The Fatal Flame (8 page)

“I used to live in Stone Street,” I said, surprised at the coincidence. “Before . . .” I gestured to the rippling burn scar she couldn’t have missed. Not being dead blind.

“Oh. I’d never have asked, but . . . Well, sod that fire anyhow, we’re still standing.” She leaned forward for another toast. “To your good looks.”

As I raised my glass again, I thought,
This is bad.

This is very bad, and about to get worse. It doesn’t matter that you like her—you have to accuse her of threatening to set the city aflame.

I wasn’t attracted to her, had nil desire to reveal the flesh under the shocking trousers. And something about her even then, if I’m honest, scratched a pinprick of alarm in my sternum. But she reminded me of my former stargazer friend Bird Daly, the way she speaks her mind because she doesn’t know how to stop, because the latch guarding her lips was long ago broken irreparably, and I felt a similarly protective urge arising.

“Before you were a printer, what did you do?”

“Are these really the questions you’re meant to be asking me?” She smoothed her hand over the arresting white streak in her chestnut haystack of hair, a worried gesture. “If not the togs, it’s the press, isn’t it? I break obscenity laws two or three times a week. You’re fining me?”

“No.” I spread my hands. “I grew up here too, on the streets sometimes, and I’m not often ketched by things that aren’t worth being ketched about. As for your press, I’m a copper star who loathes Tammany and is a rampant abolitionist.”

“An abolitionist?” Sally Woods chuckled, wriggling in her seat. “I love those. Though more than half of them are as useless on the topic of women’s rights as any old Whig. As I said, I grew up learning my dad’s trade, and when I turned eighteen, after I’d begged hard enough, he and Mum sent me to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.”

“Really?” I quirked a brow at her. “That’s dead flash, Miss Woods. What was it like?”

Mount Holyoke was opened eleven years ago. By a woman, no less, not a man with the temerity to suggest that females would not become emotionally unbalanced upon learning Latin, that they could possibly even manage astronomy without developing hysteria, and that a smattering of Homer would fail to explode their crystalline minds. Its detractors—which includes nearly everyone, male and female alike—protest that since women can’t be doctors or merchants or statesmen or lawyers or businessmen, otherwise perfectly contented future wives are being rendered unfit helpmeets, sullied with the heavy drag of superfluous information. By this they mean information apart from how best to ensure the cook buys the freshest, cheapest produce and whether baby vomit can be scrubbed out of satin. Its five or six apologists protest that educated women will produce wiser, more upstanding kinchin, thus raising keen and strapping boys and thereby finer senators. It’s true enough that apart from manual labor like straw-hat making or bookbinding or manufactory drudgery, women can’t work. And therein lies the crux of the argument that one may as well teach a duck to speak Spanish as teach a woman geology at Mount Holyoke.

I can picture Mercy Underhill there easy as I can close my eyes and see her face.

“It was grand.” Sally Woods’s eyes took on a dreamy watercolor cast. “We couldn’t afford it, but Dad said he figured I’d as much right to education as anyone, since I’d been doing print work starting at four years old. Neighbors thought he was cracked, of course—what possible use could a hen make of algebra? I was meant to tell them I’d find a husband who’d be proud of what I’d learnt, but when I didn’t bother, they gave up on my prospects altogether, and that was bully by me. Sorry. What’s Holyoke like, you asked? It’s red brick, crawling with ivy, a chapel with a real rose window, a library with a ceiling so vaulted you’d suspect you were in church. I studied natural history there, architecture, physics.”

“I’m jealous,” I confessed with a rueful twist to my lips.

“You sound sharp enough.”

“I read whenever I’ve time, that’s all. Nothing to boast over.”

“I was boasting, wasn’t I? I’m sorry, pax.”

“No, no, it’s a remarkable achievement.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to bounce about it.”

“You must have learned flash patter in the manufactory,” I inferred aloud without thinking. “It sounds oddly well on you.”

Her face instantly hardened into a frozen granite stare.

Oh, excellently played,
my brother’s voice drawled in my head.
You, my Tim, are an intellectual lamppost.

“How in
hell
do you know I did manufactory work?” she snarled.

“Your former job is relevant to the questions I need to ask you,” I admitted.

“Are the girls all right?” she demanded, voice shaking.

I was confused by the question. Then I remembered the sort of building in which I’d last encountered Alderman Symmes, her former employer. And began to suspect that something may have happened—something very old and impossibly twisted, like the root of an evil tree.

