by Lyndsay Faye
“You’ve been looking after him?”
“Yes.” I swallowed, recalling it. “I robbed your house.”
Valentine turned to me, incredulous. “You’re the figner who pinched my morphine?”
“You’d have wanted to help.” Shaking my head, I muttered, “He wouldn’t let you, so I stole your morphine.”
“Tim, that’s a mighty kindness, I—oh, God, don’t tell him.” Val’s hooded green eyes flew wide in alarm. “Jim can’t know that I killed a man in cold blood, he’d never—”
“He would,” I objected. “And you should tell him. But I won’t. You . . .”
I trailed off when an explosion dazzled our vision. A little to the right of us, emanating from another rooftop. An expert lightning maker had fashioned a blazing barrage of fireworks, rockets cascading into the atmosphere and crumbling into smoke as they floated to the cobblestones. A thunderous cheer erupted from below.
The starbursts were red.
“You’re an alderman,” I said, awed. “They’ll be looking for you both.”
Val drove a distracted hand through his already madly disarranged hair. “I can’t say as I feel like making an acceptance speech.”
“Be that as it may, congratulations. Again.”
Val only chuckled, still wincing. “Did you really vote for me?”
“Fifteen times.”
“Oh, sod off, you unbearable little prick.”
“No, I did.”
“My God. That’s almost touching. No wonder you’re dressed like a color-blind Bowery fop.”
Lips parted on a peppery reply, my eyes drifted from the scarlet constellations, and I felt the blood drain from my face. At first I thought I must be mistaken. That there had been a sort of catch in the world’s clockwork, a fretful tic in the cogs.
Seconds later my brother saw it. He pushed to his feet with some effort, cursing.
Farther down the block and one street past us shone the merest hint of another warm glow on the wall of a town house in Greene Street, one we couldn’t have seen save for our higher vantage point. Above the hint of light, smoke trickled upward in a drowsy spiral.
“That’s Silkie Marsh’s brothel,” Val realized as I joined him at the edge of the roof. “I’ve not seen her all day. She was at none of the polling stations, none of the sprees. It wasn’t like her.”
We exchanged a look.
There it is, I thought as the panic swooped down, flew with soft wings through my body like a bird coming home to a familiar roost.
My brother and I sprinted down the first two flights of stairs. When we’d reached the lower two, Val caught me by the jacket with a bitten out “Slow down,” and I obeyed. By the time we’d reached the foyer and the butler had entered the hall with a raised eyebrow, I’d tamed my breathing.
“Alderman Symmes managed to get a touch hockey,” Val mentioned. “He’s reflecting over his concession speech, no need to rush, but asked if in a quarter hour you’d be so kind as to bring brandy in a new snifter. Damned if the first didn’t manage to give him the slip.”
“Of course. Good night, sir,” the servant intoned.
We were walking across the street next, still walking, reining ourselves like the riders of high-strung mounts, sliding through patches of darkness and skirting half-stupefied clusters of electioneers. Avoiding yellow pools of gaslight as if they would burn us.
“Accident?” Valentine questioned.
“Not a chance.”
“Ideas, then?”
“One. Symmes found out she’d played him cross. Is there anything Madam Marsh loves more than that brothel, after all?”
“How do you mean, she played him cross?”
I pondered the nature of Symmes’s designs—the finest ways to hurt people threaded into an immaculate plot like a square of lace. And I knew, as I’d only guessed in Matsell’s office, that the overgrown child spreading havoc like a stray dog pissing on Croton pumps, all his energy channeled toward dominance, had owned such a passionate love of suffering that a single snipped thread could have unraveled the whole and left it a silken tangle.
As, indeed, had happened.
Stepping round the corner at last, we ran hell for leather in the direction of Madam Marsh’s establishment. The single building that, about a week previous, I’d been asked to protect.
