The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  The last thing I heard before I reached my door was the quiet, satisfied conclusion: “Robert will buy me another knife. I know he will. I’ll need it now, and he is growing to love me, after all.”

  24

  Here is another query: is it the duty of Society to burden itself permanently with every vicious woman who becomes a mother? And is it possible to make such an establishment of male and female loafers, even with the best management, anything useful to them or the world?

  —NEW-YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, AUGUST 11, 1847

  I COULD HAVE RUN for the Five Points, that corroded stain on the map where last Mercy had been seen. But it was hours since the attack, and supposing she remained there . . .

  If Mercy was yet in Five Points, then there was nothing to do.

  Instead I chose the theatrical boardinghouse as my destination. Spearing into Broadway, where every coldly polished window, every paste-bejeweled stargazer, every hack’s gleaming lantern mocked me knowingly.

  Certain of disaster.

  As I raced toward Howard Street, fear lodged like a bullet in the hollow of my throat, I didn’t think about Mercy yet alive but trampled in the muck of the Old Brewery. I didn’t think about her perishing in scarlet ribbons, gazing openmouthed at me from the straw-strewn cobblestones of Paradise Square. I didn’t even think of her dead—motionless, curled into herself like the whorls of a polished seashell. Fearing the worst as I did, the world glimmering with a sickly certain doom, I could think only about the past as I scattered pedestrians who stared after me with wondering eyes.

  Because in those few minutes . . . I didn’t know anything. And that meant Mercy was alive.

  If only for a little while longer.

  I put my head down and ran, clinging to ignorance. I didn’t deserve the luxury. Elena had been right all along. It wasn’t just that I wanted to cautiously sink my claws into Mercy and leave them there so she’d never commence hemorrhaging. I also wanted the impossible—for my mark to have been made when she could conceivably have wanted me back.

  I wanted to do that to the seventeen-year-old Mercy, the eighteen-year-old Mercy.

  Every individual Mercy except for the one three years ago who thought it better to leave me behind.

  I reached the quiet brick street, the iron lamp on the corner cracked yet fitfully flickering. Knocking would have been courteous. And impossible.

  I burst through the door.

  The foyer was empty. Firelight flickered in the parlor beyond, light at the wrong time for theatrical types. Light where all should have been the pale charcoal darkness of the tenuously waking city.

  “—argument is moot, don’t you agree?” came the voice belonging to the regal actress who’d delivered the bawdy song the day I met them. “It isn’t as if we’ve the means to treat her ourselves.”

  “Come, come, that was never my proposal,” scoffed the baritone of the portly gentleman who’d worn the blinding-pink waistcoat. “But what’s a little kindness when the burden is spread amongst us all? She has money already. What she needs are friends.”

  “We are none such. Would you wish harm to come to her due to the very brevity of our acquaintance?”

  “Of course not! I wish no harm to come to her at the hands of greedy relations or medical quackery.”

  At my footfall both looked up. The beautiful and grandmotherly actress wore a once-fine robe embellished with emerald velvet at the wrists and the neck. Her potbellied friend sat beside her on the sofa, a crystal decanter of spirits between them and cordial glasses held in practiced fingers. They ought to have been shocked at the sight of me—painted liberally with cinders, shirt gaping, sans coat, looking like a man invited to dig his own grave.

  They weren’t.

  Setting their glasses down, they hesitated. The grande dame of the stage pressed her palms together, and the portly fellow, wearing a fez and a pair of half spectacles, rose to greet me.

  “Very glad to see you, sir,” he assured me. “It was Mr. Wilde, wasn’t it? Yes, I thought so. We’d have sent word had we known your address, but I see you’ve heard the news despite our incompetence.”

  The actress, white hair turned a gentle gold in the glow from the hearth, stepped forward. “She’s been asking for you, you know.”

  “Mercy asked for me?”

