by Lyndsey Faye
Prologue
When I set down the initial report, sitting at my desk at the Tombs, I wrote:
On the night of August 21st, 1845, one of the children escaped.
Of all the sordid trials a New York City policeman faces down every day, you wouldn't expect the one I loathe most to be paperwork. But
it is. I get snakes down my spine just thinking about case files. Police reports are meant to read x killed y by means of z. But facts
without motives, without the story, are just road signs with all the letters worn off. Meaningless as blank tombstones. And I can't bear
reducing lives to the lowest of their statistics. Case notes give me the same parched-headed feeling I get after a night of badly made New
England rum. There's no room in the dry march of data to tell why people did bestial things – love or loathing, defense or greed. Or God,
in this particular case, though I don't suppose God was much pleased by it.
If He was watching. I was watching, and it didn't please me any too keenly.
For instance, look what happens when I try to write an event from my childhood the way I'm required to write police reports:
In October of 1826, in the hamlet of Greenwich Village, a fire broke out in a stable flush adjacent to the home of Timothy Wilde,
his elder brother Valentine Wilde, and his parents Henry and Sarah; though the blaze started small, both of the adults were killed when the conflagration spread to the main house by means of a kerosene explosion.
I'm Timothy Wilde, and I'll say right off, that tells you nothing. Nix. I've drawn pictures with charcoal all my life to busy my fingers, loosen
the feeling of taut cord wrapped round my chest a bit. And a single sheet of butcher paper showing a gutted cottage with its blackened
bones sticking out would tell you more than that sentence does. But I'm getting better used to documenting crimes now that I'm a
star police. And there are so many casualties in our local wars over God. I grant there must have been a time long ago when to call
yourself a Catholic meant your bootprint was stamped on Protestant necks – but the passage of hundreds of years and a wide, wide ocean ought to have drowned that grudge between us, if anything could. Instead here I sit, penning a bloodbath. All those children, and not
only the children, but grown Irish and Americans and anyone illstarred enough to be caught in the middle, and I only hope that writing it might go a ways towards being a fit memorial. When I've spent enough ink, the sharp scratch of the specifics in my head will
dull a little, I'm hoping. I'd assumed that the dry wooden smell of October, the shrewd way the wind twines into my coat sleeves now,
would have begun erasing the nightmare of August by this time.
I was wrong. But I've been wrong about worse. Here's how it began, now that I know the girl in question better and can write as a man instead of a copper star:
On the night of August 21st, 1845, one of the children escaped. The little girl was aged ten, sixty-two pounds, dressed in a delicate
white shift with a single row of lace along the wide, finely stitched collar. Her dark auburn curls were pulled into a loose knot at the top
of her head. The breeze through the open casement felt hot where her nightdress slipped from one shoulder and her bare feet touched the hardwood. She suddenly wondered if there could be a spyhole in her bedroom wall. None of the boys or girls had ever yet found one – but it was the sort of thing they would do. And that night, every pocket of air seemed breath on flesh, slowing her movements into sluggish,
watery starts. She exited through the window of her room by tying three stolen ladies' stockings together and fixing the end to the lowest catch on the iron shutter. Standing up, she pulled her nightgown away from her body. The fabric was wet through to her skin and the cling made her flesh crawl.When she'd stepped blindly out the window clutching the hose, the August air bloated and pulsing, she slid down the makeshift rope before dropping to an empty beer barrel. The child quit Greene Street by way of Prince before facing the wild
river of Broadway, dressed for her bedroom and hugging the shadows like a lifeline. Everything blurs on Broadway at ten o'clock at night.
She braved a flash torrent of watered silk. Glib-eyed men in double vests of black velvet stampeded into saloons cloaked from floor to
ceiling in mirror. Stevedores, politicians, merchants, a group of newsboys with unlit cigars tucked in their rosy lips. A thousand
floating pairs of vigilant eyes. A thousand ways to be caught. And the sun had fallen, so the frail sisterhood haunted every corner: chalkbosomed whores desperately pale beneath the rouge, their huddles of five and six determined by brothel kinships and by who ones wore diamonds, who could only afford to deck themselves in cracked and yellowing paste copies.
