The Gods of Gotham

by Lyndsay Faye

  My fingers flexed, but I held my tongue.

  “I was already frightened when I saw the carriage. I didn’t want him to come for me, too. But then I was worried for another reason, because … because Liam’s door had been locked, you see, and what if that was because the man in the black hood had come for Liam? I thought maybe this time that I could let him out instead. I liked Liam, he knew bird calls. He said because of my name, I should know them too. We hadn’t gotten to the hard ones yet, he was to teach me more that week.”

  Bird had started to cry a little, but it didn’t change her voice so much as a tremor. Tears just silently wetted her cheeks.

  “The locks to the rooms aren’t hard to pick. Robert taught me, when I was seven. Anyway, I fetched a thick hairpin from my bedroom and made certain no one was in the hallway. I picked the door open, keeping quiet as I could. Thinking I’d let Liam out the back. There were other bawdy houses he could go to, maybe, or— I didn’t know. Maybe he could get well and go to sea. That’s what I thought. But I was so stupid. Stupid. I didn’t look under the door.”

  “Why should you have?”

  “Because it was completely dark in there,” Bird choked. “If he was there, and awake, his lamp would’ve been lit. And when I did get the door open, and I snuck inside, I was only few feet in, by the edge of his bed, when I tripped over a great bowl.”

  I didn’t need to ask what was in the bowl. Not the way her eyelashes were shuddering. Two terrified moth wings fighting the pull of a tallow candle.

  “Did you light a lamp?” I asked instead.

  “No. I could see Liam in the starlight on his bed. He wasn’t breathing. There wasn’t any blood in him. It was in the bowl. Just in the bowl. And all over the floor then, all over my dress.”

  I passed an arm around her shoulders, very lightly. She didn’t object, so I let it stay there.

  “I ran back to my bedroom, where the lamps were lit. Needing the light. I wanted to scream, I think I was about to, so I put a pillow over my mouth until I knew I could be quiet. Then I tied some pairs of stockings together and knotted them to the window catch. I was frightened someone was watching me, so frightened my hands shook. Some places have … holes in the walls. I’d not heard of anyone ever finding one at Madam Marsh’s, but maybe she was too clever for us. She’s too clever for most. But no one stopped me. And then I ran. I couldn’t live there anymore. I never saw the man in the black hood that night. Just his carriage. But I knew what he was about, all along. I knew he would tear Liam to pieces.”

  It’s not something I’d have figured I’m any good at. Sitting on the floor with my arm around a skinny ten-year-old kinchin, trying to keep her bones from shaking out of her freckled skin. People might tell me things, but that doesn’t make me practiced at piecing those people back together. And maybe I was as big a milksop as I ever am, and no damned good after all. But God, what a try I gave it.

  Bird shivered tearfully. “I’ve felt wrong before, but that was different. The blood was new. Like I’d never get it off. Like nothing would help.”

  “I wish I could do something to make it better.”

  “Nothing can make it better. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I just— I liked you. You brought me inside.”

  “It’s all right, Bird.” If she gets to lie as she pleases, then by God, so can I from time to time. “You’re no different than I am, and it wasn’t your fault. Not any of it. We’re exactly the same.”

  “That isn’t true,” she gasped.

  “It’ll get better,” I vowed, only hoping it was a fact. “Better and better, the farther away you are from it.”

  “What do you mean, farther away?”

  “People like you and me don’t have time to dwell over such things, things that hurt or dirtied us,” I told her, tightening my grip. “We just keep walking. Nothing is ever clean in New York.”

  In late afternoon, I saw Bird and Mrs. Boehm off on the New York and Harlem Railroad at the Broome Street stop. Thinking over what was best to do as I walked back, air hanging thick and dirty as cigar smoke in the dimming light, I decided on stopping by the theater and lighting a little inspirational fire under my newsboys. Enlisting those lads had been just about the best idea I’d had, and I’d bribed them fair and square. I deserved some consideration. When I got to Elm Street, though, I discovered that I was already wanted. There was my small ally, looking left, right, and sideways as he trotted in the direction of the Tombs, stopping at the first glimpse of my hat.

  “There you are,” said Ninepin, pulling his gold-rimmed ladies’ spectacles off and rubbing at them in weightless relief. “You’re something past shady, Mr. Wilde.”

