The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

“You’re not helping your case, Miss Woods.”

  “What does it matter,” she said flatly. “You don’t believe me anyhow.”

  Needles versus brickbats, I thought, remembering Miss Abell’s account of the strike and Miss Duffy’s injuries. I wondered whether the reason Miss Woods unnerved me was that the eyes of a colonel fresh returned from the war in Texas stared out of a woman’s face—accepting of tragic losses to the point of being mistaken for callous. She ought to have been the queen of an ancient empire, and here she could do no better than cutting slave clothes or printing heretical screeds.

  Which brought another item of interest to the front of my mind. “How do you explain this?”

  I passed her the only note remaining to me, the only one she hadn’t taken from her greenhouse and presumably destroyed. The initial message that had sent the alderman to seek Valentine.

  We will not be cowed by those who think us less than human.

  She took it, uncomprehending at first. After all, I’d never shown it to her. Then an agonized little moan escaped, and she put her fist against where her heart must have been pounding, reckless and inflamed, against her breast.

  “How do you come to have this?” she cried out. “How?”

  I sighed, rubbing my fingers against the bridge of my nose. “So . . . yes. You printed this.”

  Closing her eyes, Sally Woods nodded. “Robert Symmes gave it to you?”

  “Yes.”

  With a palsied hand, she returned it. I’ve never in my life seen anyone fight that hard against weeping. Had I not known better, I’d have supposed that tears would melt her flesh if she allowed them to fall, long-suppressed bitterness scoring deep tracks down her spun-sugar skin.

  “Mr. Wilde, will you do a single thing for me?” she asked gruffly.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  She crossed her arms over her belly, pressing as if she were trying not to be ill. “Go back to my greenhouse and search through my archives of odd jobs. You’re my last resort, I fear.”

  “You wrote a manifesto?” I questioned, slowly folding the message and replacing it in my pocket.

  “No, I printed one for the Venerable and Distinguished Brotherhood of Tailors. It doesn’t quite fall in line with my views, but there was plenty within about the greed of modern tycoons, so I agreed to publish it, and they paid very well. Just find it, please, for Christ’s sake.” A few tears spilled over, and she wiped them with her sleeve cuff. I passed her my handkerchief. “Then come back for your handkerchief. All right? I have your handkerchief. Promise me.”

  “I promise. Listen, I’ll be back to take your statement anyhow, but before I do, at least consider trusting me. Robert Symmes is a terrible person, and you want to tell me the truth.”

  “I only wish I could.”

  “You can. Are we clear?”

  “I can’t. But yes, we’re clear.” Pocketing the cloth, she thrust her hand through the bars. “You’re coming back for your kerchief. You gave me your word.”

  “I did.” I took her hand, if only briefly. “Good-bye for now, Miss Woods.”

  As I walked away, letting the gibes and the hoots of the jailed stargazers slide over me like so much rainwater, I wondered at three questions:

  —Why should a clever incendiary leave the perfect paper trail behind her like bread crumbs through a forest?

  —How did the sewing girls—any of them—manage to plant energetic materials?

  —Why is Abraham Kane allowing me to do my job?

  There were other questions on my mind, to be sure—ones about Sally Woods’s desire for me to find a radical article she’d been commissioned to produce. I’d a cautious notion what she might be referring to, and the mere idea that I might be right sent my entire spine tingling. But though much remained unanswered, at least, I thought, the Queen Mab hadn’t burned half the city to cinders, nor Jakob Piest neither.

  I stopped by my office to write Matsell a note indicating that Sally Woods’s full statement would come on the morrow. Going one better, I did it in duplicate and sent the copy to Abraham Kane. Then I glanced at my appointment book, and my skin went cold.

  Day after tomorrow would be the elections.

  Friday, April 28: Valentine Wilde versus the incumbent Robert Symmes. Hunker versus Barnburner in a potentially deadly mêlée of fists and votes, not to mention the Whigs and the Liberty Party and the American Republican Party. Which meant all copper stars on hand, guarding certain ballot boxes and gleefully throwing others in the East River, as well as a fight if not a riot. I was never called on for such duties. Matsell knew better than to trust in my political enthusiasm. But this situation differed significantly.

