The Fatal Flame (20 page)

“Sally was . . . I admired her so,” Miss Abell breathed. “Do savvy that I don’t expect you to share my taste in politics. Plenty of good Christian men find they cannot. But whenever a new cause was proposed at the seminary—say, a campaign to defy the postal injunctions against abolitionism, for instance—Sally was the first banging on doors with a pen in her mouth and a sheaf of petitions in her fist, calling,
What ho, sisters! Our voices are needed!
She once raised the funds to buy a
cow
, of all things, for a poor farmer’s widow who’d lost hers to a train accident near our school.”

“Impressive.”

“I thought so too,” Miss Abell confessed, skin warming marginally at my praise. “She wasn’t like anyone else. And she knew it. And she . . . I honestly don’t think she cared a hairpin. When she’d stay up with me in the common room, her playing mad arpeggios almost as if they bored her and me plodding the chords underneath, I felt nearly as special as she was.”

Blanks in my canvas filled as Miss Abell spoke. Theirs hadn’t been a shallow camaraderie that would turn cold as soon as the winds did—Sally Woods and Ellie Abell had been bloodless sisters. And that sliced away a thin piece of Miss Abell every time she spoke of her lost friend. Whatever had happened between them, the aftermath had been about as merciful as cholera.

And I loathed Robert Symmes more with every passing second.

“After school you came to New York together?”

“Always together, through hell and high water, when we didn’t
remotely
understand what either one of those looked like. We were hired at the same time.” She swiped a blot of mustard away from her lip with her forefinger. “At the New American, I mean. We shared digs in a boardinghouse in Hester Street belonging to the manufactory. I still live there. Most of us do.”

“How did it suit you?”

“Manufactory work was new to us, but it seemed . . .” A pinch of shame marred her pretty brow. “Oh, to think of it now, how ignorant we were. Glamorous?”

“A steady graft, your spoils your own—why shouldn’t it have been? None of us are used to molls earning a living wage as you are, not by half.”

“You’re kind to say so, but we were fools. When Sally and I were friends, we wanted . . .”

She often paused, I’d noticed, collected stray threads of thought. As if she knew that the slightest misstep would be held against her. That any stray word would render her belief in the rights of women forever invalid, would be hurtled like vitriol in her lovely face.

“I’ve wanted plentiful untoward things, if it helps,” I offered, chasing corned beef with my roll.

Ellie Abell’s mouth took on a reluctant expression. Not as if she didn’t want to tell me something—as if she didn’t want to hear it herself, said aloud.

“I don’t . . . I’ve never thought myself
unlucky
,
you see. My father was a university dean in Massachusetts and my mother a painter of landscapes. They taught me everything that sparked my interest—skills to do with keeping house and skills as impractical as my fancies. But . . . I suppose that Sally and I imagined a place where our time was
ours.
I don’t mean that in quiet homes filled with their kinchin women don’t find joy. I only . . .”

All nonchalant patience, I sprinkled coarse salt over a cut of beef.

“Oh, what’s the
use
? I can never put this as well as Sally could,” Ellie Abell admitted ruefully. “
She
used to say to everyone who argued with her, if all the men on earth were forced to work out mathematical equations and never fight tigers . . . you see how it wouldn’t suit some of them?” She pressed her fingers against her temple.

“Of course. What compelled Miss Woods to fight for higher wages?”

Miss Abell splayed her fingers on the rough-hewn pine. “She started up talking to Dunla. As if Dunla were some sort of
cause
and not a person.”

This was a new piece of the puzzle. “Miss Duffy dropped off her piecework at the manufactory, and Miss Woods . . . what, accosted her?”

Ellie Abell nodded, worrying at a seam in the pine. “At first she only offered her extra food. Dunla looking that lenten and all. Then Sally started up asking
me
whether it was fair, and I told her no, of course it isn’t fair, that we could have been in the same straits! But she was desperate and we weren’t, and Sally just . . . Oh, the stupid,
stupid
girl.”

I settled my elbows on the tabletop. “Miss Woods spent some time palavering with Miss Duffy. Miss Woods developed some strong opinions. Then your employer entered the picture, and Miss Woods . . . imagined she could kill a pair of birds with a single stone?”