  “Well, now you’ve found me.” My pulse sped up a little, for his looks were steady but greyish. The sort of expression you might find on a lad who’d spotted a certain black carriage. “What’s the news?”

  “Look leery,” he hissed, warning me quiet as he jerked his neck down Elm toward their theatrical haunt a few blocks away. “It wasn’t me who saw— Anyway, there’s been bit of a mitten-mill. I was half spoiling, threw a facer myself. Hurry.”

  “What were you boys fighting over?”

  “You’ll see,” he sighed as we hastened away.

  We were at the edge of the Five Points when it happened. The shadows steadily gaining solidity all around us, long angles slanting longer as the sun fell. Poor buildings leaning up against one another, poorer residents propped up against the buildings. The usual scene. Then my gait hitched. And suddenly, too. There’s a particular feeling to having a knife poked into your ribs.

  A sort of stopping, when the point hits flesh, like a magician might have turned you to marble.

  “Mouth it, and I’ll make a hole in your back right here and now,” growled Moses Dainty’s voice over my right shoulder. A Scales-shaped shadow told me he wasn’t alone, and that Valentine’s twin familiars now outnumbered me. “Hand over your copper star.”

  I did, clenching my jaw as the knife bit inward.

  “That’s the spirit. Now, turn left.”

  I thought as I pivoted, grimacing, to tell Ninepin to run. But he’d vanished into the lazy drifts of smoke, saving me the trouble. So I marched east along bustling Anthony Street with a little trickle of blood already running down my spine. When we’d near reached the heart of Five Points and the Old Brewery, about the most degraded and yet public spot on Manhattan, I thought them out of their heads. But then we turned north again, into an alley, and I knew I was in for a sorry time.

  I’d never actually walked into Cow Bay previous. It was pretty clear the instant we set foot down the darkened crevice why I’d avoided it. The corridor that had once been a cow path narrowed as it went along, and the filth rose higher, a cramped stretch of hell. Before the Panic, it had been merry African concert saloons rife with laughter, bawdy houses where coloreds and whites alike could find soft-voiced black stargazers. But that was before the Panic. At first, dim as it was with the buildings looming crazily inward, I saw unmarked stairwells leading down to the sort of saloons most men would call sewers. Here and there a body crouched on the steps in the shade. Too poor to keep drinking, too drunk to walk, and too wearied of life to brush off the flies. But farther down, as the crack squeezed thinner and thinner, the stairs disappeared and there were only disintegrating wooden shacks growing from the piles of mud and shit. Walls with sagging doors. Hardly a window. And not a single breath of fresh air to be found.

  Dwelling places, they were meant to be. But not even the free-roaming pigs were wretched enough to venture into the dead-end pit of Cow Bay.

  “All right, Tim,” said Moses when we were well out of sight of the main road. “Back up against that wall.”

  I went, my hands at my sides.

  “Pretty far from Ward Eight, aren’t you, boys?” I hissed.

  “Not so far as to make us uncomfortable.” Scales shrugged, his broad, smashed, sneering privateer’s face well satisfied.

  “Fine pol
ice work the pair of you manage. You’d have done better to kill me by now, you know.”

  “Hear, hear,” put in Moses.

  “Well, we would have, too,” admitted Scales. “But we need to ask a question first, before you’re too quiet to answer.”

  “What makes you think I’ll answer now?”

  “We’ll find that little girl again.” Moses Dainty flashed me a smile from under his pale moustache. “And then we can kill her just as slow as we like. Maybe after we’ve gotten to know her a bit better. We can kill you slow too, if you’d rather.”

  “What we want to know is,” Scales announced, “did you tell George Matsell about Bird Daly padding in your ken? Does the chief know anything of her at all?”

  “He knows everything,” I lied. “Knows where she is right now, and has a guard set. He’ll have you bastards locked in a cellar before you even have time to report back to Val.”

  Scales looked a bit downcast.

  “Guess in that case, the little Wilde dies fast, then,” he muttered to Moses.

  At least, I think that’s what he said.

  I was distracted, launching myself off the wall with my open hands clutching for Moses while he played with his knife like a kinchin in short pants, throwing him with all my weight into his partner.

