The Gods of Gotham

by Lyndsay Faye

  Dr. Palsgrave looked ready to suffer a second heart episode. Then he shifted his weight and tried to make himself … well, taller than me, because we were dead even, and nowhere near as tall as Val. It didn’t work too well. Meanwhile, I felt a rare glint of family pride that I quashed like a cockroach in the pantry. The forcible bluntness of Val’s approach couldn’t be denied—but then, neither could its potential.

  “It’s outrageous. You wish me to attempt to identify a child I may never have seen, and out of thousands that I have?”

  “That’s just it,” Val agreed coolly, running a thumb over his vest buttons. “Plus tell us whatever else you happen to notice, purely as a favor to the copper stars.”

  I smelled imaginary money in the air, prettily metallic. It was the moment when—knowing my brother—Valentine could have offered a bribe. Unless he decided that the subject wasn’t worth it and didn’t bother. Val said nothing.

  He was dead on.

  Shrugging, Dr. Palsgrave approached the corpse, linking his arms behind his back. When he reached the lifeless husk, his face softened quickly, as if the sight of death still grieved him despite his anatomical education.

  “He is between eleven and thirteen,” he reported in a clipped tone. “I can see no clear sign of what caused his demise, but it was not these … twin wounds. They took place postmortem. Perhaps a foreigner raised upon heathen spells intended to steal his organs and was interrupted. Perhaps he swallowed a valuable and someone sought to recover it. Perhaps someone was in desperate need of meat. Whatever it was, he was already dead.”

  It was all more than a bit thick, the nod to cannibalism in particular. I found myself glancing at my brother for some sort of anchor to reality, and to my shock found him already looking at me. I snapped my eyes back to the doctor.

  Dr. Palsgrave’s eyes were almost tender now, deeply regretful, and he brought one hand out from behind his back and passed it gently over the kinchin’s stiff arm, “Poor little soul. As for who he is, I have not the slightest notion. Doubtless he is a street arab who scavenges for his daily bread and met with a fatal misfortune.”

  “He isn’t,” I said, not really recognizing my own voice. “His fingernails are clean. You ought to look closer.”

  Val’s entire gaudily clad chest fell back an inch as he laughed. Wincing as he always does when laughing, because the subject isn’t ever a fit one for humor. Meanwhile, I heard in my head We’ve a new occupation, my Tim … one you’ll take to like a bird to air, and beat back hot twin urges to be either irked or else to smile myself.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” hissed Dr. Palsgrave to my brother, “that I am to be subjected to the … the insolence of this fellow?”

  “Yes, but only so long as he’s beating you at physicking. Go on, Tim. Where’s he likeliest come from, this little one?”

  “From either a respectable house or from a brothel,” I said, very carefully. “But even if he’d washed his hands, his complexion is all wrong for summer in the open. He’s very pale. Won’t you tell us what you think he died from, Dr. Palsgrave?”

  Reluctantly, the angry flush seeping away, the doctor bent back over the corpse. We hadn’t any tools for him, so he took his cuffs off and searched with his fingers, my brother standing over him wearing a very encouraging scowl. He pulled back the lad’s eyelids, and he poked in his chest cavity, and, swooping down, he smelled the boy’s lips. There was a palpable reverence to his movements, a respect for what had once been a boy. Finally, he turned to wash his hands in a stone basin near the table.

  “Nearly faded marks on his body indicate that he was about a year ago subject to varicella. That is chicken pox to the layman, and highly contagious. His health was not overall good. He is, as you say, a boy of attentive hygiene—however, he is quite thin, and his lungs give every indication of having suffered a serious case of pneumonia at the time of his death. I should identify it the cause of death outright, for there are no other signs of violence to his person other than these terrible postmortem wounds, but I cannot be completely certain.”

  He cleared his throat. Hesitated.

  “His spleen is … missing, which is undoubtedly peculiar. It could very easily have been absconded with by a rat, however—there are clear signs this carcass has been picked over by vermin within the open abdomen.”

  Valentine, as a reward to us all for good behavior, went to pull the grey tarp back over the nameless kinchin. The poor lad left behind him the smell of lifeless tissue not yet gone to rot. Also a rapidly increasing dislike on my part for unanswered questions.

