The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  “Won’t you sit down for a cuppa?”

  “Oh, stop, the lot o’ you, they dasn’t mean no harm.”

  “Buy a bloody ticket, there’s a sporting girl.”

  “Are we meant to appreciate you realize we’re working?”

  “And more to the point,” the Witch continued, nodding her head, “why should I feel any better about her staring at me than I should about a reporter here to make a dollar off my life story?”

  “I didn’t go to finishing school, and the difference is payment,” Mercy replied evenly. “If you’ll speak with us, I’ll give you this lantern my friend is holding.”

  Everyone froze. Me especially.

  “We’re not—”

  “People live here, Timothy.” Mercy was quiet but radiating force—a white coal at the still center of the hearth. “We can exit a building without a lantern. What say you, madam?”

  The Witch’s eyes had fixed ravenously on the lantern, as if the object were real victuals. The rest of the girls hadn’t stopped sewing, not for a moment, never dropped a stitch for me or for Mercy’s sake.

  “Ask your questions,” the Witch said.

  Then she drew out a longish carving knife.

  “And if you don’t leave the lantern afterward, I’ll make your face look like your beau’s.”

  Miss Duffy was right to be frightened, I realized, flexing my hand.

  “How long had you lived at Pell Street when the fire broke out?” Mercy asked.

  The tongue appeared again, thrusting between the Witch’s lips as if she were a lizard. “A month, maybe more.”

  “Did you do outwork for Symmes or just live in his building?” I questioned.

  “Both. He’s a man of importance. I’d call him ‘Alderman’ if I were you sorry lot.”

  “How did you come to know him personally?”

  “Never said I knew him,” she scoffed. “That doesn’t mean I’m witless enough not to know he owns half the city. I work for him. Lived in Pell Street, before it burned. That’s the whole story, Copper Star one-oh-seven.”

  “Did you take part in the strike last year?”

  “Do I look simpleminded to you?”

  “No. But the organizers were hardly simpleminded either.”

  The same laugh erupted, slicing through the stench. “You think not?” the Witch hissed. “You think that women who defy power are smart? I’ll tell you about how smart I was once, so you can kiss my arse and get out of my office. Would that tie a pretty little bow on your outing? Since you’re leaving the lantern, you ought to get your money’s worth.”

  “We’d like to learn all you’re willing to tell us.”

  “I was a maid once.” The Witch arrowed her eyes at Mercy. “Was I a pretentious, guilt-ridden, coddled smear of dung like you? I was not. Could I say no to the master of the house? Yes. But I didn’t want to—I supposed he’d throw over his wife for me, you see. Does that sound smart to you? So eventually my belly swells and I’m chucked out after the master blames one of the groomsmen for my trouble. Do you know what’s funny about that?”

  We said nothing. I shook my head.

  “It’s funny because I lost this game once. And ever since, I’ve been winning, because I’m not stupid enough to ask the world to revolve in the other direction. I left the baby at the door of a church. I worked at tailoring fashionable undergarments for years. When I lost that job, I kept on as an embroidery specialist. When the detailing dried up, I started outwork hemming. I won’t outlive every last person who spat on me,” the Witch concluded. “But I will spit on them, I will spit on you, until my corpse is dropped in an unmarked hole.”

  Murmurs of approval filled the room and flew, like a horde of stinging insects, out the open window.

  “When you lived in Pell Street,” I said, at every kind of loss, “did you notice anyone suspicious?”

  “No one. Not a single person.”

  I balked at this certainty. “You sound pretty sure.”

  “I am pretty sure, you oaf. I lived in the downstairs front room, and how many hours of sleep per night do you think I allow myself? The answer is three, and I sleep light anyhow.”

  “None of the cutters ever paid a call?”

  “What business would that pack of uppity hens have visiting us? You suppose we’d tea cakes to offer?”

  This was troubling. Sally Woods could, admittedly, have somehow planted the phosphorus months earlier—but the odds were against it, to my mind. Too much risk of its being discovered, too much time spent between planning a heinous act of vengeance and setting it alight. A week or two, I figured, would be the longest gamble she’d have countenanced.

