The Hidden Goddess (31 page)

The young man planted his hands on his hips, looked over the display of red books with a frown, and began spitting curses in the proprietor’s face—a string, indeed, of the filthiest
expletives Emily had ever heard. Within an instant it became too much for the big man in the sleeve garters to bear. He lifted his hands in a pugilistic stance. The young man moved with the quickness of a striking snake. With one hand he grabbed the fabric of the bigger man’s collar; with the other he delivered a vicious uppercut. In a heartbeat, the other b’hoys were throwing themselves on the older man, fists and feet flying. The big man, quickly overwhelmed, crossed his arms before his face and fell to the ground, yelling for help.

There were startled cries from all around. Farley, along with the two men who had been laughing and elbowing each other over the red book, hurried to pull the young men off. And in an instant, the beating became a full-fledged melee. Young men left off kicking the moaning proprietor and launched themselves at the would-be rescuers. Fists flew, women and children ran screaming, men tumbled to the pavement.

Emily watched, horrified, as two of the young men began to pay particular attention to poor Farley in his silly green livery. One of them cracked him hard across the mouth, sending him reeling; the other followed up with a hard sock to his midsection. Farley groaned, stumbled.

“Stop it!” Emily shrieked, running in Farley’s direction. “You … thugs! You rotten dirty hooligans,
stop it
!”

The sight of a woman rushing them, screaming at the top of her lungs, made the two young men step back, grinning at each other meanly. Emily fell by Farley’s side, putting her arm around his shoulders. She looked up at the pair of young men, who were now laughing at her. “Two on one? Shame on you!”

“Shut your rum-hole, lady, or I’ll shut it for you,” one of them offered, showing her a meaty fist.

“Rackers! Finnegan! Get over here and help me throw these down.” The words came from the young leader who had started the brawl. He had beaten the proprietor into unconsciousness, and was now using his heavy boot to kick over the tables with the red books on them. With a joyful whoop, Rackers and Finnegan came like called dogs, gathering up handfuls of the red books and tearing them in half along the
spine, sending ripped pages fluttering down the street in cheap, pulpy drifts.

“Miss Emily,” Farley grunted, trying to rise, “we have to get out of here. The Stantons will have my hide.”

Emily stood, helping him up. He remained half bent, his arms clutched around his belly. As he was rising, Emily saw the brown-paper-wrapped book on the sidewalk, and she snatched it, tucking it under her arm.

“Hey!” the young leader shouted at Emily, striding over toward her. Farley turned, tried to hurry her down the street, but the hooligan clapped a heavy hand on Farley’s shoulder and made a grab for the book under Emily’s arm. “You’re not going anywhere with that. Give it to me!”

For the first time, Emily was able to get a close look at the young man, and to her astonishment, discovered that she recognized him. He had anarchist eyes and an overbite. It was the young man she’d seen in Stanton’s office the day before. Gormley, that was what Stanton had called him. Emily stared at him as Farley put himself between Emily and Gormley’s grabbing hand.

“Don’t you dare touch her!” Farley spat at him, balling a fist. “You rummy bastards should know better than to touch a lady! Shove off or I swear to God I’ll flatten you!”

Without a word, Gormley delivered two lightning-quick punches to Farley’s face before the man in green even knew what hit him. Blood blossomed from Farley’s nose, cascading down his chin; he reeled.

“Mr. Gormley, stop it!” Emily screamed.

At the sound of his name, Gormley disengaged, breathing hard. Rackers and Finnegan closed around him, a threatening phalanx. Gormley glared at Emily for a moment, trying to place her. Once he did, his face transformed from sneering menace to sullen complacency.

“Miss Edwards.” Gormley dragged a dirty fist across his face, wiping some of Farley’s blood from his cheek. He pointed at the brown-wrapped book under her arm. “That’s one of the books, miss. Everything in there about Mr. Stanton … it’s dirty lies!”

“Well, whatever they are, they’re fluttering down every
street in the Bowery!” Emily pointed to the drifts of paper blowing down the street. “You’ve scattered them like dandelions! How many more people will get hold of those pages now, eh?”

Gormley clenched his teeth. His eyes burned into her like acid.

“I don’t know anything about that,” he snarled. “All I know is we’re charged with getting rid of all of ’em. All of ’em.”

“What do you mean, charged? Charged to destroy a business? Who charged you?”

