The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  “You smug little—”

  “Excuse me—sir!”

  A chap with muttonchop whiskers—a tanner from the smell of him and the looks of his mottled hands, who’d been observing proceedings with consternation—stepped forward. “Aye?”

  “There’ll be another star police coming up Nassau on his rounds any minute now. Would you flag him down for me? Head south until you see the copper pin.”

  “Gladly,” he agreed, striding away.

  “Whores,” the man beneath me moaned. “Bloody whores—”

  “Shut it,” I suggested with feeling.

  “My work has dried up, my son hasn’t eaten meat in a week, and all so these uppity bats can keep themselves in perfume and flounces. It’s wickedness.”

  “My wages go to my mum in Connecticut,” one of the paint-smeared women protested, her lip trembling, “and I’ve never—”

  “Ma’am, this one doesn’t merit your life story,” I observed. “Are any of you hurt?”

  Murmuring to each other, blinking damp eyelashes, they answered in the negative. Then Ellie Abell, her lovely features taut as a tightrope, edged her way to the front of the crowd.

  “Oh, Mr. Wilde,” she breathed. “Whatever are you doing here?”

  “Just now, arresting a scoundrel. But might I speak with you? When my hands aren’t full,” I added, glaring at the villain’s back.

  “I, I really haven’t the time,” she stammered. “I must be getting to—”

  Thankfully, the fresh copper star materialized, led by the tanner. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t recognize him. Unsurprisingly, he recognized me. He was a burly fellow with a plug of chewing tobacco in his mouth and enough healed-over breaks in his face to qualify for state congress.

  “Mr. Wilde,” he grunted. “Post me.”

  “Deliver this to the Tombs and I’ll owe you one?”

  “I’d been yearning for a little exercise.” He knelt, holding a Bowie knife before the bulging eyes of my captive. “Give me any trouble and I’ll slit your nostrils. Savvy?”

  I’d have harbored concerns over this remark had it not been both typical and beyond my control. So instead I watched the tailor being dragged off by his shirt collar.

  “Are we in any trouble, sir?” one of the paint-smeared girls whispered.

  “Of course not. You needn’t even bring charges. I saw the whole thing. Good afternoon, ladies—Miss Abell, I need a word.”

  The trembling Bowery girls dispersed northward, casting curious looks at Miss Abell but keen to fly away home. It was a Saturday, I realized, and thus they’d just been paid their weekly wages. Dress pockets with dollars tucked into them muttered papery whispers, eager to be emptied at dance halls and oyster saloons after the bills had been paid and the cash sent home to kinfolk. A single night of pleasure before the treacle-thick drag of mending and washing and housework to be accomplished before Monday.

  I offered Miss Abell my arm. “Might I escort you, wherever you’re going?”

  She took it, hesitant but smiling a little. “After that arrest . . . I reckon so. Thank you.”

  “My pleasure. Destination?”

  “I’m going to Catharine Market for groceries.”

  So I turned us east on Maiden Lane, then north on Water Street, where the masts of the ships thrust skyward above the rooftops. Not speaking at first. Letting her grow accustomed to me. Women lit lamps in the windows of low public houses, wiping callused hands on their aprons, watching the swelling flood of workers. The edges of the sky tinted like a slow-rising bruise, shadows strengthening Miss Abell’s cheekbones and dulling the soft curls of her hair. Sally Woods, warped as she clearly was, had been right about one thing—Ellie Abell was exceptional in her way, open as a meadow and every bit as lovely.

  I cleared my throat. “I saw Miss Woods.”

  “Oh?”

  The sound was pitched high enough that I could practically taste the fear in her throat.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you . . . find out anything?”

  “Yes. Then she knocked me cold with a whiskey bottle.”

  Ellie Abell gasped, covering her mouth with her hand. “I’m so terribly sorry, I never . . . My God.”

  “I didn’t mean to ketch you.”

  “No, I’m snug, it’s just . . .” She made an effort to steady her breathing. “Well, it’s dreadful, isn’t it?”

  “You’re the one said she might be violent,” I observed mildly.

  She shook her head. “I mean, I didn’t know it before, not for absolutely certain, and heavens, to think she was my closest friend and now it’s come to—oh, Mr. Wilde, you seem like an honest sort, and that’s awful. Are you all right?”

