by Lyndsay Faye
“Timothy Wilde! Mr. Wilde, can that be you?”
I flinched slightly within the borders of the wide-brimmed hat. The expression sent a wave of hurt along the edge of my brow.
“Reverend Underhill,” I called back, walking toward him.
“It is you, then. Forgive me, but … I don’t know quite what to say. Since the fire, everyone has misplaced one another.”
The Reverend Thomas Underhill reached for my hand, his keenly intelligent face oddly pale. Reverend Underhill has the same delicate-blue eyes as Mercy. But his hair is more brown than black, greying at the temples, and his face above the simple clerical suit is on a narrower scale. Mrs. Olivia Underhill had been an English beauty, lost in one of our cholera epidemics tending to dying foreigners—she’d wide-set eyes like Mercy’s, the same divide in her chin. The reverend doted on her. Switched all his warm feelings to the congregation of Pine Street Presbyterian and to Mercy after Olivia died, and I couldn’t fault his choice. He’s a deft, capable man, eyes radiating focus, hands expressive. But something had badly frightened him. He looked a fraction of his age and lost in an angry mob, tugging at his pale yellow waistcoat when it was already lying flat.
“I’m fine,” I announced, being hearty about it. I felt a performer who’d stumbled onto the wrong stage. “And how is …”
Your daughter, I would have said before, as I wanted nothing better than to replace her surname permanently.
“Miss Underhill?” I asked.
How I managed it I’ll never know. Something tight came untethered inside my rib cage, slithering thickly through my veins like cold lead.
“She’s well. Mr. Wilde, I was looking for help when I spied you. Will you please come with me and …” He paused, his eye catching the dull glint of my copper star. “My God. That emblem on your breast—are you a policeman?”
“If not, I don’t know who is.”
“Oh, thank heaven, what a providential chance. I was just calling on a poor man who made an appeal to us for charity and on my way out of the tenement, I heard a baby screaming from within another chamber. I knocked at the door repeatedly, but discovered it locked. Then I set my shoulder to it, hard, but—”
“Babies scream pretty often,” I observed.
But I’d never once seen him frightened since his wife’s death, cold sweat beading at his temples, so I started running into Anthony Street. Then the reverend passed me, leading the way. In about ten seconds, we reached an old brick building. The reverend didn’t pause at the entrance. Instead he plunged down the alley between the residence in question and the structure next to it.
The front tenement reached four stories, scores of laundry lines running over our heads with streamers of beige rags pinned to them. A little boy, his sun-browned face pinched and blank, guarded the washing. But we were making for the rear building. In their infinite desire to house would-be Americans, property owners had recently taken to erecting residences in the rear yards of existing brick town houses. Usually a patch of open ground is left behind a dwelling place, for air and light and other extravagances. But canny landlords were now constructing second buildings at the back of the first, reached by the street-side crack between the structures, their windows facing nothing but walls. I edged swiftly around the pieces of a broken carriage wheel and then a mossy cistern head. The ground grew danker by the inch as we progressed through the fissure. By the end, we were three inches deep in runoff from the overflowing trough between the outhouse cesspool and the shallow sewer.
The wet yard the corridor led to proved to be planked over. A speckled grey dog lay on its side by the wooden outhouse, snoring in the sunshine. Just beyond it rose the second building. This one was wood, three stories, and already crumbling. Destined to be a hell before they’d even finished building it. As we hurried across the wood-slatted yard, sludge from between the cracks pressed up to lap at our boots.
The reverend paused just inside the shadowed doorway. A staircase to our left played host to a pair of drunks, nothing more than faintly breathing piles of whiskey-scented laundry.
“It’s just down this hall.” He nodded, pointing deeper into the ground floor.
The door in question was indeed sturdier than it looked. But the two of us together soon bested it, the slats flying open with a muffled bang. And here is what we saw.
