I pulled the pistol out of my coat. There was already a bullet lodged in the gun, well packed with powder. I hoped beyond my ability to state the feeling that I wouldn’t have to fire the thing. But I was already more than glad I carried it, because of the smell.
A whiff of kerosene had been my first greeting, I realized. Bone-deep unsettling wheresoever you encounter it. To me in particular.
I went into the Reverend Underhill’s private study, and there I had my answer.
He’d strung a rope up and through the slender iron arms of the chandelier, done in a noose knot. Well tied, too. The light fixture hung above and just in front of his desk, and below that on the simple braided rug was a pile of clothing. Done in pale dyes, dipped only for an instant, subtle blues and yellows that reminded you of birds’ eggs, fragile colors you can only truly identify outdoors in the sun. Dresses and chemises and stockings and shawls, all in a heap stewing in kerosene.
Of course they were all Mercy’s and of course I knew every piece.
It jarred me terribly. The first question I’d planned on asking hadn’t been
What have you done with your daughter?
A candle glowed on the desktop, and the reverend sat behind it. Staring at the scene he’d created.
“I thought you’d come, Timothy,” he whispered.
I’d like to say I’d never seen a face like that before. So hurt and so raw and so helpless. He was sitting there in only his shirtsleeves, staring with tired blue eyes at the candle, but he was repulsively
open.
His mind, the expression on his face. It was wrong to look at him, the way it had been wrong to look into the glistening innards of his single murder victim hanging there in St. Patrick’s. He’d looked half this bad the last time I’d seen him, narrow face pinched too small and his hands lost at the end of his wrists, and I cursed myself for not previously knowing what the beginning looked like. Because I
had
seen a face just like this one, finalized. On Eliza Rafferty.
“Where’s Mercy?” I left the pistol at my side for the time being. “Why do you mean to burn all her clothes?”
“Mercy is quite gone,” he said, voice rattling out from a hollow shell. “This is all that’s left of Mercy, I fear.”
I went completely still about then. The gun very heavy in my hand.
“Tell me what you mean by
gone
, Reverend. Did you hurt her?”
“What’s this?” he muttered, looking up for a moment. “Why should I hurt my little girl? She was very feverish, burning in her skin. I did what I could, but it’s too late now.”
If you’ve ever been on the deck of a ferry in stormy November, I don’t have to describe the seasick feeling that washed over me.
You left her there. You cruel, cruel coward. You left her standing in the middle of the room wearing a green dress, calling after you.
“She was well enough last night,” I said desperately.
“These things happen so quickly. Everything always happens so quickly, Timothy. I meant to burn the way she did, you see, but
perhaps now you’d be willing to bury her? To bury us? Would you? I’ll tell you where she is, but first we have to talk. I don’t imagine you understand quite yet.”
I finally noticed what was sitting on the desk beneath the candle. A small diary. The pages I could see were scrawled with at least six different hands, most of them far from educated, and a single nicely worked sketch of a little flop-eared dog. Marcas’s journal. If I could have felt any more sick to my stomach, I might have done.
“What do we have to talk about before you tell me where Mercy is?”
“I didn’t like doing it, but no one would listen,” he went on dully. “Not even you, Timothy, even after I warned you in detail. And no one would print my letters after the first, and then what with the police discrediting them— I didn’t like doing it, you must understand that much.”
All the letters, of course, had been written by the same man. The Hand of the God of Gotham, who’d first adopted a poor imitation of a cloddish emigrant. But all I had left to me physically was the final note, the brutally honest picture of a broken mind. I pulled the crazed rant the reverend had written to his friend Peter Palsgrave out of my inner coat pocket. We needed to be finished talking. When I put the obscene note on the table, phrases of it winked at me dementedly.
“I knew it was from you when I’d looked at it hard enough,” I told him. “Just tell me where to find Mercy.”
Silence.
“You said,
So small it’s an abomination.
That was Aidan Rafferty. And it was, and far worse, but to think that it shattered you so—and then the rest of it. Dr. Palsgrave is your closest friend.
Mend the broken things.
