The Fatal Flame (18 page)

“You need to play straight with me,” I insisted, also standing. “I’ve tried my best to help you. The truth, now, or by God—”

I didn’t get any further. With an expression of animal terror I’d seldom seen the like of in a fellow human, only in panicked horses and hydrophobic street curs, she snatched up the whiskey bottle and bashed me over my pate.

Things got pretty quiet after that.

For a long spell.

There were no dreams in that place. No visions of Mercy lying on her back in the summer grass at Battery Park, lifting her fingertip to write words in the air, poetry shining golden as sunbeams before fading to a memory. No nightmares of Symmes triumphant, parading Valentine through the streets in a cage.

No, the two hours I spent unconscious on Sally Woods’s greenhouse floor were about as absent as my good sense.

When I did wake up, I rolled to my side and hashed the scanty contents of my stomach onto her carpet. It didn’t help. My head throbbed like an open sore, though when I set my fingers to it, the skin wasn’t broken. Instead I found a lump the size of a bread roll and what smelled like dried whiskey when I pulled my fingers away. The heavy bottle hadn’t broken—I could see it lying forgotten on its side. But it had been open when she’d wielded it, so I’d been splashed with the stuff.

When I managed after another minute to drag myself to a seated position, I was unsurprised to find the greenhouse empty and the trunk lid thrown back as if someone had frenziedly packed a carpetbag.

“You brainless little puppy,” I said aloud.

Next I crawled to the whiskey bottle. Half its contents had bled onto the floor, but I did a man’s work of shrinking the remaining supply. It didn’t make my head feel any less of a rotten egg with a crack in the shell. But it improved my mood. I cast a muzzy look at the table where I’d set the bundle of letters.

Of course they were missing. The empty table seemed to level a barefaced leer at me.

Once I could stand, I staggered with the whiskey bottle to the printing press. Throwing back the tarp, I leaned over to peer at the mirrored letters. With my brains in that scrambled condition, making sense of the phrases was no easy matter, but manage it I did, and discern what Sally Woods had been keen to cover up when I’d arrived. They were neatly set in a typeface that was growing uncomfortably familiar, and read:

Don’t imagine that the copper stars can save you. You will pay for what you have done, and pay at my hand. I will burn the very soul in your body to ash.

Oh, isn’t it a pity such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die.

—SUNG BY THE LOWELL FACTORY GIRLS DURING THE STRIKE OF 1836

T
HE CIRCUMSTANCE OF
having your head stove in by a crazed incendiary is more than moderately unpleasant.

Then again, the circumstance of having the injury fussed over by Mercy Underhill was one of the better experiences I’ve catalogued.

I’d teetered like a drunkard west and north, though God knows the whiskey I’d consumed had been insufficient to achieve that happy enterprise, sunshine lancing harpoonlike through my eye sockets. Broadway was a fusillade of pedestrian traffic. It was high noon in New York City in springtime on Broadway, and I was in the humor of the men who end up in the Tombs overnight for punching tourists in the mouth.

But he was standing in the middle of the pavement,
the natives tell us earnestly, a crazed look to their pupils.
Not even looking at anything particular interesting or nothing, just up at the buildings. Not talking to anyone neither. Just . . . just standing.

Mercy’s new digs were in Howard Street between Broadway and the railroad. Just north enough of Ward Six to be respectable but close enough that the theatrical types could walk to the Bowery. A brick building, plain but tidy, with flower boxes under the white shutters. After I’d rung the tinny bell to no avail, I cracked the door. Hesitant, hearing hearty applause and a melodic laugh but no approaching footsteps.

When I’d reached the first opening off the foyer, I discovered some half a dozen men and women in a parlor with tattered curtains but remarkably fine art on the walls. Four lodgers smoked and sipped coffee or brandy, and two flanked the piano. The performer to the left was shorter than me—nearly a dwarf if not well and truly one—with a style inclined toward the dapper and a set of gleaming red moustaches echoing his fiery hair. The other was a statuesque woman of perhaps sixty—tall, half smiling, and I suspected the source of the laugh I’d heard blithely echoing out the door.

“I’m terribly sorry,” I said, hat in hand, “but I’m—”

“Don’t be,” scoffed a portly fellow with a fuchsia waistcoat. “These two just delivered a bawdy interlude regarding the lamentable inability of men’s cocks to shift their proportions relevant to the . . . well, requirements of the new mother following her precious gift from God, shall we say. And to the tune of Rossini’s matchless
Assisa a’ piè d’un salice.
You, I am certain, sir, have nothing comparable to be ashamed of.” He lapsed into a merry attack of coughing as the rest of the room suppressed similar fits of mirth.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. I did like them. It was that I couldn’t see them very well.

