The Gods Of Gotham (15 page)

I wondered as I hastened along Pine past the all too familiar three-story lawyers’ practices, and the shop windows full of modern
oil lanterns and hothouse flowers, why I wasn’t racing toward Bird instead to ask her all about the boy with the cross dug in his chest. Two reasons emerged as I thought it over. First, Bird had said
They’ll tear him to pieces,
and I felt poorly about telling her she’d been right. Supposing the bowl of chicken’s blood another fabrication, of course. More important, I thought, no one outside my house needed to know about Bird quite yet. Did they? The sweet-faced young liar who’d been drenched in gore and could have seen far too much.
I’d
help Bird, and then
I’d
see her on her way.

I hadn’t been south of City Hall Park since a massive slice of city had burned to the ground. The closer I came, the slower my feet went. Smoke assaulted my nostrils even though there wasn’t any, embers pulsating within the rubbish heaps. Eager hammers rang out like the pounding of the city’s pulse. Buildings—still intact, plastered with clothing and medical and political advertisements—grew ever more scorched. Occasional structures, formerly wooden, were missing entirely. And therein lay the source of the hammering: Irishmen, hundreds upon hundreds of Irishmen, were sweating through their shirts with nails in their teeth while a native or two looked on, drinking from a flask and calling out jeers.

“I’ve been sawing lumber all my life, learned it off my own father, and you call that
craftsmanship
?” a ruddy bearded man was screaming as I approached William Street. “A
nigger
wouldn’t work for so little, nor would a nigger
do so poor a job
!”

The Irish fellow gritted his teeth and very sensibly said nothing, preferring to keep his employment than to indulge in a street brawl. But he flushed scarlet as the man continued screaming epithets, the native having moved to the subject of the Irishman’s mother, and, as I passed the emigrant, the dull, helpless look in his eyes was one I recognized very well. I’ve seen tattered Yidishers with threadbare head coverings wearing it, coloreds being literally thrashed out of shops wearing it, ridiculed Quaker farmers wearing it, Indian
craftsmen with rain running down their black braids as they sit stoically before a table of beaded work and carved bone wearing it. It’s always
someone
in these parts, being made small, being made to wear that look. I’ve worn it myself. And it isn’t comfortable.

When I stepped onto Mercy’s street, I saw the devastation. And then there was nothing else to look at. Not to a man bred here, who had known New York before fire took it away. I stared into a beautiful hive of swirling man-made invention. Dozens of half-formed thoughts had somehow erupted into buildings. Fresh-cut stones amid the rubble, coloreds running water to men about to perish of heat stroke, black tree roots with the branches burned away, under which sat flowering window boxes shipped from Brooklyn or Harlem.

And because New York is the only place in the world like it, just watching it happen made a part of it
mine.
I’d expected sight of the wreckage to set my face newly afire. Instead, I looked on and thought,
Yes. We keep going. Maybe in another direction, maybe even in the wrong one. But by whichever God you fancy, we keep going.

The Pine Street Church is modestly blushing red brick, at the corner of Pine and Hanover, with the rectory adjacent. When I pushed open the thick chapel door, I spied vague movement at the back, heard hushed tones. My shoulder blades tingled at the thought it might be Mercy, but even without much light, I knew it wasn’t. A pair of women stood near the pulpit, sorting through donated clothing spilling gaudily from a great canvas sack onto a plain oak table.

“This we can put in the usable pile, can we not, Martha?” asked the younger of the two as I approached. A widow, I took it when I was close enough to spy her ring, for married women who wear homespun have more important domestic tasks at four in the afternoon than sorting through slops. She’d coarse blonde hair and a squashed nose like a pressed flower, but her voice was gentle. “It’s quite good, I think.”

“Far too good,” the older woman sniffed after glancing at the plain rose-colored nankeen. “Any destitute woman would look above her place in such a dress. The very idea, Amy. Put it in the pile to pawn instead. Can I assist you, sir?”

“I’m Timothy Wilde, member of the copper stars,” I explained, gesturing at the blasted thing.

An expression composed half of curiosity and half of severe distaste flashed over her features.

“I need to find Miss Underhill quick as possible,” I sighed, ignoring it.

