The Fatal Flame (6 page)

“What on earth is cooking, and are we eating it for breakfast?” I removed my frock coat. My cravat soon followed. Which was certainly not my typical habit in the presence of ladies, particularly ones I was heartily fond of. But as with every rule, there exist exceptions, and Mrs. Boehm was mine.

“Bielefelder schwartzbrotpudding,”
she answered, all innocence.

Mrs. Boehm is very thin, far too thin for a baker, for all that her hips are wide and winsome. She has a clear, broad Bohemian countenance and eyes of a grey-blue no easier pinned down than a cloud formation on the distant horizon. There’s such a frank presence of mind in her unusual face that I liked her upon introduction, three years back. Her lank, silvery blonde hair was coiled loosely atop her head, and she’d thrown her apron over the knob of the pantry door, leaving her in a loose white blouse and navy skirts.

“You know I don’t speak whatever that was.”

I fell gratefully into the chair. Elena is half German and half Bohemian, and she wields both languages at me as she pleases.

I like when she does as she pleases.

“Black-bread pudding,” she replied. “And tomorrow by the slice I will sell it, but yes, we can have it for breakfast.”

Standing up, she abandoned her card game and crossed to my side of the table.

Oh,
I thought as trickling warmth pooled in my belly.
One of those nights.

Elena rested her skirts against the edge of the flour-spattered table in front of me, casting steely eyes—they were grey just then, the grey of eight in the evening in March or the more melancholy Chopin nocturnes—from my boots to the swooping twin arches of my hairline.

“So early you come home.” Her grainy voice husked against the consonants.

“I solved it.”

“Oh, did you?” She smiled.

“Right down to the ground.”

“I like when you solve it.”

She kissed me, and I breathed in the warm bready scent of her before catching the back of her head with my fingertips and chasing the hint of brown sugar I always suspect lurks on the underside of her tongue.

I’m always right, too.

Some New Yorkers would disapprove of the fact I try to make myself useful to my landlady. From help with squeaking door hinges to help with fastening (or unfastening) intractable buttons. But oh, how much less lonesome she makes me of all the undeserving people she could choose—a copper star with a fragmentary face. She’s unpretentious and open and strangely pretty, and she loves nothing more than scandalous literature, which means that she readily tolerates my eccentric profession. We both are fiercely attached to one Bird Daly, whom we encountered three years ago at age ten, running from her madam, Silkie Marsh. We keep to ourselves unless we don’t, and I always make certain she initiates matters, because I never want her to think me either ungrateful or demanding. Then I end them in as many inventive ways as I can think of, as many times as possible. And the afterward ever finds her smoking tiny hand-rolled cigarettes in my bed of a Sunday morning, light playing off the downy skin of her inner thigh.

In short, when she’s lonesome or suspects me to be, her generous lips find my collarbone. And I can feel the imprint of her smiling there for days afterward.

“I’ll try to solve everything quicker, in that case.”

Mrs. Boehm seated herself in my lap, arcing forward when I traced a thumb over the line where her shirt ended and milk-colored skin began.

“Quicker you can be at solving crimes,” she agreed in my ear, my other palm flattened against the affable ridges of her lower back. “But right now, if you want, you should take your time.”

I did want. Rather badly.

Rap-rap-rap.

Elena pulled back. I chased after, catching her laughing lips for a moment longer before she escaped me.

“More work for you?”

“God, I hope not.” I tugged my jacket on again as I went to the door. “At this time of night, it’s either a riot or a murder or a—”

When I’d unlatched the door and pulled it open, I stopped speaking.

Because Mercy Underhill was standing in the moonlight on the other side.

From what I can recall of the moment, which hung suspended in a dew-drenched web of spider’s silk, spinning into ever more complex patterns, my brain kept functioning. Even when my heart stopped.

So I registered that Mercy was standing there, wearing a fawn traveling costume trimmed in jet beads and the little sapphire hat with the black feather I’d apparently caught a glimpse of at James Slip. Her pale face, with its lovely arched half-English features and the distinct vertical cleft in her chin, was so familiar but so unexpected that I felt as if a character in one of her own well-thumbed fictions had walked off the printed page into Ward Six to shake my hand. Widely set eyes of pastel china blue formed the upper two points of her triangular face, ending in a too-small bottom lip that takes refuge beneath the bow of her top one when she’s ruminating.

