The Gods of Gotham Page 15

  • American Protestant in Defence of Civil and Religious Liberty Against Inroads of Papacy, 1843 •

  The kinchin huddled together in the hack. Sophia’s eyes snagged on things, uncomprehending, as if she hadn’t been out of the house in a very long time. Maybe she’d never been out of it. But Neill’s eyes were hooded. A brief, wild look of freedom had settled into dull silent shame. He’d wiped the lip rouge off with the sleeve of his garment, leaving a mark like a gash over his arm.

  “When did you come to be in that place?” I asked. “And how?”

  He flushed along either side of his sharp little nose, through the freckles. “Only these two weeks. Da was bricklaying, but he give it up altogether on account of the drink. She said her house were like a theater, where people through wi’ workin’ play games and eat fine things. I’d nary et in a week, save for some apples I stole from a pig’s trough. Then she wouldn’t let me out ag’in. Anyway, some of it were true,” he finished defiantly, his reedy voice splintering. “Some of it were true. There was fish stew, and good fresh steak. I thought ye tended bar,” he added. Suspicious, as he’d likely remain for the rest of his life.

  I explained it. All the while wondering if it was a proper feeling for a copper star to want to wring Silkie Marsh by her shapely neck.

  “Neill, Sophia, I need to ask you something important.”

  They said nothing. But Neill’s ears perked, so to speak, and Sophia looked watchful as she could through the mild laudanum dose.

  “I’m afraid that a friend of yours by the name of Liam isn’t with us any longer. Can you tell me what happened to him?”

  “He were sick,” Sophia whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “In his lungs, like,” Neill explained. “Bad off, he was. To see him, though. Fightin’ it.”

  “I sent the maid out for strawberries for him wi’ my extra coin. He liked that. But he did na’ get better,” Sophia told me glassily.

  “And did nothing strange happen then?” I questioned.

  “Strange? Naught strange. He were just gone,” replied Neill. Sophia nodded. “Say, how do ye know of Liam?”

  “I’m friends with Bird Daly.”

  “Bird Daly.” Neill smiled, whistling through crooked white teeth. “Pretty chit. What a liar that girl is.”

  “Bird is keener than you, and she mended my doll’s dress better than I could, Neill Corrigan,” Sophia snapped. “She is pretty, and her lies are pretty too. You’ve only lived there this fortnight, ye don’t know. I’m glad her mother came back.”

  “Her mother?” I repeated.

  “Her mother come and took her. That’s what Madam said.”

  “Well, that isn’t true. But she’s out, and I’m glad of that. I’m glad of it for the three of you. Glad of nothing better.”

  Sophia nodded, gazing tremulously out the window. Neill said nothing more for the rest of our journey. But he did unbend himself a little and sit as close to me as to Sophia, after two or three minutes more. It was a pretty generous gift on his part, I thought. Much better than I’d hoped for.

  As for Bird—I liked her. Uncommonly. And despite her lies, the likelihood of a man in a black hood ever having existed would have been nil by that time, were it not for the evidence of twenty very real corpses.

  We climbed down from the hack in front of St. Patrick’s. Getting inside after midnight, I imagined, would present a problem. But I didn’t end up facing the great expressionless stones and forbidding entrance at all, because the cottage behind the cathedral had a studious light in the window. I knocked at the humble but well-made wooden slat door of Father Sheehy’s rectory, flanked by grimy-footed kinchin. Sophia, as she heard footsteps approach, made a small frightened sound like the high chime of a warning bell.

  Neill took her by the hand. “Don’t fret you,” he said, all authority in spite of the nightdress.

  Father Sheehy opened the door still wearing his daytime clerical attire, his bald pate standing out sharp against the slick light from the oil lamp. Seeing who was with me and what they were wearing, he took a deep breath and widened the swing of the door.

  “Come in at once.”

  He seated the kinchin at his neat square table, going to his pantry for bread and a small cheese wheel. These he sliced as he spoke to us. I waited with my arms crossed and my back to the door, too full of rushing blood to be still. Father Sheehy very kindly asked them their names, and whether they had parents worth speaking of or no, and what had happened that night. Neill did most of the talking, and I was to glad see the priest wanted his trust before my information. Scant enough good he could do them if they were out the window the instant his back was turned.

