SELECTED FLASH TERMINOLOGY*
ARTICLE. A man. “You’re a pretty article.” A term of contempt.
AUTUMNED. Married.
BAT. A prostitute who walks the streets only at night.
BESS. A pick of a very simple construction.
BLEAK-MORT. A pretty girl.
BOARDINGHOUSE. City prison.
CAVED. Gave up; surrendered.
CHAFF. Humbug.
CHAFFEY. Boisterous; happy; jolly.
CHANT. To talk; to publish; to inform.
CHINK. Money.
COLE. Silver or gold money.
COVE. A man.
CROSS-COVE. A thief; any person that lives in a dishonest way.
CRUMEY. Fat; pockets full; plenty.
DARBIES. Handcuffs; fetters.
DARBY. Cash. “Fork over the darby” (Hand over the cash).
DIMBER-MORT. A pretty girl; an enchanting girl.
DOXIE. A girl.
DUSTY. Dangerous.
FADGE. It won’t do; “It won’t fadge.”
FARMER. An alderman.
FIGNER. A small thief.
FLAM. To humbug.
FLY-COP. A sharp officer; an officer that is well posted; one who understands his business.
GAMMY. Bad.
GIGGER-DUBBER. A turn-key; a prison-keeper.
GRAFT. To work.
GRUEL. Coffee.
GUNNED. Looked at; examined.
HAMLET. A captain of police.
HASH. To vomit.
HATCHES. In distress; in trouble; in debt.
HICKSAM. A countryman; a fool.
HOCKEY. Drunk.
HUSH. To murder.
KATE. A smart, brazen-faced woman.
KEN. A house.
KINCHIN. A young child.
KIP. A bed.
KITE. A letter.
KITTLE. To tickle; to please.
KNOCK-ME-DOWN. Very strong liquor.
LACE. To beat; to whip.
LAG. A convicted felon.
LAND-BROKER. An undertaker.
LAY. A particular kind of rascality.
LEAK. To impart a secret.
LEERY. On guard; look out; wide awake.
LENTEN. Having nothing to eat; starving.
LION. Be saucy; frighten; bluff. “Lion the fellow.”
LOOBY. An ignorant fellow; a fool.
LULLABY-KID. An infant.
LUNAN. A girl.
LUSH. Drink.
MAB. A harlot.
MANDERER. A beggar.
MAZZARD. The face.
MILL. A fight.
MIZZLE. Go; run; be off.
MOLL. A woman.
MOLLEY. A miss; an effeminate fellow; a sodomite.
MOUSE. Be quiet; be still.
NIX. Nothing.
OAK. Strong; rich; of good reputation.
ON THE MUSCLE. On the fight; a fighter; a pugilist.
OPTIME. Class. “He’s optime number one as a screwsman” (He is a first-class burglar).
PAP LAP. An infant.
PEACH. To inform.
PECK. Food.
PECULIAR. A mistress.
PEERY. Suspicious.
PHILISTINES. Police officers; officers of justice.
POLT. A blow. “Lend the pam a polt in the muns” (Give the fool a blow in the face).
PRIGGER-NAPPER. A police officer.
QUARRON. A body.
QUEER. To puzzle.
RABBIT-SUCKER. Young spendthrifts; fast young men.
RIG. A joke; fun.
ROPED. Led astray; taken in and done for.
SANGUINARY. Bloody.
SKINNERS. Small lawyers who hang about police offices and figuratively skin their clients.
SKY BLUE. Gin.
SLIM. A punch.
SLUICE YOUR GOB. Take a good long drink.
SNUG. Quiet; all right.
SPICER. A footpad.
SPOONEY. Foolish.
SPUNG. A miser.
SQUEAKER. A child.
STAG. One who has turned state’s evidence.
STAIT. The city of New York.
STARGAZERS. Prostitutes; street-walkers.
STIR. A fire.
STOGGER. A pickpocket.
TAP. To arrest.
TO RIGHTS. Clear. “Oh! Then you are to rights this time” (There is a clear case against you).
TUNE. To beat.
WARE HAWK. Look out; beware.
WHIDDLER. An informer; one who tells the secrets of another.
