by Lyndsay Faye
“You’re wantin’ the minutes of my meeting, when each and every one o’ them slandered me?” he demanded. “Shall I give ye the names? The men who don’t supposed a Catholic kinchin ought to be raised Catholic?”
What time had he retired? At midnight. Had St. Patrick’s ever been threatened before? Yes, scores of times, never amounting to more than flung stones and brickbats. I slipped along the wall with the scene out of hell itself at my back, trying not to imagine that the wretched boy could see me. Trying not to imagine what might have happened to this one before he had died. That set me to flushing, which I’d noticed recently sent sharp needling pinpricks through my scarred face beneath its thin layer of cloth. I lost the sense of Mr. Piest’s gentle questioning when the pair disappeared into the organ loft on the eastern side. And the moment their voices had faded, I heard it again in my head.
This isn’t right.
Then, Of course it isn’t, I thought furiously.
The side walls of St. Patrick’s are intercut with narrow strips of stained glass. At the rear, where the pinnacles rise, and small rooms house vestments and sacramental objects I can’t name, are three more doors. There was a cobalt suggestion that dawn would rise soon when I unlocked the right-hand door and stepped outside. A fever gleam to the sky’s edge, quickening the breath.
Kneeling, I peered at each of the locks in turn, not certain what I was looking for. All of them were smooth, cool iron, and all of them pretty typical—ornate, a bit sour-smelling. A tidy sheen to the surface. That gleaming polish wasn’t scratched in the least. Picking a lock, I knew because Valentine had once considered it his duty to teach me how to pick locks, often leaves traces. I pulled the sharp edge of one of Father Sheehy’s keys over the surface and sure enough it left a mark. But that didn’t tell me much, after all. If a cold-blooded rabbit was skilled enough, and his pick small, it could be done without obvious signs.
I walked around to the front, where the hewn grey blocks ended and the dull red freestone greeted the passersby. People had started to mill about again, talking in whispers. Eyeing me. I paid them no mind, kneeling.
To no avail. The same untouched gloss held true for the front entrance locks, all clean and plain and defying me to learn anything from them as I shone the light into their keyholes. I paused for a second or two longer at the center entrance, seeing the reverse image through the door clear as second sight. Feeling the weight of the body there, hanging so much heavier in my chest than in the truth of its gravity.
Using the leftmost door, I came back inside. Mr. Piest and Father Sheehy stood before the altar beyond, sharing the light and volatile kerosene-soaked expressions.
“Are there other sets of keys?” I asked, returning them.
“Naught,” Father Sheehy replied.
“Then the killer is simply very good with locks, which narrows our search to six or seven thousand dead rabbits in this town. I see you’ve done better by us.”
They’d laid several items out on a cloth spread over the frontmost pew. A bag of large iron nails, their shape now sickeningly familiar to my eye. A hammer. A hacksaw, wrapped in a piece of tarp but bloody nonetheless. A paintbrush gleaming ivory in the yellowish light, and a small pot of whitewash. A sack, emptied of its contents and draped beside them: in all, a neat little kit for the violation of all that’s right.
“Where were these?” I asked.
“In my sacristy, hangin’ with my vestments,” Father Sheehy answered. The words grated along, forced from his lips. I’d not known a man could hold so much outrage within using only his jaw.
“And the outer doors not forced,” Mr. Piest added slowly, “and you the only one with the key, and these tools hidden in your own private vestry.”
“Are ye supposin’ that I, being a Catholic and a dutiful servant to His Holiness and the Church of Rome, would think to end vice by committing a ruthlessness so profane it redefines the very idea of sin?” the priest snarled. “This—this—savagery, this barbarous wrong, ’tis a lit match set to the dwellings of the New York Irish. I did not emigrate that I might ruin my flock.”
“No, no, sir, it is a point in your favor,” Mr. Piest explained. “Most decidedly.”
“And grateful I should be if ye were to tell me how.”
