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Had Symmes seen my true mind, he’d have read printed along the inner circumference of my skull the motto DAMN POLITICS, DAMN THE DEMOCRATS, AND DAMN YOU FOR THE LOW WEASEL YOU ARE.
‘Are you going to keep campaigning for Alderman Symmes?’ ‘Fuck no,’ Valentine scoffed, throwing wide the door and slamming it behind him.
In short, when she’s lonesome or suspects me to be, her generous lips find my collarbone. And I can feel the imprint of her smiling there for days afterward.
‘I’ll try to solve everything quicker, in that case.’ Mrs Boehm seated herself in my lap, arcing forward when I traced a thumb over the line where her shirt ended and milk-colored skin began.
When I’d unlatched the door and pulled it open, I stopped speaking. Because Mercy Underhill was standing in the moonlight on the other side.
I asked her in, I must have done, and Elena made gentle clicking sounds as she helped Mercy with her hat and matching blue gloves. But I think I can be safely excused from complete comprehension just then. My Past and Present had just collided like freight trains on a single track.
‘I did, yes,’ Mercy whispered, pulling her fingertip along the tabletop. ‘But I didn’t want to die there. The ground there is too ancient. It was far too old, the ground in London. Already filled with corpses. No one should die there. It would be so crowded. You’d never get any rest.’
‘What was that?’ Elena asked. Sounding as dazed as I felt. ‘I’m not completely certain,’ I replied, studying the card. ‘But I suspect it might have been my worst nightmare.’
If woman under the present system of female servitude can exercise so much influence, what more do they want? – Ohio State Journal, November 19, 1850
But no matter how unattached you are, floating like a kite torn from a kinchin’s hand, introducing the woman you love to the woman you are making love to is a curious affair. Because it had never been distasteful, what was between me and Elena. It was warm as the skin just behind her ear. I’d kissed her thoroughly and said I needed to think. She’d nodded and poured another gin. And I’d taken myself off to my room, unease flickering like a tremor under my ribs.
She cast red-rimmed eyes over the woefully unpolished copper star pinned to my chest. ‘Are you a policeman, then?’ ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’
One in a private club, the variety where my sex is neither useful nor desirable, posing in a panorama as an unlikely Davy Crockett. But as for one sitting at a writing desk like a businessman – that hocused me pretty thorough.
Over all she wore a grey ladies’ monkey jacket, the sort that falls in a graceful curve down to midthigh, cloth cut as tight against the waist and shoulders as if the garment had been plastered to the wearer. It was enough to give a man pause.
There was such a candid way about her, easy leaning posture and sweetly unkempt hair, that it was almost possible to forget that Sally Woods was dressed like a man. Almost. But I suspected I liked her anyhow.
I would be returning, of course, all too soon. Just not for any so charming a reason. Meanwhile, I pointed my boots south in the direction of the Second Ward, the affectionate April sun giving me no indication whatsoever that I was on a direct collision course with a hurricane.
As had already happened once too often that day, I was faced with a moll who’d turned sea green with fear.
When I think of people jeering and throwing rotten food at us and the outworkers actually picking it up to eat . . .’
Her lowered face was writ thick with prophecies. Anxious and expectant. As if cruel events would follow upon the heels of my visit. She was right. I knew it even as I stepped back into the afternoon sunshine. I still made every fool’s effort, meanwhile, to suppose that she was wrong.
I rubbed at my eyes, ruminating. About fire and its consequences, mainly. About the fact that New York resembles a kicked anthill. About Alderman Symmes and his vices. About the fact that I’d left Miss Sally Woods well before noon and that if she’d quit her queer greenhouse home minutes afterward, newly infused with righteous brimstone over the fact that Symmes had set a copper star on her tail, supposing she’d already planted the necessary inflammables, nothing would have prevented her from—
‘Bleeding Mary on a donkey, she’s back?’ Ninepin slouched into a dazed posture. ‘Miss Underhill. Here. In New York City. It’s like the whole island’s back to rights, isn’t it, Mr Wilde?’ I counted out dimes from my waistcoat pocket. ‘That’s precisely what it’s like. Do we have a deal?’
To my eye – and after arduous practice I can read Jim pretty fairly – he’d something on his lips he was busy not-saying. Of a quarrelsome nature. Jim has every reason to quarrel with Valentine, since they’ve been sleeping together for three years. But I suspected this was a specific complaint, not You are a profligate miscreant.
‘Do speak English, my dear man. My regrettably limited vocabulary can scarce follow you,’ Jim suggested in a voice narrow enough to turn coal into jewelry.
James Playfair ceased softly teasing at the piano, turning his body toward Val with a smile that could have kept butter solid through July.
