They weren’t about to hang a black at all.
“You see this, the
price
ye pay for your
avarice
?” a grotesquely drunk Irishman screamed at a cowed little white native wearing a swallowtail coat and yellow breeches. “The life of a nigger isn’t much, I’ll grant, but if ye sit up and take
notice
, by Jesus, he’ll have served a grander purpose than his hide would ha’ predicted!”
The speaker was a giant—black-haired, his face heavily scored with lines and burned dark by our merciless August. His loose shirt hung ragged and filthy from his bullish shoulders and he’d no waistcoat, only drab nankeen trousers that had more than once been all night out of doors. I knew several things about him just by looking: he’d only enough money for the whiskey he’d drunk that morning. Not a cent more. There’s a particular set to the eyes when that happens, whites hardening into bone. The turn of his mouth told me that something both terrible and wretchedly unfair had befallen him. His massive hands were a wreck, and that combined with his skin told me either construction work or hauling stones to the burned district had bought his last drink.
One of those hands was holding a torch in blazing midsummer daylight.
He’d two friends hovering nearby, likewise sloppy drunk and dividing their attention between sweating and standing. A non-threat for the moment. And just behind them, bound to a lonely support beam at the street edge of the unfinished building, was my colored
friend Julius Carpenter, employee of Nick’s Oyster Cellar when it was yet standing. A heap of pine faggots had been scattered around his feet. I stopped dead, gasping, right in front of the bastard who’d arranged the scene. I didn’t grudge Julius’s not greeting me, for they’d shoved a dirty turnip in his mouth, with a hole drilled through it for the rope to keep it in place. Julius was tied down too well for his limbs to be doing him any good. So his eyes were channeling all his useless strength away from his hands and his stretched-to-cracking lips, just a pair of pupils gnawing into my chest.
I doubt I’d have forgiven the stake and the torch in any event. I’m not a very forgiving sort, after all. I never have been. But Julius can taste the difference between twenty sorts of oysters set in front of him, even without their particular shells, and the manure-covered turnip had a hole in it for a rope. Planned. Specific. It was a
particular
evil, and it crippled my mercy with a leaded cudgel.
“What in
hell
do you think you’re doing?” I thundered.
Volume was crucial. If the mob lost the thread of the conversation, I could easily pay for it. But this wasn’t a proper mob at all, only an audience of miserable Irish and hardened natives staring at an arresting bloodsport. The same sort who watch lone terriers fighting hordes of rabid city rats. Not a black in sight, of course, I didn’t even have to look for them. They were hiding their children in cupboards and burying their coin beneath the privy pit. The usual precautions.
“Settlin’ a bit of an
argument
,” the blackguard sneered. “With that
coward
over there!”
He waved at the yellow-trousered businessman with the mutton chops and the silver beard on his neck below his smooth chin, who stood wringing his hands fecklessly at a safe twenty-yard distance. I can’t abide feckless men. Maybe it’s another symptom of growing up with my brother, and a better one than most, but that brand of weakling makes me feel a bit vicious. As if our all too pragmatic city wants me to run them off into the trees.
“You’re already under arrest for disorderly conduct and assault and battery,” I reported to my real opponent, “and you’re already serving a stretch at the Tombs, but if you untie that man this
instant
, I suppose I
won’t
make it assault with intent to kill.”
I’d memorized the list of things that were actually criminal versus theoretically criminal the day I started, thinking it might come in handy. It had, four times.
“And who’s going to
arrest me
?”
“I am, you ignorant cow.” I flapped the left lapel of my frock coat with the copper star pinned to it.
“Oh. A
copper star,
” he spat. “I’ve heard of you lot. About as frightening as a sow’s teat. Ye can’t bully me, you villain.”
“I’m not bullying you, I’m incarcerating you.”
The brute didn’t react much to that. Seemed to be thinking, or whatever passed for thinking when he was in that black of a pit.
“Is that
really
a copper star?” a nervous male bystander behind me wondered. “By Jove, I’d not yet seen one.”
“When I pictured them, I’d imagined them bigger,” another man remarked.
It wouldn’t have been much to the purpose to respond to these comments, so I ignored them.