Mercy was ruminating. And something ferocious too.

Around then I realized I’d opened the door and commenced not saying a damn thing.

“How are you here?” I marveled.

“Oh, Timothy,” Mercy said, nearly laughing. “How do you think?”

I asked her in, I must have done, and Elena made gentle clicking sounds as she helped Mercy with her hat and matching blue gloves. But I think I can be safely excused from complete comprehension just then. My Past and Present had just collided like freight trains on a single track. There Mercy stood, flushing along her stark cheekbones, complimenting Mrs. Boehm on the smell that flooded the room when my landlady pulled two trays of bread pudding from the ovens. Elena set them on flat cooling stones, glancing behind herself as if she’d been caught out at something.

“I didn’t know you were coming back,” I said. Because it needed saying.

“No,” Mercy agreed sadly.

It isn’t that I’d believed I would never see Mercy Underhill again. But I’d stopped allowing myself to think of it. Mercy knew I’d idolized her since childhood—unfortunately resulting in my viewing her as a picture postcard of a perfect creature, to be smothered under the best glass and kept in a thickly carved frame. When I’d learned she was just like me, all walled-off secrets and raw longings, I hadn’t acquitted myself well. And too much had happened to us for me to wonder what would happen next. The mathematics didn’t bear scrutinizing. I only wrote to her, and read her letters, and grew to know her better. And allowed myself to wish that she was happy.

She wasn’t.

Elena Boehm, after setting her baking out to cool, filled three tumblers with a better-than-healthy measure of gin. Pale eyes friendly and cautious. She knows I write letters to an eccentric girl in London whom I’ve adored since I was fourteen. And I know she’s in love with her dead husband. Thus we treat each other well. Like comrades trudging through the filth and darkness of the same war. To boot, Elena knows Mercy’s mind in a certain sense, because Mercy, before all fell to pieces, used to write a lyrical and macabre series called
Light and Shade in the Streets of New York
—published under “Anonymous,” of course, since Mercy’s style was far too voluptuous to allow pride in her own work—which both Elena and I used to read voraciously. All unaware that the companion of my tender years was penning them. Those stories owned a grisly sensuality, as perfect and desolate as broken seashells.
I may have been the only person in the room that our society condoned reading them, but they brought us together in a way, the three sets of eyes all absorbing the same tales. And the single set of hands responsible for creating them miraculously present, now pressing hard into the edge of the table as Mercy waited for someone, anyone, to say something.

“How was your journey?” I asked.

Idiot. You could ask Mercy anything. She’s sitting right in front of you. And you want to know about weather and cabin space and the relative efficiency of porters.

I expected a question in return, that being Mercy’s curiously roundabout way of communicating. But she only lifted the gin and raised it in Elena’s direction, a silent toast. She’d been so long absent, every gesture felt like a minor miracle. If I didn’t pull myself together, I realized, I’d forget to trust in realities like gravity and sunrises.

“I know I’m descending on you terribly late,” she said. “I was desperate to see a familiar face. The journey was nicely uneventful, but I spent hours finding rooms that wouldn’t ruin either my reputation or my bank account.”

“And a clean proper room you managed to find?” Elena sat down on Mercy’s side of the table. Taking over the questioning rather than indulging my fish-mouthed bafflement any further.

I’d have been grateful. Had I the mental capacity.

“Are there any
proper
rooms for unmarried females traveling alone?” Mercy mused. As if catching herself at an old trick, she nodded. “It’s just east of Broadway, at a theatrical boardinghouse. Meals appear to be based upon another species of clock than the one in this world—they’re prepared at sixes and sevens precisely. So I have to wonder if I’ve truly returned to New York or happened upon Someplace Else.” I could hear the capital letters in her voice clearly as I could see the feather-pale back of her hand three feet distant. Almost within reach. “But the tenants are lovely. No one asks prurient questions when I pass the parlor where they’re all banging out music-hall tunes on the pianoforte and I slip away alone. They’re very kind, actors,” she added more darkly. “They spend rather less time hating people than do the general population, don’t they?”

