by Lyndsay Faye
“The jawbone of an ass. A cruel, dark, base weapon. A fitting one, so I became it under the circumstances.”
“Fitting?” I cried, forgetting myself and gesturing with the pistol. “Fitting? And how? How did that child ever deserve—”
“We’re infested,” he ground out. Standing, the reverend shut the diary and lifted the candle. “You simply haven’t lived long enough to learn the consequences of a vermin infestation, Timothy—or perhaps you’ve learned it today, since Mercy’s fever can only have come from such dens. When the same sort of contagion finished Olivia, I thought perhaps it might be a part of God’s plan for me. To make me suffer, that I might learn to sacrifice more willingly. To hurt me, that I might understand pain. I supposed that perhaps I was being tested, and I would be found worthy only if I remained ever dedicated, remained pure. How can one remain pure within a dung heap, Timothy Wilde?”
The dead kinchin’s journal landed with a pathetic flutter in the cold fireplace as I stared at him. It made sense. It fit in a line. The self-obsession, the devotion, the righteousness, the atmosphere that made Mercy think only London, London, London, the fire lighting her eyes when she’d talked of her planned escape in that wretched rented bedroom the night before. It was only a downward slope, watching a man march to the bottom of a hill. This was merely the man who wouldn’t give Aidan Rafferty cream unless his mother had first denounced the pope.
I recalled him shouting at Mercy that day I’d caught sight of them, framed in their parlor window, her face flooding red with mortification, and nearly bit off the end of my tongue when I realized too late what sort of conversation they’d really been having.
“Oh, come, my opinion cannot possibly surprise you,” he scoffed. “First they pour into the city, our city, like locusts, blaspheming God wheresoever they go. Then God sends His plagues to follow after them despite their migration, and what do Olivia and Mercy do? They help the sufferers. They die alongside them, these rats that look like humans. And you see how we are repaid—look at Eliza Rafferty. Look at her. She saw through the charade at last, knew her infant for damned. And so then, like a true heathen, she slaughtered him with no more ceremony than might be afforded a stray dog.”
“You supposed that the sudden news of twenty cut-apart corpses might be a way of purging the Irish from the city,” I supplied, wrenching us back to the purpose. “Mercy was the one who told you. Mercy informed you of the bodies we copper stars found, and so you wrote those letters to defame the Irish. You sent them to the papers. You sent me one, for God’s sake, to warn me what was coming. I’d thought it for Val, but it was always meant for me.”
“I thought you would take better precautions if I warned you, perhaps even keep one eye on my daughter. I hoped so. There was clearly a monster at loose, carving crosses in child whores, and how could I help but be frightened for her safety, given the filth she daily associated with? It was obvious what was happening. I only publicized the problem, told New York what it needed to know. What did the details matter? Did you ever get a hint at the culprit, Timothy? I can’t claim to have held any hope that you would, for this vile breed is devious. But I knew that some good could come of it, a purging, once the secret had been exposed for public view.”
“And so you tried to tell everyone. You supposed that there would be a riot. That the Nativists would drive the Irish out. Mercy knew what I knew, and so you did as well. Where is Mercy now?”
A martial drumbeat couldn’t have been more steady, the sunrise more predictable. Where is Mercy? I had dreamed about exposing the kinchin killer all that while, supposed that it would feel righteously grand when I caught the bastard. Instead it felt irrelevant. I’d have objected to such a cold reward if I hadn’t deserved every second of it for the night before.
“It was such a disappointment when you impeded their circulation,” he said distractedly. “I knew then that I had to do something much more drastic. But I never wanted to,” he added, looking thin as parchment and haunted all of a sudden. “As I told Peter, I—”
“You never signed your message to him. He has no notion it’s from you.”
“Hasn’t he? I couldn’t focus just then, knowing what was coming, I couldn’t begin to think clearly. I knew the act itself would be repulsive. But I had direction from God. There was a clear sign, and I obeyed it, and for that I cannot apologize.”
