The Gods Of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye Page A

about—”
    “I don’t think she’s lying,” I murmured. It’s only a knack formed by talking to people for a living. But lies have a flavor to them, something smooth and sugared, and this wasn’t it. “Mrs. Rafferty, did you hear the reverend knocking? He was anxious over you.”
    “I heard him. I knew his voice. I’ll not call the pope a liar, notdenounce him, I tell ye. Not even for good cream like he promised the last time, and I on my knees already begging for it.”
    I glanced at Reverend Underhill and he winced, his eyes pained. “My charitable resources are extremely limited. It shames me, and daily. But we haven’t time for this. We must—”
    “What would you have used the cream for, Mrs. Rafferty?” I inquired.
    “For Aidan.”
    Her dappled eyes went a little wider when she’d heard herself. The reverend and I exchanged dark looks. So there was an infant, and no place in that cell to hide so much as a bent copper penny. I went down to one knee so Mrs. Rafferty could see me better. Her gaze was pretty pinched already from doing piecework in bad light. At the rate she was sewing, she’d be stitch-blind in ten years or less.
    “After the reverend knocked, but before we came inside, you took something out, didn’t you?” I inquired gently. “I wonder what it was?”
    “Only a rat,” she whispered. “They bite me something terrible at night. They get in through the floorboards. I put this one in the sink yonder at the end of the corridor.”
    “Weren’t you frightened,” I asked her, my stomach going hollow, “to pick it up and carry it?”
    “No,” she said, her lips trembling like the wings of a moth. “It was already dead.”
    I turned a desperate eye to the reverend. But his boots were already racing down the hall beyond.
    She was frightened,
I thought with dull insistence as I pushed to my feet and dove through the door,
and she forgot the baby when she disposed of the rat. Yes. Yes, the rat is in the sink and the baby is doubtless in a basket of some sort beside it and she went in a daze back to her room without … Aidan was the name. Aidan Rafferty is in a basket at the end of the hall.
    The reverend muffled a sound against his dark sleeve. Standing in silhouette at the end of the peeling hallway, outlined by the light of the single window above the filthy public sink. I watched my feet advancing past droppings from the free-roaming chickens that had gotten through the door. I was seeing things in fragments again, I realized. The sink had once been a cheap wooden basin and was now the mold-blighted home of several buzzing flies, disturbed by Reverend Underhill.
    “We’ll get a doctor,” I said stupidly, before even looking. I could fix this, I
had
to fix it. “We’ll get a doctor at once.”
    “A doctor isn’t any good,” the reverend replied, having regained a little control of himself. His face was pure white, though. White but burning, a white like the glory of God. “She’ll want a priest.”
    I’ve asked myself a thousand times since that day what pierced my brain about that particular death. Death, as they say, is common. And death of children even more so. They’re subject to so many cruelties that I’d not believe their survival remotely possible had I not once been a child myself. Suppose their parents love them? Still they’re playthings at the whim of disease and of violent accident, a holy brightness in their family’s lives shining as fickle as the stock market. Suppose their parents do not love them? Then they’re released into the world far too soon, forced to sell steaming cobs of corn for pennies a customer on Broadway, or else lured into far worse vocations due to the insistence of ravenous survival. Or they vanish entirely. Dissolve like a scent on the wind.
    Suppose their parents die while they’re yet kinchin?
    I knew how that played out. And it could have been far worse for me, I understand that, though in a grudging sense. Had Val not been