her head dropped, the silver streak in her hair glinting softly, as she struggled to regain control. “I can’t say any more, except that he hired the other girls back and not me.”

It’s an understatement to say that I felt terrible. Drinking her whiskey, plying her with wretched questions. It was every bit my duty, but it felt like abuse.

“All right,” I said slowly. “As you may know all too well, the latest letter threatening Robert Symmes came to pass—his building burned, two girls died, and both Symmes and Ronan McGlynn have you pegged as the incendiary. I’ve been charged with stopping the firestarter, and all evidence points plumb at you, supposing you had opportunity to plant energetic chemicals. So the question I need you to answer, Miss Woods, is—in light of everything you’ve told me—what am I to make of
these
?”

I pulled the packet of letters Symmes had given me from my frock coat and set them on the table before her.

Sally Woods stared. Pretty mouth gaping, the atmosphere in her greenhouse turned poisonous as the smoke that murdered the stargazers in Pell Street. Her tumbler crashed to the floor in a firework of glittering glass shards as she half rose, reaching out with a clawlike hand at the papers.