“I’m afraid I don’t know. But I will go direct to the manufactory after we’re through to ask them personally. And if they aren’t all right, I will arrest the bastard who led them to that state. Is that a deal?”

Sally Woods finished her whiskey in a bolt and topped up our glasses, her comely face grey with disgust. “If you mean it, it’s a deal.”

“I mean it comprehensively. Who should I ask after?”

“Ellie Abell.” Miss Woods recrossed her legs, slumping dully back in her secondhand armchair. “She’d not string you, you can trust what she says. And everyone adores her, talks to her, so she’ll know if the others are well.” Another expression flitted across her features—just as repulsed but much harder to read.

“I’ll visit her as soon as I’ve asked you a few questions.”

“The relevant ones now?”

“Yes. What is your relation to your former employer, Robert Symmes?”

Her face went as pale as the streak in her hair. It was a look of mingled loathing and fear so rarefied that it could have cured hide. Not just a disquieting expression—a dangerous one. And my heart started up its usual inconvenient habit of trying to exit my chest cavity for fairer climes as I remembered the wording of the threatening note. Most of its content could have sprung from any half-cracked socialist revolutionary. I’d seen the like in
Working Man’s Advocate
—calling for the roads to run red with the blood of tyrants, et cetera
.
But one phrase, amid so much that was predictably impotent and enraged, stood out to me now.

We will not be cowed by those who think us less than human.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She wasn’t. That much was obvious.

I sat back, trying to make myself even smaller than I already am. I’ve terrified copious people due to the disreputable star pinned to my coat, but this was different. Something infected lurked in her marrow. Waiting. Poisoning her—poisoning others, I suddenly feared, should the venom escape her slender frame.

“Can I help?” I attempted when she made no answer. “I’ll fetch water if you tell me where it is. Would you like—”

“I would like,” she hissed, “to see Robert Symmes tortured, drawn, quartered, and his head stuck on a pike in the middle of City Hall Park. Can you arrange that for me?”

“While not in my job description, Miss Woods, speaking from personal experience of the man, that seems a pretty worthy goal.”

She relaxed fractionally, her face losing its death-mask pallor.

“All right.” Her dark eyes glimmered like stones in a deep pool. “You want to know my relationship to Robert Symmes? Robert Symmes is a man who pays his girls too little and treats his emigrant outworkers like pests. He’s rich as Astor but doesn’t use any of his chink to improve the city. He’s convinced that he is the greatest politician since Jefferson, but he’s mistaken about that. And he is, in addition to all this, the cruelest human being you could possibly imagine.”

Carefully, I studied her. Her engaging snub nose and teak-colored eyes and active mouth. Wanting to ask a hard question. Because if what I suspected had happened was the truth, she deserved mountains more from the star police than a gaping houseguest who depleted her whiskey supplies.

Not that there was any guarantee I could deliver it to her. On the contrary.

“Is there anything you want to tell me? Anything. At all.”

Shaking her head bitterly, she pulled herself up. “It’s personal, and can’t be helped anyhow. But you don’t strike me the way copper stars generally do, and you should know it.”

“Granted, I’m considerably smaller.”

This earned me a dry chuckle followed by a sigh.

“Can you tell me why Symmes sacked you?”

She stared at my wide hat on the table. “No, I cannot do that. I’ve been told if I speak of it . . . Well, it doesn’t matter. Now, what is this all about?”

Pausing, I read the note again in my mind. I tried to imagine Miss Woods lobbing a brick through a window to unsettle a vile man. I succeeded. She’d the will and the arm to play with the alderman’s mind, though he seemed with a rat’s cunning to have put his finger on the culprit almost at once.

Then I tried to picture this uncannily dressed, gorgeously
present
woman actually setting fire to a building full of innocent outworkers.

Despite the wholesale malignancy of her expression seconds previous, I failed.

Not a single brushstroke of that image could I picture. And yet a small pull like the tug of a thread wrapped around my finger reminded me that something about her was unnerving. Even downright frightening. Whether the togs or the naked stare or something more noisome below the rest, however, I couldn’t be certain.

“You threatened Symmes, didn’t you?”

“Of course not.”

Angling an eye at her, I waited. It’s generally not a long preamble before people start showering me with every acid secret they can think of and then searching their minds for more. It’s exceedingly useful. No matter that the tales leave burns in my flesh.

“I did not threaten Alderman Robert Symmes,” she grated out. But I knew better.