  “Hale enough. I wondered if you could help me with something, though.”

  “If I can, of course I’ll try.”

  I reached into my frock coat. “Do you know a Miss Dunla Duffy?” I asked, passing her the note.

  She stopped walking. Swayed, paper in hand, and I steadied her. Her caramel irises glowed—a fox’s eyes, one cornered by hounds.

  “Where did you get this?” she whispered.

  “From Miss Duffy. We’re acquainted. Her house burned down, you know.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  We resumed walking. Catharine Market was near enough to the Queen Mab to trigger scuttling, spiderish memories. And close enough to the docks that it’s populated by both the hardworking and the criminal, the stalwart and the damned. A ragpicker passed us with his obscenely long hook on a pole, a bag of scraps slung across his shoulders. Dead rabbits with teeth missing and cigars lodged in the gaps cast admiring looks at my companion. The scents of fish and fowl on the wind grew stronger as the light continued to fade.

  “Dunla Duffy is an outworker for New American Textiles.” She spoke in an odd, untuned-piano tone. “The outworkers and the cutters don’t associate overmuch, but Sally’s mad scheme got us all . . . twisted. Oh, I don’t mean to imply that I’d any prejudice against the outworkers beforehand. I mean, some of the manufactory molls do. Against popery and such. I was raised Episcopalian, my grandparents were from Yorkshire, and we take a different view on these matters. These Irish lasses might be unenlightened, but how can they help they’re raised in ignorance? God, I can’t possibly . . . How I wish you’d never seen my note.” Her hand on my arm had begun to tremble.

  “It is yours, then.”

  She nodded, and a dewy sheen of tears flooded her eyes.

  “Miss Abell, seeing as the house in Pell Street took two people up in flames and Miss Woods escaped me, I can only beg you to tell me plainly what’s happened.”

  If I had her pegged for the right keyhole, moral obligation would open her lips when they might otherwise have remained a locked strongbox. And I’m more inclined to use keys than axes. Sure enough, she released a shuddering sigh, a prelude to a story.

  “I didn’t want to believe it.” Her voice shook. “When I think of Sally at Mount Holyoke, all that time we were diarying sonnets and Scriptures and sums, it’s as if an anchor’s been attached to my heart when I try to fathom what she’s done since. Might we sit down, Mr. Wilde?” Miss Abell had turned an unlikely shade of ashen, a color so wrong on her perfect skin that I didn’t think I could forgive myself for painting it there. “I’m feeling a mite—”

  “Of course.”

  We’d reached the borderline of Ward Four and Ward Seven—Catharine Street. The market buzzed with Saturday-night wanderers flitting in and out of the torchlight and the few scattered gas lamps like so many mayflies. We passed eels in open barrels slithering, glossy and snakelike, over and under and over each other, passed mounds of salted mackerel and pyramids of leeks, to a vendor who boasted a table with benches. Once we’d seated ourselves beneath the lank-haired cook staring out of his booth, I realized I’d no notion when last I’d eate
n.

  “Two plates of corned beef with the fat, and mustard, and some rolls, and two glasses of whiskey. My treat,” I added. “And if you don’t want whiskey, Miss Abell, you’ll overlook my having two, I hope.”

  “Oh! How generous. I do want it, though, I’m afraid.” She pulled a kerchief from her skirts, drying her still-quivering eyes.

  I busied myself with payment and carrying plates, feeling about as ready to hear her tale as she was to deliver it to me. Which is to say less than entirely keen. Seating myself, I tilted my drink to her with a nod.

  “Thank you. I think of Sally at school, and oh, the hijinks we’d get up to.” Cutting the corned beef and shoving it into a folded bit of roll, Miss Abell tucked into the peck like a first-rate Bowery girl.

  “What kind?”

  “Nothing too sordid, but she was the sort of person it seemed impossible to refuse. I mean . . . well, it certainly wasn’t my notion to sneak out of the dormitories at midnight to put indigo in the laundresses’ tubs where the linens were soaking and turn everyone’s drawers and petticoats blue, but I went along with it, didn’t I? Sally was a heroine for weeks afterward to all save a few stick-in-the-muds. None of us ever planned on being literal bluestockings, but . . .” She trailed off, smiling ruefully at the memory.