It wasn’t a room at all, but a closet with a pallet set along one side. My brother could probably have reached his arms out and touched either wall. Extraordinarily clean. A woman wearing a torn lace cap that might have been a cobweb sat in a chair, sewing a sleeve onto the torso of a cotton dress. Twenty or thirty more pieces of cheap nankeen lay folded at her feet. Her hair was the pale red hue of a pumpkin rind, her freckled face serene, though tight-lipped. She didn’t look up when her door burst open and two men tumbled nearly into her lap. And by that I knew something was very, very wrong.
“Where is your baby?” the reverend demanded to know, trying hard to rein his urgency. “I heard it crying from within this room. It sounded … Where is it?”
The needle slowed but didn’t stop moving as the woman’s red eyelashes tilted up. She was around twenty-five, I calculated, not long in the country—little scratches had sprouted up all over her fingertips from the unfamiliar needlework, none of them healing proper. Her blood was likely still pretty thin from eating nothing save hardtack and spoiling meat on the voyage over. She looked as if she hadn’t seen fresh fruit for six months or more, her entire body as tender as an open blister. Meanwhile, she sat silent, seeming not to understand us.
“What’s your name, ma’am?” I tried.
“Eliza Rafferty,” she replied in heavily accented English.
“And you’ve a baby, I take it? Whereabouts?”
The hazel eyes lost their bearings, slid back to her needle.
“But I haven’t any baby.’Tis a mistake you’re makin’.”
“No?” I countered, motioning out the reverend not to lose his patience. Something had gone queer about her focus. Unsettled and hovering, a bird with no place to land. I’d never seen the likes of it before, and I’ve seen a hundred different looks on a thousand different faces. “Whose are the infant’s clothing in the basket, then?” I asked, gesturing at the corner.
Her chin dipped, quivering, but her face was still a mask. And not a mask of her own making either. Not a word we were saying made sense to her.
“They must be piecework,” she whispered. “I haven’t any baby, I’m tellin’ you. I’ve dress parts to finish. Three cents apiece. Mr. Prendergast might ha’ sent those by mistake.”
“Madam, it is a grave sin to lie about—”
“I don’t think she’s lying,” I murmured. It’s only a knack formed by talking to people for a living. But lies have a flavor to them, something smooth and sugared, and this wasn’t it. “Mrs. Rafferty, did you hear the reverend knocking? He was anxious over you.”
“I heard him. I knew his voice. I’ll not call the pope a liar, not denounce him, I tell ye. Not even for good cream like he promised the last time, and I on my knees already begging for it.”
I glanced at Reverend Underhill and he winced, his eyes pained. “My charitable resources are extremely limited. It shames me, and daily. But we haven’t time for this. We must—”
“What would you have used the cream for, Mrs. Rafferty?” I inquired.
“For Aidan.”
Her dappled eyes went a little wider when she’d heard herself. The reverend and I exchanged dark looks. So there was an infant, and no place in that cell to hide so much as a bent copper penny. I went down to one knee so Mrs. Rafferty could see me better. Her gaze was pretty pinched already from doing piecework in bad light. At the rate she was sewing, she’d be stitch-blind in ten years or less.
“After the reverend knocked, but before we came inside, you took something out, didn’t you?” I inquired gently. “I wonder what it was?”
“Only a rat,” she whispered. “They bite me something terr
ible at night. They get in through the floorboards. I put this one in the sink yonder at the end of the corridor.”
“Weren’t you frightened,” I asked her, my stomach going hollow, “to pick it up and carry it?”
“No,” she said, her lips trembling like the wings of a moth. “It was already dead.”
I turned a desperate eye to the reverend. But his boots were already racing down the hall beyond.
She was frightened, I thought with dull insistence as I pushed to my feet and dove through the door, and she forgot the baby when she disposed of the rat. Yes. Yes, the rat is in the sink and the baby is doubtless in a basket of some sort beside it and she went in a daze back to her room without … Aidan was the name. Aidan Rafferty is in a basket at the end of the hall.