I thought pretty hard for a few seconds. Over what his clear sign might have been. But then my own stomach twisted away from me like a frightened cat. I knew just what he meant.
Mercy, alive if only in my memory, was talking in my ear… . Now I’ll never find another place to hide any store of coin, never … and my father’s opinion doesn’t bear speaking about. I’d supposed ever since the butcher paper that she’d suspected her father. The reason she’d rushed with her hair down to St. Patrick’s was that she’d feared her own father was a killer when he returned home in the middle of the night. Thomas Underhill’s mind had snapped so clean that he’d likely arrived half soaked in gore.
The part I hadn’t yet grasped was that she’d accidentally triggered the murder in the first place.
“First they kill my wife,” the reverend murmured. “She was so beautiful. You don’t recall her rightly, that would be impossible, but I remember. And then they contaminate my only daughter’s mind and spirit to the point that she turns into some sort of pornographer.” He breathed that last word in a gentle caress, as if trying to keep it from choking him. “She’s no better than a whore now—how could Mercy have written such filth otherwise, if she hadn’t known the touch of many men? Everything they encounter they turn to muck, can’t you see that? Even my daughter. I took the wages of her many sins, and I threw them into the street. It was gone in seconds, of course. Picked up by vagrants, other bawds, every sort of human street trash. And then I knew what I had to do. A man cannot shirk a task given him by God, and what charity can be offered to a race whose very children are so disposed to be whores?”
I closed my eyes, my pupils blank and burning. Picturing Mercy’s coins scattering in the street—the ones she’d worked for, counted upon. Seeing my own money as it had melted in July. I’m not greedy. I didn’t suppose Mercy ever was either. We were never stockbrokers, or landlords, or Party officials. But there isn’t any pity in New York. And so, lacking pity, we all need a lifeline.
I don’t know if you realize what you’ve done, but will you tell me please why for heaven’s sake you’ve done it?
“I can scarce picture it,” I said. “Finding Mercy out, and then taking what was hers. Going to the dockside bawdy house. You took a drunk little boy and you gave him enough laudanum not to care where he went.”
“Yes,” he exclaimed. “And even at that darkest hour, I was alert to signs and signifiers, Timothy. Had anyone stopped me … it would have been an omen. Can’t you see? No one else cared where he went either. Not even his keepers cared, no one cared, they are past help. I had to warn the city, had to publicize their wrongs before a single other person was infected. They took my beautiful child and they taught her to—”
“You stuffed him in a sack under … togs, I assume,” I kept on relentlessly, “cloth being lighter, and packed yourself some paint and some nails. After you’d endured Father Sheehy’s meeting, you simply slipped into an alcove, and there are plenty of them. I can’t stomach it, Reverend. Back luck for you Marcas wasn’t quite dead.”
“Yes, there was a great deal of blood for a dead boy,” he breathed, passing a hand over his eyes. “A very great deal of blood.”
“Did he wake up?” I demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“You do know,” I snarled. “Answer me.”
“I can’t think, he was very slight, and then the task itself went quick enough. I can hardly remember what passed just before I let myself out the front entrance, but perhaps—”
I lost my temper.
“You remember.” I’d closed the gap between us, and my pistol was at his brow. “Tel
l me.”
Even men who want to die shudder at cold metal pressed into their skin, and so did Reverend Underhill.
“He said nothing,” the madman answered in a liquid, rippling voice. “So he felt nothing, then. There was merely … there was just a very great deal of blood.”
“How could you have burned Mercy’s book?” I asked next.
Holding Father Sheehy’s gun to his skull I felt like a thug, no better than the men who’d shoved a turnip between Julius’s lips. But I was learning what Val had likely discovered a long while ago. When enough terrible things have happened, doing them stops being quite so uncomfortable.
“I burned Mercy’s book for Mercy,” he answered, surprised. “How could you know about that? She refused to speak of it with me afterward. It was wild—erotic in a shameless fashion, so lyrical and ripe as to be completely untamed. The sort of thing that could have done her reputation tremendous harm. She would have been a mother one day, she was meant to be, and how could she face her children as the author of luxurious trash?”
