by Lyndsay Faye
TWENTY-THREE
This is the way: make Americans only acquainted with the simple truth respecting Romanism, and they will scout it out of countenance, and even its adherents will deny its claims or practices, out of pure shame.
• American Protestant in Defence of Civil and Religious Liberty Against Inroads of Papacy, 1843 •
I didn’t go meet Matsell, as it happened.
No, I dragged myself home to Elizabeth Street. More than half delirious, and only luck to thank for keeping possession of my wallet for the whole journey. The house was very empty when I got there. No one kneading, no one sketching.
I pumped as much Croton water as I could bear to carry and started a fire in the grate. Heated the water in kettles, in soup pots. Whatever I could find. Filling the hip bath I’d pulled out from behind the stacked flour bags was one of the more irksome jobs I’d done all night, and it wasn’t even properly night now, not any longer, but nearer to chalky late-summer dawn. I didn’t have a choice, though. The little stab point in my back throbbed horribly, the gash down my arm not much better, and it’s a bad job to die of infected blood.
It’s a bad job to die when you’ve unfinished business, anyway. And I’d a full cargo’s worth. Three very important priorities.
Keep Mercy Underhill safe. Get your brother back. Stop the bastard who’s done all this.
I wasn’t too sure about the order of importance, so I let that go and determined to accomplish all three as best I could at the same time.
Settling back into the hot water hurt like all hell. Not as much, though, as when I spooned a heaping pile of pearl-ash alkaline salt onto one of Mrs. Boehm’s clean rags and started scrubbing out every part of me still bleeding. The pale powder spat and hissed when it touched the water, and I wasn’t being gentle about anything. That was purposeful. It isn’t easy to slip into unconsciousness when you’re in that much pain.
After I’d rubbed pearl-ash into every cut I could find, paying harshest attention to the tiny gouge pulsing in my back, the water was a rosy hue and I was as fresh awake as I’d ever been in my life. Drying quickly with another slop sheet, dousing the fire with pink water from the hip-bath, I fetched more clean cloth for bandaging and wrapped up my burning cuts. They would keep, now. And I’d been hurt worse. It was when I looked over my face in the pane of window glass, finding it bright-shiny and watery-textured—hideous, but on the whole healthy—that I suddenly knew what I had to do.
What was next. And it wasn’t Piest or Matsell.
With the sheet gathered around my waist, I ran upstairs for butcher paper, a hunk of charcoal, and my only clean shirt and trousers. I suffered a dizzy spell on the way, but I fought it off, more annoyed and impatient than anything. Returning just as quickly, I spread the brown sheet out on the tabletop. I poured myself a splash of brandy. Cautiously, knowing a measure of pain would keep me alert. Next, I turned back to the chair I’d hung my filthy togs over and reached into my inner frock coat pocket. Then at last I sat down at the table holding Palsgrave’s letter, the only letter that sounded as if it had been written by a lunatic and not a stage villain, and I spread it out on the grainy wood.
I can see only it.
I can see it and nothing else see it ever and ever amen only the body so small and so broken.
I stopped reading that part. It was madness without any markers, any facts to speak of. But that letter, in combination with the way Marcas had met his end …
It gnawed at me. Something is wrong. And of course it was, I’d learned that much from poor little Aidan Rafferty long since. But if I thought of all this as a story, as the way people do things, as the way someone sitting in my bar with his tongue unhinged would tell it to me …
Something was wrong.
I picked up my charcoal and I stood up from the table and I drained the brandy. Still a bit dizzy. Near to two full days awake, slit up pretty nastily, wearing only trousers and a half-buttoned shirt, on that huge piece of blank butcher paper I wrote in one corner:
THINGS A PERSON WOULD KILL FOR:
God.
Politics.
Defense.
Money.
Madness.
Love.
I looked them over. Maybe an argument could be made that money and self-love are the same, or that politics and God are similar, but I liked it well enough. So I continued, this time taking up more canvas. Drawing the following words in separate areas all throughout the middle, circling each with a thick black line like a fence:
19 buried (nameless—Jack Be Nimble of the Newsboys among them?)
