The Gods Of Gotham (47 page)

I was trying to work out if my brother was still breathing. The odds seemed fair that he was. I’d given him one hell of a black eye, but someone had carefully cleaned the place where the skin had split.

Yes, I like this Jim fellow considerably,
I decided.

“Have I gotten him home, then?” Gentle Jim inquired, genuinely worried.

“You’re a fine friend to the pair of us,” I answered. By way of an apology.

“Don’t you dream of thinking that,” Jim laughed as he walked toward my staircase. “When once he wakes up—I don’t know what troubles have recently beset the two of you, he always claimed you were quite close—you shall doubtless suppose me an utter bastard. Val coming off that much morphine is a grand and a glorious thing. I wish you all the fair luck in the world, because that is how much you will need.”

I was too much anxious
over Val to leave for the Tombs. Not because I thought he might finally have used himself too hard, but because there was no guarantee that if I left and he awoke, the bloody-minded scoundrel might not set sail for Brazil. And so I found some stomach-calming dried mint and brewed a pot of tea instead. My brother endures the sweats and the chills with remarkable calm, and the bit where his heart rate starts resembling a hummingbird’s doesn’t much vex him. But this one looked like it had been a real out-and-out. That meant I needed mint tea, and—supposing the tea didn’t work—a bucket. I fetched them.

Thankfully, I waited only about twenty minutes. I was sitting with my back to the wall by the straw tick in my relatively unfurnished room when Valentine sat up, looking like a savage who’d just crawled out of a cave and stolen a dapper Party man’s togs.

“What,” he said in a voice the texture of tree bark, “am I doing here?”

“Sleeping off the morphine,” I said amiably. “Gentle Jim delivered you.”

“That prancing little hobbyhorse.”

“I like him fine.”

Val rubbed his hand up and down his face a few times. “You never want to see me again.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Why?” he wanted to know, shoving his index finger and thumb hard into his eyeballs.

“Because I’m not a very good brother, but I’d like some practice at it.”

Val coughed up something that belonged on the ground in Five Points and tugged his red silk kerchief out of his pocket.

“And just how do you calculate to learn that lay, Tim?”

“I’ll watch you, I guess. That’s my plan.”

“Then you,” Val rasped into the cloth, “are thick as cream.”

“I know.”

I had spent more than half a lifetime believing that my brother’s foulest crimes against me consisted of firefighting, morphine use, and moral depravity, in that order. And I’d never had the smallest intention of forgiving him for any of them. Not that Val had asked. But knowing that his greatest crime was actually a bloodstain so dark it could blot a man out entirely … Miraculously, that was easier. An instant had passed the night before, as I staggered home, when I realized I could be rid of the person who’d robbed me of my parents. That I could simply let Valentine go. And then I’d thought about my twisted maelstrom of a sibling’s exactitude in stuffing pigeons with butter and suet and marjoram before stewing them, and how whenever we’d had a window it had always been scrupulously clean, and the occasion we’d run out of handkerchiefs and he’d actually cut an old waistcoat into squares and hemmed them. I’d thought about the quality of spine required to walk into a fire in which people are burning. I’d thought about reasons for doing so. It had been all I could manage not to start shouting his name down Elizabeth Street.

“Is that mint tea?” Val croaked dubiously, opening one eye.

“Yes.”

“Is it really that bad?”

“Yes.”

And it was. But that only ever takes about half an hour—the bucket period, I mean to say, and when the nausea had been conquered, Val stuck his head in my basin and washed up, and we went back downstairs. I soon found day-old bread Mrs. Boehm had wrapped and put in the cupboard, a piece of farmer’s cheese, and some house beer. The dawn was now far from grey, and the air had cooled from the passing storm overhead. A mutely watchful morning. When
I’d finished making coffee, I sat down across from my brother. Val was staring at my butcher paper, eyebrows raised.

“Your coffee,” Valentine said, “smells like the underside of an Irish boot.”

“I ought to tell you right off that you won’t be seeing Scales or Moses Dainty again. It’s not by my hand, but they’re … in no position to be found. They were hedging with Silkie Marsh and met some who objected to them trying to kill me.”

My brother was too drug-sick to grieve properly. But he did slump a little further. “There’s a question solved. Do you know, I thought that pair of cross-coves were beginning to smell like rats. But they’d run with me so long, I couldn’t swallow it.”

“I need to know what you learned from Matsell and Piest. I could go find them myself, but—”

“But they leaked to me already. You’ve turned murder artist,” he added with his eyes on the brown paper.

“It helped. What did Piest find in the woods and tell the chief?”

“That piece of old Dutch toast is really as sharp as they make them.” Val sighed, putting his elbows on the table and staring at the bread darkly. “I suppose you know he unearthed a rank lot of sheepskins by the grave. Well, he found the wench they’d been occupying too, and she was all the go to spill for him. Name of Maddy Sample.”

Maddy Sample was a lovely and apple-cheeked farm girl of seventeen who lived in the midst of a cherry orchard bordering the woods where the shields had been found. Mr. Piest, bless the mad rogue, had discovered her by visiting the nearest pub to the gravesite—a saloon called The Fairhaven, on the assumption that the girl lived very near—and then pretending to lech after every moll who’d bother speaking with him. He enjoyed zero success, as might be expected. But this behavior gave the menfolk the impression he was hot after
their property. And soon enough a fellow by the name of Ben Withers, who was more chivalrous than clearheaded, warned him not to gawk after Maddy if he didn’t want Ben’s fist in his eye.

