The Gods Of Gotham (4 page)

“Did you know, Mr. Wilde,” she inquired, “that
elixir proprietatis
is the only medicine that can offer immediate relief when dysentery threatens? I pulverize saffron with myrrh and aloe and then suffer the concoction to stand a fortnight in the hot sun mixed with New England rum.”

Mercy passed me a quantity of dimes. It was still good to see so many disks of metal money clinking around again. Coins vanished completely during the Panic, replaced by receipts for restaurant meals and tickets for coffee. A man could hew granite for ten hours and get paid in milk and Jamaica Beach clams.

“That’ll teach you to question an Underhill, Hops,” I advised over my shoulder.

“Did Mr. Hopstill
ask
a question, Mr. Wilde?” Mercy mused.

That’s how she does it, and damned if it doesn’t fasten my tongue to my teeth every single time. Two blinks, a gauzy lost lamb expression, a remark she pretends is unrelated, and you’re hung up by your toes. Hopstill sniffed blackly, understanding he was good as banished from the continent. And by a girl who turned twenty-two this past June. I don’t know where she learns such things.

“I’ll carry this as far as your corner,” I offered, turning out from behind the bar with Mercy’s spirits.

Thinking all the while,
Are you really going to do this?
I’d been fast friends with Mercy for well over a decade.
It could all stay the same.
You lifting things for her and watching the curl at the back of her neck and working out what she’s reading so you can read it too.

“Why are you leaving your bar?” She smiled at me.

“I’ve been gripped by a spirit of adventure.”

New Street was aswarm, the sheen of polished sable beaver hats punishing my eyes above the sea of navy frock coats. It’s only a two-block street terminating to the north at Wall, all giant stone storefronts with awnings shielding the pedestrians from the scorching blaze. Pure commerce. From every canopy hangs a sign, and plastered to every sign and glued to every wall is a poster: parti-colored neckerchiefs, ten for a dollar. whitting’s hand soap a guarantee against ringworm. All the populous streets on the island are papered in shrieking broadsheets, no exceptions, the flaked headlines of yesteryear just visible under the freshly glued advertisements. I glimpsed my brother Val’s smirk translated into woodcut and tacked to a door, then caught myself stifling a grimace: valentine wilde supports the formation of the new york city police force.

Well and good. I’d probably oppose it, in that case. Crime is rampant, robbery expected, assault common, murder often unsolved.
But supposing Val was in favor of the violently debated new police, I’d take my chances with anarchy. Up to the previous year, apart from a recently formed group of hapless men called Harper’s Police, who wore blue coats to advertise themselves as fit for beatings by the spirited, there was no such thing as a Peeler in this town. There was a Watch in New York, certainly. They were ancient hangdogs parched for money who toiled all day and then slept all night in watchmen’s booths, ardently watched by the brimming population of criminals. We’d in excess of four hundred thousand souls prowling the streets, counting the perpetual piebald mob of visitors from around the globe. And less than five hundred watchmen, snoring in vertical coffins as their dreams bounced around like tenpins inside their leather helmets. As for daylight keepers of the peace, don’t even ask. There were nine of them.

But if my brother Valentine is in favor of something, that something isn’t particularly likely to be a good idea.

“I thought you might want a bruiser to get you past the throng,” I remarked to Mercy. It was half a joke. I’m solid, and quick too, but a bantam. An inch taller than Mercy, if I’m lucky. But Napoleon didn’t figure height stood between him and the Rhineland, and I lose fights about as often as he did.

“Oh? Oh, I see. Well, that was very kind, then.”

She wasn’t actually surprised; the set of her robin’s-egg-blue eyes told me that much, and I decided to watch my step. Mercy is very difficult to navigate. But I know my way around the city, and around Mercy Underhill. I was born in a cheerless cottage in Greenwich Village before New York even touched its borders, and I’d been learning Mercy’s quirks since she was nine.

“I wonder something this morning.” She paused, her wide-set eyes sliding my way and then dropping off again. “But it’s silly, maybe. You’ll laugh.”

