by Lyndsay Faye
Snarling, I undid the blasted neckerchief and made a fifth attempt.
It had to be perfect.
Well. Saving my face, which was never close to perfect but was generally slightly less terrifying than at present.
I heard a distant knock from the ground floor followed by the door of the café opening and quick, sure steps hastening upstairs.
“Do forgive my tardiness! My tailor was making a few last-minute alterations, and the estimable chap simply couldn’t manage to—oh, Timothy.”
A very finely clad James Playfair stood in my bedroom doorway, holding a brown paper package I knew contained a spray of flowers for my lapel. Slender lips wide, dark brows aloft. He seemed to me, underneath the shock produced by my truly spectacular black eye, to be making a valiant effort not to laugh.
It turned me peppery, I’ll own as much.
“This is the most important day of my life and you’re going to stand there sniggering over the fact I took a slim in the daylight?” I growled.
Jim folded elegantly against my doorframe, covering his mouth with his hand. Realizing he was hiding nothing, he pulled long musician’s fingers down the back of his neck. “Of course not. That is . . . a little sniggering. If slim in the daylight means a walloping great punch in the eye, then I sincerely regret to say yes.”
“You are a deeply unfeeling person,” I announced with dignity.
This remark caused Jim to burst into such a fit of mirth that I soberly considered matching his face to mine.
“I take it back. You’re a pitiless cad.”
“Wholly callous to the finer sentiments,” he gasped, bending as he rocked with laughter. “Everyone says so. The deficiency has caused me no end of trouble as a musician.”
“I’m sick to my stomach, my head seems twice its usual size, don’t ask how my eye feels, and I’ve now tried to tie a cravat five times,” I snapped, tearing the damn thing off again. “If all you can contribute to the proceedings is mockery, Jim, leave the flowers on my table and I encourage you to jump out that window there.”
Breathless with amusement, Jim set the box down. He crossed to where I stood before the mirror and plucked my cravat from my hands. Still chuckling, he passed it round my paper collar and commenced tying it himself.
“I don’t need—”
“Oh, but you do,” Jim purred. “You most certainly and emphatically do, bright young copper star.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Timothy, cease fidgeting, I beg. I am making an effort to execute a Napoleon knot backward, which is a business for neither the fainthearted nor the distracted. You are welcome.”
Sighing, I rubbed at the edge of my scar. A short time passed with Jim fussing over silk while I contemplated severing all personal ties and emigrating to India. Then he took me by the shoulders and spun me toward the mirror.
I looked . . . I looked like a thug from one of the nastier East River gangs. But my cravat looked outstanding.
“Thank you,” I said belatedly.
“Not at all.”
“What flowers did you choose?” I asked by way of apology.
Smiling, he retrieved the package and unwrapped it.
Whatever remaining pique I’d felt toward my brother’s friend vanished. The miniature bouquet was beautiful . . . delicate, perfectly arranged.
“Lilac, which translates to first love. Honeysuckle, love’s enduring bonds. And trefoil, which I grant isn’t typical for weddings, but I thought the yellow accent would look so well with your coloring, and it stands for life, which I find appropriate to both you and to the occasion.”
“The possibility exists,” I said, pinning it to my dove-grey swallowtail coat, “that you are not a pitiless cad after all.”
He winked at me in the mirror.
My front door below us flew open without preamble and slammed shut again.
“Light a fire under it, my Tim!” Valentine’s voice boomed. “Or are you planning to stand the poor girl up?”
“Yes, thank you, eighteen fifty-four, that is exactly what I need just now,” I hissed under my breath. Snatching up my hat, I headed for the landing.
Val stood at the bottom of the stairs holding a frothing champagne bottle, a cork fixed between his teeth, grinning like a privateer. When he spied my mazzard, he spat it out. Howling with laughter that made Jim’s earlier outburst seem like a weak smirk.
“It isn’t fucking funny,” I snarled as I descended the stairs two at a time.