  She paused. “No, Miss Duffy asked for you. Repeatedly. Miss Underhill is sleeping at last, with Cynthia attending her. You’ve met the lovely blonde waif who sings comic opera at the Olympia Theatre? Cynthia is a most gentle nurse, and Kindling—I believe you’ve met our dear little friend Kindling as well—is guarding the door.”

  When I could make no reply, the rotund thespian announced, “You’ve passed a hard night already, my good man. It doesn’t require a policeman to see that. I’ll take you through to Miss Duffy. She’s still . . . quite shaken. She said she wanted to look at the moon until you arrived, and we left her to it.”

  Mercy is alive, I thought as I watched my feet progress through the combined kitchen and eating hall to a scullery leading to the back area. I thought nothing more, the fact washing over and over and over me like the lapping of colorless water at a creekside. When the actor had opened the back door, he turned with a sympathetic grunt and departed.

  The ripe smell of the chicken coop wafted toward me, and the spring vegetables in their small patch whispered in the predawn breeze. But a pretty wooden table had been set up next to these necessaries—one surrounded by chairs and carved with many names and sentiments. All the best-loved phrases and the monikers of the people who’d uttered them spread out in knife gouges for those who came after.

  Dunla Duffy had moved a seat to the center of the yard and sat gazing at the moon. A pair of perfectly round faces, studying each other quizzically. Her sleeve was torn, and I could see bruising at her wrists. But otherwise she seemed unharmed. That didn’t mean she wasn’t covered with blood, mind. The stiffening blemishes just couldn’t have belonged to her, left alone and content as she was. The moonlight had been smoke-stained and wasted in Ward Eight. Here it shone pure silver like the bowl of a spoon.

  I drew up a second chair and sat opposite her.

  “There ye are at last,” Dunla Duffy said, smiling. “I wanted to see ye.”

  “I heard.” My voice was mere sandpaper by then, scoured by ash and regret. “What happened at the witches’ tower?”

  The gravity of her expression was only deepened by its simplicity. Miss Duffy looked as a kinchin might when about to expound upon a broken doll or something equally devastating. She smelled of pig shit and death.

  “Ye’d not understand it afore I explain about the letter earlier. ’Twere from you, Mercy said afore she read it out to me.” Dunla Duffy leaned forward conspiratorially, crooking her finger. “I’m right glad ye wrote her those words, seemin’ a man who knows his business and all. I knew her fer what she was beforehand, mind. But it were grand t’ have the proof of it.”

  “What is she?”

  “An angel.”

  Seconds passed as I searched for her meaning, placed each word on a microscope slide. Then it was all so simple that it split me in two. I’d written Mercy following the attack on James Playfair:

  I recognize you to be among the angels, even if the outworkers have been brought too terribly low to mark the difference between a helpmate and a scavenger.

  “After, I knew I was right to think her an angel.” Miss Duffy’s eyes reflected light the color of tombstones. “I asked whether she were the true Angel o’ Mercy, and she said aye, she thought so, though she struggled at times t’ recall heaven. I felt that sorry fer her, not rememberin’ the hosts and all the saints, and losin’ her wings. When she said that she had to bring the truth to the witches, I knew I had to help. Can ye imagine the shame of it? If an angel should need my aid and I were found lacking?”

  Crossing herself, she smiled
at the collapse of the man in front of her.

  “You went to help the witches together,” I said.

  “First we stopped at a market and bought wee candles. Dozens o’ them, hundreds. Mercy said that would help t’ ease the outworkers and break the witches’ power, and that were true as Gospel, for I’d meself much need o’ light afore I came here. Then we carried them to the door and went inside, though it were so dark I was half frighted out o’ my wits.”

  Closing my eyes, I saw Mercy as she’d been for most of my life—walking toward fear and through it, a basket slung over her forearm. Her tiny wrist cocked just so, a few tendrils of black hair escaping the thick braided knot at the base of her neck.

  “We passed along candles, all hizzy-tizzy, so many candles I could nary believe my own eyes.” Miss Duffy rubbed her nose regretfully. “I’d thought her aglow so bright they’d ne’er dare touch her. But the angel needed me after all.”

