by Lyndsay Faye
“I wonder something this morning.” She paused, her wide-set eyes sliding my way and then dropping off again. “But it’s silly, maybe. You’ll laugh.”
“If you ask me not to, I won’t.”
“I wonder why you never use my name, you see, Mr. Wilde.”
New York’s winds are never fresh in the summer. But as we turned onto Wall, bank after bank scrolling past us in line after line of Grecian columns, the air turned sweeter. Or maybe I just remembered it that way afterward, but suddenly it all seemed pure dust and hot stone. Clean, like parchment. That smell was worth a fortune. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“There, yes. I’m sorry—I don’t mean to be cryptic.” Mercy’s bottom lip slid underneath her top one just a little, only a fraction of a warm wet inch, and I thought in that moment I could taste it too. “You could have just said, ‘I don’t know what you mean, Miss Underhill.’ And then we wouldn’t be talking about it any longer.”
“What does that make you think?”
I spied a jagged hole in the pavement. Pivoting quickly, I guided Mercy out of its path with a swish of her pale green summer skirts. Maybe she’d caught sight of the little cave herself, though, for I didn’t startle her. Her head didn’t even turn. Escorting Mercy down a block, depending on her mood, you might not be there for all the attention she pays you. And I’m not exactly Sunday, so to speak. I’ve never been a special occasion. I’m all of the other days in the work week, and there are plenty of us streaming by without notice. But I could fix that, or I thought I could.
“Do you mean to make me theorize that you like the topic of my name, Mr. Wilde?” she asked me, looking as if she was trying not to laugh.
I’d caught her out, though. No one ever answers her questions with questions, just the way she never acknowledges answering questions at all. That’s another fault of Mercy’s I’m fixed on. She’s a reverend’s daughter, to be certain, but she talks clever as a jade if only you’re keen enough to notice.
“Do you know what I’d like to do?” I questioned in return, thinking that was the trick of it. “I’ve managed to put some money away, four hundred in cash. Not like all these maniacs who take their first extra dollar and play it against the price of China tea. I want to buy some land, out on Staten Island maybe, and have a river ferry. Steamships are dear, but I can take my time finding a good price.”
I remembered being two years orphaned, scrawny and pale-skinned and twelve. Wheedling my way through sheer tenacity into the employment of a hulking but kindly Welsh boatman during once of the leaner periods Valentine and I had ever faced, having lived off of mealy apples for a week. Maybe I was hired on as a deckhand because the fellow suspected as much. I recalled standing at the prow of the ferry before the rails I’d just polished until my fingers were peeling, head thrown back as an ecstatic midsummer thunderstorm exploded in the still-blazing sunshine. For five minutes, spray and rain had danced in the dazzling light, and for five minutes, I’d not wondered whether my brother back on Manhattan Island had yet managed to kill himself. It felt wonderful. Like being erased.
Mercy quickened her grip slightly. “What has your anecdote to do with my question?”
Be a man and take the plunge, I thought.
“Maybe I don’t want to call you Miss Underhill, ever,” I answered her. “Maybe I’d like to call you Mercy. What is it you’d like best to be called?”
I was a touchstone at Nick’s Oyster Cellar that night, a lightning-bright lucky charm. All my pale glorified card sharps, all the faro-champagne-morphine-and-what-else-have-you addicts, the freaks who haunt the Exchange and make deals with damp handshakes in the back rooms of coffee houses—they all saw kismet on me and wanted a taste of it. A drink from Timothy Wilde was as good as a slap on the back from an Astor.
“Three more bottles of champagne!” shouted a weedy fellow called Inman. He could scarce breathe for being jostled by black-coated elbows. I wondered sometimes what made the financiers head for another sweltering cock-pit the moment they quit the chamber of the Board of Brokers.
“Take a glass for yourself on my account, Tim, cotton’s higher than an opium fiend!”
People tell me things. Always have done. They hemorrhage information like a slit bag spills dried beans. It’s only gotten worse as I’ve manned an oyster cellar. Incredibly useful, but it does get to be draining at times—as if I’m part barman and part midnight hole in the ground, just a quick-dug hollow to bury secrets in. If Mercy would only manage to fall into the same habit, that would be something miraculous.