The reverend muffled a sound against his dark sleeve. Standing in silhouette at the end of the peeling hallway, outlined by the light of the single window above the filthy public sink. I watched my feet advancing past droppings from the free-roaming chickens that had gotten through the door. I was seeing things in fragments again, I realized. The sink had once been a cheap wooden basin and was now the mold-blighted home of several buzzing flies, disturbed by Reverend Underhill.
“We’ll get a doctor,” I said stupidly, before even looking. I could fix this, I had to fix it. “We’ll get a doctor at once.”
“A doctor isn’t any good,” the reverend replied, having regained a little control of himself. His face was pure white, though. White but burning, a white like the glory of God. “She’ll want a priest.”
I’ve asked myself a thousand times since that day what pierced my brain about that particular death. Death, as they say, is common. And death of children even more so. They’re subject to so many cruelties that I’d not believe their survival remotely possible had I not once been a child myself. Suppose their parents love them? Still they’re playthings at the whim of disease and of violent accident, a holy brightness in their family’s lives shining as fickle as the stock market. Suppose their parents do not love them? Then they’re released into the world far too soon, forced to sell steaming cobs of corn for pennies a customer on Broadway, or else lured into far worse vocations due to the insistence of ravenous survival. Or they vanish entirely. Dissolve like a scent on the wind.
Suppose their parents die while they’re yet kinchin?
I knew how that played out. And it could have been far worse for me, I understand that, though in a grudging sense. Had Val not been there with me in the days of our orphaned youth, I’d have been considerably less persecuted, but very likely deposited in a shallow grave one winter or another. I’ve absorbed that gift, deep within me, and on days when I have already decided to depart for Mexico, where there is no Valentine Wilde, I remind myself of the fact. And I stay. In spite of everything.
No, it isn’t that the notion of a kinchin dying shocks me. And unfortunately, the concept of children being murdered isn’t a new one either. Imagine a terrible thing that couldn’t possibly happen, and it’s been performed on the New York stage with applause and encores more times than you would ever believe possible.
What mattered about that death, as I came to understand it, was that the week before, Mrs. Rafferty had apparently been pleading with the reverend over cream for Aidan. Wanting, needing, her boy’s hunger to lessen. Sharing his suffering with every shallow breath, every feeble beat of her son’s heart. She’d fallen to her knees over his welfare, stopping only at the moment when she thought her very afterlife threatened, and supposed an eternity with her child superior to three days’ worth of fresh dairy supplies.
And today—lacking the cream, and maybe the lemon juice to restore her mind, and possibly a sodding window, God only knows what she was most desperate for—she’d supposed that same boy a rat. Mrs. Rafferty appeared behind us looking out from her closet door, the needle still in her hand. Her fingers had grown palsied.
“’Tis dead,” she said. “I’m frightened of them too, but ’tis dead already, and the pair of you grown men. Why are you both so frightened? It’s shameful, I tell ye. ’Twas only a rat.”
“God have mercy on you,” the reverend whispered in a voice edged with fire.
And with that, I made my eighth arrest of my new career.
Twelve hours later, I sat at a scratched wooden desk in the Tombs in one of the office chambers, a quill topped with a hint of deathly black feather in my hand. Staring at the paper before me, mainly. Not writing. I wanted to be sick in the corner by that time. It would have at least marked a difference, proven my ability to move, maybe lessened the nausea after the fact, and I couldn’t stop staring or start writing to save my life.
Instead I thought about the reverend, wondered if he was faring any better. The reverend, who’d left behind him at age eleven a cheerless cottage in the Massachusetts woods with an ominous hickory cudgel leaning in the corner to earn his bread on a ship at sea. He’s a precise and traveled man, known all over the city as a fearless Protestant with a voraciously demanding mind. His congregants think of him as the shepherd who keeps their lives in godly order, and that’s exactly what he is; he was an abolitionist in his young days as a preacher because the idea of slavery disgusted his sense of logic. When he talks about it, he says justice, but logic is what he actually means. I think sometimes he battles poverty simply because the imbalance of it offends his aesthetics. That sounds like a weak reason, but only if you’ve never seen him peeling an orange like he’s cutting the facets of a raw diamond.
