The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  “I’d rather you not come tomorrow, Mr. Wilde,” she answered, quickening her pace back in the direction of the Catholic orphanage and whatever lessons and lectures she’d have to endure that afternoon with a fresh-broken heart.

  My hands were shaking, I discovered as I watched her disappear into the school. Pulse going like a spooked tomcat’s.

  I got to my feet, returned my hat to my head. Started walking. Since I was on Prince and Mott, my boots steered me straight for the Knickerbocker 21.

  There was a day I’d never have dreamed of walking toward Valentine Wilde when facing a crisis. But this was a different sort of Thursday, the worst Thursday I could have passed in a year of Thursdays, and my brother is always at his engine house on Thursdays, and he might be the debauched king of the dead rabbits, but he’s also fond of Bird and brutally honest when I need him to be.

  So I plunged into placid Ward Eight.

  Distantly, as if I were peering at a careful model replica of the world, I noted that my brother’s ward was plastered with political posters. That was typical—we’d an election May 1, and anyway, slogans of yesteryear keek through rips in today’s pet mottoes as if the Democrats and the Whigs had combined forces to spread a brightly scaling rash over Manhattan’s skin. We locals scarcely saw them. That is, until I encountered a matched pair of broadsides pasted in the window of a coffee shop skittishly attempting to maintain political neutrality, and I stopped in my tracks.

  On the right was a newly printed woodcut of Alderman Symmes. His handsome features and elegant moustache had been elongated to make him look smugly devilish. The text, printed in at least six different fonts of howling capitals, read:

  IS THIS THE FACE OF PROGRESS?

  ROBERT SYMMES, TEXTILE TYCOON, HAS BEEN FOR FIVE YEARS

  ALDERMAN OF WARD EIGHT

  HAS HE DONE RIGHT BY YOU?

  ARE PITTANCE WAGES & CRUMBLING BOARDINGHOUSES PROGRESS?

  VOTE FOR

  VALENTINE WILDE

  WARD BOSS, POLICE CAPTAIN, SENIOR KNICKERBOCKER 21 ENGINEMAN

  AND SPIT IN THE EYE OF HUNKER OPPRESSION

  Adjacent was another portrait, this one of Val. His arched hairline curved into a villain’s peak, still-boyish face cruel as a schoolyard bully’s, the ever-present sacks beneath his eyes etched in malicious smears.

  DEMOCRATIC PARTY INSIDER

  OR . . . TRAITOR TO TAMMANY?

  VALENTINE WILDE—FOR YEARS THE VERY FACE OF:

  CORRUPTION, INSIDE DEALMAKING, GRAFT, AND NEPOTISM!

  NOW MAKES A BID FOR ALDERMAN GUARANTEED TO TEAR APART THE HEART AND SOUL OF WARD EIGHT

  VOTE FOR YOUR LOYAL SERVANT

  ALDERMAN ROBERT SYMMES

  AND TAKE A STAND AGAINST DANGEROUS BARNBURNER RADICALISM

  It was tamer than it could have been. It didn’t say anything about nigger-lovers or sodomites.

  Nevertheless.

  I set off walking again. The posters were thoroughly disquieting, I grant. But I was so splintered by then I scarce noticed the new worriment—as if a penny had been added to the Tammany coffers or a cup of water poured into the Hudson.

  A rich whiff of smoke met my nostrils, and I looked up.

  Someplace a few blocks away from me, black soot and white steam poured into the air, gushing like blood from a wound.

  For a moment I stood frozen in place.

  There are accidental fires in New York every single day, I thought. This is only another.

  Breaking into a run, I discovered that I hadn’t been listening. Hadn’t heard the tender hissing, the distant crackle like a sweet caress over satin. Nor the mildly clanging bells and the gentle shrieks of whistles. Men’s faint, faraway shouts.

  Whereas I’d not been meditating direct on my brother seconds previous, the combination of Ward Eight and fire was enough to deluge my entire brain with the scoundrel. When I veered south on Spring, the crescendoing half-thrilled, half-terrified hubbub told me I was nearly there. A final quick left on Washington landed me in the midst of the chaos.