“Why, you were in the office same as me when he said it,” Gormley spoke through clenched teeth. “
He doesn’t want to hear about it
. So he ain’t gonna. He ain’t gonna hear about businesses that sell lies and garbage. He ain’t gonna hear about them getting just what this one got.” He extended his hand, made a curt motion. “Now hand it over.”

“No.” She tucked her arm down tightly. Rackers barked a laugh, balled a fist, began to step toward her. Gormley restrained him with a raised hand. He looked at Emily.

“Give it to me,” he repeated, softly and slowly. From the direction of the bookshop came laughing hoots and screams and the sounds of breaking glass. Emily realized that she was shaking, from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet.

“No,” Emily said, biting the word. “I won’t.”

Gormley took a step forward, grabbing Emily’s shoulder, pulling her close. Farley grabbed for her, but Rackers and Finnegan swept forward as one, shoving him backward, following him as he stumbled back. Emily stood before Gormley, his head close to hers, his breath smelling of onions and whiskey. His fingers dug into the place where her neck met her shoulder, clasping hard, making her wince. His other hand was on the book, tugging at it, trying to pull it out of her grasp. She held tightly, wrapping her body around it.

“Listen, you stuck-up bitch,” Gormley hissed. “I take my orders from Mr. Stanton, not from you. Just because you’re his—”

The sound of a police whistle shrilled through the street.

“Run for it, Gorm!” Rackers was already sprinting away; Finnegan was not far behind. Spitting a curse in her face,
Gormley gave Emily a hard parting shake before taking one step back, then breaking into a run as well. He and the other young men faded into alley and saloon, swiftly and silently as dirty water running down a drain. Emily watched as the police arrived, three of them in dark-blue wool uniforms, running heavily down the sidewalk, whistles blasting.

“Miss Emily!” Farley was at her side. “Miss Emily, are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Farley,” Emily said, her fingers playing along the edge of the brown-paper-wrapped book as she watched the police bend over the still-unconscious proprietor. The destruction wrought by the swarm of young men was awful. Tables and windows were smashed, and everywhere, the tattered remnants of red books fluttered in the wind.

Farley held one hand to his bloody nose as he took Emily’s elbow, hurrying her up the street to where the carriage waited. As he opened the carriage door for her, he held out a bloodied hand.

“Miss … why don’t you give me my book back?” he said.

Emily clutched the parcel tightly. “No.”

“You really should,” Farley said. Emily held it tighter. Farley sighed.

“I wasn’t buying it for me, I just want you to know that. I wouldn’t want you thinking I was a kind of person like that. I was … I was buying it for them. Because they’d want to know. The family has to know. That’s all.”

He closed the carriage door behind her, and she sunk back in her seat, letting out her breath. Her heart was still pounding like a freight train, and her hands were shaking. She felt up to her shoulder, where Gormley had grabbed her. The place still ached. The half-wrapped book lay in her lap, and a bit of bright red peeped from a torn corner.

All at once, fearing to hesitate, Emily tore the brown paper from the book.

It was cheaply printed on bad paper. The title,
The Blood-Soaked Crimes of Dreadnought Stanton
, was executed in stark gothic lettering.

The full-color engraving on the cover depicted Stanton, his
face twisted with evil intent. His hands and feet dripped with blood even more brilliantly red than the book’s cover. In the picture, Stanton held aloft a squirming infant. At his feet writhed a half-clothed woman who looked disturbingly familiar. Black haired, black eyed … She was, Emily realized with a twist of disgust, the very image of Alcmene Blotgate. The woman’s eyes glowed with lust—for Stanton or for the bleeding infant, it was not clear. It was hideous. It was also, Emily noticed, the very same color red as the thing Stanton had hidden in his desk when she’d been in his office last.

Back at the Stanton house, Emily spent the afternoon in her bedroom reading. It was not, as a typical afternoon spent reading, a pleasant occupation. It probably would have been more pleasant to read Wordsworth aloud, all things considered.

Though cheaply and hastily printed, the red book was completely successful in achieving its obvious intent—to make Dreadnought Stanton appear like the most depraved and disgusting individual ever to disgrace the earth’s surface. Worse still, the message was driven home in such a fascinating and absorbing way, Emily could not tear her eyes away. On every page there was something more thrilling, shocking, or scandalous than the last. From a comparatively tame opening scene depicting the wanton defilement of a holy altar, it dragged the reader through a Grand Guignol of orgiastic blood-ceremonies, heartless ritual murder performed upon mercy-begging innocents, and gleefully creative and sadistic torture and mayhem—all peppered with prurient scenes of smut involving objects and animals better left uncoupled, even in the imagination. Emily shuddered. For God’s sake, people didn’t behave like that, even sangrimancers! How could anyone want to read about people behaving like that? Still, Emily turned the pages, even if it was just horror and dismay that kept her doing so.

