The Fatal Flame by Lyndsay Faye Page A

for she’d wrapped a long flannel rag several times beneath her jaw and tied the bow over her head.
    “Yes?”
    “Does a Miss Sally Woods live here?”
    “Oh, yes,” she agreed, adding a small humming sound I wasn’t sure she knew she was making. “But not
in
the house, you understand me.”
    I didn’t.
    “In the cellar?” I hazarded.
    “Oh, mercy no, dear, I’d not subject anyone to my cellar, the house is that large. Hmm.”
    “But she . . . doesn’t live in it?”
    She cast red-rimmed eyes over the woefully unpolished copper star pinned to my chest. “Are you a policeman, then?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
    “Sometimes,” I agreed. “Where can I find Miss Woods, outside the house?”
    “Oh, yes, straight down this hall and into the rear yard, and do behave yourself, dear. Hmm. Policemen are never to be entirely trusted.”
    “Not even the best of them,” I said with a sigh, pulling my black hat off as I stepped into the hall.
    Somewhere above me a bugle was being practiced in the usual manner—that is to say, unpleasantly—and the rusted-gate smell of a ripe sheep’s liver frying filled the corridor. The once-delicate pink wallpaper was peeling in shreds as if the foyer suffered from leprosy.
    When I stepped into the back area, expecting an anterior shack erected by the unforgivably greedy, I entered a strange and wondrous new world.
    I stood in a tiny meadow. Not the sort you’d have seen on the huckleberry hillsides of my youth in Greenwich Village, and not the sort at the tiptopmost edge of Manhattan around Fortieth Street. No, it was only a small rear yard. But it had been allowed to blossom into a paradise. I trod through thorny grasses and dandelions big as cabbage heads, scuffed my boots against wild roses. Most of our parks are either cesspools or walled-in odes to money. This was Nature, and Springtime. This was exploding columbine spring, spearlike violet lupine spring. Plants I couldn’t name and had never seen survive our boot soles bursting with tiny white flowers. It was bred of pure laziness, not keeping chickens in the back area or the yard trimmed.
    It was marvelous. And just at the far end of the tiny tanglewood was a large, mud-smeared greenhouse.
    Fortunately for courtesy, the glass was filthy enough to be opaque. And I’d seen
far
stranger living arrangements in swollen-to-bursting New York—people live in derelict train carriages, there’s an Irish tent community or twelve in the woods, folk are flooding to Brooklyn of all places, and I once arrested a man who lived in the meat cellar of a chophouse. Even had his mail delivered there.
    This was . . . unusual, however. I knocked.
    “Come in,” a brisk voice answered.
    I’d expected a cot, plus maybe a stove or a washbasin. At most.
    Instead I discovered a large room, glass spotless on the interior side, with a wooden plank floor covered by two knotted rugs. A neat bed in the corner, lamp and newspaper resting on its side table. A writing desk. Three tall bookshelves half collapsing with volumes. A few pictures atop the furnishings, propped against the glass walls, mainly popular woodcuts of opera stars and concert vocalists. Four mismatched armchairs surrounding a dinted hardwood table, where one could sip and chat as if in a coffeehouse.
    But the chamber was dominated by the printing press.
    A dwarfish metal contraption by comparison to some, but still it loomed large, with its great wheel and the thick arms through which the paper was fed, its heavy tray and the pervasive clean, inky smell of the previous typeface project. A pile of blank broadside sheets rested compactly next to the thing, awaiting the whim of their owner.
    An uneasy feeling stirred.
    Sally Woods looked up from her writing desk with an efficient smile. “Copies of ‘A Digression Upon the Subject of the Female in the Book-Folding Workforce’ are a penny apiece. Two bits will get you thirty,” she