The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  So too is Valentine Wilde, who stood watching Symmes ignore him with a sort of placid wrath.

  “‘Humble’ isn’t the word I’d have picked,” Val suggested.

  “No, you’d have picked a coarser one.” Symmes gave a small shrug of one shoulder.

  “I might have, at that. What were you planning on proposing to me, Symmes?”

  I could see the clench of disgust grip Symmes’s back despite being twenty feet distant. He pivoted, blue eyes frosted with the sort of juvenile choler I’d only ever before witnessed in kinchin who’d been smacked. Say what you will about Silkie Marsh—she’s an adult, and a formidable one.

  “You will refer to me as Alderman Symmes until such time as I am no longer your alderman, which is a faraway dream of yours,” Symmes snarled.

  Valentine smiled, the one that trickles snowmelt down a man’s neck. “I’ll decline that offer, seeing as I’ve never knowingly taken orders from a pimp, thanks all the same.”

  He’s speaking flash to me and regular American to Symmes, I realized. Two conversations simultaneously, half everyday language and half unabashed code.

  Which is what flash was created for, I reminded myself, settling into my role.

  “Refrain from crude libel, if you please, Captain. These negative electioneering slogans grow so tedious,” Symmes requested with a soft smirk.

  “I could ask the same of you, or didn’t you tell Drake Todd and Archie Vanderpool I’d not so much as piss on your buildings if they were on fire?”

  “Oh, yes, that was me. And the least I can do to your reputation, I assure you.”

  “Do you figure it would be much to your credit if Ward Eight knew you for an incendiary? Or didn’t you torch your own slums?”

  Jesus Christ, what have you done? I thought, edging closer.

  Sighing, Symmes took a sip of brandy, swirling the glass. “Your rather stupid brother has been talking with his new arrest, I take it. What did Sally Woods tell you, Mr. Wilde? That I’m a very bad man and must pay for it? If I’d known how much trouble that wench would cause, I would never have allowed her to tempt me into bed.”

  Val shot me a look.

  “She was his peculiar,” I owned, identifying her as the alderman’s mistress, “though she savvies now he was naught but a rabbit-sucker—”

  “God Almighty, how difficult is it for you cretins? Speak English!” Symmes cried.

  He smashed the snifter against the rooftop. Fine crystal shattered into a jagged spill of mirrored stars. Symmes surveyed the mess and widened his stance as if actually proud of the act.

  Valentine sipped at his own expensive spirits, not the slightest bit put off over this infantile display. “Just what did you do to make Miss Woods suppose you a very bad man?” he inquired.

  No. Do not begin this subject now, not when . . .

  “Oh, would you really like to hear about that?” Symmes chuckled. “That tart was an amusement to me at first, I’ll grant. She could suck a cock and talk female rights out of the same mouth, which only goes to show that it’s the lowest of whores who deign to touch that nonsense in the first place. In any event, she provided me some pleasurable hours and then failed to respect my position. For a while her strike amused me, but the business went too far. That merited a harsh lesson in the way the world works—as you can probably imagine, given your own circumstances.”

  My brother tilted his head, justly puzzled.

  “Valentine, measure me,” I whispered desperately, demanding he listen close. “Symmes wanted to see you caved, so instead of lioning you direct, he came out dead set against James Play—”

  “I will not be trifled with!” The politico was practically screeching by this time, his even features distorted into a rictus of rage. “Stop speaking in ridiculous vulgarisms this instant. And you know perfectly well what I’m talking about, Valentine. Sally cared for nothing and no one the way she cared for that loyal little bitch Ellie Abell. So when Sally’s defiance knew no limits, after I was publicly humiliated in the newspapers, I sent for her lapdog.”

  Val’s razor attention had fixed on me. “What has Jim to do with—”

  “Meanwhile, I’ve so very many addresses, one of my secretaries must have made a mistake.” Symmes smiled lightly with his lips parted, a merry summer’s-day expression. “Somehow Miss Abell ended up at the Queen Mab, which as you know was once used for quite another purpose than manufactory concerns. I hear that something absolutely appalling happened to her there. We all missed her sunny disposition so, come the opening whistle Monday morning at New American Textiles.”

