The Gods Of Gotham (51 page)

“I burned Mercy’s book for Mercy,” he answered, surprised. “How could you know about that? She refused to speak of it with me afterward. It was wild—erotic in a shameless fashion, so lyrical and ripe as to be completely untamed. The sort of thing that could have done her reputation tremendous harm. She would have been a mother one day, she was meant to be, and how could she face her children as the author of luxurious trash?”

If I knew one thing for a certainty, despite all my blindly adoring
illusions about Mercy, it’s that she’s incapable of producing trash. I’ve read
Light and Shade in the Streets of New York
, after all. Many upon many a time. Just picturing that lost book, the one she could have sold the way Frances Burney or Harriet Lee or a score of others had done, shut my throat like a bear trap.

“Mercy,” the reverend murmured. “I’d have given anything to have saved Mercy. She was a piece of Olivia. And now the only way to see her again is to die by my own hand. A fitting penance, for a part of the blame is mine—I ought never to have allowed her such freedoms. This is my fault. I begged her to repent of her folly before the end, I begged Olivia the same over fostering blasphemy, but they both refused, and I cannot face eternity without either one of them. Mercy has cost me my soul.”

Thomas Underhill looked like a child by that time. Just as lost as was possible, not seeing his own study, feet uncertain on his own carpet.

“Where is she?” I insisted.

“You’re here to bury us after all, aren’t you?”

I tried another tack.

“What did my brother say to you,” I questioned, “the day after we met, long ago? When he’d recovered from the drugs and came to speak with you alone, before you asked us to tea, what did he say?”

“I couldn’t possibly—”

“I very much need to know,” I pleaded.

The reverend’s anchorless eyes drifted to the wall. “He asked me if I thought that God could forgive any act, no matter how vile. You know why, naturally. And of course I said yes.”

My eyes fell shut as I blessed the world entire for that one tiny grace.

“And then,” Thomas Underhill continued, “he asked if human beings were capable of the same.”

“What did you tell him?” I whispered.

“I said to keep trying and find out.”

“Thank you,” I told him, as feelingly as I’ve ever said anything. “God, thank you. Where is Mercy?”

“She’s dead.”

I forced him back into the armchair with the pistol. Scaling the desk, I used my pocketknife to cut two lengths of hemp rope from the trailing end of the noose. I left the grim circle intact for meditation and quickly tied his wrists to the arms of the chair.

“I’m here to arrest you,” I said. “Did you take her to a doctor? To a church, a hospital? Tell me where she is now, and I’ll bury her. Wait any longer, and I’ll drag you to the Tombs first, then think your request over in a month or two.”

I’d never been any dab hand at lying, but this time my heart was in it.

“She’s upstairs in an ice bath,” he cried at once. “I tried, I tried. She was already slipping away from me when—”

Losing the rest of his sentence wasn’t deliberate, but I was halfway up the staircase by that time.

My eyes took in a blinding scope of familiar details as I raced up that flight. Dozens of useless facts about the Underhill staircase. And pure facts are pretty well respected, in my new profession. But they leave out the
story.
They’re just markers, blank tombstones. That’s what I’ve come to learn by way of being a copper star, and it wasn’t Bird Daly taught it to me either. It was Mercy sitting in Washington Square Park after she’d fought tooth and nail for a member of a long-despised race, just the way her mother used to do. Mercy said that words can be cartography, and this is what she meant:

Facts aren’t important on their own.

People are important. Their stories and their kindnesses. Stories happen to be, according to Mercy—and I understood her better by then—the only thing that’s important.

The facts went like this.

At the top of the stairs directly to the right is Mercy’s bedroom. I went inside. It’s done all in a cheerful, clean blue. But it might as well never have been painted for all the bookshelves, the hundreds of titles bound with string and rabbit glue tumbling onto the floor. Books with their spines broken from savage love, books with their jackets regularly dusted, books twice bought because the first volume shattered into ink flakes. The wardrobe stood open. Emptied, the dresses downstairs and not in a fit state to be spoken of.

Mercy had been in an ice bath only recently. That was a fact I’ll never erase. But she’d thrashed her way out of the rudely cut chunks of frigid water. She was on the planked wood floor now, despite the fact that her ankles were tied with the identical hemp rope I’d encountered downstairs. Also despite the fact that she’d been wrapped into a dressing gown with her arms stuffed inside the long sleeves and the empty wrists tied behind her like a straight-waistcoat.

Her lips were blue, and the upper one still fractionally shadowed the lower. Her face looked carved in bone by that time. I’d have been
tempted to say that even her eye color was fading. But that wasn’t the case. It’s just that blue rings look one way against white, and another against dull red. And the whites of Mercy’s eyes were so very empurpled from exertion and exhaustion that they’d have been unrecognizable, maybe. To someone else.

Those were the facts.

The story, though, went like this.

Mercy Underhill was still breathing. I could see those breaths come one after another as I whirled around that chamber. Wherever I turned I could still see them, as I cast about for ways to get her dry. Ways to get her warm. It was a bit like watching a child who’d fallen. In the bad sort of fall where the kinchin flutters within itself, testing hurts. They were little breaths. About the depth of my thumb if I’d measured it against her breastbone.

