by Lyndsay Faye
“I think I’ll see you in hell.”
“Well, that’s true enough,” Valentine shot back with a smile that would have looked cold on an undertaker. “You’ll be living there, after all.”
The next morning, when I was sober enough to see straight, I awoke to my brother snoring on a flat pallet before his fireplace, smelling vividly of absinthe, and a copy of the Herald set out for me on the side table next to the bed. Val could read a lawyer’s own brief and then argue him into an early grave if he liked, but he’s better used to making news than mulling over it in print. So I knew the paper was mine. And here is what I read, after gasping my way through a burn so fierce that I thought my face must surely have been newly afire:
EXTRA New York Herald, THREE O’CLOCK P.M: TERRIBLE CONFLAGRATION: The greatest, the most terrible fire that has occurred in this city since the great conflagration of December 1835 has spread destruction throughout the lower part of the city. Three hundred buildings, according to the best calculation, have been burned to the ground… .
My eyes faltered, not wanting to follow any further.
It is a close estimate to set the loss at from five to six millions of dollars …
Now, there was a fact I already knew instinctively, couldn’t fail to have grasped despite my sorry physical state. A great deal of money had gone up in smoke over the Hudson. That was apparent. It wasn’t dollars or buildings that plagued my unconscious brother, though, tracing a line between his brows though he must still have been drunk as a lord. Val’s single redeeming quality consists of his method for calculating fire losses. And the code is stamped deep in his ribs, somewhere gripping and permanent. Thus I felt a hurt greater than my own real wounds, a raw and sympathetic sensation, when I read:
It is supposed that many lives have been lost by the terrible explosion.
The number, thank Christ, was thirty when all was said and done—a low figure of fatalities when the unholy chaos was considered.
But it wasn’t low enough for Valentine. Nor for me. Not by a long mile.
THREE
The popish countries of Europe are disgorging upon our shores, from year to year, their ignorant, superstitious, and degraded inhabitants, not only by tens, but by hundreds of thousands, who already claim the highest privileges of native citizens, and even the country itself.
• American Protestant in Defence of Civil and Religious Liberty Against Inroads of Papacy, 1843 •
The key to being poor in New York is to know how it’s done: you make shortcuts.
Valentine and I, when we were sixteen and ten, respectively, and one day woke up the only Wildes, learned that life-or-death trick fast. So three days after the fire, perfectly able to walk about but flinching like a gutter cat every time a loud noise set my ears humming, I knew my options were limited to taking Val’s offer of police work or else moving to the interior and learning agriculture. So I decided that, as I’d apparently woken up in a permanent nightmare, I’d start with the police work. And quit the instant I found something better.
On the morning of July twenty-second, a strong wind from the ocean cutting through the summer stench, I headed down Spring Street, past the pineapple vendors and the barrel-organ man in Hudson Square, to find a dwelling place. One with shortcuts. I was going to need plenty of shortcuts on five hundred a year. Nick’s had paid me still less, but that hadn’t been a problem. Not when all the extra coin had been considered, the half-a-neds and coachwheels and deuces slipped into my palm by madmen in French shirtsleeves, the jacks that clinked in Julius’s and my pockets as we parted ways at the end of a shift. Wages were different—stable and frightening. I was looking at a fraction of what I’d earned previously, supposing I wasn’t inclined to extort madams for extra chink.
Neighborhoods in New York change quicker than its weather. Spring Street, where Val lives, is a mix of people in the usual everyday sense: blue-coated Americans with their collars over their lapels and their hats neatly brushed, laughing colored girls waking your eyes up with canary yellow and shocking orange dresses, complacent ministers in brown wool and thin stockings. There are churches in Spring Street, eating houses smelling of pork chops with browned onions. It isn’t Broadway north of Bleecker, where the outrageously wealthy bon ton and their servants peer down their noses at one another, but it isn’t Ward Six either.
Which is where I was headed.
When I entered the district via Mulberry Street with two dollars of Val’s money poisoning my pocket, I knew first that there were no shortcuts to be taken advantage of in that row of godforsaken Catholic misery. Second, I thought, God save New York City from the rumor of faraway blighted potatoes.
