by Lyndsay Faye
She smiled at me pityingly. “George wants a figment of his imagination—a fine lady to preside over his realm and pour tea for guests who talk of tariffs and play sophisticated card games and drink French wine.”
“He doesn’t,” I protested. “He wants you.”
“Well, then. He’ll have to track me, won’t he?”
By this time, her small hand had lit upon my breastbone and she was forcing me out the way I’d come. There was a hard object in it, and when I reached up, curious, she slapped it into my palm. Valentine’s house key. I’d forgotten about it entirely. It seemed a relic from a past age.
“If he wants me so badly, he’ll follow after like a good American hound dog,” she continued as she ushered me out. “That’s a point in favor for dogs—the sincerity. If they snap after a piece of meat, you know well enough that they mean it.”
• • •
I realized when I awoke next morning that it was the last full day that Delia and Jonas would spend in New York. That oughtn’t to have felt disheartening. But seeing as I’d still not managed to inform them who murdered their kin, it did feel wrong.
Then I recalled that I’d a Democratic political function to attend that evening, which felt perverse.
Sitting up with a groan, I kicked away my quilt and set about washing and grooming and generally loathing the particular character of February 28, 1846. I continued absently hating my life throughout shaving, and dressing—in the best togs I had, which weren’t good at all—and marching down the stairs to scare up bread and coffee. But when I reached the bakery, I replaced quiet distaste with curiosity.
Mrs. Boehm sat with a steaming mug of tea before her, staring in befuddlement at a letter, my morning copy of the Herald, and a package wrapped in brown paper. When Mrs. Boehm is befuddled, she scowls at objects as though they’ve insulted her mother’s honor. She looks like a pale, thin, kindly woman about to slap a blackguard in the face with a leather glove. It’s remarkably endearing.
“What’s this?”
“Three things. For you, Mr. Wilde.”
“Why are you glaring daggers at them? Are we at war with Mexico or with Britain?”
“Who can say anymore. Both, neither. I do not understand,” she explained in her always hoarse, lightly accented voice, “how it comes to be that letters from over the ocean should arrive without any postage.”
I dove for it. Mind awhirl with calculations.
It takes more than two weeks to receive a missive from London, which meant that Mercy had fired this one off before ever seeing mine. That was … a thought to be filed away for later. Of tremendous importance. Meanwhile, while this one was enclosed in an envelope and addressed to me in her fantastical scrawl, my landlady was perfectly right; it hadn’t any postage. That was twice, now, that correspondence from the only girl who’d ever made me want to spend the remainder of my days memorizing the whorls on the tips of her fingers had arrived by magic.
“Are we losing our minds?” I asked.
Mrs. Boehm shrugged, jutting her pleasantly square chin at the letter. “Read it. I will bring the tea now. I am thinking you will need the tea.”
That was inarguable, so I thanked her and tore the missive open. It was near as long as the first, and every bit as illegible.
Dear Timothy,
I had convinced myself that it would be better to await your response and thus know as many of your thoughts as you wish to tell me—what color they are, I suppose, whether black or red or a pale, peaceful blue. Whether you wish to describe them to me. Whether you wish me to pen notes to you at all. And I still agree with myself—waiting would be better. But I found myself dwelling over my own recently mailed correspondence, you see, because I made a point of not forcing myself to pick it over like poor needlework, and now I worry so. Over what I said, or failed to, and how receipt of my tale may have affected you. I am not so stupid—you have said it yourself, the last thing I am in the midst of a teeming jungle of faults is stupid—that I can pretend a letter from me would affect you not at all.
It is all the more maddening to fret over your possible responses because I’d used to know how you fared more or less daily, and what’s more, I’d been able to predict you fairly well even when you weren’t in sight. Now the thought of having very likely sent you a dim and cobwebby sketch of my little life here, and not seeing at once your brows folding in on each other, and at once distracting you, feels a bit like holding a hand to a heating kettle—bearable at first, but then. Oh, then. And all the more so because when I read my own words lately, I’ve not the foggiest idea who wrote them. Anyone could have written you that letter. I only hope she treated you well.
