The Gods Of Gotham (24 page)

Of course, Valentine was already running with downright cross-cove rabbits by that time. He’d been halfway to rowdyism, “borrowing”
horses from livery stables and galloping them to Harlem and back, or convincing me that my ice cream wouldn’t pain my head so if I warmed it first by the stove and then laughing when it melted into a puddle. Calling butter cow’s-grease and sixpence a tanner. Taking a hiding for pelting rotten eggs at the retreating backs of churchgoers one day and the next teaching me how to smoke cigars. But when our parents were lost, so was he. Oh, he found us an apartment and learned to cook. Granted. After that, though, he either came home every night bloody and gin-sotted from a gang dustup, or else wild and ashy from a fire. Reeking of smoke that caused gaps in my heartbeats. And I hated him for it. He’d take himself away from me, I knew he would. He was doing it on purpose. And after that I’d have nothing at all.

How do you forgive a man for treating the only family you have left like a public dump?
I wondered.

“Mr. Wilde, forgive me if I presume too much,” Reverend Underhill requested gently. “But these despicable killings Mercy mentioned to me last evening … have you learned anything?”

He gets to call her Mercy,
I thought idly, picking at the wound. But I was still grateful. I needed a sounding board of sorts, and one I trusted.

“Could you ever give any credit to its having been a mad Irish doing the work of the pope?” I sighed.

The reverend steepled his fingers. “Why do you ask?”

“It was suggested to me. I found it pretty hard to credit. I need a … professional opinion.”

Reverend Underhill settled back with his head at a thoughtful angle. Where Mercy answers questions with more questions, the reverend answers them with stories. Parables, I suppose, consequence of the job. So that’s what he did, leaning the elbow holding the sherry on the arm of his chair.

“When Olivia was alive,” he said slowly, “she did her best to
convince me that popery was no indication of low intellect or morals. You recall when the Panic had well and truly taken hold, and people had begun literally starving in the streets, and we would find them in stables or frozen to death beside their own apple carts? Many of them Irish?”

I nodded. I’d been keeping bar, and Val had been snug with his fire and political appointments, but it was a cruel time nevertheless. An unforgettable one. And it wasn’t just Irish. Former bankers were raining out of windows as a handy alternative to dying of exposure. They weren’t brave or cowardly to my mind. Not after I’d seen enough cholera. I just considered them highly efficient.

“Well, Olivia claimed that those poor Irish were the biblical definition of ‘the least of these.’ And so she tended to and fed them as her own, be they lawful or criminal, and if the latter, be their chosen gangs the Kerryonians, Forty Thieves, Plug Uglies, or Shirt Tails. When the cholera she contracted in one of those dens took her, I asked myself before God why I’d never been convinced by her argument, as merciful and kind-spirited as it was. Why I had insisted that charity must go alongside repentance and reform. After many months, God gave me my answer, made me understand how Olivia had been wrong.”

He leaned forward, setting his glass on the table. “We do not countenance the sin of murder in this country. Or the sin of falsehood, or of theft. But we allow heresy—the greatest sin of all—to flourish. The Pope of Rome is worshipped as a very god in their religion, the sins of mankind atoned for not through repentance but through ritual, and what rank abuses flourish? What private atrocities cower behind closed doors when an organization is beholden to a man and not to God? You’ve seen the Irish here, Mr. Wilde, their wills utterly depleted by the belief they must go through a mortal man to reach their salvation. They are drunk, they are diseased, they are loose, and why? Only because their very religion has robbed
them of God. I no longer tend to those who will not renounce the Church of Rome, fearing for my own soul in fostering blasphemy. Olivia, may God rest her, was too generous of spirit to see her own error before their accursed contagion had infected her as well,” he finished in a grieved yet resigned tone. “But I pray for the Irish, Mr. Wilde, for God’s forgiveness and for their own enlightenment. I pray for their souls every day.”

I thought of Eliza Rafferty, meanwhile, and the rats doubtless sharing her bunk, and her initial crime of wanting cream for her infant without denouncing the pope, and felt very tired of a sudden. If the reverend’s prayers touched her, I couldn’t see how.

“But you can’t credit that a Catholic lunatic, leaving carved crosses in his wake, might be behind this?” I asked softly.

“Someone who has been raised by priests, perhaps, by the sort of men who hide sexual depravity beneath holy robes? Mr. Wilde, the solution suggested to you does not seem impossible to me. It doesn’t even surprise me.”

The moon-faced clock ticked morbidly in my head, a martial beat to a point of no return. It might seem stupid in such a giant metropolis to feel as if something bad is going to happen, because, well, of course it is. But the light seemed to me to have gone askew where it fell on the oak desk and the pretty braided carpet. Maybe it was the thunderstorm’s retreat leaving us all alone, to deal with each other how best we liked. Which seemed pretty savage most of the time.

“Miss Underhill visits Catholics,” I pointed out vaguely.

“Against my will, she does indeed, though I can hardly categorically forbid her from emulating her late mother. But only in a charitable, never in a medical, capacity.”

My breath caught ever so slightly as I absorbed what he’d just said. Then I nodded, grateful for any facility I’ve been granted at hiding my thoughts.

He didn’t know.

The reverend never accompanied Mercy on her missions, and she must have conveyed the impression that she was distributing good thread and cooking oil. And since he ministered only to Protestants, he had never so much as caught rumor of it. My mind flashed to Mercy changing the yellowed sheets of a typhus case on one of the occasions I’d escorted her to the east docks, and I swallowed a surge of disquiet. The day I had seen them arguing, it had been over entering Catholic households, not tending their sick at all.