“Oh! Dear Miss Underhill—has something happened?” the one called Amy squeaked.

“Not to Miss Underhill. Do you know where she is?”

Martha pulled all the edges of her sallow face into the shape of a moldy lemon. “She is with her father, at the rectory. I would not interrupt them, were I you.”

“Why not?” I asked, already half turned.

Smothering a pleased look under a thick smear of prudishness, she reported, “Voices were raised as they went indoors, and the argument is one she ought to listen to. Miss Underhill has been tending to low Irish families, against all sense. She’ll end up in the earth next to her mother, consorting with drunken foreigners like this—where does she suppose cholera comes from? And then where will the reverend be, the poor noble man?”

“Safe in God’s keeping,” I answered dryly, tipping my hat. “Your God, of course, so you needn’t worry.”

I left behind me a pair of open mouths.

Exiting the side door of the church and following the little path through the apple trees to the dark-leafed hedge that borders the rectory, I stopped short when I caught sight of Mercy and her father standing before the bay window in their parlor. And they were arguing, to be sure, Mercy’s teeth worrying her thumbnail, her father’s
posture stern. On my life, I never meant to spy upon them, but something in Mercy’s eyes made my feet stop just short of the hedgerow—and in any case, seeing her again had just done something very uncomfortable to my heart rate.

But they are not even Christians, Mercy,
I watched him say, making a decisive movement with his hand.

Missionaries tend to the poor in Africa, and the tribes there have more gods than they can count. There isn’t any difference,
she said, gazing wide-eyed at him.

The tribesmen are merely unlettered, innocent.

And the Irish merely poor. I can’t—

The reverend stalked a few feet away, steps swift and angry, and I lost sight of his response. But whatever it was caused Mercy to flush like a sunrise, and wince her eyes shut as she stood with her face to the window. His speech lasted for perhaps ten seconds. When it had ended, Thomas Underhill stepped back into my line of sight with an anguished expression, pulling Mercy’s dark head to his chest. She went readily, gripping his arm, and the last thing I saw before turning away from a scene far too intimate to view was the reverend speaking once more, his chin resting lightly on his girl’s head.

It terrifies me,
he was saying.
I’d not risk your health for a thousand lost souls.

Guilt would have gnawed at me, witnessing a scene like that, had I not been well aware of what they were arguing over. Society charity types limit their usefulness to hosting themed teas with generous slices of tongue pie, lemonade soirees where they feelingly discuss ways to rid the earth of vice. Mercy isn’t a society type, though. She frankly isn’t any specific type at all that I can discern despite my constant scrutiny, and after all she comes of abolitionist stock. If any breed of charity worker is willing to dirty their hands, and at any hour of the day they’re called on, it’s an abolitionist. So I don’t muse over the fact that Mercy’s equally impassioned mother
died by walking into a sickroom full of sufferers, the way her father does. I don’t muscle Mercy back into the light and air when I see her do it. I wait it out, or she’d never speak to me again.

Such were my dark thoughts as I rounded the corner of the house. When I reached the front door, it swung open, and then Mercy turned to shut it once more.

I froze stiff for no reason at all. Mercy copied me when she reached the footpath, the swinging basket over her arm marking off seconds. As she recognized me, I watched her face shift from pale to bloodless. A tiny piece of hair had just caught at the edge of her lower lip, and most people would have wanted to brush it back for her. That would have ruined the expression, though, whatever it was.

“I’m headed for the Browns, though I haven’t nearly enough flour for them,” Mercy said in a rush. Apropos of nothing, as usual. “Mr. Wilde, I’ve a very urgent visit to make. Are you here to see Papa?”

I shook my head, still tongueless.

“Then do please escort me to Mulberry Street, and after that … please talk with me. I fear I’m all out of sorts for conversation just now. Will you go?”

She may as well have asked whether I’d any interest in a holiday from a stint in hell. So I nodded. With my hand on her arm once more as we hastened down the road, after the usual rush of quiet joy, everything looked closer, focused. Seen through a gently curving lens. I almost forgot why I’d come for a moment. I wouldn’t get to have her, so
Today,
I thought,
is better than all the days stretched in front of it will be, because today we’re seeing the same view.