  I would be voting for the first time in my life, I’d decided. The resolution delivered a small flutter of feathery nerves. Pouring a finger of gin, I raised it in the general direction of Ward Eight and my no doubt hopelessly inebriated brother.

  “Go straight to hell,” I said aloud, swallowing it down.

  By the time I escaped the Tombs, six o’ clock had struck and the gas lamps carved long shadows in our unswept streets. The markets in my ward are where foodstuffs go to die, so I hurried to the closest butcher and grocer along Broadway for mutton and butter and parsley, anxious—as if I hadn’t enough on my mind—over what Bird would say to me that night. The thought her small foot might not even touch our doorstep was appalling, but, No, I thought, she’s braver than you are, she’d never cancel, and so I added a newspaper parcel of the first wild strawberries to my purchases as the clouds painted themselves violet and orange and a queer cool lavender.

  I was right about my small friend if nothing else, for Bird opened the door before I’d even quite reached the bakery, having heard my hasty step in the road. Her hands were sticky with dough, her perfect box-shaped face serene. Elena Boehm—in the kitchen beyond, shaping rolls for our supper, fine hair dusty with finer flour—winked at me, and I breathed easier.

  “I still don’t believe you, even after what Mrs. Boehm told me,” Bird announced, stepping aside to let me pass.

  “All right,” I said, a bit startled.

  “But I’ll try,” she added, grey eyes steady as granite.

  “All right,” I agreed, pushing a stray piece of dark auburn hair behind her ear.

  Then we didn’t talk about it.

  I hung my wide-brimmed hat, and Elena kept teaching Bird how to bake, as she’d been doing for nearly three years, and we didn’t talk about it. We laughed together. Over me trimming off excess mutton fat and shallowly slicing my finger open, because Valentine has always been a dedicated cook, for reasons I’d always suspected and now knew for an agonizing certainty, and I am an ignoramus who buys shilling oyster sandwiches when my brother isn’t providing supper. Over Elena sending Bird into fits with a German drinking song. Over Bird’s face when the mutton leg came out, dripping and decadent, and I moved to slice it into cubes for the hash.

  “Mr. Wilde,” Bird whispered, tugging at my sleeve edge.

  I was about to answer her. But at the same moment, there came a knocking. Not at our front door either.

  At the back door.

  Insistent without being loud.

  When I think something is wrong, I am only occasionally correct, but I am always cautious over it.

  When I know something is wrong, I am perennially right.

  At the look on my face, Mrs. Boehm edged herself between Bird and the back door. I retained the carving knife and crossed the kitchen, cursing the fact it hadn’t ever occurred to me to put a spy hole at eye level. That was changing, I determined, with Mrs. Boehm’s permission. That was changing tomorrow. Meanwhile, I was nigh certain that now I’d arrested Sally Woods and solved his problem for him, I’d a thug sent from Robert Symmes if not the man himself to deal with, eager to teach the Wildes a lesson in manners.

  I was wrong
about that. I wish I hadn’t been, though. Every single time I think about it.

  When I opened the door, James Playfair practically fell into my arms as I dropped the knife. Shirtless, his upper body covered in blood, bruises, scrapes, and sweat.

  As well as in tar. And in feathers.

  19

  That old Tammany opposite us, once consecrated to the genius of true freedom, has latterly admitted within its sanctuary, the priest of Baal, but we will purify it; yes, even by a sacrifice offered without the gates.

  —MIKE WALSH, THE NEW YORK HERALD, MEETING OF THE BARNBURNERS AT CITY HALL PARK, JULY 1848

  “JIM?” I GASPED, holding him up.

  “I hate to intrude, but—” he attempted, then bit down a moan when I tightened my grip.

  Tar, I thought stupidly, even as the gummy material stuck to my waistcoat and jacket. It had been more than ten years since I’d seen anyone wearing the stuff.