  However else I felt about Valentine, I’d one huge advantage simply by virtue of being his brother: I am a small man who knows how to fight large men.

  You have to be quicker.

  Uppercut, pivot, rush, kick, everything faster than them though your heart is racing. Everything cleaner than them though you’re not near as tall. And that’s how I fought that day.

  Swifter. Sharper.

  Better.

  Because the instant two bigger men push one smaller man to the ground, it’s over.

  And then Scales caught my jaw with a crack like a pistol shot. I fell as if it was one in fact, flat on my spine in whatever muck fouls the back end of Cow Bay, my ears ringing. I remember wondering, when Scales’s boot came down on my throat and Moses wielded his knife again, if I could have picked any more pitiable way to die than this: sprawling in dung, gutted by a pair of fellow copper stars.

  I thrashed once, helplessly, the boot crushing down against my larynx.

  Everything drifted away.

  And then someone screamed, and it jerked me back from the edge like a towline.

  “Don’t touch me, you smoked Irish bastards—” another voice snapped.

  I still couldn’t move, but that lasted only a second.

  Air rushed into my lungs. And thank God that’s a mindless task, or I’d have missed the opportunity, dancing at the edge of something wide and black as I was.

  Another scream, this one softer. A thud.

  When I could see again, I’d already rolled to my knees, gasping like a drowning man. Otherwise hale, though. There was no sign of Moses Dainty and Scales any longer. Or there didn’t seem to be. All had gone inexplicably quiet.

  Soon as I could, I dragged myself up to my feet toward the smear of sunlight so very far above that miserable stretch of alley.

  I was completely, entirely surrounded by ghosts.

  They had carved-out gouges for eye sockets—brown eyes intact, but within genuinely starving faces. The decaying rags hanging from them might have been clothing, or maybe just the shreds worn by spirits in picture books. But spirits didn’t smell this way, and I hoped spirits didn’t look as much in pain. I couldn’t tell their exact ages, though there were women as well as men. About twelve of them, all told. All as silent and motionless as if they were already dead and not just well on their way to it. All staring at me as if I were the apparition, as if I cut the figure of the magical specter and not them.

  They’d come from the surrounding houses, I realized. Every last one of them black. And then I remembered who lived at the end of Cow Bay. Cow Bay, where even the Irish wouldn’t go. Or not thus far. Not yet.

  “You’re Timothy Wilde,” a woman said.

  I tried to answer but fell back against the wall awkwardly, nodding instead.

  They waited.

  “Where,” I rasped when I could, “where are the other two copper stars?”

  One man stepped forward, shaking his head.

  “Don’t be wasting your time asking after that pair, Mr. Wilde. You’re all right?”

  I nodded, though my throat still pulsed like a smashed insect under my fingers. The colored man I’d never seen before in my life placed my copper star in my free hand.

  “I won’t waste another thought on them,” I vowed.

  My voice was about as good as a stick drawing words in a patch of sand. But it did the job.

  “Well, you seem all right, Mr. Wilde,” the man said as one by one the ghosts peeled away. “Anything else we can do?”

  “Thank you. Shake hands with Julius Carpenter for me.”

  The remaining men and women turned slowly and deliberately back to their homes. Looking, under thick layers of hunger and want, grimly satisfied.

  “Oh, any of us see him as knows him, that we will, Mr. Wilde,” he agreed, as he too faded back into the shadowland from which they’d come.

  The stab wound, I thought, was only a tiny hole. Beneath my notice. Staggering back toward the mouth of Cow Bay, I met with my second gang of thugs that early evening.

  Ninepin had disappeared to a specific purpose, that much was obvious. Fang stood at their head with a weighted club hung slack in his fingers and the scar on his lip tugging up like a Punch-and-Judy puppet. Behind him slouched six others including Matchbox, Dead-Eye, and the bigger soldiers from The Thrilling, Gruesome, and Bloody Spectacle of the Battle of Agincourt. I was more than half touched to see them. Herding the vigilante crew back streetside, I burst into dying sunlight once more.

  “They hemped you bad,” said Matchbox worriedly. “Can’t you breathe?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Then why look so ketched?”

