The Fatal Flame

by Lyndsay Faye

  Mercy blinked disbelievingly, her other hand lifting to pass through my hair. “You say such terrible things, Tim. You’re my closest friend. You always have been. For whom else am I meant to stay alert, stay myself? Aren’t you remotely ashamed of the fact I’m delusional? Did you ever expect anything of me, if truth be told?”

  Shaking my head, I lifted myself by the forearms and leaned down, leaving a single kiss just at the edge of the mouth that had asked me so many impossible questions. Mercy was right. Madness was a humiliating ailment, a wicked one, a disease that sent previously respected citizens to skulk in closets, shun their own kinfolk. Disappear entirely. It competed with abject poverty for the most disgracefully ironclad proof that God loathed the sufferer. Mercy was wrong, though, in another way.

  “I never wanted you perfect,” I told her. It had been years in coming, and about a decade too late. “I love you. I only wanted you mine.”

  For an hour, perhaps, we stayed like that. Knowing the worst—that her mind wasn’t hers anymore, no more than it belonged to me. That her thoughts had been captured by some other spirit, a creature gentle and malevolent by turns. I held her hand in my keeping. Nothing further. She still didn’t love me, the way I figured the landscape.

  I didn’t care.

  After dawn broke and the spell with it, while Mercy slept on, I paid a call on the now-four-person vigil being held in the parlor. I told them, in broad strokes, our story.

  And I told them my plan.

  —

  Dr. Peter Palsgrave is a physician residing on a medically prestigious stretch of Chambers Street—a road chock-full of brothers of the bolus, as flash patter terms doctors. He was initially ketched at the sight of me, as I know him to have indulged in some plenty dusty practices years back. Dr. Palsgrave is a solidly good egg, though, for all his huffing and puffing and his corseted waist, his queer amber eyes, and his equally rich silver side-whiskers. He’s a physician specializing in kinchin. He’s also an alchemist—which means he’s a genius, and a simpleton, and a chemist, and an anatomist. When Mercy was a girl, he was an intimate friend of the family.

  Mercy blinked at the house a few times when I helped her out of the carriage. Then she gave a crooked little laugh and rapped the doorknocker herself.

  “This isn’t a social call, is it?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll consider living here, then, if he allows me to? You imagine that would be safer than my being alone?”

  “Of course he’ll allow it. He’s a lonesome narcissist who adores you. And there are advantages to living with a doctor who’s cared for you all your life, aren’t there? It’s perfect.”

  “No it isn’t. That’s the problem, don’t you agree?”

  A servant, recognizing Mercy with a start, showed us into the study. It’s a grandly eccentric space. Half laboratory, table thick with cobalt-glass jars and small burners and apothecary bottles with tight wax seals. Half library, the shelves stuffed with gilt-leafed medical texts, the warm scent of crumbling paper underlying the vague antiseptic atmosphere. I’d been there only once. But I remember thinking it a wonderful place, and I wrote after seeing it, With all the magical discoveries already unearthed, what else in the world silently waited to be fully understood?

  Dr. Palsgrave sat erect behind his chemistry equipment. Scribbling away in a massive notebook, scowling in hearty choler at our footsteps. The lilac light of dawn christened an illustrated human heart before him, arteries curving away from it like serpents, looking wholly as ominous as that apparatus is in fact.

  “Whatever my imbecile of a butler may have told you, I haven’t the slightest intention of seeing any patients for at least another half an hour.”

  “Didn’t you once say I could presume to call on you at any time?” Mercy asked, amused.

  Dr. Palsgrave sprang from his chair, dropping his pen, his hand flying over his chest. Rheumatic fever had ravaged his heart at an early age. But to my mind it doesn’t help matters that he owns the disposition of the edgier variety of lapdog.

  “Mercy Underhill,” he gasped. Dr. Palsgrave stroked his palm down his waistcoat, a self-settling motion I’d not seen in years. “By the Lord, you’ve just taken several years off my life, dearest child. What on earth are you doing here? And who is that with—”

  Dr. Palsgrave paled at the sight of me. Poor fellow, I know far too many of his secrets. I swept my hat off apologetically.

