The Fatal Flame (34 page)

Fear wouldn’t be up to the task, though it might have cowed some. But love would.

The chief made a muffled satisfied sound. “Miss Woods, please consider yourself confined to your home until these matters are settled to my liking. I will advise the two copper stars who were watching it to return at once. Spirits can often run high before an election.”

Miss Woods breathed out slowly, rose, and shook hands with the pair of us.

“Take care,” she said to me, turning back at the door. “Once Robert savvies you know . . .”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ll be on my guard.”

When she’d gone, I regarded my chief. “I’ve nil idea how to bring Symmes to task, as he conducted the entire business through intermediaries. But we have to try. He assaulted James Playfair, you see.”

Matsell’s canyon-deep frown lines shifted in repulsion. “The Tammany pianist? You’re brother’s friend?”

“The same.”

“Is he alive?”

“Something similar.”

“Politics,” Matsell told me in a voice that verged upon paternal, “is ugly.”

“Naturally. Ugly men practice it. Though when I try to brain-work how Symmes came to be as ugly as he is, I’m . . . I honestly can’t fathom it.”

“I’ve studied humanity for decades.” The chief waved a wide bear’s paw at his bookshelves. “How do gangs form? How can females be expected to rise from their squalor when they are never told procreation is optional? Why do languages hang themselves by the neck until they’re so much garbled nonsense? I don’t have many answers, Mr. Wilde. But my father ran a bookstore, and I went to sea as a lad and saw things both ungodly and marvelous, and I’ll never cease being curious. That’s what I like about you, what I liked from the start. You want to understand people.”

I respected our chief so by then, even in moments of madness admired him, that I could only incline my head in thanks.

“I’ve three requests.”

Shifting, I leveled a steadier stare at him. “What are they?”

“You will not attempt to arrest an alderman who might be reelected this very day, no matter how eager you are to do so. We will find other avenues.”

It gouged a mighty chunk from my belly. But I nodded.

“You will look out for yourself and for Captain Wilde. I watched Tammany split in eighteen thirty-seven, and we were thrashed senseless at the polls. That’s preferable to my best policemen suffering the same.”

“Thank you. Lastly?”

“Vote for your brother.” Chief Matsell stood, tugging down his voluminous waistcoat. “I don’t give a damn you don’t live in Ward Eight, make it happen. If Valentine Wilde loses to the Whig Party, not to mention to Alderman Symmes, there will be literal hell to pay.”

—

T
his is patently ridiculous,” I informed Mr. Piest and Mr. Connell in my office half an hour later.

I leaned on my desk as they fussed over me. They’d taken my grey waistcoat and replaced it with a Bowery one, dotted all over with blue cornflowers. They’d taken my black frock coat and replaced it with a billowing grass-green swallowtail. They’d taken my collar and folded it down over my lapels. Any minute, my transformation into the doll-sized version of Valentine would be complete.

It didn’t bear mulling over.

“Where did you even get these togs?”

“Where d’ye think, you tit? The Hall,” Connell answered. “Every starving Irishman as can walk goes to the Party costumer the week afore elections so’s to look a citizen. You do know how voting
works
, aye?”

“Both citizens and noncitizens bribed by the Party by means of jobs and liquor cast as many illegal ballots as they can in a single day, after which said votes will be either tossed in the river or purposefully miscounted.”

“Mr. Wilde does have a certain pithy grasp of the subject, you see, Mr. Connell, despite his notorious lack of political affiliation,” Mr. Piest noted, chuckling as he handed me a shocking-orange cravat.

A grave silence fell.

“Are you
trying
to hurt me?” I asked him, eyes wide.

“If ye think that the Symmes camp is going t’ be kittled by the sight of Valentine Wilde’s famous kid brother voting fer him, I’ve a handful o’ magic beans I wonder if you’d be interested in purchasing?” Connell wondered sweetly. “Put on the damn disguise, ye sow-sucking idiot.”

Sighing, I snatched the cravat from Mr. Piest and tugged my own off.

“I’m not famous,” I said.

Piest and Connell didn’t spare this observation so much as a glance, let alone a reply. Just continued rifling through a carpetbag stuffed to the gills with clothing that seemed specifically designed by my brother to torture me.

“How am I meant to vote in a ward that isn’t mine?” I asked next.

