Elementary (22 page)

If nothing else, Rose could escape, must be safe. All at once, Jane understood how Daniel had felt, helpless to protect her. Rose's safety meant more than her own.

Rose said nothing, only rose into the inky gloom with a shrill cry that split the night. Her brilliant plumage stood out against the darkness like a brilliant jewel set against velvet. The men hesitated as Rose shot through the sky like an arrow and away.

Thank goodness, away.

Godspeed, Rose
, Jane thought. And then they were upon her . . .

There was a great outcry . . .

And now, alone, bound and tossed into the hull of the boat, Jane suspected she would soon discover the fates of the missing girls she had tried so hard to find.

 • • • 

The day after her meeting with Daniel, Jane determined to seek information from her new beat uptown, since she was officially barred from the old. Instead of the tenements and workshops of the Five Points, she alighted from a cab to the front door of a fashionable brownstone on Madison Avenue, where Mrs. Fitzsimmons had agreed to meet with her.

Mrs. Fitzsimmons' daughter Molly had disappeared back in February, and the police and the other reporters had already come and gone. Now, in April, Jane hoped Mrs. Fitzsimmons could shed some light on what had happened.

Jane presented her card to a liveried butler, who disappeared down a long hallway, his footsteps echoing away into nothingness. She was surprised when the butler returned with the lady of the house herself, sweeping to the front door to meet Jane.

Every inch the French fashion plate, Mrs. Fitzsimmons was a vision in a green walking dress, with a perfect little white hat and matching gloves. Jane felt quite dowdy in her own best muslin dress.

“Pleasure, I'm sure,” the Madame of the house drawled as she held out a silk-soft hand for Jane to shake. “Your reputation precedes you, Miss Emerson. I expected a dirty-faced hellion of the streets.”

She looked as far from the image of a grieving mother as could be imagined.
A whited sepulcher
, a voice whispered in Jane's mind, and then she swallowed the bitter thought away.

After a moment of complete shock, Jane managed to laugh. “I clean up quite nicely, don't I? Thank you ever so much for meeting me. You must be terribly busy, all dressed up in your finery.”

“Oh, this is my working dress . . . we are to have a ball tonight, and I am all in a tizzy over it.”

A restless breeze disturbed the lace curtains at the window next to the front door. “Oh, dear, looks like rain, doesn't it?” the lady said, a little too quickly.

“A ball! How lovely,” Jane said, her voice affecting Mrs. Fitzsimmons's careless cheer, her mind churning furiously underneath. “I hope it doesn't rain tonight and spoil it. May I ask the occasion?”

For the first time, the lady looked a bit discomfited. “It is the engagement party for my son, Herbert. He is marrying one of the daughters of the Old Knickerbockers, Emily Van Heusen. We are thrilled to pieces, and as the saying goes, rain will not wash you away . . . they are a grand old family.”

Mrs. Fitzsimmons seemed to sense the question hidden in Jane's silence. “Oh. You're thinking of Molly, aren't you?”

Jane nodded. “I am here, as you know, because of her, to see if you have learned anything more of her fate.”

Mrs. Fitzsimmons glanced down the hall, her cheeks blushing demurely. Her butler took a step forward, as if expecting to toss Jane out on her ear for her impertinence.

But no. Evidently the lady had decided to speak her peace before bidding Jane farewell. “I know that's why you have come. You want to see me in mourning, secluded, my family destroyed. That is what you expected, what you hoped to put in the newspaper, I'm sure. Read the stories from February, and that is what you will find.”

Jane struggled to put her subject at ease, but she saw that she had already lost Mrs. Fitzsimmons, indeed that she had lost her before she had ever knocked upon her front door. “I'm sorry,” she finally said. “That is a beautiful dress. Such a green.”

“It is a French
piqué
. My seamstress is a miracle worker, isn't she?” Mrs. Fitzsimmons's voice burned with acid. “I know that poor Molly doesn't want me to mourn her, wherever she has gone off to. She would be so happy for Herbert. Perhaps she has access to the society pages and has read of their engagement. As the saying goes, Miss Emerson, life marches on.”