Wrenching the champagne bottle from his careless grip, I drank what probably amounted to a quarter of it in a single swig. I needed it. Badly. Valentine wore a new waistcoat inhabited by a populous cote of embroidered turtledoves done in silver thread.
I desired keenly to slap the man.
“Yes it is.” My brother could scarce speak and was wincing as if splayed on a rack. “It is very, very funny.”
“Are you already drunk?”
“Of course I am, you witless little titmouse.”
“I honestly have no idea what you see in him.” I passed the bottle to James Playfair, who cheerily took a long pull.
“I don’t either, I assure you,” he said fondly, handing it back to my horrible sibling. When Val could manage to drink, he tilted it down his throat and made an about-face.
“Oh, I needed that. That smeared the icing over the cake. Thank you for taking a punch in the face, Timothy, it brightened me considerable. Our chariot awaits, hop to it.”
As we rattled along in the hack, Val and Jim gently ribbing each other while I stared fretfully out the window at the passing strangers and slums, I couldn’t help but reflect over the peculiar miracle my life had turned into.
If the 1845 fire hadn’t incinerated my hopes and dreams, I’d likely be long married by now, I considered. Supposing Mercy had said yes all those years ago. I’d certainly been about to pose the query. Maybe I’d have kinchin of my own, kinchin with midnight-black hair and sweet, sideways smiles like hers. Maybe I’d be tending bar at Nick’s Oyster Cellar with a Julius Carpenter who was still alive, maybe owning my own ferry boat just as I’d dreamed in those days. Standing at the helm with the scent of seaweed flooding my nose and waves slapping my prow, smiling into the indifferent sun.
I thought about the star police forming the same year I’d lost everything, about the flowers Jim had chosen for me. About life and Kildare’s new baby, all the infants born so thick and heedless around the globe, and that when I’d started there wasn’t a name for my singular profession, but nowadays people were calling me a detective. A child born in the year 1854 could not only grow up to do the same sort of work I seemed so inexplicably to excel at but could now put a name to the occupation. Maybe even be proud of it.
Who could say?
And I realized that despite tragedies both minor and monumental, I didn’t regret the fate that had befallen me.
Not a single second.
“Stop brooding, you look like a cow.” Valentine slapped my arm so hard I’m sure it left a mark. “We’re there.”
Stepping down from the hack, I peered up at the familiar church spire, blinking in disbelief at what was about to happen. The weather was cool for April, chill enough to be bracing, a grey-and-blue sky watching with detached interest as I took an enormous breath.
“Ready to face the cannonade?” Val asked, dropping a large paw on the back of my neck.
Swallowing, I nodded.
“Forward march, then,” Jim decreed, adjusting his tall black hat.
“There you are,” Ninepin hissed as I entered the dimly illuminated door. “You’re late, Mr. Wilde, and I was that ketched, I thought— Jesus Christ, who’s given you a fibbing?”
“No one you know,” I sighed.
“A national hero,” Val drawled, finishing the champagne bottle and setting it behind a
vase.
“Get your arse in that pew,” I snapped, pointing furiously. My brother and his friend obligingly disappeared.
“She’s here, I take it?” I asked Ninepin lowly.
He nodded his flaxen pate, looking about twelve varieties of sickly. I figured I looked the same, but with an eye swollen shut. The lad was dressed in the better of his two sets of togs, the solemnity of the attire marred somewhat thanks to the monocle he’d adopted when someone finally told him his spectacles were designed for a moll, and by the most hideous Bowery necktie that had ever blinded me. It would have been uncharitable to criticize his tastes, however.
“You’ve seen her?”
Ninepin shook his head, resting his palms on his kneecaps. His real name is Francis Garvey. Exactly zero people call him that—not his old paper-selling mates, not his fellow journalists at the Herald, not the tutors he bribed to teach him to read when he learned ambition, no one. But the pomp of the occasion would certainly call for it today.