“They’d not told me that the copper stars were t’ be nigger-lovers,” the soused Irish wretch leered. “That’ll make thrashing them all the better sport, though.”
Civilized conversation seemed to have reached a definite wall. But when I stepped forward to untie Julius, already in a hot rage and now practically seeing cinders, I had a waving torch in my face for my trouble.
I ducked. I ducked again.
Throwing myself a bit backward, I avoided a swipe that would have set my torso aflame.
Gasps breezed through the air all around me, a hushed cry from
a weeping moll.
Steady yourself, you bloody milksop,
I was thinking as my heart tried to escape the cage of my ribs.
The only way he’ll know you hate fire is if you
tell
him.
I stopped ducking, therefore, and stopped dodging, and took two steps forward. Calling over my shoulder to the sniveling native gentleman with the infuriating yellow trousers.
“Just what is this mongrel’s argument with you?”
“I …” The wringing hands pressed very tight together for a moment. “I sacked my construction staff. I’ve every right! I own the building. The building to be built, rather, I own the
lot
, you see, and I couldn’t conscience it any longer, I—”
“Ye couldn’t conscience the
pennies
that you paid us above what you paid the
slave crew
you went a hirin’ after!” the Irishman bellowed. “And my wife in a
family
way!”
“You’re paid the
same,
I tell you, that wasn’t the— I can’t be expected—”
“I’m going to make this very clear,” I announced loudly. “I take it that you three, and your other mates with more sense than to be here, were all sacked and a black crew took your place. I’m sorry to hear it. But for every
second
that you don’t untie that man, I’ll add another charge to your accounting before the judge.”
“Ye can’t even get
near
me, you gabby little weasel, and you expect—”
“Assault with intent to kill,” I interrupted. The crowd grew hushed.
“I’ll set ye afire, you runty—”
“Fighting in the street,” I added.
“Fuck off,” he scoffed. “Take my torch, lads, light the—”
“Insanity,” I snapped. “Murder. Insulting females in the street, for I’m dead certain none of them want to be looking at this spectacle. Threatening life. Intoxication with disorderly conduct. Keep it up, why don’t you.”
“Stop this,” a choked voice commanded from behind me.
I knew who it was, would have known that voice from the bottom of the Hudson. But I’d one eye on the torch and another on the crowd and the trio of thugs, and so before I could do anything, the voice was at my elbow. Maybe I’m less useful than I like to imagine myself.
“Miss Underhill, get away from here,” I said.
She didn’t. Mercy walked right past me.
The trio of rowdies were too dazed with liquor and the strain of treading the desperate edge of their world to even object. Shocked into simply watching. Everyone fell silent as churchyards when a woman, and not a very formidable-looking woman either, but a woman with blue eyes set far apart and a grace like a cool wind off the ocean, marched up and started untying my former coworker.
It was suddenly a very, very bad situation.
“Get that uppish whore out o’ this,” snarled the villain who’d started it all.
One of his two pals was just the right sort of drunk to think that wrenching a slightly built woman off a pile of timber and a black laborer was about his style. He tore Mercy away from Julius. When he did, I dove forward, and almost got a mouthful of fire as a consequence.
I didn’t care, though, not by that time. Finally I managed to dart around the much bigger man, finally I was in the thick of it, and
finally
I was within two feet of the cur who was bruising Mercy’s upper arms as she struggled wildly, and I determined to make the wretches bleed before they bested us. That being the way it’s done around here. The one touching Mercy would get a fist in the throat, and then when they killed me I’d at least have died properly.
I planted my feet. Then, in the oldest trick known to street fighting, I screamed at the top of my lungs.
It startled the thug holding Mercy enough for him to loosen his
grip on one of her arms, just before my fist landed where his neck met his collarbone.
He collapsed, windpipe half-crushed, and I caught Mercy around the waist before she went down with him. The others listed drunkenly away from me, likely supposing me cracked. That was fine. It meant a wider berth while they took a better measure, the ringleader shoving his torch out in front of him as if I might attack at any moment. Shivering, whiskey-stupid, but not a likely candidate for my pity. When Mercy had her feet back, she rushed for the makeshift funeral pyre. My pocket knife was out an instant later.