I thought about the last time I’d seen him so pale, shortly after Olivia Underhill’s death. The reverend had adored his wife, and I know what adoration looks like. After lowering her into the ground the day of her passing, her body shriveled and scarcely recognizable, he hadn’t quit his securely locked study in the space of three entire days. No amount of pleading, even by fourteen-year-old Mercy, would coax him to emerge. Finally, seconds before Val meant to christen his new lock picks, the door had opened, and Thomas Underhill had kissed his weeping daughter, held her close and stroked her hair, and then announced that the small outbuilding of the Pine Street Church had required reroofing for long enough, and he intended to see to it. He’d left the room without a backward glance, my brother and Mercy and I staring after him numbly. Mercy found nothing in the study to indicate what he’d been doing all that while until months later, when she discovered that every separate page of her mother’s extensive book collection had been meticulously bordered by hand in black ink. Thousands and thousands of sable mourning bands silently edging the parchment.
No, the reverend couldn’t possibly be faring any better than I was, not by a long lonely mile. Not when the question of cream was considered.
Footsteps approached. I looked up from under the brim of my hat. It was Mr. Piest, taking his single shift break for coffee. I could smell it. But he’d a pair of tin cups in his hands, not a single one. His flyaway grey curls waved a manic greeting at me as he set one of the cups down.
“Patriot, I salute you,” he declared gravely.
On his way out, heavy Dutch boots thudding, he added, “You’ll grow more used to it, Mr. Wilde.”
That’s a load of shit, I replied in my head with a vengeance.
But when I’d taken a sip of the oily coffee—which was rich, far better than it should have been—I managed to set quill to paper.
Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. Entered No. 12 Anthony Street eight a.m. on suspicions raised by the Reverend Thomas Underhill of No. 3 Pine Street. Made for rear building, ground floor, and discovered resident Mrs. Eliza Rafferty in state of grave confusion. Infant Aidan Rafferty missing from chamber. Mother, claiming to have been plagued by a rat, led us to sink of same rear tenement, where infant had been placed.
Arrested Mrs. Rafferty, who continued to display incomprehension of events, though she had by this time grown most emotionally disturbed. Called at once for aid by way of Reverend Underhill, and first to arrive on scene were
Roundsmen York and Patterson, who summoned the coroner. I escorted Mrs. Rafferty to the women’s wing of the Tombs, where she was incarcerated under prisoner number 23398 and awaits questioning.
Stopping, I marveled at my handwriting. Perfectly clear. What an appalling thing that was. Unfeeling in a way that made my gut twist, repulsed by the even letters. I supposed reasonably that they’d need it legible, and next thought that any man who was capable of writing it all this neatly was a disgrace.
Official coroner’s report on body of Aidan Rafferty, aged approximately six months, pending; marks on the neck clearly indicate strangulation as the most apparent cause of death.
My script stared back at me, a monument to steady-handedness. Revolting. When I saw how crisp the sentence looked, how distant-minded, I took the cursed star badge off and hurled it against the whitewashed wall as hard as I could.
Walking home that night under blazing August stars with the dead copper star in my pocket, I wondered how best to make my brother pay for bringing about the day I’d had. I was thinking pretty hard, thinking God damn Valentine Wilde over and over again as I reached Elizabeth Street and Mrs. Boehm’s bakery.
Then something soft and frantic drove itself right into my knees.
My hands reached for the little girl’s arms before my brain registered that the collision had been with a little girl. It was a good thing, too, for she was pulling at her hair, touching a piece that had come loose from a top knot, and she would have crashed to the spattered cobbles. When I set her upright, she looked at me as if from on a ship’s deck midriver. Not really there. Not really anywhere, yet. In-between.