Ellie Abell nodded miserably.

“And she kept at it, long after you’d supposed Symmes had no real interest in any cause save his own.”

“I don’t wish to be ungrateful—I admit it kittles Mr. Symmes to be admired by his underlings, so he’ll grant a wish here or there to puff himself up, ensure loyalty, but he loathes being bossed. I
told
her it wouldn’t work!” she cried. “But Sally had married herself to the twin notions of having this man she wanted and having a better workplace after Dunla told her she’d recently dined on some trapped rats she roasted over a barrel.”

“You haven’t told me the important part yet,” I said slowly. “How did the strike
end
?”

Miss Abell adjusted her shawl as if it were a chain-mail coat. The shadows in the marketplace had lengthened into bands of flickering torchlight beams and the streaks of darkness between them. Some had begun to eat away at her as the sun abandoned us, turning parts of her hands and torso and face into mere gaps in the gloom.

Exquisitely carefully, as if she were stitching lace onto a board, Ellie Abell told me a story.

The strike had commenced on a mockingly splendid late-summer Monday the previous year. The sort that vanishes in a heartbeat, hinting at autumn and tasting of the last overrich berries still clinging to the bushes. Girls massed before the New American to protest, fresh-faced and hopeful.

Their first day had gone well, save for the glare of Robert Symmes when he arrived, and the bitten-off words that he was “far too poor a man to raise the wages of a passel of pigeons
.
” The second day had gone well save that Symmes broke the ranks of the Bowery girls with a stream of German and Yidisher matrons, marching them into the manufactory to keep churning out trousers for human cattle. The third day had gone well except for the arrival of the out-of-work tailors, many of them union men, who’d started right into catcalls and toxic glares and weighty spitting. The fourth, fifth, and sixth days had gone well excepting the thunderstorms and the fact the tailors had found some tomatoes festering on a shelf before a corner liquor grocery and put them to use against the dissidents’ skirts.

Then Saturday had dawned, and the strike had been broken by means of hired thuggery and ended. As if this weren’t bad enough, at the close of the day, unlike every other Saturday they’d ever known at the New American Textile Manufactory, no one was paid. And all the while the scissors of the emigrants
snick-snick-snickered
at them from the open windows above Nassau Street.

“I can’t think of how Dunla and the other outworkers looked without wanting to cry,” Miss Abell said unsteadily. “Oh, we cutters were hungry enough, but we’d saved money for tea and apples. They . . . they’d
nothing
to spare. We pooled our chink, gave them what coin we could, and they used it on victuals a dog wouldn’t touch.”

“I’m shocked Symmes allowed the strike to continue for a full week.”

“Oh. On Friday the article came out in the
New Republican
. ‘Rights for Females, Sewing Girls a Busted Flush.’ That . . . well, that
more
than settled the matter.”

Something familiar caressed my still-throbbing brains. “Was it written by a Mr. William Wolf?”

She frowned, surprised. “That it was. Oh, I’m sure he
meant
it to be fair—I mean, he seemed genteel enough, and I was quoted to good effect, Sally too, but then . . . he talked with
Dunla
for another perspective on female rights, and oh, imagine it.”

“She sounded a hair shy of sensible?”

“You could say that. Mr. Symmes was hot enough to
explode
when it came out in the late edition. Said we’d gone and made him a public laughingstock. I think previous to that, our small efforts had amused him, but then . . . It was over the next day. Men were standing there with brickbats when we arrived with our picketing signs. Some of them I recognized as copper stars without their pins. That . . . surprised me.”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” I managed. “But I’m deeply sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter how sorry you are,” she said in a dead-of-winter undertone. “But thanks all the same. Anyhow. It lasted a week, and I never want to cogitate on it again.”

Sitting back, I contemplated her. The frozen shoulders and the neutral expression. The hot pulse of living hurt beneath the carefully hammered armor.

“Miss Abell, I can’t help but think you’re still leaving out the . . . the
most
important part,” I ventured gently.

“The most important part is that Sally organized the strike, and that it did
not
go well,” she said, voice ringing. “Afterward we returned to work, all save for Sally. I lost touch with her completely. She never so much as sent me a letter. I wasn’t worth her while, apparently. That hurt more than . . . more than the rest of it.”

