The Gods of Gotham

by Lyndsay Faye

  But what could the copper stars do under the circumstances?

  My colleague saw to it that within five more hours he was buried, in a quiet place under the familiar apple trees, in the Pine Street churchyard. We learned later that the reverend’s earthly properties were fast tied up with his pastorate. And anyhow, he’d been a charitable man long before the end, serving the needs of poor Protestant families. After the burial, there was only the house owned by the parish, and its furnishings. None of it valuable as anything but aids to memory. His will left his extensive library to a nearby free school. And that was just exactly like him after all, I thought. It hadn’t seemed to have ever once occurred to Thomas Underhill that his daughter might need more than she had, when so very many had so much less.

  I didn’t plan on forgiving him for that either.

  After sleeping for a few scant hours, I waited at home all through the night for a knock on the door.

  When the hesitant rap came, I went outside and took a small woven bag from a beggar woman who’d lost the main balance of her teeth. I gave her a second coin for her trouble, though she told me she’d already been well paid not to look in that bag. And that if she did open the bag, the sender would know, and the pigs would eat her when she was left for dead in the streets. I asked where she’d come from, and she pointed to a grocer half a block away. A man on its porch watched us from under a straw hat brim, silent and cheerless.

  I didn’t acknowledge him, though. Thanking the tattered moll, I pocketed my delivery and set out on foot for Pine Street.

  But I never reached it. Passing rows of modest brick houses with their white-painted lintels brightening, the third time in a row I’d watched morning spread out buttery and thick over the city, I glimpsed Mercy walking the opposite direction. That is, toward me.

  Mercy wore a dove-grey dress that didn’t quite fit her. From the saleable charity pile at the church, I assumed, for it was very clean and neatly sewn. Its bell-shaped skirt hung a little loose around her waist, though, and its wide neck draped even more off one shoulder than her frocks normally do. She’d taken half the time with her hair as usual, and I could see from a distance her lips were lightly blistered and her hands bandaged in a few places.

  I thought, This is what Mercy looks like in a grey secondhand dress on the last day you will ever see her, as our steps met in the dead center of the western Pearl Street sidewalk.

  “Mr. Wilde,” she said.

  “Hello,” I said.

  It was a start.

  “My father is dead,” she murmured. “You were there, you—you know, I think.”

  “Yes.”

  “The policeman was kind, but he wouldn’t let me see. And he said murdered. But that wasn’t the way of it. I don’t believe him.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t be sorry. You helped. You didn’t want me to have to—for what really happened to be known.”

  She’d been crying, but not for long. The edges of her eyes were merely pink, still glistening a bit, and the angry red color from being forced into an ice bath was fading. The rest was very blue, her hair very thick and very dark. Mercy hadn’t asked me a single question yet, and suddenly I realized why. What had just happened to her, the dark, ugly realizations, the exposed secrets that burned when you touched them … They couldn’t be bettered by learning more. I wondered if Mercy would ever ask another question again in my hearing.

  “The buried kinchin were autopsies,” I told her quietly. “They weren’t desecrated at all, they were used by Dr. Palsgrave for science after they’d passed. It’s complicated, but a better outcome than we could have hoped for. I haven’t arrested him and I’m not going to. But I wanted you to know that everything’s … over with, now.”

  I said nothing of Marcas and the church door. That image was already tattooed on her corneas as she stared at me, saying nothing, as dazed and hurt as any creature I’d ever witnessed.

  “I’ve a gift for you.” I held out the little purse.

  Mercy touched her teeth to her lower lip. No questions, though.

  Who’d have thought that the very worst thing ever to happen to you would be Mercy losing question marks, I thought, then forced myself to stop thinking.

  “It’s three hundred dollars in cash. It comes from a … very appropriate donor, and one you never need feel debt toward. It isn’t mine or Val’s or anyone’s you might think, but it’s … it’s yours, and you’re going to London. Three hundred is enough to be getting on with, although … I’m sorry your togs were ruined, or can you wash kerosene out of clothes?”

  I stopped.

  When she tugged open the drawstring and saw the actual coin, Mercy’s mouth fell open entirely, like a ribbon bow being pulled.

  “I don’t see how this could be mine.”

  “Trust me,” I insisted. “I know I’m not entirely to be trusted in your eyes just now, but please trust me. I’m sorry about all of that. You’re getting away from this place. And if you find you need do nothing more in London and grow tired of it, or if you go elsewhere, to Paris or Lisbon or Boston or Rome, and then later want to see New York again … I’ll be here.”

  There were too many blisters on Mercy’s fingers. I wanted to wipe them smooth again. It was a relief, in a way, to know she wasn’t in love with me. I could carry on as before.

  Whatever is best for Mercy. Nothing much else need be considered.

  “Are—” Mercy stopped, struggling. “Are you staying in New York forever, then?”

  I breathed considerably easier after that. And what a question for her to want the answer to. It was enough.

  “I’ve a career now,” I confessed. “And a brother who belongs locked in a cranky-hutch. I think I might hate them both, but I think I’m the right man for both jobs.”

  Mercy’s eyelashes flicked. “I can’t. I can’t take this from you.”