As for the swarms of emigrants gushing ceaselessly onto the South Street docks, I’d found out their next stopping place: the entire block consisted of Irish and dogs and rats sharing the same fleas. Not that I hold any truck with Nativists, but I couldn’t prevent a shiver of sympathetic disgust constricting my throat. There were so many of them, scores passing to and fro, that I focused on one individual just to stave off a rush of dizziness. I lit on a still-sleepy peasant youth of about thirteen in trousers worn through the knees, entirely shoeless but wearing blue stockings, who stumbled past me into a corner grocery store. He bypassed the pale putrid cabbages set for show outside the entrance and headed straight for the whiskey bar. His posture matched the building he was patronizing. The Sixth Ward was built over the top of a swamp called the Collect Pond, but if you didn’t know that, you’d wonder why the buildings lean at lunatic angles, seemingly stitched onto the sky in crazy-quilt seams.
I stepped over the fresh corpse of a dog felled by traffic and carried on, edging through the crowd. All the men walked with a purpose into groceries that didn’t sell edible vegetables, the women’s hands blazed redder than their hair from hard labor, and the children … the children seemed by turns harrowed and merely hungry. I saw one respectable fellow as I passed. A priest with a perfectly round head, faintly blue eyes, and a tight white dog collar. But he was ministering to the most wretched of the occupants, or so I hoped.
No, there were no shortcuts for an American on Mulberry. And my face simmered in the heat, rendering fat into the already greasy bandaging. Or something else, possibly. Frankly, I didn’t want to dwell on it.
My face hadn’t been a Michelangelo exactly, but it hadn’t ever served me wrong either. Oval tending toward youthful roundness, and near enough identical to my brother’s. Broad and high brow, deeply arcing hairline, hair indifferently blond. Straight nose, small mouth, with a little upside-down crescent where lips turn to chin. Fair skin despite our merciless summers. I’d never spent overmuch time mulling over my mazzard previously, though, because when I’d wanted a friendly hour or two with an idle shopkeeper’s daughter or a hotel maid with appetites, I’d always gotten it. So it was a good enough face—it didn’t cost me money when I needed a tumble, and I’ve been told my smile is very reluctant, which apparently makes people want to tell you their life histories and then pass you two bits for your patience.
Now I had absolutely no notion of what I looked like. The physical pain was already bad enough to make me steal a little of my brother’s laudanum without added aesthetic horror.
“You’re spooney,” my brother had announced, shaking his head as he studiously roasted coffee beans. “Don’t come over all squeamish on me now, for God’s sake. Have a keek at yourself and be done.”
“Sod off, Valentine.”
“Listen, Tim, I can understand perfectly why you’d keep shady at first, in light of when you were just a squeaker and all, but—”
“By tomorrow at the latest I’ll be clear of this house,” I’d replied on my way out, effectively ending the conversation.
Cutting across Walker Street, I turned up Elizabeth and then all at once shoved my fists in my still-sooty pockets in shock.
The structure directly before me was a miracle. A carefully printed wish list of shortcuts.
Thresholds
and shutters on this block weren’t quite gleaming, but they’d been scrubbed with vinegar and glinted respectably. The laundry strung along the hemp lines between buildings, fickly fluttering in the sun, was mended instead of lagging in limp shreds, giving me a settled feeling. And neat and humble and right before my very eyes stood a two-story brick row house wearing a rooms TO LET BY DAY OR MONTH sign. On the first floor, attractively lettered on a small awning, MRS. BOEHM’S FINE BAKED GOODS held court. Not ten feet away from the entrance stood a pump ready to gush out clean Croton water.
That was potentially four shortcuts, if you’re counting.