  “You’re dead to rights that you’ve never tended this pup before now—at a hospital, or inside private digs?” my brother persisted.

  “I tend to thousands of children and have few colleagues willing to assist me. Why I, a doctor of medicine, should be expected to recall their individual faces I cannot say,” Dr. Palsgrave huffed, drying his hands. “You’d be much better off asking a charitable worker. I bid the pair of you good day.”

  “What charity worker would be best?” Val drawled with a smile that meant unfinished business would be tolerated with bad grace.

  “One who has a good eye for faces, is trustworthy, and who is willing to visit Catholics, of course,” Dr. Palsgrave snapped, reattaching his cuffs to his sleeves. “An anomaly amongst charitable types. You’ll want Miss Mercy Underhill for that, I shouldn’t wonder. I work intimately with the Reverend Thomas Underhill in poor Protestant wards. But there aren’t many who venture where Miss Mercy does, not even her father. Now for the last time, good-bye.”

  His quick, nervous footsteps thudded up the stairs. Something had gone wrong with my mouth. It was dry as bones. If I moved it, I thought, it might possibly splinter apart.

  “Well, if that isn’t a ream bit of luck for us.” Valentine slapped me on the back. “You can find Mercy Underhill blind in the dark with your hands trussed, can’t you now—”

  “No,” I said clearly. “No. I only wanted to help you, to help you with the body. That’s all.”

  “Why in hell would you want to help me? And once you’d wanted to, for whatever cracked reason, why would you stop?”

  “I won’t make Mercy look at that. Not for anyone.”

  “Not for the dead kinchin himself?” When my mouth opened furiously, Val lifted a wide and admittedly authoritative hand. “You saw a croaked Irish chit and it funked you, so you came with me to learn whether you had the nerve to do it twice. I savvy, Tim. But you were aces. Listen, I’m going to have his body cleaned up and put in a robe, so all she’ll have to ruminate on is his name. I’ll even send it to St. Patrick’s, it’s only six blocks down Prince, and see whether they recognize him first. It’s possible the priest will know where he hails from.”

  “I’m not even posted to this—”

  “Matsell was ready to sack you this morning, chit or no chit, so I’ll tell him I need you to sort this out for the Eighth. It’s perfect. I’ll mention what you said about fingernails. That was sharp. Comes of tending bar, I suppose?”

  “But I don’t know how to—”

  “And who does, Tim? All my men are questioning the neighbors as they make rounds, and I’ll sling you the fresh news when you report back to me tonight. I’ll be at the Liberty’s Blood after ten. You can cock an organ with me.”

  “Please tell me that means smoking a pipe.”

  “What in buggering hell else would it mean?”

  “I can’t just go and interrupt Mercy’s entire—”

  “It’s for a murder. She’s a game sort, and plenty brainy, she’ll be white about it. Farewell, Tim, and best of luck.”

  “This is not just about murder!” I snapped, rubbing at my own high brow in despair.

  Valentine was already halfway to the stairs. “Oh,” he said, stopping.

  I braced for ridicule. But he only flipped me a coin with a knowing smirk on his face. “That’s a shilling, I think. Get yourself a mask to match that flush hat of yours. Something pa
triot-red and bully and mysterious.”

  Fisting my hand over the coin, I protested, “A mask is never going to solve—”

  “Give that tired red rag in your mouth a rest, Timothy. I didn’t say it would. There’s a whole world of things I can’t solve, much as it may surprise you.”

  His voice had been positively greased with sarcasm. Then quick as a wolf, Val grinned at me with an honest dazzle of teeth. “But it’ll help, eh? It’ll help. Go to it. Then find Mercy Underhill and figure out who’d crack open an Irish lad like a lobster. I don’t mind telling you, I’m keen to know as much myself.”

  SEVEN

  The Annual Reports of the City Inspector show that nearly one-half the deaths by consumption are of the foreign part of the population, and that more than one-third the whole number of deaths are of foreigners. Such an immense disproportion can only be accounted for on the supposition that some extraordinary causes of death prevail among the strangers who come to reside among us.

