The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  This wasn’t the same. This was healthy kates with coin in their pockets and blood in their cheeks. Discussing how they lived their lives.

  Come time for the roof to be mended, ’f I don’t ask Jeremiah to fix it and no one else, I’m the biggest flat as was ever taken for a—

  Did you see Kitty’s new straw bonnet, she only paid three bits, and it’s worked like a craftswoman’s showpiece, you simply must go to Bowery just north of Spring and ask for—

  Don’t be a ninny, Mexico isn’t the question any longer, it’s about whether or not they’ll demand Oregon follow along in the vile trade despite its latitude, and then we’re sure enough—

  Striding past the working girls and their rows of open tin dinner pails, hinges gleaming, packed with leftovers of jugged hare and cocky leeky and baked goose, I made every effort not to cast dark looks of concern at them. I’m pretty sure I was a fantastical failure.

  “Can I help, sir?” came a cutting American tenor.

  The foreman greeted me in the wide center aisle. He was fifty, maybe, nearly as short as I am, bald as a frog, with a prim mouth and a pinched, nickel-counting look about the eye.

  “Simeon Gage,” he announced as we shook hands.

  “Timothy Wilde. I’m from the star police.”

  “I can see that. What’s it to do with us?”

  “Might you take me to your office? It’s a private matter.”

  His mazzard congealed in the way that means, If it’s bribes you’re after, please be sane about the figure. But he led me into a room at the back of the giant workspace, indicating a chair across from a desk with a messy stack of ledgers and time sheets and insurance forms resting on it. We sat.

  “Busy day?” I angled my eyes at the paperwork.

  “I take care of some of the alderman’s more tedious filing,” Gage replied, chest ballooning. “He is a personage of great importance. You might call me—as a trusted overseer, you understand—one of his secretaries. Accounts payable, contracts, policy renewals, and the like. I can barely keep up at the moment. Let alone manage those witless hens out there.”

  I smiled. Not amiably. “Are you familiar with a former employee of this establishment, a Miss Sally Woods?”

  He shifted his priggish lips. “Aye.”

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  “She’s trouble.”

  “What variety?”

  “The worst I can think of.” He scraped backward in his chair dramatically, tugging his waistcoat down. “I was a tailor before this modern system unmanned me. When I was down on my luck, with no orders coming in and otherwise respectable people thinking nothing of wearing ready-made slops, Mr. Symmes gave me a boost out of the mire. So by trouble I mean the sort of trouble every fellow fears most—the sort that’ll strip him of his dignity. No respect whatsoever for the natural order, for authority, for rules, for Mr. Symmes. She worked hard enough, for a girl anyway, but she’s ruinous otherwise. Educated, you know,” he added, picking at one of his fingernails.

  I made a hare-quick decision to spend as little time as was possible with Simeon Gage.

  “I need to speak with an Ellie Abell. Is she here?”

  “Sure enough.” He narrowed his eyes, measuring.

  I waited.

  That went on for a spell.

  “I’ll just bring her in, then?” he sneered.

  “Aces, I’d appreciate it.”

  He departed with an audible level of annoyance in his footfalls. When he returned, it was with an apple-cheeked beauty with light ash-brown hair, full lips, and a pair of golden eyes that radiated fear.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Miss Abell,” I said. “Mr. Gage, I’ll show myself out when I’m through.”

  An eyebrow as bushy as his pate was hairless reared upward. “If it’s to do with Miss Abell here, then it’s company business, isn’t it?”

  Miss Abell’s mouth twitched, the door of a safe slamming shut.

  “You’ll probably want to give us some privacy,” I objected, “unless the manufactory is after a hefty fine.”

  “What in hell would you fine us over?”

  “I’m a pretty imaginative sort. I’d puzzle it out.”

  Purpling with vexation, Gage made an effort to slice me open with his eyeballs. He wasn’t any too successful. But his heart was in it, bless the man.

  “Much obliged for your cooperation, Mr. Gage. I’ll make sure Tammany hears of it.”