  “Go to London,” I said, pushing it into her hands.

  “Timothy, why are you doing this?”

  “Because you’ll write a map.” I was already walking away from her.

  “But why do you want that of me?” she called softly.

  Giving me one more invaluable question.

  “I want that for a very good reason,” I answered, keeping my pace. “If you ever want me to understand something, any piece of you … well. If you’ve written a map, then I’ll know where to look.”

  By two weeks later, September had made itself better felt. The charcoal-sketched notions of trees in City Hall Park burst violently red and then faded back into line drawings. The air was fresher, for now. Down by the docks it smelled of tar and fish and sweat and smoke instead of constantly rotting animal remains. Everything was brighter for being so much more muted. And everyone alike indifferently happy for the three or four days September lasts before winter sets in.

  I wanted to kill my brother again by then, but I didn’t hate him yet, and I hoped I wouldn’t any longer.

  I found out where a light-fingered apprentice had cached his master’s best cutlery, which was the second crime I’d solved in as many weeks.

  It felt good.

  On a beautifully fresh Sunday morning, I opened my copy of the Herald at the kitchen table and read this passage:

  The office of the Irish Emigrant Society is at present located at No. 6 Ann Street, in a plain and unpretending building. Occasional scenes of an amusing kind occur in the office. Crowds of anxious expectants are seated there, looking out every minute for a chance, in comes an employer in search of a steady man, or decent girl, when buzz! fifty candidates for the piece of good fortune are on the alert, and on their legs in an instant.

  Failing to see the humor in the anecdote, I tossed that particular copy into the bread oven when I was through with it. Not that the press had failed to serve police interests, by any means. George Washington Matsell, in a stroke of genius I could never have anticipated, gave out to the newspapers that the kinchin called Marcas found so gruesomely slain
at St. Patrick’s was hushed by a pair of insane Nativist political radicals, with wicked English ties and a history of outrageous violence in the name of vile European anarchy. They went by the names of Scales and Moses Dainty, and had both been killed in the Five Points riot the same day they enacted their heinous, utterly anti-American assassination. One reporter had the nerve to ask whether they’d been copper stars. Matsell said no. When I checked the records myself, Matsell turned out to be right, too, which only goes to prove the chief is thorough as well as clever, and knows when it’s beneficial for the reputation of the police force to erase particular names from Ward Eight’s roster. Plenty of people knew different, of course, and a few knew still better than that. But regular New Yorkers can’t be bothered to dwell on the same crime for more than a fortnight. Things returned to normal: brutal, greedy, frenzied, and secretive, but with less talk of mad Irish kinchin killers.

  Mrs. Boehm and I reached a decision. And so, to tell her about it, I invited Bird Daly on a trip to Battery Park.

  After a few hours and several small meals, the sun was sinking low and we’d grown tired of wandering. The grass there is much better kept than anywhere else on the island, though, and being close to the sea was still pleasant rather than unspeakably cold. So when we felt like stopping, we sat under a spreading oak near to where I’d been buried in a stack of Bibles when Valentine found me. I didn’t mind so much thinking of it any longer.

  The time seemed ripe, so I set to. I told Bird that she was going to live at a home founded by Father Sheehy and go to school. An Irish Catholic school. Mrs. Boehm and I not being very learned, and learning being absolutely necessary.

  It didn’t go quite so well as I’d expected.

  That is, I’d expected it to go badly in the first place. But I’ll skip the next few minutes of Bird’s ranting at me, and proposing herself for various jobs if we couldn’t afford her, and her using language she shouldn’t have picked up yet. It doesn’t show her in her best light, and I don’t like to think it ever really crossed her mind that we might be tired of her company. Bird Daly is plenty warm company, and I convinced her of it eventually. So she sat there, all angry eyebrows and outraged freckles, staring at the throngs of people.

  “I think I can’t manage it,” she said finally. “I think I’ll miss you, and Mrs. Boehm, and not … not manage it.”

  “Here’s what I think about it. Shall I tell you?”

  Bird nodded, grey eyes shimmering like silver coins at the bottom of a deep fountain.

  “I think that you won’t have to miss me, because I’ll see you when you like. Maybe sometimes when you wouldn’t like, because I’ll drop in unannounced and you’ll have to leave off learning sums, or playing at hopscotch. And soon enough you’ll never want to leave the place, to go off and be a grown young lady, because there will be so many other kinchin who you’ll miss when the time comes.”

  Bird’s throat seemed to be working at something pebbleish.

  “Will there be other … will there be kids like me there?”

  Working out exactly what she meant took me two seconds. When I did, I looked very hard at a passing carriage, shamming as if I knew the society lady being dragged about by horses with improbable feathers on their heads. So that Bird wouldn’t see what my face was really going on about.

  “Kinchin-mabs?” I said clearly. “A great many. You mean, apart from the ones I sent there myself? Neill and Sophia and all the rest?”

  My little friend nodded. Resigned, if not content.

  And so we watched the people passing us by, knowing things about them. The both of us. Knowing things by the dirt on their sleeves and the hard look in their pistol-sight eyes. Knowing things because we were safer, and richer, for knowing them before they did. And happy in the notion that we were reading the same letter of the same sentence on each and every human page.