Nearby, Mulberry Street was sweltering. Blackened produce melting through its crates into the pavement outside groggeries, buildings swooning against each other in the heat. Packed with people, and nary a man there by choice. Seventy-six was a wooden structure—built of matchsticks and twice as flammable, to my eye. We entered and without pause climbed to the second floor. Going to
the end of the hallway, Mercy knocked at the door on the right. When a low murmur answered her, she pushed it open, nodding at me to wait in the passage.

I could see three-quarters of a bare room that smelled cloyingly of illness and had an oily human texture to the air. For about the dozenth time in my life I stopped myself from hauling Mercy bodily out of a strange sickroom. But I know precisely the sort of agony that churned through the mind of the reverend that morning. Because every time, it feels like being pulled in half.

Three children sat on the bare floorboards. The youngest maybe two years old, though he could have simply been underfed, naked, and sucking on four of his fingers. Two other girls in streaked cotton shifts, eight and ten by the looks of them, hemmed handkerchiefs. From the bed, a reedy voice sounded. American, for my money, though she could easily have had Dutch grandparents. Mercy set the little sack of flour in a teakettle, as there wasn’t a table or cupboard in sight.

“The temperance tract women were here again. I’m to clean the floor and wash all the linens before they deliver the potatoes, but I haven’t any vinegar. Nor ash, nor turpentine.”

The woman speaking, blonde hair plastered to her brow and flushed with ague, didn’t look game for standing, much less scrubbing floors. Mercy pulled a blue bottle and a little glass vial out of her basket.

“Here is turpentine, and I’ve an ounce of quicksilver for the bedbugs. If you share both, will Lacey Huey help you to clean?”

“She’ll do it,” sighed the sick woman in relief. “I did her washing last month when her gout was bad. Thank you, Miss Underhill.”

“If I’d any potatoes today myself, I’d leave them, worse luck.” Mercy made a wry face that tugged one side of her lips down.

They spoke for a few moments more, of the woman’s fever and her kinchin and what exactly the temperance tract ladies had
demanded be done to the wretched chamber before its occupants deserved any food. Disease, the clergy and the scientists agree, is caused by weak living. Rich foods, bad air, rotten earth, lazy hygiene, liquor, drugs, vice, and sex. The sick, therefore, are generally supposed something lower than angelic and thus not to be directly associated with by virtuous charitable workers. Mercy and other radicals flout that system gleefully, and—despite the terrifying danger to her—I do see her point. I don’t know what causes illness. No one does, really. But I’d been sickly more than once as a child, and Valentine, who can’t be accused of owning many virtues, has the constitution of a draft horse. It doesn’t quite wash.

“Thank you for coming,” Mercy said to me after warmly bidding the kinchin farewell and closing the door. “We’ll take this staircase back down; the other is rotten in three places.”

Sunlight dazzled my eyes as we regained the street. Recalling with a jolt just how foul my errand truly was, I prepared to warn her that I’d a terrible request to make. But Mercy spoke first, as I angled our feet toward St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“My father had the most grotesque nightmare,” she said. “I came down this morning and there he sat in the parlor, with a pen and paper and a book. Not reading or writing or notating, only sitting, before he attended to his duties. He could hardly speak to me. It made me quite worried for your own recovery. Are you well?”

It took me a second or two, but then I realized she wasn’t speaking of the fire. She meant Aidan Rafferty.

“It was a hard day,” I admitted.

“I confess myself sorriest of all for my father,” she said with a painted-over look. “I suppose the infant is in heaven, and maybe you do as well. Or in the cool earth, perhaps. Only my father imagines it in hell. Who do you pity most, Mr. Wilde?”

The mother,
I thought.
Sitting in the Tombs with a fogged mind, and only rats to talk it over with.

“I don’t know, Miss Underhill.”

Mercy isn’t surprised very often—and so I watched this second instance like the collector I was. At the sound of her name, her lips fell open, and then she bit the lower one gently.

“Haven’t you thought about it, then?”

“I try not to.”

“Why have you come to find me, Mr. Wilde? Here I thought us old friends, and you disappeared without a word, following a great disaster. Do you imagine us heartless, not the sort to wonder where you’d gone?” she added, her eyes ricocheting to the side.