The Gods Of Gotham (17 page)

M
rs. Boehm was standing in the middle of her kitchen beyond the neatly swept bread counter when I arrived home, her hand pressed hard over her pleasant crescent of a mouth. Not moving, precisely, and not standing either. Something ’twixt the two of them—rocking her scant weight back and forth, blinking.

“What on earth is the matter?” I asked her, ducking around the display of seeded loaves.

“I gave her slippery elm tea,” she answered tightly, not looking at me. “Slippery elm tea is best when blood’s humors are unbalanced. And a poultice, after. That works very well.”

“Has Bird fallen sick?” I exclaimed.

“I sent her out.” Mrs. Boehm shifted her weight to her left foot, half turning again before swaying back. “Just down the road, for a fresh fish for luncheon. Not far, but this terrible heat. I never meant to—I did not think it would tax her. She can hardly move,” she finished, tapping a loose fist against her lips with a disordered expression like a field freshly ploughed.

Imagining that Bird would be in Mrs. Boehm’s bed, I raced up the stairs. The door to the darkened room creaked slightly when I opened it. A hurt, pleading sound. It was a remarkably featureless chamber for a woman with her name on the building, I thought as my eyesight slowly sharpened in the dull brown shadows. A spindly chair, a single picture on the wall and that not even of a person. It was a lush pastureland scene, unrepentantly green and very much reminiscent of my childhood. The sufferer was clad in a thin linen sheath and lying on her back. Her hair fell over the pillow in a jungle of dark woody tendrils. A warm poultice smelling strongly of roasted apple and tobacco sat on her chest, sending me a sharply unwelcome memory of being eleven years of age and suffering through Valentine’s notions of how to cure a severe head cold. Her eyes fluttered open when she heard me. A pair of grey moths in the dim light.

“What’s happened to you?” I questioned in a soft tone, walking to the bed.

“I came over all feverish,” she scraped past a dry throat.

“Coming back from the fish stall? Where are you troubled, Bird?”

“I’ve red marks, and it hurts to breathe.”

“Mrs. Boehm seems very worried about you.”

“I know. I’m sorry to be any bother.”

I sat on the side of the bed, about to tell her the outrageous lie that she wasn’t any bother at all. Debating with myself, and fair heartsick over the question, whether it was worse to tell a very ill
little girl that her friend had in fact been torn to pieces, or allow said friend to go unavenged. The answers I needed would cut right down to this kinchin’s bones in the telling of them, I thought. But before I could say anything, I spied something odd.

“What were you speaking of before you went out for the fish?” I asked conversationally.

Bird’s eyes drifted to the window, pupils suddenly bottomless and inscrutable. “I can’t remember,” she whispered. “Is there water?”

I held the glass up to her lips, watching how carefully her head moved, how very carefully, like a doll’s and not a girl’s, and then I set the water down again.

“What if I said that Mrs. Boehm is very upset, and already told me what you talked about?” I not-quite-lied.

A tiny flinch. Barely a hairsbreadth, skin snagged on a bent pin.

“She wants to send me to a church orphanage,” Bird sighed. “And I’ll go, if she really does hate me so. I told her I’d pay for the cup, that I’m sorry when that happens, but she kept saying ‘better suited.’ I think
you
would let me stay here, if she didn’t peck at you so. If she didn’t force you to
mind
her. But I’ll go, when I’m well again.”

“In that case, we’d best not let you run dry of beet juice. Or is it mulberry? I can’t tell.”

The expression on Bird’s face when I revealed her pretended illness isn’t one I like to think back on. Kinchin look angry when you find them out in a charade. I know for a fact Val had been furious one morning long ago, having smeared himself with wild strawberries to absolutely no avail in an effort to avoid helping to cure the hide of a horse we’d lost to hydrophobia. Tanning is foul work, after all. But Bird’s face flushed and collapsed the way an adult’s does. A bloom of guilt, and then the falling flap of a dove shot from the air. I wanted to tell her to unlearn it somehow, to go back to being hot with anger at the snubs children suffer.

“The poultice is too hot, isn’t it?” she asked in a normal voice,
smiling a little. Charm following discovery. She looked down. Artfully done red blotches on her neck and chest were just barely beginning to pinken the sharp-smelling cloth sack. She sat upright and dropped it with a wet, disappointed sound on the side table. “Generally beet juice won’t run. I stole one from the pantry before I left and had a newsboy cut it with his pocketknife.”

“Clever.”

“You aren’t angry, then?”

“I will be, if you can’t manage to stop lying for ten seconds at a stretch.”

Her eyes contracted slightly, appraising. “Pax, then. I’m through spinning yarns.” She scrambled out of the sheets and sat before me, Indian-style. “Ask me something.”

I paused. But she was already riven in so many sinewy places under her skin, maybe all of us were, and waiting out of charity’s sake was no charity at all. Hesitating only a moment longer, I removed my hat and set it on the red-and-blue patchwork coverlet. Bird’s eyes widened again at the obvious signal that something grave was hurtling in her direction.

“Do you know a woman named Silkie Marsh?” I questioned.

She startled, a frightened hand gripping the sheets as she jumped to a kneeling position. “No, no. I’ve never—” Stopping, wincing because she knew she’d already given herself away, Bird pulled a deep breath in through her mouth.