“If you ask me not to, I won’t.”

“I wonder why you never use my name, you see, Mr. Wilde.”

New York’s winds are never fresh in the summer. But as we turned onto Wall, bank after bank scrolling past us in line after line of Grecian columns, the air turned sweeter. Or maybe I just remembered it that way afterward, but suddenly it all seemed pure dust and hot stone. Clean, like parchment. That smell was worth a fortune. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“There, yes. I’m sorry—I don’t mean to be cryptic.” Mercy’s bottom lip slid underneath her top one just a little, only a fraction of a warm wet inch, and I thought in that moment I could taste it too. “You could have just said, ‘I don’t know what you mean,
Miss Underhill.
’ And then we wouldn’t be talking about it any longer.”

“What does that make you think?”

I spied a jagged hole in the pavement. Pivoting quickly, I guided Mercy out of its path with a swish of her pale green summer skirts. Maybe she’d caught sight of the little cave herself, though, for I didn’t startle her. Her head didn’t even turn. Escorting Mercy down a block, depending on her mood, you might not be there for all the attention she pays you. And I’m not exactly Sunday, so to speak. I’ve never been a special occasion. I’m all of the other days in the work week, and there are plenty of us streaming by without notice. But I could fix that, or I thought I could.

“Do you mean to make me theorize that you like the topic of my name, Mr. Wilde?” she asked me, looking as if she was trying not to laugh.

I’d caught her out, though. No one ever answers her questions with questions, just the way she never acknowledges answering questions at all. That’s another fault of Mercy’s I’m fixed on. She’s a reverend’s daughter, to be certain, but she talks clever as a jade if only you’re keen enough to notice.

“Do you know what I’d like to do?” I questioned in return, thinking
that was the trick of it. “I’ve managed to put some money away, four hundred in cash. Not like all these maniacs who take their first extra dollar and play it against the price of China tea. I want to buy some land, out on Staten Island maybe, and have a river ferry. Steamships are dear, but I can take my time finding a good price.”

I remembered being two years orphaned, scrawny and pale-skinned and twelve. Wheedling my way through sheer tenacity into the employment of a hulking but kindly Welsh boatman during once of the leaner periods Valentine and I had ever faced, having lived off of mealy apples for a week. Maybe I was hired on as a deckhand because the fellow suspected as much. I recalled standing at the prow of the ferry before the rails I’d just polished until my fingers were peeling, head thrown back as an ecstatic midsummer thunderstorm exploded in the still-blazing sunshine. For five minutes, spray and rain had danced in the dazzling light, and for five minutes, I’d not wondered whether my brother back on Manhattan Island had yet managed to kill himself. It felt wonderful. Like being erased.

Mercy quickened her grip slightly. “What has your anecdote to do with my question?”

Be a man and take the plunge,
I thought.

“Maybe I don’t want to call you Miss Underhill, ever,” I answered her. “Maybe I’d like to call you Mercy. What is it you’d like best to be called?”

I was a touchstone
at Nick’s Oyster Cellar that night, a lightning-bright lucky charm. All my pale glorified card sharps, all the faro-champagne-morphine-and-what-else-have-you addicts, the freaks who haunt the Exchange and make deals with damp handshakes in the back rooms of coffee houses—they all saw kismet on me and
wanted a taste of it. A drink from Timothy Wilde was as good as a slap on the back from an Astor.

“Three more bottles of champagne!” shouted a weedy fellow called Inman. He could scarce breathe for being jostled by black-coated elbows. I wondered sometimes what made the financiers head for another sweltering cock-pit the moment they quit the chamber of the Board of Brokers.

“Take a glass for yourself on my account, Tim, cotton’s higher than an opium fiend!”

People tell me things. Always have done. They hemorrhage information like a slit bag spills dried beans. It’s only gotten worse as I’ve manned an oyster cellar. Incredibly useful, but it does get to be draining at times—as if I’m part barman and part midnight hole in the ground, just a quick-dug hollow to bury secrets in. If Mercy would only manage to fall into the same habit, that would be something miraculous.