WHIPSTER. A sharper; a cunning fellow.
Prologue
DUNFHLAITH Ó DUFAIGH, as she had been called in the green mother country, where the rocks pierced the grasslands the way gaunt collarbones pierced the peaceful slumbering corpses in the streets, recalled what it felt like to be hungry. To long for thick brown bread with salt, to taste pipe smoke on her tongue as if it were solid charred beef. To find mushrooms in a tree stump and sell them for whiskey—not out of recklessness but because mushrooms could barely touch her appetite, while a pint of whiskey might help her forget her ravenous belly for an entire day. With care, maybe two.
Dunla Duffy, as they called her in New York City, remembered Ireland with a fondness that lingered like the mists which used to flinch away from the doorstep of her hovel when the stern sun rose. Because Dunla Duffy wasn’t hungry anymore.
These days Dunla was starving.
When I was a younger version of Timothy Wilde, not copper star 107 of the New York City Police Department but a kinchin running feral through the streets, I knew hungry like I knew my own name. But I’ve never known starving—and if my brother, Valentine, had never done me a single other good turn in his mad life, that would have been enough.
He did more for me than that, of course. But if I get ahead of myself, I’ll never manage to put any of this on paper.
Just before dawn on the day we met, Dunla and I, she sat in the corner of a ground-floor chamber in Pell Street, listlessly hemming ankle cuffs in the rented room she shared with other molls who did manufactory outwork in their living quarters. Trousers were heaped into ziggurats throughout the room, waiting for the brutal sunrise and for the women to rouse themselves. Both the workers and their wares were on the splintering floor, furniture being a luxury. Both were, by Manhattan standards, worthless, because the year was 1848 and the British Isles hadn’t glimpsed a potato that wasn’t blackly leprous since 1845. At daybreak others like Dunla would arrive. Such women were similar to the piles of garbage heaped on our street corners.
No one wanted to look at them. And there would be more the next day.
“You thief,” snarled a crone’s voice from the opposite corner.
Dunla, distracted by a rash that had recently bloomed along her limbs like frenzied spring wildflowers, didn’t reply.
“You’re a thief.”
The room’s twelve other residents stirred fitfully at the noise. Dunla managed, with an effort she found frankly unfair, to raise her head.
As Dunla informed us later, she was fourteen years old. Her huge eyes shone out pale green from straggling locks of equally green and greasy hair framing her round face. She’d once owned pale copper tresses and couldn’t recollect quite how they’d faded to the color of rotting corn silk—I worked out the mystery of her seaweed-bright curls for myself eventually, of course, as I’ve a tendency to unravel puzzles. For all the meager good it does my acquaintances. Dunla did remember that, with her sweetly blank expression and her unnerving eyes, the villagers had given her wary glances when she was a child. But her mother had once lifted her high in the air toward the full silver moon and called Dunla her brightest light, brighter even than the gealach lán above their heads. Whenever Dunla’s imagination attempted to reproduce fresh butter and failed, she thought about being someone’s moon.
Dunla, to be truthful—because Christ knows the tale is too grim to be anything but true—was simple. But she managed in spite of the fact.
The moon seems far off and all, she told me on the day she watched my heart break, but the tide still comes in. Don’t it, now?
From Dunla I learned that people, like deities, can move in mysterious ways.
“Thief.”
“What?” she said toward the rusty voice.
“I say you’re a whorish, no-good, shit-eating thief,” the old woman snapped.
Dunla blinked in surprise.
The Witch continued sewing. She stitched quickly and without finesse, her iron hair massed in thunderstorm billows under a disintegrating scarf. The others whispered that the Witch was mad. Dunla had never seen cause to disagree with them. Anyway, she’d glimpsed the Witch before they shared this stifling Pell Street purgatory—she’d been conjuring flames out of a cauldron, Dunla was sure of it.
Dunla had crossed herself, terrified, and hurried away.
“There are laws in this country,” the Witch declared.
The Witch had moved into the front room the previous month, carrying seven vile candles she’d made from rancid lard and twine contained in clay cups. When alight, the contraptions reeked of smoldering entrails. One burned now, and Dunla was using the devilish dregs of its glare by which to sew. She’d woken the instant the glimmer touched her eyelids. Mistakenly thinking it dawn.
