The Gods Of Gotham (54 page)

A
very uncomfortable mix of pricklish sensations haunted me as I arrived back home. First, the fact that I didn’t have two bodies, and couldn’t check whether Mercy was nursed fully back to health at the same time; and second, the thought that maybe no one would be there. That maybe Silkie Marsh could whisper instructions to blackbirds and send them flying up to nameless assassins in Harlem. Ravens croaking out “Kill Bird Daly” and then lazily winging back to the city.

When I opened my front door, though, the coiled-up feeling
melted. There was Valentine, sitting at the bread-kneading table with Mrs. Boehm. He’d gotten a pitcher of gin, and two tumblers were out, alongside my landlady’s supply of precious chocolate, a plate of pastries much finer than she usually bakes, and a deck of playing cards. The entire room smelled of butter. Mrs. Boehm herself was flushed to her sparse hairline, grinning so wide that she might have knocked the gin pitcher off the table. She’d clearly just laid down a hand, and I could see it upside down. A full house.

“No argument is possible,” she was saying, clapping her hands once. “You are a … tell me again, please. What word is it, for a man who so badly loses at all cards?”

“A flat,” Val answered. “And proud to lose to so square a republican as yourself, though not as proud as I am to teach you the lingo. Timothy Wilde, copper star! You look like death passed you over, thinking he’d already done his job. You’ve lost your mask as well, but that looks pretty flash.”

“It’s wonderful to see you both,” I said. “I need to ask Bird a question.”

“She is probably not yet sleeping.” Mrs. Boehm poured an ounce more gin into Valentine’s glass and then sipped at her own with German delicacy. “If you are quick.”

Bird wasn’t yet sleeping, though she’d curled up on the trundle pulled out from Mrs. Boehm’s bed. The simply stitched curtains were pulled back from the window. As I walked quietly in, Bird’s square little chin jutted eagerly up in my direction.

“You’re all right,” she said. “I knew you would be. Mr. V said that you were nowhere you couldn’t gammon your way back again.”

“I wasn’t. Bird, can I ask you something?”

Bird sat up readily, tucking her knees cross-legged beneath the counterpane.

“When you said all that time ago that I’d kissed the girl in that picture I’d drawn,” I questioned softly, “what did you mean? You
seemed troubled over it, and you know Mercy Underhill. You must have met her, where you used to live.”

“Oh,” Bird whispered. “Yes.”

She thought about the question for a bit too long. Long enough for me to notice that she supposed I’d not like her answer. But I waited her out, for it was plaguing me.

“Well, I didn’t think her quite right, you see. She was doing … the same thing, exactly the same as me, but she could come and go as she pleased and I couldn’t, so when you’d her picture, I supposed …” Bird trailed off, puzzling worriedly. “I thought she must have been your mistress, if you’d her picture. But I don’t understand her. Who’d ever want to just for, if … and if they could get out again, why—”

“No, hush,” I said as she grew panicky. “Thank you for telling me. It’s not easy to understand, but I do want you to know … she wished your lives better. You savvy, I think?”

“I see that,” Bird murmured, nodding. “Everyone else loved her. Just not me. But if you ask me to really like Miss Underhill, and not pretend, I’ll do it.”

“No, I’d never ask that.” I squeezed her shoulder once. “She has enough people who love her. No one is ever going to decide that sort of thing for you again.”

I arrived back downstairs in time to see Valentine slipping out my front door. So I went after him. Having already criminally missed going after my brother once, I didn’t mean to do it again anytime soon. When Val heard the door shut, he glanced back, his boot on the lowest of our three steps to the street. Not wary, exactly. But cautious. Tugging my hat off tiredly, I raised an eyebrow at my brother—the one on the more expressive side of my face.

“It’s all over,” I said. “I solved it.”

“Bully.” Val fished a cigar end out of his pocket and tucked it in the corner of his mouth.

“That’s all you have to say?”

“Aces,” Valentine answered, winking.

“You don’t want to know what happened?”

“I’ll get it from Matsell tomorrow. He tells a better story.”

“You’re a prick,” I marveled.

“If you’re keen to have me recollect any more of this in the morning, I’d not waste words now,” my brother suggested, checking his pocket watch. “Anyway, I’m off to a clandestine Party meeting. I have to ogle over a score of Irishmen and decide who’s fit to guard future ballot boxes. Waste no more of my time, Tim.”

“Regarding this afternoon,” I persisted, leaning back against the side of the house. “Your escorting Bird and Mrs. Boehm back here. That was bene enough. You did me a good turn. But staying with them the whole time, until I returned, not knowing what I was about?”

“Mmm?” he said, already looking back and forth and over and under for a hack. Walking backward into Elizabeth Street, not paying me any attention. Just exactly the way he always acts.

It’s infuriating.

“Thank you,” I called out.

Valentine shrugged, standing in the middle of the road. The bags beneath his eyes lightened an ounce or two as he glanced back at me. “It wasn’t much.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow at the Liberty’s Blood. Try not to take so much morphine you’re half croaked by the time I arrive, all right?”

Valentine caught the sort of grimace he gets when he’s laughing. It passed, though, and the gleaming-bone wolf’s smile appeared in its place.

“Sounds dead flash. Try not to be such a comprehensive cow’s teat in the meantime, will you, my Tim?”

“That seems pretty fair,” I answered sincerely.

I never went back
to the Pine Street Church, or to the Underhill residence.