  “Eat this while I fetch you some things from the church storeroom, now,” he concluded. “I’ll take Mr. Wilde here and be bringin’ ye better clothes. Neill, see that she eats, yes?”

  “I’ll see to it, Father,” he replied. Neill, I thought, was a small man who liked tasks. Not a boy at all.

  Outside in the dewy heat, air sparkling with almost-rain and smelling of the thunderclap that would surely soon engulf us, Father Sheehy peered at me, openly interested.

  “I’d be grateful to know how ye stole property o’ Silkie Marsh with her a devil and your brother the devil’s best advocate.”

  He waved me toward the nearest entrance to St. Patrick’s, iron keys in his fingers and a lantern in the other hand. I was willing enough to tell him, and I did, though there likely wasn’t any art to it. I was too keen to go in a hundred directions at once, grow a thousand pairs of hands. Wanting to know Matsell’s mind, if Piest had found a button and what the devil it would mean if he did, whether Bird’s eyes had stopped looking like there were too many layers behind them. Father Sheehy’s hands froze in the trunk of charity garb when I said the word nineteen, but otherwise he kept his marvels to himself.

  “I want ye to know somethin’,” he said slowly, folding a small dress and a set of blue trousers. “When you need my help, you’ll have it. And you will need my help, I fear. This is a keg o’ gunpowder in a bonfire.”

  My face twitched under the quarter-mask, burned slightly as if it agreed with him. “Yes, but why do you say so?”

  “Because at any moment, Mr. Wilde, I fear your work on this case might be called off.”

  Not only did I not fear any such thing, it had never occurred to me. A flush warmed the back of my shirt collar. I felt as if he’d insulted me, though he hadn’t.

  “The copper stars will leave the deaths of twenty kinchin a mystery? We’re made of more iron than that, I hope. Though we’re untested.”

  Father Sheehy closed the trunk’s lid with a decisive snap and leaned both hands on the table to look at me. “Not twenty kinchin. Twenty Catholic kinchin who’ve nary been missed. For as long as this case appears solvable, and for as long as it marches in line with Democratic politics, ye’ll be a man with a grave and awful mission. But neither George Washington Matsell nor Valentine Wilde will suffer the infant copper star force to be publically humiliated, nor the Democrats to take a lacin’ over a thankless task.”

  “The day my brother and Chief Matsell take me off the case, I’ll watch the pope shake hands with President Polk before a cheering crowd.” My voice was dark with indignation, harsh as penny pipe smoke in my throat.

  “No offense meant, to be sure. As for His Holiness Gregory the Sixteenth, it would doubtless surprise most Gotham dwellers to learn that he’s a bit too preoccupied with fightin’ the slave trade, the modern rail system, and the terrorists in the Papal States to ruminate much over America at all,” he added in a bone-dry voice.

  “No offense taken,” I said tightly. “What do you mean to do about Neill and Sophia?”

  “I’ll see that homes are found for them, better than their last if God grant us grace, and take them this very night to the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum School. But I warn you: there’s men as would have only one God in this city, and Him a Protestant. You’ll learn it soon
enough.”

  “I know it already. But you’ll soon learn that there are some men in this city more concerned with right than with God.”

  “Separate things, are they, right and God?” he inquired slyly.

  They are, in my opinion. But it would have been a fool’s errand to argue so to a priest.

  The storm began to break outside the leaded windows, fat droplets washing away the feeling of sweat hanging midair. The sort of rain that never lasted long and roared at the ground, welcome only in that you were no longer on tenterhooks waiting for it. The feeling a fellow gets after a beating or a fight. At least now I know what the worst of it was.

  Father Sheehy gathered up the togs and his jangling keys. “Ye needn’t answer, though you’d never offend me anyhow. I like practical men. You’d quick see I am one m’self, forgetting the collar. And here you are, another practical sort—neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor wicked, I think. Let us pray that you are not one of a kind, as in my experience your type tend to be o’ tremendous use to God.”

