by Lyndsay Faye
“Where did you come by the press?”
This question likewise kittled her. “It was my dad’s. I learned typesetting before I learned needlepoint. Never did learn needlepoint, come to that. Mum was more of a gardener than a seamstress. I lost them to smallpox five years back.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“So am I. All I have left of them is this press. I grew up on Stone Street, in a printing shop with our rooms above—seems old-fashioned now, with all the giant houses and the outwork printers. These days you have to be either enormous or particular. God, I haven’t thought about Stone Street in months. Not that anything that was there is still standing.”
“I used to live in Stone Street,” I said, surprised at the coincidence. “Before . . .” I gestured to the rippling burn scar she couldn’t have missed. Not being dead blind.
“Oh. I’d never have asked, but . . . Well, sod that fire anyhow, we’re still standing.” She leaned forward for another toast. “To your good looks.”
As I raised my glass again, I thought, This is bad.
This is very bad, and about to get worse. It doesn’t matter that you like her—you have to accuse her of threatening to set the city aflame.
I wasn’t attracted to her, had nil desire to reveal the flesh under the shocking trousers. And something about her even then, if I’m honest, scratched a pinprick of alarm in my sternum. But she reminded me of my former stargazer friend Bird Daly, the way she speaks her mind because she doesn’t know how to stop, because the latch guarding her lips was long ago broken irreparably, and I felt a similarly protective urge arising.
“Before you were a printer, what did you do?”
“Are these really the questions you’re meant to be asking me?” She smoothed her hand over the arresting white streak in her chestnut haystack of hair, a worried gesture. “If not the togs, it’s the press, isn’t it? I break obscenity laws two or three times a week. You’re fining me?”
“No.” I spread my hands. “I grew up here too, on the streets sometimes, and I’m not often ketched by things that aren’t worth being ketched about. As for your press, I’m a copper star who loathes Tammany and is a rampant abolitionist.”
“An abolitionist?” Sally Woods chuckled, wriggling in her seat. “I love those. Though more than half of them are as useless on the topic of women’s rights as any old Whig. As I said, I grew up learning my dad’s trade, and when I turned eighteen, after I’d begged hard enough, he and Mum sent me to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.”
“Really?” I quirked a brow at her. “That’s dead flash, Miss Woods. What was it like?”
Mount Holyoke was opened eleven years ago. By a woman, no less, not a man with the temerity to suggest that females would not become emotionally unbalanced upon learning Latin, that they could possibly even manage astronomy without developing hysteria, and that a smattering of Homer would fail to explode their crystalline minds. Its detractors—which includes nearly everyone, male and female alike—protest that since women can’t be doctors or merchants or statesmen or lawyers or businessmen, otherwise perfectly contented future wives are being rendered unfit helpmeets, sullied with the heavy drag of superfluous information. By this they mean information apart from how best to ensure the cook buys the freshest, cheapest produce and whether baby vomit can be scrubbed out of satin. Its five or six apologists protest that educated women will produce wiser, more upstanding kinchin, thus raising keen and strapping boys and thereby finer senators. It’s true enough that apart from manual labor like straw-hat making or bookbinding or manufactory drudgery, women can’t work. And therein lies the crux of the argument that one may as well teach a duck to speak Spanish as teach a woman geology at Mount Holyoke.
I can picture Mercy Underhill there easy as I can close my eyes and see her face.
“It was grand.” Sally Woods’s eyes took on a dreamy watercolor cast. “We couldn’t afford it, but Dad said he figured I’d as much right to education as anyone, since I’d been doing print work starting at four years old. Neighbors thought he was cracked, of course—what possible use could a hen make of algebra? I was meant to tell them I’d find a husband who’d be proud of what I’d learnt, but when I didn’t bother, they gave up on my prospects altogether, and that was bully by me. Sorry. What’s Holyoke like, you asked? It’s red brick, crawling with ivy, a chapel with a real rose window, a library with a ceiling so vaulted you’d suspect you were in church. I studied natural history there, architecture, physics.”