1 trash bin (Liam)
1 escaped (Bird)
9 rescued (Neill, Sophia, Peter, Ryan, Eamann, Magpie, Jem, Tabby, John)
1 publicly desecrated (Marcas)
1 mistaken for a rat (Aiden)
I’m not sure why I added the last name. He was so very long past, and not a bit connected. But I wanted him there. He was important to me.
So.
Twenty-two dead, and Bird sleeping warm and peaceful in the middle of a rambling berry patch farmstead in Harlem. Or so I hoped.
But then I began to notice something. I poured myself another small brandy, just for something to do with my hands when I stopped to think. Oddly enough, my hands as they were writing and circling and busy felt alive. I thought, Yes, this is working, don’t stop, everything you can think of belongs on this piece of butcher paper. Everyone depends on it.
Leaning over, I started drawing. I drew a quick sketch of Silkie Marsh. I drew Mercy as she’d been at St. Patrick’s, with her eyes wide and her hair down. I drew one of the buried corpses, cracked open and bones bare. I drew Marcas, in cruelly broad lines, because that’s what his murder had looked like. I drew Bird’s new dress. Just little pictures between the spaces, spooling the cobwebs from out of my head.
It worked, too. When the pictures were out of me, I started remembering words.
And the right ones this time.
People tell me things they shouldn’t. Things they ought to be powdering over, shoveling underground, facts they ought to be stuffing into a carpetbag before dropping into the river and quietly drowning. I wrote the series of statements in another section, deciding “Statements” was a fair enough name for them. Bits of sentences from Mercy, from Palsgrave, remarks that hadn’t seemed to have any connection to each other.
By the time I was through scribbling them out, they didn’t look like spoken phrases at all. They looked like a map. A map of hell, maybe, but a map nevertheless, and my breath caught in my throat.
I pulled the letter—the only letter left to me—out from where it lay half covered under the butcher paper. I read it over.
Nothing made sense, but everything fit.
I felt a bit like laughing, but that would have been horrible. And anyway there had to be some difference between me and Val. So I finished my sheet of butcher paper instead.
First I circled Love. From under “Things a Person Would Kill For.” And then God too, for that was a part of it. And then Money.
Next I wrote the following questions:
What did Piest find in the woods and tell the chief?
Who attended Father Sheehy’s Catholic school proposal meeting?
A knock occurred just beyond the bread display.
I approached Mrs. Boehm’s door, having stopped on the way for a kitchen knife. Rankly exhausted, sick at heart, buzzing with savage and unnerving butcher-paper knowledge. Grasping the knob, I lifted the blade she used to quarter chickens.
And there stood Gentle Jim, of all the people in the world, with my brother’s treelike biceps draped senselessly over his shoulders. When I’d first spied Jim with his head lolling off the crook of Val’s arm at the Liberty’s Blood, I’d have called you a liar if you claimed he could support his own scant weight, let alone Val’s. But I’d have been dead wrong, and Valentine didn’t presently appear to be much up to walking by himself. I guessed nine reasons for that, and then settled on on
e overarching one, which was his brother Tim is a purblind milksop.
“Good Lord,” I managed. “Thank you. Come in, for God’s sake. I’ll take his legs.”
“It would greatly endear you to me,” Jim replied exhaustedly.
That didn’t end up happening. What did seem to work was me slinging both of Val’s arms over my shoulders and walking up the stairs with him hanging on my back, Jim following with my brother’s ankles so the man wasn’t dragged up each and every step. Though in that state, he’d never have noticed. I’ve seen it a hundred times.
Reaching my room, I dropped him pretty hard on my straw tick mattress. Not out of spite, for once, but because he’s damnably heavy.
“What the devil,” I prompted.
“Yes, well.” Gentle Jim tugged at the paper collar of his laundered shirt wearily. “I never did set any stock in his perfection. Only his tremendous appeal.”
