The Gods Of Gotham (42 page)

“It
was
in the afternoon papers,” Fang corrected me.

That one took me a moment to breathe through.

“I
need
that carriage, lads,” I pleaded.

“You heard him,” drawled Fang to the little knot of fight-marked boys in a tone I couldn’t well fathom. “Leak it.”

“I leaked it to
them
right enough,” the lanky youth snapped, pointing a grubby finger at Ninepin and Matchbox. “And I got a punch in the daylight for my trouble, too.”

“You’ll get one again if you don’t change your story, Tom Cox,” growled Ninepin.

“You won’t, so long as I’m here,” I said firmly. “Spill it. Where is the carriage?”

“Dunno. We lost it,” Tom Cox muttered.

“You
what
? Well, where
was
it, then?”

“Outside a chophouse near to St. John’s Park, where we was hawking afternoon papers, already pulling away when we eyed it. We stopped work, shadowed it for a mile and a half through slow traffic, thereabouts, and it pulled up in front of a brick autum. Then
somebody
got out of it,” he added, glaring spit-bright and defiant at Ninepin. “
Somebody
went into the autum. Shut the door behind as the rotan drove off again. I keeked it
clear as day.
So did these lot. After that, we shoved off, came back here. Didn’t know what to think.”

“For the last time, who got out of the carriage in front of the church and went inside?”

“Say Mercy Underhill again,” snarled Ninepin, pulling his spectacles off his face and handing them to Fang, “and I’ll go as many rounds as it takes to keep your great gaping potato-trap shut.”

“Sod off,” snapped Tom Cox, leaping to his feet. “She’d that green dress on, the one that’s off her shoulders with the fern pattern, we’ve all seen it a score of—”

I caught Ninepin by the collar as he pitched headlong into the fray. He wasn’t on my mind, though. Just in my hand.

The green dress, off the shoulders as most of hers are, with the fern pattern. The one I last saw her in when she was standing across the street from Niblo’s Gardens in March.

Like a history book. Such a very long time ago.

She’d the basket slung over her arm at the same angle her eyes drifted sideways, and it had been stuffed full of half-finished short stories. Mercy had been trapped indoors for days with a bad case of ague, but well recovered by the looks of her color, and I hadn’t known she was well again, I’d the day before handed the reverend a bottle of cordial and a used book from a stall. He’d thanked me as if the mere tokens were great talismans, because Thomas Underhill loathes Mercy’s falling ill like he loathes nothing else on earth. But there she was, off balance like the best of statues, and she’d finished the ode she’d been working on while laid up recovering, and I read it in the middle of the street, rays of sunlight flashing white off her black hair.

If Mercy had been descending from the carriage owned by the man in the black hood, then she was in danger. That was all there was to it.

“The autum was Pine Street Chuch, yes?” I questioned.

“It was,” agreed Tom Cox, face flushed with the readiness to send Ninepin starry-eyed and bleeding into the ground.

“Stop scrapping, then. Miss Underhill’s in trouble.”

Everyone stopped.

“Thank you. You’re all dead flash rabbits. Stay here tonight, and off the streets,” I ordered, letting Ninepin go as I turned toward the exit.

That she hadn’t known whose carriage she was in, I was certain. There are things a man is right about, things he knows. Things like
Mercy needs my help.
I whistled for a hack on the first street corner good enough to encounter one, and told the driver to deliver me to the Pine Street Church.

D
arkness was gathering her thick skirts around New York as I pulled up at the corner of William and Pine. My breath came easier as the minutes rolled past, which was a blessing, though now that I could breathe I couldn’t see a damn thing. Streetlamps in these parts are left for dead when the glass cracks. I stepped down, paid the hack. My world seemed muffled. The carriage ought to have made more sound as it drew away.

Nothing would have happened the way it did if Mercy Underhill hadn’t stepped out her own front door seconds later, out of the little brick house under the trees by the Pine Street Church. And nothing
would have happened the way it did if she’d seen me standing there under a broken streetlamp. A man without any light.

But I did see her, and she didn’t see me, and something in my mind slotted into place like typesetting. It wasn’t a conclusion, though, which only goes to show how paper-skulled I truly am. No, it was a question.

Where is she going?

So I followed her.

She walked rapidly for the first few blocks west along Pine, wearing a light summer hood in pale grey over her hair. I can stay quiet when I want to, so she didn’t hear me. I walked close enough to defend her if she met an enemy. Far enough to linger behind if she met a friend.

Mercy hailed a hack when she reached Broadway. So did I, urging the driver quietly to follow as the moon broke through the cloud cover. By that time, I didn’t need the newsboys to have told me that the latest atrocity was in the afternoon editions—I could read it clear in the pedestrian traffic patterns. For every local walking clean and brushed and satin-buttoned in front of shop windows, there were two speaking together with trim lips and faces stretched like canvas drying. Dandies and swells and stockbrokers of the type I’d used to listen to, distracted for a moment from their clothes and their money. I knew which words they were saying without even bothering to read their lips.

Irish.

Catholic.

Outrage.

Savage.

Nuisance.

Danger.

When Mercy alighted from the hack at Greene Street, within sight of Silkie Marsh’s bawdy house, I was already convinced she was
headed straight inside it as I paid my own driver from half a block back. They were known to each other, there were a hundred reasons for her to visit. But then she stopped under a striped awning before a tea shop and waited. Hood pulled low, eyes glancing back and forth to either street corner.