“That’s no difficulty, Mr. Wilde,” Piest soothed, holding up a yellow-and-scarlet-striped pocket square and eyeing it critically before stuffing it into my breast pocket. “The going rate for freemen crossing ward lines is fifty cents per voter. All quite usual, fear not.”

My palm was beginning to seem a comfortable haven for my face, so I deposited it there. Beyond aggrieved.

“Where’s Mr. Kildare?” I questioned through my fingers, as he’s seldom more than ten feet from Mr. Connell.

“Gone a-wooing,” the latter replied, winking.

“Truly?” I questioned in not-insignificant shock.

“Aye. If this Caoilinn creature don’t kill the fool within ten seconds of being escorted to ice cream and coffee, there’s a weight off me, I’m that anxious.”

“Let us not unto the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” I muttered, tucking my hands under my arms.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. Best of luck to the man. He deserves a warm bed.”

“Hear, hear, Mr. Wilde, and may destiny grant him luck with the object of his affections,” Mr. Piest agreed.

Mr. Connell approached me. Warily. He swept my wide-brimmed black hat off my head and replaced it with a towering brown stovepipe beaver.

There are limits to what even the most determined men can endure.

“No,” I said, taking the terrible thing off.

“But ye—”

“
No.
The hat stays.”

Connell looked at Piest. Piest looked at Connell. Minute shrugs passed along their shoulders like sparks over telegraph wires.

“Fine,” Connell sighed. “’Tis yer own head at risk, after all.”

“The notorious hat stays, as a point of principle,” Mr. Piest assented, beaming.

“Right, then I’ll be off.”

I’d walked about six steps down the corridor when I heard my door shutting with a neat
snick
and a pair of footfalls shadowing me. One light but sure, with a delicate Irish swagger. The other ponderous, produced by quarter-ton Dutch boots.

“Oh, for God’s sake, do I have an honor guard?” I exclaimed.

They didn’t bother to answer. Again. Leaving me to wonder, and pretty mightily wonder too,
How often am I shepherded by these fellows without my knowledge?
Because I was beginning to suspect that the answer was
As often as necessary.
And I—who’d been too preoccupied with being hungry to have pals once, who’d been unlucky enough to witness old friends rendered cold corpses destined for colder ground, felt marvelously lucky.

For a moment.

—

A
pril 28 was a clear morning, a bright one, a red tinge of hostility already snaking through the atmosphere as we three marched for Ward Eight. Throngs of men strutted along sporting sashes and corsages and Party ribbons pinned to their coats, shouting partisan mania in a heady crossfire of noise.

SOLIDARITY WITH OUR SOUTHERN BROTHERS
was the theme painted on a Whig booth at the broad corner where Lispenard met Broadway, and cartmen fighting the election-day traffic shook their whips at the moustachioed businessmen manning their fortress. A smallish brass band lay claim to Grand Street two blocks north, under fluttering banners espousing
FREE SOIL, FREE SPEECH, FREE LABOR, FREE MEN
. Across the road from the Barnburner musicians, an enclave of mothers had gathered bearing hand-painted signs reading
FREEDOM FROM LIQUOR MEANS FOOD FOR YOUR CHILDREN
and
WHAT TYRANNY MORE WICKED THAN INTEMPERANCE?

I’d always avoided election days—even apart from my horror of voting, they’re riots long before the fisticuffs start, hysterical antipapists jostling against Irish gang heelers with clubs held in slack, scarred fingers. But family members are regrettably nonnegotiable, and I’d only one example of the type.

Thus I would vote for my brother. Even if it killed me.

The ticket booths we passed, where the slips for the candidates were handed out, already boasted disorderly queues of steely-eyed men with flasks in their fists. Some of these lines were well over two blocks long, curving round corners and jutting into intersections. When we were a quarter of a block into Ward Eight, I spied the first ticket stall announcing
CAPTAIN VALENTINE WILDE FOR ALDERMAN
and stopped to gape at the crowd.

My brother’s queue was four and five rogues wide in places. Jubilant. Plenty dangerous-seeming. Irish and German and native and even a smattering of British scoundrels, interspersed with plentiful local merchants wearing monocles and ready smiles. I’d known Val Wilde for a manifestly popular human. But this bordered on the absurd. A thin, sneering fellow in a blue coat met my eye as I studied the crowd and tipped his hat to me with a smirk. My hand shot out, gripping Piest’s bony elbow.

