The Gods Of Gotham (23 page)

“God damn you, Valentine Wilde,” I said out loud as I tucked the sick, twisted thing in my frock coat and ran out the door.

I
half expected him … I expected nothing good. But here’s how I found Val, when I burst into his rooms on Spring Street. He was wearing naught but underclothes, this time in the company of a stunning Irish lass with her ruddy hair blotting up the white of his pillow (she being entirely naked, of course, skin pale as dogs’ teeth), and the following items surrounding them: three pipes, each differently shaped. One bag of what appeared to be dried mushrooms. A little brown glass bottle labeled tincture of morphine. Whiskey, unopened. Half a hock of ham.

“Val,” I said, not caring about his wrath much, “get rid of the hen.”

“I’ll not. The very idea,” Valentine muttered halfheartedly.

The next ten minutes weren’t entirely to the purpose. But soon enough, I had the stargazer out the door and my brother drinking coffee. Slowly. It was a challenge for him to hold the cup. I’d have pitied him, sitting in his linen drawers trying not to hash his guts out, were it not a tired and self-imposed picture.

“I’ve been sent a letter,” I said. Not kindly.

“And yes?”

“It isn’t for me. It’s for you.”

“Why say you?” He coughed messily. “Did the culprit spell Timothy
V-A-L—”

“It’s a good job you can still spell your own name. Can you read just yet, or shall I tell it to you?”

“Best to call it out. And be quick over it, so it sooner comes time for you to leave.”

I read it to him. I caught his interest somewhere around the misspelled word
Romannists.
When I was through, he pressed his fingers into the postal sacks beneath his eyes and held out his right hand.

“Give it over, bright young copper star.”

I did. Valentine lifted the letter, holding it to the light of the window. Then, setting it down again, he pulled a box of lucifers from the pocket of his frock coat, which was draped over the back of his chair. Val lit one of the matches with his thumbnail and very deliberately held it to the paper.

“Stop that,” I gasped, snatching at it.

Val yanked his hand away and stood, to my endless surprise. I’d not have thought it in him an instant before, but now I was uselessly pawing for the letter high above his head as I watched it burn. Sometimes I can best him when he’s glum enough from the night before. Sometimes. But he’s not only taller, he’s quicker. I felt six years old again, and he twelve with a harmless striped grass snake
he planned to brain against a tree trunk. The snake didn’t survive the adventure.

“Why?” Valentine questioned, watching the spreading feathers of flame. His fascination with fire makes me altogether ill. “It’s not any good for us, Tim.”

I tried a tack other than the physical as I watched the fibers being gnawed into slips of ash. “But isn’t it
evidence
?”

“Could be,” he admitted cheerily. “But I think you mean
wasn’t
it evidence. Now it’s cinders.”

“You don’t credit that it could have been written by the killer?”

“That heap of witless bosh? No. Do you?”

“Possibly not,” I growled, “but how are we to find out who wrote it if it’s
gone
?”

And it was gone, by that time. Val probably burned his thumb slightly, but he didn’t show it. Just smoothed silken-thin bits of soot out of his hair.

“Who cares who wrote it?” Valentine asked.

“Whoever wrote it knew about the dead kinchin!”

“Ah,” he smiled. The rogue had completely recovered himself. It was such a powerful feat that I couldn’t even despise him for it. “I like that you think it could be anyone other than a rat Whig of a copper star—there must be six or seven of them—or else maybe a cracking mad copper star. Trying to stir up a mob against the Irish on account of every Irish mother’s son being a Democratic-minded Party man. I like it almost as much as you supposing you can tell who wrote a letter just by keeking at it for long enough. That’s rich. But a letter like that gets seen, and the party has a war on its hands. Every half-starved Paddy off the boat turns loyal Democrat once he learns who his friends are, who’ll give him a leg up, and a fine friend I’d be to the Irish if the Whigs saw this load of tripe—we’d be branded un-American, drowned in scandal. Voted out so fast our heads would spin.”

“And God forbid that the
Party
should suffer,” I said, sneering.

“Bless your lips, it’s a fact.” He grinned. “Thank you for bringing that scrap of blasphemy, Tim, you’re right as an almanac it was for me, and thank you for the coffee. It was real white of you. If you would be so kind as to bugger off now, I’d be much endeared to your person.”

Breathing a bit
too hard outside of Val’s house, standing next to a post for tethering horses in Spring Street with no notion of where to go or what to do, I reviewed my options.

I could invade Madam Marsh’s brothel and loudly demand to know what in hell went on there, on pain of imprisonment or worse treatment. She would either surrender or put me off. And if the second, the man in the black hood would be warned. Disappearing unpunished, should there be such a person. I could go stare like an idiot at the bones we’d stashed in a locked room at the Tombs, wondering who they were. I could badger an abused little girl with grey eyes into telling me things she claimed not to know. I could get drunk. Or find something stronger, if I wanted to resemble my brother even more than I already did.

In the end, I was weak. In a sorry state of willpower and growing sorrier with disgust, I went to the Underhills’ house. Maybe I was a fool who only wanted to see something wonderful for a moment before admitting I couldn’t avenge a score of dead children. But I thought to myself, on my honor, that I meant to get an earful of sound advice.