I am near certain I forgot to say thank you. Thank you. I’d not be here if it weren’t for you, in so very many senses, and of course you’d no wish for me to depart at all. To say that you’ve been kind to me would be to put very small words to something enormous like the curve of the horizon, so I shan’t. But thank you.
If I was very morbid before, do your best not to pay me any undue attention. One day I’ll stop seeing mortality stamped like the mark of Cain on every passing stranger, and one day the ticking tocking ticking of my own survival will be less loud, I pray. My heartbeat is quite grotesque at the moment, but I will try to muffle it. I promise. I will write more words. Sensible ones. I will draw better maps of my mind. I will try harder. I will drown the ticking in a sea of ink, and yesterday I saved a young boy from a terrible case of pneumonia, and what else can I expect to be given? Aside from good work and blank paper? I’ve reached the conclusion that the balance of my charitable deeds in New York had more to do with being absent from Papa’s presence—his house, his air, his eyes, his everything—than to do with being present for the needy. But there are worse escape routes, are there not? Death ought to mean something, as lives do. Mine will. No matter how loud the ticking.
You deserve my apology, as well. I never felt half so beautiful or mysterious in any other company by comparison to yours. But I supposed you chased the irresistible unknown—that because you had never exchanged hope for action, you therefore remained intrigued. I might have shattered it, gone in like a barbarian army and razed the temple. I never did. To be honest, I believed you’d lose regard on the instant you achieved mine, so preoccupied were you. If I’d been at all brave or selfless, I’d have smashed my statue and pedestal, crushed that Mercy to a faceless powder and replaced her with this one. Please forgive me for polishing her and setting her ever in the best light—she was an illusion, but she made my life more bearable at times, though at other times she infuriated me. And please rip her down. Supposing you haven’t yet. She was terribly uncomfortable, so petrified and dry and liable to crack.
Words come hard today. Every day, now. I hope you know what I mean. I never wanted you to see the grime in the sill if you opened the window. But now I’m not myself any longer, maybe you’ll come to know someone new, and like her enough to write her in London? She still resembles me, after all. If not, you’ve already done far more for me than you know.
If you cannot be well and be close to me at once, tell me to stop. I do remember nonsense about letters in bottles and correspondence burnt unopened, and I am braver than that, though only just.
Sincerely,
Mercy Underhill
How long I stared at that letter, I’ve no idea. How many pulses of the extremely inconvenient organ in my chest lanced against my rib cage, I’ve no notion either. I think it was quite a spell. Then I read it again, and I realized something that tore a messy hole right through me.
Mercy wasn’t merely despondent. For all the passion her words had always owned, the bright chaos and the rage and the teeth beneath the smile, they’d been orderly. Sensible. And they were like her children—she could quote verbatim sonnets she’d written when twelve years old. The thought of her staring at her writing without recognition was akin to God mistaking man for a serpent. Barring the possibility that she’d been merely exhau
sted on both occasions she’d written …
Mercy was unwell.
Mechanically, I reached for the tea. Tea wasn’t going to help. But I felt as if a butcher were scraping the meat from my bones.
“Not good news,” Mrs. Boehm said quietly.
“Not all of it,” I agreed, voice strained.
“What is inside of this package? It’s from your brother.”
“I probably don’t want it, then.”
“No? I like him, your brother.”
“Absolutely everyone else does. I do occasionally. Open it if you like.”
She did, with enthusiasm better befitting Christmas morning as experienced by a six-year-old than a package from my inexcusable sibling. When she’d pulled away all the string and paper, her broad brow cleared, and her face lit up in delight.
“Krásný,” she exclaimed. It was a Bohemian day and not a German one in her head, apparently.
Despite my sincerest effort not to, I leaned forward.
She touched a set of used clothing. Used, but not factory slops—the fabric and stitchwork were sumptuous. I could simply tell, from a frayed buttonhole there or a crease here, that it had been worn previous. There was a white shirt, pale and soft as goose down. A double vest of sapphire velvet. A trimly fitted set of buff trousers. A silken scarlet cravat. Finally, a frock coat of dove grey, with some of the longest and most sweepingly cut tails I have ever seen.