“Offering you a girl to abuse that day at the Queen Mab was a pretty dense mistake, for all your hooliganism,” I pointed out. “As if someone who knew you intimately had planted a notion guaranteed to explode in Symmes’s face.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that Symmes has been Silkie Marsh’s landlord since before he was an alderman. And I’m betting that she didn’t like it.”
My suspicions weren’t based on the fact Silkie Marsh had known so much about the fire in Pell Street so quickly, or had been aware of Miss Woods’s shackled enmity. Considering her stargazers with their wide ears and her Party insiders with their wide mouths . . . Madam Marsh might as well have been the bricks in the walls, the creak of a stair just when a man supposes himself alone. All the Tammany schemers confided their machinations to her, and Symmes might have proved no exception.
No—the blindingly obvious clue was that she’d known that Val would announce his candidacy that night at the Knickerbocker 21. When I thought of the transparency with which she’d first approached me at that soiree, not in the least amazed that Val of all people had defied Tammany, I could only curse myself for not having seen the vendetta being played out before my eyes.
It comes as no shock to me that Val rebelled against Robert’s leadership, for lack of a more apt term, she’d said.
As if that weren’t enough, giving me all the story I could ever ask for, she’d said during the uncanny meeting at Tammany Hall:
It is about nothing whatsoever save for revenge, Mr. Wilde.
She’d been telling me the truth. I just hadn’t realized she’d been referring to herself.
“You’re thinking she suggested to Symmes I solve his Sally Woods problem and mentioned I’d like something unusual in the way of a bonus. Meaning Silkie didn’t want me on the incendiary case so I’d be duped after all,” Valentine said, comprehending me.
“She wanted you on the incendiary case so you’d expose her landlord and made sure to drag me into it as well, not knowing I’d been at the Queen Mab by chance. It’s almost flattering,” I panted.
“It falls a hair short.”
We stopped before her brothel, hearts pounding. Val regarded the scene before us with an expert’s canny eye. Meanwhile, my usual affliction asserted itself, my stomach shrinking into a stony pebble.
Part of the first floor was ablaze, dainty yellow and sultry crimson flames licking upward like dragons’ tongues from the windows of the receiving room I’d visited on too many grim occasions. People darted hither and thither, shouting for an alarm to be raised, though every volunteer fireman in Manhattan that night must have been neck-deep in lush and seeing in triplicate, delaying their arrival.
Which is why it nearly killed me when Valentine continued walking toward the building.
“Don’t,” I snapped, following.
“I told you, I’ve not seen Silkie all day.” Val paused, looking up. Perfectly calm. I’ve always loathed him for that, though I know it’s wrong. “I can’t smell white phosphorus, so that’s to the good.”
I myself could hardly breathe, for all we were still safe in the road. “But you don’t have any of your gear, just a walking stick. You—”
“I’m the senior engineman of the Knickerbocker Twenty-one for good reason, do you savvy that? I’ll be fine. Leg it on the double to the station house for help.”
“You can’t risk yourself for her of all people!”
“This isn’t a question of who she is,” my brother ment
ioned while shedding his frock coat, as if we were discussing the weather conforming to everyone’s best expectations.
“No, it’s about you, it always has been about you, and I know exactly who you are, and you will not do this to me,” I attempted in desperation. “I realize she doesn’t glut on torment like the alderman did, she simply doesn’t give a damn one way or the other what people suffer, so long as she profits, plays vicious games for amusement. But this isn’t bravery, it’s suicide. Without any tools—”
“Without any tools, waiting until the blaze spreads doesn’t fadge, does it? When the Knickerbockers arrive, tell them they owe me a champagne toast.”
Val marched up the short flight of stairs, tried the unlocked door, and disappeared in a sickening gush of smoke.
Had the circumstances been different in the smallest degree, I’d never have managed it—knees knocking as they were, sweat beading along my spinal column, more frightened than I’ve ever been. And I am frightened shamefully, unmanfully often.
Nevertheless.
I retched at the ground. Shook my palsied hands out and breathed into them a few times. Dropped my coat on the ground next to Val’s. Closed my eyes and counted to three.