“I’m jealous,” I confessed with a rueful twist to my lips.
“You sound sharp enough.”
“I read whenever I’ve time, that’s all. Nothing to boast over.”
“I was boasting, wasn’t I? I’m sorry, pax.”
“No, no, it’s a remarkable achievement.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to bounce about it.”
“You must have learned flash patter in the manufactory,” I inferred aloud without thinking. “It sounds oddly well on you.”
Her face instantly hardened into a frozen granite stare.
Oh, excellently played, my brother’s voice drawled in my head. You, my Tim, are an intellectual lamppost.
“How in hell do you know I did manufactory work?” she snarled.
“Your former job is relevant to the questions I need to ask you,” I admitted.
“Are the girls all right?” she demanded, voice shaking.
I was confused by the question. Then I remembered the sort of building in which I’d last encountered Alderman Symmes, her former employer. And began to suspect that something may have happened—something very old and impossibly twisted, like the root of an evil tree.
“I’m afraid I don’t know. But I will go direct to the manufactory after we’re through to ask them personally. And if they aren’t all right, I will arrest the bastard who led them to that state. Is that a deal?”
Sally Woods finished her whiskey in a bolt and topped up our glasses, her comely face grey with disgust. “If you mean it, it’s a deal.”
“I mean it comprehensively. Who should I ask after?”
“Ellie Abell.” Miss Woods recrossed her legs, slumping dully back in her secondhand armchair. “She’d not string you, you can trust what she says. And everyone adores her, talks to her, so she’ll know if the others are well.” Another expression flitted across her features—just as repulsed but much harder to read.
“I’ll visit her as soon as I’ve asked you a few questions.”
“The relevant ones now?”
“Yes. What is your relation to your former employer, Robert Symmes?”
Her face went as pale as the streak in her hair. It was a look of mingled loathing and fear so rarefied that it could have cured hide. Not just a disquieting expression—a dangerous one. And my heart started up its usual inconvenient habit of trying to exit my chest cavity for fairer climes as I remembered the wording of the threatening note. Most of its content could have sprung from any half-cracked socialist revolutionary. I’d seen the like in Working Man’s Advocate—calling for the roads to run red with the blood of tyrants, et cetera. But one phrase, amid so much that was predictably impotent and enraged, stood out to me now.
We will not be cowed by those who think us less than human.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She wasn’t. That much was obvious.
I sat back, trying to make myself even smaller than I already am. I’ve terrified copious people due to the disreputable star pinned to my coat, but this was different. Something infected lurked in her marrow. Waiting. Poisoning her—poisoning others, I suddenly feared, should the venom escape her slender frame.
“Can I help?” I attempted when she made no answer. “I’ll fetch water if you tell me where it is. Would you like—”
“I would like,” she hissed, “to see Robert Symmes tor
tured, drawn, quartered, and his head stuck on a pike in the middle of City Hall Park. Can you arrange that for me?”
“While not in my job description, Miss Woods, speaking from personal experience of the man, that seems a pretty worthy goal.”
She relaxed fractionally, her face losing its death-mask pallor.
“All right.” Her dark eyes glimmered like stones in a deep pool. “You want to know my relationship to Robert Symmes? Robert Symmes is a man who pays his girls too little and treats his emigrant outworkers like pests. He’s rich as Astor but doesn’t use any of his chink to improve the city. He’s convinced that he is the greatest politician since Jefferson, but he’s mistaken about that. And he is, in addition to all this, the cruelest human being you could possibly imagine.”
Carefully, I studied her. Her engaging snub nose and teak-colored eyes and active mouth. Wanting to ask a hard question. Because if what I suspected had happened was the truth, she deserved mountains more from the star police than a gaping houseguest who depleted her whiskey supplies.
Not that there was any guarantee I could deliver it to her. On the contrary.
“Is there anything you want to tell me? Anything. At all.”