  We were getting nowhere at admirable speed. So in a last-ditch effort, I asked, “Have you any information that might help us find the person who burned down your home?”

  The Witch stopped sewing. Her eyes lifted. They cut right through a man, sliced the meat from his bones and left him there to bleed.

  “My home?” she spat. “My home, the fellow says. If that was a home, I’m the belle of the ball. Christ, get out of my sight, the pair of you. I didn’t think it could get any worse in here. I was wrong.”

  Aching with disappointment, I stepped forward and set the lantern down. The Witch cackled in glee and dragged the bull’s-eye closer, as if it had been a treasure chest.

  “What are the candles made out of?” Mercy asked as we went to the door.

  “Turned animal fat, the sort that’s well past eating.” The Witch flicked her eyes up at us. “Why, you want a sip? Jesus, if I could send all so-called reformers to Liberia instead of the Africans, I could maybe die with a smile on my face.”

  Leaving that abyss was a nerve-wracking feat. For all the hugeness of the space, the sounds of countless people waiting to die made it seem as if the walls were closing in. It probably took us three minutes, stepping carefully, moving faster as our eyes adjusted. It felt like a lifetime, though. And when we’d made it through the front door, still blessedly hand in hand, we gasped the marginally fresher atmosphere as if we’d come up from the depths of an inky ocean.

  Mercy pulled away and, with her back to me, retrieved a small kerchief from the pocket of her black-and-white day dress. Tugging at her elbow didn’t work, so I stepped around her. She’d nearly dried her eyes by then, but a single track remained, and I wiped it away with my fingertips. She smiled shakily.

  “Were you frightened?” I asked.

  “Yes, but . . . that’s not what I . . .” She bit her lower lip, hard enough to hurt. “She was wrong, in a way. About me. But I wish . . . I wish she hadn’t also been right.”

  “No.” I cupped my other palm to her face, willing her to look at me. “She was wrong. About every single word.”

  “How can you be certain?” she asked, fresh tears welling into blue pools.

  “Because I know you.”

  You don’t remember, I didn’t say, when you were thirteen and you lent me a little green chapbook of poems you’d written, poems you wanted back when I was through, and you don’t know that whilst you were at church, I sat at your father’s desk and stole his ink and paper and copied the entire collection out line by line. I know everything there is to know about you, and I’m still here.

  “Yes,” she said in a whisper like autumn reeds. “Yes, I think in spite of everything perhaps you do after all.”

  —

  You comprehensively brick-brained lunatic, I thought when I arrived at my office an hour later.

  Collapsing behind my desk with a large glass of gin, I drained the liquid and deposited my head in my hands. I just sat there for long moments. Feeling the liquor sweetly buzz through my veins like bees. Rubbing at my temples absently. Harder on the side where my scar rippled, unsightly and utterly unchangeable, across a quarter of my face.

  Why in hell did
n’t you just kiss her senseless?

  Mercy would have let me, I thought. Before I brushed away the last of the tears and skimmed my lips lightly along her hairline. Before I offered my arm and walked her back to the theatrical boardinghouse. Before I left her at the door, half smiling and composed again.

  Anyone would think you’re coward, a virgin, or a fucking eunuch.

  I slumped forward, the heels of my palms grinding into my eyes.

  Knock-knock-knock.

  “Come in.”

  The door swung open. Ninepin stood there with a short, square-shouldered, well-dressed gentleman wearing quiet plaid trousers and a matching brown swallowtail coat, a man with whom I was not familiar. The stranger swept his hat off as they stepped into the room.

  “Well, I’ve brung him at last,” Ninepin reported sulkily. “He tumbled to a dusty mob of tobby coves working James Slip—wanted a story out of them, went underground so’s he could get one, and then peached to the hamlet of the Fourth. Mr. Wilde, meet the Wolf.”