  “The witch who frightened you at Pell Street shouted something. You were attacked.”

  Miss Duffy nodded as if in a trance. She was only fourteen, I thought. A lifetime for some, an instant for others. Her grassy hair glinted in the moonlight, curling like the snakes Medusa’s crown had sprouted.

  None of this is her fault.

  I couldn’t have known she’d be my saint and my executioner—that she’d have both encouraged Mercy’s fit of madness and saved her from it. All I knew was that if one of Gotham’s gods had truly been responsible for the events that night, then I wanted an explanation. An accounting of just what good this could possibly serve. I touched the edge of a curl where it shone.

  “It weren’t always so,” she told me shyly. “Once ’twas yellow-red, like me mam’s. After our cow died, it turned queer. There were a coppersmith next door, and when I grew too weak t’ walk to the stream, I washed in his barrels. I thought maybe he cursed me, but he’d always been kindly. It were a púca, I think, as done it. The goblins were always terrible mean-spirited in those parts.”

  A coppersmith’s barrels and an emigrant with fern-green locks. So there was another mystery unraveled, or at least for me it was. I stroked along the edge of her hair as I stood. Miss Duffy beamed up at me, a soft glow playing about her mouth.

  “Mercy bein’ an angel and all, I’d not have taken the knife up when they came at us if not fer you, sir,” she whispered. “She could ha’ gone back to heaven that much faster, but I recalled she were yer gealach lán. Did I do right?”

  “Exactly right. What happened when you’d fought them off?”

  “We ran,” she said eagerly. “No one stopped us after I’d used the Witch’s knife. I’d not thought to meet an angel, and I’d ne’er thought to help one, but God’s designs are mysterious. I’ve always been foolish, but Fate didn’t care that I couldn’t understand. It used me despite my thickheadedness. The moon seems far off and all, but the tide still comes in. Don’t it, now?”

  I looked at her. Wanting to answer, I found myself inadequate. As I so very often prove.

  Nodding farewell, I returned to the house.

  Murmurs yet emanated from the parlor. They were deciding what to do with Mercy—these bawdy, warmhearted almost-strangers who knew her to be balanced on the edge of a precipice, facing either greedy relations or medical quackery or both. I’d have stopped to reassure them but could delay no further over seeing Mercy herself.

  So I climbed the creaking stairs, the conversation behind me pausing briefly and then resuming its liquid murmur.

  The dwarf called Kindling dozed in a cushioned chair. A violent gust disturbed the ends of his vibrant red moustache as he started awake.

  “Mr. Wilde!”

  “Don’t be alarmed. I’ve just seen Miss Duffy. With your permission—”

  “No, please, go right on in.” Kindling drew a patterned satin dressing gown tighter about himself as he shivered, and I was struck again by just how taken with Mercy these people had been. “Cynthia is watching her. When I think . . . Oh. Mr. Wilde, I’m so sorry, I—”

  I turned the knob. For a moment I puzzled over whether to tread gently or to stamp my feet and announce my presence. Then a lamp brightened with tremendous care. When it had reached a quarter strength, I could see that Cynthia was likewise wrapped in a robe—lying next to Mercy in the bed, the singer above the coverlet. Swinging her legs to the floor, she blinked at me with her unrouged Cupid’s-bow lips dissolving in distress.

  “I knew you’d come. We’ve done all we could without a real doctor. Mr. Wilde, please forgive us, but we didn’t want anyone to think . . .”

  . . . That she’s mad, I supplied. And take her away somewhere nothing good could ever happen again.

  “I’m grateful. How bad is she?”

  “In no danger, though some pain despite the tonic. There are bruises. None of them threatening, in my opinion. Mr. Wilde, I couldn’t bear if you thought me to have treated her with any of my usual . . . flippancy. Please—”

  “I think nothing of the kind. My thanks to you, and to the others.”

