The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  “Died of stars?”

  “Sure enough, though some survive.”

  I traced my lips with my thumb and forefinger. Mercy seemed likewise riveted—this was half madness and half metaphor, and yet there was such method in it. For all we couldn’t savvy her, Miss Duffy clearly imagined she was talking solid, straight-line sense.

  “And you know her well?” I urged. “The girl who’d stars in her eyes?”

  “Well enough from the spell, when they said as we’d be given more wages if we linked arms, singin’ and marchin’ in a circle, like.”

  “This spell . . . did they call it a strike?”

  She snapped her fingers. “Aye, ’tis the very word.”

  Here was progress, the sudden lightening of my heavy bones told me. For strikes are rare enough, strikes by women practically unheard of. Dunla Duffy performed outwork for—of all places—New American Textiles. The picture in my mind, as yet the merest suggestion of an outline, gained a new brushstroke.

  “It reminded me of a spell me cousin tried on the potatoes afore she died,” Miss Duffy continued, “so I didn’t favor it, spells bein’ wicked, sir, and the potatoes as rotten after as before. But they said as it weren’t the wicked sort o’ spell, and I were that hungry, so I thought the saints would nay see the harm?”

  “They don’t see any harm at all in the strike sort of spell, Dunla, I assure you,” Mercy said, a brittle weariness sharpening her tone.

  “I trusted the starry-eyed girl when she said so,” Miss Duffy agreed. “She’d nary lie t’ the likes of us outworkers, she were always so gentle. We’d nay trusted her friend—the one as is marked by the devil, she frightens me—but we trusted her. It were that disappointin’ when the spell didn’t work after all.”

  My head pulled back, the motion echoing through my sore skull like a hammer blow against a great iron bell.

  “Does the girl with stars in her eyes have a lovely complexion and very pretty ash-brown hair—about five foot two, plump, amber-colored eyes?” I asked carefully.

  Miss Duffy’s innocent face sparked with triumph. “That’s her.”

  “And the one with the devil’s mark—she has a handsome face and dark brown hair with a great white streak at the temple?”

  Grinning, Miss Duffy nodded. “Just so.”

  “Timothy, are you all right?” Mercy asked urgently.

  “No,” I admitted, newly sick to my stomach. “If what she says is correct and I’m hearing it aright, Miss Ellie Abell attempted to warn Miss Duffy here of Sally Woods’s desperate intentions. The note clearly indicates the house in Pell Street, since it was given to a resident. Then I handily allowed Miss Woods to bash me in the cranium and disappear.”

  Eyes wide, Dunla Duffy commenced rocking a little. I figured it for a fair reaction. She was young, I reminded myself, so very young yet, no older than fifteen, and navigating a faraway land with neither kith nor kin to guide her. Anyway, I was half set to try rocking myself, and the rest be damned. But Sally Woods wanted fast catching, so I sucked in a breath and carried on.

  “Miss Duffy, can you remember any strangers visiting the Pell Street house before it burned?”

  She only rocked harder. “Nary strangers.”

  “The other outworkers must have fled with or without their piecework. Can you think where any might have gone?”

  “The Witch would ha’ gone back to her tower,” she whispered. “Back where they hover over their cauldrons. She said when I offered to pay her later fer the light, she’d have us all roasting over a spit by then, said as tomorrow wasn’t good enough, and so the others chucked me out.”

  “She sounds terribly frightening,” Mercy said soberly.

  “She’d seven devil candles, just that ’twas enough to make you afeared o’ her, sure enough.”

  “Right,” I sighed. “Excepting witches in towers, did you know any of the residents well enough to help me find them?”

  “I’d not lived there long. I’d been ousted from me old digs when I could nay pay them weekly, and the rent in Pell Street were by the night. I’m a good girl, I work honest. Some said as there were other ways o’ bein’ paid, but I wouldn’t. They weren’t my friends, those other lasses, though I’d ne’er want them burnt.”