  All was as I’d thought, then. Robert Symmes had delegated a rape as he delegated everything else. An arrow quivered in my heart all the same, and I drew an unconscious half step back. My brother, for his part, had gone quite still. When he’s intimidating people, he tends to employ small, repetitive movements—the swirl of his stick or the tapping of his fingers.

  Not this time. He was as motionless as his own headstone.

  “How long did you instruct McGlynn to keep her?” I questioned.

  “Oh, only overnight, I assure you. Longer wouldn’t have served my purposes. She imagined she’d escaped him, the fool. That wasn’t the clever part, though,” Symmes crowed. “The clever part was the week after Miss Abell disappeared from the manufactory, when I found her cowering in a low den in Ward Six. I told her I’d heard about the truly appalling miscommunication, that I had immediately fired Ronan McGlynn upon learning his true colors. Of course, I simply requested that Mr. Gage oversee the repairs for American Textiles instead, but what she didn’t know couldn’t harm her. Then I offered her a generous bonus to pay for expenses while she recovered, as well as work without fear of sacking if she returned, even supposing she was with child. Which she was, though she lost the brat, I believe.”

  The fact that I’d figured as much didn’t go far toward settling the inferno in my chest. On the contrary.

  “In any case, I was unprecedentedly merciful with the creature, as I thought it would pay to keep her close. She proved duly grateful, naturally. Where else could a fallen woman have found employment besides a brothel? I probably saved her life. Meanwhile, I told Sally that if she ever darkened the threshold of New American or tried to see her friend again, bits of Miss Abell would be delivered to her front door.”

  “What,” Valentine said in a perfect monotone that chilled me to my core, “have you done with James Playfair?”

  “He’s at my ken,” I murmured. “Plenty sanguinary, but snug in kip, I promise—”

  “You haven’t heard?” Symmes laughed, rocking backward on his heels. “I dipped him in hot pitch and covered him in chicken down. No wonder you haven’t dropped out of the race yet, and here I thought I’d simply miscalculated. I’d have chosen your brother here, but I needed someone to arrest Sally Woods since you defected. Now she’s safe behind bars, of course,” he added wistfully. “So you can expect a similar lesson in your future, Mr. Wilde. That is, unless Valentine here withdraws from the race instantly. Regardless of the election results.”

  It would be a mistake to say that the alderman frightened me, as I was already too deeply mortified to register animal terror. But he’d convinced me, and entirely.

  Symmes wanted a reckoning.

  “Do we have him to rights—enough to see him scragged?” Valentine asked me under his breath.

  I ached to say yes—that I’d collected plentiful hard evidence, enough to convict Symmes of firestarting and assault, and yes, we could watch the most despicable man of my acquaintance swing from a rope in the midday sun. But the fact is that I’d failed us utterly. Symmes had passed out filthy tasks as if they were court favors—I could make cases against Gage, McGlynn, the incendiary herself. But I couldn’t promise the alderman would hang, not when my key witnesses were a set of radical females.

  Only that a jail
door might shut on him—and might open again far too soon.

  “I’ve close to nix,” I whispered, ears burning.

  “In that case, mizzle,” Val directed me steadily.

  He was ordering me away. “I can’t—”

  My sibling lifted his crescent-stamped chin and raised his voice, switching to plain talk. “Alderman Symmes here doesn’t want any more of your cheek while we’re about a Tammany matter. This is negotiation of terms. Be scarce before he decides to think up something uglier to do to you than he already has.”

  Robert Symmes smiled and pulled out his pocket watch.

  “Val—”

  “I said mizzle. We’ve been roped, and if we’re to tap the farmer, I need privacy.”