  • The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York, January 1845 •

  Red masks are for bandits in Bowery theatricals and possibly Italian pantomime artists. My rogue of a brother, of course, wouldn’t know the difference. But the idea itself was infuriatingly sound. So I bought a charcoal grey strip of soft cotton, and I tied it angled around my head over the thin oiled sheet, so my eye was exposed. Then I went to the Pine Street Church.

  I wondered as I hastened along Pine past the all too familiar three-story lawyers’ practices, and the shop windows full of modern oil lanterns and hothouse flowers, why I wasn’t racing toward Bird instead to ask her all about the boy with the cross dug in his chest. Two reasons emerged as I thought it over. First, Bird had said They’ll tear him to pieces, and I felt poorly about telling her she’d been right. Supposing the bowl of chicken’s blood another fabrication, of course. More important, I thought, no one outside my house needed to know about Bird quite yet. Did they? The sweet-faced young liar who’d been drenched in gore and could have seen far too much. I’d help Bird, and then I’d see her on her way.

  I hadn’t been south of City Hall Park since a massive slice of city had burned to the ground. The closer I came, the slower my feet went. Smoke assaulted my nostrils even though there wasn’t any, embers pulsating within the rubbish heaps. Eager hammers rang out like the pounding of the city’s pulse. Buildings—still intact, plastered with clothing and medical and political advertisements—grew ever more scorched. Occasional structures, formerly wooden, were missing entirely. And therein lay the source of the hammering: Irishmen, hundreds upon hundreds of Irishmen, were sweating through their shirts with nails in their teeth while a native or two looked on, drinking from a flask and calling out jeers.

  “I’ve been sawing lumber all my life, learned it off my own father, and you call that craftsmanship?” a ruddy bearded man was screaming as I approached William Street. “A nigger wouldn’t work for so little, nor would a nigger do so poor a job!”

  The Irish fellow gritted his teeth and very sensibly said nothing, preferring to keep his employment than to indulge in a street brawl. But he flushed scarlet as the man continued screaming epithets, the native having moved to the subject of the Irishman’s mother, and, as I passed the emigrant, the dull, helpless look in his eyes was one I recognized very well. I’ve seen tattered Yidishers with threadbare head coverings wearing it, coloreds being literally thrashed out of shops wearing it, ridiculed Quaker farmers wearing it, Indian craftsmen with rain running down their black braids as they sit stoically before a table of beaded work and carved bone wearing it. It’s always someone in these parts, being made small, being made to wear that look. I’ve worn it myself. And it isn’t comfortable.

  When I stepped onto Mercy’s street, I saw the devastation. And then there was nothing else to look at. Not to a man bred here, who had known New York before fire took it away. I stared into a beautiful hive of swirling man-made invention. Dozens of half-formed thoughts had somehow erupted into buildings. Fresh-cut stones amid the rubble, coloreds running water to men about to perish of heat stroke, black tree roots with the branches burned away, under which sat flowering window boxes shipped from Brooklyn or Harlem.

  And because New York is the only place in the world like it, just watching it happen made a part of it mine. I’d expected sight of the wreckage to set my face newly afire. Instead, I looked on and thought, Yes. We keep going. Maybe in another direction, maybe even in the wrong one. But by whichever God you fancy, we keep going.

  The Pine Street Church is modestly blushing red brick, at the corner of Pine and Hanover, with the rectory adjacent. When I pushed open the thick chapel door, I spied vague movement at the back, heard hushed tones. My shoulder blades tingled at the thought it might be Mercy, but even without much light, I knew it wasn’t. A pair of women stood near the pulpit, sorting through donated clothing spilling gaudily from a great canvas sack onto a plain oak table.

  “This we can put in the usable pile, can we not, Martha?” asked the younger of the two as I approached. A widow, I took it when I was close enough to spy her ring, for married women who wear homespun have more important domestic tasks at four in the afternoon than sorting through slops. She’d coarse blonde hair and a squashed nose like a pressed flower, but her voice was gentle. “It’s quite good, I think.”