  Mercy took her hand with an expression that tore a sizable hole in my chest, she having once been in the unspeakable position of facing ruin or exchanging intimacy for a hefty sum of money. I’d caught her at it and turned a private nightmare into a public spectacle, one I can’t think of without wanting to eradicate myself. I can still hear her shouting at me three years later, still see unshed tears gleaming in the moonlight.

  Stop looking at me like that, it’s horrifying. I am the only thing I have, a man can’t ever understand that, I have nothing else to sell, Timothy.

  Wrenching myself out of the past, I questioned, “Can you tell us aught about your employer, Robert Symmes?”

  Dunla Duffy stared, mute.

  “The man with the pocket watch?” I attempted, faintly amused.

  “Oh.” Miss Duffy made a frantic sign of the cross. “He’s an awful bad man, sir.”

  “Can you tell us why you think so?”

  “Because o’ the girl with the stars in her eyes. After the strike she were gone fer another week entire, and when she came back, he’d smile every time he spied her. He’d touch her arm, her cheek. It weren’t decent, sir, even after the stars had gone.”

  “What do you mean by stars, Miss Duffy?” I asked in despair.

  She appeared offended by the question. A mulish cast suffused her features.

  “I think I know,” Mercy mused, touching her bottom lip introspectively with her teeth. “Miss Duffy, have you ever had stars in your eyes?”

  “No,” she gasped, scandalized. “I told ye, I were raised proper.”

  “You see?” Mercy asked me, smiling sadly.

  For a moment I didn’t. Then I did, and that was much worse.

  “You think that Miss Abell was with child, Miss Duffy?” I questioned.

  Dunla Duffy furiously clapped both palms over her ears.

  “He’s sorry for being so crude, Miss Duffy.” Mercy gently reclaimed the nearer hand. “Can you tell me, between us womenfolk, and meaning her no harm, how you learned that she’d stars in her eyes?”

  Dunla Duffy dropped her voice conspiratorially. “At work when I were after pickin’ up more pieces, I stopped to freshen myself, and she were in the lavatory, nine sorts o’ sickly, and I petted her hair and said as no matter what the circumstance, it were God’s gift t’ her, but the sickness were makin’ her muddled in the head, fer I could nay understand her answer.”

  “What did she say?” Mercy asked as I leaned forward.

  “Well, ’tis true enough that I don’t always follow folk when they’re speakin’,” Miss Duffy replied slowly. “But this weren’t the same, fer she looked me clear in the face and she said, This is all Sally’s fault.”

  —

  Interrupting Miss Abell inside the manufactory again seemed neither prudent nor profitable. At six o’clock when the sun sank westerly, I could catch her if I timed it well and discover just what razor-thorned entanglement had perhaps produced a child by another woman’s doing—and a lost child at that. So after stopping at the Tombs to order an immediate guard set over Miss Woods’s eerie greenhouse, I headed for the Catholic Asylum to patch up one of my few friendships.

  My trek to the orphanage passed as if in a dream. Because I wasn’t walking, not really.

  I was cataloguing moments.

  Moments of quiet glances at Mercy, her bird’s-egg irises cupping black pupils that seem to stretch for miles in the distance. Me thanking them both, Mercy’s We will see you soon, in that case? and how it left no room for refusal, only my If you’d be so kind, and then her Can selfish wishes be kindnesses simu
ltaneously?—which was admittedly the enigmatic Mercy but her saying something marvelous, ending with a press of her hand, which I didn’t kiss because it would have been too soon, too much, and far too little all at once.

  I arrived at the orphanage during lunch hour, but I’d no luck in the dining hall, standing in the arched stone entryway searching the tables for a dark red head. Thankfully, though, I know a great many of Bird’s pals. And they know me, because if I’m willing to compliment myself on any of my meager victories, it’s this one: I’d put them there. Having found them somewhere else that doesn’t bear writing about. So when Ryan and Neill and Sophia spied a copper star with a wide black hat standing under the keystone, they ran up to me.

  “What the devil’s happened?” Neill asked, in the brogue that’s lessening every time I hear it. “Bird said she’d be in her room finishing a love letter.”

  “I—she what?”