  “This is what a fellow looks like when his own brother sends a pair of footpads to hush him.”

  Not as if he didn’t warn me, I added in my head.

  We tramped the remaining few blocks to the theater in darkening silence, went inside and down the steps toward the lamp-lit stage. Shadows hung unnaturally that evening already, or so I thought. The streaks of gloom looked like a scene painted by a kinchin who’d lost perspective halfway through, and I remembered with a dull ache that the public had seen Marcas’s corpse, that everything was surely ruined already no matter what I did.

  The remainder of the news hawkers idled on the stage, shuffling their feet or lying on their backs playing cat’s cradle. I could see a new worktable, busy with paper and fuses and packages of gunpowder. Hopstill had paid the newsboys a series of calls, then. And none of them seemed to have blown their own faces off. Three of them, however, were christened with black eyes and split lips.

  “What is going on?” I demanded.

  “We had a scrap.” Matchbox’s eerily adult eyes seemed more tired than usual. He brushed his fingers through his black hair, slumping Indian-style in front of the melted heaps of wax footlights.

  “You found the black carriage,” I supposed.

  Silence. One of the bashed-up youths snorted softly in disgust, turning the page of his newspaper. But I felt a thick rush of pride.

  Something I’d tried had actually worked.

  “Listen, this entire city has doubtless turned for the worst, you’d best go on and leak it to me.”

  “Was there really,” began Dead-Eye, rubbing anxiously at the marble stuffed in his face, “a croaked kinchin-mab hitched up like Je—”

  “Yes,” I owned tightly, “and you know how word travels. If it wasn’t in your afternoon papers, it’s for no reason other than the chief of police.”

  “It was in the afternoon papers,” Fang corrected me.

  That one took me a moment to breathe through.

  “I need that carriage, lads,” I pleaded.

>   “You heard him,” drawled Fang to the little knot of fight-marked boys in a tone I couldn’t well fathom. “Leak it.”

  “I leaked it to them right enough,” the lanky youth snapped, pointing a grubby finger at Ninepin and Matchbox. “And I got a punch in the daylight for my trouble, too.”

  “You’ll get one again if you don’t change your story, Tom Cox,” growled Ninepin.

  “You won’t, so long as I’m here,” I said firmly. “Spill it. Where is the carriage?”

  “Dunno. We lost it,” Tom Cox muttered.

  “You what? Well, where was it, then?”

  “Outside a chophouse near to St. John’s Park, where we was hawking afternoon papers, already pulling away when we eyed it. We stopped work, shadowed it for a mile and a half through slow traffic, thereabouts, and it pulled up in front of a brick autum. Then somebody got out of it,” he added, glaring spit-bright and defiant at Ninepin. “Somebody went into the autum. Shut the door behind as the rotan drove off again. I keeked it clear as day. So did these lot. After that, we shoved off, came back here. Didn’t know what to think.”

  “For the last time, who got out of the carriage in front of the church and went inside?”

  “Say Mercy Underhill again,” snarled Ninepin, pulling his spectacles off his face and handing them to Fang, “and I’ll go as many rounds as it takes to keep your great gaping potato-trap shut.”

  “Sod off,” snapped Tom Cox, leaping to his feet. “She’d that green dress on, the one that’s off her shoulders with the fern pattern, we’ve all seen it a score of—”

  I caught Ninepin by the collar as he pitched headlong into the fray. He wasn’t on my mind, though. Just in my hand.

  The green dress, off the shoulders as most of hers are, with the fern pattern. The one I last saw her in when she was standing across the street from Niblo’s Gardens in March.

  Like a history book. Such a very long time ago.

  She’d the basket slung over her arm at the same angle her eyes drifted sideways, and it had been stuffed full of half-finished short stories. Mercy had been trapped indoors for days with a bad case of ague, but well recovered by the looks of her color, and I hadn’t known she was well again, I’d the day before handed the reverend a bottle of cordial and a used book from a stall. He’d thanked me as if the mere tokens were great talismans, because Thomas Underhill loathes Mercy’s falling ill like he loathes nothing else on earth. But there she was, off balance like the best of statues, and she’d finished the ode she’d been working on while laid up recovering, and I read it in the middle of the street, rays of sunlight flashing white off her black hair.