Shaking her head bitterly, she pulled herself up. “It’s personal, and can’t be helped anyhow. But you don’t strike me the way copper stars generally do, and you should know it.”
“Granted, I’m considerably smaller.”
This earned me a dry chuckle followed by a sigh.
“Can you tell me why Symmes sacked you?”
She stared at my wide hat on the table. “No, I cannot do that. I’ve been told if I speak of it . . . Well, it doesn’t matter. Now, what is this all about?”
Pausing, I read the note again in my mind. I tried to imagine Miss Woods lobbing a brick through a window to unsettle a vile man. I succeeded. She’d the will and the arm to play with the alderman’s mind, though he seemed with a rat’s cunning to have put his finger on the culprit almost at once.
Then I tried to picture this uncannily dressed, gorgeously present woman actually setting fire to a building full of innocent outworkers.
Despite the wholesale malignancy of her expression seconds previous, I failed.
Not a single brushstroke of that image could I picture. And yet a small pull like the tug of a thread wrapped around my finger reminded me that something about her was unnerving. Even downright frightening. Whether the togs or the naked stare or something more noisome below the rest, however, I couldn’t be certain.
“You threatened Symmes, didn’t you?”
“Of course not.”
Angling an eye at her, I waited. It’s generally not a long preamble before people start showering me with every acid secret they can think of and then searching their minds for more. It’s exceedingly useful. No matter that the tales leave burns in my flesh.
“I did not threaten Alderman Robert Symmes,” she grated out. But I knew better.
“Supposing I already savvied that you did?”
Sally Woods’s hands began to shake. I didn’t care for that, so I pressed on.
“I’m not threatening you. I’m asking you.”
“Yes,” she growled at last. “He told you, didn’t he? That filthy man actually set the star police on me. I’d cause, you have to know that. I’d—” Her voice broke. “I’d such cause, and now you’re going to carry me off to the Tombs and—”
“I don’t think you’d much like the atmosphere, though I could arrange a tour.” Rising, I returned my hat to my head. “I need you to stop toying with his mind from now on. This kind of threat . . . it’s a serious matter.”
Miss Woods stared at me, dumbstruck. Then she levered to her feet and stuck out her hand. I shook it, finding her grip every bit as firm as mine. I liked that, though. I liked her, considerably. Even though something about her prickled the nape of my neck.
“Where am I bound?”
“Nassau Street and Cedar. It’s called the New American Textile Manufactory. Symmes owns at least four others I know of. Maybe more. But that’s where I worked.”
“I’m on my way there, then. Thank you for the whiskey.”
“Come back if you like, Mr. Wilde.” She followed me to her door. “We’ll have a drink and talk abolition and dirty politics. I mean it. You’re welcome here.”
“I’d love to,” I assured her, meaning it just as heartily.
I would be returning, of course, all too soon. Just not for any so charming a reason. Meanwhile, I pointed my boots south in the direction of the Second Ward, the affectionate April sun giving me no indication whatsoever that I was on a direct collision course with a hurricane.
6
The first event engraved on my memory was the birth of a sister when I was four years old. . . . I heard so many friends remark, “What a pity it is she’s a girl!” that I felt a kind of compassion for the little baby.
—ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, ORGANIZER OF THE 1848 SENECA FALLS CONVENTION
THE STROLL FROM THOMAS STREET down to Nassau wasn’t taxing, so I walked there. Soon enough nearing what we’d used to call the Burnt District. And the teeming hive of manufacturing there, as if an industrious honeycomb had been cannonaded and splattered its sweet commerce throughout the once-charred First Ward.
If I could choose between a fire that destroyed our family and a fire that destroyed a patch of my skin . . . there isn’t any question which I’d erase from the record. But the Fire of 1845 brought its fair share of consequences. One was that my life was ruined, and thus I became a reluctant—very reluctant—star policeman. One was that people died. Too many of them. One was that about three hundred buildings at the busiest tip of Manhattan surrounding Wall Street burned down to their basements.