Mr. Piest, whom I’d confided in very closely over our shared meal, “discovered” the body in the garden shed half an hour after I’d told him of it. Since I’d given him the key and all. The Reverend Underhill had obviously been strangled to death, but there were no witnesses. Nor clues. Nor suspects. It was a sad crime, obviously a murder.

But what could the copper stars do under the circumstances?

My colleague saw to it that within five more hours he was buried, in a quiet place under the familiar apple trees, in the Pine Street churchyard. We learned later that the reverend’s earthly properties were fast tied up with his pastorate. And anyhow, he’d been a charitable man long before the end, serving the needs of poor Protestant families. After the burial, there was only the house owned by the parish, and its furnishings. None of it valuable as anything but aids to memory. His will left his extensive library to a nearby free school.
And that was just exactly like him after all,
I thought. It hadn’t seemed to have ever once occurred to Thomas Underhill that his daughter might need more than she had, when so very many had so much less.

I didn’t plan on forgiving him for that either.

After sleeping for a few scant hours, I waited at home all through the night for a knock on the door.

When the hesitant rap came, I went outside and took a small woven bag from a beggar woman who’d lost the main balance of her teeth. I gave her a second coin for her trouble, though she told me she’d already been well paid not to look in that bag. And that if she did open the bag, the sender would know, and the pigs would eat her when she was left for dead in the streets. I asked where she’d come from, and she pointed to a grocer half a block away. A man on its porch watched us from under a straw hat brim, silent and cheerless.

I didn’t acknowledge him, though. Thanking the tattered moll, I pocketed my delivery and set out on foot for Pine Street.

But I never reached it. Passing rows of modest brick houses with their white-painted lintels brightening, the third time in a row I’d watched morning spread out buttery and thick over the city, I glimpsed Mercy walking the opposite direction. That is, toward me.

Mercy wore a dove-grey dress that didn’t quite fit her. From the saleable charity pile at the church, I assumed, for it was very clean and neatly sewn. Its bell-shaped skirt hung a little loose around her waist, though, and its wide neck draped even more off one shoulder than her frocks normally do. She’d taken half the time with her hair as usual, and I could see from a distance her lips were lightly blistered and her hands bandaged in a few places.

I thought,
This is what Mercy looks like in a grey secondhand dress on the last day you will ever see her,
as our steps met in the dead center of the western Pearl Street sidewalk.

“Mr. Wilde,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

It was a start.

“My father is dead,” she murmured. “You were there, you—you know, I think.”

“Yes.”

“The policeman was kind, but he wouldn’t let me see. And he said
murdered.
But that wasn’t the way of it. I don’t believe him.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You shouldn’t be sorry. You helped. You didn’t want me to have to—for what really happened to be known.”

She’d been crying, but not for long. The edges of her eyes were merely pink, still glistening a bit, and the angry red color from being forced into an ice bath was fading. The rest was very blue, her hair very thick and very dark. Mercy hadn’t asked me a single question yet, and suddenly I realized why. What had just happened to her, the dark,
ugly realizations, the exposed secrets that burned when you touched them … They couldn’t be bettered by learning
more
. I wondered if Mercy would ever ask another question again in my hearing.

“The buried kinchin were autopsies,” I told her quietly. “They weren’t desecrated at all, they were used by Dr. Palsgrave for science after they’d passed. It’s complicated, but a better outcome than we could have hoped for. I haven’t arrested him and I’m not going to. But I wanted you to know that everything’s … over with, now.”

I said nothing of Marcas and the church door. That image was already tattooed on her corneas as she stared at me, saying nothing, as dazed and hurt as any creature I’d ever witnessed.

“I’ve a gift for you.” I held out the little purse.

Mercy touched her teeth to her lower lip. No questions, though.

Who’d have thought that the very worst thing ever to happen to you would be Mercy losing question marks,
I thought, then forced myself to stop thinking.

“It’s three hundred dollars in cash. It comes from a … very appropriate donor, and one you never need feel
debt
toward. It isn’t mine or Val’s or anyone’s you might think, but it’s … it’s
yours,
and you’re going to London. Three hundred is enough to be getting on with, although … I’m sorry your togs were ruined, or can you wash kerosene out of clothes?”

I stopped.

When she tugged open the drawstring and saw the actual coin, Mercy’s mouth fell open entirely, like a ribbon bow being pulled.

“I don’t see how this could be mine.”

“Trust me,” I insisted. “I know I’m not entirely to be trusted in your eyes just now, but please trust me. I’m sorry about all of that. You’re getting away from this place. And if you find you need do nothing more in London and grow tired of it, or if you go elsewhere, to Paris or Lisbon or Boston or Rome, and then later want to see New York again … I’ll be here.”

There were too many blisters on Mercy’s fingers. I wanted to wipe them smooth again. It was a relief, in a way, to know she wasn’t in love with me. I could carry on as before.

Whatever is best for Mercy. Nothing much else need be considered.

“Are—” Mercy stopped, struggling. “Are you staying in New York forever, then?”

I breathed considerably easier after that. And
what
a question for her to want the answer to. It was enough.

“I’ve a career now,” I confessed. “And a brother who belongs locked in a cranky-hutch. I think I might hate them both, but I think I’m the right man for both jobs.”

Mercy’s eyelashes flicked. “I can’t. I can’t take this from you.”

“Go to London,” I said, pushing it into her hands.

“Timothy, why are you doing this?”

“Because you’ll write a map.” I was already walking away from her.

“But why do you want that of me?” she called softly.

Giving me one more invaluable question.

“I want that for a very good reason,” I answered, keeping my pace. “If you ever want me to understand something, any piece of you … well. If you’ve written a map, then I’ll know where to look.”