The Fatal Flame (Timothy Wilde, #3)

by Lyndsay Faye

“outwork.” That’s a new market, modern as the telegraph, meaning “work without the sordid taint of decent wages.”

I don’t know the name for hunting down criminals after the fact rather than stopping crimes in progress, as the roundsmen do. Somebody should conjure one up. The police have existed for three years now—that’s plentiful time to have figured out a title for my job.

The one thing more disgraceful than being poor, I’ve found, is looking the part. A penniless but chastely dressed woman is graciously allowed to beg for a stale crust. A slovenly dressed one with a cache of gold in the flour jar from her midnight admirers is widely considered better off dead.

Though the Married Women’s Property Act just allowed them marginal safety as regards inheritance, they’re still about as well-off, legally speaking, as your more pampered stock of Georgia house slave. When once married, they don’t own their kinchin, they don’t own their wages, they don’t even own their own hides if the master of the house is inclined to regular doses of the belt.

A man can own the deftest tongue on the planet, but I’ve found if his audience lacks ears, talk is ineffectual.

not all of the same stripe, we copper stars. Oh, we wear the same badge and we work under Chief Matsell, who, for a political man, is a shockingly decent one. But none of us are quite meant to be here, after all. Some of us are meant to run a distillery or own a haberdashery or till a farm. Others are meant to keep a gambling hell or host a bear-baiting ring or rob headlong midnight stagecoaches. Plenty are a little of both sorts, like my brother, both ruthless and pastoral, and skirt dangerous boundaries. But we’ve all been blasted by something that scored lasting marks. Not a man of us woke up and said, May I one day be a policeman of New York?—because we simply didn’t exist. Who could imagine such work as keeping a city safe?