“I’d sooner she minister in an actual slave pit of South Carolina than such slave pits of the human mind as she will insist on going to.” He made a queer little gesture with his usually nimble hands. “It has changed her, in ways that I’m not sure I understand.”

My brain followed easily to the end of his sentence, but found the rest of his page blank. Granted, Mercy’s spirit was an unlikely combination of her parents’—an oil-and-water mix of determination and whimsy that made her fascinating even when inscrutable. She had always been the most individual creature I knew, therefore, and so she couldn’t change, could she? Mercy was already thousands of things I couldn’t grasp. She could only become more herself.

“I’m only growing old, and mawkish,” the reverend added lightly when I said nothing. “May God protect her in such places.”

There was a sentiment I could get behind. As I stood up to take my leave, something occurred to me.

“Reverend, if you don’t mind my asking—feeling about blasphemy as you do, why should you be so tolerable about my brother?”

A quick smile flashed into life on his face. “See those shelves?” he asked, pointing at all the books. “My daughter’s playground? You’ve read a number of them yourself, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, confused. “A great many.”

“Well, when you weren’t looking, so did your brother. If independence of mind is to be admired in the human race, then your
brother is a most laudable man.” He stood, shuffling his papers into a neat stack. “All the best to you, Mr. Wilde, and please—I should like to be kept aware of your progress, insomuch as you can safely tell me.”

Walking out the door with a puzzled, anxious look dividing my brows, I realized that I was back to my Sahara-dry list of options. And getting stone drunk was edging further up the ranks by the second. When I’d shut the door behind me, however, I spied Mercy.

She was running. I hadn’t seen her run in months, and she sprinted down the street with her black hair rioting against the tiny lace cap on her head, her swinging shoulders bare above the wide collar of her butter-yellow day dress, dozens of tucked pleats straining against her waist. Seeing me, Mercy came to a gasping halt with a smile forming on her face. I couldn’t for the life of me fathom why.

“Are you all right?” I asked, only wanting a quick answer to the question.

Of course, I didn’t get one.

“Mr. Wilde,” she said. Breathlessly, on a laugh. “I was looking for you, at the Tombs. But you weren’t there, and now I see why.”

I tried again, harder.

“I’m grateful you found me, then. But what do you mean?”

“If I told you I badly needed your help, and that the matter is tied to your own stake in this evil business, you’d go with me immediately, yes?”

“
What’s
happened?” I demanded bluntly.

“Mr. Wilde,” said Mercy, her bosom still heaving, “I think I’m right in supposing that you speak flash?”

N
inepin
could
whiddle you both the whole scrap, if I
please
to. None trustier, and none belonging more heart and soul to Miss Underhill here,” said the lad before me, his pocketknife worrying at something foreign stuck to the sole of his boot. “Tip us a wetting, copper, and I’ll cackle like a right old tabby. Mr. Wilde, that is to say,” he amended, glancing an unspoken apology at my companion.

I sat next to Mercy in a cellar coffee-and-cake saloon on Pearl Street, sharing one side of a grimy booth, staring down my nose at an uncommonly fine example of New York’s news hawkers. This one
had reached the ripe age of twelve, I thought, for the cigar in his grinning mouth was pretty well practiced, and his blue vest and knee-length purple trousers fit him well. He was experienced enough selling papers to afford to keep his clothing apace with his body, and anyway kinchin below twelve don’t much like coffee. Rum, yes. But not coffee. The lad who’d introduced himself as Ninepin liked coffee considerably. We’d barely arrived, and he was through his second cup. Now he was asking me, not unexpectedly, for something stronger.

“Suppose you cackle
first
,” I suggested.

Ninepin scowled. He had fiercely blond hair, like a canary, his muscles of necessity and pugilism better developed than they should have been, and he’d scavenged a pair of gold ladies’ reading spectacles. He kept taking them off, polishing the glass with a scarlet kerchief when making a particularly juicy point.

“Ain’t as if I can’t get it myself, is it? Free country and all that. Toady!” he called to the saloon keeper. “A pair of French creams, if you please!”

The barkeep walked over readily enough with two brandies. Ninepin then paid for them in a style that was, I have to admit, pretty fine. He passed one to Mercy.

“Why’d you run off that way?” he coaxed suggestively. “It don’t fadge, my pretty bloss, and here you’re back with a bobbie like enough to rub me to wit.”

“I’ve no intention of arresting you,” I simultaneously translated and replied.

He ignored me. “We’re flusher alone, Miss Underhill.”

“Do you think so?” she asked him with a skewed smile, passing her cup over to me and ignoring the child’s, which he was already sipping.

“Dead to rights.”

“What if I told you that, while ever grateful for your company, I can’t always quite grasp the sense of it?”

Ninepin blushed. Clearly unused to flirting, and newly sad of the fact. It was so raw that it was hard to look at. Like seeing a wet colt falling over. He pulled the cigar from his mouth, dipped the end in his coffee, and put it back.

“Don’t patter naught other jargon, do I? Did I ever have kin what set me up with a brother of the quill? I ain’t educated. Just in love,” he added slyly.

It was a good job I was staring ruefully down at the brandy a twelve-year-old seemed to have just purchased for me, because I know two looks flashed by under the brim of my hat. One was hearty amusement, which he wouldn’t cotton to a bit. And the other was too embarrassing to admit to myself. So I let both pass.

“That were the reason you missed last rehearsal,” Ninepin said sadly. “We ain’t rhino fat blokes.”

“Wealthy sophisticates,” I said under my breath.

“Could it be possible, Ninepin, that I missed last rehearsal because I’d already given you the bolts of cloth you required, and I was needed elsewhere?” Mercy inquired mildly. “Perhaps you’d permit me to attend the next one, after telling us both what you said this morning at City Hall Park?”