The Fatal Flame (39 page)

The world swayed a bit. My bones were turning cottony, a collection of threads ill suited to keep me upright.

“Steady on,” Val said, frowning.

That was indecently alarming, as generally he insults me into action. “What’s her name?”

“Nell Grimshaw.” He paused, puzzled. “You told me all about her. Hell’s bells, you even sketched the woman for Matsell. You didn’t diary her moniker?”

I shrugged as I turned toward Ward Six. “I never learned it.”

The smoke coated my skin too thickly for me to catch its scent any longer. I could feel it nevertheless as I strode toward the prison. Grime in my teeth, grit caking my eyelashes. I longed for a bath. A river, a tide pool, an ocean. Something big enough to wipe me clean of torturing my only kin for almost two decades. A way to cleanse my nostrils and ears of caked ash and of Val’s saying regarding our parents’ demise,
It’s of passable interest to me, since I’ve always thought you felt the opposite. . . .

Ruthlessly, I shook my pate. Dwelling on the night’s other trials wasn’t going to help me.

Not when I was headed for a rendezvous with the Witch.

—

T
he gathering in my office at four in the morning, held during the uniquely metropolitan time that’s neither night nor day but a hybrid nothing, a lightless in-between period both ancient and capricious, consisted of the following:

Me, behind my desk. Mr. Piest, nursing one of the three coffees he’d bought after being similarly summoned, seated to my left.

And one Nell Grimshaw, firestarter, alleged Witch, facing us from the room’s only other chair.

Her steely hair had escaped its kerchief in her struggle to escape the star police. I saw scratches at her neck, and her lip bore a crimson split. But she didn’t seem anxious to bolt. They hadn’t restrained her before my arrival—she sat with her hands folded, eyes branding my soiled skin. If I hadn’t known better, I could almost have credited her with supernatural powers. Dressed in rags, with a ramrod posture, smiling as though she’d invented the four elements, Nell Grimshaw looked like she could have simply pointed her forefinger to torch stone as if it were paper.

“Mr. Wilde, forgive me, but are you certain you needn’t seek medical—”

“I’m only tired,” I assured Mr. Piest, though despite the coffee I felt moorless as a cigar butt discarded into the Hudson. “Do you have the preliminary report?”

He nodded, pressing his chin into the small folds of his neck. My friend passed the document to me.

“Mrs. Grimshaw—”

“Don’t try to be
gentlemanly.
I can’t bear that sort of swill,” Nell Grimshaw sneered. “I was never married.”

“Miss Grimshaw,” I corrected myself. “So you were entering the Queen Mab clearinghouse when the copper-star guards arrested you. I want to know—”

“Did you truly draw a picture of me and give it to the pigs?”

Her face had changed. Luminous, riveting, almost . . . almost the person she really was. Not due to the avidity, mind. I’d known her for a force of nature already. This was my flattery of her prowess taking effect. Miss Grimshaw’s lined blue eyes shone, and her queenly jaw thrust forward in her eagerness to learn just how famous—or infamous—I’d rendered her.

“I did. I’ll find it and give it to you if you answer a few questions. We have you dead to rights anyhow, for trying to burn down the Queen Mab.”

She shrugged, smoothing her thunderstorm hair back ineffectively.

“Miss Grimshaw, if you could please recount this evening’s events in your own words, we would mark you most attentively,” Mr. Piest requested.

“What have
you
to do with it?”

Piest shifted his weight forward, tugging his shabby coat sleeves down. There was a splash of beer from our earlier exploits staining one paper cuff. “Mr. Wilde is my colleague.”

Miss Grimshaw nodded. She seemed queerly pleased by her surroundings. The incongruity of her enjoyment struck me as another quicksilver glimmer of lunacy.

“How did you find me out?” She turned her attention back to me, blue eyes keenly focused. “I was never seen setting them.”

I saw no harm in answering. “For one thing, you aren’t a seamstress. You told me that after being fired as a domestic, you worked stitching fashionable smallclothes. Then doing embroidery, and finally as an outworker. I’d have maybe trusted your obsession with proper lighting as the reason your eyes are still so finely tuned, but that wasn’t it at all, was it?”

She snorted. “Plenty of seamstresses are smart enough to know they can’t win in the long run by gambling away their eyes at dusk.”

