by Lyndsay Faye
“I say, sir,” the prisoner called out to me, “please help—I am being detained against my will.”
“Sure, and that’s pretty much the point of it,” Connell returned.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked.
“I was accosted in the street by this—this individual,” the captive sniffed. “A fine pass we have come to in this town when a gentleman suddenly finds himself being manhandled by some sort of bleached savage. Violence has been done to my person. I appeal to you, sir, to right this at once.”
“What’s the charge?” I asked evenly.
“Passin’ forged stock certificates,” Connell replied.
“Put him at the end of the eastern cell block,” I suggested. “I hear there’s a fresh litter of rats down there. They ought to get along fine.”
“Get your filthy paws off me!” the counterfeiter shrieked as Mr. Connell pulled him away. Then to me, “Don’t you read the newspapers? Aren’t you aware of what sorts of perversions these Irish are capable of? Their murderous debaucheries? You would leave me in his hands?”
“I don’t know quite what ye’ve been doing these several days, Mr. Wilde,” my fellow copper star said as we parted, “but I wonder if you could be going about it a wee bit faster?”
It was such a fair question that I didn’t even have the heart to answer it.
I went to the clerical common room for the copper stars within the depths of the Tombs. Once there, I began reading an argument for the complete expulsion of papists from America alongside an Irish manifesto of Catholic rights. Research born of total desperation. Scraping splinters off the bottom of an empty barrel. Then Mr. Piest strode in, making an impressive racket in his five-pound boots. Manic-eyed and wagging his chinless jaw up and down, he pointed at me gallantly.
“I have done it, Mr. Wilde! I have found it. It has been discovered. At last,” he declared, “I have found something.”
He dropped the something on the table. It was a male sexual shield. A good one, the sort long used by housewives who’d tired of miscarriage, or by whores who didn’t fancy the notion of their noses eroding from Cupid’s disease. Made of very neatly stitched up sheep or goat intestine, forming a long reusable hood. Not fresh. Worn until a crack had formed, for one thing, though it certainly wasn’t clean either. I stared at it dubiously.
“Where?”
“In light of your recent exhortation of hard, steady work, I expanded my range, Mr. Wilde. You greatly affected me. I had been looking only thirty yards’ radius from the site of the mass grave, but I found my answer fifty yards away, in a secluded little valley.”
“Good Lord. I thought you were still on roundsman duty.”
“I am,” the noble old lunatic confessed blearily. “Matsell’s orders. I take two hours every morning, to have the best daylight.”
Registering that Mr. Piest’s silvery hair was practically standing on end, and that his aged hands were vaguely tremulous, I started to say something appreciative and sympathetic. But then I trailed off.
“You don’t mean to tell me,” I said, fighting whatever was crawling up the back of my throat, “that before they’ve been killed, or even after, he—”
“No!” Mr. Piest held up a single finger. “Were that the case, I’d have found many more, going back five years. Would I not? As it is, I only found four, discarded when cracked, and none look more than a year old to me.”
He pulled the rest of them out from his stuffed coat pocket and they joined their flaccid brother on the tabletop. I wanted very badly to jump up and wring the spooney old bastard by the hand. And then again, I didn’t.
“You’re a wonder at finding things, Mr. Piest,” I said warmly instead. Then a tight little coiled-up thrill shot through me and I sat forward. “You think that whoever used these goes there often. Very often. You think they might have heard something, seen something. There are scattered homesteads up there, small farms beyond the settled grid—”
“And these are all clearly home-sewn, not bought, who would buy—”
“Shields from a druggist and risk exposure when you’re copulating—”
“In the woods, so as to keep your sin a secret? These came from the wife of a cuckolded farmer, or a country maiden with an appetite and a keen sense of caution. Within walking distance, as will be obvious to you, Mr. Wilde.”
I sat back in my chair, a feebleminded grin on my face. Sweeping my hat off, I made him a seated bow. Mr. Piest bowed back, ridiculously low.
