Free The Gods Of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye Page B

certificates to emigrants. Three men I’d collared for being drunk and disorderly, which had been a challenge only in the sense that I had been forced to explain to them, “Yes, you are required by law to go with me; no, I don’t care that it will break the heart of your sainted mother; no, I’m not the smallest bit frightened of you; and yes, I am willing to drag you to the Tombs by your ear, if required.” Finally, I’d a pair of minor assault cases to do with hard liquor, weary workingmen, and the whores who’d been unlucky enough to get in the way. InAnthony Street itself, in either direction as your eyes cross the railway line, the houses are dark charcoal streaks from an unsteady hand dragged across the sky, and they come too cheap. They’re hungry buildings. Man-eaters, ready to swallow the nearest emigrant down a broken stairwell or rotting floor. Stuffed near to rupturing with Irish, of course. And on that morning, by the time I’d made my eighth slow circuit and the sun had burned past rose into yellow, they were calling my name.
    “Timothy Wilde! Mr. Wilde, can that be you?”
    I flinched slightly within the borders of the wide-brimmed hat. The expression sent a wave of hurt along the edge of my brow.
    “Reverend Underhill,” I called back, walking toward him.
    “It is you, then. Forgive me, but … I don’t know quite what to say. Since the fire, everyone has misplaced one another.”
    The Reverend Thomas Underhill reached for my hand, his keenly intelligent face oddly pale. Reverend Underhill has the same delicate-blue eyes as Mercy. But his hair is more brown than black, greying at the temples, and his face above the simple clerical suit is on a narrower scale. Mrs. Olivia Underhill had been an English beauty, lost in one of our cholera epidemics tending to dying foreigners—she’d wide-set eyes like Mercy’s, the same divide in her chin. The reverend doted on her. Switched all his warm feelings to the congregation of Pine Street Presbyterian and to Mercy after Olivia died, and I couldn’t fault his choice. He’s a deft, capable man, eyes radiating focus, hands expressive. But something had badly frightened him. He looked a fraction of his age and lost in an angry mob, tugging at his pale yellow waistcoat when it was already lying flat.
    “I’m fine,” I announced, being hearty about it. I felt a performer who’d stumbled onto the wrong stage. “And how is …”
    Your daughter,
I would have said before, as I wanted nothing better than to replace her surname permanently.
    “Miss Underhill?” I asked.
    How I managed it I’ll never know. Something tight came untethered inside my rib cage, slithering thickly through my veins like cold lead.
    “She’s well. Mr. Wilde, I was looking for help when I spied you. Will you please come with me and …” He paused, his eye catching the dull glint of my copper star. “My God. That emblem on your breast—are you a policeman?”
    “If not, I don’t know who is.”
    “Oh, thank heaven, what a providential chance. I was just calling on a poor man who made an appeal to us for charity and on my way out of the tenement, I heard a baby screaming from within another chamber. I knocked at the door repeatedly, but discovered it locked. Then I set my shoulder to it, hard, but—”
    “Babies scream pretty often,” I observed.
    But I’d never once seen him frightened since his wife’s death, cold sweat beading at his temples, so I started running into Anthony Street. Then the reverend passed me, leading the way. In about ten seconds, we reached an old brick building. The reverend didn’t pause at the entrance. Instead he plunged down the alley between the residence in question and the structure next to it.
    The front tenement reached four stories, scores of laundry lines running over our heads with streamers of beige rags pinned to them. A little boy, his sun-browned face pinched and blank, guarded the washing. But we were making for the rear