  The fire was out, it seemed. Mostly. The structure was in a row of low, mean, unkempt lodging houses. Adjacent to the briny western slips where seafarers quit their creaking boats to find cheap temporary digs and cheaper temporary company. The building was still alive, however. Hissing and spitting and steaming, expelling wet smoke and hot ash like snowflakes. A monster taking its last spittle-choked breaths before shuddering to sleep.

  A smell lingered, something meaner than smoke. Something leering. It crept down the throat syrup-slow.

  But worse—or potentially worse—two engine companies stood before the grim wreck.

  One, I saw when I careened to a halt, was Neptune Engine Number 9. Drake Todd stood at the helm of his machine, red fireman’s shirt soaked, his hawkish face and the long silvery scar beside his eye making him resemble nothing so much as a pirate at the helm of his ship.

  Opposite him—apparently just having arrived to discover a rival fire gang and smoking rubble instead of a fire—stood my brother before his own perfectly polished engine. He was flanked by his volunteer firedogs, their ropy hands fisted on hips or lightly slung over the axes in their belts, braces cinched tight over pugilistic shoulders. Puzzling whether the Neptune 9 crew might be in the market for some friendly smashing.

  “Do you pack of scamp-foots mind telling me what in the name of the devil’s red arse you’re doing here?” Valentine snarled.

  My brother looked terrible.

  Not the way Valentine looks terrible before noon as the morphine sweats out of him, skin grey and slick as if he’s made of river clay. And not the way he looks terrible when he’s in altitudes on the godless substance, glassy green eyes sharp as broken bottles and laughing as if he has a spear in his side. This was a version of terrible I’d not seen in years. He held his weighted cane cocked over one shoulder, always a weapon if also a crutch when the wretch can’t see straight, opposite hand planted arrogantly on his hip. But a tremor below his left eye jumped erratically, his mouth seemed parched at the corners, and the face that normally tempers flinty anger with a gleam of irony didn’t seem remotely amused. It was a moonless-midnight expression, one that frightened me.

  “What am I doing here? Well, strike me dead if Valentine Wilde himself didn’t just ask a stupid question.” Todd sounded wearied by his fire-dousing efforts but otherwise unmoved. “Is that building just there smoldering, and am I wearing a red shirt?”

  The Neptune men not occupied with spraying down the remnants of a furnace chuckled. The Knickerbocker men cast placid smiles at one another. The breed of smile meaning, While we are not amused by the previous jest, the odds of knocking some teeth to the cobbles seem to be pleasantly increasing.

  Val swung his stick down and used it to take a step or two forward, his lips curling.

  “Pardon, let me rephrase that question,” he offered in the sugary tone that meant things were about to go very, very wrong. “Do you pack of scamp-foots mind telling me what in the name of the devil’s red arse you’re doing here when your engine house is in Ward Two, and how in burning blazes you got here so quick-footed, and why in holy hell that building looks to me as if it was torched deliberate-like?”

  Catching a brass rail, Drake Todd swung down from the engine, on a level with Valentine. He wasn’t nearly so tall—no one is—but his bowlegged swagger and the countless scars on his knuckles were enough to bode ill.

  “It looks like a deliberate torch job because it is one.” He spat on the ground—not directly at my brother, thankfully, which would have been a cardinal mistake. “White phosphorus planted all through the place. Never saw clearer signs of an incendiary.”

  “Sick son of a bitch,” Val mentioned coldly. It sounded both rote and meaningful, as if it were the amen at the end of a prayer.

  “Sick son of a bitch,” Todd intoned. “Though f
rom what I hear, ‘sick bitch’ is more likely. You savvy whose building this is, I take it?”

  Unable to remain in the shadows, watery knees or no, I sidled up behind my brother. His cronies nodded at me, as did Todd. Val turned, and the brows above his haggard eyes knotted in confusion.

  “I was heading for the Knickerbocker and saw the commotion,” I explained. “You look like a warmish stiff.”

  “And you look like a stunted puppy with a face fit to turn milk into cheese,” he snapped.

  A force beyond my control drew me back an inch or two. Several of the Knickerbocker men muttered under their breath, and one made a few trilling sounds like the ironic chirping of crickets. It was apt enough. No one was laughing.

  I swallowed whatever had risen in the back of my throat, which felt like it could have been my spleen.