“Supposing I already savvied that you did?”

Sally Woods’s hands began to shake. I didn’t care for that, so I pressed on.

“I’m not threatening you. I’m
asking
you.”

“Yes,” she growled at last. “He told you, didn’t he? That
filthy
man actually set the star police on me. I’d cause, you have to know that. I’d—” Her voice broke. “I’d
such
cause, and now you’re going to carry me off to the Tombs and—”

“I don’t think you’d much like the atmosphere, though I could arrange a tour.” Rising, I returned my hat to my head. “I need you to stop toying with his mind from now on. This kind of threat . . . it’s a serious matter.”

Miss Woods stared at me, dumbstruck. Then she levered to her feet and stuck out her hand. I shook it, finding her grip every bit as firm as mine. I liked that, though. I liked her, considerably. Even though something about her prickled the nape of my neck.

“Where am I bound?”

“Nassau Street and Cedar. It’s called the New American Textile Manufactory. Symmes owns at least four others I know of. Maybe more. But that’s where I worked.”

“I’m on my way there, then. Thank you for the whiskey.”

“Come back if you like, Mr. Wilde.” She followed me to her door. “We’ll have a drink and talk abolition and dirty politics. I mean it. You’re welcome here.”

“I’d love to,” I assured her, meaning it just as heartily.

I would be returning, of course, all too soon. Just not for any so charming a reason. Meanwhile, I pointed my boots south in the direction of the Second Ward, the affectionate April sun giving me no indication whatsoever that I was on a direct collision course with a hurricane.

The first event engraved on my memory was the birth of a sister when I was four years old. . . . I heard so many friends remark, “What a pity it is she’s a girl!” that I felt a kind of compassion for the little baby.

—ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, ORGANIZER OF THE 1848 SENECA FALLS CONVENTION

T
HE
STROLL
FROM
T
HOMAS
S
TREET
down to Nassau wasn’t taxing, so I walked there. Soon enough nearing what we’d used to call the Burnt District. And the teeming hive of manufacturing there, as if an industrious honeycomb had been cannonaded and splattered its sweet commerce throughout the once-charred First Ward.

If I could choose between a fire that destroyed our family and a fire that destroyed a patch of my skin . . . there isn’t any question which I’d erase from the record. But the Fire of 1845 brought its fair share of consequences. One was that my life was ruined, and thus I became a reluctant—very reluctant—star policeman. One was that people died. Too many of them. One was that about three hundred buildings at the busiest tip of Manhattan surrounding Wall Street burned down to their basements.

Another was that industry has popped right back up again from the soot. Startling and sudden and garish as a jack-in-the-box.

Brick buildings and board buildings. Brownstone buildings and even some strange few painted iron-faced buildings. Grey-trimmed buildings and whitewashed buildings and marble buildings and granite buildings. I can’t describe the vertigo of it. The sheer scope. Three-story buildings, four-story buildings, fives and even neck-craning sixes towering above the fractured pavement, where the speckled pigs still roam free in search of sex and cabbage scraps. It’s a heady business. Absinthe-rich, delirious. I’d made the mistake of nearing that newborn rumpus of a district at about half past twelve. And striding down Broadway, no less—the more fool I. So I was jostled continually by stockbrokers and hot-corn girls and stoggers with their hands half in my pockets before I’d slapped them aside like so many flies. My nostrils full of horse manure, and fried clams, and the sweet neutral aroma of stone simmering in the sun.

Quick as was possible, I turned off kaleidoscope Broadway down Cedar, in sight of my goal.

Nassau isn’t a street I much frequent. It’s being rebuilt with manufactories where the business-residences and coffeehouses had stood before the flames licked them to rubble. That is, I knew as much, but it must have been six months since I’d set foot in it, and I confess . . .

I was not a little bustled.

It was a cluster of manufactories all right, regardless of the irregularity of the architecture. Interrupted only by the newly famous American and French Dining Saloon, where the merchants gather to shake shrewd palms, its sign advertising
TURTLE SOUP FOR EXPORTATION
. Tradesmen bustling, their shabby custom-cut coats mended on a dozen occasions and cheap cuff links shining, doing business. Colored men delivering goods and picking up orders—though none are allowed to be official stevedores. Several boy kinchin asking after prices and running them back to Wall Street with unlit cigars marinating in their mouths.

And finally, the girls of the Bowery.

Dozens of them. Scores. More females eating their midday dinners on stoops and stairwells so as to soak up the sunlight than I’d ever dare to count.