“That’s Sam Scrivener, the picklock we collared not two weeks back,” I hissed in alarm. “He’s escaped the Tombs somehow. We—”

“Ah, more probable that he, like many of the more Tammany-minded of our prison population, is voting,” Mr. Piest demurred, coughing diplomatically. “See? There’s a copper star at his elbow, keeping him under guard. A tour of our prisons would discover precious few inmates this morning. Don’t fret, Mr. Wilde, they’ll be safe and snug and snoring off the liquor behind bars come morning.”

“How many times are ye wanting to vote on behalf o’ yer kin, then?” Mr. Connell asked me when I’d stared in amazement at Mr. Piest for longer than he thought reasonable.

“Once?”

My friends burst into such a clattering hailstorm of laughter that I glimpsed people halfway down the block turning to stare.

“No, no, Mr. Wilde,” Mr. Piest said when he’d recovered. “One vote would be . . .”

“A token,” Mr. Connell supplied.

“A gesture of profound goodwill,” the Dutchman added.

“But . . .”

“And I hesitate to appeal to your vanity in this of all matters, my stout compatriot, however . . .”

“
One
vote doesn’t mean a dog’s fart, does it, now? Ye’d be ashamed to deliver that accounting to yer own brother.”

“I would?” I asked. Not surprised, but genuinely horrified.

Thus began my first—and I hoped, by the grace of Providence,
only
—day of voting for an alderman candidate in New York City.

“But the line—” I attempted.

“Star police!” boomed Mr. Connell, shoving through the throng. Moses wielding a staff couldn’t have been more efficient. “Make way! Yer ballot-approval inspectors have arrived, and all o’ we lawkeepers grateful fer your Democratic support at the polls, freemen! Deliver yer votes and we’ll deliver justice to our fair streets!”

When we’d reached the front of the queue, irascible mutterings swarming after us like horseflies, Mr. Piest landed a threadbare elbow on the booth’s counter before the Party rabbit behind it could so much as open his mouth. My friend winked at the ginger rascal, flapping his copper star.

“We’ll need a large sample of Barnburner tickets to test quality, gentle patriot, and best of luck to you on this auspicious day regarding both your personal health and your good fortune,” Mr. Piest announced.

“I don’t think—” I began.

“’Tis a fact,” Mr. Connell mentioned tenderly in my ear. “Ye
don’t
think, do you?”

“Forty Captain Wilde tickets for inspection, then, to assure the police force that nothing underhanded is taking place here, my good citizen?” Mr. Piest asked, sliding a five-dollar note toward the now-pleased electioneer.

“How does fifty sound?” The Irishman licked at a black gap in the line of his none too pearly teeth. “Seeing as ye’ve none other than Timothy Wilde in your company, though curse me own dead grandmother should I ever reveal such to antagonistic parties.”

I blinked stupidly. Which in retrospect was probably what they expected of me.

“There’s a stout lad,” Mr. Connell trilled.

“What a very generous proposal,” Mr. Piest approved.

So began a polling experience that I’ll never forget even supposing I could bleach the inside of my skull. But despite myself . . . I saw the sport in it. A sort of rapture in
honestly fighting for something
, even if that meant dishonesty in the execution. Half a second on the heels of that sensation, of course, found me predictably disgusted with myself.

Please may I never vote again,
I thought as we passed through trial after bare-knuckled trial, our pockets stuffed with slips of paper bearing my inexcusable brother’s name.

At Ward Eight’s District Seven polling location, I narrowly avoided a punch to the jaw when Connell stepped forward—cleanly, almost pleasantly—and caught a Hunker thug’s fist. We stood in a grog shop, flanked by barrels of fat herring and pickles, having slipped past the intoxicated guards with sage nods and confident spitting.

“Wrong target,” Connell announced.

“You’re mistaken.” The Hunker leered.

The ensuing mitten-mill enabling me to stuff my ticket into the ballot box that would likely end up bobbing in river water was fairly exhilarating. I escaped with a disarrayed cravat. My friends followed with bruised knuckles, laughing fit to burst their waistcoats. Being well used to the process.

At Ward Eight’s District Five polling location, which was a hotel lobby, I took a hard blow to the gut. Choking on air and falling to one knee. I still voted—doubled over, thrusting the ticket into the slot. Two thugs lay flat as piecrust behind me, which was my own doing.