At the front of the half-full cathedral, I saw Father Connor Sheehy emerge from a side door I knew well. He lives behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Tends to its grounds and its flock with equal care and a liberal dose of Irish sagacity. Smiling at us, his bald head crowned with a formal velvet hat, he waved a hand.
“I’m going to hash my guts out,” Ninepin groaned.
Feeling no better, I gave him a small push. “All men on deck.”
“No, honest to God, I—”
“Ninepin, get up there,” I growled, shoving the poor fellow harder.
He made it to the dais without fainting, though I’d have called the odds dead even he’d keel over before the end of the ceremony. He’d not been in position two minutes, meanwhile, shifting restlessly from leg to leg, when I heard the small snick of the door behind me opening.
A head keeked out, wearing a woven diadem of spring blooms.
Bird Daly was dressed all in white lace. The gown had a round neck, and she’d tied a red velvet ribbon about the gathered waist. Her wine-colored hair was pinned up like a lady’s. Now, at age nineteen or thereabouts, it suited her. Perfectly. Her square face had grown with her, every chiseled surface still dotted with reckless freckles, and I loved every one of them, each spot and speck that made Bird herself.
Love like a weight in my chest, a painful press of devotion.
“Mr. Wilde,” she gasped softly, covering her mouth with her hand.
“You have my abject apologies.”
“What for?”
Making a vague gesture of reproach at my face was the only response possible.
Unexpectedly, Bird giggled. She emerged from the door’s shadow and put her arms around me, still sufficiently shorter that I nearly got a mouthful of blossoms. Instead I kissed the top of her head and held on.
“Don’t speak flash on your wedding day,” I advised hoarsely. “And remember your fiancé’s actual moniker.”
“It’s Ninepin,” she said, pulling away. “But I’ll behave, Mr. Wilde.”
“I am completely terrified just at the moment,” I admitted to my friend ruefully.
Bird smiled, one of her dimples appearing. She owns several smiles—all of which are precious to me and several that do not look like happiness but rather separate feelings woven over and under one another. This one was an open book. Print-clear and joyful. The rarest of her expressions. She couldn’t have given me a better gift if she’d conquered nations in my name.
“Lean on me, then,” she said, taking my arm as I readied myself to walk her down the aisle. “I’m not afraid.”
—
I’ve tied all three of the manuscripts about my time as a star police with kitchen twine. They’re bulky objects. Marred by crinkled edges as I hastily turned the foolscap during some periods. Gritty with dust on what was once the topmost sheet when I couldn’t bring myself to look at them during others.
I’ve decided they don’t belong to me any longer.
This afternoon at four o’clock, I’m due at Dr. Peter Palsgrave’s residence. He’s an old man now, alive despite his ailment, though he must be pushed about in a wheeled rattan chair these days. His nurse, Arthur, one of his former students, attends to the task when Mercy Underhill cannot.
But she’ll be herself today, sure-fingered and contemplative. I’m certain of it.
Once a very long time ago, Mercy escaped New York City. She departed in hopes of being a writer, and I wanted that for her, wanted her to draw a map of her mind for me so that I could navigate her sinuous shoals, wanted a book of fiction I could study to delineate all her currents and her cliffsides and her lighthouses. She didn’t manage it. Couldn’t manage it.
After she came back, I began to understand that I’d had it backward. Typical of me. What was needed wasn’t a volume to help me understand Mercy. I already love her, after all.
When I arrive there this afternoon, Mercy will be reading in the medicinal herb garden behind the town house with a cup of tea at her elbow, laced with rum if she and Dr. Palsgrave are feeling adventurous. They often are. After telling the pair of them all about Mrs. Bird Garvey’s wedding yesterday, I’ll wheel the doctor into his study, where he loves to putter about as the evenings lengthen, and when I return to the yard, the slanting sun will render Mercy’s face still more angular, and her lips will slide up at my approach. Her whitening hair will waltz with the shadows of the overhanging trees, and she’ll know me this time. She doesn’t always, not anymore.
But she will today. And if she doesn’t, then she will again soon enough.