  “I was just escorting Miss Underhill.” Smiling at him, I took a step back. “It’s good to see you, Dr. Palsgrave. Any progress with the elixir of life?”

  He huffed out a breath of relief, the shawl collar of his impossibly tight jacket receding and swelling again. “I am on the scent at long last! Electricity. Electrical galvanization can be applied to certain compounds to produce— No, no, it’s much too complex for the neophyte to grasp. Mr. Wilde, between the pair of you, I wonder I’m not in the midst of complete heart failure. How wonderful to see you again.”

  Dr. Palsgrave wrung my hand, and then, beaming, the doctor embraced Mercy so enthusiastically that her feet left the carpeting.

  When he’d set her down, Mercy quirked a smile at him. “I’ve missed you, Dr. Palsgrave.”

  “Missed me, missed me, she says. What utter nonsense. Young folk are the most charming and shameless liars. But what the devil has happened, my dear girl? Are you all right? Tell me what’s befallen you, and we’ll make all well again.”

  “It will take . . . it will take some time to tell, Doctor.”

  “As ever, I am wholly at your disposal, Miss Underhill. Do sit down.”

  “I’ll leave now. Will you be all right?” I asked her.

  “I think so. How can I thank you?” Mercy inquired, angling her face in my direction.

  “You’ve nothing to thank me for.” Tipping my hat to Peter Palsgrave, who stood cocking his head from one to the other of us like a bantam rooster, I turned to go. “And I’ll be back soon. I promise.”

  Remarkable, in retrospect, how calm I was. How level about it all.

  Remarkable too that my voice was so even when I left her there.

  Remarkable that only afterward—in the street no less, walking with fierce strides away from the doctor’s residence and consulting rooms—that the stinging at the back of my eyes turned sharp enough to blind me to the streets of New York.

  I’d always recklessly assumed, seeing as I was still breathing and all, that I survived the 1845 fire. Minus a portion of my face, but otherwise intact.

  But it had been fatal.

  I had allowed hope to perish, to crumble in so many feathery ashes, and by the time I missed it, it had already scattered to the four winds.

  25

  Woman is man’s partner, not his rival—the complement, not the double of his being. It is not to her dispraise to deny her what would add nothing to her worth, while it would destroy her fitness for her place in a perfect order of society—the mental energy, the creative power, the sustained strength of reasoning which distinguishes man. She is not fitted for public life.

  —NEW YORK CHRISTIAN ENQUIRER, NOVEMBER 2, 1850

  “THAT WAS JUST ABOUT THE MOST AWFUL—” Bird Daly cut herself off, shaking her head.

  I’d stopped at a public bathhouse on my way home from Dr. Palsgrave’s. Stupid with hurt and stinking of fire. I’d viciously scrubbed myself, scrubbed as if I could deny my own existence or reverse the effects of time ticking solely in one direction. Destruction lingered in my hair yet. Then I’d gone home to our German neighbors and the two people on earth I wanted to see most.

  Elena had pressed her lips to my cheek and vanished, citing an urgent need to visit the market for her business’s sake. Soon you will tell me what happened, she’d said. Soon, Timothy. So instead I’d told Bird, in vaguest fashion, what had happened. She’d turned white as powdered sugar and f
lung her arms around my waist in a frenzy to make all right for me again.

  That wasn’t what she meant by awful, though.

  No, now Bird and I were clearing up the carnage of our ruined dinner, she scraping pots and I scrubbing them spotless in an aching, violent sort of fashion. Queasy with exhaustion. And my brother had just departed.

  Not alone.

  “It was awful at that.” Sucking in a breath, I unfairly directed my rage against a crusted bit of shriveled-up mutton.

  I’d been talking with Bird at the squalid table when Valentine arrived. My brother had nodded at the pair of us, jerked his high-browed head toward my second-floor chamber, and wrenched his face into a question mark. I’d said, Yes, he’s awake, which was the most positive accounting of the situation I could offer, and Val had vanished soundlessly up the stairs.

  Bird and I had stared at each other. Equally at a loss. Only muffled voices reached us, indistinct sounds like the murmured repetition of Catholic prayers.