“No matter what the tragedy, it is true,” Jane replied.

The lady's eyes hardened. “We all make our bargain with the devil, one way or another. And one must do one's best. Poor awkward, jealous Molly. Perhaps it is for the best that she isn't here for the engagement ball. She is all elbows, a skinny, gangly little thing. Happy for Herbert, I'm sure she is, and happy to miss the ball as well.”

Jane swallowed hard and bit her tongue to stay quiet.

“Did you know Police Commissioner Alistair himself will be attending this evening?” Mrs. Fitzsimmons continued. “How thrilling for Herbert.”

How thrilling for Mrs. Fitzsimmons, the mother of the impending groom. Commissioner Alistair was a tool of the Tammany machine, a corrupt, venal man whom Jane had met in the course of her work.

Jane made some vague murmur of congratulation, and before the butler could show her the door, Jane had already moved to open it herself.

She saw that Mrs. Fitzsimmons had nothing to give her. As the saying went, out of sight, out of mind.

 • • • 

The thud of heavy leather boots against storm-beaten wood shook the little boat in which Jane had been hidden. She smelled rather than saw the knot of rough men enter the hold, and half a dozen hard, cruel hands grabbed at her arms and hauled her to her feet.

“Come on, ye Friday-faced moll,” one said close to Jane's ear. His breath, fetid and swampy, filled her nostrils. “Once the Rooster's done with ye, I'll have a turn with what's left.”

The other men laughed, an ugly, disquieting sound. Jane took the fear and rage balled in her stomach and sent it out in a sharp spike of Fire off her skin.

The men leaped back in surprise, and the leader cried out in pain. He punched Jane in the shoulder, so hard that she staggered and almost fell.

“Don't mark her, you hackum Sam,” another man said in the darkness. “Rooster will eat yer liver for it.”

The man with the swampy breath growled and grabbed her again. “If you try any more parlor tricks like that, you little cow, I'll throw you in the East River, be damned what the Rooster wants.”

The Rooster. Jane had heard much of this man's exploits along the East River, for he was the man who led the River Rats, the most terrifying band of river pirates in New York. But more than likely he had heard of her also, or at least knew that she was a reporter for the
Daily Clarion
. Why would the Rooster take the extraordinary step of taking her captive?

She was a defenseless woman in his eyes, true, but surely he knew there would be consequences to what he had done to her. Jane summoned her power and kept it within her as the men hauled her up the narrow, swaying stepladder leading to the deck.

The moon was gone now, obscured behind a thick veil of gray clouds. The docks glowed purple in the shifting shadows of deep night. Jane sent her awareness high into the brooding, unsettled clouds, and found Fire there, energy also held in reserve and waiting for release.

“Storm's coming, a real Nickey,” one of her captors noted. She could see them dimly, now, and they looked like a pack of wolves guarding their prize. They pulled her, more gently, onto the wharf and past the other boats tied there.

An enormous warehouse loomed between them and the shore, and when Jane probed it with her inner sight, she reeled back, overwhelmed by the malevolent evil dwelling within. Physically sickened, she swayed on her feet, and the thug who had punched her grabbed her by the arm again.

“Don't go swoonin' on me, you bleak mort! Rooster'll chew me gigg off.”

He shook her like a rag doll, and his roughness brought Jane's consciousness back into her body once again. She knew, now, where the girls had ended up. Though given what lurked within the structure, she sadly doubted that they still lived.

She squinted at the hulking monstrosity of the thing. “You do all of this only for money?”

Somehow her question shocked this rough pack of men into silence. “Well, let the Rooster tell,” the first man with the rotten teeth finally said. But he sounded sick and hesitant now, as if Jane had punched him back in the gut.

He led her another few yards toward the warehouse, the horrible miasma of evil getting thicker with every step. But to Jane's surprise, instead of completing their journey to the bolted door, her captor led her to a narrow stairway leading off the wharf by the shore.

Instead of stepping foot on Water Street, the pack of men and Jane descended the stairway all the way down, past the street level, to a dark, yawning cave under the wharf itself. Underneath, it smelled like garbage, wood rot, and algae. The broken stones shifted underneath Jane's feet, and bound as she was, she feared falling here even more than she had on the narrow stairs.

