The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

I blinked at familiar green eyes, then smiled crookedly down at my hideous orange cravat. The Liberty’s Blood is Ward Eight’s low-liquor hell in the comfortable mode, a bastion of Party insiders and the fresh emigrants who fawn over them. Somehow Piest and Connell and I had stumbled into the rear chamber. Beyond the dust-shrouded canopy of American flags, back where hardened men carouse until dawn. A truly regrettable taxidermied bald eagle presides there, wings unfurled, over equally distasteful proceedings.

  “Did someone knock you in the pate and dress you like a Bowery swell?”

  Valentine, I thought, is speaking to you. Make minimal sense.

  “Why should you want to know what I’m wearing? Don’t you want to know what I’m voting?” I demanded semicoherently, attempting to sit up in a canyonlike armchair.

  “Down with slaveholder tyranny! May every last barn burn!” Piest slurred from the low sofa opposite me. Connell snored his agreement to the ceiling.

  “You voted?” my brother demanded. Deeply perplexed.

  Valentine looked healthy enough for the balcony, but certainly not the front row. His face was cleanly shaven and his collar spotless, but he’d barked his knuckles on a set of teeth, and his eyes remained sunken as tombstones.

  I remembered what I couldn’t avoid telling him any longer, and my breath caught in my throat.

  “Valentine—”

  “They’re counting votes now.” Pulling me upright, Valentine steered me toward the door. “We’re due at a meeting to discuss amicable settlements. Can’t have the Ward falling apart, no matter which way the dice fall once the ballots are tallied.”

  Something about the phrase meeting to discuss amicable settlements raised alarums in my addled pate. They meant nothing good, I suspected. Depending upon who was conducting them, I’d a hunch I felt about them the way I do about bear traps.

  “Wait, wait.” I tore my arm out of my brother’s grasp, half falling on a sot costumed as Benjamin Franklin. Since he wasn’t awake, we didn’t argue the point. “A meeting where?”

  “Where do you think? At Alderman Symmes’s house, two blocks hence.”

  “No.” I made a blind swipe for Val’s wrist and came up victorious. “No meetings.”

  Valentine shouted something at the bartender, and seconds later a tepid but nicely muddy tin cup of coffee was in my fingers. I drank it at a go and opened my lips to resume protests.

  Only to discover that my brother was already halfway out the front door of the Liberty’s Blood.

  “Tammany can’t afford a riot, and neither can the star police. One conversation and we bury this hornet’s nest. Pull yourself together, bright young copper star,” Valentine ordered over his shoulder. “It’s almost finished.”

  21

  Let us all go to the polls with a full determination to keep the peace, but also with a firm resolve to deposit our votes in the ballot box and enable our friends to do so—or die in the struggle.

  —JAMES WATSON WEBB, NEW YORK COURIER AND ENQUIRER, APRIL 8, 1834

  THE MEETING WASN’T what I’d expected. And I’d expected the worst.

  “Val, slow down,” I insisted as we exited the saloon, wedging ourselves past beer-stained revelers.

  “Why? We’re getting this over with.” He swung his stick in a wide arc, the pearly top glinting in the starlight. “Granted, there are half a million people in this godless city, and there’s not a single one whose company I wouldn’t prefer to—”

  “Valentine, he sets his own buildings on fire.”

  My brother stiffened midstride. Then his hand came down on my collar, and he dragged me like a still-wet kitten into an alley, stepping over a pair of drunks wearing more Party-endorsing ribbons than was strictly tasteful. I landed with my back to the bricks and his fingers digging into my upper arm.

  “Say that again. Slower.”

  “Symmes is the incendiary. Or he hired her, rather. Jesus, Val, let go of—”

  “Start,” my brother hissed, “at the beginning.”

  “What about—”

  “They aren’t listening,” Val growled in reference to the cup-shot voters. “Talk.”

  “Symmes asked one of his secretaries, an equally loyal and stupid one, to insure his slums for copious chink. Then Ronan McGlynn planted the energetic materials—since he was the property manager, if he’d said he was putting down rat poison, the poor souls in those houses would never have questioned it.”