A stream of honest working sweat trickled down my back by nine o’clock, when the sun went down. Men sweating for other reasons demanded drinks and oysters as if the world had spun off its axis. Apparently there was nothing for it but to annihilate the feast before we all slid off. I was moving fast enough for a dozen, juggling orders, calling back friendly insults, counting the shower of coins.
“What’s the good news, Timothy?”
“We’ve got enough cold champagne to float an ark on,” I shouted back at Hopstill, who’d reappeared. Julius materialized behind me, hoisting a bucket of fresh-shaved ice. “Next round’s on the house.”
The way I figured it, Mercy Underhill hadn’t said no to any of my remarks. Nor “You seem to have the wrong idea,” nor “Leave me be.” Instead, she’d said a good many completely unrelated things before I left her at the corner of Pine and William streets, a breeze picking up from the east, where the coffee houses churned rich burning smells into the heavy air.
She’d said, “I can understand your not liking my family name, Mr. Wilde. It makes me think of being buried,” for example. She’d said, “Your own parents, God rest them, had the generosity to leave you the surname of a lord chancellor of England. I’d love to live in London. How cool London must be in the summer, and there the parks have real grass, and everything electric green from the rain. Or so my mother always told me, whenever a New York summer seemed too much to bear.” That was a regular catechism of Mercy’s, whatever the season—a little prayer to her late mother, Olivia Underhill, a native of London who’d been odd and generous and imaginative and beautiful and wonderfully like her only child.
Mercy had added, “I’ve finished the twentieth chapter of my novel. Don’t you think that’s a thrilling number? Had you ever expected me to get so far? Will you give me your honest opinion, once it’s finished?”
If she aimed to discourage me, she was going to have to up her game.
And I might not be a scholar in title, or a churchman, but Reverend Thomas Underhill liked me fine. Barmen are pillars of the community and the hub of New York’s wheel, and I had four hundred dollars in slick silver buried in the straw tick of my bed. Mercy Underhill, in my opinion, ought to be called Mercy Wilde—and then I’d never know where another conversation was headed for the rest of my life.
“Give me fifty dollars and I’ll see you’re a rich man by the end of the fortnight, Tim!” shrieked Inman from yards away in the roiling vat of bodies. “Sam Morse’s telegraph can make you a king!”
“Take your fairy money and go to hell,” I returned cheerfully, reaching for a slop rag. “You ever play the market, Julius?”
“I’d likelier burn money than speculate it,” Julius answered without looking at me, deftly pulling the corks from a row of drenched champagne bottles with his wide fingers. He’s a sensible fellow, quick and quiet, with fragrant tea leaves braided into his hair. “Fire can heat a man’s soup. You calculate they know the Panic was their doing? You think they remember?”
I wasn’t listening to Julius any longer by that time. Instead, I was dwelling thick as laudanum on the last thing Mercy had said to me.
Don’t think you’ve hurt my feelings. I’m not married to the name, after all.
It was the only sentence directly to the purpose I’d ever heard her say, I think. At least, it was the first since she was about fifteen, and even so, the remark had a sideways charm to it. So that was
a heady, graceful moment. The moment when I discovered that Mercy saying something near-plain is every bit as beautiful as Mercy talking circles like a flame-red kite in the wind.
At four in the morning, I passed Julius an extra two dollars as he propped the mop handle in the corner. He nodded. Worn to a thinly buzzing alertness, we headed for the steps leading up to the awakening city.
“You ever wonder what it’s like to sleep at nighttime?” I asked as I locked the cellar door behind us.
“You won’t catch me in a bed after dark. Keep the devil guessing,” Julius answered, winking at his own joke.
We reached the street just as dawn flared with grasping red fingers over the horizon. Or so the corner of my eye thought, as I settled my hat on my head. Julius was quicker to catch on.
“Fire!” Julius bellowed in his low, smooth voice, cupping his hands around his sharply defined lips. “Fire in New Street!”