It was all smallish. As if cut for a lean man, and not a very tall one.
Mrs. Boehm, eyes sparkling, passed me the accompanying note.
Embarrass me at a Party function, and I will alter where your nose is oriented on your face.
It was about then that my head hit the table. I shook it, rolling my ruined brow to and fro against the wood. That felt nice. Comforting.
“What are you thinking?” Mrs. Boehm asked worriedly.
“I was wondering when the moment would come that my life is ruined entirely. More so than my life is already ruined, I mean.”
“And?”
“It’s here,” I sighed. “I can stop waiting. It has arrived.”
twenty-two
The chastity of my daughter cannot be protected as an American citizen, because African blood courses her veins, consequently she has “no rights that a white man need respect.” She has no virtue that a white man need regard. She has not honour that a white man need admire. No noble qualities he need appreciate.
—WILLIAM M. MITCHELL, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, 1860
I donned the togs, and I went to the Democratic fete.
It proved considerably more eventful than I had anticipated.
The festivities were held at Castle Garden, which is at the southernmost tip of the island. I’m particularly fond of the shoreline—of the Battery, where you can feel the wind as if you were midriver, and of the small pleasure grounds surrounding Castle Garden where you can see the wide, wide bay for what it is. The castle used to be a fortress, a redbrick circle of civic defense built on a manmade island with a lengthy bridge promenade spanning the waves. I’ve been there dozens of times.
That didn’t spare me any shock when I arrived that evening, in a chattering, clattering mass of other guests.
They’d carpeted the entire bridge span in scarlet. A bespectacled gent in a fur coat jostled my elbow when I froze in disbelief. Castle Garden is gaslit and every lamp was blazing, kindling smaller blazes in the countless gemstones—some diamond, some paste—arrayed in the hair of the ladies who passed me, all leaning on the arms of ponderous men with side-whiskers and gold monocles. I crossed over the water, breathing the rich brine of the bay mingled with the fresh spruce boughs adorning the lampposts. Many attendees were obviously Fifth Avenue aristocrats—landowners and trade barons and such. Others, though, were Bowery types—bruisers with greased curls escorting laughing molls in watered silk skirts, keen for liquor, dancing, and then after-hours copulation in the private rooms of the downtown coffeehouses.
It didn’t get any better when I went inside.
They roofed over the circular space within the fort’s walls when they transformed it into a pleasure garden. But I’d never seen it so thickly slathered with gilt and bunting. Areas had been roped off for dancing, already being put to merry use. Another space boasted dozens of silver oyster platters, festooned with curling ribbons of lemon and coldly glittering ice, and a team of colored oystermen in livery were cracking shells as if their lives depended on it. Meanwhile, trays of boiled tongue in aspic and hot corn fritters swept continually past my head, as did waiters bearing enough champagne to put out last summer’s fire.
I’d known, in the abstract, that the Party had money. Of course I had. I just hadn’t been aware that the Party was made of money.
I took two champagne glasses and drained them, then took another. The waiter, bless him, didn’t so much as flicker an eyelash. It greatly endeared me to the man.
The opera stage featured a cake my head wouldn’t have measured up to if I’d been standing on the dais. In front of this monstrosity stood a politico of no little personal charm and a frankly alarming physical presence, with poison-green eyes and a sinister curl to his lip. Valentine was declaiming thanks, congratulations, patriotism, and continued donations to a group of smiling Party officials and their wives. He wore an azure jacket, and when I peered more closely, I was given to understand that his waistcoat was populated by embroidered hummingbirds.
Clearly not the direction in which to go.
I was en route to a dimmer part of the amphitheatre, equipped with couches and coffee and cigar smoke and a piano being very aptly played, when I was recognized.
“Still with us, I see, Wilde.”