  I’d supposed the days following our dark discovery would be frantic and grueling. And I was right. But they didn’t end up mattering very much, because the letter didn’t arrive until August twenty-sixth, and the letter was what caused all the trouble.

  The morning after I delivered Neill and Sophia to St. Patrick’s, August twenty-third, we had a meeting of the copper stars of Ward Six, in the open judicial chamber in the Tombs, presided over by Matsell. As the rumor tearing through the police force like cholera had already informed most, nineteen children had been found beyond the city’s settled spaces, he reported. Some of the bodies were as much as five years buried, some more recently interred. All seemed to be under thirteen, though that was a guessing game. Boys and girls alike. When the skeletons weren’t too far disintegrated, they seemed all to have had crosses carved into their torsos. They were likely to be Irish, and certainly murdered. This was a secret, the blackest secret in a city where hidden confidences and midnight conspiracies were thick and prosperous as the rats. And it had better stay a secret, Matsell informed us, because the murder of an Irish chit called Liam in Ward Eight had been picked up by the newspapers and was now the full-throated cry of every bellowing newsboy. I knew this already, for I’d voraciously consumed the Herald that morning. The thought of the burial grounds likewise being dissected and shrieked about and speculated over sent a cold thrill down my spine.

  “The mab who initially found the corpse has been going from paper to paper, trading story for coin,” Chief Matsell concluded. “And if I find that any man of you has done the same regarding our other discovery, I’ll make you wish you were a whore. You’ll feel enough like one by the time I’m through with you.”

  The room was a study by the time George Washington Matsell stormed out of it. Germans shocked but painting calm looks on their faces. American rabbits lowly chattering. Irish, black and red alike, much more Irish suddenly, an undercurrent among them you could see in hard glances and mouths tense as fists before a brawl.

  “Did you find any buttons?” I asked Mr. Piest as the crowd dispersed. He sat in the corner like a shellfish in the crack of a rock.

  “Mr. Wilde, Mr. Wilde,” he said, shaking my hand and sucking his withered cheeks in resignedly. “I did not. Traces were as easily culled from that landscape as blood from a carrot. But I will find something for our chief, Mr. Wilde, be it a thread or be it a sack of shovels. Mark me. I’ll do it, or die trying.”

  Mr. Piest was laughable. But however laughably he was phrasing his subject, he spoke my exact mind. Maybe we were both mad, it occurred to me as I left the Tombs, going back home to look in on Bird. That wasn’t exactly a practical destination, but it needed doing. I couldn’t think straight otherwise. Since the gravesite, Bird had been much more convincingly unwell.

  Mrs. Boehm stood cutting pleasing scores into the tops of loaves, her ovens making her dark blue cotton dress cling to her tiny but vibrant hummingbird breasts. Her mouth was still turned down at its corners.

  “Any change?” I asked her, setting a slender loaf of white sugar wrapped in the familiar purple paper on the table. A peace offering before there’d been any further war.

  “Danke,” she said, looking surprised. “No.”

  We’d suffered an incident over a dough hook Bird had glimpsed Mrs. Boehm using, just before I’d left for the Tombs that morning. I’d never heard anyone scream that way, ever. As if the sound could blot out everything else, make it all go white under a flood of noise. More pottery had been smashed, and again her hand had been blamed for it. Then she’d turned quiet, and that was worse.

  “Speak with her, maybe.”

  “I’ll try.” I turned to head up the stairs.

  “Good. And when you’ve tried, if she stays so quiet, I’ll try again.”

  “How’s Light and Shade in the Streets of New York coming?” I added teasingly over my shoulder.

  The rolling pin she’d just lifted froze midair.

  “Don’t worry, I read it myself,” I assured her. “The one where the murderer hides the body within a display at Barnum’s American Museum is my favorite. It’s grand.”

  Her lips parted, and then she hazarded a sly glance at me from under her barely visible lashes.

  “Perhaps a scullery maid has been seduced by a visiting earl, perhaps not. If I read such things, I would know.”

  “Bully,” I grinned, climbing up and out of sight.

