The Gods Of Gotham (21 page)

“Do you have shoes?” I added.

Another blank scared look, another negative.

“What on earth do you mean?” cried Madam Marsh. “They live here!”

“Not anymore,” I said.

“Do you know, dear old hen,” remarked Val, “that stargazing is illegal? I didn’t either. I was just an unschooled fire rabbit hard after a tumble. But they told us it’s against the law. Tough to credit, isn’t it? So these two are leaving now.”

Silkie Marsh’s rose-blossom features flew in several opposing directions, a flower savaged by a gale. Rage flickered past, then dull hurt as she gazed at my brother, then forced acceptance. I’m not a cruel man, generally, and I’m not proud of myself for gloating. But it was gut-deep satisfying.

“Is there anything else you’d like to take, then, Mr. Wilde? Valentine?” She smoothed a hand down her black satin bodice. It was a brilliant piece of theater, for the fury had disappeared.

Val snapped his fingers. “I’d near forgotten! We’ve a committee
fund-raiser coming, Silkie, and I know you’re a very scrapper for the Party. I’ll have those three dollars back, with thanks for your pains. And a very good night to you, darling duck.”

Silkie Marsh passed him the money. Exit Valentine, her eyes charring his wide back. I wanted to linger, ask again if other of her kinchin-mabs were missing. Ask if she thought she could cross me when I’d pegged her as false. But the instant I did, she’d learn that I knew of Bird. And that gave me pause, thinking on Bird’s trembling lips when she steadfastly refused to call Silkie Marsh by name.

So instead I tipped my broad hat coldly and quit that vile house with all speed. I found myself standing on the pavement with two shoeless kinchin almost identically dressed, wearing a madman’s grim smile. My brother, his cigar hanging from the side of his mouth and his hands on his tapering hips, shook his head philosophically.

“That dirty slamkin,” Val mused. “It almost disappoints me in the honesty of New York’s population. I practically kept her for a lady bird a few years back, you savvy. And right in front of my face the whole time … I was drunk, though. Well, Timothy. I have one question for you.”

“Yes?”

“What, precisely,” Valentine desired to know, directing two stabbing finger points at each of the kinchin standing wide-eyed on the street in the wetly thickening August air, “are you going to do with
those
?”

T
he kinchin huddled together in the hack. Sophia’s eyes snagged on things, uncomprehending, as if she hadn’t been out of the house in a very long time. Maybe she’d never been out of it. But Neill’s eyes were hooded. A brief, wild look of freedom had settled into dull silent shame. He’d wiped the lip rouge off with the sleeve of his garment, leaving a mark like a gash over his arm.

“When did you come to be in that place?” I asked. “And how?”

He flushed along either side of his sharp little nose, through the freckles. “Only these two weeks. Da was bricklaying, but he give it up altogether on account of the drink. She said her house were like
a theater, where people through wi’ workin’ play games and eat fine things. I’d nary et in a week, save for some apples I stole from a pig’s trough. Then she wouldn’t let me out ag’in. Anyway, some of it were true,” he finished defiantly, his reedy voice splintering. “Some of it were true. There was fish stew, and good fresh steak. I thought ye tended bar,” he added. Suspicious, as he’d likely remain for the rest of his life.

I explained it. All the while wondering if it was a proper feeling for a copper star to want to wring Silkie Marsh by her shapely neck.

“Neill, Sophia, I need to ask you something important.”

They said nothing. But Neill’s ears perked, so to speak, and Sophia looked watchful as she could through the mild laudanum dose.

“I’m afraid that a friend of yours by the name of Liam isn’t with us any longer. Can you tell me what happened to him?”

“He were sick,” Sophia whispered.

“Yes?”

“In his lungs, like,” Neill explained. “Bad off, he was. To see him, though. Fightin’ it.”

“I sent the maid out for strawberries for him wi’ my extra coin. He liked that. But he did na’ get better,” Sophia told me glassily.

“And did nothing strange happen then?” I questioned.

“Strange? Naught strange. He were just gone,” replied Neill. Sophia nodded. “Say, how do ye know of Liam?”

“I’m friends with Bird Daly.”

“Bird Daly.” Neill smiled, whistling through crooked white teeth. “Pretty chit.
What
a
liar
that girl is.”

“Bird is keener than you, and she mended my doll’s dress better than I could, Neill Corrigan,” Sophia snapped. “She
is
pretty, and her lies are pretty too. You’ve only lived there this fortnight, ye don’t know. I’m
glad
her mother came back.”

“Her mother?” I repeated.

“Her mother come and took her. That’s what Madam said.”

“Well, that isn’t true. But she’s out, and I’m glad of that. I’m glad of it for the three of you. Glad of nothing better.”

Sophia nodded, gazing tremulously out the window. Neill said nothing more for the rest of our journey. But he did unbend himself a little and sit as close to me as to Sophia, after two or three minutes more. It was a pretty generous gift on his part, I thought. Much better than I’d hoped for.

As for Bird—I liked her. Uncommonly. And despite her lies, the likelihood of a man in a black hood ever having existed would have been nil by that time, were it not for the evidence of twenty very real corpses.

We climbed down from the hack in front of St. Patrick’s. Getting inside after midnight, I imagined, would present a problem. But I didn’t end up facing the great expressionless stones and forbidding entrance at all, because the cottage behind the cathedral had a studious light in the window. I knocked at the humble but well-made wooden slat door of Father Sheehy’s rectory, flanked by grimy-footed kinchin. Sophia, as she heard footsteps approach, made a small frightened sound like the high chime of a warning bell.

Neill took her by the hand. “Don’t fret you,” he said, all authority in spite of the nightdress.

