The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  Reaching into his coat for his small pipe, James sensibly turned on his heel and retired to the parlor.

  “Jimmy!” Val called after him in a voice equal parts fond and fuming.

  I settled, half leaning, against the table. Val crossed his arms with an operatic flourish and shot me a green-eyed glare. It desired me to answer the question How do you people expect me to tolerate your nonsense? I’d no ready answer, because now, for the first time within the tempest of my anxiety over Val’s sticking his neck out, I realized that he had a point. Which was unhelpful.

  “You’ve always been good about women,” I mused quietly instead. “Some of the rabbits you run with wouldn’t know the difference between a rape and a dead flash night on the Bowery.”

  Val lapsed into thought, absently scoring his scalp with his fingernails. “Well, at the end of the day, there’s coves as have served time in the House of Refuge when they were squeakers and coves as haven’t.”

  Confused, I glanced at him. Many years ago—when our parents were yet living—Val had briefly disappeared. His devoted delinquency led to a stint at the House of Refuge, a remedial establishment for vagrant kinchin located in the untamed countryside at Twenty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, and one that favors hearty floggings as an aid to character development. My brother’s character had not, I need hardly say, been improved, and when I think about the copper-wire smell of dried blood emanating from his back and the reckless smile he’d worn when he staggered home with his hair shorn off, visibly thinner after less than a week, a smoldering hatred burns in my gut.

  This new information, though—when I’d managed to process the remark, my blood froze. Val noticed my horror and shook his head.

  “Not me. Though right you are, my Tim, there’s bastards there as fancied the young lads particular. No, but . . . there was a little miss. Thin face, blonde plaits, had a haunted look to her. When I told her I was fixing to escape, she asked me either to take her with me or cut her throat. She’d a piece of glass saved for the purpose. I couldn’t manage either, you mark me. Bad business. I was only twelve, but I always wished I’d done the one or the other.”

  Eyes shutting briefly, I nodded.

  I remembered in a flood all the many, many occasions Val had interacted with Bird Daly, brought her oranges and cast-off frippery from the Party’s charity trunks, called her little cat and laughed, wincing, always wincing, as if the fact of his laughing at all were somehow a crime, when she either made an apt observation or ribbed me over my plentiful faults. I remembered when I’d yet hated him, first informing Val that Silkie Marsh kept ten-year-old stargazers. Morphine-crazed as he’d been, my own eyes blinkered with spite, I could still recall the warped spasm of revulsion that flickered across his face. Then I recollected I’d actually imagined that he’d sent Bird to the House of Refuge over Party obligations. And that he’d tried to have me permanently hushed for the same reason.

  Unfortunately, my version of guilt is a bitter pill gracelessly swallowed. And so I needed in an urgent fashion to change the course of the dialogue. Before I’d nauseated myself any further.

  “I need to know how serious you find Symmes threatening your candidacy and possibly your life. You’re reckless and morphine-addled as a general practice, but hardly suicidal. Well, on the days when you aren’t fighting fires,” I couldn’t help but add meanly.

  It’s a fundamental difference in logic. Val thinks of fighting fires as a holy penance set against the balance of burning our parents alive. I think of it as a self-destructive compulsion designed to remove the burden of living from his shoulders altogether.

  Wanting an ally, I marched from the kitchen into the comfortable—if questionably decorated with framed Tammany propaganda—front sitting room. Jim’s brooding pipe smoke had filled the air with clove and warm, bitter walnut. He angled clear blue eyes at me as I landed in the striped armchair. As I’d expected, Val followed me into the meticulously clean parlor so he could continue attempts to needle me into submission.

  “How worried should I be over a goddamned Hunker when the hardworking men of this ward would sooner spit in a plantation owner’s eye than shake his hand?” Valentine leaned against the doorframe. Jim resolutely ignored him.

  “There are plenty of popular Hunkers in the Party,” I argued.

  “No, there are plenty of rich ones, and your knowledge of inner-circle Tammany dealings wouldn’t top up a thimble.”