“He says he’s not a sodomite,” I remarked stupidly.
“And just what do you mean to insinuate about me, if you please?”
I liked him fine after that. As perfect replies go, that one was all aces. And if sodomy had just saved Val’s hide, it was now my hands-down favorite of his indulgences.
“What was he doing, just now?”
“The unfortunate rogue met a sea captain at the Liberty’s Blood and signed on for a voyage to Turkey,” he sniffed. “However, every mother’s son drinking there owes Valentine far too much money and far too many favors to allow him such a … career misstep. We objected. Strenuously. Not molleys,” he added, rolling his eyes before I could say a word. “I venture to surmise I am his only intimate acquaintance in the City Hall Park set, actually, or … my goodness. I hope I am. What a dreadful line of thought, Timothy. Anyhow, the dockworkers didn’t like to see him shipped off either, what with his role in their Party, and all. Thus I was charged with escorting him home. Val grew rather uncultured with me en route, dreaming of the open sea as it were and finding himself thwarted in his aims, and threw his house key into a sewage sink. I am above retrieving it from such a place. And here we are.”
I was trying to work out if my brother was still breathing. The odds seemed fair that he was. I’d given him one hell of a black eye, but someone had carefully cleaned the place where the skin had split.
Yes, I like this Jim fellow considerably, I decided.
“Have I gotten him home, then?” Gentle Jim inquired, genuinely worried.
“You’re a fine friend to the pair of us,” I answered. By way of an apology.
“Don’t you dream of thinking that,” Jim laughed as he walked toward my staircase. “When once he wakes up—I don’t know what troubles have recently beset the two of you, he always claimed you were quite close—you shall doubtless suppose me an utter bastard. Val coming off that much morphine is a grand and a glorious thing. I wish you all the fair luck in the world, because that is how much you will need.”
I was too much anxious over Val to leave for the Tombs. Not because I thought he might finally have used himself too hard, but because there was no guarantee that if I left and he awoke, the bloody-minded scoundrel might not set sail for Brazil. And so I found some stomach-calming dried mint and brewed a pot of tea instead. My brother endures the sweats and the chills with remarkable calm, and the bit where his heart rate starts resembling a hummingbird’s doesn’t much vex him. But this one looked like it had been a real out-and-out. That meant I needed mint tea, and—supposing the tea didn’t work—a bucket. I fetched them.
Thankfully, I waited only about twenty minutes. I was sitting with my back to the wall by the straw tick in my relatively unfurnished room when Valentine sat up, looking like a savage who’d just crawled out of a cave and stolen a dapper Party man’s togs.
“What,” he said in a voice the texture of tree bark, “am I doing here?”
“Sleeping off the morphine,” I said amiably. “Gentle Jim delivered you.”
“That prancing little hobbyhorse.”
“I like him fine.”
Val rubbed his hand up and down his face a few times. “You never want to see me again.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Why?” he wanted to know, shoving his index finger and thumb hard into his eyeballs.
“Because I’m not a very good brother, but I’d like some practice at it.”
Val coughed up something that belonged on the ground in Five Points and tugged his red silk kerchief out of his pocket.
“And just how do you calculate to learn that lay, Tim?”
“I’ll watch you, I guess. That’s my plan.”
“Then you,” Val rasped into the cloth, “are thick as cream.”
“I know.”
I had spent more than half a lifetime believing that my brother’s foulest crimes against me consisted of firefighting, morphine use, and moral depravity, in that order. And I’d never had the smallest intention of forgiving him for any of them. Not that Val had asked. But knowing that his greatest crime was actually a bloodstain so dark it could blot a man out entirely … Miraculously, that was easier. An instant had passed the night before, as I staggered home, when I realized I could be rid of the person who’d robbed me of my parents. That I could simply let Valentine go. And then I’d thought about my twisted maelstrom of a sibling’s exactitude in stuffing pigeons with butter and suet and marjoram before stewing them, and how whenever we’d had a window it had always been scrupulously clean, and the occasion we’d run out of handkerchiefs and he’d actually cut an old waistcoat into squares and hemmed them. I’d thought about the quality of spine required to walk into a fire in which people are burning. I’d thought about reasons for doing so. It had been all I could manage not to start shouting his name down Elizabeth Street.