“Laws, ye say?” Dunla repeated, frightened. She’d never broken a law before.
“I do say. Laws against stealing light.”
Twelve other pairs of eyes narrowed, appraising. The young mother and her daughter. The two sisters. The stargazer and her very close friend, the other stargazer. The three German women who were always weeping, staring at the walls and clutching one another’s hands. The pregnant lass curled on a pile of newspaper. The girl from the House of Refuge with her hair shorn off. The eleven-year-old kinchin mab.
“It’s my light,” the Witch hissed. “You want to use it, you pay me. What can you pay me, little rat?”
When Dunla saw the other women staring, her spine began to quiver. Some looked vexed, some pitying.
All looked afraid of the Witch.
A knife appeared in the Witch’s hand. It shimmered in the glare of the sputtering animal fat.
“Pay up now, precious,” the Witch whispered, “or I’ll carve my dinner out of your backside.”
“Tomorrow,” Dunla squeaked. “I can sure enough pay ye tomorrow.”
“By tomorrow I’ll have every last one of you roasting over a spit.”
“Please—”
“Pay up now, or suffer the consequences.”
A minute later, maybe less, after screams and chaos and cries of Get out, for God’s sake, Dunla found herself on Pell Street—shoeless, as she’d been for months—with her arms full of unfinished trousers. A thin, miserly rainfall heralding her arrival.
Huddled half under the clothing, Dunla remained on the front steps until the feeble clouds expired and the April sunlight glared dully down at her, illuminating the hordes of Africans and emigrants bustling through Ward Six—the neighborhood known worldwide as a ripening lesion on the face of New York.
It’s my ward too, of course. So I don’t mean that personally.
Tottering through horse droppings and far worse, Dunla staggered past the unconscious drunks with the flies buzzing about their grog-stained shirts, past the drooping wooden houses parroting her own imbalance, past a legless veteran returned from Mexican glory, propped against a porch. We all refer to them as the “returning volunteers,” which makes a pleasanter time for us than saying “ruined men.” This one had tied his uniform into knots at the knees and sipped steadily at a bottle of morphine. The veteran made a bitter grab for Dunla’s skirts. But he was nearly as weak as she was, and so she lurched with her armful of pantaloons onto Chatham Street and turned south.
On Chatham Street it’s impossible to tell where the shops end and the road begins. The borders fluctuate, as porous and fickle as our laws. The storefront of WM. DOWNIE’S HARDWARE EMPORIUM gushed into traffic in the form of tool-burdened tables and a dozen open boxes of carpentry nails. Dunla nearly overturned a precarious pyramid of hats stacked before HABERDASHERY BY P. J. COPPINGER but avoided it when the shop attendant shoved her aside and she fell into the fragrant spring mud.
The next thing Dunla remembered was standing before the foreman of the manufactory in Nassau Street for whom she did “outwork.” That’s a new market, modern as the telegraph, meaning “work without the sordid taint of decent wages.”
“You’re daft,” Mr. Simeon Gage said, incredulous. “I’ll have to charge against your next batch for these materials. They’re ruined.”
Dunla looked down at the mud-soaked pantaloons and couldn’t think of a single word to say.
On her way out of the manufactory, past rainbow rows of flashily dressed Bowery girls at tables doing the more difficult cutting, one familiar face hurried up to her. A pretty peaches-and-cream face with clear, defiant amber eyes, framed by the palest shade of ash-brown waves.
“Oh, Dunla, thank heaven,” the cutter said softly, pressing a folded paper into her hand. “I’ve been looking for you. Here’s four bits. You can pay someone to read this note and then have enough left for some real peck. Lord, but you’re lenten, my girl. Run along now! And you mind what it says!”
Of this dialect, spoken by our criminal element and our rowdier gentry and called flash patter, Dunla comprehended little. Just then she understood it precisely as well as she did the note in her hand, which was not at all.
Thanks to my downright bizarre thirty years of informal education surviving here in New York, I can both speak flash and read English, so I know that her friend had said, You can pay someone to read this note and then have enough left for some real food. Lord, but you’re starving, my girl.