  “It isn’t as simple as all that.”

  “Of course it is, and you are being a blue-ribbon horse’s arse. Symmes and his ilk, all these new garment-industry bosses who pay their workers chicken feed and drive down wages, they manufacture slave clothing. The pantaloons, the cotton shirts, the linsey-woolsey gowns, the linen aprons, the pantalets thin enough to see your hand through—”

  “The South sends us the cotton, the North turns it into cloth, then we turn the cloth into togs and sell it back to them. Yes, I’m not political but I’m not stupid either,” I groused.

  “You sure as taxes had me fooled.”

  “I’m not the one who deliberately called down hellfire and brimstone from his own alderman!”

  “Can the two of you hear yourselves speaking?” Jim queried under his breath. “It’s like a pair of schoolchildren scrapping over a marble.”

  “What the devil could that flea-brain Symmes possibly do to me?” my brother growled, hands now propped against his hips where the braces dangled like unanswered questions. “Other than bore me to death when he makes speeches about Southern conciliation? Because—”

  “He might have mentioned that you’re a molley,” I fired back, thoroughly flummoxed. I stood to face him. “And that he could severely harm your reputation by implying such.”

  “Oh, of all the prattling nonsense,” Val scoffed. “I’m not a molley. That was easy, wasn’t it? Next?”

  James Playfair, who was attempting to appear not even mildly interested and failing miserably, directed his attention to the light bleaching the edges of Val’s white curtains. Sodomy is punishable by a decade’s stint at the Tombs, I should mention—but only sodomy. So we copper stars arrest people for affectations about as often as we turn down illicit reward money. What would be the point? What if we did collar a slender-limbed aesthete, down where they loiter beside the defunct City Hall fountain that since March has forborne the giving of aesthetic pleasure in favor of dribbling green ooze from its spigot? Which partner sheltered in the shadows of the park’s trees would be the witness to the crime and which the criminal? The one on his knees or the other? And who would give a damn?

  That doesn’t mean that news of Captain Valentine Wilde’s extended amorous liaison with James Playfair wouldn’t spell disaster of the highest order. On the contrary.

  “Right,” I retorted sardonically, “of course you’re not a molley. Symmes actually said sodomite, but no, you’re not breaking the law, you’re merely canoodling with a man nine nights out of ten, perfectly respectable seeing as actual buggery doesn’t enter into it.”

  No one answered. James continued staring through the gap in the curtains as a faint blush rose over the tips of his ears. Valentine didn’t say anything either. Just pulled up his braces as if he’d not previously been aware he was wearing them. In fact, the pair said nothing at all so loudly just then that what they weren’t saying was perfectly . . . audible.

  My mouth dropped open and shut again.

  “Don’t tell me,” I begged, closing my eyes and raising my palms in supplication. I did my best not to look unfriendly as I took a step back. It was only a signal. An urgent one. Nothing personal. “God, just don’t tell me.”

  “Timothy,” Jim attempted, sounding mortified, “I—”

  “Not telling me is what you’re doing. Right?”

  “For heaven’s sake, I didn’t say anything!”

  “I know, but now we’re past that,
keep cracking on with the not saying anything, would you?”

  “Why in Christ’s name are your eyes closed, you mutton-witted runt?” Val’s voice demanded.

  I opened them, newly furious. Then I strode up to my brother and got a good handful of his shirt. “Maybe it’s so I don’t have to watch you glibly dismissing my concerns when Symmes could try to send you to prison.”

  Val, notwithstanding my grip, tossed his face ceilingward as he laughed over the top of my pate. “I am not the molley in this room. Nor the bright young copper star with the panic problem. I am equally not the nut-shriveled politician who doesn’t realize that the Party will never allow a ward boss to be slandered as a lace-festooned debauchee. Your concerns are—”

  “Justified,” I snapped.

  “Severely understated,” Jim said in a low moan.

  “Irrelevant,” Val insisted. “I have an entire ward’s worth of Irishmen in my pocket, rabbits that I see are fed and clothed and kept in brown liquor. Symmes smears me, we all lose them. He won’t smear me.”