  “She won’t even tell me about the ball,” Sophia—who was eleven, and newly enamored of balls—complained. “Will you tell us about the ball, Mr. Wilde? Were there cakes? She was very pretty in her cloak, didn’t you think so?”

  “I did think—”

  “She looked like an angel, she did. I ain’t half surprised she’s found a beau,” Ryan added with a shy smile.

  My mouth worked at speech. It failed despite thirty years of steadyish practice.

  “There was a newsboy, this morning. Loitering,” Neill said meaningfully.

  “A handsome one,” Sophia confided, “wi’ fine manners and blond hair and spectacles—”

  “I’ll be back soon, and with more time to spare, all right?”

  I clapped their shoulders and made for Bird’s room as hastily as my pounding head allowed. Startled but optimistic as to my prospects. Continuing the established theme of my day, however, our meeting did not go according to plan.

  “I don’t want to see you,” said Bird Daly when she opened the door, regarding me as if I were a less desirable species of bedbug.

  “Bird, I’m sorry, but that benefit was getting downright dusty.”

  She’d stepped back from the threshold, so I walked inside. The nuns ensure their charges’ sleeping areas are kept virtuously tidy, but this one seemed overpopulated beyond its occupants’ control. Hats stacked atop trunks. Boot tracks crisscrossing. Crude rag dolls with woolen hair, limbs akimbo, keeping company in a neat line along the wall with a single horsehair pony that Elena had given Bird two years previous. Hair ribbons lurking under bed frames and dangling from bureau drawers. One too many pillows in Bird’s bunk. And there it was—a letter in Bird’s floridly dramatic hand, drying cool as you please on the desk in a barrage of midday sunlight.

  Sidling closer to the writing surface, I sifted through and selected words for her. “You’ve every reason to be annoyed, but—”

  Smash.

  Bird stood before me, chest heaving, having just fragmented her own inkpot in preventing me approaching the desk.

  I gaped in dismay. Not at the inkpot. She’d used to shatter things when she felt she was shattering herself, when the world around her tilted unbearably and she struggled to navigate the tempest, would test gravity by destroying ornamental knickknacks and mugs of tea and on one memorable occasion an actual window. It devastated me to think she could still feel that way, its being a year and more since the breaking things stopped.

  “Bird—”

  “You should have told me!” she cried, walking through ink to press a livid finger against my chest. “That she was there, that the Madam was there.”

  “Holy Christ,” I managed, no longer concerned over profanity. “How—”

  She reached into a pocket of her simple brown charity dress and thrust a poorly penned communiqué into my face.

  Dear Miss Daly,

  I write at the conveenyance of my frend Matchbox as hes learnd of his letters and I an unskooled News Hawker but plenty Rich for all that. Your pressense at the bennifit was much wellcome and I hope later to see You maybe by the fountain in this here cort yard maybe else wear but I’ll be there to meet You at seven of the clock every night till the nights stop coming. Don’t be ketched about Silkie Marsh at the fight or that you missed the rest. There was no fight and its a damn shame Val Wilde wuld have won that bout twenty ways from nohow it wuld have been a particular smasher you bet your last dime. I love you.

  —Ninepin

  “Bird, I’m . . . I’m so sorry you found out this way. But why would I have wanted you to know that—”

  “You wouldn’t,” she interrupted, tossing her head and pretending there wasn’t ink on her shoes. “But I ought to have known. You ought to have savvied that I’d have cut out properly if you’d chanted the truth to me and not treated me like . . .” She lost English for an instant, fuming. “You thought I couldn’t manage seeing—”

  “That’s not true, I didn’t want you to—”

  “I ought to have known!”

  “I’d have been a cad to tell you.”

  “You don’t savvy she’s in my head anyhow?” she all but shrieked.

  We were quiet for a few seconds. I didn’t know what to say. And had I known, I wouldn’t have been brave enough to say it.

  Bird’s small frame was practically thrumming with rage. “You don’t think it matters to me whether or not you tell me the truth? Get out.”

