Free The Gods Of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye

Park in the autumn. Nothing much to look at, but then, they’d made them in a hurry, I thought. I touched the crown of my hat to the clerk and was the first man out the wide granite doorway.
    An officer of the New York City Police Department.
    There are fifty-five of us in the Sixth Ward, and a wider range of pure and half-bred scoundrels you won’t find. But there’s a common vein to us nevertheless, and I put my finger on it as I walked home to Elizabeth Street and a growler of Bavarian lager.
    We’re damaged right down to the last man, I’ve discovered, we 1845 star policemen. Perforated. There’s something the city hasn’t given us quite yet, or has taken away, a lacking shaped a little different every time. We’re all missing bits and pieces. For each of us, there’s a gap no one can quite ignore.
    I was still puzzling out the best way to both hide and ignore my own unsightly punctures when the blood-covered girl appeared,three weeks to the day later. Pulling at her hair like an Irish widow of half a century, the moonlight painting her dress a dull stiffening grey.
    Her name is Aibhilin ó Dálaigh.
Little bird
is what it means—Bird Daly. And she was about to turn the city upside down. August twenty-first was also the date, as it happens, when we found that poor baby. But I am getting ahead of myself.

FOUR
    At No. 50 Pike Street is a cellar about ten feet square, and seven feet high, having only one very small window, and the old-fashioned, inclined cellar door. In this small place, were lately residing two families consisting of ten persons, of all ages.
    •
Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York
, January 1845 •
     

     
    M rs. Boehm’s naturally early baker’s hours had already proven a godsend, for my landlady willingly rapped at my door at three thirty, before the day broke. A sallow stain from her taper’s light would be just visible, and I’d call out, “Good morning!” before rolling to my side with a groan. Such was my new routine. The silent trickle of honey-colored light would drift back down the stairs as I changed the dressing on my face in the near-dawn gloom, relishing the half hour of cooled air before the sun contaminated it.
    I will look at my face,
I thought every morning, though in truth I hadn’t a mirror of my own. Followed by
Why haven’t you stolen akeek at your face in some shop window or other by this time?
in the afternoon. Next would clang
You’re spooney
in my brother’s voice, each and every night as I blew out my bedside candle, and then I’d plummet into exhausted slumber. Telling myself all the while that my face was really an unimportant factor in the grand scheme of things. My ribs had healed quick enough, after all, and wasn’t it better to dwell on good news? I was strong as I’d ever been, though I’d not yet grown used to the fatigue dragging at my bones when I was awakened before the sun had yet caressed the lip of the world.
Good looks are trivial,
I’d think. Or
I’m not a vain person.
    And I already knew more than enough about it, didn’t I?
You were lucky,
I heard the stooped, nasal-sounding doctor telling me the day before I’d quit Valentine’s,
not to have lost your eye. As it is, the damage will probably not affect your range of facial movement in the
regio orbitalis—
the scarring will be extensive, but the muscles of the
frontalis
and
orbicularis oculi
will work normally.
So I knew the medical jargon, and I knew that all the skin from the level of my right eye upward, covering my temple and a third of my brow and even a bit into my hairline, felt perpetually aflame, and I knew the expression that flickered across my brother’s face when he supposed I didn’t savvy he was watching me. That was plenty of information, wasn’t it?
    Truthfully, my stoicism was all bluff—the thought of seeing myself turned my stomach. It was a coward’s avoidance, not a resigned and phlegmatic survivor’s. But no one I encountered knew