Emily didn’t mind much about some of the accusations. She was certain she didn’t believe the part where Stanton breakfasted on a litter of newborn kittens. But some of them
had the ring of horrible truth. There was the same story General Blotgate had told at the Investment—of Stanton’s using Black Exunge on living creatures, then burning them alive for the amusement of the other cadets. According to the book, it wasn’t just chickens. The descriptions made Emily shudder. And there was the depiction of Mrs. Blotgate (unconvincingly renamed in the book as Mrs. Blackheart) in Stanton’s arms, the adulterous lovers swearing the eternal destruction of everything good and decent in the world …

For the fifteenth time that afternoon, Emily threw the book to the ground, temper flaring. Lies! Filthy, ugly lies designed to further weaken Stanton’s position at the Institute. That’s all it was. But if so, why had Stanton hidden it from her? The ways of credomancy generally bewildered her, but she knew from experience that trying to hide a secret only gave it more power. And what was he trying to hide, really? The lies … or the parcel of truth that lay behind them?

There was a knock at the door. Emily looked up guiltily, her heart jumping into her throat. She snatched the book up from the floor and managed to tuck it behind herself as Mrs. Stanton came into the room. The older woman paused, her hand on the doorknob, and looked toward Emily’s arm, which Emily was holding awkwardly behind her back.

“I’ve been speaking with Farley,” Mrs. Stanton said. “He was quite worried for his job. For good reason, as I have since discharged him.”

Indignation flared up in Emily. “He was only doing as I asked him. It’s not fair to—”

“My son sent you here to be safe, not to tramp around New York City getting yourself involved in street brawls.” She gestured obliquely to Emily’s hand, which was still behind her back. “Farley told me you’d managed to obtain one of those … things. I assume from your ridiculous posture that you’ve been reading it?”

Slowly, Emily pulled her hand out from behind her back and laid the garish red book on the side table. Mrs. Stanton advanced, took the book in between two fingers, lifted it disdainfully, and threw it into the fireplace. The cheap paper
flared up quickly, issuing a great quantity of foul-smelling black smoke.

“It is an exceptionally transparent attack,” Mrs. Stanton said, watching the flames and smoke rise together. She turned and looked at Emily. “I certainly hope you’re not silly enough to have let it upset you.”

“Why should it?” Emily said. “If it’s all lies.”

“If?” Mrs. Stanton’s green eyes glittered. “Then you have doubts?”

Emily swallowed, but said nothing. Mrs. Stanton hmphed.

“Most of it, I’ll own, seems rather unlike him. Blood strikes me as a highly unsanitary and disgusting beverage, and I can hardly picture him swilling jeweled goblets full of it. But the rest …” She paused. “Well, perhaps it is best that I refrain from sharing my opinion of my son’s taste in intimate companions.”

“You don’t … you can’t believe any of it?”

Mrs. Stanton lifted an eyebrow. “Dreadnought was a willful and perverse child. There is not a single earthly foolishness that I am unable to imagine him perpetrating. But whether he did any of those outlandish things or he didn’t, it makes no difference. He is my son.”

“Well, I’m sure he didn’t do any of it!” Emily said. “But, for heaven’s sake, if he did … you couldn’t—”

“Of course I could,” Mrs. Stanton said. She came to sit near Emily, in a chair that looked very uncomfortable. The way she sat in it, with her back straight as a poker, made it seem even more so. “And I would. What else would you have me do? Disown him? Denounce him? Ruin my world and my reputation in the service of some idealistic moral fantasy?”

“In the service of … decency.” Emily could hardly choke out the words.

“Your frontier ethics are so rawboned, Miss Edwards, as rough-hewn and clumsy as the log cabin in which you must have been raised.” Mrs. Stanton’s face was like marble as she spoke; only her lips moved with ugly precision. “Decency is striving for perfection in a world in which every other hoglike creature satisfies himself with sloppiness and indulgence. Decency is not in failing to murder someone. It’s in murdering
the right person, and sparing your family the indignity of getting caught.”