Leaning down, he grasped the pile of intestinal balloons and returned them to his pocket. “I shall find the owner, Mr. Wilde. I shall make inquiries. My questions will be the soul of discretion, and we will gain our answer. I must speak with the chief!”
He scuttled out again, whistling an old Dutch tune. The single oddest man I’d ever encountered. And worth his weight in fresh-minted guilders.
I went home that night much less heavy than I’d been, good luck floating under my boots. Merrier than I’d felt in days, ready for a pint or two of small beer, and then a glass or two of whiskey, and then bed, with hope loosening the knots in my shoulders. At Elizabeth Street, the front shop light was blazing as I went in.
Mrs. Boehm stood at the counter, staring at the pair of nankeen trousers Bird had been using. She looked smeared somehow. All her edges gone slack, as if she’d been touched before the paint was dry. Her wide mouth adrift, and the set of her hands with their piece of kinchin’s clothing resting uselessly on the wood.
“That was wrong of you,” she said in a dry cornsilk voice, weightless and empty.
“What? What’s happened?”
“You should not have sent her away to the house. Not that house, ever. And not so soon. I was angry before, but my mind was changing, Mr. Wilde. You ought to have told me.”
Gravity shifted its pull several times and simultaneously at that, a dizzy, panicked feeling.
She didn’t just say “house.” She said “House.” House of Refuge.
“Where’s Bird?” I demanded. “I never sent her away. Where is she?”
Frightened dull blue eyes flew up to meet mine. “There was a carriage. Two men, one very dark and tall. One lighter and smaller, with hair on his lip. They took her. I’d have stopped them, but they had papers, signed by you, Mr. Wilde, and—”
“Was there a first name?”
“No. Only Wilde. They left five minutes ago.”
I ran out the door.
Every face on Elizabeth Street seemed to have a sneer on it, every indolent pig hoping I realized just how badly I could bungle a job I knew nothing about. Two men: one very dark and tall, and one lighter and smaller, with hair on his lip.
Scales, whose first name probably didn’t exist any longer, and Moses Dainty—Val’s men.
My feet struck the ground viciously, heading like a bullet shot for the nearest horse. It was tethered in front of a grocery and it wasn’t mine, no argument in the world could have claimed it mine, but I tore the leather straps off the post and I swung myself in the saddle and I dug my heels in, ignoring its very reasonable startlement.
You live across the street. You can solve the crime of the stolen horse tomorrow.
I thought about cursing my goddamned interfering wicked-minded brother’s name as I almost killed a pair of Bohemian pedestrians heading home from a beer hall. But by that time, cursing seemed superfluous.
The House of Refuge is located where Fifth Avenue, Twenty-fourth Street, and Broadway collide, its charity hidden well away from respectable people’s eyes. In the countryside, east of where the bodies had been found—although recently men had begun building improbable mansions nearby. And I didn’t waste an instant mulling over whether their stated destination might be a ruse. It was a reckless roll of the dice, and yes it made my breath stutter in my chest, and yes it made me bully the unfortunate stranger’s chestnut gelding, and yes it was a guess based neither on evidence nor trust.
But I had nothing else to go on. I could fly tow
ard the House of Refuge or else gallop toward India or the Republic of Texas. Gripping the reins, I swerved from Elizabeth Street into the mad lights of Bleecker, only a block from Broadway now and capturing the eyes of sable-hatted gentlemen and roughnecked Scots laborers alike as I thundered past.
My thoughts were pretty black as I traveled my route, earning squeals from stargazers and tourists and dignitaries, a weird and wild quarter-masked figure on a sultry summer night. They went in this fashion, most of them:
Valentine is warning you he means business. Valentine is despicable. Valentine seemed to like her, though. Valentine is a powder keg with his fuse running directly into the fingers of the Democratic Party, and Bird Daly is a witness to a scandal and therefore a liability.
The rest went like so:
Bird thinks you did this. She supposes evicting her your idea.
All the while I galloped, my eyes searched for a closed carriage. And I knew what it should look like, too. Something official enough to fool Mrs. Boehm, who was no kind of fool. And neither was my brother, God rest his soul after I’d killed him for this. The coach, therefore, needed curtains and it needed good paint, preferably with a charitable-looking seal on its door.