“Here, I have it,” I hissed, kneeling. “Back away.”
“I won’t,” she replied, tearing at the hemp ropes tying Julius down.
“Then for God’s sake, get that thing out of his mouth.”
Not knowing how long he’d been trapped, I gripped my friend’s shirt at his lower back as I freed him from the ropes. But he was steady enough, though his hands trembled slightly below his bloody wrists. Julius broke away, half stumbling on the piled-up faggots. Bending over, he finally tore the repulsive object Mercy had been loosening from his mouth. He gagged once or twice, shaking. Meanwhile, I kept one eye on Mercy and one on the slowly recovering drunks, who stood whispering together in a poisonous knot.
“Are you all right?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder.
Julius coughed, his hands on his trouser knees. “It’s nice to see you again,” he managed. “Thought you’d left town.”
“I moved to Ward Six.”
“Well, if that isn’t the most damn fool thing I ever heard. What was wrong with Ward One?”
“Copper star,” came an evil singsong. One I was steadily tiring of.
The torch-brandishing Irishman had found not only his courage but a fresh stock of allies. Three new men, laborers from the crowd, I thought, now stood with the original set of criminals. Two
had knives, and I caught the flash of brass knuckles from the third. Apparently New York was about to watch one of their new copper stars being cut to death. Fine entertainment.
“Cease!”
thundered a deeply strange voice.
I could have laughed at that sound. But it’s Val’s job, after all, to laugh at things that aren’t funny. And anyway, as I turned my head, I felt a rawboned idiot for having forgotten that there was more than one of me in this city.
Mr. Piest stood in all his weird crustacean glory at the head of a band of copper stars—about twenty-five of us, fully half of Ward Six—everyone armed with cudgels and tapping them menacingly against boot tops. The native rabbits seemed pretty pleased about the situation. Or better pleased than the Irish police, who were pointedly not looking at one another. They stood just as iron-faced, though, stalwart and neatly aligned, a picture of professional determination. Red hair and black hair and blond and brown packed all together, with already-tarnishing little stars pinned to their coats.
The Irishman screamed something in his own language. It sent an angry red hue over the faces of policemen I knew from the Tombs. Mr. Connell’s broad, intelligent face froze instantly, and the phrase slid a trapdoor over Mr. Kildare’s. I wondered why, knowing them both to be steady policemen of good character—people I’d swapped stories with of aching legs after a sixteen-hour shift, of being hissed at in the streets.
And then the drunken thugs flew straight at the copper stars in a fury. Like a family of ravens headed into a glass windowpane.
Breaking their cluster apart, several of the police shouted. I heard warnings, gleeful yells, one violently delighted “Have at you, you dirty sons of bitches,” but the outcome was never much in question. Flying cudgels, twisting bodies like an acrobat’s routine at the Gardens, a shriek from one of the drunks as a particularly efficient copper star shattered his leg underneath him.
And then there was only the ringleader left standing, waving his torch at his enemies like a sword.
Mr. Connell, a scarlet-haired Irishman I heartily liked and had twice shared my spent newspaper with at the Tombs, stepped behind him neatly and felled him with a graceful loose-elbowed cudgel swing to the back of the head. Once he was down, a few American boots headed for his ribs. More shouts went up, a midnight laugh that reminded me of Val’s. I wondered whether we ought to be doing things like that, kicking felled culprits, but Mr. Connell stepped in with a sober-faced snarl and solved the problem, shoving a pair of overly enthusiastic rabbits away from his captive.
I worked at getting my wind back. Everything slowly stilled. The news hawkers were gathering around me, suspicion wiped clean from their hardscrabble faces. It had been replaced by soft-lipped awe.
“That,” breathed Ninepin, his spectacles in one hand and his polishing cloth dangling in the other, “were poetry. That were watching the devil at lying. ‘Insanity. Murder. Insulting females in—’ ”
“Where has Miss Underhill gone?” I questioned urgently.
“Run off, said she needed some quiet,” said Fang. “And
Miss Underhill
! Lord, what a pelt she was in! She ought to be a queen, I tell you. Queen of Gotham.”