The New American Textile Manufactory, a strange iron fabrication, proved to be unlocked. The front hall was as spacious and aloof as a bank, doubtless to accommodate the molls arriving en masse at six in the morning. Its lower levels were offices, so I climbed up an equally disconcerting—but thankfully solid—set of cast-iron stairs to the second floor.

Stepping over the threshold into the manufactory proper, I took a moment to stare. Scores of women were dining in the huge room before me. It was occupied by very long aisles, large bolts of extremely cheap unprinted fabric in blues and browns and greys, tall enough ceilings to give one pause, and dozens of long tables at which the Bowery girls worked. Curled and ribboned and flounced and colorful as peacocks. Their scissors and measuring tools sat idle before them while they ate, laughing as they shared boiled peanuts and pickled radishes.

I paused just beyond the entryway. Reading conversations on their lips, as the echoing din prevented my hearing them clearly.

Many were chatting of beaus, but most were talking practical matters. That wasn’t in the least shocking. Women are required to be practical the way fish require water. What was surprising was that they were talking practicality to one another not in shuttered-off nooks filled with silver-edged portraits. Nor in the sweat-sweet kitchens of rank hovels.

But in public. In a workplace, no less.

In New York as in other cities, the fair sex falls into pretty particular categories—categories that dictate behavior the way species decides fur versus feathers. Women with enough money to be termed ladies aren’t meant to be seen in the open, not unless being put through their paces along Fifth Avenue, or tasting cordials at the Astor House, or taking the air in an open four-wheeler. And they’re not meant to be aware of mud, or sweat, or labor—so if one did start up chatting pothole repair with a gentleman friend, she’d be dosed with a headache powder and sent to sleep off the strain. Women lacking the funds to be called ladies
can talk domestic concerns over tea with thinned milk within bare walls if virtuous. If unvirtuous, they can say whatever they damn well please, as ruination doesn’t visit by degrees but rather once and forever after. And if emigrants, they can shriek what they will from street corner to street corner, as they’re already about as high in the social strata as our feral cats.

This wasn’t the same. This was healthy kates with coin in their pockets and blood in their cheeks. Discussing how they lived their lives.

Come time for the roof to be mended, ’f I don’t ask Jeremiah to fix it and no one else, I’m the biggest flat as was ever taken for a—

Did you see Kitty’s new straw bonnet, she only paid three bits, and it’s worked like a craftswoman’s showpiece, you simply must go to Bowery just north of Spring and ask for—

Don’t be a ninny, Mexico isn’t the question any longer, it’s about whether or not they’ll demand Oregon follow along in the vile trade despite its latitude, and then we’re sure enough—

Striding past the working girls and their rows of open tin dinner pails, hinges gleaming, packed with leftovers of jugged hare and cocky leeky and baked goose, I made every effort not to cast dark looks of concern at them. I’m pretty sure I was a fantastical failure.

“Can I help, sir?” came a cutting American tenor.

The foreman greeted me in the wide center aisle. He was fifty, maybe, nearly as short as I am, bald as a frog, with a prim mouth and a pinched, nickel-counting look about the eye.

“Simeon Gage,” he announced as we shook hands.

“Timothy Wilde. I’m from the star police.”

“I can see that. What’s it to do with us?”

“Might you take me to your office? It’s a private matter.”

His mazzard congealed in the way that means,
If it’s bribes you’re after, please be sane about the figure.
But he led me into a room at the back of the giant workspace, indicating a chair across from a desk with a messy stack of ledgers and time sheets and insurance forms resting on it. We sat.

“Busy day?” I angled my eyes at the paperwork.

“I take care of some of the alderman’s more tedious filing,” Gage replied, chest ballooning. “He is a personage of great importance. You might call me—as a trusted overseer, you understand—one of his secretaries. Accounts payable, contracts, policy renewals, and the like. I can barely keep up at the moment. Let alone manage those witless hens out there.”

I smiled. Not amiably. “Are you familiar with a former employee of this establishment, a Miss Sally Woods?”

He shifted his priggish lips. “Aye.”

“What can you tell me about her?”

“She’s trouble.”

“What variety?”