About two minutes later, a man walked up to her. Not known to me. Handsome, his waistcoat sporting more embroidered flowers than Valentine’s and his swallowtails tight across the chest, brushed a clean blue-black. I disliked him immediately. The moon shimmered along the curve of his beaver hat. I couldn’t hear Mercy speak as she approached him, but I saw her face in the spider’s-silk glow, and so I didn’t have to.

I’ve been so frightened
, she said.
It hurts to be this frightened. Quick, quick, or I’m lost for good.

His reply was unknowable, as his face was turned from me. They set off down the moonwashed road about ten inches apart.

I followed. They went into Silkie Marsh’s house after ringing her bell. Lights blazed from every windowpane. I could see the bits of mirror and candle and carpeting that tempted men inside, all the tugging shine of the hardwood and the crystal. For maybe as long as ten minutes, I only waited. If I followed Mercy into Silkie Marsh’s brothel, then that was exactly what I was doing: I was
following Mercy,
no two ways about it. In the end, I simply forced my feet to move. Mercy going abroad at night was unusual but could be explained with a bit of effort. A kinchin with scarlet fever, a poor man thrown from a horse, a midwife who needed another pair of hands. Mercy meeting a strange fellow hours after being seen in the carriage of the man in the black hood, though—I couldn’t possibly have conscienced not learning what it meant.

I told myself that, anyhow.

When I dove across the street at last, I didn’t bother with knocking. The front door was unlocked, and I burst through. My eyes took
in the empty foyer, gleaming with rich color. I brushed past it all, past the oils and the ferns, and invaded the parlor.

There were about nine of me in the floor-length Venetian mirrors, all looking as if I’d barely survived an encounter with Cow Bay. And about nine of Silkie Marsh, too, who sat perched in her amethyst velvet chair mending a stocking, of all things. She looked up at me, momentarily startled. Seeming very young and petal-like for an instant, the sweetness of her face fairly glowing above the severity of fashionable black satin. Silkie Marsh is right to wear such things, for they don’t suit her and make her seem a girl trying out an elder sister’s ball gown. Black satin, unlikely as it sounds, makes you suppose she isn’t dangerous.

“Mr. Timothy Wilde,” she said. “You look very near to collapse. Might I offer you a drink?”

I said no, but she ignored me. She set her stocking and her needle on the chair and went to the sideboard by the piano, pouring a pair of neat whiskeys, sipping hers as she handed mine over.

Finding I needed it after all, I bolted the drink and passed the glass back to her. “Thank you. Where is Mercy Underhill?”

“I don’t know whether that is any of your business, Mr. Wilde,” she said sweetly. “In fact, I am sure it isn’t.”

“I know she’s here, and I need to speak with her. Tell me where she’s gone.”

“I don’t like to tell you. It’s an ugly matter. Please don’t make me, Mr. Wilde, you’re not a forceful man in that way. You’ll think still worse of me than you already do.”

“You needn’t worry much over that.”

“I don’t like betraying secrets, as I’m a woman of my word, Mr. Wilde. But if you must insist, she’s just down the hall there, through the door next to the Chinese vase. I know you’ll never find it possible to like my company, but don’t try to speak with her at the moment. Please don’t, for mercy’s sake.”

I’d crossed the hallway in under five seconds, I think. The Chinese vase rested on a pedestal with a pretty shaded lamp hanging on the papered wall above it, the pale amber shine making a circle.

Shoving the door open, I entered.

The small chamber’s lights were dim, more shade than shape. But there was a startled sound, and a quick, frantic little thrashing. I saw figures on the bed, one of them bare from the waist up, face twisting to look at me with eyes wide and unfocused. And the man was there too, above her but half under the coverlet, glancing backward, wearing nothing at all. His hand covered Mercy’s pale curve of breast and his smallest finger traced the line of her rib.

“This room is
occupied
,” he drawled. “Kindly—”

I hauled him off of her, which shut him up.

“However you’ve hurt her, I’ll pay you back triple,” I vowed, with one hand bruising his forearm and the other nearly tearing out his hair.

“He isn’t hurting me, you fool,” Mercy gasped. She’d sat up in the bed, pulled the coverlet more fully over herself. “Does it
look
like he’s hurting me?”

I let him go, and the dandy staggered back.

“Mr. Wilde,” Mercy began. Her eyes closed now, breathing fast through her nose. “You need to—”

“Oh, bugger this, it’s all off now,” gasped the stranger flailing helplessly about the room for his fine clothing. “What do you think me? I’m a sensitive man, I could not possibly—not after—and you
know him
?”

Mercy’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. She clutched her fist into the coverlet, kneading it ruthlessly. My back encountered the wall, and I slid down it to sit on the bare boards. Watching the stockbroker—no, exporter-importer more likely, his accent was all New York but his shoes and watch and the silk of his waistcoat foreign—regain what was left of his dignity.

“Well, whether you know him or not, I am sorry to be of such poor service to you and the proposed transaction, as—I don’t—oh, confound it, best of luck, Mercy. You’ll come by the money somehow or other. As for me, well … another time, perhaps.”

With that, he was out the door, shutting it behind him. I shuddered. Standing up, I turned to face the window, away from Mercy.

“I don’t know if you realize what you’ve done,” came her voice from behind me, “but will you tell me please why for heaven’s sake you’ve done it?”

“He was going to pay you,” I whispered. “And he paid Silkie Marsh for the furnished room.”

A rustling of fabric as she rose from the sheets.

“How long?” I attempted. “Tell me. Please. How long has this been happening?”

A dark chuckle emerged from the bed. It ended in a gasp, as if she were drowning, and it sent a frigid chill through my gut.

“How long, you ask? How long have I known the company of men, or how long have I been paid for it?”

I couldn’t answer her. So she continued regardless.