  Rising, I extended my hand, and the news reporter shook it firmly. I knew that Ninepin had just said William Wolf had disappeared in order to procure a story about a gang who by night bludgeoned pedestrians and then tipped them into the river, and that afterward the journalist had duly notified the captain of Ward Four. But I wondered if Mr. Wolf knew it. That had been an impressive run of flash patter, even for Ninepin.

  “Timothy Wilde, star one-oh-seven. Thank you for coming.”

  “Not at all.”

  William Wolf’s voice was deep, his eyes widely set and nearly black. Ninepin and the boys were right, I thought in some surprise. If Mr. Wolf wasn’t Indian, one or both of his parents surely claimed Mexican descent. I wondered whether he’d come from the alarmingly large region poised to become an American slave state rather than a Tejano wilderness. His lips were angular, broad, and turned down at the corners, and his glossy close-cropped hair, far shorter than the usual fashion, was dark enough to reflect glints of blue. How in hell he’d managed to become a newsman of note I couldn’t fathom, for—legally speaking—Indians hold about as many rights as blacks, which is to say few in letter and none in practice. Most of them, or at least the ones who haven’t faded westward into the distant forests or settled in the gaps between cities, sell food or trinkets or do manual labor for a living.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Wolf. Thank you, Ninepin.” I passed him his money. “You can leave us to it.”

  “Bloody self-important, noddle-pated . . .” he muttered sadly.

  “Ninepin, I’m sorry,” I added to his skinny back. “Write to Bird all you want, and best of luck. You’re a fly bloke, and I was being a right prick.”

  Ninepin turned. He pulled his glasses off, predictably, and tapped them with great gravitas upon his chin. “Truly?” he questioned.

  “Truly.”

  “I savvy she’s your friend. And a fellow has to look after his doxies and all.”

  “Well . . .”

  “So that’s pretty white of you, Mr. Wilde.”

  “Cheers. Off you go.”

  “In a second. Share a nip of your sky-blue with a cove and we’ll call it square.”

  Sighing, I poured Ninepin a tiny measure of gin. He drained it, smacking his lips together theatrically.

  “Nothing like a quick stop to sluice your gob afore the afternoon stiffs come off the press. Fare thee well, Mr. Wilde. Mr. Wolf, write faster if you please, your work is golden, and I need the extra chink to court a ladybird.”

  Grinning, Ninepin departed. I quashed warring urges to thank the scamp for appreciating Bird’s finer qualities and offering to strangle him if he ever so much as breathed on her person. But since Bird needed just such a harmless distraction these days due to my own stupidity, I held my tongue.

  William Wolf had seated himself opposite my desk. His gaze was thoughtful and patient—the perfect expression for a reporter to adopt when questioning a subject—but laced with tart amusement. No, irony, I thought. His interest in humans hadn’t led to his wholehearted admiration of the species.

  “Would you care for a splash yourself?” I asked, going for another glass.

  “Why not, as it’s nearly lunchtime.”

  “And already feels like midnight.” I poured a pair of drinks and sat down again. “I’ve been . . . active. You’re right, of course, and you needn’t accept.”

  “I always accept,” he answered, swirling the tumbler philosophically. “One can never know what would have been the usual order of business in a new environment unless one says yes. You’re an intriguing man, a notable man, and your office is new to me. So I say yes.”

  “To everything?”

  “Nearly,” he returned. “Not to quack nostrums purportedly made from snake venom being sold out the back of a corner grocer in Ward Seven. It was only colored laudanum, of course, or so it proved, but the prospect was dangerously unpalatable.”

  I felt my mouth curving upward. “You have a wide range of interests.”

  “So do my readers. What are the particular interests of the man who solves riddles for Tammany Hall?”

  “I’m surprised you’ve heard of me.”

  “I’m surprised you’re surprised.”

  Pondering, I linked my fingers together. “I’m working on a problem, and you wrote an article about the key players.”

  “Was it riveting?” He failed to smile, which somehow lent the question all the more air of droll humor.

