The Fatal Flame (32 page)

“Can I send for him now?”

“No.” Jim shifted, wincing. “The entire object of this happy enterprise was to throw him off his stride just prior to the election. If he should find out, Symmes will have accomplished far more than otherwise.”

It agreed with everything I knew of Jim’s character. But I didn’t have to like it, and I didn’t know how long I could keep mouse—I’d see Val all too soon, and surely he’d read it on me, see stamped on my brow that something ghastly had happened.

“I can’t promise to lie to him,” I admitted. “It doesn’t generally work, in any case.”

“Just delay seeking him out. Please?”

“You’re in charge here. I’ll be back in ten minutes with fresh supplies.”

Brooding, I made up a tea tray with cold broth and cheese and a few of Mrs. Boehm and Bird’s fresh rolls, a jug of small beer, a large knife, and the laudanum bottle. When I regained my bedchamber, I pulled the chair over with my foot and set all in reaching distance.

“Can you walk?”

“Let us not attempt feats of skill and daring just yet, but I believe so.”

“Are you all right for a little? I’ll be back, but there are . . . matters I need to see to.”

“I’ll be fine here. But don’t hurt yourself, Timothy,” Jim requested soberly. “Tell me you won’t do something reckless.”

“I won’t do anything reckless,” I told him.

I meant it too. For all the good it did.

After locking Jim inside, I shoved a note under Herr Getzler’s door requesting he shoot anyone attempting to break into Mrs. Boehm’s Fine Baked Goods with his prettily carved German flintlock. As well as another message containing equally plaintive injunctions that Elena and Bird stay with the Getzlers until the day after the elections.

Then I returned home in the thin morning light, rubbing my hands. If
vengeance
was truly the theme, I thought, recalling Silkie Marsh and her frosted-over eyes, I’d officially decided to give the perpetrators a run for their money.

But my first duty was to send a note to Mercy, warning her. Seating myself downstairs, out of earshot of Jim’s labored breaths and feeling a downright villain over it, I penned the following message to the woman who so wholly occupies every spare inch of my brains:

Dear Mercy,

I beg you for my sake to exercise especial care for now, as matters have grown improbably darker. Keep a companion with you at all times. And please, don’t think any longer about what happened at the Old Brewery. I recognize you to be among the angels, even if the outworkers have been brought too terribly low to mark the difference between a helpmate and a scavenger. Know who you are, and stand by it. Know too that I will stand beside you, should you ever wish me there.

Yours,
Timothy

Heart pounding like a battering ram in a siege, I hastily folded the note and poured wax along the seam, preventing myself altering a single word. But the hope was wild in my chest by that time, and anyhow the man of reason lurking within my muddled pate is well aware I could have measured every letter of that message like an alchemist poring over a potion and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.

I’d never have singled out the word that sealed our fates.

—

I
returned to the greenhouse in the enchanted-seeming wildwood, clapping Roundsman Clare on the shoulder and relieving him of guard duty, picking the well-oiled lock on Miss Woods’s door with a much-abused penknife. The project that Sally Woods had set me proved much more arduous than locating William Wolf’s article at the Mercantile Library Association. I pulled dusty crates into the center of the room as the light slowly filtered through the murky glass, flipping through mountains of badly organized pamphlets and broadsides, silence pooling around me as if I were in a human fishbowl.

After about an hour, I found the sheet in question. It was single-sided, the only publication I could find attributed to the Venerable and Distinguished Brotherhood of Tailors.

Most of the broad page was the usual earnest mewling of men who felt they’d been wronged by the modern system of outwork and by the decline of human decency. But in one column I discovered a short story. The tiny fiction was about a tailor who’d lost his livelihood, a fellow who along with equally shabby workingmen blamed the seamstresses for their misfortunes. Together they wrote a message—a threat, really—with the object of making the rich property owner suffer for hiring wanton females.

It read in this way:

Women across the nation are on the rise. As strikes don’t move you, we’ll see whether vengeance might. Improve the hateful conditions of those who wield the needle as a sword or watch your outwork go down in flames. We will not be cowed by those who think us less than human. You might not weep over the martyrs we will create in the name of justice. But you will mind about your lost pantaloons when they burn.