First, the pump meant pure Westchester river water and not the filthy stew drawn from Manhattan’s sunken wells. Having the Croton River piped in your home means your landlord paying up front for the service, which happens just as often as the Atlantic freezes so a man can walk to London. Better to live by a free public pump. Second, residing above a bakery meant cast-off day-old bread. A baker is a thousand times likelier to give neighbors the surplus rye loaf than a stranger. Third, bakeries stoke up their ovens twice a day, which come November meant a pallid fraction of most people’s heating costs, since the ovens would be baking caraway rolls while heating my floor.
Finally, Mrs. Boehm’s meant a widow. Women can’t start their own enterprises, but they manage to inherit them when very careful. And I could see where the sign’s paint was fresher on the “Mrs.” than on her surname. Making shortcut number four. If you’re short on rent and a widow needs a roof mended, you might not find yourself back on the streets.
I pushed open the door to the bakery.
Very small, but well loved and well cared for. A simple pine counter displayed stacked rye and plain brown farm loaves, the smaller treats arranged on a wide flower-patterned serving dish. I could see sultanas poking out of a thousand-year cake, and its smell of candied orange peel livened my senses.
“You would like some bread, sir?”
My eyes swept from the baked goods to the woman who’d made them, approaching me as she rubbed her hands against her apron. Mrs. Boehm looked around my age, closer to thirty than twenty. Her jaw was firm and her faded blue eyes alert and inquisitive—which, combined with the newness of the “Mrs.” above her door, led me to believe her husband hadn’t long been absent. She’d hair the color of the seeds dotting her sunflower rolls, a dull shineless blonde that looked nearly grey, and her brow was too wide and too flat. But her mouth was wide too, a generous sweep that oddly reversed how thin she was. When just her lips were considered, I could picture Mrs. Boehm scraping ample butter over a thick slice of her fresh farmer’s loaves. I liked that at once, felt strangely grateful for it. She didn’t seem mean.
“What’s your best seller?” I was pleasant but not smiling. Smiling sent a burn like a brand through my skull. But it doesn’t take much effort for a barman to sound friendly.
“Dreifkornbrot.” She nodded at it. Her voice was low, pleasantly rough and Bohemian. “Three seeds. A half hour ago I baked it. One loaf?”
“Please. I’ll be having it for dinner.”
“Anything more?”
“I’ll be needing a place to eat dinner.” I paused. “My name is Timothy Wilde, and I’m pleased to meet you. Has the upstairs room been let yet? I’m in terrible need of lodgings, and this seems the perfect fit.”
That afternoon, I bought a fresh and nicely stuffed straw tick mattress with Val’s money and hauled it back to Elizabeth Street over my shoulder, ribs protesting with every step. My new home had two rooms: the main chamber measured twelve feet by twelve with a pair of stunted windows overlooking the chickens in the dull brown yard below. For the moment, I ignored the windowless sleeping closet in favor of bedding down in the living area.
Laying the rustling tick before my open windows, I stretched out just after the sun vanished in a lingering smear of red. At least in the main chamber I could get a breath of cool starlight. Which was much to the good, for I felt like the only silent point in a geography of alien noise. A dogfight howled somewhere in the distance, wild and exultant. German men hunched around tankards of beer in the crowded house adjacent sent a low thrumming through the thoroughfare. I missed my books, and my armchair, and the particular blue of my lampshade, and my life.
I’d live here, I thought, and I’d do police work though nobody knew how, least of all me. And it would get better in slivers. It had to. I’d been knocked considerably sideways, so the trick was to keep right on moving.
I dreamed that night that I read Mercy’s novel. The gorgeous saga she’d always intended to write from the day she finished The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Three hundred pages of cotton-soft parchment, bound up with a green ribbon. Her writing gushed in watery ripples over the pages, penmanship that called to mind the maddest intricate Belgian lace. Wrought on a pin’s head but stretching for miles if unraveled. The sort that leaves its creators blind.
On August first at six in the morning, having visited a slop shop with more of Val’s funds and purchased a good secondhand set of clothing including black trousers and hose, a simple black frock coat over a blue waistcoat and white neckerchief, and a revolutionary-hued scarlet kerchief at my breast as a temporary nod to politics, I presented myself at the Halls of Justice in Centre Street. I also wore a round-brimmed hat, wider than had been my habit. The moment I put it on, eye-catching as it was, somehow I felt very pleasurably invisible.