And I know that the note said:
I fear that my friend means to set your house aflame and burn you all alive.
Dunla did understand the fifty cents, however, and soon found herself shoving a fried-oyster sandwich into her mouth, weeping as she did so, salty juices and tears running down her chin and fingertips while the world flowed soundlessly around her like a cold river eroding a stone.
1
It is impossible to go a rod in any of the more thickly frequented thoroughfares without meeting some apparently miserable supplicant for the bounty of the charitable. All kinds of deformity and suffering are put to use in this business; mis-shapen children, pale and pining infants, wretched old age. . . . Many of these objects are shocking if not disgusting, and ought to be strictly excluded by the authorities from the public streets.
—NEW-YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, AUGUST 17, 1847
I AM NOT THE HERO of this story. I don’t suppose I ever was the hero of any of these stories I set down to make some sense of the senseless. At least I’ve been writing of the hero all this while. Even back when I’d supposed my brother little more than a flaming plague on the surviving Wilde household.
Admittedly I played a role in the war between the manufactory girls and the men who’d wronged them so savagely. And I managed to be clever and discreet, which is why Chief of Police George Washington Matsell trusts me with solving his most controversial crimes in the first place. Though I always take justice as far as I can, I’ve hushed up many a shame-stained scandal in my time as a star police.
I’d stand up and applaud myself if I deserved it. So I’ll sit here and keep writing.
Despite my former bartender’s attention to detail and the fact that people tend to press their darkest secrets into my palms like razor-edged love tokens (neither of which qualities I can even take credit for, as they come naturally), I’m not particularly bright. Clever, yes. Oh, I’ve found myself so very, very clever at times. But as my brother, Val, frequently mentions, I am also dim as dusk. And when I think about that now, about how much more I could have done and what others were forced to do in my stead, something in my chest begins a deliberate downward tear.
Oh, not that yet. That part of the story will come all too soon.
I am not the hero, as I mentioned, but I was playing at one when it began.
I stood huddled in the doorway of a sail-repair shop in plain view of the lumbering East River, jostled by leathery first mates placing orders. I’d a fine vantage point of the James Slip, just at the corner of Oliver and South Streets—briny April wind in my face, a pickled seaside sun in my eyes. Birds wheeled above, screaming for scraps. There are plentiful dregs to be found along the waterfront.
We were after the human variety.
“When can we expect this coldhearted villain to make his appearance?” my friend Jakob Piest asked, ducking into his gruel-speckled muffler.
My closest police comrade has a tendency to wear what he eats. I think of Piest as my partner-in-whatever-it-is-we-do, since I don’t know the name for hunting down criminals after the fact rather than stopping crimes in progress, as the roundsmen do. Somebody should conjure one up. The police have existed for three years now—that’s plentiful time to have figured out a title for my job. Most of the copper stars walk in circuits, eyes peeled for mayhem. Thanks to Chief Matsell’s esteem, I decipher unsolved mayhem. Whenever I can borrow Piest, I do—it’s keener sport with a mad companion beside me. His eyes are invaluable, and he’s honest as the frayed cuffs on his frock coat. I likewise appreciate that he resembles your friendlier breed of barnacle and talks like a knight-errant. It’s a good job there aren’t many windmills left in Manhattan and that jousting poles are similarly scarce, or Mr. Piest would never set aside the time police work requires.
“According to the shipping wires, they’re smack on schedule, so he should be here any minute now,” I mused. The vessel before us rocked and groaned in protest, lashed down like a frothing wild creature. The gangway was rising, and swarthy stevedores with tobacco in their cheeks leaned against dollies, waiting to grapple with the huge ship full of luggage and dry goods about to be disgorged.
“I hope that I am neither a vicious nor a petty person, Mr. Wilde.” Piest’s stringy grey hair waltzed in the spring breeze. “But I relish the thought of Ronan McGlynn passing his days in a Tombs cell, watching the mice cross the great mountain range of his belly as he attempts to lull himself to sleep.”
