by Lyndsay Faye
Timothy Wilde, Star 107, I signed the report ten minutes later.
I returned the pen to its stand. For a moment I listened to the ticking of the gilded grandfather clock in the corner, stretching my right hand backward with my left. Then a pheasant carcass scavenged from a restaurant’s rubbish bin crossed my mind. Unripe apples, tea made from mint weeds and lemon rinds, tomatoes stolen from a churchyard.
Breath faltering, I folded my arms and placed my head on them, and I stayed there. A small man slumped across a large desk in the middle of Tammany. For far longer than I like to recall.
16
We are many in the city
Who the weary needle ply;
None to aid and few to pity
Tho’ we sicken down and die;
But ’tis work, work away
By night and by day;
Oh, ’tis work, work away,
We’ve no time to pray.
—NED BUNTLINE, “THE SEWING GIRL’S SONG,” MYSTERIES AND MISERIES OF NEW YORK
I WAS FORCED TO POST notes to my colleagues at the Tombs the following morning indicating that I’d be missing our scheduled parley. Not because I didn’t need to see them but because Mercy Underhill doesn’t generally slip unfolded sheets of foolscap without any envelopes under Mrs. Boehm’s front door reading:
I would like to speak with you. If it’s nothing then it’ll come to nothing as everything else does in its due time but if it isn’t nothing you’ll want to know about it even though one day it will fade just the same. Meet me at my lodgings for breakfast. No one will think anything of it I assure you and anyhow there’s nothing to think exactly is there and the best kippers and toast I find are to be had at nine o’clock, God not having granted our proprietress the gift of early rising.
—Mercy
I’d descended the stairs at seven in the morning on April 26, freshly shaved and washed, to find Elena Boehm seated at the ever flour-grainy and butter-smeared table. No matter how many times a day she scrubs that piece of furnishing, it’s always blessed by her most recent culinary effort. I’ve never minded it. The kitchen table smells comfortable, in a way nothing else does.
Elena was making a list. I’ve always liked that she’s left-handed, though I’ve no idea why. Well, I’ve a hint of one, perhaps. It indicates she isn’t a normal person, which makes me that much more easy in her presence.
“She still sounds not very well, your friend,” Elena said hesitantly. After I’d gawked like a looby for ten or twelve seconds too long at Mercy’s note. I couldn’t blame her for reading the thing—it wasn’t even folded in half.
“She was better, before . . . Just recently, I mean.”
It sounded a miserable protest even to my own ears. Elena squeezed my wrist and went back to jotting down items.
“For dinner. Tonight. Forgot, maybe?” she asked without inflection.
“God no.” I dragged myself from the mire of my thoughts. “Bird is coming over for dinner. If she still agrees, mind. She thought I said something terrible to her yesterday.”
My landlady waited for me to elaborate. Arms crossed, fingers latched tight over her blue dress sleeves and her strangely colorless eyes pinned to my wreck of a face. I elaborated.
“Ach!” she exclaimed fondly, creasing her wide brow. “The poor thing. No, no—don’t think that. It might have been clumsy, but not ever would I suppose that you would think of such untruths, let alone speak them to Bird. You will fix this between the two of you. Bring some things back for dinner?”
“Of course. Which things?”
“A leg of mutton,” she said, noting the request with a check mark on her slip of paper. “For the hash. If you can find any fresh parsley, that I would like. I have the dried mushroom powder for roasting. Wine we have, in the pantry. Maybe please some fresh butter? We are low on butter.”
“Butter, parsley, leg of mutton. That’s all we need?”
“Would not that be a rare blessing.”
I smiled. “Anything else?”
She shook her head, wordless.
Something undisguised about her face struck me just then. I realized that never, not a single time in my life with her, had Mrs. Boehm deemed me unworthy of her secrets. On every occasion I’d asked after them, she’d answered me. Hesitant, maybe. But ultimately unguarded. And I understood that her explanations had been caresses, her confessions intimacies. Despite the fact I’d scarcely told her anything, unless I was unspooling like a skein of blood-red ribbon. It ached, when I saw it plain, in a part of me I hadn’t known was dedicated to Elena at all. She’d said that people mark each other, and I owned by happy accident a stunning collection of Mrs. Boehm’s anecdotes. Meanwhile, I’d never so much as wondered if she wanted to know where I’d been born.