  Then Jim Playfair had walked downstairs under his own power with Val’s fist supporting his elbow. Not fully dressed, not by half, but wearing an untucked shirt and trousers and socks and boots. He looked as if he’d either died already or was about to on the spot. Greyish sweat stood out along Jim’s hectically fevered brow, the scent of delirium flooding the air, and he took a long moment before speaking. As if not entirely certain where he was.

  “I am eternally in your debt,” Jim had said to me.

  “You’re nothing of the kind,” I’d protested as one of the proudest men of my acquaintance turned away from me without understanding fully who I was.

  “Have you ever watched a hanging?” Bird’s voice emerged above the scrapes and clatters as she passed me the roasting pan.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “Not by choice. At the Tombs.”

  “I’ve never seen one, you savvy that,” Bird said with the odd extravagance of explanation that kinchin use when they don’t want to be told their remarks are stupid. “But I read a story about a hanged man once, and when I pictured it, the convict’s expression standing there on the trap, he . . . he looked like Mr. V just did.”

  It was about all I could do not to flinch from that. Because she was dead right. And I hadn’t heard my brother say a single distinguishable word during the entire ghastly interim.

  “When we’re knocked down, we get up and keep walking,” I reminded her. She hovered uncertainly while I struggled with cast iron. “We’ll be all right.”

  “Yes,” she said unsteadily. “Just, I gunned Mr. V as they left, and I know they’ll come out swinging, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “It isn’t fair.”

  I couldn’t help it. I dropped the pan in the washtub and hugged her close with soapy fingers and said, “I know, I hate it. It isn’t fair.”

  When Bird tensed, I let her go at once. The moment my arms dropped, she walked deliberately away from me, putting the table between us.

  A glacial chill descended.

  “I want to tell you that you can stop being mates with me if you like,” Bird announced with a tremulous lower lip.

  Wiping my hands with a rag, I studied her. A little girl who ought to have been carefree. Or as carefree as a kinchin can be, savage and pregnable as they are.

  “Why do you say so?” I asked with tremendous care.

  She glanced away. “Because I thought you’d told me a real hummer about Mr. Playfair, and I was beastly to you, and then you only meant to be kind, but I called you a liar when I’m the liar, and then I saw them. Together. I never thought . . . I met a molley once, at the Madam’s, but he was dressed all in sequins. So I didn’t understand before. And I insulted your honor.”

  She ceased speaking for a few seconds.

  “So you and I can split out, if you like,” Bird informed me in a very quiet voice. “Stop being pals.”

  It took me a long while to formulate my response.

  “Bird,” I said.

  Her head shifted.

  “I don’t care what you say or don’t say to me. I don’t care how you act or what you do. Well, none of that is quite true, but you’re sharp enough to savvy what I mean. Provided you don’t decide I’m useless, my tombstone will say ‘Timothy Wilde, friend of Miss Bird Daly.’ Unless you’ve a different last name by then. Which you will have, supposing I live long enough.”

  When Bird’s face gradually broke into a smile like a sunbeam cresting a wall, I remember thinking only in weak relief, That was too easy.

  And afterward, No.

  It wasn’t.

  Some parts of life are difficult. Too many.

  With Bird it was only a matter of being myself right up until she couldn’t stand it any longer. She walked back up to me, and I pinched her chin in my fingers as if nothing had happened between us.

  We resumed washing dishes.

  I daydreamed as I scrubbed that there existed a monument that had watched us—some sort of landmark witnessing our pact. Knowing even as I craved permanence in New York City, that want would never come to pass. Very few noted our presence here, and fewer still cared that I thought every day about Bird, fretted over whether she would fall into some drudgery or other, or else marry the wrong person. It was palpably clear to me how slender her list of options was. The pair of us would live for as long as we could.

  As well as we could. That was all.

  Then we’d blow away like wishes made on dandelion heads.

  —

  I slumbered for a long time that afternoon after taking Bird back to the orphanage. Distantly, I heard customers knocking. I’d have roused myself to reassure them that Mrs. Boehm’s Fine Baked Goods would be open tomorrow but found my blood replaced with sludge incapable of propelling me to the door. Soft nightmares haunted me that would have brought me awake under most circumstances. Instead my mind drifted through scorched empty battlefields as if I’d fallen in Texas and my corpse were left to simmer. The smell of charred weeds all around me.

