The Gods Of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye Page B

there with me in the days of our orphaned youth, I’d have been considerably less persecuted, but very likely deposited in a shallow grave one winter or another. I’ve absorbed that gift, deep within me, and on days when I have already decided to depart for Mexico,where there is no Valentine Wilde, I remind myself of the fact. And I stay. In spite of everything.
    No, it isn’t that the notion of a kinchin dying shocks me. And unfortunately, the concept of children being murdered isn’t a new one either. Imagine a terrible thing that couldn’t possibly happen, and it’s been performed on the New York stage with applause and encores more times than you would ever believe possible.
    What mattered about that death, as I came to understand it, was that the week before, Mrs. Rafferty had apparently been pleading with the reverend over cream for Aidan. Wanting,
needing
, her boy’s hunger to lessen. Sharing his suffering with every shallow breath, every feeble beat of her son’s heart. She’d fallen to her knees over his welfare, stopping only at the moment when she thought her very afterlife threatened, and supposed an eternity with her child superior to three days’ worth of fresh dairy supplies.
    And today—lacking the cream, and maybe the lemon juice to restore her mind, and possibly a sodding
window
, God only knows what she was most desperate for—she’d supposed that same boy a rat. Mrs. Rafferty appeared behind us looking out from her closet door, the needle still in her hand. Her fingers had grown palsied.
    “’Tis dead,” she said. “I’m frightened of them too, but ’tis dead already, and the pair of you grown men. Why are you both so frightened? It’s shameful, I tell ye. ’Twas only a rat.”
    “God have mercy on you,” the reverend whispered in a voice edged with fire.
    And with that, I made my eighth arrest of my new career.

    Twelve hours later , I sat at a scratched wooden desk in the Tombs in one of the office chambers, a quill topped with a hint of deathly black feather in my hand. Staring at the paper before me, mainly.Not writing. I wanted to be sick in the corner by that time. It would have at least marked a difference, proven my ability to move, maybe lessened the nausea after the fact, and I couldn’t stop staring or start writing to save my life.
    Instead I thought about the reverend, wondered if he was faring any better. The reverend, who’d left behind him at age eleven a cheerless cottage in the Massachusetts woods with an ominous hickory cudgel leaning in the corner to earn his bread on a ship at sea. He’s a precise and traveled man, known all over the city as a fearless Protestant with a voraciously demanding mind. His congregants think of him as the shepherd who keeps their lives in godly order, and that’s exactly what he is; he was an abolitionist in his young days as a preacher because the idea of slavery disgusted his sense of logic. When he talks about it, he says
justice
, but
logic
is what he actually means. I think sometimes he battles poverty simply because the imbalance of it offends his aesthetics. That sounds like a weak reason, but only if you’ve never seen him peeling an orange like he’s cutting the facets of a raw diamond.
    I thought about the last time I’d seen him so pale, shortly after Olivia Underhill’s death. The reverend had adored his wife, and I know what adoration looks like. After lowering her into the ground the day of her passing, her body shriveled and scarcely recognizable, he hadn’t quit his securely locked study in the space of three entire days. No amount of pleading, even by fourteen-year-old Mercy, would coax him to emerge. Finally, seconds before Val meant to christen his new lock picks, the door had opened, and Thomas Underhill had kissed his weeping daughter, held her close and stroked her hair, and then announced that the small outbuilding of the Pine Street Church had required reroofing for long enough, and he intended to see