“I want you to know everything, but I keep it from you because I don’t want you to be frightened,” I said all in a rush.
“Why on earth would I be frightened?” she replied, surprised.
“You think I don’t like talking to people, talking to you, but it isn’t that.”
“But you don’t like talking to people,” she said softly. “People tell you too much. And then you walk away from them with a full mouth and closed lips.”
She was right. But she was also mistaken.
“I’m not talking about people, I’m talking about you. My life is very ugly. I don’t want you to be frightened. Not ever, and especially not due to my needing someone to listen to me because I’m already afraid.”
I’d her face in my hands before I knew what I was doing, and her jaw lifted for my mouth, and then I was tasting vanilla, cinnamon, all along the edge of her throat and only hoping that the things I did and the truly stupid things my brother did would lead her to no harm.
She took me by the throat with the flat of her palm and pushed me back. In a friendly manner, smiling. Nothing but warmth in her pale eyes and amusement lifting her pronounced cheeks.
“You like being told to buy fresh parsley,” she conjectured. “Or maybe you like me not to be worried?”
“The latter,” I said at once, trying to press my nose back into her neck. The act on my part wasn’t studied, nor even driven by romantic inclinations. When I think about it, it was affection. A simple thing, the simplest, affection.
Or shouldn’t it be?
“You go now,” Elena said, laughing as she put her arms around me. “You go to this Miss Underhill and see what it is she means to say.”
“All right,” I sighed against her neck.
Then I let her go. Elena tucked a wisp of hair about the density of a spider’s web behind her ear, waving her hand in a comradely farewell. We couldn’t have known what would happen that night, read the future in the flour grains on her table. But it’s been years since April 26 of 1848, so many years, and when I think about what I ought to have done differently, among all my great errors I nevertheless remember that wave, and that I ought to have kissed her before the gentle creak of the door and the thud of my boots in the dirt marked my departure from what had been—for all its many singular silences—a happy home.
—
Half an hour later, after leaving an apologetic note to Piest, Connell, and Kildare tacked to my office door, I was seated at a low bench in the public dining space of Mercy’s lodging house. It was a longish kitchen, really. A normal one, strung up with neatly braided garlic and onions, flour stacked in the corners. Except that the farthest wall, where not hung with cast-iron pans, was littered with pinned-up theatrical notices on corkboard—calls for actors, playbills, congratulatory notes, flyers as raucous as Tammany propaganda tacked helter-skelter above the cutlery.
As was decidedly not the case with Party publicity, it made for a nice effect, I thought.
The room was done in simple blue and white tiles that made one think of sharing a fresh crust or pouring a beer fo
r a friend. I’d expected the lateness of the designated nine-o’clock hour to mean we would monopolize the meal hall. But a space was warmed by the dwarf at the far corner of the dining bench—Kindling, I recalled—and the waifish blonde with the perfectly rounded-off lips sat across from him. When I entered with Mercy, they waved quite unabashedly, then started up a quiet symphony of whispers and giggles over bowls of hot porridge. It would have been charming had I not known dead to rights the gossip was about me.
“We help ourselves over breakfast, though luncheon and dinner are served to us,” Mercy said as she and I collected plates and toast and preserves and some admittedly handsome kippers that lay in a skillet. A carafe of coffee rested on the table, and we sat on either side of it. “I admit, I much prefer it so. Papa and I always did for ourselves or each other, and when I was in London, I supped with my cousin. You can trust cousins, the food they pass you. Here I feel such a stranger that something always looks wrong about meals, the colors and such, though I don’t suppose it’s very lucrative policy to poison one’s lodgers. Is it?” she added anxiously.