A stream of honest working sweat trickled down my back by nine o’clock, when the sun went down. Men sweating for other reasons demanded drinks and oysters as if the world had spun off its axis. Apparently there was nothing for it but to annihilate the feast before we all slid off. I was moving fast enough for a dozen, juggling orders, calling back friendly insults, counting the shower of coins.

“What’s the good news, Timothy?”

“We’ve got enough cold champagne to float an ark on,” I shouted back at Hopstill, who’d reappeared. Julius materialized behind me, hoisting a bucket of fresh-shaved ice. “Next round’s on the house.”

The way I figured it, Mercy Underhill hadn’t said no to any of my remarks. Nor “You seem to have the wrong idea,” nor “Leave me be.” Instead, she’d said a good many completely unrelated things before I left her at the corner of Pine and William streets, a breeze picking up from the east, where the coffee houses churned rich burning smells into the heavy air.

She’d said, “I can understand your not liking my family name, Mr. Wilde. It makes me think of being buried,” for example. She’d said, “Your own parents, God rest them, had the generosity to leave you the surname of a lord chancellor of England. I’d love to live in London. How cool London must be in the summer, and there the parks have real grass, and everything electric green from the rain. Or so my mother always told me, whenever a New York summer seemed too much to bear.” That was a regular catechism of Mercy’s, whatever the season—a little prayer to her late mother, Olivia Underhill, a native of London who’d been odd and generous and imaginative and beautiful and wonderfully like her only child.

Mercy had added, “I’ve finished the twentieth chapter of my novel. Don’t you think that’s a thrilling number? Had you ever expected me to get so far? Will you give me your honest opinion, once it’s finished?”

If she aimed to discourage me, she was going to have to up her game.

And I might not be a scholar in title, or a churchman, but Reverend Thomas Underhill liked me fine. Barmen are pillars of the community and the hub of New York’s wheel, and I had four hundred dollars in slick silver buried in the straw tick of my bed. Mercy Underhill, in my opinion, ought to be called Mercy Wilde—and then I’d never know where another conversation was headed for the rest of my life.

“Give me fifty dollars and I’ll see you’re a rich man by the end of the fortnight, Tim!” shrieked Inman from yards away in the roiling vat of bodies. “Sam Morse’s telegraph can make you a
king
!”

“Take your fairy money and go to hell,” I returned cheerfully, reaching for a slop rag. “You ever play the market, Julius?”

“I’d likelier burn money than speculate it,” Julius answered without looking at me, deftly pulling the corks from a row of drenched champagne bottles with his wide fingers. He’s a sensible fellow,
quick and quiet, with fragrant tea leaves braided into his hair. “Fire can heat a man’s soup. You calculate they know the Panic was their doing? You think they remember?”

I wasn’t listening to Julius any longer by that time. Instead, I was dwelling thick as laudanum on the last thing Mercy had said to me.

Don’t think you’ve hurt my feelings. I’m not married to the name, after all.

It was the only sentence directly to the purpose I’d ever heard her say, I think. At least, it was the first since she was about fifteen, and even so, the remark had a sideways charm to it. So that was a heady, graceful moment. The moment when I discovered that Mercy saying something near-plain is every bit as beautiful as Mercy talking circles like a flame-red kite in the wind.

At four in the morning, I passed Julius an extra two dollars as he propped the mop handle in the corner. He nodded. Worn to a thinly buzzing alertness, we headed for the steps leading up to the awakening city.

“You ever wonder what it’s like to sleep at nighttime?” I asked as I locked the cellar door behind us.

“You won’t catch me in a bed after dark. Keep the devil guessing,” Julius answered, winking at his own joke.

We reached the street just as dawn flared with grasping red fingers over the horizon. Or so the corner of my eye thought, as I settled my hat on my head. Julius was quicker to catch on.