“True. But they’re much better at it than you are and can thus afford such niceties as light. Your work hemming something as simple as a kerchief is appalling.”

I remembered the jagged way her needle had pierced the cheap cloth. As if stabbing someone, every seam drunkenly listing along the scrap’s edge. Aggressively incompetent. I’d been stupid enough to think the likes of Simeon Gage intimidated by her when he could never have overlooked blatant ineptitude.

“What were you in actuality?” I asked, intrigued.

A proud smile resembling a snarl appeared on her once-handsome face. “A girl from a family that lost all their money. And then, as I told you, a maid. But for decades after my child’s father sacked me, I’d no need of employment. I was one man’s kept mistress, then another’s. Even toured once, in a company of dancers, from here to Charleston. Bluffed my way into a nannying position when I couldn’t dance any longer, if you can believe so much. That held for another twelve years. When their brat grew up, I was tossed out with a pittance. When they left for Oregon to seek fame and fortune, even the pittance vanished.”

“You’re too canny not to have saved funds. Some calamity befell you,” I surmised.

“Calamity is common. What do the details matter?”

“Curiosity. I’ve lost everything myself once or twice.”

“Influenza.” Miss Grimshaw shook her head. “Bloody
vultures
, the lot of you.”

“So you’d no money left, no intimate friends, and ended up in the dire position of stitching outwork at the Old Brewery. But you were terrible at it, not being used to the task nor the hours. Is that when you made the candles? They were remarkably creative, by the way.”

“Any emigrant bitch fresh off the estate could hem a straight line, and you’re right enough, they were quicker at it than I was.” Nell Grimshaw adjusted the assortment of rank threads that served as her shawl. “I needed extra time. I bought cracked cups with the last of my chink and filled them with the rotten fat a cookshop had discarded. Then it was just a matter of finding some scrap twine.”

“You used them for fuses, didn’t you, when you set the buildings alight? Put them near some white phosphorus with a fat-soaked bit of string trailing, pretended to take the air, and walked clean away.”

Her eyes gleamed at me wickedly. “You’re a shade less brainless than I’d figured, Mr. Wilde.”

“I can count, that’s all. You’d seven, a Pell Street witness was sure of it. After the first two fires, when I saw you at the Old Brewery, you’d only five. However did you conscience it? Two of your Pell Street neighbors died in agony.”

I shouldn’t have marveled—the Witch had reveled in her own malice. Miss Duffy had offered to pay for the stolen light the next day and received an open threat in return, though I’d not supposed Miss Grimshaw’s answer serious when first I’d heard of it.

By tomorrow,
she’d said,
I’ll have every last one of you roasting over a spit.

“As questions of conscience are unlikely to advance our discussion, let me interject, if you please.” Mr. Piest raised his palms to our prisoner, the picture of reasonableness. “Your being reduced to the extremities of poverty I can both comprehend and regret, Miss Grimshaw, but as for the firestarting itself, I confess myself at a loss. How came such an extraordinary step about? How did you not simply starve, as so many others have done?”

Passing my tongue over ashen lips, I glanced at my fellow copper star. “If she’d neither kith nor kin in New York, she could easily have died so. As it happened, she’d given up a son on a church doorstep long ago.”

“Oh, Mr. Wilde,” Piest gasped, one knee jerking akimbo. “Mr. Wilde, I must say, even beyond the inferences to do with her profession, that is
masterful.
I’ve never had reason to defame the eyes in my own head, mind, but your skills as a portrait artist simply
must
have been at work here.”

“What are you yammering about?” the woman I’d known as the Witch snapped at the Dutchman.

“You looked familiar to me when I first met you, madam,” he answered gravely. “I could not place the reason. Mr. Wilde proved the superior observer.”

He was wrong. I’d done no better than Piest upon initially meeting her at the Old Brewery. I’d thought her—beneath the age and the spite at least—an archetype of a classical beauty or the echo of a belle’s silhouette framed upon some unremembered wall.

“Had you always tracked your son’s progress?” I questioned. “Or were Robert Symmes’s successes previously unknown to you?”

If I’d expected a flinch or a quaver, I’d have been destined for disappointment. Instead she laughed again, her late child visible in flashing blue eyes and a mocking lift of the jaw. Nell Grimshaw hadn’t raised her illegitimate offspring, granted. He’d been his mother’s son all the same. I couldn’t deny Miss Grimshaw’s dark history—but recalling her expert marksmanship when taunting Mercy, neither could I help but recognize that the artist painted with the family brush.