  “How did you tumble onto this?”

  I told Val about finding the woman I knew only as the Witch, about inquiring whether anyone who didn’t belong there had visited Pell Street and her emphatic answer of No one. Not a single person. I’d thought that strange even then but let it slip my regrettably porous mind.

  “That initial meeting at the Queen Mab . . .” Valentine mused.

  “Yes, exactly! The alderman—”

  “Not yet, and maybe not anymore,” Val bit out viciously.

  “Sorry, Symmes, then—he called you in that day at the clearinghouse so you’d unwittingly help him frame Sally Woods. His buildings burn, she gets collared for it.”

  My kin leaned heavily against the wall in what looked a potent blend of awe and revulsion. “How many buildings were new insured?”

  “Eleven.”

  “That sick son of a bitch,” Val breathed. “He would’ve stopped once we’d pinned the bluestocking, then? If Miss Woods is locked up in hock, she can’t very well be starting fires.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. He’d been feeding notes indicating what buildings would go up next to Ellie Abell, asking her to deliver warnings to Drake Todd. She’s the gullible type, I’m afraid, and believed them to originate from Miss Woods.”

  “Are you implying that dousing the blazes quick was never civic-mindedness, just part of the pony show?” Val growled.

  “Dead to rights. Later Symmes would have made it seem the girls were in cahoots all along, that Miss Abell took over the firestarting from Miss Woods after her arrest but felt tender over incurring collateral damages and tipped the Neptune Nines.”

  “That’s a piss-poor lay, my Tim. Ellie Abell can’t keep delivering cautions over stirs and setting them at the same bloody time,” Valentine objected. “Not to mention she’d surely have reliable alib—”

  “No, no, no, my theory is Symmes had far worse in mind,” I interrupted. “The only two fires to date were set before I arrested Miss Woods. What would have happened if Miss Abell disappeared at the same time the warnings stopped?”

  It required two seconds for my brother to process this question before his face hardened with the swiftness of a portcullis slamming shut.

  “The fires continue, this time without advance notice. We firedogs lose more buildings. More locals cock their toes up before their time. Building number eleven collapses, and lo and behold . . .” Val pulled a hand down his face, marring the stony set of his mouth.

  “Miss Abell reappears,” I supplied.

  “Ragged and soot-stained, no reasonable explanation where she’s been all the while.”

  “Supposing Miss Abell was held against her will, Symmes could have blamed those girls for whatever he liked.”

  “Who really set match to tinder on the days of the fires? McGlynn was already napped when the first broke out.”

  I told him. Val nodded, dawning horror painting hollows along his jawline.

  “Cruelty is something of a hobby for Symmes,” I continued. “In fact, that’s how I figured— Valentine, wait!”

  My brother stalked with a lion’s swinging strides out of the crevice, over the drunks, and into the moonlit road. The set of his broad shoulders and the quick snap of his cane on the cobbles informed me that someone was about to be severely injured. I only hoped the victim’s surname wouldn’t prove to be Wilde.

  “Whatever you’re doing, don’t
do it,” I requested, catching up to Val after dodging an overfriendly stargazer with tinsel dripping down to her shell-thin shoulders.

  “I’ve been summoned to a meeting by Robert Symmes, and it is a meeting I plan to attend.” Val elbowed through a knot of New York University types gleefully waving rattles and taking swigs from a jug.

  “But Chief Matsell said Mr. Kane wants to delay until after the elec—”

  “I don’t give a rat’s tender arse what Abraham Kane or Cornelius Villers wants at the moment. And in case you haven’t noticed, my Tim, the elections are over. Run along home.”

  “Like hell I will run along—you’re the one wanted me here five minutes ago!” I protested as I collided with a barrel-chested merchant. “Come back, I haven’t told you—”

  “You have told me plenty!”