  I wouldn’t. But that tipped the scales into Simeon Gage’s exiting his office, yanking his door shut so hard than a pen on his desk toppled out of its stand. Reaching, I returned it to its home.

  “Please sit down, Miss Abell.” I took my hat off and gestured at Gage’s chair behind the desk. She sat as gingerly as if requested to perch on a fence post. “My name is Timothy Wilde. You’re in no scrape here, I promise. I just want to ask a few questions for your own safety.”

  “For my safety?”

  “I was sent by a Miss Sally Woods.”

  Her fetchingly ample cheeks paled, followed by a look of dull horror she smothered so quick it might never have been there. “What’s Sally up to now, then? What’s she keen to bring on our heads this time?”

  Taken aback, I shifted elbows in the straight-armed chair. “She wanted to know if you were faring well here.”

  “Oh, she’s scheming something again, that wicked little cat, I knew it.”

  Conversation appeared to have made a sharp turn. So I adopted an understanding look. Ran my fingers along the edge of my scar, which was burning in the usual futile alarm. Annoyed myself and dropped my hand.

  “I’d like to hear what I ought to look out for, in that case.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly speak about Sally to a policeman.”

  “Miss Abell, I’d sooner cross Tammany Hall than an honest woman. On my honor.”

  Ellie Abell licked her rosy lips, cogitating. She wore a dress of sage green and, in typical Bowery fashion, had belted it with a yellow shawl. Her intricate little straw bonnet perched at the back of her head, clinging as if to a cliff’s edge, festooned with fabric buttercups and a ribbon of brighter yellow still. First impressions told me she was the brand of good-hearted that verged on gullible. The layer of ice that keeps city dwellers safe from one another was lacking. Intuition told me she had the brains to combat that deficiency, even if her face was the picture of a tea rose in midbloom. So honor—and God knows I make every effort in that direction—seemed the right tactic.

  “I spoke too soon, Mr. Wilde,” she fretted, pulling out a handkerchief and twisting it. “I don’t know that Sally’s planning any lay. We haven’t spoken. Not for ages. Not since she was sacked.”

  “She seemed mightily concerned over you.”

  “Well, that’s stemming from the wrong source entirely. Oh, I’m not the sort to hold a grudge, Mr. Wilde, but sometimes I could just . . .” She fluttered a hand vexedly. “Just spit on that girl’s shoes.”

  I frowned. “You tell me the story, and I promise I’ll keep an eagle’s watch over this place, Miss Abell. It’s important, for reasons I can’t discuss just now.”

  Seconds passed as she did sums in her head, adding the columns over whether trusting me or sealing her plush mouth was the better course. As had already happened once too often that day, I was faced with a moll who’d turned sea green with fear.

  Miss Abell reached a decision and drew a steadying breath. “It was . . . let me see.” She counted on her fingers. “Probably six months ago now since Sally started ruining everything.”

  “How long have you known Miss Woods?”

  “Oh, I went to seminary with her, you know. Mount Holyoke. We were thick as anything there—went to picnics and concerts, played Schubert duets half the night long. We were practically sisters. But she’s always been . . .” Miss Abell sampled
words on her tongue, made a careful selection. “Headstrong. And of course I think women ought to study, and work, and maybe . . . maybe even vote someday. Only if we’re schooled well enough in politics, naturally. An ignorant vote is as undemocratic as an absent one.”

  She stopped. Checking whether I was shocked at the concept of females stuffing ballot boxes. The answer was that Frederick Douglass wasn’t and neither was I, never mind that most New Yorkers would figure both myself and Mr. Douglass for legally insane. So I crooked my mouth up and leaned forward with my elbows on my thighs.

  Miss Abell blew out a little gust through her lips. “But she’s . . . ugh, I can’t stand shocking decent Christian people to make a point, it’s . . . undignified. No, indecent. Who does she think she is? She isn’t helping the cause in the smallest by making people hate her. After school everything changed. It was as if all the radical principles she’d heard there had . . . stuck to her somehow. It was bad enough when she wore petticoats and stirred up trouble, and now I hear she’s printing all manner of freelance trash and dressing like a man. It sets the female-rights movement backward in the public eye every time she leaves her house.”