Then I walked inside a burning building.
It was every bit of the nightmare I’d imagined, unfortunately.
The familiar front hall with the portrait of Silkie Marsh was empty save for a suffocating screen of charred air. I entered the front saloon, where the smell of a hundred gaslights being ignited assaulted my nostrils. Flames skittered along the walls like devilish insects, reflected a thousandfold in the Venetian mirrors. I hadn’t made it two feet into that hell before my brother shoved me out again.
“Are you completely brainless?” Val demanded in a ragged voice. “Get the living fuck out of here, Timothy.”
“Either you come with me or I come with you.”
Pressing his lips together, Val strode for the staircase. The icy sweat down my neck was now a sweltering stream, rank fear resting at the back of my throat. When my brother knelt to examine the carpeting, he swiveled toward me with a pensive expression.
“I thought it was just the front room. But this entire place is soaked with lamp oil.”
I ignored the cowardly throb this caused in my chest, ignored the ash settling into our skins as the temperature skyrocketed and the hideous crackling behind us grew louder.
Val rose to his full height. “Walk out that door,” he ordered, pointing. “Now.”
Gripping the staircase newel as a wave of dizziness threatened, I shook my head.
Val muttered a lavish string of curses and cut past me. Our boots squelched in the fuel-doused carpeting as we hurried up the stairs. The lights in the seemingly empty house were all weirdly ablaze, but despite that I could scarce see five steps ahead. Already nauseous, I catalogued new sensations—a lance like a spitted fowl through the back of my pate, a gong pulsing behind my corneas.
When we reached the hall, we found a chair propped against the knob of a door. Val threw it aside as if it were made of matchsticks and tried the handle. Locked. Kneeling, he deftly pulled his knife from his pocket.
“That won’t work.” I coughed.
“Why not?”
“It’s the wrong size. Bird picked one of these doors with a hairpin.”
I watched Val approach a portrait on the wall and smash it with the head of his stick. He wrapped his untied cravat a few times around the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, picking up a slender shard of glass.
“Breathe through your shirtsleeve. It’ll help.”
Shoving my nose into my elbow, I complied.
Mere seconds passed, moments thin and destructible as paper, before Val had the door open. All the while I saw my friend Bird before my stinging eyes as she’d been at age ten—terrified, setting lies adrift as if they were toy ships and watching them founder, freckles blooming all over her square face.
I vowed to myself, If you live to see her again, you will make her understand that no one is good enough to marry her, and not the other way round.
The comfortable bedchamber Val revealed was likewise suffused with light. Silkie Marsh sprawled on the corner of a disarranged mattress, dressed in a rich black gown, gagged with a strip of linen, both wrists bound behind her to the bedpost. Her eyes gleamed through the haze like a feral cat’s, golden hair wrecked with the force she’d been using to attempt escape.
“Hello, darling old shoe,” Val said dryly, throwing the splinter of glass away and whipping out his pocketknife again.
A rolling, roiling sound like the tide of the ocean rumbled beneath us as the ambient temperature began to sear the inside of my nose. Valentine cut her bonds and unloosed the gag from her delicate mouth, which released a single spat invective. I briefly noted blood crusting under her fingernails, bruises along her bare forearms.
“My heroes,” she said, equally mocking as grateful.
“Anyone else in the building?” I wheezed.
“No. I was alone.”
I strode back the way we’d come, scouting our escape. When I reached the railing, my heart turned over.
A golden midsummer field of flame had sprouted between the parlor and the entrance, continuing its rapid growth along the fuel-saturated carpeting. Whirling, I returned to the bedroom.
“Not that way?” Val questioned, eyebrow raised.
It was growing difficult to speak. My mind felt corroded, blasted with the poisonous heat. “That window, there. Bird tied stockings together and—”
“Do you really think I didn’t have bars installed thereafter, Mr. Wilde?” Madam Marsh hissed, reeling past me. The firelight set all her edges ablaze at the room’s threshold, turned her into the silhouette of a beautiful devil.