It was stamped on the identical paper, naturally, as the rest of Sally Woods’s printmaking. Likewise set with the same typeface.

“You’re going to suffer for this,” I announced with grim satisfaction to a man who was not present.

I tucked the folded broadside in my tailcoat, locked the greenhouse, and headed for the City Records Office under a hazy clamshell sky, expecting to find nothing whatsoever. At times the discovery of
nil
can be very telling indeed. Once within the spotless halls, surrounded by the
click-clicking
of many polished shoes, I attempted to look up the Venerable and Distinguished Brotherhood of Tailors.

The effort proved fruitless in the most bountiful of ways—there was no such thing as the Venerable and Distinguished Brotherhood of Tailors.

Belatedly ravenous, I returned to Ward Six and the Tombs.

As I approached Sally Woods and her cell, the look she darted down the cheerless hallway was one of the saddest I’ve seen. She might have been a flood victim asking whether any of the neighbors yet retained passable boats. I’d a pair of paper-wrapped ham-and-brown-butter sandwiches in one hand, which made unlocking the cell slightly awkward. But after a struggle I threw the door wide.

Miss Woods stood there, deciphering my mood. I can’t imagine what conclusions she must have reached.

“You figured out who was likeliest to have planted the phosphorus undetected,” I announced.

It wasn’t a question. She nodded slowly. Shifting the key to my trouser pocket, I pulled the tailors’ flyer from my jacket and handed it over. Finding the passage in question, she pointed viciously as she held it up to me.

“Isn’t there a flasher way we could have done this than bashing me in the skull and forcing me to arrest you?” I complained, taking the paper back.

“There are
many
flasher ways we could have done this,” she conceded. “But I apologize again for the . . . bashing.”

Nodding, I passed her a fried sandwich, the first real food either of us had likely sampled since I’d arrested her, and we departed. Jeers and obscenities trailed after us like optimistic pickpockets. As we quit the cell block, I sensed her footsteps behind me wavering.

“I just want to know about the Venerable and Distinguished Brotherhood of Tailors,” I vowed. “I’ll never ask you what happened to Miss Abell again, I swear to you. And I want my handkerchief back.”

Smiling, she passed it over. It was a bit damp, to be sure. But a fine token of trust for all that, and equal to the cause of removing butter from one’s fingertips.

“Who approached you regarding the Venerable and Distinguished Brotherhood of Tailors and their print job? Sorry, don’t—let me guess. Someone you trusted only because you already knew him, someone close to Symmes who pretended to pity your misfortunes, someone versed in tailoring and its woes.”

“Mr. Wilde!” she exclaimed. “How can you describe the exact—”

“Damn it, I never wanted to meet him again. Will you be all right going back to New American Textiles?”

“Will it do some good?” she answered, her voice like rusted chains.

“It will do plentiful good,” I said, thinking with a blade in my chest of Jim’s regard for gracefulness and beauty and decency as we reached the road.

The journey to the manufactory took but ten minutes by hack to Nassau Street. Hardly a heroic quest. 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.

All the Bowery girls meticulously cutting, be the cloth destined for ever so humble origins, looked up at us in shock.

“What the devil is going on here?” Simeon Gage exclaimed, scurrying toward us.

“I imagine you’ll want to ask us that someplace private,” I said. Giving the words some heft.

Swallowing, the foreman turned on his heel.

I’d ample time to reflect, as he led us to his office, over just how much I’d initially disliked Mr. Gage. How dismissive he’d been of absolutely everyone, myself included. How settled in himself, how
right
, how complacent, and how very, very uncurious, which to me was the worst of all
.
And he hadn’t exactly improved himself in the interim. Simeon Gage’s mouth remained obdurate, his eyes beady and close-set. But at the sight of Sally Woods, his hairless pate beaded as if we’d plunged neck-deep into July, and his prim hands wandered aimlessly.

Once cloistered, he picked up a small sheaf of papers. Fiddled with the edges. Set the stack down, gestured haughtily at the pair of chairs across from him. He wasn’t fooling anyone.