Apart from culinary practices, my brother is inexcusable and James Playfair is . . . James Playfair is a molley.
‘Don’t,’ he said tightly, and not to me. ‘Don’t, please, stop—’ ‘And that is why,’ Valentine concluded, ‘I hereby announce my candidacy on the Barnburner platform to humbly serve my betters as the alderman of our very own Ward Eight!’
‘Oh, don’t make me laugh, you puny prig. Those Irish lasses are born whores. God just went and turned their potatoes as rotten as their muffs. They all become mabs sooner or later anyhow, once they arrive here. Why should you care if I help them along? The way they take to it after a day or two and a few licks with a belt, you should see them – begging for it.’
‘Talk to the alderman – he’s the one who was sharing her sheets. If you ask me, Robert Symmes keeping the likes of Sally Woods as his mistress for all those months is about the most foolheaded decision in the entire history of New York, even if she’s a pretty little piece. But I don’t have to tell him as much, and neither do you. He’s paying for it dear enough now. Isn’t he?’
Sally Woods detests Robert Symmes with a sweeping purity like a famine or a drought. And there is no deeper hatred than that engendered by someone you loved once, and were hurt by, and can love no longer, I realized.
On a tongue that never mentioned I love you and instead phrased it, and I quote, you aren’t stupid, the last fucking thing you are is stupid, you’ve watched me for years trailing after you, the way I look at you, it’s obvious to the entire goddamned world, you can’t stand there in front of me and claim not to have known it, and somehow supposed that a civilized observation.
Never have you knocked at my door, wanting, greedy. Sinking into me uninvited. This is the sort of care you take with a woman you do not love.
You’re the one who dipped your wick into your own payroll. Answer the question.’
Every lawyer in Christendom claims ‘lack of feminine virtue and salacious signals led to confused circumstances’ when defending a client against rape charges.
‘If Valentine Wilde doesn’t withdraw, I will so utterly destroy that arrogant, ungrateful sodomite that he and everyone close to him will wish they had never been born. Think carefully on that, Mr Wilde. And a very good morning to you.’
In fact, the pair said nothing at all so loudly just then that what they weren’t saying was perfectly . . . audible.
‘Maybe he’s concerned Symmes might make public the fact you’re fucking your best friend?’ I posited. ‘Wait, wait, you can say it out loud, but we can’t say it out—’
‘I thought, hell, why not use his affections for everyone’s mutual benefit? Wouldn’t that be civic-minded of me? Of all the stupid, self-obsessed notions. He was never fond of me, only fond of what we were about.’
And that sliced away a thin piece of Miss Abell every time she spoke of her lost friend. Whatever had happened between them, the aftermath had been about as merciful as cholera.
As for Bird, she ignored every opportunity I presented her to forgive me my churlishness and go back to being fast mates.
‘How do you know if you’re in love?’ So close, I thought, so close and now this.
It was fair. It cut, though.
We couldn’t have known what would happen that night, read the future in the flour grains on her table. But it’s been years since April 26 of 1848, so many years, and when I think about what I ought to have done differently, among all my great errors I nevertheless remember that wave, and that I ought to have kissed her before the gentle creak of the door and the thud of my boots in the dirt marked my departure from what had been – for all its many singular silences – a happy home.
So we paved over the surface, and the swamp went away. Except it didn’t, not really. It festers under the entirety of the Five Points, which is why all the buildings here sag into rot and ruin about a month after they’re constructed. As for the Old Brewery, as it’s called, it’s an ancient nightmare of a place.
No, what strikes you first is the smell. Unwashed bodies, unclean refuse, unadulterated woe – sweat and shit and sex and every other uniquely personal scent signaling Get out.
But I knew, sure as Mercy’s hand rested in mine, that I had just encountered Miss Duffy’s Witch. And I suspected – as would later prove correct – that, as so commonly follows encounters with witches, events of great magnitude and ugliness lurked behind the horizon of my immediate future.
Nevertheless, a quiet understanding had settled over me thanks to what had been done to James Playfair.
I’d never have singled out the word that sealed our fates.
Our entrance was impressive, however. I still enjoy the picture – a small star policeman with a dented copper pin, entering a sewing manufactory on the arm of a radical labor organizer. She being tall and shapely, with wildly disarranged hair, wearing a pair of pin-striped trousers.
‘Did Symmes select the buildings slated for destruction, or did you pick them yourself?’
‘He might have,’ I objected. ‘He idolizes one of the very manufactory barons snatching the bread from the tailors’ tables. He’s an idiot.’
The notion of leaving him again scared me witless. I’d thought plenty over what he meant to Val. I’d never noticed what he meant to me.