If I knew one thing for a certainty, despite all my blindly adoring illusions about Mercy, it’s that she’s incapable of producing trash. I’ve read Light and Shade in the Streets of New York, after all. Many upon many a time. Just picturing that lost book, the one she could have sold the way Frances Burney or Harriet Lee or a score of others had done, shut my throat like a bear trap.
“Mercy,” the reverend murmured. “I’d have given anything to have saved Mercy. She was a piece of Olivia. And now the only way to see her again is to die by my own hand. A fitting penance, for a part of the blame is mine—I ought never to have allowed her such freedoms. This is my fault. I begged her to repent of her folly before the end, I begged Olivia the same over fostering blasphemy, but they both refused, and I cannot face eternity without either one of them. Mercy has cost me my soul.”
Thomas Underhill looked like a child by that time. Just as lost as was possible, not seeing his own study, feet uncertain on his own carpet.
“Where is she?” I insisted.
“You’re here to bury us after all, aren’t you?”
I tried another tack.
“What did my brother say to you,” I questioned, “the day after we met, long ago? When he’d recovered from the drugs and came to speak with you alone, before you asked us to tea, what did he say?”
“I couldn’t possibly—”
“I very much need to know,” I pleaded.
The reverend’s anchorless eyes drifted to the wall. “He asked me if I thought that God could forgive any act, no matter how vile. You know why, naturally. And of course I said yes.”
My eyes fell shut as I blessed the world entire for that one tiny grace.
“And then,” Thomas Underhill continued, “he asked if human beings were capable of the same.”
“What did you tell him?” I whispered.
“I said to keep trying and find out.”
“Thank you,” I told him, as feelingly as I’ve ever said anything. “God, thank you. Where is Mercy?”
“She’s dead.”
I forced him back into the armchair with the pistol. Scaling the desk, I used my pocketknife to cut two lengths of hemp rope from the trailing end of the noose. I left the grim circle intact for meditation and quickly tied his wrists to the arms of the chair.
“I’m here to arrest you,” I said. “Did you take her to a doctor? To a church, a hospital? Tell me where she is now, and I’ll bury her. Wait any longer, and I’ll drag you to the Tombs first, then think your request over in a month or two.”
I’d never been any dab hand at lying, but this time my heart was in it.
“She’s upstairs in an ice bath,” he cried at once. “I tried, I tried. She was already slipping away from me when—”
Losing the rest of his sentence wasn’t deliberate, but I was halfway up the staircase by that time.
My eyes took in a blinding scope of familiar details as I raced up that flight. Dozens of useless facts about the Underhill staircase. And pure facts are pretty well respected, in my new profession. But they leave out the story. They’re just markers, blank tombstones. That’s what I’ve come to learn by way of being a copper star, and it wasn’t Bird Daly taught it to me either. It was Mercy sitting in Washington Square Park after she’d fought tooth and nail for a member of a long-despised race, just the way her mother used to do. Mercy said that words can be cartography, and this is what she meant:
There exists a 2.5 inch scratch in the pale brownish wallpaper in the Underhills’ staircase, just above the eighth step. Nothing about that is important. What’s important is that I was sitting there at the age of sixteen, silent and miserable even after a hearty dinner, because my brother hadn’t been home for two days. I supposed, as usual, he was dead. I supposed, as usual, he’d burned somehow. I supposed myself alone. So I pulled my pocketknife out, and I drove it right into the wall. And the next thing I can recall, Mercy had decided to place herself at the bottom of the stairs, stating that she must now read the poems of William Cullen Bryant aloud to her father. To her father, who was in his study with the door open twenty yards off. And not sitting on the eighth step.
Facts aren’t important on their own.
People are important. Their stories and their kindnesses. Stories happen to be, according to Mercy—and I understood her better by then—the only thing that’s important.
The facts went like this.
