The Fatal Flame (44 page)

Once a very long time ago, Mercy escaped New York City. She departed in hopes of being a writer, and I wanted that for her, wanted her to draw a map of her mind for me so that I could navigate her sinuous shoals, wanted a book of fiction I could study to delineate all her currents and her cliffsides and her lighthouses. She didn’t manage it. Couldn’t manage it.

After she came back, I began to understand that I’d had it backward. Typical of me. What was needed wasn’t a volume to help me understand Mercy. I already love her, after all.

When I arrive there this afternoon, Mercy will be reading in the medicinal herb garden behind the town house with a cup of tea at her elbow, laced with rum if she and Dr. Palsgrave are feeling adventurous. They often are. After telling the pair of them all about Mrs. Bird Garvey’s wedding yesterday, I’ll wheel the doctor into his study, where he loves to putter about as the evenings lengthen, and when I return to the yard, the slanting sun will render Mercy’s face still more angular, and her lips will slide up at my approach. Her whitening hair will waltz with the shadows of the overhanging trees, and she’ll know me this time. She doesn’t always, not anymore.

But she will today. And if she doesn’t, then she will again soon enough.

As the lights are fading to dusk and the fireflies rise from their sleep, I’ll give her these three stories. I’ll lean down and kiss her, as I often do, and take my leave again. And when she is herself,
whenever
she is herself and not one of the many sorts of spirits that inhabit her mind now, she’ll study the maps I’ve made. She’ll read these nearly-books and then she’ll know who I am. That’s a lifelong dream of mine.

And to think it only took me a little over two decades to work out how to achieve it. We so stubbornly speak to each other in our best pet languages. When really, how much simpler would it be to speak to the listener in his or her own?

This isn’t everything I’ve ever wanted. It’s a sliver like the moon that will be rising as I walk back to Elizabeth Street, eyes on the cobbles and on the streetlamps and on my thousands upon thousands of neighbors.

But it’s the fraction we were dealt, Mercy and I, and these outpourings of ink I intend to give her will complete the picture of a life sincerely if partially lived.

Time is a tyrant, words our last and only weapons.

—Timothy Wilde, April 16, 1854

The road leading to the American Civil War was a notoriously long one. Acrimony and bitterness over the Peculiar Institution—not to mention the utterly debased nature of the Institution itself—were ripping America apart at the seams long before seven Southern states formed the Confederate States of America and shots were fired upon Fort Sumter in April of 1861. Tammany’s rancorous divide between the Hunker and the Barnburner factions was echoed throughout the entirety of the industrialized Northern metropolises. It was widely thought necessary to end slavery, yet potentially devastating to attempt this in fact. Meanwhile, Congress’s efficacy as a governing body foundered in the wake of such weighty moral dilemmas—many of which, one must allow, were treated as matters of economy rather than of liberty and justice for all. The conservative bargainers and would-be pacifists were correct if only in a single sense: hundreds of thousands died tragically in the War Between the States. The fact that still-undetermined millions of Africans had already died horrifically and were still dying in slavery, meanwhile, is undisputable.

The acquisition of massive territories in Oregon and Texas deeply exacerbated this already festering debate. David Wilmot, a fiery New York Barnburner whose career I followed closely to ready myself for this tale, recalled an incident that well sums up the problem the country was facing, in a speech delivered in 1847 and reprinted multiple times thereafter. He reported:

An intelligent member of Congress from the South, in conversing with me upon this subject, and remonstrating against my course, said, “if you succeed in your efforts to prevent the extension of slavery, and confine us to the territory now occupied by it, in less than a century we will have a population of thirty millions of blacks, with less than half that number of white population in their midst; and, said he, then the terrible alternative will be presented: we must either abandon the country to them, or cut their throats.” Would you, he said, bring such a calamity upon us?

Needless to conclude, Wilmot was unimpressed by the unnamed Southern politico’s arguments.