We dogged her to another staircase. Another rooftop, another battle, only this house was but three stories tall and disintegrating like so much tissue, reports like gunshots sounding in our wake as the downstairs dissolved.
“What happened?” Valentine demanded.
“We were all engaged for the evening’s festivities at Tammany, and I gave the servants a holiday. When our escorts arrived, they sent my sisters along in the carriages while another begged a private word. After lashing me down, he appears to have set my home on fire.”
The three of us crested the staircase, chests heaving as if we’d run a mile in the desert. It felt like I’d hot sand in my mouth, sand in my throat. The physical flames hadn’t yet crawled voraciously into the upper floors, but they would.
Very soon.
“Valentine, find something to serve as a rope and meet us on the roof,” Silkie Marsh commanded, waving a white hand down the hall at two blank doors. “Mr. Wilde, you’re with me.”
As if I wasn’t already trapped in a loathsome enough hallucination, we now appeared to be taking orders from our mortal enemy, for Val turned on his heel whilst I pursued her in the opposite direction.
Silkie Marsh threw open a plain wooden door to reveal an attic, steps in its corner leading to a hatch that fed onto the rooftop. We were surrounded by boxes. Stray trunks. Cloth-draped chairs meant to be mended but ultimately forgotten. The usual detritus accumulated by dozens of people living in a single residence over a number of years. Crossing the room, Madam Marsh snatched a piece of burlap off a massive chandelier. Its crystals were missing, its brass unpolished. She’d obviously replaced it with a finer one, and here the original lay.
“I can lift it, but I can’t carry it very far,” she breathed, nodding at the trap leading to the roof. “You can, though.”
Seeing her mind, I dove for the thing. It was indeed light enough for her to hoist with a single effort, but far too unwieldy for her to haul up to the roof. My body was so weakened by then, skin dripping like a midsummer glass of iced tea, that I borrowed a trick from my brother and tore my cravat off,
wrapping it around my damp palm before clutching a branch of the fixture.
“Get the hatch open,” I husked, nearly suffocating.
When she’d thrown it wide and scrabbled topside, I breathed a fraction easier. Knowing that hesitation meant none of our ashen corpses would even require headstones, I set one hand to the stair rail and dragged the metal beast up after me.
My fingers were numb when I’d finished the task, my breath coming in parched gasps. But I managed it, depositing the chandelier at the roof’s edge next to the little decorative fence that all the town houses in this row featured.
Then I more or less collapsed on the roof of Silkie Marsh’s goosing-ken, sucking down air, as she sat with her fist tightly clenched before her mouth. Both of us staring at the roof opposite. Both awaiting Valentine, on whom our lives depended.
“Did Symmes confide in you, or did you tumble to his incendiary lay yourself?”
Not looking at me, Silkie Marsh wiped her fingers over her lips. “Robert may have suggested to me that Miss Woods meant to turn firestarter, and he may have shown me notes to that effect. I may have found the notion patently ridiculous after he’d boasted he was expanding his textile empire threefold, and it’s possible I reported my suspicions to Mr. Kane and Mr. Villers.”
“Symmes discovered you’d peached to his betters?”
“I can only assume so,” she answered, waving a hand at the floors below us.
“How long have you been plotting his downfall?”
Silkie Marsh didn’t even mull it over. The tale was perched at the end of her tongue. “I was short on rent about a year after moving in, and he found a convenient way for me to repay him. In my new parlor. In front of all my sisters. After I’d said no. As a—”
She stopped, turning to face me. Eyes blown black, grime coating her skin and hair as it did mine. Furious beyond any raw emotion I’d ever seen her produce.
“I hate you,” she said clearly. “Your kindly, sad, interested face, your knowing irony, your virtue, your . . . your everything. I detest you, Timothy Wilde.”
“I detest myself plenty often,” I admitted. “And I loathe you entirely.”
