The Gods Of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye

building. In their infinite desire to house would-be Americans, property owners had recently taken to erecting residences in the rear yards of existing brick town houses. Usually a patch of open ground is left behind a dwelling place, for air and light and other extravagances. But canny landlords were now constructing second buildings at the back of the first, reached by the street-side crack between the structures, their windows facing nothing but walls. I edged swiftly around the pieces of a broken carriage wheel and then a mossy cistern head.The ground grew danker by the inch as we progressed through the fissure. By the end, we were three inches deep in runoff from the overflowing trough between the outhouse cesspool and the shallow sewer.
    The wet yard the corridor led to proved to be planked over. A speckled grey dog lay on its side by the wooden outhouse, snoring in the sunshine. Just beyond it rose the second building. This one was wood, three stories, and already crumbling. Destined to be a hell before they’d even finished building it. As we hurried across the wood-slatted yard, sludge from between the cracks pressed up to lap at our boots.
    The reverend paused just inside the shadowed doorway. A staircase to our left played host to a pair of drunks, nothing more than faintly breathing piles of whiskey-scented laundry.
    “It’s just down this hall.” He nodded, pointing deeper into the ground floor.
    The door in question was indeed sturdier than it looked. But the two of us together soon bested it, the slats flying open with a muffled bang. And here is what we saw.
    It wasn’t a room at all, but a closet with a pallet set along one side. My brother could probably have reached his arms out and touched either wall. Extraordinarily clean. A woman wearing a torn lace cap that might have been a cobweb sat in a chair, sewing a sleeve onto the torso of a cotton dress. Twenty or thirty more pieces of cheap nankeen lay folded at her feet. Her hair was the pale red hue of a pumpkin rind, her freckled face serene, though tight-lipped. She didn’t look up when her door burst open and two men tumbled nearly into her lap. And by that I knew something was very, very wrong.
    “Where is your baby?” the reverend demanded to know, trying hard to rein his urgency. “I heard it crying from within this room. It sounded … Where is it?”
    The needle slowed but didn’t stop moving as the woman’s red eyelashes tilted up. She was around twenty-five, I calculated, not long in the country—little scratches had sprouted up all over her fingertips from the unfamiliar needlework, none of them healing proper. Her blood was likely still pretty thin from eating nothing save hardtack and spoiling meat on the voyage over. She looked as if she hadn’t seen fresh fruit for six months or more, her entire body as tender as an open blister. Meanwhile, she sat silent, seeming not to understand us.
    “What’s your name, ma’am?” I tried.
    “Eliza Rafferty,” she replied in heavily accented English.
    “And you’ve a baby, I take it? Whereabouts?”
    The hazel eyes lost their bearings, slid back to her needle.
    “But I haven’t any baby.’Tis a mistake you’re makin’.”
    “No?” I countered, motioning out the reverend not to lose his patience. Something had gone queer about her focus. Unsettled and hovering, a bird with no place to land. I’d never seen the likes of it before, and I’ve seen a hundred different looks on a thousand different faces. “Whose are the infant’s clothing in the basket, then?” I asked, gesturing at the corner.
    Her chin dipped, quivering, but her face was still a mask. And not a mask of her own making either. Not a word we were saying made sense to her.
    “They must be piecework,” she whispered. “I haven’t any baby, I’m tellin’ you. I’ve dress parts to finish. Three cents apiece. Mr. Prendergast might ha’ sent those by mistake.”
    “Madam, it is a grave sin to lie