“The worst I can think of.” He scraped backward in his chair dramatically, tugging his waistcoat down. “I was a tailor before this modern system unmanned me. When I was down on my luck, with no orders coming in and otherwise respectable people thinking nothing of wearing ready-made slops, Mr. Symmes gave me a boost out of the mire. So by trouble I mean the sort of trouble every fellow fears most—the sort that’ll strip him of his dignity. No respect whatsoever for the natural order, for authority, for rules, for Mr. Symmes. She worked hard enough, for a girl anyway, but she’s ruinous otherwise. Educated, you know,” he added, picking at one of his fingernails.

I made a hare-quick decision to spend as little time as was possible with Simeon Gage.

“I need to speak with an Ellie Abell. Is she here?”

“Sure enough.” He narrowed his eyes, measuring.

I waited.

That went on for a spell.

“I’ll just bring her in, then?” he sneered.

“Aces, I’d appreciate it.”

He departed with an audible level of annoyance in his footfalls. When he returned, it was with an apple-cheeked beauty with light ash-brown hair, full lips, and a pair of golden eyes that radiated fear.

“Thank you for seeing me, Miss Abell,” I said. “Mr. Gage, I’ll show myself out when I’m through.”

An eyebrow as bushy as his pate was hairless reared upward. “If it’s to do with Miss Abell here, then it’s company business, isn’t it?”

Miss Abell’s mouth twitched, the door of a safe slamming shut.

“You’ll probably want to give us some privacy,” I objected, “unless the manufactory is after a hefty fine.”

“What in hell would you
fine
us over?”

“I’m a pretty imaginative sort. I’d puzzle it out.”

Purpling with vexation, Gage made an effort to slice me open with his eyeballs. He wasn’t any too successful. But his heart was in it, bless the man.

“
Much
obliged for your cooperation, Mr. Gage. I’ll make sure Tammany hears of it.”

I wouldn’t. But that tipped the scales into Simeon Gage’s exiting his office, yanking his door shut so hard than a pen on his desk toppled out of its stand. Reaching, I returned it to its home.

“Please sit down, Miss Abell.” I took my hat off and gestured at Gage’s chair behind the desk. She sat as gingerly as if requested to perch on a fence post. “My name is Timothy Wilde. You’re in no scrape here, I promise. I just want to ask a few questions for your own safety.”

“For
my
safety?”

“I was sent by a Miss Sally Woods.”

Her fetchingly ample cheeks paled, followed by a look of dull horror she smothered so quick it might never have been there. “What’s Sally up to now, then? What’s she keen to bring on our heads
this
time?”

Taken aback, I shifted elbows in the straight-armed chair. “She wanted to know if you were faring well here.”

“Oh, she’s scheming something again, that wicked little cat, I
knew
it.”

Conversation appeared to have made a sharp turn. So I adopted an understanding look. Ran my fingers along the edge of my scar, which was burning in the usual futile alarm. Annoyed myself and dropped my hand.

“I’d like to hear what I ought to look out for, in that case.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly speak about Sally to a policeman.”

“Miss Abell, I’d sooner cross Tammany Hall than an honest woman. On my honor.”

Ellie Abell licked her rosy lips, cogitating. She wore a dress of sage green and, in typical Bowery fashion, had belted it with a yellow shawl. Her intricate little straw bonnet perched at the back of her head, clinging as if to a cliff’s edge, festooned with fabric buttercups and a ribbon of brighter yellow still. First impressions told me she was the brand of good-hearted that verged on gullible. The layer of ice that keeps city dwellers safe from one another was lacking. Intuition told me she had the brains to combat that deficiency, even if her face was the picture of a tea rose in midbloom. So
honor
—and God knows I make every effort in that direction—seemed the right tactic.

“I spoke too soon, Mr. Wilde,” she fretted, pulling out a handkerchief and twisting it. “I don’t
know
that Sally’s planning any lay. We haven’t spoken. Not for ages. Not since she was sacked.”

“She seemed mightily concerned over you.”

“Well, that’s stemming from the wrong source
entirely.
Oh, I’m not the sort to hold a grudge, Mr. Wilde, but sometimes I could just . . .” She fluttered a hand vexedly. “Just spit on that girl’s shoes.”

I frowned. “You tell me the story, and I promise I’ll keep an eagle’s watch over this place, Miss Abell. It’s important, for reasons I can’t discuss just now.”

Seconds passed as she did sums in her head, adding the columns over whether trusting me or sealing her plush mouth was the better course. As had already happened once too often that day, I was faced with a moll who’d turned sea green with fear.

Miss Abell reached a decision and drew a steadying breath. “It was . . . let me see.” She counted on her fingers. “Probably six months ago now since Sally started ruining
everything
.”