The Fatal Flame (40 page)

My
home
, the fellow says. If that was a home, I’m the belle of the ball.

I glanced once again at the initial police report and noticed a curious fact.

“The notes state you’d only a candle when they arrested you,” I observed. “Come to think of it, I’m puzzled those men aren’t bleeding just now. What happened to the knife you carried?”

“That thieving bitch stole it from me.”

This wasn’t immediately comprehensible.

“Duffy, I think her name was.” Nell Grimshaw pronounced the name as if it left bitter grounds in her mouth. “There was a fray at the Old Brewery before I left it.”

Duffy,
I thought, as the world turned cold.

“A fray? Didn’t you get those marks from the copper stars?”

My eyes whipped to the report again. No mention was made of resistance. I’d assumed she’d fought the police during arrest, and meanwhile there she was, perfectly peaceable if poison-tongued, sitting in my office.
Stupid,
you are so comprehensively—

“Ha!” she exclaimed. “Not bloody likely. I was caught in a mob and my knife knocked away. Last I saw was Duffy picking it up again.”

“She . . . what?”

Miss Grimshaw’s eyes reflected a flinty spark of pleasure. “That self-righteous parasite of a lady friend you were with—she came back to the Old Brewery. Christ knows why, to ease her conscience or just retrieve her damn lantern, I couldn’t say. It’s clear enough she’s a glutton for punishment. I hate that prissy scavenger—I shouted that she carried charity cash just as I was leaving, and . . . well, you can imagine. Pity that Duffy idiot stole my knife. I’d have gotten it back, but the residents were swarming, and it was safer to be done with the place. They were on those girls like rats on a fresh corpse.”

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.”

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.