  “Can you tell me why she lost her position here?”

  “The strike, of course!” Miss Abell lurched upright, bosom heaving as a dawn blush rose over her cheeks. “Everyone savvies that.”

  Here was a point of interest. Manufactory work hasn’t been common in these parts for long, so neither have strikes. But the Lowell girls struck in 1834, and again in 1836, and the entire state of Massachusetts called them plentiful ugly names, whores being the most popular, before they trudged back to work following threats of blacklisting and far, far worse. The newspapers warned us all uneasily that a shameless “gynecocracy” threatened. I’d never lit eyes on the term before, and damned if I fully comprehended the dire consequences of a gynecocracy, but it didn’t take me long to determine which side should actually be diagnosed with hysteria and dropped in an ice bath.

  “Tell me about it,” I requested.

  “She went and made up a workers’ manifesto, didn’t she, Lord knows that must have been what gave her the notion to go into printing after she was fired . . . she tacked it on the door of the manufactory as if she were Martin Luther. Oh, so many of us went along with her lay that I blush to think about it, I really do. She’s always been that silver-tongued.”

  “She struck me so too.”

  Ellie Abell gazed at a memory rather than the wall. “We were all out in the midsummer torrents last summer, marching in circles with painted signs. Caroline has the best voice, so she organized the choruses, and Patience made badges, and I even wrote a poem to contribute to the local papers. None of them took it, of course. They thought us all noddle-headed for demanding higher wages when the tailors detest us working in their field at all. But Sally wanted rates closer to the male cutters and double the chink for the outworkers, so there we were with rain in our boots.”

  “And how did you fare?”

  “How do you think? Poorly.” She glanced at her lap. “It was awful. Just . . . I felt like such a goose for joining Sally, picketing and all. That little minx even convinced a good many of the outworkers to join us, and God knows they can’t afford to lose so much as a penny’s wages. When I think of people jeering and throwing rotten food at us and the outworkers actually picking it up to eat . . .”

  She waited to see if I was shocked. I’d like to have been.

  “Sally swore that they’d never hold out against all of us together—the cutters and the outworkers. But they’d no intention of raising wages.” Her pale brown eyes glinted with betrayal, hurt. “I just . . . It was selfish, Mr. Wilde. She meant to make a name for herself. Well, she did, and may she have the best of luck with it.”

  Miss Abell sat back, tugging her sleeves down emphatically.

  “Is she dangerous?” I asked. I’d suspected so myself, after all.

  “Socially, perhaps.” Miss Abell refolded her kerchief and returned it to the pocket of her dress.

  “Lawbreaking?”

  “God, yes. Enthusiastically. Did I mention the trousers?”

  “Violent?”

  Her face tightened. She shook her head. “I don’t . . . Oh, I couldn’t ever tell you for certain. I pray not, Mr. Wilde.”

  That was about as comforting as a spilt basket of snakes.

  “And what is her relationship to the owner of your manufactory, Mr. Robert Symmes?”

  She was out of her chair as if launched from it, hands smoothing her skirts. “Oh, that’s none of my business. None whatsoever. Heavens, think of the time, and I’ve not even washed my lunch pail, the whistle will blow at any—”

  “Miss Abell, I must insist that—”

  “No, no, no, you’ve already sent Mr. Gage into a temper, and I was a bit slower than usual this morning, but I can make it up—”

  “I want you to answer the question. Please.” I rose to my full if inglorious stature.

  “And I’ll never put myself at risk for her again!” she cried.

  Clapping a shocked hand over her mouth, she stumbled backward, her other fingers over the V of bright yellow shawl tied at her waist. “Oh, Mr. Wilde, I’m sorry. . . . I believe you, you know, that you’re honorable. For the love of mercy, leave it alone.”