“Because no one behaves like that,” I replied, understanding my fellow copper star perfectly. “Hushes a kinchin and then shows off where he hid his tools. Had we discovered these without your company, it might have looked different. As it is, the news is still pretty gammy.”
“How so?”
“Someone just butchered another kinchin, but this time he wants us to calculate it was you.”
“Do you suppose that’s why the crosses are painted around him?” Mr. Piest exclaimed, snapping his fingers. “To point to the father here?”
“I can’t say, though I like it better than the other explanation.”
“And yes?”
“That he’s lost what little was left of his mind.”
Bang bang bang.
The sound thudded from the rear side of the cathedral this time. Mr. Piest scurried off, snatching up the keys. I stayed with Father Sheehy, hoping he wasn’t about to turn greenish or fall into a black study. I needn’t have worried, though. He looked keen to restain a rainbow-hued church window by putting some sick bastard’s head clean through it.
Chief Matsell came in, with Dr. Peter Palsgrave at his heels. Mr. Piest followed, having sent Neill away once more.
“Post me up,” said the chief. “How bad is it?”
“If it can get any worse, it’s beyond my imagining,” I answered, gesturing.
We all walked purposefully toward the front end of the church. I was about to explain further, Mr. Piest and Father Sheehy striding deferentially behind us, when Dr. Palsgrave started to scream.
It was an unearthly, horrible sound—something ripped from his throat that should have stayed there. A private noise. Anguished and terrified, like a pit had opened beneath him. All at once, he stopped, sinking into the nearest pew.
“Surely you’ve seen blood before, Doctor,” Chief Matsell pointed out, incredulous.
“It’s—it’s nothing,” Dr. Palsgrave panted, clawing at his chest. “Just my heart. Oh, my heart. Heaven have mercy, what has happened?”
“The same thing that’s happened twenty other times,” I said, an edge to my voice.
“But this. This, this. Look at it,” Palsgrave cried, hauling himself to his feet using the back of the next pew. “And done to a helpless little child. Who could stomach such an act? I can’t bear to—it’s completely insane.”
This isn’t right, my head announced relentlessly.
“Our man’s mental condition is deteriorating,” Chief Matsell agreed decisively. “We’ve ignored his warnings, and he has been pushed into a state of violent lunacy. Now, tell me what else you’ve found, Wilde, while Dr. Palsgrave here makes a preliminary study. Dr. Palsgrave, master yourself.”
The semi-hysterical expert looked sick with fear, but he wrenched himself forward as if determined to ignore the violence taking place within his chest. I felt a little tender toward Dr. Palsgrave, hearing Bird in my head. I could buy that he loved children. And could smell the blood myself from ten yards off. This was graphic waste, the antithesis of doctoring. If he diaries our names and later sees us … well, then we’re sick again, aren’t we? He failed. But the chief was right, and the doctor knew it, so he blinked very hard a few times and mechanically drew nearer to the center door.
It was only five minutes later that Dr. Palsgrave wanted the body on the ground, nothing more being gained by viewing the dark glory of a madman’s staging. So the chief nodded, and Father Sheehy fetched a crowbar, and between the pair of those iron-spined men, three minutes later it was done. We had the boy laid out on a stretch of canvas sacking, looking so much smaller than he had moments before.
After a few more fluttery minutes, Dr. Palsgrave delivered us his final verdict.
&
nbsp; “To my knowledge, I have never seen this child previously. He was healthy in life, approximately eleven years old, his organs are entirely intact, and he is dead of a laudanum overdose,” Dr. Palsgrave announced.
We stared.
“There are traces of spittle upon his lips that suggest the onset of nausea. That in itself would not be very conclusive, but in addition, he shows every sign of asphyxiating—his fingernails are quite blue, as are his lips.”
“So he was strangled to death,” said the chief.
“By no means—there are no marks on the child’s neck.”
“So he was poisoned? But—”
“Smell the stain on the boy’s shirt collar for yourself and then tell me it isn’t an anise-flavored opium paregoric!” the old man cried. “Laced with morphine, I shouldn’t wonder, for it appears to have done its work before the nausea had a chance to set in.”