At the top of the stairs directly to the right is Mercy’s bedroom. I went inside. It’s done all in a cheerful, clean blue. But it might as well never have been painted for all the bookshelves, the hundreds of titles bound with string and rabbit glue tumbling onto the floor. Books with their spines broken from savage love, books with their jackets regularly dusted, books twice bought because the first volume shattered into ink flakes. The wardrobe stood open. Emptied, the dresses downstairs and not in a fit state to be spoken of.
Mercy had been in an ice bath only recently. That was a fact I’ll never erase. But she’d thrashed her way out of the rudely cut chunks of frigid water. She was on the planked wood floor now, despite the fact that her ankles were tied with the identical hemp rope I’d encountered downstairs. Also despite the fact that she’d been wrapped into a dressing gown with her arms stuffed inside the long sleeves and the empty wrists tied behind her like a straight-waistcoat.
Her lips were blue, and the upper one still fractionally shadowed the lower. Her face looked carved in bone by that time. I’d have been tempted to say that even her eye color was fading. But that wasn’t the case. It’s just that blue rings look one way against white, and another against dull red. And the whites of Mercy’s eyes were so very empurpled from exertion and exhaustion that they’d have been unrecognizable, maybe. To someone else.
Those were the facts.
The story, though, went like this.
Mercy Underhill was still breathing. I could see those breaths come one after another as I whirled around that chamber. Wherever I turned I could still see them, as I cast about for ways to get her dry. Ways to get her warm. It was a bit like watching a child who’d fallen. In the bad sort of fall where the kinchin flutters within itself, testing hurts. They were little breaths. About the depth of my thumb if I’d measured it against her breastbone.
I got all the rope off her, and the icy fabric. She went first into my frock coat and second into every single piece of Thomas Underhill’s clothing I could rob from his wardrobe. Getting her warm was paramount, beyond even fetching a doctor, and so I carried her downstairs to the kitchen and made a soft nest out of quilting before the iron stove.
If a fire was lit faster in the history of North America, I don’t know where or when.
Oddly, by the time I’d used enough of my breath to turn Mercy’s fingers the color of her piano keys and not her blue wallpaper, I’d gone a ways toward forgiving the Reverend Underhill. Only for that part of it, mind. Not for the dead kinchin, and not for the letters. B
ut I knew he loved Mercy. He loved Mercy like a man who had no other family left.
And I thought then that it would be the grimmest pit of hell to hurt the person you loved most simply because your mind was wrong. I’d hated putting Eliza Rafferty in a wet cage filled with the rats that had already haunted her. She’d no excuse, and I’d no alternative. And yet.
I’ve done mad things myself. Stupid things. Never quite that mad or quite that stupid, but after all it wasn’t for lack of trying.
When Mercy started to come back to herself, she looked around her as if I was the only shape she could recognize. I had her cradled against me with my back to the wall, waiting. As she awakened, eyes drifting to and fro again, lips growing just that shade less chalky, I pulled her slightly closer. It was mesmerizing.
“You were never sick, were you?” I questioned softly.
Mercy’s lips formed no.
“Are you cold now?”
She closed her eyes, shaking her dark head. Her hair and her temple hit my upper arm lightly. Seconds later she bit out, “He’s gone mad. He thought me diseased. I wasn’t. Timothy, I wasn’t. I’m not feverish just because—I’m not.”
“I know,” I whispered into her hair. “And I’m sorry, love. I’m so very, very sorry.”
It might have been wrong to let Mercy start sobbing without any attempt to settle her delicate state back into quiet. But I don’t suppose women very delicate in general, and I don’t suppose humans all that quiet. So apart from providing a warm structure to cry against, I let her alone. It was warming her. It was maybe the best thing she could have done. Medically speaking. But Mercy’s very clever, so that didn’t surprise me.
“Is my father all right?” she asked at length.
“I don’t think he is, actually.”
“Tim, I was the one who told him about the hidden bodies. It was my idea, I thought he may have heard something useful, this is—”
“Don’t say it,” I told her fiercely. “Don’t you dare apologize to me. It’s a number of people’s faults, but never yours.”