  It was like tracking a tornado’s path through a maelstrom. All around us partisans lurched through the thoroughfare sloshing liquor onto one another’s sleeves. I was yet drunk myself, which turned the revelry nightmarish—a blur of red lips laughing, pagan voices howling at the moon. I managed a quick burst of speed between a hot-corn vendor and a country preacher shrieking that the world was ending.

  I believed him. But I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I could do about it.

  Because when I finally caught my brother by the coat sleeve, I was too late. He’d reached Robert Symmes’s broad granite doorstep, where I’d once paid a call with Chief Matsell. The row house towered above us, a five-story stone-and-brick ode to wealth.

  “I told you to—”

  “You need me here,” I panted. “Trust me.” Raising my hand to the doorbell, I hesitated.

  “Are you going to ring that or simply stare uselessly at it, as if it’s a nip—”

  I pressed as hard as I could. Twice.

  We waited. I cleared my throat. Twin barbs of guilt and reluctance had caught in it like a fishhook.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Val’s eyebrow twitched upward. “For what? You look eight shades of green.”

  “For not telling you sooner. I’ve managed to keep it quiet, but Symmes—”

  Val meant to listen to me. He angled his head down and attended, which meant he might have been warned upon certain subjects. But just then the butler I’d so aggressively summoned opened the door, and we were shown through the marble-floored hall into the parlor of Alderman Robert Symmes. The butler hovered as Val explained our business, afterward departing on silent feet.

  Meanwhile, I surveyed the furnishings, somehow still more repelled by Symmes. I’d seen only his office previously. But his parlor was appalling. I’d been in the dwellings of folk who prefer money to people before—I’d solved crimes for them, retrieved their stolen silver and their secretly pawned jewelry. It wasn’t that the landscapes on the expensively papered walls were tastelessly selected—on the contrary, I thought, I’d love to buy such things for Mercy and arrange them in a sitting room where the sunset lingers even in February. But hirelings had selected every object, never Robert Symmes, and thus it felt like a space belonging to a score of people or even none. The army of individuals paid to decorate that room skittered along my skin like bedbugs.

  “For God’s sake, what are we doing here?” I pleaded.

  “Planning how to ensure the Ward doesn’t collapse after the election, of course.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing, let me handle this,” Val ordered, adjusting his cravat in a handy etched mirror.

  “Gentlemen,” Robert Symmes announced, throwing wide the double doors we’d entered through, “welcome to my home. Well, one of them. It’s once again a surprise to see you, Mr. Wilde. I thought I’d called for the captain here.”

  “You won a bonus prize,” I said stonily.

  Symmes flipped open his pocket watch, announcing his aversion to my presence. His unbuttoned maroon swallowtail coat probably cost more than my monthly rent, but I could see he’d been as active as Valentine that day. Shirt collar torn at the edge. A button missing from his dove-colored waistcoat. I wished I’d been there to cheer every blithe fist hurtling toward his person.

  “So you’ve arrested Sally Woods at last,” Symmes drawled, pouring three neat brandies at his sideboard. “Your reputation for competence is greatly exaggerated, Mr. Wilde, but I must confess that pleased me.”

  “Actually, I—”

  “Stamfish!” Valentine commanded.

  At first I couldn’t recollect the word’s definition. Val’s eyes burrowed into mine, urgency radiating like the heat from a bonfire.

  Then I remembered, and my breath hitched in my chest.

  At the Queen Mab, Symmes had harped on my brother’s gutter vocabulary. I asked you to speak plain English, and I meant it, he’d commanded pettishly, and Valentine had shoveled slang into his ears.

  Robert Symmes is an amateur boxer and a spoiled business mogul who bought his way into the Party’s graces and fell out of them when he lied about his holdings. He’s like a talking silver dollar—zero qualifications beyond money and brutality.

  And Robert Symmes doesn’t speak flash.

  I’d never used the word stamfish previous, but it’s a warning—it means that authorities are listening and all dead rabbits present should switch to rarefied levels of flash patter.

  A sprinkling of sweat materialized along my hairline. I learned flash by accident, hate the fact I speak it, and I’d no doubt that Valentine could add more words to George Washington Matsell’s dictionary than our eccentric chief has ever dreamed possible. Meanwhile, I was being asked to demonstrate a complete mastery of street slang, and in about two seconds.