Feminism in various incarnations has existed for as long as females, but as a concerted effort in a modern Western cultural context, the 1840s marked a distinct change in organization and tone. Abolitionists of the antebellum period failed at first to embrace another burgeoning “infidel” cause, as the female rights movement would not gain significant traction for decades to come. The industrialization of America and its complete lack of social infrastructure had already rendered the most comfortable of lives precarious; and when women began pointing out that they were not allowed to work in positions anyone could see they were well suited for (bookkeeping is a ready and early example, as few would have dared to suggest that women were mentally capable of being doctors or lawyers or heads of state), they were roundly dismissed by reformers and conservatives alike. Zealots like Frederick Douglass were the exception rather than the rule. The first Woman’s Rights Convention took place at Seneca Falls in 1848, and Douglass accepted his invitation to attend with enthusiasm, stating in
The North Star
, “All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman. . . .” This was a shockingly anomalous opinion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her partner-in-reform Lucretia Mott were deeply gratified by Douglass’s approval, but they met with ferocious opposition from strangers, friends, and family. Stanton’s father, Judge Cady, wished, in fact, that she “had waited until I was under the sod before you had done this foolish thing.”

It should be noted that the motivation behind the female rights movement was far more one of survival than of pique or pride or even social progress. When the women went past claiming equal intellect to mentioning that they were not allowed to inherit property fairly, or that they must work or perish, or that the only way to survive destitution was moral ruination (specifically in the sense of entering the sex trade), they received replies such as this one from the New York
Christian Inquirer
in 1850: “Rights imply duties, and freedom from certain duties is one of the most precious rights of women. The immodesty and rashness with which duties not assigned to them are sought by some women, give poor indication of any appropriate sense of the difficulty and importance of discharging those distinctly imposed by Providence.” The fact that countless women starved to death as a result of being denied such indecorous “duties” was mainly addressed during the time period by way of assurances of heaven and a just reward in the halcyon afterlife for humble maidens who embraced suffering in a duly Christlike manner.

The stigma against mental health problems, as terrible as it remains at present, was still worse in the nineteenth century; I’ve endeavored to make not only mental illness but its accompanying ostracism as historically accurate as possible, which proved challenging. Additionally, I often lacked clinical vocabulary when describing various problems (it took me quite a long time on Valentine’s behalf to discover, for instance, that the contemporary slang for “high” would have been “in altitudes”). While I’m not an author who thinks that my after-the-fact opinions of my characters have any bearing on how readers view them, on an academic level, it may be of interest to know that I imagined Silkie Marsh as a sociopath, Robert Symmes as a sadist, and Mercy and her father the Reverend Underhill to suffer from hereditary paranoid schizophrenia, an illness which has a definite and tragic genetic component.

Throughout the Timothy Wilde trilogy, I have endeavored to show all due respect for the NYPD’s ideals and practices, but I have never pretended their record is spotless, and to do so would be not merely coy but asinine. Heroes and villains and plain misguided men and women often wear the same uniforms. The shower-bath scene in which Ronan McGlynn is interrogated in the Tombs courtyard by roundsman Kildare is taken directly from a nineteenth-century woodcut illustration, seeming by its subsequent description to explicitly describe an early American form of waterboarding. Whether one defines such measures as “enhanced interrogation” or simple torture, one cannot doubt that deep pockets of grey existed in our early law-enforcement practices, as indeed they do to this very day. To acknowledge such is not to dishonor the countless heroes of the NYPD, and one hopes only that history will judge every man and woman according to their deserts rather than their reputations. One shudders to think what a contemporary biography of Captain Valentine Wilde would look like.

