The Gods Of Gotham (36 page)

Hoping violently that I’d simply beaten them there.

It’s an abandoned federal arsenal. The House of Refuge, I mean. Black as pitch in the steadily disappearing farmland surrounding it, blacker than the trees, blacker than an actual arsenal would be. As I mentioned, copper stars are meant to send vagrant kinchin there. But I’d never followed that particular order. And I never would do. They could penalize me however they liked. They could send me to the Tombs myself for insubordination, threaten any punishment, force me into hard labor, equip me with a leg iron, deliver me some licks with the cat while I was tied over a barrel, lock me up alone in a chamber the size of a closet without light for days. Because I was full grown, and likely enough to survive such treatment.

Some of the kinchin at the House of Refuge didn’t.

The horse shivered, sweat pouring dark as blood along its neck as I waited. I rubbed at its mane, sensing its uneasiness under me, thankful it hadn’t already decided I was more trouble than worth carrying. Crickets hissed at me from the void, and the sly whispered wings of dimmed fireflies hummed in my ears. The wall I sheltered in the shadows under was two feet thick. A stone fortress, more than high enough to foil most would-be escapees.

Not Valentine, though. Not by a long stretch.

The irony was that when he’d been incarcerated there, our parents had been enthusiastically alive. But it was an institution built to keep idle youth off the streets, then reform them by way of a pungent dose of “moral and corporal discipline.” Well approved by the city elders, and by every parent whose kinchin were disinclined to steal liquor from groceries and drink it on the Battery.

Not Henry and Sarah Wilde, therefore.

It took my parents four days to find out where Val had been dragged off to. Eight more to secure an audience with a judge. As I was a runty six years old, I can only recall how silent our house was. How suddenly stamped with empty spaces. My brother’s truancy at age twelve was passionate, but hardly regular. And whenever he vanished, I’d always assumed he’d come back. His coming back was the natural order. But everything was different that time: the way my mother couldn’t sew a straight line, the way my bull of a father couldn’t bring himself to finish his supper. When they did finally speak with the magistrate, the official observed that Val had been caught breaking windows. Asked for better documentation of his birth. Dismissed them.

Val arrived home two days later, when my parents were nearly beside themselves and hadn’t stopped whispering for forty or so hours. His tawny hair was viciously shorn off, and he wore a threadbare uniform. He asked with a cocky grin on his face for a cut of meat and some small beer. My dad was nearer to him and the first to pull him into his arms, so my dad was the first to notice that Val’s shirt had dried completely into the bloodied cuts crisscrossing his back.

Whether Val was boldly exaggerating about making brass nails, or about the infernal bells summoning them from place to place in soulless silence, or about the mortifying forced washings or the spoiled food, I never cared. I saw my brother’s shirt for myself. Henry Wilde wasn’t an easy man, but when my mum was soaking the fabric
off Val’s skin, I heard him clear as anything pounding his fists into the barn wall. Even six as I was, I’d a similar urge myself that I couldn’t express with words, and so kicked apart a rotting box.

The thought of Valentine sending Bird to the same place was half horror and half awe. So wrong that it was a scrap of nightmare. I’d gained the same feeling once by dreaming of a monster with teeth at the ends of its digits and its mouth full of fingernails.

Hoofbeats approached me.

At a clean, swift clip, too. Not drawing attention. Neither losing an instant of time.

There was a breeze at my back, and it shivered along the prison wall, echoed by the muted snuffling of the stolen horse. I was buried in the high stone’s shadow, and the driver the only man who could possibly see me. But my own vision of the clopping vehicle as it drew closer was very clear. It was a four-wheeled carriage pulled by a matched pair, with curtains over the windows, and I caught a glimpse of a seal of sorts painted on the door. And by then I had a plan.

Digging my heels into the ribs of the animal, I burst into the road again.

“Halt!” I shouted, waving my arms.

The set of black horses obeyed me an eyeblink before their driver did, as I was directly in their path. There ought to have been lights on that carriage by night. I could see the shadows of its lanterns hanging cold and unlit from its four corners, very tellingly.

“Who goes there?” called down the driver.

“Police.” I shook my lapel at him. “I must speak with your passengers.”

I didn’t give him time to answer. I clucked at the gelding and trotted to the side of the vehicle. Whether the horse trusted me because it was obedient by nature or because it preferred me to its usual master, I’ll never know. I reached over and jerked the door open, my feet on a level with the metal steps.

Moses Dainty on the left-hand side, moustache twitching with vexed confusion. Scales on the right, breathing through his mouth because that’s what he does when plans wobble or tilt. Sitting rigid and furious and tearful and perfectly healthy next to Scales was Bird Daly. She scowled at the sight of me, and then the scowl faded.

Bird can spot a lie, and who’s been telling it.

“Hand her over,” I said gruffly. “Whatever you were told, Madam Marsh wants her back.”

The pair of thugs glowered at me and then glanced at each other. Meanwhile, outrage flashed across the little girl’s face before settling into a fixed shipwreck victim’s expression. The blank look of a half-drowned person clutching a raft, waiting directionlessly for something to happen.

“You know better than to try to fun a Party man, Tim,” Moses argued, “seeing as—”

“Whatever my brother told you, I’m here to say he’s off his chart. Madam Marsh sent me here personally. You’d not want her coming down on the Party over a clear mistake, and when I was here to warn you? This one’s spoken for. Pass me the chit and we’ll say nothing else.”