I smiled at my friend’s quixotic turn of phrase, eyes skipping across coal-stained enginemen and the chalk-and-rouge-smeared whores who survived off their nickels. Piest’s tone was pure poison, but so was our target. We’d recently learned that for months Ronan McGlynn had been turning a tidy profit in plucking comely Irish virgins straight from the gangways and welcoming them to worse than hell with a smile. And nothing scrapes either of our tempers thinner than the exploitation of wide-eyed innocents.
Before us, reporters from the Herald and the Tribune gathered, salivating over the freshest news from overseas. Beyond, the water lapped at the tugs and the sloops and the freighters, striking in lacy plumes against the docks.
“Ah,” breathed Mr. Piest.
“Bully,” I agreed.
The great ship, hull glistening, had commenced hemorrhaging first-class passengers. Fine-featured ladies, feet invisible under the great swaying bells of their skirts, once-careful curls harassed by the ocean wind. Gentlemen at their sides, nodding vague approval beneath their black hats and checking the time and generally congratulating themselves. In ten minutes they’d have disappeared with their steamer trunks piled high behind the hacksmen, gliding away to make vastly important decisions about proper hotels and appropriate restaurants and the writing of letters back to wherever they came from.
We didn’t give a damn about them, though. Another figure had materialized, bouncing on the tips of his boots in anticipation, carrying a sign tucked under his arm. It read APPLICANTS FOR MANUFACTORY WORK WANTED. Which is true enough, now that these eerie mass workplaces have begun cropping up like dry rot.
Ronan McGlynn, however, didn’t mean a word of it.
I set McGlynn’s age somewhere north of fifty, for while his blue eyes remained clear and his ruddy skin hale, his shoulder-length hair was white and his legs sticklike beneath a jolly round belly. He wore perfectly cut doeskin trousers—not the ready-made slops New York has begun vomiting out, but sewn to measure—and a white vest beneath a violet frock coat. A snowy beard and a grey top hat completed the benevolent picture. But he was only a pantomime of a prosperous businessman. McGlynn owned a thin gash of a mouth and the stare of a born slave trader, the outline of a flask marred his jacket, and his nails where they gripped the pasteboard sign were dark with grit.
I notice that sort of thing, though. When the Irish lasses poured off the boat, dazzled and hungry, they’d be lucky to notice a twenty-one-cannon salute. Not that they’d get one.
“If it isn’t the ugliest pair o’ copper stars this side of Connell’s arse,” came a gruff Irish voice to my left.
“Me arse is widely considered comely, truth be told. The shape of it, the heft and all. Are ye blind, Kildare?” a still-thicker Irish brogue questioned, amused.
“Welcome to the festivities.” I smiled crookedly beneath the brim of my broad black hat.
Maybe I ought to have objected to the greeting, but Mr. Piest’s bulging blue eyes and absent chin admittedly resemble a carp’s. As for my own appearance . . . the Fire of 1845 had replaced the upper right quarter of my face with skin like a poorly cobbled thoroughfare. No one to my knowledge found me unbearably ugly previous, but I hadn’t exactly taken a survey. People find Val plenty spruce in appearance, and we could be twins apart from the fact he has me beat by six years of age and eight inches in height. We’ve deep-set green eyes and a little downward half-moon stamped in our chins, clean features with a slender nose below double-arched dirty-blond hairlines. Youthful faces for all that we’ve both seen too much, his marred only by weighty bags beneath his eyes and mine by a scar ugly enough to pickle cucumbers.
So I wasn’t going to argue with Connell. Not when I enthusiastically agreed with him that neither Piest nor myself belongs on a facial-tonic advertisement.
As for our fellow copper stars, Connell has a pleasantly boxlike head, rough-featured and approachable, with flaming red hair he ties back with a short ribbon. Mr. Kildare, the taller and quicker-tempered of the two, rubbed at his wiry black side-whiskers. They joined us in the sail-repair shop’s shadow, leaning with indolent nonchalance against the brick wall.
“Where’s the pimp, then?” Kildare wondered.
“I’ll be after thinkin’ ye really are blind.” Connell nodded toward where McGlynn preened. “Will you look at the airs and graces o’ the scum.”
“Shit’ll fly, if ye hit it with a stick,” Kildare reminded us.