  Val and I have always fought like wildcats. Before I hated him, when I was a kinchin and thought him a king. All the long while I hated him, when I thought him senselessly malicious. After I’d stopped hating him and knew him for courageous and shattered and vicious and steadfast. And I can’t remember a time, whether in the honeysuckle meadows of Greenwich Village or sleeping in a turned-over skip, when he hasn’t mocked me for my scrawny size. Often it’s couched in bizarrely complimentary insults along the lines of That’s my brother—built like a Pygmy, but that lad could have you flat on the ground before you so much as saw him make a fist. So miniature idiot or fluff-brained little dandelion or even the memorable thimbleful of shit wouldn’t have even merited a blink on my part.

  My face, though. My face is a wound that looks healed over but isn’t. And Val never rags me over that. Oh, he’ll suggest, If you keep rubbing at your face like you’re kneading dough, I’m putting your pate in my oven or How you think you draw less attention to a scar by twisting it like a bloody wine cork I will never understand.

  But those remarks—crude as they are—stem from the fact he seems to hate that I hate the disfigurement. As if I were rabbit enough to fly it like a battle standard.

  I’m not.

  Something that could almost have been consternation tightened my brother’s square jaw.

  All at once he turned back to Todd.

  “White phosphorus, you say,” he resumed. “Casualties?”

  Forcing air from my lungs, I reminded myself that I could always break my brother’s nose after the present conversation had concluded. And held my tongue.

  “Aye, white phosphorus,” Todd allowed. “Nary a death this time, we were that quick about it, and the second and third floors unlivable. Actually impossible to live in, if you take my meaning, not a cellar with shit seeping through the walls. The flooring had rotted clean through, kept falling on the heads of the residents. Archie! Share and share alike with Timothy Wilde, as he’s taken an interest.”

  Todd’s friend Archie Vanderpool, soot-smeared and sweating like the heavily muscled hog he was, approached us. He passed me an open cigar box, angling a disgusted glare at Valentine. I wondered why. But I was livid enough with my sibling to take the object myself and pretend with a will renewed that the smell wasn’t making me nauseous. Nestled within the cheap pine receptacle was a chunk of spent fuel, yet smoking, the source of the evil white smoke. It had reddened the eyes of all present, turning already aggressive men to scarlet-gazed demons.

  “I take it this is energetic material,” I said.

  Ordinarily my brother would have jeered at me for not knowing. But he only peered downward. “Phosphorus, all right.”

  “And this building belongs to Alderman Symmes, I assume.”

  “Of course it belongs to Symmes,” Valentine grated out, drifting a bit sideways but steadying himself with his cane. “What I still want to know is what the Neptune Nine boys are doing here.”

  “They put out the Pell Street fire too.” I glanced at Val as the memory stirred. The too-beautiful engine in the midst of my ward’s catholic—and I mean that in both the religious and in the adjective senses—squalor. “That’s Ward Six.”

  As if it were possible, Valentine’s scowl deepened. “Are you Neptune coves tired of Ward Two? Can’t say as I blame you, manufactories popping up like mushrooms—it would leave me in tears.”

  My mind tied itself into a truly painful knot. Picking over details as a miner sifts for gold, I recalled our initial meeting with Todd and Vanderpool, and Mr. Piest’s preamble explaining our presence.

  It seems that the building’s owner has been the target of scurrilous threats, he’d reported.

  Threatening letters, you said? Vanderpool had questioned minutes later.

  Only Mr. Piest hadn’t said anything about letters at all.

  “Someone warned you this building was specifically at risk,” I realized. “Now. Today.”

  Drake Todd tipped his head readily. “In the flesh, at our engine house.”

  “Who turned stag?”

  Todd mulled it over in the careful manner I generally associate with reluctant truth-telling. “Never left a name, said Symmes shared his dustier mail with her and she was there on his say-so. Good meat on her, pale brown hair, very comely.”

  My blood froze.

  “Surname of Abell?”

  “Maybe so,” Archie Vanderpool demurred. “Seemed a good girl, for my money. That’s twice she’s tipped us—put us onto the Pell Street blaze as well. Symmes told us in person to treat whatever she said as gospel.”

  I ought to have expected it. Supposing Miss Woods owned even the residue of a conscience, she wouldn’t have wanted the city entire to burn for her cause. She’d have given fair warning. And Miss Abell had all but confessed to me she was further involved.