Val and I met the Underhills on the first occasion he took such a profound combination of toxins that I thought he wasn’t breathing any longer. We were living in Cedar Street, in a windowless room resembling a breadbox with a single cooking burner and two pallets,
and I arrived home one evening at age fourteen to find my twenty-year-old brother greatly resembling his own marble effigy. After trying to rouse him, I’d raced out of the house, witless with fright, and the first sign of help I could find was the lit window of the rectory adjacent to the church on the corner of Pine. When I pounded at the door, it opened to reveal a quizzical, sober man in his shirtsleeves, a pale woman deftly stitching by the fire, and an unforgettable black-haired little girl reading a book, lying on her belly on the braided rug with her ankles crossed.

There’s some churchmen who aren’t good for much beyond stirring speeches, but Thomas Underhill knows how to make use of hot water, smelling salts, brandy, ammonia, and common sense, and that night he employed all of them. The look he gave me as he quit our room was the kindest possible, as there wasn’t a trace of pity in it. The next morning, apprised of the tale, Val had marched over to the Underhill residence and spoken with the reverend. It must have been the single most eloquent speech of all time, for we were invited to tea that afternoon, and I found myself sitting across from Mercy Underhill, watching in rapt fascination as she breathed cooling air over her Darjeeling. Val had then produced a bouquet of wild daisies for Mrs. Underhill, vowing how sorry he was to have caused any trouble.

As for me, he stole a beefsteak from somewhere, since God knows we couldn’t afford to pay for it, and cooked it shockingly well on our pitiful stove that evening. Saying not a single word further regarding the night before, apologetic or grateful or otherwise. I was less than moved.

So by near-tragic accident I came to watch Mercy grow up. She wrote poetry and tall tales and one-acts every spare second, and Val and I and the reverend painted the rectory flowerboxes yellow each spring, and Olivia Underhill while she was living made the best election cake I’ve ever had. I could recall us sitting at their table after
a fireman’s ball countless times, Val flushing under the collar with gin and I flushing for entirely different reasons.

Being in a foul mood, I walked the distance, confident at least of bitter-chocolate-tasting distraction, rich and dark and irresistible.

The Underhill’s lone servant girl, a pale waif of poor British extraction by the name of Anna, smiled when she opened the door. Then she frowned, doubtless curious to know why a quarter of my face had been deemed unworthy of daylight. But she told me right off that Mercy was seeing to a shockingly bad scurvy case along the East River, the entire family living off of day-old fish and week-old bread, and that the reverend was in the parlor.

It was like coming home, a little. There were all the countless bookshelves—I’d read most of their contents, waiting at different times for Mercy to show her face—and there was the clock with its sinister moon face, the window with the plush seat looking out at greenery and tomatoes tied to little scaffolds. But I wasn’t expecting the reverend’s expression when I stepped in from the foyer, my hat in my hand. The reverend himself is generally such an alert sort of person. Treating things like surprises when they don’t actually surprise him, just to brighten the mood, that narrow face of his darting in your direction. But this was a look like a statue done poorly. The parts fit together wrong, sad blue eyes clashing against the usual optimistic set of his lips. And none of it really seeing anything as he sat there with scattered papers before him.

“Mr. Wilde,” the reverend said pleasantly. But something tense as razor wire crossed his face. And I knew what it was, too.

If he’d never seen me again, he’d still have kept seeing Aidan Rafferty, granted. In his sleep, in blank moments when adding fresh cream to white teacups, between the lines of tedious books. No matter what else he’d witnessed in his dark life, that vicious red welt along the white neck, the purpling of tiny fingertips—it would have left a gouge. But sharing the same sight, in two heads, without
talking about it, just from looking at a person, is a different brand of indignity. I felt it as painfully as he did. I wondered if I shouldn’t have come.

“I can’t stay. You’re busy, and—”

“I’m not.” He smiled fondly, pushing papers away from him. “And I hope you would assume that even if I was busy, I’d want to know how you’re faring.”

I sat when he gestured at the chair opposite. He was already on his way to the sideboard to pour us two very modest glasses of sherry. Unlike many Protestants, the reverend isn’t a teetotaler. He believes humans should be able to control themselves, all humans, believes it like it’s written down somewhere. Maybe it is. I think he keeps liquor in his house just to prove he doesn’t need more than one drink. A stray drop from the lip of the bottle fell to the sideboard and he pulled out his kerchief, passed it three times over the spot, refolded the cloth, and returned it to his pocket. Ruthlessly efficient.

“Watching the pair of you growing up, living so near to us and doing so well by yourselves … you ought to assume my perpetual interest sealed,” the reverend continued, passing me the drink.

“And Val a captain now,” I said dryly.

I regretted it the second it came out of my mouth. I can rag Valentine all I like in my head, but I’m not meant to subtract from him publicly.

“Well, your brother has always danced a fine line between success and despair, but we do know why.”

I left that alone. Certainly our house had burned down, and our parents inside it, and yes, I’d seen their bones, and yes, that lived inside my own skeleton. Still.
I
didn’t see the necessity of committing every social outrage alphabetically afterward, and then repeating the project, so why should my brother?