  Roped meant that Symmes had us cornered—but tap the farmer was flash for arrest the alderman. Symmes lit a cigar and swaggered off to survey the nocturnal landscape, waiting for me to vanish. The concept of leaving turned my blood to water. But while I knew that Val would never trust a bargain made with the devil, he could trick Satan himself into a trap, which gave me a pale-edged flicker of hope. The principle tenet of my life since birth has been that my brother is cleverer than I am.

  So when he insisted that I go, I headed for the door.

  “Careful,” I warned.

  Val winked at me. “He’ll be a lag before sunup. See you downstairs.”

  It wasn’t strictly possible for Symmes to be a convicted felon prior to dawn. But if anyone could do it, I thought as I descended, liquor still singing faint arias in my bloodstream, Valentine could.

  The click of the portal to the sky shutting reached my ears, and I hesitated.

  It had clearly been my brother who’d closed it. So I walked along the hallway past the garret, trotting down the staircase.

  I was nearly back to the parlor before I stopped with my foot on a lushly carpeted step, thinking more clearly than previous. Realizing I’d still a full brandy glass in my hand, I set it on the rug with some care.

  You’re wrong, I thought as a tidal wave of fear flooded my stomach.

  No you aren’t.

  Then I was stumbling back up the endless flights like a man possessed.

  Stairs, corridor. Stairs, corridor. Stairs, corridor.

  Stairs, corridor.

  Flying past the garret, I sailed up the final steps and threw myself at the entrance to the rooftop.

  I plunged into the cooling air. All was quiet save for the squeals of the carousers far below, their drums and whistles and off-key bawdy songs. Far above New York, a few thin clouds draped themselves in languid configurations across the inky sky.

  Whirling, I shouted for my brother.

  Then I saw him.

  Valentine had slumped to the rooftop with his back to the iron railing. Eyes closed, fingers of both hands laced tight over his knees. His tall hat was missing and his togs more disarrayed than previous—his scarlet cravat had been torn open, waistcoat buttons all but ripped away.

  Numbly, I walked to join him and peered over the barrier.

  The pearlescent starshine was faint, my vision blurred. But I could almost make out a broken heap of clothed bones.

  Robert Symmes, lying where my brother had clearly thrown him to his death. And the glint of a wicked black pool creeping slowly outward along the stones.

  22

  On her chain of life is rust,

  On her spirit wing is dust;

  She hath let the spoiler in,

  She hath mated her with sin,

  She hath opened wide the door,

  Crime has passed the threshold o’er. . . .

  —PUBLISHED IN THE ADVOCATE OF MORAL REFORM AND FAMILY GUARDIAN, 1852

  I STARED AT THE LIFELESS BODY of the former alderman, my teeth fixed in a vise and my scar throbbing. Hearing in my imagination—which has always been too dynamic for my liking—the final slender shriek that must have woven itself so neatly into the cries of dead rabbits and Bowery girls, another splash of red in a savage tapestry.

  I knelt on the rooftop beside my brother.

  Val’s bare head was bowed almost to his knees, limbs gently trembling like the shimmer of a match. I gripped his shoulder. But he still wouldn’t look at me. He brought his right hand up to press his thumb and forefinger hard into his eyelids.

  “It was . . . unfortunate that I flammed you, but . . . I didn’t want you to see that.”

  My throat twisted.

  “You’re disgusted anyhow, for all you didn’t watch, I know.”

  Shaking my head violently because my mouth wasn’t operative proved fruitless, because Val continued, eyes still trapped beneath his fingers, “It’s fine, you’re far too square to condone what just happened, hate me all you like, but I can generally see our way clear out of a scrape, and this—”

  “I’m not disgusted,” I managed to say.

  He hazarded a glance at me. I’ve seen Val half dead on so many occasions that they live fossilized in my skeleton, but I’d never before seen him look frightened.

  It terrified me.

  “Aren’t you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Valentine nodded once, as if he understood me. His eyes fell shut again, limbs relaxing fractionally as his head fell back against the iron railing.

  “Fair enough. It isn’t as if it’s my first murder.”

  I’m reasonably sure my heart stopped.