  “Miss Woods,” Val said in an undertone as Symmes returned the brandy bottle to its shelf. “She’s polishing the iron?”

  I drew a complete blank.

  You’re only ketched over this because Val is watching you, I told myself furiously.

  Touching my tongue to my lip, I willed my heart to slow and my gin-soaked brain to speed.

  Polishing the iron with his eyebrows. The truncated expression was obscure, but the entire phrase was self-explanatory once it came to me—it describes a prisoner bleakly staring through prison bars. Val was asking if Miss Woods remained at the Tombs.

  “I turned gigger-dubber this morning—she’s quit the boardinghouse,” I replied. Meaning I’d played turnkey and released Miss Woods.

  “She’s leery, then?”

  “So are the duo fly-cops at her ken.”

  My brother nodded, the grim line of his lips growing a shade less taut after I’d informed him that not only was she wary, but so were the two policemen protecting her home. If Symmes learned we savvied the truth, what witness to his crimes would he want hushed faster than Sally Woods?

  “The state of the English language in these parts grows more diseased by the second,” Symmes sneered, twitching a hand at the two full glasses on his sideboard without passing them to us. He turned away. “Do pretend to be educated men. Come along! Up to the roof, so we can see the sooner who won this farcical contest.”

  Casting a puzzled look at Val, I went for the brandies and handed him one.

  “Fireworks,” he answered to my unspoken question. “They’re counting the returns at the hotel down the street. When they’re through, they’ll set off a massive blowout—blue if it’s Symmes. Red if it isn’t.”

  “You say count the returns, as if that’s what’s actually happening,” I couldn’t help but dig as we regained the opulent entryway.

  The alderman awaited at the top of his grandly open staircase, leaning on the burnished rail. Somehow glaring and gloating at the same time. He whirled his coattails at us as he continued down the hall to the next set of stairs, and we followed apace.

  “What’s the lay?” I asked with steel in my tone.

  “Nab him on the scent.” />
  So we planned to catch Symmes out through his own errors. “What if I can’t patter—”

  “You patter flash like a goose floats.”

  Up, up, up we went. As high as I’ve ever been in New York, come to think of it. There was yet another staircase next to the garret, and this we climbed as well, reaching a little square room containing only a door. Robert Symmes opened the portal with a key.

  We followed the incendiary into the sky.

  When I set foot on the roof of the soaring town house, I lost my breath a bit. The stars were out, securing the sky high above us with diamond-tipped pins. A prettily worked fence bordered the rooftop, and along its edges wrought-iron benches had been placed facing outward at intervals. Currently they looked down on the orgiastic election-day carousal below. Shouts and guffaws and the popping of firecrackers reached our ears from every direction save for the back area of the mansion. It was the one unique aspect of a painfully blank dwelling, and I couldn’t lie to myself.

  It was marvelous.

  Spread out around us like a feast, Manhattan glowed. Tiny points of light beginning around Thirtieth Street and stretching all the way to the Battery. I could see the grand stripe of Broadway, the stately progression of Fifth Avenue, could see clear across the river to the dark forests of New Jersey, and when I turned, there were the distant winking beacons along Brooklyn’s bustling shoreline. For once the air was clear, and we were too high above the cobbles to see the filth in the cracks. I’ve never liked New York. It’s too hard to survive here. But for about seven seconds that night, I adored it. Its power and its scope.

  “Welcome to my humble sanctuary!” Symmes said, spreading his arms wide with his back to us.

  That’s when it hit me.

  The man was a special breed of insane. It takes a certain sort of vanity to grow so very fond of oneself that one cannot imagine losing the game. He’d already thumbed his nose at Tammany in his relentless quest for wealth. He’d already grown so addicted to godlike destruction that he preferred torching his own properties to collecting the rent. But Tammany is dangerous. So is Silkie Marsh, whose stitch in the patchwork I’d begun to guess at in Chief Matsell’s office.