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He suggested “calling off the mongrels haunting my properties now the danger is past”, but I trust your opinion rather further than I do the alderman’s.’
My chief nodded. Not because that made sense. Because he knew me.
How can females be expected to rise from their squalor when they are never told procreation is optional?
But hirelings had selected every object, never Robert Symmes, and thus it felt like a space belonging to a score of people or even none. The army of individuals paid to decorate that room skittered along my skin like bedbugs.
For once the air was clear, and we were too high above the cobbles to see the filth in the cracks. I’ve never liked New York. It’s too hard to survive here. But for about seven seconds that night, I adored it. Its power and its scope.
‘God Almighty, how difficult is it for you cretins? Speak English!’ Symmes cried.
You’re wrong, I thought as a tidal wave of fear flooded my stomach. No you aren’t. Then I was stumbling back up the endless flights like a man possessed.
Numbly, I walked to join him and peered over the barrier. The pearlescent starshine was faint, my vision blurred. But I could almost make out a broken heap of clothed bones.
Knowing that hesitation meant none of our ashen corpses would even require headstones, I set one hand to the stair rail and dragged the metal beast up after me.
When I reached the other side, I faced the same struggle as Silkie Marsh had in wrangling myself onto the roof. Save that a slender, ashen hand helped to pull me up.
‘The regrettable conclusion that you were not to be trusted entirely, since you can hardly argue with the fact that you are not Tammany Hall.’ ‘Know. Your. Place,’ Villers snarled savagely, snatching the pince-nez off his nose and tapping them thrice against Silkie Marsh’s slim shoulder.
Uncaring of appearances, still sans frock coat, taking the air with a ruthless murderess after having voted fifteen times while dressed as a Bowery monkey that afternoon.
And I have said I hate you to Valentine more times in my life than I have said to him Good morning. How my brother has managed to survive me for so long, God only knows.
‘The lads just told me – police arrested Symmes’s firestarter when she broke into the Queen Mab tonight. In the act of setting a fuse. They want you to question her.’
‘Had you always tracked your son’s progress?’ I questioned. ‘Or were Robert Symmes’s successes previously unknown to you?’
I hate that prissy scavenger – I shouted that she carried charity cash just as I was leaving, and . . . well, you can imagine.
The last thing I heard before I reached my door was the quiet, satisfied conclusion: ‘Robert will buy me another knife. I know he will. I’ll need it now, and he is growing to love me, after all.’
I had allowed hope to perish, to crumble in so many feathery ashes, and by the time I missed it, it had already scattered to the four winds.
Just in time for the wedding that afternoon. The wedding. The wedding that turned my palms watery and sent my pulse clacking away like a train. The wedding that just now made me unspeakably clumsy as I wrestled with the slippery sodding cravat. The wedding that was probably going to cause me to collapse like a wet kitten the instant I crossed the church’s threshold. Supposing I ever made it there in the first place.
I thought about the star police forming the same year I’d lost everything, about the flowers Jim had chosen for me. About life and Kildare’s new baby, all the infants born so thick and heedless around the globe, and that when I’d started there wasn’t a name for my singular profession, but nowadays people were calling me a detective. A child born in the year 1854 could not only grow up to do the same sort of work I seemed so inexplicably to excel at but could now put a name to the occupation. Maybe even be proud of it.
‘Lean on me, then,’ she said, taking my arm as I readied myself to walk her down the aisle. ‘I’m not afraid.’
And to think it only took me a little over two decades to work out how to achieve it. We so stubbornly speak to each other in our best pet languages. When really, how much simpler would it be to speak to the listener in his or her own?
Time is a tyrant, words our last and only weapons.