But I saw no such thing. And so I rode like a scream on the wind up Broadway, skirting the omnibuses and the drays and the hackneys and the handcarts. Without much trouble, as it happened, because I was one man on one horse, and I hadn’t the time to be afraid of a collision. Flying past the turnoff for Washington Square, I’d a perfectly still memory for an instant of Mercy sitting in a park speaking of London, having just walked open-eyed into a smallish mob to free a black man. It whirled away from me all too quickly, replaced by ghastly things. The sort of things that happen to kinchin who go to the House of Refuge.
Bird will sew piecework until she goes stitch-blind at twenty-five. Bird will be shipped to a bleak prairie fit only for slitting your own throat to be the wife of a failing frontier farmer. Bird will die of pneumonia in the Tombs for stealing a rich man’s purse once she figures out she can probably manage it without being caught.
Bird will return to her former profession.
I rode the poor beast still harder, my lungs chugging fast as its hooves, my entire body turned into some sort of ode to velocity.
As I hurtled along arrogant Broadway, hearing yells of satin-cloaked disdain in my wake, bypassing mansions with distantly glimpsed chandeliers as if they were so much washed-up tidal muck, I felt a ruthless thrill at my speed warring with a growing despair at my helplessness. I hadn’t seen them yet. And I would have seen them, I knew I would. If they’d been present to notice.
Where had they taken her?
I was honestly considering turning back, spurring the innocent horse madly in another direction. Any direction. The right direction.
But then I stopped to think.
I was almost at the House of Refuge now. I’d passed Union Place’s border at Seventeenth Street, its grass parched in the moonlight but its new-minted landscape irritatingly hopeful. Only a little farther to go. And if they’d been clever, and thought I might arrive home any second, ruining their scheme, what would they have done?
They’d have gone all the way around Washington Square and then cut back to Fifth Avenue, taking the wrong route a bit but still getting there directly. Because if they did need to flee my pursuit, I would surely come after them along Broadway.
Or so I was thinking as I rode up to the gates of the formidable House of Refuge. I reined in the gelding, waiting. Listening as my harsh breath broke the moonlit silence.
Hoping violently that I’d simply beaten them there.
It’s an abandoned federal arsenal. The House of Refuge, I mean. Black as pitch in the steadily disappearing farmland surrounding it, blacker than the trees, blacker than an actual arsenal would be. As I mentioned, copper stars are meant to send vagrant kinchin there. But I’d never followed that particular order. And I never would do. They could penalize me however they liked. They could send me to the Tombs myself for insubordination, threaten any punishment, force me into hard labor, equip me with a leg iron, deliver me some licks with the cat while I was tied over a barrel, lock me up alone in a chamber the size of a closet without light for days. Because I was full grown, and likely enough to survive such treatment.
Some of the kinchin at the House of Refuge didn’t.
The horse shivered, sweat pouring dark as blood along its neck as I waited. I rubbed at its mane, sensing its uneasiness under me, thankful it hadn’t already decided I was more trouble than worth carrying. Crickets hissed at me from the void, and the sly whispered wings of dimmed fireflies hummed in my ears. The wall I sheltered in the shadows under was two feet thick. A stone fortress, more than high enough to foil most would-be escapees.
Not Valentine, though. Not by a long stretch.
The irony was that when he’d been incarcerated there, our parents had been enthusiastically alive. But it was an institution built to keep idle youth off the streets, then reform them by way of a pungent dose of “moral and corporal discipline.” Well approved by the city elders, and by every parent whose kinchin were disinclined to steal liquor from groceries and drink it on the Battery.
Not Henry and Sarah Wilde, therefore.
It took my parents four days to find out where Val had been dragged off to. Eight more to secure an audience with a judge. As I was a runty six years old, I can only recall how silent our house was. How suddenly stamped with empty spaces. My brother’s truancy at age twelve was passionate, but hardly regular. And whenever he vanished, I’d always assumed he’d come back. His coming back was the natural order. But everything was different that time: the way my mother couldn’t sew a straight line, the way my bull of a father couldn’t bring himself to finish his supper. When they did finally speak with the magistrate, the official observed that Val had been caught breaking windows. Asked for better documentation of his birth. Dismissed them.