  “Right, I am going to depart before you lot start up the fisticuffs, and do recall that last time it garnered only a matched set of black eyes and was thus spectacularly unhelpful,” Jim announced, rising.

  “It felt good, though,” I muttered, dropping Val’s shirt.

  “Damn right it did,” Val hissed. “James, just where do you think you’re going?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jim answered with a too-bright smile that wavered at the edges. “To the bathhouse to steam away my sorrows, to my flat to drown them in gin, to hell, it really isn’t any concern of yours, and you can expect to see very little of me until after the elections.”

  “Christ on a mule, why are you acting like this?” Val groaned, pressing his forefinger and thumb hard into his ancient-seeming eyes.

  “Maybe he’s concerned Symmes might make public the fact you’re fucking your best friend?” I posited.

  “Wait, wait, you can say it out loud, but we can’t say it out—”

  “Well, there we have it, and I shan’t take up any more of your time,” Jim said desperately, making haste for the front door.

  “Jimmy, to put it another way, it would kittle me muchly if you didn’t swan off on the very day I’m about to start a run at the office of alderman and could use your wits, instincts, and company,” my brother bit out when Jim’s hand reached the doorknob. “Stop diddling about and come back.”

  Jim paused, huffing a laugh that sounded more like he’d been punched in the solar plexus than it did an expression of mirth. “Why?” he asked.

  “Holy Lord, what do you mean why, you limp-wristed tit?”

  “I should like to know the reason that action would please you, and I thus inquired.”

  “Because I want you here.”

  For an instant, Jim looked about ready to cry. He’s in love with my brother, after all. But the brightness in his eyes might have been a trick of the light. I honestly couldn’t say, since less than a second later he’d slammed the door behind him.

  —

  My business with my brother and his long-suffering friend having been conducted to the satisfaction of no one, I went south to Thomas Street to speak with and probably arrest Sally Woods. Natural inclination urged me to instead go straight to Mercy Underhill’s new residence, both to question Miss Duffy further (a note from Piest assured me that she’d been readily welcomed by the object of my devotion) and to study the curl that refuses to be included in Mercy’s hair arrangements and rests, a single whorl of feathery black, at the nape of her neck. Since that’s what I wanted to do, rather than learn that Miss Woods was a murderess, my duties to Manhattan clearly lay in the opposite direction.

  The Thomas Street landlady with the unfortunate mumps affliction appeared unsurprised to see me, merely making a humming sound when she answered.

  “Might I go through and speak with Miss Woods again?”

  She glanced at my star pin. “Police roaming the streets, meddling with perfectly decent folk. It’s not Christian, dear.”

  “Agreed,” I answered as I passed through into the hall.

  The little greenhouse in its wild habitat had taken on a decidedly more sinister air since the Pell Street fire and the collection of violent threats in my frock coat. The grimy glass house I’d once thought charming now called to mind a sorceress’s cottage, nestled in the depths of a wood where crooked paths change their patterns in the dappled sunlight, leading kinchin ever farther into the gloom of gnarled trees.

  My knock was answered with an energetic “Come in!” and I entered. Miss Woods was at her printing press, setting type. When she saw me, she brushed her fingers together and pulled a nearby tarp over the machine.

  “Liberal as you are, that’s a right fiery piece written by one of my former classmates for the Working Man’s Advocate, and I’m really not financially stable enough to be fined just now,” she said, smiling nervously. She wore trousers again, but this time her chemise and matching fitted jacket were blue, and she’d added a mauve neck stock fixed with a small pearl pin. Her chestnut hair with its streak of white midsummer-lightning bolt was even more helter-skelter on this occasion, only the front half pinned up and the rest scandalously left falling down her slim back. “Morning, Mr. Wilde. What can I do for you?”

  “I need to have a few more words with you, Miss Woods. There seem to be . . . conflicting accounts.”

