Free The Fatal Flame by Lyndsay Faye

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. There Mercy stood, flushing along her stark cheekbones, complimenting Mrs. Boehm on the smell that flooded the room when my landlady pulled two trays of bread pudding from the ovens. Elena set them on flat cooling stones, glancing behind herself as if she’d been caught out at something.
    “I didn’t know you were coming back,” I said. Because it needed saying.
    “No,” Mercy agreed sadly.
    It isn’t that I’d believed I would never see Mercy Underhill again. But I’d stopped allowing myself to think of it. Mercy knew I’d idolized her since childhood—unfortunately resulting in my viewing her as a picture postcard of a perfect creature, to be smothered under the best glass and kept in a thickly carved frame. When I’d learned she was just like me, all walled-off secrets and raw longings, I hadn’t acquitted myself well. And too much had happened to us for me to wonder what would happen next. The mathematics didn’t bear scrutinizing. I only wrote to her, and read her letters, and grew to know her better. And allowed myself to wish that she was happy.
    She wasn’t.
    Elena Boehm, after setting her baking out to cool, filled three tumblers with a better-than-healthy measure of gin. Pale eyes friendly and cautious. She knows I write letters to an eccentric girl in London whom I’ve adored since I was fourteen. And I know she’s in love with her dead husband. Thus we treat each other well. Like comrades trudging through the filth and darkness of the same war. To boot, Elena knows Mercy’s mind in a certain sense, because Mercy, before all fell to pieces, used to write a lyrical and macabre series called
Light and Shade in the Streets of New York
—published under “Anonymous,” of course, since Mercy’s style was far too voluptuous to allow pride in her own work—which both Elena and I used to read voraciously. All unaware that the companion of my tender years was penning them. Those stories owned a grisly sensuality, as perfect and desolate as broken seashells.
I may have been the only person in the room that our society condoned reading them, but they brought us together in a way, the three sets of eyes all absorbing the same tales. And the single set of hands responsible for creating them miraculously present, now pressing hard into the edge of the table as Mercy waited for someone, anyone, to say something.
    “How was your journey?” I asked.
    Idiot. You could ask Mercy anything. She’s sitting right in front of you. And you want to know about weather and cabin space and the relative efficiency of porters.
    I expected a question in return, that being Mercy’s curiously roundabout way of communicating. But she only lifted the gin and raised it in Elena’s direction, a silent toast. She’d been so long absent, every gesture felt like a minor miracle. If I didn’t pull myself together, I realized, I’d forget to trust in realities like gravity and sunrises.
    “I know I’m descending on you terribly late,” she said. “I was desperate to see a familiar face. The journey was nicely uneventful, but I spent hours finding rooms that wouldn’t ruin either my reputation or my bank account.”
    “And a clean proper room you managed to find?” Elena sat down on Mercy’s side of the table. Taking over the questioning rather than indulging my fish-mouthed bafflement any further.
    I’d have been grateful. Had I the mental capacity.
    “Are there any
proper
rooms for unmarried females traveling alone?” Mercy mused. As if catching herself at an old trick, she nodded. “It’s just east of Broadway, at a theatrical boardinghouse. Meals appear to be based upon another species of clock than the one in this world—they’re prepared at sixes and sevens