As the lights are fading to dusk and the fireflies rise from their sleep, I’ll give her these three stories. I’ll lean down and kiss her, as I often do, and take my leave again. And when she is herself, whenever she is herself and not one of the many sorts of spirits that inhabit her mind now, she’ll study the maps I’ve made. She’ll read these nearly-books and then she’ll know who I am. That’s a lifelong dream of mine.
And to think it only took me a little over two decades to work out how to achieve it. We so stubbornly speak to each other in our best pet languages. When really, how much simpler would it be to speak to the listener in his or her own?
This isn’t everything I’ve ever wanted. It’s a sliver like the moon that will be rising as I walk back to Elizabeth Street, eyes on the cobbles and on the streetlamps and on my thousands upon thousands of neighbors.
But it’s the fraction we were dealt, Mercy and I, and these outpourings of ink I intend to give her will complete the picture of a life sincerely if partially lived.
Time is a tyrant, words our last and only weapons.
—Timothy Wilde, April 16, 1854
HISTORICAL AFTERWORD
The road leading to the American Civil War was a notoriously long one. Acrimony and bitterness over the Peculiar Institution—not to mention the utterly debased nature of the Institution itself—were ripping America apart at the seams long before seven Southern states formed the Confederate States of America and shots were fired upon Fort Sumter in April of 1861. Tammany’s rancorous divide between the Hunker and the Barnburner factions was echoed throughout the entirety of the industrialized Northern metropolises. It was widely thought necessary to end slavery, yet potentially devastating to attempt this in fact. Meanwhile, Congress’s efficacy as a governing body foundered in the wake of such weighty moral dilemmas—many of which, one must allow, were treated as matters of economy rather than of liberty and justice for all. The conservative bargainers and would-be pacifists were correct if only in a single sense: hundreds of thousands died tragically in the War Between the States. The fact that still-undetermined millions of Africans had already died horrifically and were still dying in slavery, meanwhile, is undisputable.
The acquisition of massive territories in Oregon and Texas deeply exacerbated this already festering debate. David Wilmot, a fiery New York
Barnburner whose career I followed closely to ready myself for this tale, recalled an incident that well sums up the problem the country was facing, in a speech delivered in 1847 and reprinted multiple times thereafter. He reported:
An intelligent member of Congress from the South, in conversing with me upon this subject, and remonstrating against my course, said, “if you succeed in your efforts to prevent the extension of slavery, and confine us to the territory now occupied by it, in less than a century we will have a population of thirty millions of blacks, with less than half that number of white population in their midst; and, said he, then the terrible alternative will be presented: we must either abandon the country to them, or cut their throats.” Would you, he said, bring such a calamity upon us?
Needless to conclude, Wilmot was unimpressed by the unnamed Southern politico’s arguments.
Feminism in various incarnations has existed for as long as females, but as a concerted effort in a modern Western cultural context, the 1840s marked a distinct change in organization and tone. Abolitionists of the antebellum period failed at first to embrace another burgeoning “infidel” cause, as the female rights movement would not gain significant traction for decades to come. The industrialization of America and its complete lack of social infrastructure had already rendered the most comfortable of lives precarious; and when women began pointing out that they were not allowed to work in positions anyone could see they were well suited for (bookkeeping is a ready and early example, as few would have dared to suggest that women were mentally capable of being doctors or lawyers or heads of state), they were roundly dismissed by reformers and conservatives alike. Zealots like Frederick Douglass were the exception rather than the rule. The first Woman’s Rights Convention took place at Seneca Falls in 1848, and Douglass accepted his invitation to attend with enthusiasm, stating in The North Star, “All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman. . . .” This was a shockingly anomalous opinion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her partner-in-reform Lucretia Mott were deeply gratified by Douglass’s approval, but they met with ferocious opposition from strangers, friends, and family. Stanton’s father, Judge Cady, wished, in fact, that she “had waited until I was under the sod before you had done this foolish thing.”
