The Fatal Flame by Lyndsay Faye

curious affair. Because it had never been distasteful, what was between me and Elena. It was warm as the skin just behind her ear.
    I’d kissed her thoroughly and said I needed to think. She’d nodded and poured another gin. And I’d taken myself off to my room, unease flickering like a tremor under my ribs.
    Blinking at my chamber, sun seeping through my curtains in a waxy haze, I appreciated the mere fact I had a sanctuary. Women who find themselves similarly alone, as Mercy and Elena had done, were expected to procure magical establishments where they could genteelly refrain from all corrosive male contact, including such perverse activities as
eating in male company
and
living off the same corridor as a man.
Small wonder that Mercy had found such a stroll through the wolf’s maw terrifying. After the strain of her voyage and her housing search, maybe it was only natural that . . .
    Stop thinking about Mercy’s mind before you lose your own,
I admonished myself sternly as I sat up in bed. I’d been half sick over it for hours the night previous.
    If she’s here and she’s financially secure, then by God you can fix the rest of it.
    I’ve arranged my upstairs rooms atypically. The walled-in “sleeping chamber” I use for a library, not being overkeen on sleeping in matchboxes. But it hasn’t proved quite sufficient. So I’ve supplemented with shelves in the main room, the one with the window essential to my sanity, and the place thus resembles a library of tomes young and fresh and used and cracked and bought and received as gifts.
    But with a bed in it.
    The rest of the walls, unfortunately, are obscured by my charcoal drawings. I say “unfortunately” because ever since the worst fire, the first fire, the one that stole our parents, I’ve sketched vistas and portraits and eager flames and lashing storms when my mind is uneasy. I’ve a certain facility for it, actually. And it helps order my thoughts when a crime needs untangling. But there are . . . scores of them, and those only the ones I keep.
    If I could manage a happy enough month to scribble only ten charcoals, that would be a sun-gilt, face-skyward occasion.
    Elena, I discovered after a duck in my washbasin and a shave, was out making a delivery. So I snatched up my usual day-old roll rather than molest her bread pudding (which was half gone by then, and it barely seven) and elected to pay a call on Miss Sally Woods. The bluestocking whom Symmes had accused of itching to turn firestarter.
    What sort of woman would write such a threat?
    A bitter, dry-lipped spinster, I supposed, or an actress whose petals were drooping. Both desperate for a spotlight.
    I could only have been more wrong about Miss Woods if I’d surmised that she was probably a performing bear.
    Walking up Greenwich Street through Ward Three, I was suddenly enveloped by springtime. Springs and autumns aren’t given more than a finger snap around here before fleeing from blazing jungle summers and frigid moonscape winters. But that day, after the clouds broke, gleamed vivid as the inside of a watermelon. A lovely colored woman with a berry-bright head scarf brushed past me, her basket teeming with muddy carrots and a fresh-killed chicken slung over her coppery arm. Our streets seemed alive as they hadn’t been seconds before, omnibus drivers now free of the bone-chilling mists shrugging off oilskin capes to feel the daylight on their necks. I wasn’t fussed by the discarded leaky kettles in the gutter or the trimmed-off rotting lettuce leaves or the brownish laundry suds underfoot as I drew nearer the East River.
    I didn’t even mind the squat ruffian pasting up posters that screamed BARNBURNER TRAITORISM MUST PAY THE ULTIMATE PRICE! And that’s saying something.
    The house at 130 Thomas Street proved to be damaged by salt spray but far sturdier than the reeling shanties of my ward. My knock was soon answered by a stooped, lantern-jawed woman with a bad case of the mumps,