  I went into Mrs. Boehm’s bedchamber. But Bird, who’d been so still that you could see the currents roiling under the frozen-over lake, wasn’t there. So I went into my own room, pretty scared she’d flown out the window as quick and soundless as she’d crashed into my knees.

  She hadn’t, though. Bird lay on her stomach in her long tunic-like blouse and boy’s trousers, a lump of coal in her hand. She’d taken one of my many wistful ferryboat sketches down from the wall and was adding to it. Snakelike forms threatening the ship from beneath the water, a hawk in a tree. Either the hawk had just caught itself supper, or another snake was forcing its way down the predator’s gullet. When I came in, she glanced at me. Guilty over reinterpreting my art.

  I picked up another piece of charcoal.

  “I have to be along soon,” I said, shading the gently curled talons of the hawk.

  Bird nodded, her hunched back beginning to look slightly less like a turtle’s shell. We were quiet for a bit. I’d resolved to mention nothing of her friends’ escape, not yet. Not wanting to say Silkie Marsh. She’d know of their adventure just as soon as the corpses left her eyes.

  “What’s your face look like, the whole of it?” she asked suddenly.

  I turned glass for a moment. Brittle as a prism.

  But then I took my hat from my head and thought, It’s better than Val tearing it from my pate when the liquor’s turned him hateful and the morphine’s wearing off.

  Better than doing it alone. Maybe.

  “Find out for me, won’t you,” I suggested. “I frankly couldn’t say. It’s been a weight on me.”

  Bird rolled up to her knees. Since I was also on the bare floor, she didn’t have to reach far to pull the strip of mask off, tug the single piece of oiled gauze from my face. She let the fabric fall to the boards.

  And then she tore out of the room.

  A strange fearful sickness rushed through me, the drowning sort that can’t be mastered even if a man supposes himself a man. But then Bird ran back in again with a hand mirror from Mrs. Boehm’s bedchamber, and she held it up.

  “You look like a real flash dead rabbit, Mr. Wilde. A regular brawler. Not such a one to scrape against.”

  So I took a keek for myself.

  The flesh surrounding my right eye as far up as my hairline was both new and ruined. A weird bright red with shallows rippling through it, the skin of a lizard and not a human. And she was right. It was so ugly as to be downright riveting. Previously, I’d been a scrapper in body and barely passable for handsome in fea
ture. Youthfully healthy, anyhow. Now I was a wildman, a scoundrel who’d try anything, risk violent death over an acquaintance or a box of cigars.

  It didn’t suit a barman. But it looked pretty fine on a copper star.

  “Should I tie the cover back on, so as not to frighten my enemies?” I joked.

  “Yes,” she answered, smiling a little. “But it would only frighten enemies, I think. Not anyone you aren’t angry with.”

  I was so grateful for her for a moment that I hadn’t any words for it. I never did find them.

  “I’d best be back to work.”

  Bird reached for the flimsy cloth but winced in dismay at something. She held it up for me to see. There were charcoal marks from her fingers all over it, grey on grey smears of ashy dust.

  “I’m sorry. I only wanted to see.”

  “Never mind.” Hideous and unaware or hideous and well informed, I was still freakishly scarred, so I tied it back on, kicking the oiled cotton away in the corner as I rose. “If you hadn’t asked, I don’t know when I’d have ever taken it off at all.”

  I’d like to say that the ensuing afternoon was in any way satisfying. It was hateful, though. It involved me sitting at the Tombs with my teeth pressed together, writing:

  Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. On suspicion of an unlawful burial reported by one Bird Daly, former resident of Madam Silkie Marsh’s brothel at 34 Greene Street, I accompanied Chief Matsell and Mr. Piest to 30th Street and Ninth Avenue.

  I’d not hated a spill of ink so badly since Aidan Rafferty. And two nights later, after a pair of miserable days spent speaking with what seemed everyone in the city, I wrote this:

  Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. Have interviewed various tradesmen (grocer, poulterer, seamstress, coal merchant, liquor supplier, coachman, maid, man of all work) connected with establishment of Madam Marsh, to no effect. Apart from employment practices, house above suspicion. Questions directed to sparse residents near road where the burial site was discovered report only unremarkable traffic.