This place was no haven against the evil contained in the warehouse. Indeed, the very ground oozed with a malevolent magic. Jane gathered her own reserves around her, muttered under her breath the first protective ward her guardian Polly March had taught her long ago, when her magic had first begun to manifest.

The man sat on a throne, radiating a luminescent glow. Jane was so surprised to see him sitting there, she forgot her fear.

She whispered to the black lodestone hidden in her skirts, where she had tucked it as a precaution. The stone was magnetized by a lightning strike eons ago, and it still retained the traces of the fire that had touched it. Jane used it to focus her own latent Fire.

She squinted to make out the man more clearly. He sat cross-legged on what looked like a settee made of bones, a silk top hat tilted rakishly on his head. His face looked painted on, and his fingers clutched the ends of the armrests as if he was restraining himself from leaping.

“It's her,” he said, his voice barely containing a trill of excitement.

A terrible unease settled in like an ache at the base of Jane's stomach. This man had been waiting for her.

“You seem to know me,” she said, her voice quiet, still, steady. “But I don't believe that we have met.”

“Pity. But now the moment is here. I'm Tommy Rooster, Janie girl, and I been waiting for you.”

Jane frowned at his over-familiarity, but she refused to give him any more clues to her mind than that. “It must be kismet, then, sir. I have been searching for you—and the girls you have taken.”

He glowed brighter, a terrible greenish cast shadowing his face, and she squinted against the sickly light he emanated. “I am going to tell you some things, and you are going to listen,” he said.

“And then you are going to die.”

His voice echoed inside her mind louder than his spoken words. That violation, the invasion of her innermost sanctum, made Jane so sick she thought she was going to vomit. She knew that voice. It had whispered to her in the witching hour in the years after her mother died, when despair and loneliness gathered close.

She refused to answer him, either in her mind or out loud before his minions. This creature was Tommy Rooster, or what the world knew as Tommy Rooster. But crawling within him like maggots was a deeper, more ancient power.

“I'm a right friendly gent,” he said aloud, his voice booming and pleasant, and his men, gathered around behind Jane, affirmed his words with a gale of fearful-sounding guffaws. “I likes the girls, the girls like me.”

“They are all dead.”

Alas, she did not need the chthonic voice to confirm what she already knew in her bones. She said nothing, remained absolutely silent. And with the force of her concentration, the hidden lodestone began to grow hot.

A low rumble of thunder far in the distance, beyond Brooklyn, echoed after Rooster's words. He hesitated for a moment, then continued.

“Those girls, lost girls all. They came to me with broken hearts. You came, too.”

Jane could not restrain a shudder.

“They came willingly!”

The men behind her murmured under their breath, and she caught a whispered “not hardly,” but nothing more than that.

A low rumble of thunder, again, and the sharp smell of a storm. The sudden patter of rain on the wooden wharf above their heads. Jane strained against the rope at her wrists, but it was hopeless. “You preyed upon those girls,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.

“To the contrary. They were unwanted, and their fathers wanted them gone. Don't believe me? Look at their names, ask for gossip if you like. Look at the truth hidden behind the pretty society lies. They were girls instead of boys. They were ugly. They were too racy and naughty, and made their papas angry.”

Jane was too horrified to respond. A vision in green, a French
piqué
and a darling little white hat, flashed before her. Mrs. Fitzsimmons' words echoed in Jane's mind . . .
“We all make our bargain with the devil . . .”

“I do an important job,” Rooster went on. “I call those pretty little things to me, a Pied Piper of broken hearts, and they come to me because they know nobody else really wants them. I take 'em in. I'd take you in.”

“You sell them,” Jane blurted out. As horrible as the white slavery trade in New York was, Jane took refuge in the idea now. Because the alternative . . .

“I sell them, sure. To people who know what to do with them. To people who want what I can get out of them.”

“They want power. And power requires sacrifice. These girls weren't worth keeping. I keep their secrets I give them what they want. I am hungry I am hungry I am hungry.”