The air surrounding the newly assigned police headquarters was spun from a sandstorm that early morning, just pervasive grit and sharply slanting heat until a man couldn’t think straight—which was at least appropriate to the architecture. It had taken all of a fortnight, from what I understand, for the combined prison and courthouse to be nicknamed the Tombs when completed. The slabs of charcoal granite weigh on a man the instant he sets eyes on them, pulling the breath from his chest. All the blank windows stretch two stories high, but are themselves imprisoned by iron frames, each big enough to serve as a fire grate to a giant. Carved in morbid lead-colored rock above each window is a globe wearing a pair of delirious wings and a set of serpents trying to wrestle the planet back into orbit.
If their goal was to make it look like a place to be buried alive, they did a pretty spruce job on a quarter of a million dollars.
A little knot of ten or twelve protesters came into focus as I approached the entrance, all men whose cravats were hideously colorful and carefully knotted, and whose noses had been broken on at least one occasion. Several wore mourning bands but no actual mourning attire, which I took to be an act of symbolic protest, and one held a sign reading DOWN WITH PIG TEERANNY/POLICE YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED. That flint-eyed fellow spat just in front of my feet as I passed them.
“What’s the mourning for?” I asked, curious.
“Liberty, freedom, justice, and the spirit of the American patriot,” drawled a bruiser with half an ear.
“I’d go so far as a black neckerchief, then,” I suggested as I walked into the prison.
All that can be seen from the outside of the Tombs is a thick wall lined with the double-height windows clapped in irons. But I learned after walking up the eight steps leading under those unrelenting pillars that the interior is a quadrangle, and already I was intrigued in spite of myself. There are open spaces, and four-story cell blocks separated by gender, and a profusion of courtrooms for deciding the length of the prisoners’ entombment. A pox-scarred brute with a dirty white cravat directed me to the largest of the courtrooms, where I gathered the police would be addressed regarding their duties.
As I walked through the open air where the gallows stood on hanging days, a queer creature fell into step beside me. I couldn’t help but stare at him. He was dressed very shabbily, with a dribble of egg staining his threadbare black sack coat, and his gait was slightly bowlegged. Downright crablike. The mad walk impaired his height to the point that he was almost as short as I am. From his face, pinched and chinless with pale hazel eyes staring out, I was sure he’d craw
led from the ocean that morning. I’d have guessed his age at sixty. But his boots were square and Dutch and of a style older still, and his wispy grey hair flew wildly about in a wind that didn’t touch anything else.
We entered the courtroom in the same stride. He scurried off to find a seat and I did the same, taking in the scene as I settled onto a bench usually devoted to trial lawyers. Here the walls were neatly whitewashed, the judge’s high altar standing empty before us. I raked my eyes across my new cohorts.
A fool’s motley coat would have looked uniform next to the seated mob. There seemed about fifty of them, and again I felt like a patch of vacant silence in the middle of a tumult. Irish aplenty, their laborers’ hands choked with veins and their chins jutting with red side whiskers, looking wary and combative in dingy blue coats with long tails and old brass buttons. Black Irish too, pale and thick-shouldered, squinting cannily. Scattered Germans with patient, dogmatic expressions, arms folded over their chests as they spoke. Americans with their collars turned down, whistling Bowery music-hall tunes and elbowing their laughing friends.
Finally, me and the crablike old man in the Dutch boots, awaiting orders. He with considerably more visible enthusiasm than I.
“Welcome, gentlemen! I’m proud to be addressing the police of the Sixth Ward of the First District of the great City of New York.”
Scattered clapping. But I was too deeply struck by the man who’d just launched himself through the small judges’ door to the left of the judicial bench to bother. I’d last seen him in the middle of an inferno, after all, so I spent a moment to look him over more carefully. If there was a single new policeman Justice George Washington Matsell didn’t fascinate, I’ll own I missed the fellow.
