Free The Fatal Flame by Lyndsay Faye Page A

precisely. So I have to wonder if I’ve truly returned to New York or happened upon Someplace Else.” I could hear the capital letters in her voice clearly as I could see the feather-pale back of her hand three feet distant. Almost within reach. “But the tenants are lovely. No one asks prurient questions when I pass the parlor where they’re all banging out music-hall tunes on the pianoforte and I slip away alone. They’re very kind, actors,” she added more darkly. “They spend rather less time hating people than do the general population, don’t they?”
    “But the room?” Elena prompted.
    “Oh. Four walls, papered in fern print with only a score or so of smashed mosquitoes, quite a tolerable little sanctuary. And of course I needn’t stay if I don’t like it,” she hastened to add.
    “Very difficult it is, for a woman alone to find a space,” Elena commiserated.
    “I’ve only ever thrown myself at family and hoped they’d put me in a jewel box. I’d never had to seek one out for myself before. Is it always so terrifying?”
    “My husband, he dies,” Mrs. Boehm said evenly, tracing the lip of her cup. She didn’t mention that her son had been taken as well, in one of the all-too-common cattle drives up Broadway that devolve into chaos and tragedy. “So. I say to myself, why must I suffer so deep? Then Franz’s ovens and his flour sacks and his loaf pans, I begin to see them. Notice through tears. And I think, I have everything. Space, work. I am rich. I am forever unhappy. But unhappy in my home, never unhappy I will be on street corners.”
    Mercy tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear, leveling a particular look at Elena. I was staggered at seeing it again. It’s the one she adopts when she’s admiring but doesn’t wish to offend the source.
    “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she offered.
    Elena shook her head, for some inexplicable reason giving me a small smile. “It was a long time ago. If one is to lose everything one loves, one might as well be comfortable about it, yes?”
    To my shock, Mercy laughed heartily. Elena, chuckling, refilled everyone’s gin.
    “Are you going to ask me?” Mercy inquired, eyebrows quirked in my direction.
    “Are you going to answer me?” I returned. Much harsher than I’d meant to. “I’d never press you,” I hastened to add. “But—”
    “But I didn’t warn you before arriving on your doorstep.” Mercy took a mouthful of gin that could hardly be called delicate, even in Ward Six, and cocked her head at me. “There isn’t a polite way of saying I’m suddenly much wealthier than I was. That is, however, what I ought to have done. I apologize. Just because I don’t know where my efforts will bleed into offense, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try them out first. I have a backbone—I ought to make use of it occasionally.”
    “You have had an inheritance?” Mrs. Boehm questioned.
    Mercy stared deep into her glass, reflecting. “I’ve been staying with my kin, running their curiosity shop. Antiquities, books, that sort of thing. An old gentleman whom I’d often helped knew of my work in the East End soup kitchens, and we struck up a— I’d say a friendship, though there may possibly have been more to it on his part. I found him books on botanical subjects. He seemed to feel as if flora was God’s living art crafted specially for him, you see, and one day I gave him a fern preserved in glass that someone had sold us. He said it was just the sort surrounding the tiny cottage where he grew up. He was always very shabbily dressed for all that he was well spoken, and when he passed away, I discovered that he was the richest old miser who ever slept on his pile of coin.”
    “That’s amazing.” I shook my head, smiling at last. “Congratulations. It sounds like something from one of your stories.”
    She smiled in return. “It does, doesn’t it? I think of late that the difference between what is real and what is not real isn’t so