Mercy wore a light off-the-shoulder day dress of black-and-white-checked cotton—it was neatly pressed, and the wide band of salmon-colored ribbon she’d passed through her thick black hair was artfully done. But her skin was pale enough to be faintly blue, and she’d been gnawing at her underlip to the point of leaving it raw. I remembered how she’d looked left in an ice bath to freeze to death by her paranoid lunatic of a father and fought the urge to take her heart-shaped face in my two hands and kiss her back to health.
“No.” I poured us both cups of steaming coffee. “Though if you want, I’ll come over every mealtime and taste your plate for safety.”
Idiot, I thought when she smiled knowingly.
“Would you?” She stopped, brows pinching together as if she’d hurt herself. “I’m sorry. You so seldom say to me all of what you mean. It’s just . . . fragments, you see, smashed eggshells and broken teacups. So I formed the habit of questioning you further. But you needn’t answer that. I’ve always wondered if death by poison is painless or if it burns from the inside, little rivulets eating through your bloodstream until you’re hollow. If it were peaceful, like going to sleep, I’d not mind the idea so.”
A distant, unrelated titter from the dwarf followed by, “Oh, you naughty thing,” from the actress filled the silence as I absorbed this harrowing sentiment.
Mercy has always been morbid. Always. She’d once, for Light and Shade in the Streets of New York, written a short story about an emigrant mother whose child was starving, who’d served her boy black pudding as a last gift before dying. The source of the blood for the black pudding was never explicitly stated, but the doctor upon declaring the poor woman dead remarked how clumsy she’d grown in her last illness, with so many bandaged cuts on her arms.
But this was different. The empty way Mercy’s hands rested before her, palms-up on the table, fingers softly curved in over nothing at all.
Your father died by his own hand. He’d been broken by the weight of the world, and that is not allowed to happen to you, never to you, you are precious and living and—
“Anyhow,” she said, as if continuing a conversation, “I’ve been thinking. And talking with Dunla. That’s why I sent a street boy with the note before dawn.”
“You sounded distressed,” I hazarded.
“Did I? I can’t . . . It was a dewdrops-on-spider’s-silk sort of morning. Eerie. I can never remember those very well after they’ve passed over. Distressed, you say?”
“There was rather a lot of talk of nothing.”
“Oh!” She sipped her coffee, seeming much relieved. “I was reading Shakespeare last night. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ you know the speech. It must have gotten stuck. That happens at times now. I couldn’t get rid of the voice in my head reading ‘Now that the wind and earth and sky are silent’ for over a week once, though it was Chaucer reading me his translation and not Petrarch himself.”
Smiling, she fell quiet.
It was hardly comforting. But it was in line with her usual daylight madness, so I commenced breathing again. “How are you getting on with Miss Duffy?”
“Very well. She is fourteen, I’ve discovered, and hasn’t a soul left to her in the world. And she’s perfectly sensible once you come to know her, though I admit she owns a peculiar turn of phrase. She’s a bit like buying the yearly almanac and opening it to discover it’s only rather exotic illustrations and no prose to speak of. Eat your breakfast—it’s quite the safest meal, as I said.”
Only you, I surmised as I sampled a kipper, would call Dunla Duffy sensible and then describe her as a pictorial almanac.
“Here’s five dollars, by the way,” I said, remembering. Dipping inside my frock coat, I passed her the notes. “Courtesy of the star police, since I’m sure you didn’t expect a new bunkmate.”
She frowned. “Don’t you recall I’ve money of my own now?”
“That doesn’t mean you signed up for a half-simple Irish sewing girl.”
“You know full well I’ve always done charity work for the Irish. Anyway, I like her. She’s seen unspeakably ugly things and still doesn’t care for ugliness.”
“You’re right. But I’m in dire need of some answers.”
“And thus you need fresh Pell Street sources, I suppose?” Mercy dipped a knife into the butter pot and spread it delicately over her toast. It was such an ordinary action, so akin to the sort I wanted to share with her endlessly, it seemed of enormous importance. “Sources who may have seen something unusual and can phrase such things rather more prosaically?”
“Just so.”
“That’s why we are finding the Witch.”