  Val wasn’t talking about a shiv in a sawdust-strewn gambling den. My brother isn’t—wasn’t—a killer, no matter his thug proclivities. He was talking about Henry and Sarah Wilde, and an accidental fire that put our parents under the ground with the roots and the worms a very long time ago. Back when Greenwich Village was filled with brilliantly green cornfields and sheep pens and the sixteen-year-old Valentine Wilde lit a cigar in the barn.

  “Of course it’s your first murder!” I cried, shocked out of my stupor.

  He flinched, startled. Sliced a disbelieving look at me.

  “Buggering hell, Valentine, I—of course it is, are you insane? You just killed a man who should have hanged and never would have, the worst man I’ve ever met, and we’d never have been safe otherwise, not in bloody Oregon would we have been safe from him. You did it for me and for Jim and for all those girls he’d have kept tormenting like a cat with a mouse, all because you knew I’d never have the balls to do the same, and now you’re sitting here and comparing that to . . . Of course it’s your first murder!”

  “You’ve said that three times now,” Val answered in an oddly small voice.

  “Well, are you listening?” I shouted.

  He swiped his fingers over his eyes once more. “It’s . . . ah, of passable interest to me, since I’ve always thought you felt the opposite. So yes, actually, I am listen—”

  One second I was kneeling paralyzed on a rooftop. The next I was crushing my brother, clinging to wreckage like a shipwreck victim, knowing that no gesture I could make would ever atone for the things we’d done to each other. But the inadequacy of gestures, I realized with his coat between my fingers, was a petty and cowardly reason not to make them in the first place. I thought of what Mercy had said, on the night she’d returned to me.

  Just because I don’t know where my efforts will bleed into offense doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try them out first.

  So I wrapped my arms around Val’s shoulders, which confused the blackguard, because he recoiled and then stilled and then chuckled miserably for a spell. Finally he snaked one hand up and pressed my arm. Hard.

  I didn’t mind.

  He sighed. “What’s that list of yours again, your tally of my shortcomings?”

  “Narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion, sodomy, spying, forgery, lying, and now murder.”

  “Impressive.”

  �
�Your first murder. Congratulations. Do you fucking understand me? Your very first—”

  “Jesus, my Tim, give a cove some breathing room, supposing you want to have a conversation with him. Tim. I’m serious. Timothy, get off before I throw you from here to Ward One.”

  Settling back against the railing, I draped my wrists over my knees. Shattered glass sparkled at us from a few feet distant, looking about as broken and as glinting with a strange, unsettled hope as I felt just then. Valentine straightened one leg to the floor and pulled the other shin closer. Seeming no more prepared to move than I was.

  “Turns out you’re flasher on the muscle than Robert ‘Bonecrusher’ Symmes after all,” I mentioned.

  My brother laughed heartily at that, features twisting. He was right. He shouldn’t have found it funny. But then I shouldn’t have said it, so I figure we were even.

  “I warned Symmes I was coming for him,” he said when the pained fit of mirth had passed. “The fight was fair.”

  “I could read that in your togs. You didn’t have to tell me.”

  “Yes,” he said flatly. “I did.”

  We were quiet for a little.

  “We should be running out the door,” I mused.

  “We should be strolling out the door, bidding a hearty fare-thee-well to the butler, mentioning in passing that Symmes is too lushy to see straight.” Valentine pulled his cravat the rest of the way off, twining it in his fingers. “You’d make a sam-fool assassin. Timothy?”

  His voice had dropped, so I listed my head in his direction. “Yes?”

  “Just how bad is the . . . James Playfair business?”

  “Bad. I’d have sent for you, but Jim didn’t want Symmes to stake undue claim on your attention.”

  “Jim is a flouncing dunce with naught between his ears but maudlin piano concertos, the coded sentimental meaning of every sodding flower sold at Catharine Market, and inexpressibly stupid conceptions of honor.” Val wasn’t fooling anyone. His tone was equal parts fierce and fraught.

  Oh, so my brother does love him, echoed faintly in my pate.