  “Far too good,” the older woman sniffed after glancing at the plain rose-colored nankeen. “Any destitute woman would look above her place in such a dress. The very idea, Amy. Put it in the pile to pawn instead. Can I assist you, sir?”

  “I’m Timothy Wilde, member of the copper stars,” I explained, gesturing at the blasted thing.

  An expression composed half of curiosity and half of severe distaste flashed over her features.

  “I need to find Miss Underhill quick as possible,” I sighed, ignoring it.

  “Oh! Dear Miss Underhill—has something happened?” the one called Amy squeaked.

  “Not to Miss Underhill. Do you know where she is?”

  Martha pulled all the edges of her sallow face into the shape of a moldy lemon. “She is with her father, at the rectory. I would not interrupt them, were I you.”

  “Why not?” I asked, already half turned.

  Smothering a pleased look under a thick smear of prudishness, she reported, “Voices were raised as they went indoors, and the argument is one she ought to listen to. Miss Underhill has been tending to low Irish families, against all sense. She’ll end up in the earth next to her mother, consorting with drunken foreigners like this—where does she suppose cholera comes from? And then where will the reverend be, the poor noble man?”

  “Safe in God’s keeping,” I answered dryly, tipping my hat. “Your God, of course, so you needn’t worry.”

  I left behind me a pair of open mouths.

  Exiting the side door of the church and following the little path through the apple trees to the dark-leafed hedge that borders the rectory, I stopped short when I caught sight of Mercy and her father standing before the bay window in their parlor. And they were arguing, to be sure, Mercy’s teeth worrying her thumbnail, her father’s posture stern. On my life, I never meant to spy upon them, but something in Mercy’s eyes made my feet stop just short of the hedgerow—and in any case, seeing her again had just done something very uncomfortable to my heart rate.

  But they are not even Christians, Mercy, I watched him say, making a decisive movement with his hand.

  Missionaries tend to the poor in Africa, and the tribes there have more gods than they can count. There isn’t any difference, she said, gazing wide-eyed at him.

  The tribesmen are merely unlettered, innocent.

  And the Irish merely poor. I can’t—

  The reverend stalked a few feet away, steps swift and angry, and I lost sight of his response. But whatever it was caused Mercy to flush like a sunrise, and wince her eyes shut as she stood with her face to the window. His speech lasted for perhaps ten seconds. When it had ende
d, Thomas Underhill stepped back into my line of sight with an anguished expression, pulling Mercy’s dark head to his chest. She went readily, gripping his arm, and the last thing I saw before turning away from a scene far too intimate to view was the reverend speaking once more, his chin resting lightly on his girl’s head.

  It terrifies me, he was saying. I’d not risk your health for a thousand lost souls.

  Guilt would have gnawed at me, witnessing a scene like that, had I not been well aware of what they were arguing over. Society charity types limit their usefulness to hosting themed teas with generous slices of tongue pie, lemonade soirees where they feelingly discuss ways to rid the earth of vice. Mercy isn’t a society type, though. She frankly isn’t any specific type at all that I can discern despite my constant scrutiny, and after all she comes of abolitionist stock. If any breed of charity worker is willing to dirty their hands, and at any hour of the day they’re called on, it’s an abolitionist. So I don’t muse over the fact that Mercy’s equally impassioned mother died by walking into a sickroom full of sufferers, the way her father does. I don’t muscle Mercy back into the light and air when I see her do it. I wait it out, or she’d never speak to me again.

  Such were my dark thoughts as I rounded the corner of the house. When I reached the front door, it swung open, and then Mercy turned to shut it once more.

  I froze stiff for no reason at all. Mercy copied me when she reached the footpath, the swinging basket over her arm marking off seconds. As she recognized me, I watched her face shift from pale to bloodless. A tiny piece of hair had just caught at the edge of her lower lip, and most people would have wanted to brush it back for her. That would have ruined the expression, though, whatever it was.

  “I’m headed for the Browns, though I haven’t nearly enough flour for them,” Mercy said in a rush. Apropos of nothing, as usual. “Mr. Wilde, I’ve a very urgent visit to make. Are you here to see Papa?”