  We never said a word.

  After leaving Bird with a score of her former friends and her future friends the next day, I went back home. Bird wasn’t there any longer, and that went hard. But Mrs. Boehm smiled at me with her wide lips as I passed her on the staircase. And I smiled at her, and it was something.

  I still hadn’t any furniture to speak of. But I hadn’t needed it until then, and maybe I would think about it now. Matsell had secretly raised my salary to fourteen dollars a week. Picking up the magazine that had long been resting on the boards just inside my door, waiting until I was ready to touch it, I sat under my window and read the last installment of Light and Shade in the Streets of New York.

  The scullery maid who had been seduced by the aristocrat died in childbirth. But the baby was delivered to the earl, who wept with remorse for his coldness, and he took the infant girl in his arms. The tale was lush with imagery, keenly insightful despite the popular cliché of its premise. Like the rest of the series, it was about passionate people creating tragedies because they didn’t know how to do otherwise.

  I lay back on the straw tick and fell asleep at midday. As deeply as I ever have.

  I dreamed that Mercy went to London and met a rich earl and married him. But soon enough, the vision shifted. She had idle hours and paper aplenty.

  Suddenly, I was reading her book:

  I careen through chapters at a furious rate. The writing itself is now sidelong, much more like Mercy’s manner of speaking than her tales. Hinting at great loves and losses, but never any direct story. By the end she’s Patience on a monument, watching the people of New York pound like the breaking Atlantic surf all around her.

  I look for myself in words that sound like me. In the spaces between period and capitalized letter.

  Naturally I do. The dream is mine.

  And so I search for a man, strongly built but short in stature. A twist to his lips at once bitter and thoughtful, blond hair that sweeps in a deep peak down his brow. I pore over her society parties—tables covered in oyster shells, the smell of fried beets in the heavy air, a black fiddler playing outside her window. Searching for a pair of green eyes that have seen too much, and that love her.

  But she hides me away, of course. She imprisons me in metaphors, fragments me into secondary characters. Saloon keepers and servants. I follow the ink trail she’s left, yes, but I recall at the same time how she used to look at me, the corners of her lashes forever snatching at glimpses of something else.

  I can never quite fathom what she wanted of me. Not even in the dream. Only what she turned me into.

  Having woken up sweating, I threw open the window.

  The air was cool enough, with autumn marching toward us so steadily. But the dust still blanketed Manhattan’s fields and churches in a sheet of sunny brilliance. Too keen to view directly. I shut my eyes.

  And because I love her past all reason, as I found myself losing the words she’d written in the vision, I struggled to memorize them.

  He had all manner of pet names for me. To the degree that when the gentleman at long last uttered my right name aloud, it seemed the only true expression of myself, as if all men heretofore had mispronounced or forgotten it.

  An empty exercise. A mad one. She was never talking about me.

  THE GODS OF GOTHAM: HISTORICAL AFTERWORD

  The history of New York’s Five Points is rife with legend, speculation, and controversy, but I have done my best to present its conditions accurately. In 1849, the Herald ran a sensational story about an infant who had been discovered “in the sink of the dwelling house No. 6 Doyer Street. From the appearance of the child when found, it was evident that foul means had been used, as, around the neck of the little innocent, a cord had been tied tight, causing strangulation.” Despite the severe poverty of Ward Six, murder was far from common, and the residents who found the body were shocked, calling at once for the police. When the copper stars arrived, they were directed to the mother’s chamber by neighbors. Eliza Rafferty was “sitting very composedly in a chair in her room, making a dress, that being her profession.” The coroner determined that th
e infant had been murdered, despite Rafferty’s insistence that the baby was already dead before being placed in the sink. What exact circumstances drove her to infanticide remain unknown, but many Five Pointers lived hand-to-mouth in such desperate and miserable circumstances that survival was a daily exercise in will.

  New York’s formation of a police force lagged behind that of other large metropolitan centers like Paris, London, Philadelphia, Boston, and even Richmond, Virginia. There were many reasons for this delay, but not least the fact that New Yorkers have never much liked being regulated, and the revolutionary spirit of autonomy and independence was still running strong in the antebellum period. It is much in evidence today, as a matter of fact. But in 1845, following a period of increasing crime and civic unrest, it was finally decided that the streets could not go unattended any longer, and the now legendary NYPD was formed despite vocal opposition and political controversy. In the same year, a recently arrived blight called Phytophthora infestans spread widely across Ireland and the Great Famine began, leading to the death or relocation of millions of Irish and prompting a social upheaval that still shapes New York City today.

  New Yorkers have always been avid theatergoers, but none more so than the news hawkers and the bootblacks of the Five Points. The playhouse founded by the newsboys was in fact on Baxter Street, and they were responsible for everything from the stage properties to the musical underscoring, mounting full productions of such scripts as The Thrilling Spectacle of the March of the Mulligan Guards. The house seated fifty, and once played host to the Russian grand duke Alexis when he toured the notorious slum, after which the boys proudly renamed their theater company The Grand Duke’s Opera House.