The little girl could spot out even the richest and healthiest of the street bats for what they really were. She knew the mabs from the
ladies instantly. When she spied a gap in the buttery hacks and carriages, she darted like a moth out of the shadows. Willing herself invisible, winging across the huge thoroughfare eastward. Her naked feet met the slick, tarry waste that curdles up higher than the cobbles, and she nearly stumbled on a gnawed ear of corn. Her heart leapt, a single jolt of panic. She'd fall – they'd see her, and
it would all be over.
Did they kill the other kinchen slow or quick?
But she didn't fall. The carriage lights veering off scores of plate glass windows were behind her, and she was flying again. A few girlish
gasps and one yell of alarm marked her trail. Nobody chased her. But that was nobody's fault, really, not in a city of this size. It was only the callousness of four hundred thousand people, blending into a single blueblack pool of unconcern. That's what we copper stars are for, I think…to be the few who stop and look.
She said later that she was seeing in badly done paintings – everything crude and two-dimensional, the brick buildings dripping
watercolor edges. I've suffered that state myself, the not-being-there. She recollects a rat gnawing at a piece of oxtail on the pavement, then nothing. Stars in a midsummer sky. The light clatter of the New York and Harlem train whirring by on iron railway tracks, the coats of its two overheated horses wet and oily in the gas-light. A passenger in a stovepipe hat staring back blankly the way they'd come, trailing his watch over the window ledge with his fingertips. The door open on a sawdusty slaughter shop, as they're called, half-finished cabinetry and dismembered chair legs pouring into the street, scattered as her thoughts.
Then another length of clotted silence, seeing nothing. She reluctantly pulled the stiffening cloth away from her skin once more.
The girl veered onto Walker Street, passing a group of dandies with curled and gleaming soaplocks framing their monocles, fresh and
vigorous after a session with the marble baths of Stoppani's. They thought little enough of her, though, because of course she was running hell for leather into the cesspit of the Sixth Ward, and so naturally she must have belonged there.
She looked Irish, after all. She was Irish. What sane man would worry over an Irish girl flying home?
Well, I do.
I spare considerably more of my brain to vagrant children. I'm much closer to the question. First, I've been one, or near enough to it.
Second, star police are meant to capture the bony, grime-cheeked kinchen when we can. Corral them like cattle, then pack them in a locked wagon rumbling up Broadway to the House of Refuge. The urchins are lower in our society than the Jersey cows, though, and
herding is easier on livestock than on stray humans. Children stare back with something too hot to be malice, something helpless and
fiery-sudden, when police corner them…something I recognize. And so I will never, not under any circumstances, never will I do such a
thing. Not if my job depended on it. Not if my life did. Not if my brother's life did. I wasn't musing over stray kids the night of August 21st, though. I was crossing Elizabeth Street, posture about as stalwart as a bag of sand. Half an hour before, I'd taken my copper star off in disgust and thrown it against a wall. By that point, however, it was shoved in my pocket digging painfully into my fingers along with my house key, and I was cursing my brother name in a soothing inner prayer. Feeling angry is far and away easier for me than feeling lost. God damn Valentine Wilde, I was repeating, and God damn every bright idea in his God damn head.
Then the girl slammed into me unseeing, blank as a torn piece of paper on the wind.
I caught her by the arms. Her dry, flitting eyes shone out pale grey even in the smoke-sullied moonlight, like two shards of a gargoyle's
wing knocked from a church tower. She has an unforgettable face, square as a picture frame, with somber swollen lips and a perfectly
snub nose. There's a splash of faint freckles across the tops of her shoulders, and she lacks height for a ten year old, though she carries
herself so fluid that she can seem taller in memory than in person.
But the only thing I noticed clearly when she stumbled to a bankrupt halt against my legs as I stood in front of my house that
night was how very thoroughly she was covered in blood.
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