“I wanted you to watch this,” I said to Miss Woods.

Gage’s reptile pupils shot to me. “Do you mind telling me just what in hell you think you’re doing bringing a loose woman, a known agitator, and I presume an escaped criminal into this manufactory?” he demanded.

“Why do you presume that, I wonder?” I asked.

The room grew quiet. And Simeon Gage quietest of all.

“First,
loose woman
—you didn’t mention she’d been the alderman’s mistress when last I saw you. Why?”

“Mr. Symmes is a man of great stature, his peccadilloes are his own concern, and I would never dream of betraying them to a
copper star
,” he sneered.

“How noble. Second, I’ll give you the
known agitator
, since there you’re pretty much dead to rights. Third,
escaped criminal
. I arrested her only yesterday, so you seem mighty well informed to me, Mr. Gage. Who mentioned that Miss Woods had been collared?”

“My employer, of course,” he snapped. “Mr. Symmes has been awaiting word the threat was past for well over a terror-filled week now, and so when Chief Matsell sent him notification—”

“He filled in his . . . What did you call yourself?
Secretary?
He has several of those, I imagine, but none quite so loyal as you. You seem less busy with paperwork today than you were when I visited previous.”

It was a mild observation, for the desk was now nearly empty. It shouldn’t have looked as if I’d caught him with his hand in the till. He froze all the same, licking his lips.

“Did Symmes tell you Miss Woods here had been thrown in the Tombs for lighting his buildings on fire?”

“He did,” Gage answered almost inaudibly.

“Did you believe him?”

Swallowing, the foreman directed his attention at his desktop.

“I don’t blame you, though you must have been grateful for even that bald a lie,” I reflected. “Almost everything Robert Symmes owned burned in the eighteen forty-five fire, I’m told. That’s when he built New American Textiles. Right here, on charred ground.”

Mr. Gage remained riveted by wood grain, blinking myopically.

“How many new insurance policies were you taking out on your employer’s most unprofitable slum residences last I was here?” I asked. “Was it only three or four? Ten? I think you said before that you could
barely keep up
.”

“I . . . I couldn’t,” he stammered. “But—”

“Did Symmes select the buildings slated for destruction, or did you pick them yourself?”

My profession requires me to see many cornered men. Some look like stray cats—gleefully gnawing at the chicken carcass until it’s snatched away. Others resemble whipped curs—cringing, having lived for approval for too long to survive without it. That look always riles me, and Mr. Gage looked like the latter. Cowed, almost sorry.

But only because he’d been caught.

“I was following orders,” he said weakly. “Nothing I did was illegal. It wasn’t fraud, it was just . . . just business.”

“How many structures did you reinsure?”

“Eleven,” he admitted, chewing on a thumbnail.

“All through different insurance agencies, none of them local, so no one company would throw a fit and investigate you when their accounts turned to cinders?”

“Yes, but using different insurers was all per Mr. Symmes’s instructions, I tell you! He strongly disliked Tammany’s relentless scrutiny of his financial affairs. Their interest was positively invasive. Variety of insurers was a boon to his privacy. When I heard the structures had started burning down—”

“You
failed to consult the police.
But I can see why the thought of coming clean might have been a little unsettling, so let’s talk about something else. You were a tailor once, you said to me.”

Whipping the broadside from my jacket, I spread it on the desk. Gage’s eyes lit up with recognition before darting from one to the other of us, perplexed.

Miss Woods surged forward in her chair, viperlike. “I
trusted
you.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he protested.

“The job I did for you,” she spat at her former overseer, jabbing the short column of fiction with her forefinger. “The Venerable and Distinguished Brotherhood of Tailors pro-labor diatribe. I’d misgivings about it from the start, but I was short darby for rent and the price you offered was aces. You mean to say you didn’t know there was aught dusty about it?”

“There was nothing whatsoever dusty about it! Oh, you’ve still plentiful cheek left even after your little revolution failed, haven’t you? The trousers are a nice touch, by the way. I’d love to teach you some manners over my knee!” he exclaimed.