“Which would have been bully,” Val explained, “but Maddy Sample isn’t married to Ben Withers. He lives at a brewery a quarter mile away.
Also
bordering the forest. Which made our Mr. Piest wonder what the devil dear little Ben was so worried about.”

Mr. Piest hadn’t yet encountered Maddy Sample. But he found her soon enough at the cherry orchard when he told her parents that his wife was ailing, and needed a part-time companion of sunny disposition. For a large sum of coin, a few of which he handed over to them as a gesture of good faith. The Samples wished his wife a swift recovery and in the meanwhile sent him straight to their vegetable garden to speak with Maddy. When he’d gently told her what he’d found, what he wanted, and what he’d pay her for pretending to call on his wife, Maddy washed her hands and rode with him to the Tombs.

“Matsell and Piest questioned her, and the pair of them know what they’re about, making a moll comfortable.” Val dunked a piece of bread in his small beer and hazarded a bite of it. “The doxie was spinning yarn after yarn as soon as a glass of French cream was in her hands. Ben Withers is a real out-and-outer, but he’s not yet through his brewers’ apprenticeship. Ben Withers is a bit peppery about who she talks with. Ben Withers has a fine ankle for a jig. When they’d got her off the topic of her young man, she admitted they go to the woods to play plug-tail, and when they asked if she’d ever spied anything dusty, she said there’s a carriage comes there at times. Saw it twice.”

“My God,” I said softly. “Did she see what they were about?”

“Didn’t want to get caught, did she? So she kept her distance. Whenever they appeared, she and Ben turned tail.”

“What else?”

“Just one thing. The carriage had a picture on the side. She said it was an angel.”

“An angel?”

“Sure as taxes, an angel. That’s why Matsell wanted us. It truly
is
a religious nutter, Tim. Which means last night was only a taste. We’re buggered if we can trace him, and buggered if we can’t.”

“No,” I said on a tiny, hushed little breath. “It doesn’t mean that at all. I know what’s happened. Right down to brass tacks.”

It’s a good job Val hates my coffee and is downright snobbish about it, or I think he’d have spit it out. Meanwhile, I felt like I was flying and free-falling at the same time. It’s not a bit pleasant.

“How?”
my brother demanded.

I pointed dumbly at the sheet of butcher paper.

“Mother of God. Then what are we doing here, young copper star? And are you going to leak?”

“Will you get uppish if I don’t tell you yet?” I asked, rising.

“Yes. No. Christ, Tim.”

“I have to see someone.” I was buttoning my vest, casting about for my boots, tying the thin strip over my scar. “Can you do one thing for me? Please?”

“When I can stand,” Val said judiciously, “and when you’ve poured me a whiskey. You rankly inhospitable cow’s teat.”

I went for the liquor. “Can you ride at once up to Harlem and find a farm called Boehm? Marthe Boehm. My landlady is there, and Bird Daly. They plan to come back to the city today, but they need an escort. If you’re on the muscle, I’ll know nothing can go wrong.”

“Is anything likely to go gammy where
you’re
headed?” he asked pointedly.

“It’s all bob, Val, trust me,” I said, assuring him of my safety. “Just one or two people I need to speak with.”

“I’ve taken orders from bigger flats than you, I suppose.”

Cocking his head in a measuring sort of way, my brother poured himself a second glass of whiskey. Bigger than the first. I’d my frock coat on and was nearly out the door when I turned back.

“Why didn’t you just tell me you had nothing to do with Bird’s being dragged off to the House of Refuge?”

“Because you go deaf when I talk, Tim.”

He said it in the same tone as he’d say, “Why not, if the weather’s fine?” or “Because you can’t add lemon to milk that way, tit-brains, it’ll curdle the sauce.” Didn’t meet my eyes either, just pulled out his tiny appointment book and began jotting down
Boehm
with a pencil stub from his frock coat. I hadn’t much liked having my heart broken by cruel chance the night before. This new crack through it seemed fair, though, because I have apparently been an instrument of merciless punishment for seventeen years and because Valentine Wilde does not ever—despite his habits, never needs to—write anything down in order to recall it. Which meant that risking a glance in my direction seemed long odds to him just then.

“I thought so,” I said when I could manage to talk at all. “Val, I’m sorry for it. Please don’t go to Turkey. Promise me.”

He did look at me then, and his eyebrow twitched with dark amusement. “The life of a sea-crab has lost its sheen.” Val paused, tucking his appointment book away again. “You won’t go charging up against the Party half-cocked? They’re dangerous. I’ve been trying to tell you so.”

“It’s not them I’m fighting, turns out,” I called back as I left him, settling my wide hat over my brow. “I’m thick as cream, just like you said. It’s absolutely everyone else.”

I
quit the hack at the intersection of Chambers and Church streets. The combined house and practice shone, a beacon of good health in the form of housing. About as far a cry from Five Points as you could imagine. Its steps newly scrubbed by his servants, and the knob on his door flashing merry arcs of light in the sun. Glancing over the brass plaque announcing dr. peter palsgrave, physician to youth, I rang the bell.