Was I a pretentious, guilt-ridden, coddled smear of dung like you?
she’d asked. And Mercy, who’d been reviled by countless unfortunates in her life, had taken the poison straight to heart.

“I used to watch him through the church windows, even dress myself in rags so as to sit in the beggars’ pew and catch closer glimpses,” she breathed with a mother’s blind pride. “My bright boy. He was all golden curls as a lad, same as I was. There was none of his faithless father in him. He led the other kinchin about the yard like a general—could outtalk them, outfight them.”

I could well picture Robert Symmes terrorizing his schoolyard population with petty vengeances. “He was adopted, I take it?”

She nodded dreamily. “The Symmes family had railroad money—if they were to take in a foundling, they wanted the
best.
They saw him educated, placed among the right people. I heard rumors of all this later, naturally—when I’d returned from touring and was changing dirty nappies for someone else’s colicky parasite. But my Robert was never lost to me for long. He was too much in the public eye.”

“Had you not lost your position, would you have remained a secret to your son for good, Miss Grimshaw?” A gentle crinkle edged Mr. Piest’s pale eye. “That seems very hard to me, for a mother as passionate as yourself.”

“When I listen to men, I wonder how the species survived this long,” she jeered. “Of
course
I didn’t seek him out, you pathetic creature. A respectable widowed nurse they thought me, after I’d bought enough false references. Neither an unwed mother nor a swell’s ladybird nor a dance-hall kate. I’d three meals a day and a bed with no one else in it—you think I’d have risked all that on the slim chance an alderman would believe I was his
mother
?”

“But after losing your savings, you’d no choice except to find him.” I clasped my hands on my desk. “You wrote to him?”

She shook her head. “He could have been blackmailed, exposed as a bastard. No one knew his origins save myself, the pastor, and the Symmes family. I paid a call at his offices saying I’d news of Robert Grimshaw. He knew his real name, the name I’d left pinned to his blankets at the rectory.”

“He was skeptical.”

Miss Grimshaw’s cheek gained a spot of color. “He’d every right to be.”

“Very skeptical. He threw you out the first time.”

Rage thrummed in the pulse at her neck. “Not everyone is a gullible dunce along
your
lines, you realize. How did you know about that?”

“I didn’t,” I sighed, tracing the tide pool on my brow. “But I do know Robert Symmes, and now you’ve told me. When did he offer you a job?”

“Not a job!” she cried, arcing forward in her chair so quick that both Piest and I startled. “
Not
a job. How dare you suggest a great man would stoop to employing his own long-lost mother. A test!”

A discordant but strident chime of sympathy sounded within me. I’d imagined Symmes had manipulated his mother into assisting him in exchange for money. That would have been plenty distasteful.

The truth was sickening.

“A test,” Mr. Piest repeated, eyes darting to me.

“How was the alderman to know she was truly his mother?” I asked softly. “She’d neither eyewitness evidence nor paperwork. Any nefarious female could have seized her opportunity after learning of his adoption, and powerful men draw parasites like sugar does flies. He wanted . . . loyalty as proof of birthright?”

“My boy was clever as well as cautious,” Miss Grimshaw bragged. “And what wouldn’t I risk for him? I, who’d done nothing to help him save for give him away? Hang me, jail me, do what you like, I’ll claim it was all a scheme I dreamed up with that McGlynn idiot. I’ll never testify against Robert.”

Piest and I watched her in something neighborly to awe. With a subtle wash of horror marring the finish. I thought of her warning to myself and Mercy regarding the brute who’d been her son and could barely repress a shudder.

He’s a man of importance. I’d call him ‘Alderman’ if I were you sorry lot.

“Think how close we came!” Nell Grimshaw exulted. Then she shrank fractionally. “He was right to suppose he might have been taken in by me. But when I imagine how it could have been afterward . . . He never charged me for the Pell Street digs, you know. I could afford nothing save the Old Brewery after it burned, but none of that mattered. Another month, perhaps, and he’d have taken me home.”

It wasn’t bearable, frankly.

A flinch must have crossed my face, for Miss Grimshaw glared at me in abrupt suspicion. She needn’t have done. I was only recalling her words when I’d begged her to help me find the man who’d destroyed her home.