During the first ten years I spent in New York, I lived a few blocks away from where Chief of Police George Washington Matsell is buried at the idyllic uptown Trinity Cemetery in Washington Heights. The gate was often locked, so I visited infrequently (though I borrowed piecemeal several wonderful character names from tombstones). But Matsell and his preoccupation with language and his
Rogue’s Lexicon,
his passion for understanding people and their motives, the murky bits of his history and accusations of his being a Party bully as much as a reformer and a wildly liberal apologist, are the reasons I was able to infuse these books with the language and the ethos of their time period. Here is to, unabashedly,
The Secret Language of Crime,
and may many more such lexicons be produced during times of tremendous struggle and social upheaval.

Writing this book was an enormous struggle. I have always been what authors term a
pantser
, a charming “seat-of-the-pants” term the hopelessly disorganized call themselves so they don’t feel like crying into their Top Ramen bowls and whiskey mugs at four in the morning when the words won’t come. To every single one of the friends and family who relentlessly, stubbornly believed in me during that process, I thank you. I’m not ashamed to say there were moments stretching into days when I thought this manuscript wouldn’t happen. And I am actually proud of the fact that, after the horrid mess topped 150,000 words in its first draft, you all applauded heartily as I trimmed its length with gentle chain saws.

My gratitude to my editor, Amy Einhorn, for supporting Tim Wilde—and, in every fashion her copious brain can come up with, me personally—is immense. Additionally, I’m in perennial awe of her ability to induce me to tell the
right
story, and at the
right
moment. Thanks to her and thanks most sincerely to her brilliant team, including but certainly not limited to Elizabeth Stein, Lydia Hirt, Katie McKee, Kate Stark, Alexis Welby, and all the other lovely powerhouses who keep me afloat.

The team of completely metal, hard-rocking ladies at William Morris Endeavor, who are the reason you might be reading this book, deserve far more than my simple thanks, for I owe them a very great deal more than that. Erin Malone, you are the Master Splinter to my Ninja Turtle, if Splinter had been smokingly hot and fashionable and not a sagacious sewer rat. (You know what I mean.) Tracy Fisher and Cathryn Summerhayes, if representing authors were an Olympic event, your team would win gold every year, and I often picture you in a two-person bobsled for this very purpose. Amy Hasselbeck, you are absolutely the tops.

Thank you a thousand times to my foreign-language publishers, every language and every time zone, as well as to Claire Baldwin and her superlative team at Headline in the UK (who tend to keep my version of English remarkably intact). I’m continually humbled by your creative output and canny suggestions, from
la belle France avec Deborah Druba et Carine Chichereau
to marvelously tiny Swedish pocket editions.

My everlasting gratitude to the Bryant Park Research Library and the entire NYC library system for helping to make the Wilde brothers the men they are. Additional historical research was of course necessary, however, and my thanks on this occasion are thus due to historians Richard Bernstein, Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Perlman Gordon, Christine Stansell, Sean Wilentz, Timothy Gilfoyle, Jonathan H. Earle, Gustavus Meyers, Edith Abbott, and Norman Ware. Contemporary accounts (throughout the trilogy) have been my bread and butter, and I’d be ungrateful not to mention Lydia Maria Child, Ned Buntline, George G. Foster, and the countless reporters for the
Herald
newspaper I’ve quoted at length.

Thank you to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and to the many, many other women—some infamous, some now-famous, some forgotten entirely—who enabled me to live as I do.

Finally, thank you a thousand times to anyone who has ever picked up a strange book, frowned at it, hefted it, skimmed it, and thought Timothy Wilde was worth getting to know. You are each and every one of you my heroes.

Lyn
dsay Faye
is the author of the critically acclaimed novels
Dust and Shadow
,
The Gods of Gotham
—which was nominated for an Edgar for Best Novel—and
Seven for a Secret
. If you were to ask her, she would say she writes hero stories. Faye, a true New Yorker in the sense that she was born elsewhere, lives in Queens with her husband, Gabriel.

*
Excerpted from George Washington Matsell,
The Secret Language of Crime: Vocabulum, or, The Rogue’s Lexicon
(G. W. Matsell & Co., 1859).

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