“Is that mint tea?” Val croaked dubiously, opening one eye.
“Yes.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“Yes.”
And it was. But that only ever takes about half an hour—the bucket period, I mean to say, and when the nausea had been conquered, Val stuck his head in my basin and washed up, and we went back downstairs. I soon found day-old bread Mrs. Boehm had wrapped and put in the cupboard, a piece of farmer’s cheese, and some house beer. The dawn was now far from grey, and the air had cooled from the passing storm overhead. A mutely watchful morning. When I’d finished making coffee, I sat down across from my brother. Val was staring at my butcher paper, eyebrows raised.
“Your coffee,” Valentine said, “smells like the underside of an Irish boot.”
“I ought to tell you right off that you won’t be seeing Scales or Moses Dainty again. It’s not by my hand, but they’re … in no position to be found. They were hedging with Silkie Marsh and met some who objected to them trying to kill me.”
My brother was too drug-sick to grieve properly. But he did slump a little further. “There’s a question solved. Do you know, I thought that pair of cross-coves were beginning to smell like rats. But they’d run with me so long, I couldn’t swallow it.”
“I need to know what you learned from Matsell and Piest. I could go find them myself, but—”
“But they leaked to me already. You’ve turned murder artist,” he added with his eyes on the brown paper.
“It helped. What did Piest find in the woods and tell the chief?”
“That piece of old Dutch toast is really as sharp as they make them.” Val sighed, putting his elbows on the table and staring at the bread darkly. “I suppose you know he unearthed a rank lot of sheepskins by the grave. Well, he found the wench they’d been occupying too, and she was all the go to spill for him. Name of Maddy Sample.”
Maddy Sample was a lovely and apple-cheeked farm girl of seventeen who lived in the midst of a cherry orchard bordering the woods where the shields had been found. Mr. Piest, bless the mad rogue, had discovered her by visiting the nearest pub to the gravesite—a saloon called The Fairhaven, on the assumption that the girl lived very near—and then pret
ending to lech after every moll who’d bother speaking with him. He enjoyed zero success, as might be expected. But this behavior gave the menfolk the impression he was hot after their property. And soon enough a fellow by the name of Ben Withers, who was more chivalrous than clearheaded, warned him not to gawk after Maddy if he didn’t want Ben’s fist in his eye.
“Which would have been bully,” Val explained, “but Maddy Sample isn’t married to Ben Withers. He lives at a brewery a quarter mile away. Also bordering the forest. Which made our Mr. Piest wonder what the devil dear little Ben was so worried about.”
Mr. Piest hadn’t yet encountered Maddy Sample. But he found her soon enough at the cherry orchard when he told her parents that his wife was ailing, and needed a part-time companion of sunny disposition. For a large sum of coin, a few of which he handed over to them as a gesture of good faith. The Samples wished his wife a swift recovery and in the meanwhile sent him straight to their vegetable garden to speak with Maddy. When he’d gently told her what he’d found, what he wanted, and what he’d pay her for pretending to call on his wife, Maddy washed her hands and rode with him to the Tombs.
“Matsell and Piest questioned her, and the pair of them know what they’re about, making a moll comfortable.” Val dunked a piece of bread in his small beer and hazarded a bite of it. “The doxie was spinning yarn after yarn as soon as a glass of French cream was in her hands. Ben Withers is a real out-and-outer, but he’s not yet through his brewers’ apprenticeship. Ben Withers is a bit peppery about who she talks with. Ben Withers has a fine ankle for a jig. When they’d got her off the topic of her young man, she admitted they go to the woods to play plug-tail, and when they asked if she’d ever spied anything dusty, she said there’s a carriage comes there at times. Saw it twice.”