  A person doesn’t generally die of it, I thought next, heart racing.

  Not generally.

  Only sometimes. When it’s heated enough.

  The pine-pitch reek flooding the air was suffused underneath with the crueler aroma of burned human skin. Bird, who’d emerged from behind Elena, let fly a full-throated scream.

  “Get her out of here,” I ordered sharply. “Elena, take the carving knife and don’t let go of it, and go next door and tell them do not open up for anyone but me, all right?”

  “Yes, yes.” She lifted the knife, face drawn with horror. “But I will leave Bird and come back here, I will help you—”

  “Do not come back here,” I hissed. “It’s too dangerous. Go.”

  I was already dragging Jim to a chair as Mrs. Boehm took a sobbing Bird Daly to pay a surprise call. I was also thinking. Remembering what I could about medicine. Praying to no god in particular, but with a fervency that would guarantee any one of them listening if they weren’t deaf, sadistic, or nonexistent.

  A person doesn’t generally die of it, I thought, willing myself calm.

  When Jim was safely draped over our table, I fetched another kitchen knife and carefully folded his slim fingers around it.

  “Symmes did this?” I asked with metal in my voice.

  “None other than, though he’d assistance.”

  “I am leaving you for five minutes,” I said clearly.

  “Oh, please don’t say that,” he choked, all pretense at glibness vanished.

  “Listen to me—you’re going to be fine. I’m filling the hip bath at the pump outside.”

  “Yes, my apologies, thank you,” he said, panting a little.

  I went.

  As I stood outdoors in the pale, firelit darkness of Ward Six, filling up the hip bath, determined not to grow so enraged I became useless or careless, I let my mind drift over positively murderous thoughts regarding Robert Symmes.

  And suddenly I knew.

  The outlines were as vague and foreboding as my grimmer sketches, but as for broad brushstrokes—I understood everything. Generally, it feels like falling off a cliffside onto barren stones. This time it was no more jarring a landing than that of a windswept snowflake, seeing as I’d more important things on my mind than solving a crime just then. Nevertheless, a quiet understanding had settled over me thanks to what had been done to James Playfair.

  Feeling light-headed, I leaned against the Croton pump and directed a bit of queasy spittle at the ground.

  William Wolf, I thought—and correctly too—was right.

  Muscles straining, I dragged the hip bath brimming with cold reservoir water back indoors. Jim had sat up a little. Still holding the knife, face turning the sickliest shade of green I’d ever witnessed. When I’d pulled the sloshing tub to the table, he made as if to stand.

  “I’ll help,” I said. “Did they get your legs at all?”

  “No, merely the visible areas.”

  It wasn’t merely. They’d drenched his shoulders and his chest with hot tar, painted his back and crossed round the sides. I’d say it covered forty percent of his upper body, the pale remainder mottled with contusions and sickly sweat, which gave me cause for considerable optimism. Because if the seared flesh encompassed more than half a fellow’s surface area, and if the tar was scorching enough—

  A person doesn’t generally die of it, I told myself fiercely as I lifted the taller man, togs and all, into the hip bath.

  “Sink down,” I said.

  Jim buried himself to the neck in frigid water, wearing a frozen look on his handsome face as if he might crumble apart when touched. I felt all too brittle myself without the excuse of being covered in pitch and chicken down, and Jim is one of the most dignified men I have ever met in all my days, so I reached into the hip bath and started taking off his shoes.

  Jim put a hand over his eyes as he shuddered. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t you dare thank me. What happened?”

  “I was playing the piano at the Hall, and . . .” He stopped, swallowing hard. “Everyone was there, the donors and tycoons and such, worried over how badly the vote will be split day after tomorrow and throwing all the money they can at the dilemma. I’d finished, and they’d paid me, and God knows I’ve been careful ever since . . . ever since the Knickerbocker Twenty-one benefit, but Symmes was waiting outside with his compatriots.”

  I removed the second shoe and the stocking beneath. “He’ll pay for it, I promise you. Was it in public?”