That’s what he does, bringing kinchin back from near-death, though you aren’t aware of— Christ, it’s unspeakable. You wanted him to stop you before you committed murder. The same sort of
murder you supposed all the others to have been, but this time in the public street. For all the world to see at last. And pinned on Father Sheehy, of all people.”
The reverend dropped his face prayerfully into his palms.
“It could only have been you. That was Scripture, wasn’t it? ‘I am a broken jawbone’?”
“The jawbone of an ass. A cruel, dark, base weapon. A fitting one, so I became it under the circumstances.”
“Fitting?” I cried, forgetting myself and gesturing with the pistol.
“Fitting?
And
how
? How did that child ever deserve—”
“We’re
infested
,” he ground out. Standing, the reverend shut the diary and lifted the candle. “You simply haven’t lived long enough to learn the consequences of a vermin infestation, Timothy—or perhaps you’ve learned it today, since Mercy’s fever can only have come from such dens. When the same sort of contagion finished Olivia, I thought perhaps it might be a part of God’s plan for me. To make me suffer, that I might learn to sacrifice more willingly. To hurt me, that I might understand pain. I supposed that perhaps I was being tested, and I would be found worthy only if I remained ever dedicated, remained pure. How can one remain
pure
within a
dung heap,
Timothy Wilde?”
The dead kinchin’s journal landed with a pathetic flutter in the cold fireplace as I stared at him. It made sense. It fit in a line. The self-obsession, the devotion, the righteousness, the atmosphere that made Mercy think only
London, London, London,
the fire lighting her eyes when she’d talked of her planned escape in that wretched rented bedroom the night before. It was only a downward slope, watching a man march to the bottom of a hill. This was merely the man who wouldn’t give Aidan Rafferty cream unless his mother had first denounced the pope.
I recalled him shouting at Mercy that day I’d caught sight of them, framed in their parlor window, her face flooding red with
mortification, and nearly bit off the end of my tongue when I realized too late what sort of conversation they’d really been having.
“Oh, come, my opinion cannot possibly surprise you,” he scoffed. “First they pour into the city,
our
city, like locusts, blaspheming God wheresoever they go. Then God sends His plagues to follow after them despite their migration, and what do Olivia and Mercy do? They
help
the sufferers. They die alongside them, these rats that look like humans. And you see how we are repaid—look at Eliza Rafferty.
Look at her
. She saw through the charade at last, knew her infant for damned. And so then, like a true heathen, she slaughtered him with no more ceremony than might be afforded a stray dog.”
“You supposed that the sudden news of twenty cut-apart corpses might be a way of purging the Irish from the city,” I supplied, wrenching us back to the purpose. “Mercy was the one who told you.
Mercy
informed you of the bodies we copper stars found, and so you wrote those letters to defame the Irish. You sent them to the papers. You sent me one, for God’s sake, to warn me what was coming. I’d thought it for Val, but it was always meant for me.”
“I thought you would take better precautions if I warned you, perhaps even keep one eye on my daughter. I hoped so. There was clearly a monster at loose, carving crosses in child whores, and how could I help but be frightened for her safety, given the filth she daily associated with? It was obvious what was happening. I only publicized the problem, told New York what it needed to know. What did the details matter? Did you ever get a hint at the culprit, Timothy? I can’t claim to have held any hope that you would, for this vile breed is devious. But I knew that some good could come of it, a purging, once the secret had been exposed for public view.”
“And so you tried to tell everyone. You supposed that there would be a riot. That the Nativists would drive the Irish out. Mercy knew what I knew, and so you did as well.
Where
is Mercy now?”
A martial drumbeat couldn’t have been more steady, the sunrise
more predictable.
Where is Mercy?
I had dreamed about exposing the kinchin killer all that while, supposed that it would feel righteously grand when I caught the bastard. Instead it felt irrelevant. I’d have objected to such a cold reward if I hadn’t deserved every second of it for the night before.
“It was such a disappointment when you impeded their circulation,” he said distractedly. “I knew then that I had to do something much more drastic. But I never wanted to,” he added, looking thin as parchment and haunted all of a sudden. “As I told Peter, I—”
“You never signed your message to him. He has no notion it’s from you.”