  Cynthia had abandoned a chair before lying exhausted on the bed, and I pulled it where I wanted it. There is a tangible poetry in particular injuries. An arm twisted by a kinchin adventuring in a tree, a tooth broken in defense of a friend.

  Other hurts are senseless, and thus doubly unbearable.

  Dunla Duffy had done a heroine’s work of defense. Mercy was nowhere braced into splints, I discovered after a few careful sweeps of my fingers above the quilt. Her eyebrow had been split and carefully bandaged, though, and a bruise bloomed upon her cleft chin. A set of starving fingers had clearly torn the earring from one of her ears, for the lobe was swathed in cotton. As I watched her, she stirred fitfully. Smelling smoke and rightly mistrusting it.

  “You’re all right.”

  It was the smallest of exhalations, yet she flinched as if I’d shouted at her. The backs of my fingers brushed at the severe curve of her cheek.

  “Mercy, you’re at your boardinghouse. Your friends are here. I’m here too.”

  Her hair was a sable vortex on the pillowcase, her smile cracked from worrying it with small teeth. The familiar line creased her brow as she began to bite her underlip, and I couldn’t stop myself any longer, couldn’t keep my hand that was already on her face from gently tugging at the edge of her lip with my thumb until she released the abused flesh.

  Mercy’s eyes slid open. I watched as she understood, finally. It felt rather like dying, though without the calm that’s meant to follow after.

  “I hope you can forgive me,” I said. “I was always too careful with you, and then . . . then I wasn’t. You weren’t meant to go back there.”

  A few drops of moisture spilled from the edges of Mercy’s lashes. Tears of neither pain nor the lamp’s glare but of frustration, I thought. Fear, perhaps. My head fell forward, selfish and insistent, and cradled itself in the hollow made by the curve of her waist beneath the bedclothes.

  “You must think me very stupid,” she whispered.

  My cheek brushed a seam in the blanket as I shook my head.

  I thought her so many things—a poet and a poem. A beautiful mistake. As incapable of happiness as I was, perhaps. As eager for others to achieve it in our stead. I knew Mercy Underhill to be a thousand and one separate things, one of which was the reason my heart kept pulsing when I was failing to mind the useless organ. I thought her too valuable to prop a word against and call it the right one.

  “When I think of Dunla . . .” Mercy shoved her fingers between her eyes. “Just how badly have I hurt her? Is she alive?”

  “Happiest I’ve ever seen her.”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “I wouldn’t dare. She thinks saving you was a holy crusade.”

  It isn’t going to be quick or easy, I thought, looking up at her from my prone position. The thespians had been right
to speak in practicalities. Her mother had died untimely, her father at the end of his own noose, thinking himself the local Hand of God.

  It’s going to be like wedding yourself to a butterfly or an unpublished sonnet. You’ll never fully have her, and you’ll bleed for it daily.

  I wanted it anyhow. I’ve never loved anyone else.

  “Were you in another fire?” Mercy asked hoarsely, brow wrinkling.

  Startling myself, I smiled at this. “Yes.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Not even singed.”

  Her eyes drifted to the ceiling when she realized I’d speak no more on the subject. “I thought I was doing some good all that while. In London. Before. When in truth . . . parts were real and parts, I think now, were only a dream.”

  Reaching, I tucked her fingers against my mouth, breathing them. Lemon soap and candle wax and noble gestures and every other thing that smelled like Mercy, wedged prayerfully under my nose.

  “I’ve written so many fairy tales that living one shouldn’t be such a shock to the system,” she added, laughing darkly.

  “Apart from the rest of it, I should have been braver for you,” I said against her fingerprints. “It might have helped. I’m sorry.”

  “This isn’t your fault.”

  “That’s a bald lie, love.”

  “Anyhow, not everyone is meant to live one entire single life. I’ve been thousands of people. So I suppose it’s fair my own time should be shortened. I only hope I’ll remember you. I’ve been forgetting things, you know, people too, pieces at a time. It’s like reading a play with all the character names erased.”

  “You don’t have to remember me.”