“It’s a bit far-fetched, don’t you see, Doctor?” Mr. Piest attempted. “The method, it’s quite … humane. Is that likely?”
“We are dealing with a homicidal religious maniac, and you grouse to me about likelihood?”
“You mean to tell me,” Chief Matsell growled, “that some sick-minded brute broke in here with a captive, poisoned him, and then after sending him tenderly off to sleep, nailed him up and sawed him open? For effect, like?”
“Oh, merciful God,” whispered another voice, very small.
No matter how snappish we were fighting, no matter how occupied we were with the boy on the ground, I still to this day can’t credit myself, Timothy Wilde, not noticing the whisper of Mercy’s steps until she was nearly upon us. Without her own lantern, her hair down, her face bloodless as the moon. Her eyes fixed on murder’s latest sacrament. I did catch her as she fell, though, and as she fainted, she said something that might possibly have been “Timothy.”
NINETEEN
And we ask again, Can Romanism be the religion for America? As a religious system, it is an old fossil of the Dark Ages, formed to awe a rude and superstitious people, and in all its great peculiarities in direct antagonism with the religion of the Bible, which is the religion of these United States.
• Letter written to Bishop Hughes of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City •
Here is what happened that day, Sunday, August thirty-first, in the nineteen hours before New York City fell apart. From five in the morning, when Mercy arrived in the cathedral, when dawn’s scarlet glow started burning across the East River’s cool grey skin, until around midnight, when the match hit the fuse.
I missed the arrival of discreet copper stars charged with removing the body to the Tombs. Father Sheehy had lent me his keys again, and I was installing Mercy in his bed. The bedchamber was plain, dignified. Religious art on the walls, so it was no monk’s room, kept blank for God’s glory. So far as I was coming to understand Father Sheehy, it matched him: reverent, cultured, and honest. The bed was against a wall, covered with a plain quilt. I drew it back and settled my temporary charge on a pillow.
Her eyes opened. Slivers of pale blue showing through a cloudy sky.
“Marcas.” Her voice strained badly, though she herself was barely conscious. “What happened?”
“It’s all right. You’re at Father Sheehy’s. But—”
“What happened to Marcas, Mr. Wilde?” There was a sheen to her eyes now, one that tore at me.
“That’s his name, then,” I breathed. “You know him. Whyever did you come here?”
“Was that—was that done to him first?” Mercy asked, biting her lower lip so hard I wanted to reach for it, gently pull it out again, and give her my knuckle for a substitute.
“It was laudanum. He didn’t feel a bit of it. Please, just tell me what happened to you.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“Not yet. Mercy, please.”
Her dark head fell toward the pillow. She was working so hard to keep from crying that my speaking her name was enough to cut her strings and send her limp. It had done just about the same to me, once I’d heard myself say it, but one of us had to stay collected. And I could do it, too, if it was for her.
“I heard shouting in the streets,” she whispered. “All Irish voices. Calling out to each other, cutting right through the dark. That there was a devil loose and he’d defiled St. Patrick’s.”
My skin went cold. The newspapers didn’t matter any longer, then. Nothing we’d done to hide this foul investigation mattered anymore—we were exposed as that poor boy had been, hung up for all the world to see.
“I threw on my dress and my cloak without a light,” Mercy continued. “I—I thought I might know whoever it was, thought I could help, perhaps. I thought you might be here. That maybe we could set it right.”
Something purely selfish decided to inhabit my arm. I reached out and slipped my hand into hers. I didn’t calculate it, but it was only for me and not meant to comfort. Her fingers were cold, and she pushed them farther into my palm.
“His name is Marcas, but only because they call him that. And he’s nothing to do with Silkie Marsh. His house is nearly in the East River, the southwest corner where Corlears Street meets Grand. It’s all boys there. I once treated him for whooping cough. When I saw him, I—I’m sorry.”
Half a second later she was weeping on my shoulder, trying the whole time not to make any noise. My arms around her back and her mouth open on my coat. It’s not charitable to say that it was the happiest moment of my life. But in the midst of the nightmare landscape I’d wandered into, I think it was.