“Madam Marsh? But wait,” Scales began stupidly, “did she—”

“Yes. In person. Only an hour ago. I’ve galloped here, can’t you see that? Fine. If you want Silkie Marsh thinking you a pair of jilters heaving her goods, I’ll leave you to it. I’d not much like to see what happens when she goes back on you. Doubtless the Party will pay for the funerals.”

“This was all to be pretty straightforward,” Moses put in. “I don’t think we ought to—”

“Hand her over,” I interrupted, “or I’ll have my brother thrown off the copper stars. Watch me do it. I’ve my own neck to think of, should you finish this blunder the way you’re so set on doing. Didn’t you see me guarding her at the Party meeting?”

It took maybe ten seconds but it was the right combination of words. Scales, who’d longer arms, half stepped onto the footrest, hauled Bird up by her armpits, and deposited her in front of me, sidesaddle so her dress wouldn’t hamper my riding.

I didn’t wait to say thank you. I was already thundering back into town, in the dark of night on a stolen horse, the instant I had a grip on her torso. When we were south of Union Square Park and obviously free of the baffled hirelings, I nudged her a little, slowing.

“Are you all right?”

“Where are we going?” came a tiny voice.

“Home. To see Mrs. Boehm. Then off to find a better hiding place.”

Bird nestled in tighter, before I set us to flying again and the wind carried the edges of her words off.

“I never truly thought it was you sent me away, Mr. Wilde,” she lied. “I never did.”

I’d heard Bird tell a score of lies for her own sake already. For precaution, for defense, for misdirection, for sympathy. It was easy enough to stomach those lies, because Bird Daly needed lies the way some creatures need shells. And so I’d sat back and watched them tumble out like beads off a broken string. There wasn’t any choice about it. I wasn’t about to stomach that last invention of hers, though. Not for a minute. As I said, I’m full grown.

“Bird, don’t lie for my sake,” I said as I nudged the horse back into life. “Ever again.”

“All right,” she whispered after giving that some consideration. “Then I’m glad it wasn’t you.”

The lights in the bakery windows
on Elizabeth Street were fair quivering with watchfulness. When I reined in the long-suffering horse and dismounted, reaching up to hoist Bird down, she was
stolen from me again within six seconds. This time by Mrs. Boehm, who flew through the door with her broad mouth cracked in a grin that didn’t match the wet in her eyes.

“Are you all right?” Mrs. Boehm snapped, sounding considerably put out that Bird had allowed herself to be kidnapped.

“I think so,” Bird managed. “Are there any poppy seed cakes not sold today?”

I led the horse across the street to the grocery. Peered around me. All peaceful calm at the streaky sulfur-smelling cabbage display, all slurring good cheer at the plank bar within. Tethering the horse, I gave it a bucket filled at the Croton pump on the corner. I brushed it down a bit with a rag from our side yard and plenty more fresh water. It shivered happily. The entire grim adventure had taken less than an hour. Chalking up another point for the copper stars, I went back inside.

“Where is she?” I asked Mrs. Boehm, sweeping my hat off and sitting backward in a chair pulled up to the table.

“Upstairs, with a cake and some milk.” Mrs. Boehm had been wiping down her ovens, but she turned to look at me, her plain, friendly face wrenching sideways. “I let her go. It was my fault, I—”

“It was nothing like your fault. We’ll just make sure not to let it happen twice.”

She nodded. Sinking on a long, low exhale, she sat across from me.

“Mrs. Boehm, I’m sorry about your husband and son.”

I didn’t want to sorrow her, but it needed saying. Maybe it was selfish of me. Still. The name on the bakery redone to claim her ownership, matched against the steady stream of regulars far older than the paint. The way she talked with Bird, lacking the shadows of more adult concerns flickering along her face as the child spoke. She was actually
listening.
Practiced poultices, reserves of silent patience, and a pair of nankeen trousers kept locked away in a trunk.

“Thank you,” she said softly. Then, “That was a question, I think?”

“Not if it vexes you. Just a fact.”

“There was a cattle drive on Broadway two years ago. Very sudden, the way they grew frightened. Lost control.” She hesitated, rubbing at a glassy streak of butter on the wood with her thumb. “Sometimes I wonder if maybe I would sooner have heard the danger. The stampede, the hooves. But it was too fast for Franz, and Audie was on his shoulders.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

Mrs. Boehm shrugged in a way that meant I shared no part in it, not that she no longer bled at the memory. “I have a shop, and a home. A neighbor when it happened said I was lucky to keep so much and that it was the will of God. What a stupid woman,” she concluded. “For God to make something young and perfect and then crush him. Why go to the trouble? Stupid people imagine God thinks like they do. Maybe God is not there, but I cannot believe God is stupid.”

A knock sounded from behind us. A quiet little
rat-tat-tat
.

Cautiously, I opened the door. There had been something odd about the noise even apart from its softness, and I saw what it was when I looked down. The knuckles were pretty undersized, and the striking point on the boards three feet below where it should have been.

“Neill,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

Neill was gasping with effort, his bony little shoulders rhythmically flapping. He wore a good quality set of charity togs—cotton shirt and frayed tweed vest and corduroy breeches that didn’t quite cover his shiny half-shell knees.

“Father Sheehy is needin’ you at St. Patrick’s. Not able to come himself. Sent me. Guardin’ it, he is, best as he can, but needs ye, come on, I’m to bring you quick as possible. Please.”

“Has someone been hurt?” I demanded after snatching my hat and advising Mrs. Boehm to open the door for no one save myself.

“Can’t rightfully say,” Neill panted as we broke into a run. “But someone’s been killed, and killed all wrong, sure as there’s a mad Irish devil prowling these streets.”