I paused with my fork midway to my mouth. “The woman whose light Miss Duffy was so ketched over stealing?”
Mercy nodded. “At first I thought it a fruitless corridor to venture down, but she looms so powerfully in Dunla’s head that I can’t help feeling we’re being led to her by some force. And of course the rest of the residents have scattered, but since, as Dunla says, witches quite naturally are to be found in their towers with their cauldrons, she’ll be easily discovered.”
Swallowing my toast presented fresh challenges of a sudden.
“Timothy?” Mercy’s lips pursed.
“Do you really . . . think she’s that sort of witch?”
“Of course. Dunla told me so.”
“Yes,” I said. The word somehow acquired additional syllables.
“Oh, here she is herself!” Mercy exclaimed. “The poor thing, now she is allowed a little sleep, I can never bear to wake her. Dunla, dear, come sit with us after you’ve filled your plate and explain to Mr. Wilde about the witches.”
And please, in the process, assure me that the love of my life isn’t insane, I begged some faceless deity as the sewing girl scouted the buffet.
Miss Duffy sat down, weirdly round eyes pinned to her plate. She’d taken several kippers and three pieces of toast that were now as much piles of berry preserves as they were bread. It struck me with a little jab twixt my ribs as a melancholy business, that she’d so seldom had access to such things. Not to mention the fact she was likely as much preparing for the grim future after she left Mercy’s rooms as she was making up for lost meals.
“What about the witches?” she asked with a rather large amount of toast—or preserves, rather—in her mouth.
“You were afraid of the Witch because the other girls said she was mad, granted. But why else were you afraid of her?”
“Oh, sure enough because o’ the spells she were after a-casting within the tower.” Morning light glinted from the odd mossy-copper braids Miss Duffy had worked into a small bun atop her head.
I confess that this explanation did little to aid my understanding.
Mercy’s eyes were twinkling. “Why
don’t you tell us exactly what that looked like, as you told me yesterday?”
Miss Duffy, between bites, explained in her peat-thick Irish brogue that when she’d first arrived in Manhattan six months previous, staggering into the New World like a shipwreck victim, she’d been greeted by an Irishman at the docks. My neck prickled instantly, but this greeter was no Ronan McGlynn. It was instead a member of the Irish Emigrant Society, which has for a few years now sought to lessen if only by needle-thin degrees the barbarity of our welcoming system—and by welcoming system I mean the process of ships spewing newcomers from the whale’s belly to fend for themselves. The Society fellow (she couldn’t recall his name but believed he was an angel in disguise) took Miss Duffy to his offices in Ann Street after asking where her kin were and what her plans might be and discovering her slate blank on both counts.
And anyway, after he’d spoken with you, he knew you for a loose-limbed lamb on the slaughterhouse floor, I thought, silently thanking the anonymous gentleman.
Upon arriving at the Irish Emigrant Society, Dunla Duffy was given a bowl of barley broth containing “sure enough real beef and turnips” and a map of the city. As she ate, she was taught that St. Patrick’s Cathedral was on the corner of Prince and Mott and made to memorize the address lest she need help. She was told not to bother seeking assistance at Protestant churches (Mercy’s cleft chin twitched in familiar repulsion at this). She was admonished that the only respectable trades for Irish girls included sewing, servitude, or—if she was very lucky and personable and quick—serving food in a Catholic-friendly eating house. She was to ask the literate to read employment notices to her from the Herald. The cheapest of desperate housing could be found in Ward Six, but there was one address she was to “avoid at all costs as a churchgoer, as it was sinful and perilous.” Miss Duffy’s savior described it to her.
“And when first I passed by the place, I found he were ne’er slaggin’ me neither, fer all the witches live there and huddle over their cauldrons, sure enough,” Miss Duffy whispered. “I saw them through the entrance, whenever I dared t’ pass it by. But I were that dead on me feet sometimes, so’s I had to go through the square or faint dead away, and then ye can’t help but see the tower and the hell flames. The door bein’ always open and all. The Witch lived there afore Pell Street. I saw her specific-like.”