She quieted quickly, blushed when she pulled back. I let her go and passed her my handkerchief.
“I need to present you with an argument,” I requested quietly. “You’re the only one I can trust to hear me out.”
Mercy sighed darkly.
“Shall I get out of this bed before delivering my expert opinion?”
We repaired to the kitchen. My head felt more or less packed with unlit fireworks. It didn’t take me long to find Father Sheehy’s whiskey, an endearing third of a bottle with six months of dust on it, and I poured us two generous glasses.
“Do you think,” I asked her, “that murder has to have a reason?”
“In the mind of the murderer, yes,” she said slowly. “Otherwise, why would it happen?”
“So,” I expounded, grateful just to hear her recovered enough to return questions with more questions, “what is the reason in this case?”
Mercy squinted at me. Drew her head back and took a sip of spirits.
“Religion,” she reported, dead as dust.
“Not politics?”
“In New York, aren’t they the same?”
“They aren’t,” I objected. “Look here: a man deciding to kill kinchin and defile their corpses in secret might be doing it for religion, or an insane corruption of it. But not for politics. Politics isn’t about secrecy. It’s about press.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “but things have obviously changed since that—that—cruelty in the church, have they not?”
“Exactly. Which is why I think something’s happened to our man. Maybe he’s nervous, because we’re getting to him. Maybe he’s growing more ill. There’s another letter, one sent to Dr. Palsgrave, that suggests he might be. Maybe he wanted Father Sheehy implicated for some unholy reason. All I know is that this is beyond what we’ve seen before, and I don’t believe that the other murders were done for politics no matter what’s being written to the Herald. This was cruel of a purpose. The whitewashed crosses drawn all around the child, the staging. It was cruel to draw attention.”
Mercy’s jaw was working again. “I assume the cathedral was locked. How did he get in?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’ll learn it, on my honor.”
She stood up, gracefully finishing the whiskey. “I pray you do, Mr. Wilde. And now, I left the house very abruptly. I must go.”
I’d not have expected anything more, knowing her as I did. But she stopped with her h
and on the knob, casting me an angled eyebrow.
“Promise me you’ll be careful?”
“I promise,” I answered.
Mercy Underhill left for home.
I grinned stupidly at my whiskey for a few moments. Thinking over my job, which was harrowing. My task, which was nigh impossible. My face, which was mangled. My savings, which no longer existed.
Draining the glass, I imbibed a silent toast to each and every one of those misfortunes before locking Father Sheehy’s door behind me.
When I checked back in at the cathedral proper, much of the blood was cleaned away, Chief Matsell and Dr. Palsgrave were gone, and Mr. Piest was dropping the evidence we’d found into a sack. A few bleary-eyed clerics stood speaking in whispers, wielding mops with religious zeal. Father Sheehy had vanished.
“At the Tombs,” Mr. Piest explained. “He was taken in for questioning.”
“That’s pure flam,” I snapped, forgetting myself. “Don’t tell me he was arrested?”
“No, but on the evidence—think of how Chief Matsell sees it. If we’re right about Sheehy, he’ll be free in two hours. But if we’re wrong, and it comes out we were wrong and could have questioned him, it’s the end of the copper stars.”
I nodded, a brushfire headache growing behind my right eye. The eye hadn’t been hurt in the tragedy downtown, of course, but now I suspect I tense it when vexed. And I was about as vexed as was possible. Having already lost my temper once, I regained it so as to lose it again.
“Dr. Palsgrave went with them?”
“He went home. Complained of severe heart palpitations.”
I opened my mouth, furious.
“He’s a private citizen who can have nothing to do with this crime,” Mr. Piest interrupted reasonably. “I’ll tell you what I mean to do, Mr. Wilde. I mean to write out a report after looking long and hard at these tools. I mean to eat a few oysters and some bread and butter, quick as humanly possible. Then I mean to go north, and find the owner of those used shields. And you?”