Father Sheehy opened the door still wearing his daytime clerical attire, his bald pate standing out sharp against the slick light from the oil lamp. Seeing who was with me and what they were wearing, he took a deep breath and widened the swing of the door.

“Come in at once.”

He seated the kinchin at his neat square table, going to his pantry for bread and a small cheese wheel. These he sliced as he spoke to us. I waited with my arms crossed and my back to the door, too full of rushing blood to be still. Father Sheehy very kindly asked them their names, and whether they had parents worth speaking of or no, and what had happened that night. Neill did most of the
talking, and I was to glad see the priest wanted his trust before my information. Scant enough good he could do them if they were out the window the instant his back was turned.

“Eat this while I fetch you some things from the church storeroom, now,” he concluded. “I’ll take Mr. Wilde here and be bringin’ ye better clothes. Neill, see that she eats, yes?”

“I’ll see to it, Father,” he replied. Neill, I thought, was a small man who liked tasks. Not a boy at all.

Outside in the dewy heat, air sparkling with almost-rain and smelling of the thunderclap that would surely soon engulf us, Father Sheehy peered at me, openly interested.

“I’d be grateful to know how ye stole property o’ Silkie Marsh with her a devil and your brother the devil’s best advocate.”

He waved me toward the nearest entrance to St. Patrick’s, iron keys in his fingers and a lantern in the other hand. I was willing enough to tell him, and I did, though there likely wasn’t any art to it. I was too keen to go in a hundred directions at once, grow a thousand pairs of hands. Wanting to know Matsell’s mind, if Piest had found a button and what the devil it would mean if he did, whether Bird’s eyes had stopped looking like there were too many layers behind them. Father Sheehy’s hands froze in the trunk of charity garb when I said the word
nineteen,
but otherwise he kept his marvels to himself.

“I want ye to know somethin’,” he said slowly, folding a small dress and a set of blue trousers. “When you need my help, you’ll have it. And you will need my help, I fear. This is a keg o’ gunpowder in a bonfire.”

My face twitched under the quarter-mask, burned slightly as if it agreed with him. “Yes, but why do you say so?”

“Because at any moment, Mr. Wilde, I fear your work on this case might be called off.”

Not only did I not fear any such thing, it had never occurred to
me. A flush warmed the back of my shirt collar. I felt as if he’d insulted me, though he hadn’t.

“The copper stars will leave the deaths of twenty kinchin a mystery? We’re made of more iron than
that
, I hope. Though we’re untested.”

Father Sheehy closed the trunk’s lid with a decisive snap and leaned both hands on the table to look at me. “Not twenty kinchin. Twenty
Catholic
kinchin who’ve nary been missed. For as long as this case appears
solvable,
and for as long as it marches in line with Democratic politics, ye’ll be a man with a grave and awful mission. But neither George Washington Matsell nor Valentine Wilde will suffer the infant copper star force to be publically humiliated, nor the Democrats to take a lacin’ over a thankless task.”

“The day my brother and Chief Matsell take me off the case, I’ll watch the pope shake hands with President Polk before a cheering crowd.” My voice was dark with indignation, harsh as penny pipe smoke in my throat.

“No offense meant, to be sure. As for His Holiness Gregory the Sixteenth, it would doubtless surprise most Gotham dwellers to learn that he’s a bit too preoccupied with fightin’ the slave trade, the modern rail system, and the terrorists in the Papal States to ruminate much over America at all,” he added in a bone-dry voice.

“No offense taken,” I said tightly. “What do you mean to do about Neill and Sophia?”

“I’ll see that homes are found for them, better than their last if God grant us grace, and take them this very night to the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum School. But I warn you: there’s men as would have only one God in this city, and Him a Protestant. You’ll learn it soon enough.”

“I know it already. But you’ll soon learn that there are some men in this city more concerned with right than with God.”

“Separate things, are they, right and God?” he inquired slyly.

They are, in my opinion. But it would have been a fool’s errand to argue so to a priest.

The storm began to break outside the leaded windows, fat droplets washing away the feeling of sweat hanging midair. The sort of rain that never lasted long and roared at the ground, welcome only in that you were no longer on tenterhooks waiting for it. The feeling a fellow gets after a beating or a fight.
At least now I know what the worst of it was.

Father Sheehy gathered up the togs and his jangling keys. “Ye needn’t answer, though you’d never offend me anyhow. I like practical men. You’d quick see I am one m’self, forgetting the collar. And here you are, another practical sort—neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor wicked, I think. Let us pray that you are not one of a kind, as in my experience your type tend to be o’ tremendous use to God.”

I’d supposed the days following
our dark discovery would be frantic and grueling. And I was right. But they didn’t end up mattering very much, because the letter didn’t arrive until August twenty-sixth, and the letter was what caused all the trouble.

The morning after I delivered Neill and Sophia to St. Patrick’s, August twenty-third, we had a meeting of the copper stars of Ward Six, in the open judicial chamber in the Tombs, presided over by Matsell. As the rumor tearing through the police force like cholera had already informed most, nineteen children had been found beyond the city’s settled spaces, he reported. Some of the bodies were as much as five years buried, some more recently interred. All seemed to be under thirteen, though that was a guessing game. Boys and girls alike. When the skeletons weren’t too far disintegrated, they seemed all to have had crosses carved into their torsos. They were
likely to be Irish, and certainly murdered. This was a secret, the blackest secret in a city where hidden confidences and midnight conspiracies were thick and prosperous as the rats. And it had better stay a secret, Matsell informed us, because the murder of an Irish chit called Liam in Ward Eight had been picked up by the newspapers and was now the full-throated cry of every bellowing newsboy. I knew this already, for I’d voraciously consumed the
Herald
that morning. The thought of the burial grounds likewise being dissected and shrieked about and speculated over sent a cold thrill down my spine.