Another was that industry has popped right back up again from the soot. Startling and sudden and garish as a jack-in-the-box.
Brick buildings and board buildings. Brownstone buildings and even some strange few painted iron-faced buildings. Grey-trimmed buildings and whitewashed buildings and marble buildings and granite buildings. I can’t describe the vertigo of it. The sheer scope. Three-story buildings, four-story buildings, fives and even neck-craning sixes towering above the fractured pavement, where the speckled pigs still roam free in search of sex and cabbage scraps. It’s a heady business. Absinthe-rich, delirious. I’d made the mistake of nearing that newborn rumpus of a district at about half past twelve. And striding down Broadway, no less—the more fool I. So I was jostled continually by stockbrokers and hot-corn girls and stoggers with their hands half in my pockets before I’d slapped them aside like so many flies. My nostrils full of horse manure, and fried clams, and the sweet neutral aroma of stone simmering in the sun.
Quick as was possible, I turned off kaleidoscope Broadway down Cedar, in sight of my goal.
Nassau isn’t a street I much frequent. It’s being rebuilt with manufactories where the business-residences and coffeehouses had stood before the flames licked them to rubble. That is, I knew as much, but it must have been six months since I’d set foot in it, and I confess . . .
I was not a little bustled.
It was a cluster of manufactories all right, regardless of the irregularity of the architecture. Interrupted only by the newly famous American and French Dining Saloon, where the merchants gather to shake shrewd palms, its sign advertising TURTLE SOUP FOR EXPORTATION. Tradesmen bustling, their shabby custom-cut coats mended on a dozen occasions and cheap cuff links shining, doing business. Colored men delivering goods and picking up orders—though none are allowed to be official stevedores. Several boy kinchin asking after prices and running them back to Wall Street with unlit cigars marinating in their mouths.
And finally, the girls of the Bowery.
Dozens of them. Scores. More females eating their midday dinners on stoops and stairwells so as to soak up the sunlight than
I’d ever dare to count.
The New American Textile Manufactory, a strange iron fabrication, proved to be unlocked. The front hall was as spacious and aloof as a bank, doubtless to accommodate the molls arriving en masse at six in the morning. Its lower levels were offices, so I climbed up an equally disconcerting—but thankfully solid—set of cast-iron stairs to the second floor.
Stepping over the threshold into the manufactory proper, I took a moment to stare. Scores of women were dining in the huge room before me. It was occupied by very long aisles, large bolts of extremely cheap unprinted fabric in blues and browns and greys, tall enough ceilings to give one pause, and dozens of long tables at which the Bowery girls worked. Curled and ribboned and flounced and colorful as peacocks. Their scissors and measuring tools sat idle before them while they ate, laughing as they shared boiled peanuts and pickled radishes.
I paused just beyond the entryway. Reading conversations on their lips, as the echoing din prevented my hearing them clearly.
Many were chatting of beaus, but most were talking practical matters. That wasn’t in the least shocking. Women are required to be practical the way fish require water. What was surprising was that they were talking practicality to one another not in shuttered-off nooks filled with silver-edged portraits. Nor in the sweat-sweet kitchens of rank hovels.
But in public. In a workplace, no less.
In New York as in other cities, the fair sex falls into pretty particular categories—categories that dictate behavior the way species decides fur versus feathers. Women with enough money to be termed ladies aren’t meant to be seen in the open, not unless being put through their paces along Fifth Avenue, or tasting cordials at the Astor House, or taking the air in an open four-wheeler. And they’re not meant to be aware of mud, or sweat, or labor—so if one did start up chatting pothole repair with a gentleman friend, she’d be dosed with a headache powder and sent to sleep off the strain. Women lacking the funds to be called ladies can talk domestic concerns over tea with thinned milk within bare walls if virtuous. If unvirtuous, they can say whatever they damn well please, as ruination doesn’t visit by degrees but rather once and forever after. And if emigrants, they can shriek what they will from street corner to street corner, as they’re already about as high in the social strata as our feral cats.