“I just need to speak with Miss Mercy Underhill, and then,” I said—perhaps a bit unclearly, and clutching at the doorframe.

“Oh, Miss Underhill!” exclaimed a young nymph with enormous blue-green eyes and a Cupid’s-bow mouth almost as tall as it was broad. “We
adore
her so already, and the reading she gave us last night—
such
poetry, I’m still weeping in my kerchief, it—”

“Are you a friend of hers?” the distinguished near-dwarf cried in an agreeable basso profundo. “She’s our best new recruit! Will you look at him—handsome as he is with that remarkable disfigurement? Of course she would know all the finest flash men in town. Oh, what
luck
.”

“Look at the badge on his coat, Kindling,” said the queenly woman on the other side of the piano. “He hasn’t time for your foolishness. Are you all right, sir? We can take you up to her directly.”

“Please,” I managed. “That would be—”

“Better now?” Mercy’s voice inquired.

The dizzy spell and the tiny man and the portly coughing fellow had presumably taken me up the stairs and into a combined sitting room and bedchamber. It boasted fern wallpaper as liberally dotted with mosquito corpses as Bird’s face is with freckles. And that’s saying something. I’d landed in the chamber’s only visible armchair with my pulsating pate between my knees, a cool wet cloth over my neck, thinking,
Mercy’s hand is resting against the cloth on the back of your neck, and you are in no fit condition to diary that memory.

I’ve experienced myriad disappointments in my life. But that one stung.

A vague shadow edged past as I regarded the uncarpeted floorboards—spindly figure, girlish posture. Wearing stockings that had once been cut in half and reversed for longevity, the heel portion becoming the toe with the opening sewn shut.

“Miss Duffy,” I managed. “How are you faring?”

When I looked up, Dunla Duffy was wandering toward the chipped windowsill. I marveled at the difference a day made. No, at the difference
Mercy
had made. I’ve spent years pondering what Mercy might taste like, but her charitable inclinations always petrified me. Her mother, Olivia, died of an ailment contracted from someone precisely of Dunla Duffy’s ilk, and her father lived—grief burrowing through his soul like a ravenous parasite—to take his spectacularly misguided revenge. The emigrant’s hair, now clean, was still a brittle greenish gold color I’d only ever glimpsed before in metal, but Mercy had braided it into a queue. She must have made a tincture for the rash as well, for my old friend has always been clever with potions, and the furious bumps had faded from scarlet to pink. In short, Dunla Duffy looked skeletal but rather less poised to die in any immediate fashion.

Delicate fingers felt at the lump on my head. I figured it for about the size of a smallish prize turnip and said as much, sitting up.

Mercy smiled at one side of her mouth, the smile where the other side tucks into a wry frown, the one that means,
Yes, yes, clever you,
and dropped the wet cloth into a bowl with faded flowers edging the lip. “Rather smaller than a prize turnip but bigger than an underdeveloped watermelon?”

“A minuscule ostrich egg.”

“An extraordinarily large marble.”

I smiled at her, feeling about twenty years old again. Back when being in love with Mercy was a blaze of unclouded constellations and not a diamond-bright stone in my chest. She wore the sort of gown she favors, with a very wide neck and wider sleeves, striped top to toe in yellow and grey. A few scattered strands of silver outlined her simply arranged black hair. I wanted,
needed
, to count them individually.

Then it occurred to me to wonder if I’d greyed myself. Since 1845 I haven’t been any too friendly with mirrors.

“Will I live?”

She tugged my hand up and consulted my life line, cornflower-blue eyes narrowed. “Yes, I think so.” She dropped it readily, but in an amiable fashion.

My breath caught at the whimsical reply. She seemed suddenly identical to the Mercy I remembered. Not the Mercy who hid her novel from her father for fear he’d burn it, which he did. Nor the Mercy who hid her assignations with men from the world because the world would judge her a harlot, which we did. Nor the Mercy who thought if her true self were ever revealed, all the lights and the shadows, she’d lose everything.

Which she did.

No, this was the thirteen-year-old Mercy who discovered a mouse nest in her garret and lost no time in collecting brick shards, lumber scraps, and glue, demanding we construct a fortress in the style of the Taj Mahal. The cupola was made of chicken wire, and though I was building it for mice ostensibly, I was actually building it for the same motivation as the creator of the original palace. Mercy cried for an hour when the cat devoured the occupants, cried as if her trust in the world were shattered.

“Who tried to take a closer look at your thoughts?” she wanted to know.

“A manufactory girl.”

An eyebrow slid toward the ceiling in disbelief.

“A violently delusional manufactory girl.”

“I should say so.” She looked doubtful, lower lip taking refuge beneath her upper one. That expression had always broken my heart a little. “Are you going to tell me about it?”