For a moment, I stood there, frozen in the dark with a streak of scarlet above me, already acting about as useless as a broken gas-lamp inspector. Feeling the same sickness in my belly the word fire always causes me.
TWO
The explosion was heard at Flushing and supposed to be the shock of an earthquake. Cinders fell on Staten Island, and for several miles over in New Jersey, the sun was obscured by smoke during the forenoon.
• New York Herald, July 1845 •
The third floor of the storefront across the street from us looked as if it had imprisoned an amber sun. Fierce yellow tongues were eating away the outer windows, the fire already laying claim to what must have been a vast inner storeroom. Fires in these parts are about as common as riots, and every bit as fatal, but here one raged in plain sight without anyone having yet given the alarm. So whatever the cause, it had been horribly quick—a lamp left lit near a pile of cotton wool, a cigar end in a rubbish bin. Any small, stupid, deadly mistake would serve. It’s a large warehouse that faces Nick’s, taking up much of the small block, and my heart took a second dip in my chest when I recognized that a glow so very bright must have reached throughout the entire floor and now surely raged against the wall of the adjacent building.
Julius and I were racing toward the blaze an instant later. You run toward as-yet-undiscovered fires in New York, not away from them, offering your own help until the all-volunteer fire companies arrive on the scene. People have roasted for want of a hand out a window. I glanced behind us, longing for the clang of the fire bell even though I detested the sound.
“How can no one have seen it yet?” I gasped.
“It’s not sensible.” Stopping, Julius sent up the cry of “Fire!” again and then hurtled after me.
Neighbors trickled into the street under the charcoal sky, staring in awe and with a weird city-dweller’s thrill-seeking pleasure at the wide ribbon of flame on the upper floor. Behind us, at last the nearest fire bell rent the air with its shocking peals—single clangs to summon help to Ward One. Moments later, the answering echo erupted from the cupola of City Hall, beyond the park.
“Wait,” I said, pulling sharply at Julius’s shoulder.
The remaining windows of the storage facility began lighting up like a series of matchsticks—sparks had clearly invaded every story, fire devouring the interior as if the huge building were made of paper. Glass shattering in sudden pistol shots that I couldn’t quite understand.
Then I did understand, and that was far worse.
“This is Max Hendrickson’s store,” I whispered.
Julius’s brown eyes went wide.
“Jesus have mercy,” he said. “If the fire hits his stock of whale oil—”
Red flannel flashed past us as a volunteer fireman with his braces hanging off and his curious leather helmet drooping over his face careened around the corner of Exchange Place. Hell-bent to claim the nearest fire plug for his own engine company, I thought with my familiar slight flare of disdain. And thereby all the glory.
Meanwhile, it occurred to me that my future was now less than certain.
“Go, fetch your valuables,” Julius ordered before I said anything. “And pray you have a house an hour from now.”
I lived in Stone Street, two blocks below the southern terminus of New Street, down Broad, and I sprinted around the corner away from the doomed building with nothing but Mercy, my residence, and its four hundred dollars in silver on my mind. I would get that money if it killed me. Storefronts I’d passed a thousand times went by in an eyeblink, handcrafted chairs and leather-bound books and bolts of cloth just visible behind the darkened shop displays, my boots flying over eroding cobblestones, running as if hell were at my heels.
That was my first mistake. Hell turned out to be in front of me, over a block away from the New Street fire.
The instant my foot touched Broad, a detonation like a volcano erupting burst 38 Broad Street into a plume of rock, granite missiles the size of grown men sailing above me. The structure had hurled a quarry’s worth of stone into the buildings opposite by the time I skidded to a halt.
At first I thought, Holy Christ, someone’s set a bomb in our midst. But 38 Broad, I remembered in the back of my hellfire-dazzled mind as the mammoth warehouse rent itself in pieces before my eyes, was presently a saltpeter storage facility. It held shipments of gunpowder belonging to the well-liked merchant duo of Crocker and Warren. Which was a shame for New York, really. As thunder nearly shattered my eardrums, I thought, Bad luck. A window must have been open, for cinders from the oil fire in New Street had obviously been borne on the wind across the thoroughfare and into a room of powder kegs. Amid the fury, airy curlicues of ash hung perfectly still high above the cobbles. Maybe it was thick of me to even ponder the role of luck at the time, but exploding saltpeter warehouses seem to have a slowing effect on my wits.