  When I awoke, discovering that my hair still reeked and the afternoon sun through my window was full on my face, that grew more sensible.

  Elena wasn’t baking when I arrived downstairs. She clearly had been, though. The kitchen I’d left spotless as the smallest possible gesture of apology for disrupting her life was chalky with flour, and the oven blasted warmth. Generally when I happen upon her relaxing, she’s reading. Something lurid and lovely, like Mercy’s short stories were. Before. Nothing magnetizes people like a shared taste in disgraceful fiction.

  This time she sat with a small glass of gin, as she favors. Hands wrapped around the simple cup, a tasteful engagement ring on the fourth finger of her left hand.

  It was her left hand that passed me a cup of coffee whenever I forgot to ask for one. Her left hand that wrote me notes whenever she wanted fresh oysters. Her left hand that flapped whenever she was disgusted with a customer who’d just departed and she was about to imitate the poor soul.

  It would have been admirable to have been surprised. I certainly ought to have managed that much. But I hadn’t fought for her. Not once, not a single time, and she knew it. We two were easy, friendly. I’d have jumped into the Hudson to save her from drowning, but it would never have occurred to me to ask if her parents were yet living or how she felt about keeping a dog.

  The wedding ring she’d always worn as the widow of Franz Boehm had been so familiar to me, though. Seeing the new one, the band with the single small stone, Elena sitting there as if the jewel belonged on her finger—it unnerved me. It shouldn’t have done. She’d never been mine, and I’d known it.

  Still.

  I ought to have been, even in the depths of my melancholy, surprised.

  “I was so dazed earlier. You wore it to the market, didn’t you? I don’t like to picture you with him,” I admitted when I crumpled opposi
te her with my own glass and the gin bottle between us. “Herr Getzler is a good man. I mean no offense. And I’ve been terrible to you, practically a curse on this house. I’m sorry for it. I just feel . . .”

  Elena passed a wrist over her brow, inadvertently drawing a clean streak through the wheat dust. “Feel how?”

  I winced, baffled at myself. “I know you deserve someone who wants to carve your name in every tree he ever encounters. I’m going to congratulate you, I promise. Please don’t let the delay make you think ill of me.”

  Elena frowned, puzzling. It’s one of my favorites of her expressions. One I wouldn’t be seeing anymore after she’d become a local purveyor of immaculate baked goods with the name GETZLER painted on the sign and not an intimate friend. It was the oddest circumstance and not one she deserved, but in the aftermath of knowing Mercy mad for a fact and watching Symmes’s postmortem blow to my brother as it landed, I couldn’t begin to feel happiness or sadness or anger. She might as well have been talking to an onion.

  “Soon, I said. Now you tell me what happened to you,” Elena prodded gently. “But slow.”

  “Your engagement is much more important than—”

  “Nein. Tell what you’ve been doing.”

  It was neither pretty nor ugly. My eyes were dry the entire time, because I felt like a safe that had been cracked open, its contents plundered, and that I was empty.

  Elena had seated herself atop the table before me by the time I’d finished. If circumstances were ordinary, I might have brushed my fingers into the crook of her elbow to feel the supple texture there. I might simply have deposited my head in her lap and seen where that might lead. As matters stood, I held a glass of oddly tasteless gin in my two hands and strove to feel something, for her sake if not for mine.

  “You think all is changing because of you, your mistakes, and it is not so,” Elena said, leaning with her wasp’s waist down toward me. “Will you listen?”

  I was capable of nothing else and therefore nodded.

  It had transpired, Elena told me, that after they emigrated, Franz and her son, Audie, had worshipped America with the sort of abandon reserved for visionaries and lunatics. They’d stopped to sample every doughnut and refused to keep a reasonable pace when passing a brass band. This enthusiasm for immersing themselves could have led to their being at the tragic cattle drive up Broadway that look their lives, but Elena wasn’t prepared to swear it. The loss of them had devastated her, however, rendered her a third of the woman she’d been the day previous.