I was brain-injured and in love. So I told her about it.

“How terrifying. And what a pity for the New American Textiles strikers it came to nothing,” she mused when I’d finished. “Though frankly, the manufactory conditions in London’s East End make our workhouses look like pleasure gardens. I toured one once with a reformer’s association. A great, dark, overheated room like a circle of hell where the women worked mechanical looms. The place reeked of sheep’s wool and sickly sweat. I was assured that lewd advances by the overseers were so frequent as to be expected and were borne with a sort of numb horror. Meanwhile, the poor creatures’ wages wouldn’t keep the breath in a gnat. Most were too tired for rage, but as for those who were not—I can picture this Sally Woods, how the system broke her.”

“I couldn’t, before today,” I confessed. “Setting fire to a building full of innocents? It’s inhuman.”

“Oh, quite human, I fear.” Mercy drew her fingers over her opposite wrist regretfully. “It is a mistake to imagine reprehensible acts inhuman when so many humans are capable of them, don’t you suppose?”

I did. But it burned in my throat to know that Mercy agreed. That she was picturing her father strapping her in a strait-waistcoat, forcing her into an ice bath. Nearly killing her.

Brightening with an effort, Mercy angled an eye at Miss Duffy. “You sent me a friend. An eccentric housewarming gift, but then we never did go in for convention, did we?”

I studied Mercy over. She wasn’t looking at me—hardly ever does when she’s speaking, not with anyone. Her eyes are always listing to the edges, as if the mad world she’d spoken of night before last lived in the space between the wall and the window, or the cobblestone and the curb. She seemed rested. Focused. Altogether
better.
I could have lifted her in the air by the waist and twirled her in a circle. Of course I didn’t, but even the craving felt better than the dull ache of anxiety.

“Thank you for taking her in,” I said. “I could think of no one who’d dream of actually letting her inside, and . . .”

“And you thought of your old friend the madwoman, did you?”

My eyes snapped back to hers, startled. Mercy’s are pretty widely set, and she uses them to level a gossamer-delicate gaze of incomprehension at people she thinks have just made confusing, stupid, or bigoted remarks. So innocuous it’s devastating. And it was aimed square at me.

“Who is she, then?” Mercy inquired.

“She does outwork for New American Textiles and was given a warning note before her house burned. But it didn’t identify the firestarter, and I can’t work out who gave it to her. Might we all have a chat? I couldn’t get anywhere alone.”

“I can’t imagine you struggling to maintain a conversation,” she said, smiling. “But of course we can.”

Mercy went to the window and touched Dunla Duffy’s threadbare sleeve. “Dunla, dear, do you remember Mr. Wilde?”

Miss Duffy turned. Her face and eyes were both so spherical she looked quite void of sense. But then she said, “It’s the one with the mark on his face. He ought to have jailed me fer standin’—’tisn’t right to stand, they say, ‘Move along’—but he bought me buttercakes.”

“He’s much more the sort to buy a girl buttercakes than to jail her for standing.” Mercy cast a look at me, and for an incandescent moment I thought it appeared almost fond. She went to the bed and sat, patting the simple quilt. “Dunla, would you come talk with us?”

Miss Duffy’s cracked lips dipped into a small frown. “I’ve nay talent fer talkin’ as such. Even Mam said so.”

“But you’re so kindly and frank—that’s all we require.”

Dunla Duffy sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. “He’s the one read me the note as said she wanted t’
burn us
,” she whispered to Mercy. “But he nary said
who.
Can ye ask him, then, since yer his moon?”

“His what?”

“Me mam when I was low once lifted me and said as I was bright to her, brighter than the
gealach lán,
and later when she were gone away and the hunger grew past bearin’, I’d think on bein’ her full moon. So maybe he’ll answer ye when he’d not when I asked him meself.”

My hand lifted to push at the rubbery skin on my brow, it not being possible according to the laws of physics to sink through the floor.

“Unfortunately, the letters that spell the name of the culprit weren’t on that piece of paper,” I hastened to explain. “Can you tell me more about the manufactory girl who gave you the note? You said she had stars in her eyes?”

“Aye, she had, but not any longer.” Miss Duffy stared into the middle distance. “’Tis maybe a blessing, I knew a lass in the village as died of it.”

“Died of stars?”

“Sure enough, though some survive.”

I traced my lips with my thumb and forefinger. Mercy seemed likewise riveted—this was half madness and half metaphor, and yet there was such
method
in it. For all we couldn’t savvy her, Miss Duffy clearly imagined she was talking solid, straight-line sense.

“And you know her well?” I urged. “The girl who’d stars in her eyes?”

“Well enough from the spell, when they said as we’d be given more wages if we linked arms, singin’ and marchin’ in a circle, like.”