  I nodded. I’d dug up the edition at the Mercantile Library Association in Nassau Street, where periodicals are archived, digging through rack after rack of print as the city clerks bustled through the quiet reading room, their hair neatly slicked and their collars turned up against their chins. Then I’d found it staring me in the face—RIGHTS FOR FEMALES, SEWING GIRLS A BUSTED FLUSH. It was a colorfully written account of the molls who’d defied New American Textiles. The much-maligned “Frailty, thy name is MAN” sentiment, for instance, was juxtaposed with a blistering portrait of Dunla Duffy, whose grasp of the strike’s purpose had been tenuous and was rendered in broad strokes. Miss Woods and Miss Abell had fared much better, but praise for their backbones and the lovely, clever heads those stalwart spines supported hadn’t prevented Wolf concluding:

  We await Alderman Symmes’s decision with interest—but not, let us add, with much uncertainty as to its nature. And thus, like so many other Movements of these cataclysmic times, despite its passionate origins the strike against New American Textiles seems poised to prove so much banging of spoons against copper pots—all sound and feeling, and incapable of any success other than to create its own cacophony. Within that very hullabaloo, however, lies the kernel that so dismays the Conservative—Power has had its nose well and truly tweaked by the Fliers of Petticoat Flags, and though they accomplish ever so little, the din of their voices will not now be easily quelled.

  “I want to know your impressions of Miss Woods and Miss Abell.”

  He nodded. “I want an estate on Long Island with a kennel of racing dogs.”

  “Do you want anything simpler?”

  “The story of your investigation. And how you investigate it.”

  Rubbing my fingers over the upside-down semicircle in my chin, I reflected upon the profound dangers of this proposal.

  “I don’t know that the details can be made public.”

  “Shouldn’t they be?”

  “I try to follow my conscience, but the Party—”

  “Oh, I see. You’ve a fondness for your own good health, as do I. Nothing Tammany fails to approve—just everything else. I’m fascinated by you, you understand. To our health.”

  William Wolf finished the gin decisively and tilted his head back, awaiting my answer.

  I didn’t like it. Not being the subject of an exposé and not sharing my all-too-scandalous information. But I ne
eded the fires to stop. Thus I suspected what I really needed was a portrait of the hours between when the “Busted Flush” article appeared and the vicious quelling of the strike the next day. I had to know why two passionate friends were no longer speaking. And why Ellie Abell had once seemed to Miss Duffy to have stars in her eyes when now only the icy glimmer of tragedy lingered there.

  “It’s a deal,” I told him.

  William Wolf pulled a notebook from his brown swallowtail coat as I reached for the pad on which I pen police reports and sketch suspects. Oddly mirroring each other.

  “How did you come to cover the manufactory girls?” I asked.

  “I was already interested in female rights—they accidentally timed the strike to suit me. What do you think of the movement?”

  “I think some of the women I know are sharper than I am. Doesn’t mean I like to see them jeopardized, but their work should be fairly compensated.”

  “Ah, a social radical. I take it you’re an abolitionist, then, as they go perennially hand in glove?”

  “I was antislavery long before the Bowery girls started antagonizing the tailors, yes.”

  “Your brother, Captain Valentine Wilde of firefighting infamy, is suddenly running on a Barnburner ticket. Do you support his campaign?”

  I blinked, not having lent any special thought to this thorny question. “I’m not a bit political, but Val’s a hard worker and a Free Soil hero. How came you to write about female autonomy?”

  “It’s a hot enough subject that anything you say will at least be read if not appreciated. I don’t care if people appreciate me, only if they buy a copy of the New Republican.”

  “Ninepin heartily agrees with you. Tell me about meeting the seamstresses.”

  “Of course. Tell me why you’re intrigued by them.”

  I was beginning to enjoy the rapport of this tit-for-tat questioning. Mr. Wolf placidly jotted notes in jerky shorthand, knee cocked akimbo with his shin resting against his leg. We somehow felt like collaborators after a five-minute acquaintance. I suspected that to be a talent of his.