If you’ve never viewed an elephant outfitted for a ball, it would be difficult to grasp the effect a formal grey swallow-tailed coat has on Chief George Washington Matsell. He held a whiskey glass, swirling the liquor in the crystal tumbler. Eyeing me. I grow uncomfortable when Matsell is eyeing me. Everyone does.
“I’m sorry for all the trouble,” I offered. “I’d apologize about my office, but that wasn’t my doing.”
“No, I can’t really see you inscribing your own lynching on your wall. Anyhow, you can spell miscegenation.”
I relaxed a fraction. “Maybe when this has blown over … I could …”
Chief Matsell took a sip of spirits, boring termite holes in me with his eyes. “Get back to police work at the Tombs?”
My neck commenced burning. But I nodded.
“Supposing you don’t do something characteristically rash or brainless anytime soon, I don’t see why not.” Matsell took on the distant expression he gets when he’s weighing whether you’re worth smiling at. “Ceaselessly streaming vexations build my character. You’re quite keen at that. Anyhow,” he added, gesturing lightly at first my attire and then the room at large, “this counts. The effort to be reasonable.”
“It doesn’t come naturally.”
“Oh, I’m well aware. The Millingtons just donated eight hundred dollars to the Party. They mentioned you by name, most appreciatively.” He slapped me on the shoulder in farewell. “This is the system, Mr. Wilde. Come to like it, or it will cease liking you.”
Biting my lip, I blinked in frustration. I’d never held any respect whatsoever for politics, but considering the Adams affair, now I was about as likely to grow fond of the Party as I was of bedbugs.
That was the moment I spied Rutherford Gates.
He stood in profile to me, twenty or so yards distant, in a herd of flounced skirts, looking dapper as usual and with his thumbs tucked into his braces. But Gates appeared … diminished. The eager boyishness of his gestures had faded, and a brittle layer of tension, like a glaze, covered his once-animated face. Aching to know the true reason, love thwarted or guilt discovered or any shade in between, I reached for a fresh glass just as Silkie Marsh swept up to the state senator.
Madam Marsh again wore black satin, elaborately beaded on this occasion, with a
train and a low neck that showed the full swell of her porcelain skin. She wore black because she’d known no one else would, presumably, and the effect made her look a priceless piece of statuary in a yard full of bedraggled peacocks. She spent a brief time greeting Gates, her exquisite features alive with warmth, concern, and affection beneath the corona of her flaxen hair.
Then she spied me, and a guillotine blade flashed through her eyes while the smile remained fixed.
I tilted my champagne flute in her direction. A challenge, not a greeting. Her smile never faltered, but the hand resting on Gates’s forearm twitched. It was pretty satisfying.
She excused herself from Gates, who still failed to notice me. Moments later, Silkie Marsh had procured a pair of fresh drinks and was sweeping in my direction, striking hazel eyes aglow.
“Mr. Wilde. What a shock. To see you looking so well, and in honor of the Party—I can’t help but think we’ll be friends at last one day.”
Taking the drink, I let that monstrous notion die unheralded.
“And how goes your investigation?” she added sweetly. “So touching, the way you’ve grown attached to this family. So very personally involved.”
That merited a sharp look. “And aren’t you personally involved, Madam Marsh?”
Laughter looks very fine within the complex hollows of a white throat, and thus Silkie Marsh angles her head away when she succumbs to mirth in front of a man. When she’d got her breath back, she leaned close, murmuring in my ear. “I’ve been involved personally in only the most trivial fashion. But I’ve enjoyed myself quite disproportionately. And Rutherford Gates is a great friend of mine, so I will admit to being deeply invested in his well-being and the success of his upcoming campaign. He is a wonderful man, when you come to know him, and has done much for our fair state. I hate to see him suffer. I’ve been doing all that I can to keep up his spirits in the midst of this inexplicable tragedy.”
Her breath alive in my ear, I thought of her visit to Val’s rooms that night. About reasons for murder and the flavor of lies. Nothing fit. Nothing. Aside from Delia and Jonas’s departure for Canada the next morning, I’d failed in every way possible.