Belatedly, I turned to run. I’d taken two steps when I saw a woman flying past me, her mouth open and her face fixed in surprise, her hair streaming backward in a lazy arc. One shoe was blown from her foot, and the foot itself had a smudge of blood on the instep. And that was when I started seeing things funny, just as I realized that I was flying too. Then I heard—no, felt, for the world was silent—the entire earth ripping in half as easily and raggedly as an old piece of cotton.
When I opened my eyes again, the planet had inverted itself. And it was still busily exploding.
My head rested against a door still within its frame, but doors aren’t meant to be horizontal. I wondered why this one was. And why there seemed to be hulking pieces of stone surrounding me on all sides.
A tiny matchstick’s worth of flame nuzzled at the woman’s red calfskin shoe six inches from my hand. That single spark angered me terribly—its smug, devious approach. I wanted to save the shoe, return it to the flying woman, but I couldn’t seem to move my arms. The index finger of my right hand twitched, the movement of a dull, brained little animal. I glimpsed the sky through a crevice and wondered how dawn had risen so quickly.
“Tim! Timothy!”
I knew that voice. I felt a flood of irritation, and also of plain, stupid fear under the shock. He wasn’t too full of morphine to be standing, then. Of course not. That would be so easy. Instead, he was clearly striding into the very center of the bull’s-eye, with shrapnel and brimstone raining freely down upon his person. How very like him.
“Timothy, call out where you are! For the love of God, Tim, answer me!”
My tongue stuck stubbornly to the back of my teeth. I didn’t want that voice to see me sprawled in a Chinese dancing girl’s pose, unable to so much as lift a singed shoe. I didn’t want that voice anywhere near a warehouse acting like the world’s biggest cannon, either. But all I could register was a cottony sense of no.
Something sticky and metallic was running down my cheek.
Light. Too much of it.
A flickering yellow blaze like a god-sized fireplace struck my eyes when someone began tearing away the rocks. Only my upper body had been partly buried. My legs were in the open air and
soon enough my face was too, when a cleanly shaven but bearish figure tossed aside a heavy iron shutter.
“Christ, Tim. Julius Carpenter just saved your hide, telling me which way you’d gone. There’s nary yet breathing in this street.”
I blinked at my six-years’-elder brother, the soot-grimed mountain of a hook-and-ladder man with his ax swinging freely from his belt and his face obscured by the inferno behind him. The anger in my chest grew watery, mingled with sudden relief. When he pulled me up by the arms, I bit down on a yell and managed by some miracle to keep my feet once I was upright. He threw my arm over his coarse red shirt before setting off fast as I could keep pace with him, back the way I’d come, both of us stumbling through the rubble as if it were ankle-deep sand on a beach.
“There’s a girl, Val,” I rasped. “She landed very near me. We have to—”
“Gingerly, gingerly,” growled Valentine Wilde. I’d never have heard him through the pervasive ringing if he’d not been two inches from my ear. “You’re more than half hocused, aren’t you? Wait till we’re out of this and I can see you better.”
“She—”
“I saw a piece of her, Timothy. She’ll be put to bed with a shovel. Shut your head a moment.”
I don’t remember much more until Valentine had reached a brick wall under a gaslight back on New Street and propped me up against it. What had been a half-deserted stone business thoroughfare was now an overturned hornet’s nest. At least three volunteer engine companies had already arrived, and a viciously tight thread of visible tension ran between each and every man in a red shirt. Not a one was brawling, or bickering over fire plugs, or donning brass knuckles. Every time one firefighter met another’s eye, his only expression was And next? And next? Half of them were looking at my brother, their eyes skimming toward him and then fixing. Wilde. Wilde isn’t afraid of anything. Wilde sees his way clear. Wilde runs into infernos as if they’re rose gardens. All right, Wilde. And next? I wanted to force them all quiet with my bare hands over their mouths, make them stop calling out to him.