The last of the first-class passengers descended. “You hired McGlynn?” I asked quietly.
“Yesterday, ’twas. We’re meant to be the muscle for a goosing slum in Anthony Street,” said Kildare, whose beat had bordered mine when I’d spent sixteen hours a day trudging in a circle as one of the first New York police.
“A real brothel or an imaginary one?” Jakob Piest asked, brow askew. He doesn’t speak much flash, but we deal with so many brothels it would have been absurd for him not to recognize goosing slum.
“O’ course a real brothel. Don’t be insulting,” Connell said mildly. “Paid the madam five dollars in case McGlynn wanted to check up on our sincerity, didn’t I now? She’s a motherly sort to her stargazers, more than game t’ help flush out the likes o’ this rat.”
“An unnecessary and ungallant query on my part, Mr. Kildare,” Piest apologized.
Prostitution, I should mention, is illegal. Not in fact—merely on paper. When women resort to the practice due to hunger or cold, I mourn for them. Arresting them, though, all the many thousands of them, would be a bit of a wrench, since testimony from the gentlemen who’d bought their kindnesses would be required to convict them. That doesn’t mean, however, that forced prostitution is a form of commerce we’re willing to tolerate. We calculate there are enough slaves south of the Mason-Dixon without treating Manhattan women like the cheaper sort of broodmares.
“We ordered a great bloomin’ lot o’ fresh dells, plump virgin dells fit to break yer hearts and raise yer flagpoles,” Kildare explained, smiling. “Dells with small knubbly titties, dells with great pillow titties, dells with perfect round peach titties to make ye praise the Maker fer—”
“He’s to bring in six new girls for us special like.” Connell pulled out a small notebook. “To be viewed directly, at a quarter past twelve.”
A thick stream of respectable dull greys and browns and maroons seeped from the boat as the second-class passengers, faces hopeful and wary, descended the gangway, their plain woolen traveling costumes thrice mended. Shabby young unmarried men who’d carefully brushed their hats, bespectacled women with the addresses of female boardinghouses clutched in spotless gloved hands. The one thing more disgraceful than being poor, I’ve found, is looking the part. A penniless but chastely dressed woman is graciously allowed to beg for a stale crust. A slovenly dressed one with a cache of gold in the flour jar from her midnight admirers is widely considered better off dead.
McGlynn, still hopping a little in expectancy, stilled when the steerage passengers—no better than ambulatory cargo but treated less tenderly—began to stumble blinking from the bowels of the ship onto American soil. I was peering with grim intent at the older man when the flash of a blue hat and a sweep of black hair passed the corner of my eye.
Before I knew my legs had made a decision, they’d taken two quick steps toward James Slip.
“Mr. Wilde?” Piest questioned, instantly alert. I must have looked like a greyhound quivering at the starting gate, electric shimmers gliding along my skin.
I forgot to answer him.
And it was all nonsense, of course, because that can’t have been her, the last of the second-class passengers. That can’t possibly have been Mercy Underhill.
Mercy Underhill, an old friend and correspondent of mine who held my heart in her hands when she imagined she was merely embroidering with them, or doling out beef tea, or writing her darkly magical short stories, lived in London. Not New York. Not since she’d left it, in 1845, three years back.
But it was just the way she held her head, exactly so, inky hair and papery skin. Since I was a boy, I’ve been studying the way Mercy carried herself at the slightest of angles, as if reading a book held in one slender hand, as if she were always looking for someone who’d disappeared round the corner, just out of her reach.
“Mr. Wilde?”
I stepped back, embarrassed. “I fancied I saw someone I used to know.”
Nothing remained of her. Only swarming Irish, emaciated to the point of weightlessness, some bloodlessly pale and others burned nut brown from outdoor labor, coming thick and fast as petals blown from fruit trees. That was sensible, though, because Mercy had breathed not a word of returning to the city that had treated her so poorly in her last correspondence to me. And anyway, I love her. I see echoes of her everywhere. I could probably find her face in tea leaves and collapsed puddings, as if she were my first and forever saint.
“We had him pegged, all right,” Connell said, eyes fixed on our true prize.
I shook my head in considerable
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