  “Miss Woods implied she was considerably less refined than you.”

  “Oh, she was decisive and clever in a way I’ve never dared to be—all her words were bullets and her sentences cannonballs.” As if seeing the imagery she’d just summoned, Miss Abell stopped with a haunted expression. “I never—”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  I commenced smearing mustard on bread. Oftentimes when people suppose I’m not listening, the listening grows considerably more profitable. My graft is to sit there, scarred and sympathetic, whilst they shovel information like dirt onto a corpse.

  “Sally was . . . I admired her so,” Miss Abell breathed. “Do savvy that I don’t expect you to share my taste in politics. Plenty of good Christian men find they cannot. But whenever a new cause was proposed at the seminary—say, a campaign to defy the postal injunctions against abolitionism, for instance—Sally was the first banging on doors with a pen in her mouth and a sheaf of petitions in her fist, calling, What ho, sisters! Our voices are needed! She once raised the funds to buy a cow, of all things, for a poor farmer’s widow who’d lost hers to a train accident near our school.”

  “Impressive.”

  “I thought so too,” Miss Abell confessed, skin warming marginally at my praise. “She wasn’t like anyone else. And she knew it. And she . . . I honestly don’t think she cared a hairpin. When she’d stay up with me in the common room, her playing mad arpeggios almost as if they bored her and me plodding the chords underneath, I felt nearly as special as she was.”

  Blanks in my canvas filled as Miss Abell spoke. Theirs hadn’t been a shallow camaraderie that would turn cold as soon as the winds did—Sally Woods and Ellie Abell had been bloodless sisters. And that sliced away a thin piece of Miss Abell every time she spoke of her lost friend. Whatever had happened between them, the aftermath had been about as merciful as cholera.

  And I loathed Robert Symmes more with every passing second.

  “After school you came to New York together?”

  “Always together, through hell and high water, when we didn’t remotely understand what either one of those looked like. We were hired at the same time.” She swiped a blot of mustard away from her lip with her forefinger. “At the New American, I mean. We shared digs in a boardinghouse in Hester Street belonging to the manufactory. I still live there. Most of us do.”

  “How did it suit you?”

  “Manufactory work was new to us, but it seemed . . .” A pinch of shame marred her pretty brow. “Oh, to think of it now, how ignorant we were. Glamorous?”

  “A steady graft, your spoils your own—why shouldn’t it have been? None of us are used to molls earning a living wage as you are, not by half.”

  “You’re kind to say so, but we were fools. When Sally and I were friends, we wanted . . .”

  She often paused, I’d noticed, collected stray threads of thought. As if she knew that the slightest misstep would be held against her. That any stray word would render her belief in the rights of women forever invalid, would be hurtled like vitriol in her lovely face.

  “I’ve wanted plentiful untoward things, if it helps,” I offered, chasing corned beef with my roll.

  Ellie Abell’s mouth took on a reluctant expression. Not as if she didn’t want to tell me something—as if she didn’t want to hear it herself, said aloud.

  “I don’t . . . I’ve never thought myself unlucky, you see. My father was a university dean in Massachusetts and my mother a painter of landscapes. They taught me everything that sparked my interest—skills to do with keeping house and skills as impractical as my fancies. But . . . I suppose that Sally and I imagined a place where our time was ours. I don’t mean that in quiet homes filled with their kinchin women don’t find joy. I only . . .”

  All nonchalant patience, I sprinkled coarse salt over a cut of beef.

  “Oh, what’s the use? I can never put this as well as Sally could,” Ellie Abell admitted ruefully. “She used to say to everyone who argued with her, if all the men on earth were forced to work out mathematical equations and never fight tigers . . . you see how it wouldn’t suit some of them?” She pressed her fingers against her temple.

  “Of course. What compelled Miss Woods to fight for higher wages?”

  Miss Abell splayed her fingers on the rough-hewn pine. “She started up talking to Dunla. As if Dunla were some sort of cause and not a person.”