“Hasn’t he? I couldn’t focus just then, knowing what was coming, I couldn’t begin to think clearly. I knew the act itself would be repulsive. But I had direction from God. There was a clear sign, and I obeyed it, and for that I cannot apologize.”
I thought pretty hard for a few seconds. Over what his clear sign might have been. But then my own stomach twisted away from me like a frightened cat. I knew just what he meant.
Mercy, alive if only in my memory, was talking in my ear… .
Now I’ll never find another place to hide any store of coin, never
…
and my father’s opinion doesn’t bear speaking about.
I’d supposed ever since the butcher paper that she’d suspected her father. The reason she’d rushed with her hair down to St. Patrick’s was that she’d feared her own father was a killer when he returned home in the middle of the night. Thomas Underhill’s mind had snapped so clean that he’d likely arrived half soaked in gore.
The part I hadn’t yet grasped was that she’d accidentally triggered the murder in the first place.
“First they kill my wife,” the reverend murmured. “She was so beautiful. You don’t recall her rightly, that would be impossible, but I remember. And then they contaminate my only daughter’s mind and spirit to the point that she turns into some sort of
pornographer
.”
He breathed that last word in a gentle caress, as if trying to keep it from choking him. “She’s no better than a whore now—how could Mercy have written such filth otherwise, if she hadn’t known the touch of many men? Everything they encounter they turn to muck, can’t you see that? Even my daughter. I took the wages of her many sins, and I threw them into the street. It was gone in seconds, of course. Picked up by vagrants, other bawds, every sort of human street trash. And then I knew what I had to do. A man cannot shirk a task given him by God, and what charity can be offered to a race whose very
children
are so disposed to be whores?”
I closed my eyes, my pupils blank and burning. Picturing Mercy’s coins scattering in the street—the ones she’d worked for, counted upon. Seeing my own money as it had melted in July. I’m not greedy. I didn’t suppose Mercy ever was either. We were never stockbrokers, or landlords, or Party officials. But there isn’t any pity in New York. And so, lacking pity, we all need a lifeline.
I don’t know if you realize what you’ve done, but will you tell me please why for heaven’s sake you’ve done it?
“I can scarce picture it,” I said. “Finding Mercy out, and then taking what was hers. Going to the dockside bawdy house. You took a drunk little boy and you gave him enough laudanum not to care where he went.”
“Yes,” he exclaimed. “And even at that darkest hour, I was alert to signs and signifiers, Timothy. Had anyone stopped me … it would have been an omen. Can’t you see? No one else cared where he went either. Not even his keepers cared, no one
cared,
they are past help. I had to warn the city, had to publicize their wrongs before a single other person was infected. They took my beautiful child and they taught her to—”
“You stuffed him in a sack under … togs, I assume,” I kept on relentlessly, “cloth being lighter, and packed yourself some paint and some nails. After you’d endured Father Sheehy’s meeting, you simply
slipped into an alcove, and there are plenty of them. I can’t stomach it, Reverend. Back luck for you Marcas wasn’t quite dead.”
“Yes, there was a great deal of blood for a dead boy,” he breathed, passing a hand over his eyes. “A very great deal of blood.”
“Did he wake up?” I demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“You
do
know,” I snarled. “Answer me.”
“I can’t think, he was very slight, and then the task itself went quick enough. I can hardly remember what passed just before I let myself out the front entrance, but perhaps—”
I lost my temper.
“You remember.” I’d closed the gap between us, and my pistol was at his brow. “Tell me.”
Even men who want to die shudder at cold metal pressed into their skin, and so did Reverend Underhill.
“He said nothing,” the madman answered in a liquid, rippling voice. “So he felt nothing, then. There was merely … there was just a very great deal of blood.”
“How could you have burned Mercy’s book?” I asked next.
Holding Father Sheehy’s gun to his skull I felt like a thug, no better than the men who’d shoved a turnip between Julius’s lips. But I was learning what Val had likely discovered a long while ago. When enough terrible things have happened, doing them stops being quite so uncomfortable.