“But the room?” Elena prompted.

“Oh. Four walls, papered in fern print with only a score or so of smashed mosquitoes, quite a tolerable little sanctuary. And of course I needn’t stay if I don’t like it,” she hastened to add.

“Very difficult it is, for a woman alone to find a space,” Elena commiserated.

“I’ve only ever thrown myself at family and hoped they’d put me in a jewel box. I’d never had to seek one out for myself before. Is it always so terrifying?”

“My husband, he dies,” Mrs. Boehm said evenly, tracing the lip of her cup. She didn’t mention that her son had been taken as well, in one of the all-too-common cattle drives up Broadway that devolve into chaos and tragedy. “So. I say to myself, why must I suffer so deep? Then Franz’s ovens and his flour sacks and his loaf pans, I begin to see them. Notice through tears. And I think, I have everything. Space, work. I am rich. I am forever unhappy. But unhappy in my home, never unhappy I will be on street corners.”

Mercy tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear, leveling a particular look at Elena. I was staggered at seeing it again. It’s the one she adopts when she’s admiring but doesn’t wish to offend the source.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” she offered.

Elena shook her head, for some inexplicable reason giving me a small smile. “It was a long time ago. If one is to lose everything one loves, one might as well be comfortable about it, yes?”

To my shock, Mercy laughed heartily. Elena, chuckling, refilled everyone’s gin.

“Are you going to ask me?” Mercy inquired, eyebrows quirked in my direction.

“Are you going to answer me?” I returned. Much harsher than I’d meant to. “I’d never press you,” I hastened to add. “But—”

“But I didn’t warn you before arriving on your doorstep.” Mercy took a mouthful of gin that could hardly be called delicate, even in Ward Six, and cocked her head at me. “There isn’t a polite way of saying I’m suddenly much wealthier than I was. That is, however, what I ought to have done. I apologize. Just because I don’t know where my efforts will bleed into offense, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try them out first. I have a backbone—I ought to make use of it occasionally.”

“You have had an inheritance?” Mrs. Boehm questioned.

Mercy stared deep into her glass, reflecting. “I’ve been staying with my kin, running their curiosity shop. Antiquities, books, that sort of thing. An old gentleman whom I’d often helped knew of my work in the East End soup kitchens, and we struck up a— I’d say a friendship, though there may possibly have been more to it on his part. I found him books on botanical subjects. He seemed to feel as if flora was God’s living art crafted specially for him, you see, and one day I gave him a fern preserved in glass that someone had sold us. He said it was just the sort surrounding the tiny cottage where he grew up. He was always very shabbily dressed for all that he was well spoken, and when he passed away, I discovered that he was the richest old miser who ever slept on his pile of coin.”

“That’s amazing.” I shook my head, smiling at last. “Congratulations. It sounds like something from one of your stories.”

She smiled in return. “It does, doesn’t it? I think of late that the difference between what is real and what is not real isn’t so stark as we suppose it to be. I dream electric thunderstorm squalls, cataclysms if I’m honest, and somewhere in other worlds I know the tempests exist in truth, because I wake gasping as if running for shelter from howling winds, and my sheets are like ice, and I can taste the sweetness of the lightning still on my tongue. Have you ever felt that way?”

I wedged a hand over my mouth. Concerned—deeply concerned—about whatever would come out of it next.

“Hasn’t everyone?” Elena attempted.

Mercy sighed dreamily. “I thought so. Though what was I just saying? I can’t always recall when I’m tired. And the journey was so long. There were angels, good angels, keeping the monsters clear of the ship this morning. Under the water, of course, their wings covered with the most beautiful fish scales rather than feathers. But it was still quite exhausting. Sea voyages always are, don’t you think?”

“Yes.” Elena cast me a worried look. “Yes, I do.”

It bears mentioning that my letters from Mercy had grown . . .
erratic
is too light a word. She’s a poet, always has been, but the imagery had turned wildly abstracted of late. Worse even than in the months immediately after her father died. Sonatas and star systems and demons and birds of painful flaming brilliance rising from charcoal.