I got all the rope off her, and the icy fabric. She went first into my frock coat and second into every single piece of Thomas Underhill’s clothing I could rob from his wardrobe. Getting her warm was paramount, beyond even fetching a doctor, and so I carried her downstairs to the kitchen and made a soft nest out of quilting before the iron stove.

If a fire was lit faster in the history of North America, I don’t know where or when.

Oddly, by the time I’d used enough of my breath to turn Mercy’s fingers the color of her piano keys and not her blue wallpaper, I’d gone a ways toward forgiving the Reverend Underhill. Only for that part of it, mind. Not for the dead kinchin, and not for the letters. But I knew he loved Mercy. He loved Mercy like a man who had no other family left.

And I thought then that it would be the grimmest pit of hell to hurt the person you loved most simply because your mind was wrong. I’d hated putting Eliza Rafferty in a wet cage filled with the
rats that had already haunted her. She’d no excuse, and I’d no alternative. And yet.

I’ve done mad things myself. Stupid things. Never quite that mad or quite that stupid, but after all it wasn’t for lack of trying.

When Mercy started to come back to herself, she looked around her as if I was the only shape she could recognize. I had her cradled against me with my back to the wall, waiting. As she awakened, eyes drifting to and fro again, lips growing just that shade less chalky, I pulled her slightly closer. It was mesmerizing.

“You were never sick, were you?” I questioned softly.

Mercy’s lips formed
no.

“Are you cold now?”

She closed her eyes, shaking her dark head. Her hair and her temple hit my upper arm lightly. Seconds later she bit out, “He’s gone mad. He thought me diseased. I wasn’t. Timothy, I wasn’t. I’m not feverish just because—I’m
not
.”

“I know,” I whispered into her hair. “And I’m sorry, love. I’m so very, very sorry.”

It might have been wrong to let Mercy start sobbing without any attempt to settle her delicate state back into quiet. But I don’t suppose women very delicate in general, and I don’t suppose humans all that quiet. So apart from providing a warm structure to cry against, I let her alone. It was warming her. It was maybe the best thing she could have done. Medically speaking. But Mercy’s very clever, so that didn’t surprise me.

“Is my father all right?” she asked at length.

“I don’t think he is, actually.”

“Tim, I was the one who told him about the hidden bodies. It was my idea, I thought he may have heard something useful, this is—”

“Don’t say it,” I told her fiercely. “Don’t you dare apologize to me. It’s a number of people’s faults, but never yours.”

After an hour more of silence and occasional shivering, she fell asleep. Heated through at last, with her head on my shoulder and her three pairs of breeches falling over my knees. Very, very beautiful. No less so for the frozen cracks on her lips or the blisters all over her hands.

When I went back into the study to check on the reverend, none of the new facts came as any surprise to me.

I never told Mercy how loose I’d tied those bonds. How easy I’d made it for Thomas Underhill to free himself.

I’d done it for Mercy, after all. So that isn’t the sort of thing I can mention to her. That I sent the reverend to hell a bit quicker, if there is one, rather than subject her to visiting him at the Tombs.

Thomas Underhill had hanged himself weird and savage, his spine badly broken, face both purple and swollen, neck stretched an inch at least though I’ve never studied anatomy.

People who slit kinchin open out of mad hate and bitter memories ought to get worse than their own nooses around their necks. They ought to be served with jail time. Communion with the rats they’re so fond of comparing actual people to. I think that when those sort get a chance to visit with real rats, they begin to forget the comparison to words like
Irish
and
black
and
thief,
maybe even
whore.
And they deserve every minute of it, to my mind. But it wasn’t about me.

I left Mercy well blanketed by her stove as the heat dwindled. I left the reverend locked in his own chapel’s gardening shed. Twisted up with the shovels and rakes, for the moment. Not wanting Mercy to find him, I took the keys.

Breathing deep, steadying myself, I looked out across the churchyard at the peaceful gravestones. An amber hue hung over everything. The sun wasn’t quite setting by then, but I could feel its tug. It would be an autumn light almost, I imagined, swiftly falling. August suns linger for the worst news generally, but that sun showed better charity. I needed charity. I was tired enough to feel dead.

When I’d closed the garden shed door, I went looking for someone whose time could be purchased. That took forty seconds, and ended by being a hot-corn girl with a very slight harelip. Paying for her entire stock with Party money, I sent her to bring Dr. Peter Palsgrave, whom Mercy clearly trusted, to the Underhill residence.

Then I set off to confront the coldest killer I could ever have imagined. The reverend was mad, after all, and my new quarry owned no such convenient excuse.

S
ilkie Marsh wasn’t at her establishment, more’s the pity, so I was sent on to the theater within Niblo’s Garden on Prince and Broadway—the establishment Hopstill spent all his time building fireworks for, though I doubt he’d ever seen an actual show.

By the time I’d arrived there, the yellow had left the air. A clear fall blue bloomed in the sky above the lush plant life and the lusher crowds packing the brass-fitted saloon. Brushing by candied apple vendors and the great green blades of the landscaping, I walked into the theater. It was to be a vocalist that night, a break in the endless parade of acrobats. I gave a coin to a boy in a cocked paper hat who
was selling peanuts, and I asked where Silkie Marsh was sitting that night. He told me readily enough. Flashing my star in place of a ticket, I walked up the stairs.