  A person who’s been tarred and feathered generally doesn’t bother with recovering his reputation. He simply departs. And often enough forgets to pack his name.

  “No, I was kicking up too great a fuss. And the rest of the Party likes me—I play for Hunkers as well as Barnburners—so they’d never have managed it on the street. Symmes told his cronies to seize me, four of them, and they’d a barrel of hot pitch in an alleyway. They dragged me back there and . . . well.”

  Jim was shaking in earnest by then, as anyone would be submerged in an unheated bath. I waited and he waited, meanwhile, for the cold to do him some good.

  “Say the word and I’ll fetch a doctor,” I offered quietly.

  “No, don’t for God’s sake, I shouldn’t even be able to look at him. You were the one p-person who I . . .” He trailed off, clenching his lean jaw.

  “And you were close enough to my ken that I imagine hardly anyone of importance saw you.” I paused. “Right. Does it seem to have hardened fully?”

  He nodded, blue eyes closed.

  “Here.”

  Offering Jim my hands beneath the water, I pulled him up to a standing position. Cold as a dead fish and nearly as limp. I remembered Jim suddenly, dressed to the nines and playing the piano at his own ken one night, a night when my brother drank only half a bottle of whiskey and didn’t take any morphine tonic at all, and I felt my throat constricting.

  “Chair,” I said, half carrying him over to it. “I’ll be right back.”

  I went for a warm blanket, a paint scraper from the shed behind the house, a jug of kerosene, copious towels, a flask of laudanum, and the whiskey bottle. Setting everything but the blanket on the table, I draped the wool around him. His head lolled a little, and I caught his neck in my hand.

  “Jim?”

  “Present and among the living.”

  “Hear, hear. Drink this.”

  “With pleasure.”

  I poured more laudanum down his throat than might have been strictly wise. But he didn’t object. And he was about to start objecting, I knew.

  Strenuously.

  I reached for the whiskey and swallowed some of that. To steady myself.

  “Jim,” I said again, softly.

  “I know,” he replied with a sigh.

  “I don’t want to. But . . .”

  He looked at me direct, a ripening bruise on his cheek twit
ching. “I’d rather it was you, Timothy. Truly.”

  I drew a tremulous breath. “I’d rather it was anyone else.”

  “If you say no, I should hardly blame you. I’d understand, would never hold it between us,” James said, nothing save fondness in his eyes beneath the wracking pain.

  “No, I am not saying no—who do you take me for? But we’ll fetch my brother first. I’ll send a street kinchin for—”

  “Don’t you dare send for your brother,” Jim snapped. “I’ll leave at once if you so much as try.”

  “Jim, that makes no sense. He’s good in a crisis, would never flinch from one, and he—” I stopped myself. “Don’t you want him here?”

  “No.”

  “But why?” I pleaded.

  “Because I believe in things!” he cried. The tears that had barely threatened a moment previous spilled over, and he swiped them angrily away with his unmarked palms. “I believe in gracefulness, and beauty, and common decency, and . . . oh, I can’t even tell you what I believe in anymore, but those were the cardinal points, and I assume he appreciated them, and it would kill me if he saw this. Do you understand?”

  I took longer about it than I should have. But then I’ve never pretended to be as brave as my friends are.

  “I understand,” I said.

  Quiet descended like a noose around our necks.

  I have to start, I thought. Not moving.

  “Timothy,” Jim said with all the force he had left, “I’ll be fine. I’m English. We like a little pain.”

  He managed to make me smile, which saved the pair of us. I picked up the kerosene and started rubbing it into his skin, damp chicken feathers waving softly in the breeze that my movements created. And after about twenty minutes of depositing the kerosene all along the many edges of the tar, pretending I didn’t have to do what was clearly my duty, I picked up the paint scraper.

  I will never forget, not until I am the faintest shadow of a memory, that it took a full half hour of peeling his flesh off before Jim started to scream.

  —

  Later that evening—night, rather, for even the moon had fled by then—I walked to Herr Getzler’s front door and handed him a large tray of half-prepared foodstuffs.