  Ellie Abell fled. Minutes later, yet lost in sinister reflection in Simeon Gage’s office, I heard the shrill one-o’clock whistle signaling the employees to return to their stations until their shifts ended at six, and the girls of the Bowery streamed out into the lengthening evening shadow play. Figures casting scarecrow-thin silhouettes upon the pavement, swinging clasped hands as they walked north and home.

  “Bugger,” I said decidedly, putting my hat on after giving my scar a mean-spirited squeeze.

  When I quit the manufactory, all the molls cutting cotton and Simeon Gage looming over them like a stone-lipped gargoyle, I spied out where Miss Abell sat. Her lowered face was writ thick with prophecies. Anxious and expectant. As if cruel events would follow upon the heels of my visit.

  She was right. I knew it even as I stepped back into the afternoon sunshine. I still made every fool’s effort, meanwhile, to suppose that she was wrong.

  I strode north, approaching my workplace at around two p.m. It’s a monstrous hollow rectangular building with an open gallows yard in the center. Worthy of ancient pharaohs who’d as soon kill as pardon, a gloom-draped monument to punishment, with Egyptian detailing and double-height windows set deep in the massive stone walls. The place is horrid on every level. But although horrid it’s also mine, mine in a way no other place of occupation has ever been, which strangely endears it to me. Rapacious skinners with neat frocks and smart cravat pins stood on the wide steps at the southern Leonard Street entrance, passing coins to the colored men who run within the lockup to question whether any fresh arrivals can afford a lawyer. Several of the flint-eyed barristers nodded to me as I approached, though whether due to my familiar if grotesque face or to the fact that I admittedly deposit a great many profitable rogues in that dungeon, I couldn’t say. Nodding in return, I gained the front stairs.

  I’d take a sip of gin in my neat little office, I thought. And put my pen to paper. And think it through.

  It seemed a fair enough plan. Except that someone familiar was hurtling out of the prison-courthouse on skinny crab’s legs, bug-eyed and frantic, a tattered red muffler flapping behind him.

  “Mr. Piest! My God, man. Where’s the fire?”

  He scraped to a halt, gasping. “Thank all the stars! When you were not in your office, I was most distressed. But how did you hear with such speed?”

  “What happened?” I demanded, gripping the noble old crackbrain’s coat sleeve.

  “Well, you’ve heard, obviously,” he returned. “The fire is in Pell Street. Come along with me, or Robert Symmes will suppose we’ve m
uch to answer for!”

  —

  Fires lend me the sensation that electric eels reside in my pelvis. And by the time we’d reached the leering nightmare of Pell Street—leaping over the manure-heaped iron path that was the New York and Harlem Railroad tracks, skirting the rum-drenched netherworld of the Five Points, ducking into a despair-tinged corridor three blocks east of the Tombs—I’d learned a bit more about this stir in particular.

  Robert Symmes, as he himself had boasted, owned buildings that could be characterized as “highly saturated with tenants” and might better be called slums. One of them had burst into flames at about twelve-thirty that day—and its immediate proximity to the Tombs meant that Chief Matsell was able to alert Mr. Piest as he walked his Chatham Street rounds.

  “Is the fire out, then?”

  “To my knowledge, yes, Mr. Wilde, thank Providence and the ready assistance of a redoubtable fire company. But Symmes was apparently furious—that ignoble brute told the chief he held the star police personally responsible for its failure to protect his private interests. Thus I would gather the damage is palpable.”

  “Casualties?”

  “I cannot say, Mr. Wilde,” the mad Dutch roundsman gasped, nearly breaking his neck when his boot met an eroded pit in the roadway. “We’ll know soon enough.”

  Pell Street leans inward from both sides, like knob-boned crones hunched over soup bowls in a workhouse dining hall. It’s all topsy-turvy pine structures divided into innumerable apartments, with rear buildings erected in the anterior yards to serve as fertile generators of misery and sewage. But even through the twin stenches of poverty and overflowing school sinks, I could smell brimstone by now.