  When Mr. Symmes showed me the note about setting outworkers afire, I thought of Dunla at once. He agreed Pell Street may well be at risk, so I did all I could.

  And yet I hadn’t expected it. Even Val, who’s never surprised, blinked owlishly at the rival gang.

  “Miss Woods sends Symmes notice a hairsbreadth too late to stop her,” I understood, “and he’s arranged for you to race to whichever property was targeted.”

  “Pays us fair chink for it too. As if dousing stirs weren’t our honor-bound duty. Supposing some firemen aren’t fit for the job, it’s the lot of the rest to take their place,” Todd finished.

  A grim, grainy silence fell. It was punctuated by the American natives and Tammany Irishmen of Val’s fire company edging forward. Jack, a fair-haired friend of my brother’s with gaps in his mouth like missing fence posts and a pair of gold front teeth, grinned as he advanced. Others contented themselves with gleeful cracking of knuckles and the donning of brass ones.

  Valentine tapped the pearly head of his cane against his palm. It’s the least often employed and least subtle of the motions he uses to threaten people with the thing. And therefore the most distressing.

  “Our engine house is within buggering spitting distance of this wreck. Explain fit for the job, if you please,” Valentine hissed.

  The Neptune 9 men had begun similarly massing. Leaving the last of the spraying hoses and tugging closed the gushing Croton pumps. Sensing atmospheric violence crackling, the way bats can see in the dark.

  Drake Todd’s wickedly slim lips quirked. “It’s no wonder you can’t savvy the good the manufactories have done, Captain. Ward Eight didn’t burn in the ’Forty-five fire. Ward Eight wasn’t a trash heap and us the men what cleared it.”

  My brother took a furious step forward as I caught his elbow. He shook me off as if I were a scrap of lint.

  “You’re taking the snuff,” he seethed. “I walked into five sodding blazes on Broad Street and dragged eighteen people out of them, shoveled rubble and ash and baked body parts into barrows the same as the goddamn best of you.”

  I know what my brother does. And I know why he does it. But it splintered me yet further, the actual hearing him tell i
t.

  “Did you rebuild your own ward after you’d tidied it?” Todd growled. “I did. I did, and so did Robert Symmes, and so did all the other tycoons who turned right around and kept building. If you want to fault my loyalties, you can sod straight the fuck off.”

  “Oh, loyalties, my apologies. Just post me, is this a political conversation?” Val crooned. “Or a personal one?”

  Todd’s entire body coiled like a furious bowstring. “The businessmen of this town keep the whole bloody clockwork oiled, and you cheddar-brained Barnburners are going to shove a wrench straight in the works with your goddamned principles. Who gives a shit about slavery when New York can’t even feed itself?”

  “I funnel more chink toward my voters through Tammany-appointed jobs in a week than Symmes pulls out of his arse for his manufactory wenches in a year.” Val’s eyes narrowed into brilliantly sparking slits.

  Todd merely spread his feet wider. “You’re looking at a Hunker firehouse, and the more jobs at any pay the better when people rot to death on street corners. But that’s neither here nor there. Obviously, I’ll man up when the closest engine house refuses to put out fires if the buildings are owned by Symmes.”

  My brother found himself at a loss for words. It was like watching an alley cat botch a landing—unnatural and vaguely embarrassing for the onlooker. He just stood there, staring with leaden pistol-shot irises. The rest of the Knickerbocker 21 seemed similarly winded.

  “When the what?” I spluttered on everyone’s behalf.

  “You heard me,” Todd scoffed. “These snakes won’t touch a Symmes building. Look who their bloody delusional captain is—it’s on his orders, no less.”

  It wasn’t true. I didn’t even have to ask. My brother would as soon leave a fire unchecked as he’d overcook a lamb chop.

  “That is the biggest hummer I have ever heard. My ears are bleeding,” Val snarled, swaying like a sapling in a thunderstorm. “Of course I never—”

  “You did, and any man who disavows protection over certain buildings for his own ends is a disgrace. I’d not waste my own spit in the eye of such a purblind coward as that.” Casually, as if donning a scarf, Todd slid a set of brass knuckles over his fingers. His interests weren’t merely mercenary—he’d actually swallowed what he’d been fed.