“I know for a fact you hail from there. So you needn’t tell me, if it pains you,” I said gently.

“She’s here, isn’t she? She found me. I won’t go back, I—”

“She isn’t here, and I shouldn’t have frightened you. I never would have, but I need answers more than you need rest at the moment. I’m sorry for it. Bird, when you said they were going to tear someone to pieces … We found a body. About your age, a little older, and from the same house.”

Bird said nothing at first. Shifting so that she sat with her legs to the side, she asked in a perfectly even voice, “How did you know we were from the same ken?”

“I had some help identifying him, though I don’t know his name. As for you, well … there was your dress. And what you said about … someone being hurt. And you all had the chicken pox last year. See for yourself.”

Bird ducked her chin to look at the two almost completely faded pox scars at the base of her slim neck and then lifted it with an unlikely and heartfelt grin. A tooth residing in her lower jaw was crooked, amiably jostling with its neighbor.

“You’re mighty fly, Mr. Wilde. Nothing gets past you. Is that because you’re a copper star?”

“No,” I admitted, shocked I hadn’t upset her more. “It’s because I used to tend bar.”

She nodded wisely. “Well, you’re a plumb sort of fellow, plumber than most. I could tell straight off, like I said. I’m sorry I tried to queer you earlier, but it’s …” Bird cleared her throat, another weirdly adult gesture I wanted to rid her of. “What do you want to know?”

“The truth.”

“You won’t like it,” she said dully, fidgeting with the hem of her shift. “I don’t.”

“What was your friend’s name?”

“Liam. He didn’t have another. He was from the dockyards, lived by begging scraps from the sailors and stevedores. Came to us two years ago. He said he was sick of giving something free they ought by rights to pay for, and in any case the food at Marsh’s is pretty fine.”

I sat frozen. Trying not to let my body say the things that my mouth would wrestle bleeding to the ground before allowing them to escape.
There shouldn’t be such ways in the world.

“And what happened to him last night?”

Bird shrugged, the most helpless and the least apathetic shrug I’ve ever seen. “Last night the man in the black hood came.”

“And the man in the black hood is the one who hurt Liam?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“No one does, nor what he looks like. I think he’s a savage of some sort. Maybe a Red Indian or a Turk. Why would he hide his face otherwise?”

I could think of several reasons, but failed to share them. “And how did you come to be covered in blood?”

Bird’s jaw closed, a ferociously shut door. “I don’t want to talk about that. It was Liam’s. I went in, and I saw … I
don’t
want to talk about that.”

I thought about pushing, then turned disgusted with myself. Enough questions existed without my harping on the worst of them. For now.

“Why did this man in the black hood hurt Liam?”

“There isn’t a reason that I can tell. Like I said, he could be a savage. But I think maybe he likes it. They like funny things sometimes. His step is always so light and quick, as if he’s about something wonderful and not … He’s the one cuts them to pieces, all right.”

My heart stuttered badly, a matchstick held to a wet wick. “
Them?
”

“Yes, them.”

“How many of them?”

“Dozens of us.” Her throat worked suddenly, thrashed like a tied down animal. “
Them.
I live here with you now.”

“And how in God’s name am I supposed to help you if you tell me one outrageous lie after another?” I demanded to know, passing my fingers through my hair. “First you expect me to believe you ran from your father, or that you accidentally shivved a man, or that you soaked your—”

“Or that my blood’s out of humor, but not now! Truly, not now,” she cried.

“Bird,” I attempted, my bones feeling fragile and crisp with exhaustion, “this is unfair. You’ve done nothing but lie to me, and now you expect me to believe that
dozens
of children have been cut to pieces by some sort of … of child-loathing maniac?”

Bird nodded, her perfectly trained face wavering without her permission. The whole look brought to mind a loose carriage wheel navigating slick mud and malicious stones.

“Without anyone noticing? Without …”

I trailed off.

Who
would
have noticed, after all? The police were two weeks formed, and not a soul considered it good taste to listen to the Irish. Hell,
I
no longer considered it sound judgment to listen to Bird, and of course she was exaggerating. Of course. Two or three of her mates had gone missing, and she’d inflated it to
dozens
and a Turk in a hood.

“How am I to trust you?” I pleaded.

Bird’s entire ten-year-old body suppressed a shudder, a quake of revulsion from the base of her spine.

“I could show you where they’re buried,” she whispered. “But only if you agree to let me stay here.”

“Two weeks,”
Mrs. Boehm had said, the edges of her mouth as anchored to the floor as her feet. Something about Bird’s deception had shrunk her skin several inches too small for her. There would be punishment involved if it were her child, she’d said darkly, but she guessed Bird knew her own mind, didn’t she? So two weeks before she must leave. It was like watching a jail sentencing in reverse.

“I’m sorry,” Bird had said, taking what she could get. “See if I can make it up to you, though. I could—”

“Two weeks,” Mrs. Boehm had said, and then pounded the piece of dough in her fists as if expunging the sins of many worlds.

And now Bird and I were walking to the Tombs, the heat sending sharp wafts of scorched horse urine and baked stone into our nostrils. Bird had changed back into the boy’s pair of trousers and the long buttoned blouse, but had added a scrap of burlap for a belt. She looked like a street sweeper working a corner for spare pence.