  As I was pushed unceremoniously out the door by a thirteen-year-old girl, I attempted, “Bird, I’m truly sorry. Forgive me. I’ll be back by later. And meanwhile please be careful about writing Ninepin love letters. He’s a genteel sort but rough living, and he gets enthusiastic over beautiful—”

  “As if I would ever write that silly newsboy a love letter!” she cried.

  I took a moment. Caution seeming appropriate. “Neill thought you were writing—”

  “Yes, indeed I was. It’s none of your business, though, and it’s nothing to do with that newsboy. I am writing a letter to Mr. James Playfair, and you’ve a great deal of nerve, and I’ll thank you to get out and allow me to get back to my own affairs.”

  She slammed the door in my face.

  As I exited the prettily worked stone corridors the way I’d come, I concluded with grim reluctance that I’d slender chance of success at any of the tasks Gotham’s gods had seen fit to bestow upon me. Through an open streetside window, a baby was shrieking, as unwanted tiny creatures tend to announce their continued existence to the world.

  13

  Were she, scorning the opinions of that world which scorns her poverty, to cast herself into the hot-house of vice, she might get along very well as regards mere food and clothes, for a winter or two; but let us rather hope to see her freeze, starve, die in misery, with purity still in her soul, than to yield to the fatal step which would engulf all that is precious and beautiful in her character.

  —NED BUNTLINE, MYSTERIES AND MISERIES OF NEW YORK, REGARDING THE POOR SEWING GIRL

  AT FIVE MINUTES TO SIX O’CLOCK, daylight ebbing sluggishly into gunsmoke clouds, I lurked in a doorway in Nassau Street across from the New American Textile Manufactory. My hat pulled low, my head pounding like a brass band. The painted metal windows where the cutters labored over slave togs showed row after row of beribboned heads and Simeon Gage’s stalking shadow.

  When six o’clock pealed stridently from the church towers, the manufactory girls rose as if one. It took a few minutes to collect their belongings, store their unfinished efforts, don their bonnets of white chip and elaborately worked straw. Then they poured out of the great building, some arm in arm and some swinging tin lunch pails, a rainbow-hued stream of feminine labor.

  Then a man who’d likewise been idling in a doorway burst out of it. He’d a bucket in one hand, a paintbrush in the other. And when the first of the Bowery girls drew near, he dipped the brush and slashed across the front of the moll’s dress a lurid streak
of blood-red paint.

  She screamed, and quick as a viper he’d progressed to the next girl, swiping at her with a murderous look in his eye as she ducked away in terror.

  “Harlots!” he was shouting. He was a small man, a sallow-cheeked and an underfed one, with clothes that had been perfectly cut to his shape but made from the cheapest possible cloth. A tailor if I’d ever set eyes on the breed. “You filthy, selfish, heartless—”

  I was nearly across Nassau by then. Dodging hacks and wagons, half slipping on dung and straw, hands curled into fists. Other men stopped, turning to see what the shrieks were about. While several appeared plenty alarmed, a hatchet-faced brute started up whistling while a lout selling trinkets from a harnessed box clapped in approval.

  “Stop that at once,” I ordered, flapping the lapel of my coat with the copper star pinned to it.

  “They’re vultures!” he cried, wielding the brush in my face. The savagery of the gesture made it seem a bloodied knife. “Jezebels, the lot of them, stealing bread from the mouths of honest family men.”

  “You’re an honest family man, I take it?”

  “And a Bible-fearing Christian who respects the natural order. Get the hell out of my—”

  He stopped talking after that. Mostly because, after a planted left foot and a short but merciless spin, I’d pinned him to the grimy sidewalk with his arm twisted behind his back and my shin against his spine, winding him. He spluttered, his face keeping closer company with bird droppings than usual, thrashing under my leg.

  “If you don’t want a lacing, you’ll settle, and I mean instantly,” I suggested, grinding my knee into his ribs. My temper had passed scorching into molten. The girls formed a half circle. Staring with white faces, a few of the molls paint-smeared and weeping softly.

  “You’ve obviously never watched your kinchin go hungry so a pack of whores can live in sin, you pig!”

  “I’ve also never been arrested for assaulting ladies in the street, so you’ll have the advantage of me there too.”