  This was a new piece of the puzzle. “Miss Duffy dropped off her piecework at the manufactory, and Miss Woods . . . what, accosted her?”

  Ellie Abell nodded, worrying at a seam in the pine. “At first she only offered her extra food. Dunla looking that lenten and all. Then Sally started up asking me whether it was fair, and I told her no, of course it isn’t fair, that we could have been in the same straits! But she was desperate and we weren’t, and Sally just . . . Oh, the stupid, stupid girl.”

  I settled my elbows on the tabletop. “Miss Woods spent some time palavering with Miss Duffy. Miss Woods developed some strong opinions. Then your employer entered the picture, and Miss Woods . . . imagined she could kill a pair of birds with a single stone?”

  Ellie Abell nodded miserably.

  “And she kept at it, long after you’d supposed Symmes had no real interest in any cause save his own.”

  “I don’t wish to be ungrateful—I admit it kittles Mr. Symmes to be admired by his underlings, so he’ll grant a wish here or there to puff himself up, ensure loyalty, but he loathes being bossed. I told her it wouldn’t work!” she cried. “But Sally had married herself to the twin notions of having this man she wanted and having a better workplace after Dunla told her she’d recently dined on some trapped rats she roasted over a barrel.”

  “You haven’t told me the important part yet,” I said slowly. “How did the strike end?”

  Miss Abell adjusted her shawl as if it were a chain-mail coat. The shadows in the marketplace had lengthened into bands of flickering torchlight beams and the streaks of darkness between them. Some had begun to eat away at her as the sun abandoned us, turning parts of her hands and torso and face into mere gaps in the gloom.

  Exquisitely carefully, as if she were stitching lace onto a board, Ellie Abell told me a story.

  The strike had commenced on a mockingly splendid late-summer Monday the previous year. The sort that vanishes in a heartbeat, hinting at autumn and tasting of the last overrich berries still clinging to the bushes. Girls massed before the New American to protest, fresh-faced and hopeful.

  Their first day had gone well, save for the glare of Robert Symmes when he arrived, and t
he bitten-off words that he was “far too poor a man to raise the wages of a passel of pigeons.” The second day had gone well save that Symmes broke the ranks of the Bowery girls with a stream of German and Yidisher matrons, marching them into the manufactory to keep churning out trousers for human cattle. The third day had gone well except for the arrival of the out-of-work tailors, many of them union men, who’d started right into catcalls and toxic glares and weighty spitting. The fourth, fifth, and sixth days had gone well excepting the thunderstorms and the fact the tailors had found some tomatoes festering on a shelf before a corner liquor grocery and put them to use against the dissidents’ skirts.

  Then Saturday had dawned, and the strike had been broken by means of hired thuggery and ended. As if this weren’t bad enough, at the close of the day, unlike every other Saturday they’d ever known at the New American Textile Manufactory, no one was paid. And all the while the scissors of the emigrants snick-snick-snickered at them from the open windows above Nassau Street.

  “I can’t think of how Dunla and the other outworkers looked without wanting to cry,” Miss Abell said unsteadily. “Oh, we cutters were hungry enough, but we’d saved money for tea and apples. They . . . they’d nothing to spare. We pooled our chink, gave them what coin we could, and they used it on victuals a dog wouldn’t touch.”

  “I’m shocked Symmes allowed the strike to continue for a full week.”

  “Oh. On Friday the article came out in the New Republican. ‘Rights for Females, Sewing Girls a Busted Flush.’ That . . . well, that more than settled the matter.”

  Something familiar caressed my still-throbbing brains. “Was it written by a Mr. William Wolf?”

  She frowned, surprised. “That it was. Oh, I’m sure he meant it to be fair—I mean, he seemed genteel enough, and I was quoted to good effect, Sally too, but then . . . he talked with Dunla for another perspective on female rights, and oh, imagine it.”

  “She sounded a hair shy of sensible?”

  “You could say that. Mr. Symmes was hot enough to explode when it came out in the late edition. Said we’d gone and made him a public laughingstock. I think previous to that, our small efforts had amused him, but then . . . It was over the next day. Men were standing there with brickbats when we arrived with our picketing signs. Some of them I recognized as copper stars without their pins. That . . . surprised me.”