My pulse thrummed uneasily. “But you were friends for such a long time before. Weren’t you in the aftermath keen to find out why—”

“No.” Her tone was dry enough to cure beef. “Sally had delegated me too many . . . hopeless responsibilities. Anyhow, sometime after she was sacked, Mr. Symmes came to me—as her closest friend—with some remarkably disturbing letters. He asked me how he should handle her, and I told him to let her alone. I’d used to care for her so. I tried to protect— I clearly shouldn’t have done. I’m sorry, but I’ve nothing more to say.”

She did, though. About an illness she blamed Sally Woods over, one that Miss Duffy was convinced was a pregnancy. About just why in hell she’d delivered a warning to
Dunla Duffy
of all people, when Symmes owned scores of properties and Miss Duffy could comprehend writing about as deftly as she could tact and economics.

So I took a gamble. Speaking as softly as ever I could.

“Miss Duffy mentioned you’d been indisposed after the strike ended.”

Ellie Abell rose, adjusting her skirts. Appearing to me, under all the rest of it, lonely. Wholly, despairingly lonely. I’ve always had a brother. Even when I didn’t want one. But there is ordinary loneliness and there is a hollowed-out loneliness like a grave fresh dug. Miss Abell—in a way that sent a pulse of grief through me—looked as if she suffered the latter.

“All the fresh goods will be gone if I dally any longer. Yes, Mr. Wilde, I was ill with a bad case of ague.”

“I wish you’d trust me,” I pleaded.

“I wish you’d
let me alone
,” she begged, bending with the table between us, close enough so I could feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek. “And I need hardly remind you that Dunla is half in her wits and half out of them.”

Jumping after her, I stood with my arms spread. Not touching her. But sure enough blocking her, and not proud of the fact. Her eyes gleamed in the spectral light as her hands fisted in her skirts.

“Answer me just one single question more, please, Miss Abell. You warned the Pell Street residents specifically that Miss Woods meant to burn them alive. How could you have known? Miss Duffy certainly seems afraid of your old friend—she called her devil-marked only this afternoon.”

“If so, that’s the most sense Dunla’s ever shown,” Ellie Abell hissed. “Dunla was one of several physically
struck
before we finally dispersed. Sally didn’t give a dried fig, kept telling us to stay in the circle and the men would stop. She actually said,
It’s to be expected people will be hurt in a war
. As if we were an army. Can you
imagine
? Needles versus brickbats.”

“Was she always so callous?” I lowered my arms.

She shook her head, eyes swimming. “I hadn’t thought . . . Oh, I don’t
know
about before. Or what changed her. If she changed. But it oughtn’t to have bustled me—she was furious at Dunla over the gammy publicity that ended the strike. Sally never could abide thickheadedness—it had always infuriated her when the rest of us couldn’t keep up. If women are to be allowed autonomy, what’s to become of the stupid ones?”

“I don’t know,” I realized. “The same as what happens to stupid men?”

“Maybe. Anyhow. When Mr. Symmes showed me the note about setting outworkers afire, I thought of Dunla at once. He agreed Pell Street may well be at risk, so I did all I could. She and Sally
hated
each other.”

“Enough to set an entire house aflame?”

“Have you ever seen what a woman obsessed with vengeance
looks
like when her dreams are obliterated, Mr. Wilde?”

“Yes,” I replied. Seeing Silkie Marsh’s face before me, smiling like that other breed of angel—the ones who are said to live below us rather than above.

“Then please stop hounding me and
find Sally Woods
,” she admonished, drawing her shawl about her shoulders and stalking into the cadaverous twilight.

Seconds later she was untraceable. I’d have had as much luck tracking the smoke that had left the torches five minutes prior. I wanted to follow, sweetly chip and tenderly hammer the truth out of her. But I’m not that man, so I departed the market. Very nearly as ignorant as I’d entered it.

And therefore doing no one in the saga the smallest bit of good.

—

I
headed for my office at the Tombs, planning on taking the proper action of a responsible copper star who’s feeling better than half checkmated. I’d used to ignore this key principle in favor of pestering game pieces until they made sense to me. But people have died that way. And I’m a fast learner.