Val arrived home two days later, when my parents were nearly beside themselves and hadn’t stopped whispering for forty or so hours. His tawny hair was viciously shorn off, and he wore a threadbare uniform. He asked with a cocky grin on his face for a cut of meat and some small beer. My dad was nearer to him and the first to pull him into his arms, so my dad was the first to notice that Val’s shirt had dried completely into the bloodied cuts crisscrossing his back.
Whether Val was boldly exaggerating about making brass nails, or about the infernal bells summoning them from place to place in soulless silence, or about the mortifying forced washings or the spoiled food, I never cared. I saw my brother’s shirt for myself. Henry Wilde wasn’t an easy man, but when my mum was soaking the fabric off Val’s skin, I heard him clear as anything pounding his fists into the barn wall. Even six as I was, I’d a similar urge myself that I couldn’t express with words, and so kicked apart a rotting box.
The thought of Valentine sending Bird to the same place was half horror and half awe. So wrong that it was a scrap of nightmare. I’d gained the same feeling once by dreaming of a monster with teeth at the ends of its digits and its mouth full of fingernails.
Hoofbeats approached me.
At a clean, swift clip, too. Not drawing attention. Neither losing an instant of time.
There was a breeze at my back, and it shivered along the prison wall, echoed by the muted snuffling of the stolen horse. I was buried in the high stone’s shadow, and the driver the only man who could possibly see me. But my own vision of the clopping vehicle as it drew closer was very clear. It was a four-wheeled carriage pulled by a matched pair, with curtains over the windows, and I caught a glimpse of a seal of sorts painted on the door. And by then I had a plan.
Digging my heels into the ribs of the animal, I burst into the road again.
“Halt!” I shouted, waving my arms.
The set of black horses obeyed me an eyeblink before their driver did, as I was directly in their path. There ought to have been lights on that carriage
by night. I could see the shadows of its lanterns hanging cold and unlit from its four corners, very tellingly.
“Who goes there?” called down the driver.
“Police.” I shook my lapel at him. “I must speak with your passengers.”
I didn’t give him time to answer. I clucked at the gelding and trotted to the side of the vehicle. Whether the horse trusted me because it was obedient by nature or because it preferred me to its usual master, I’ll never know. I reached over and jerked the door open, my feet on a level with the metal steps.
Moses Dainty on the left-hand side, moustache twitching with vexed confusion. Scales on the right, breathing through his mouth because that’s what he does when plans wobble or tilt. Sitting rigid and furious and tearful and perfectly healthy next to Scales was Bird Daly. She scowled at the sight of me, and then the scowl faded.
Bird can spot a lie, and who’s been telling it.
“Hand her over,” I said gruffly. “Whatever you were told, Madam Marsh wants her back.”
The pair of thugs glowered at me and then glanced at each other. Meanwhile, outrage flashed across the little girl’s face before settling into a fixed shipwreck victim’s expression. The blank look of a half-drowned person clutching a raft, waiting directionlessly for something to happen.
“You know better than to try to fun a Party man, Tim,” Moses argued, “seeing as—”
“Whatever my brother told you, I’m here to say he’s off his chart. Madam Marsh sent me here personally. You’d not want her coming down on the Party over a clear mistake, and when I was here to warn you? This one’s spoken for. Pass me the chit and we’ll say nothing else.”
“Madam Marsh? But wait,” Scales began stupidly, “did she—”
“Yes. In person. Only an hour ago. I’ve galloped here, can’t you see that? Fine. If you want Silkie Marsh thinking you a pair of jilters heaving her goods, I’ll leave you to it. I’d not much like to see what happens when she goes back on you. Doubtless the Party will pay for the funerals.”
“This was all to be pretty straightforward,” Moses put in. “I don’t think we ought to—”