  Sally Woods pressed her lips together, complexion fading to an uneasy ivory. “You’ve been plenty square with me, please don’t suppose I can’t savvy that. But it’s . . . any angle you ogle from, it’s a painful subject. Can I decline?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Is Ellie all right?”

  There was such fear in the rising plea at the end of that question that I couldn’t help but feel for her all the more. “She’s fine. But she painted an interesting picture of you, Miss Woods. Might we sit down?”

  “I’ll get the whiskey. Sounds like we’ll need it.” She sighed, nodding at the circle of chairs.

  When she was seated across from me with the bottle of spirits between us, swirling pretty copper liquid on her provocatively crossed knee, I set to.

  “Miss Abell mentioned that you were at Mount Holyoke together—that you were pretty thick there, the pair of you, like sisters.”

  Sally Woods looked sure enough heartbroken, glancing sharply away from me with her chin up as if telling herself to be brave, and I hadn’t even come to the difficult questions yet. That mightily troubled me.

  “I adored Ellie. Do adore her. She’s passionate and clever and warm, and God knows I’d seldom enough met a girl who shared my interests before the seminary. We’re kindred spirits.”

  “She’s charming.”

  “Ellie is plenty more than charming, though she’s that as well. She’s got an incisive mind matched with great gentleness. A combination of qualities I lack, so I admire her all the more. She can tell a rig sharp as any fishwife’s, but with no one the butt of the joke—I’ve always been biting, aggressive. I thought that was what strength looked like. It doesn’t. Strength looks like Ellie. She’s oak as you please. I love her very much.”

  “She seemed well bustled over the strike business.”

  Miss Woods took a small sip of liquor, eyes downcast. “She lost her respect for me. I’d have done the same. She’d used to think me a pretty fine specimen before I flew too close to the sun. I’d grand ambitions and grander still intentions, Mr. Wilde, those of reshaping our society for the better, but failure leaves a stink. And then she blamed me for stirring up trouble, getting myself sacked, ruining it all. I don’t blame her a bit for refusing to speak with me.”

  Tracing the ragged edges of my scar, I pondered tacks. Dive in too quick and she’d snap closed like a clamshell, even supposing she was innocent. Dip my toe in too slow and she’d l
ikewise grow peery.

  “Miss Woods, I don’t relish asking you questions I know will pain you. But Robert Symmes has accused you of threatening him again, and it’s come to light that you knew him . . . intimately?”

  Her breath came fast and fearful through her delicate snub nose. When next she lifted the whiskey glass, I’m sorry to say her hand shook. But she swallowed, and looked at me as if through a pistol sight, and nodded.

  “Robert and I caught each other’s eye when I was hired at the manufactory,” she bit out. “Remember how I told you I’ve superb taste in whiskey and in nothing else? Well, that goes for my taste in men too. Ellie was hired on day one, same as me, and she warned me to steer clear of him—I’d always been mooning after married professors and the like, the more untouchable the better. Every morning I wake up wishing I’d listened to Ellie and not tried to bag myself a powerful alderman. Though that makes me sound a brazen opportunist, and really I was halfway in love with him in about the space of a sneeze. I thought him handsome and aloof and mysterious rather than handsome and conscienceless. He’s a complete smirk. It was my own blunder, and Ellie and I are paying dear for my mistake.”

  “You discussed the female-rights movement with him?”

  “I thought, hell, why not use his affections for everyone’s mutual benefit? Wouldn’t that be civic-minded of me? Of all the stupid, self-obsessed notions. He was never fond of me, only fond of what we were about.”

  The phrase inventive little slut flashed through my pate against my will. Miss Woods carded her fingers through the tangle of hair lying over her shoulder. Talk of Symmes looked about as pleasant as cutting out her own tongue.

  “You weren’t afraid of children?” I wondered.

  She paled still further, seeming almost faint for a moment, but shook her head. “I’m a modern and an educated woman, Mr. Wilde. I’ve a sponge I soak in vinegar. You’ll be wanting to see it, I suppose.”

  “Of course not.”