The Gods Of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye

to it. He’d left the room without a backward glance, my brother and Mercy and I staring after him numbly. Mercy found nothing in the study to indicate what he’d been doing all thatwhile until months later, when she discovered that every separate page of her mother’s extensive book collection had been meticulously bordered by hand in black ink. Thousands and thousands of sable mourning bands silently edging the parchment.
    No, the reverend couldn’t possibly be faring any better than I was, not by a long lonely mile. Not when the question of cream was considered.
    Footsteps approached. I looked up from under the brim of my hat. It was Mr. Piest, taking his single shift break for coffee. I could smell it. But he’d a pair of tin cups in his hands, not a single one. His flyaway grey curls waved a manic greeting at me as he set one of the cups down.
    “Patriot, I salute you,” he declared gravely.
    On his way out, heavy Dutch boots thudding, he added, “You’ll grow more used to it, Mr. Wilde.”
    That’s a load of shit,
I replied in my head with a vengeance.
    But when I’d taken a sip of the oily coffee—which was rich, far better than it should have been—I managed to set quill to paper.
    Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. Entered No. 12 Anthony Street eight a.m. on suspicions raised by the Reverend Thomas Underhill of No. 3 Pine Street. Made for rear building, ground floor, and discovered resident Mrs. Eliza Rafferty in state of grave confusion. Infant Aidan Rafferty missing from chamber. Mother, claiming to have been plagued by a rat, led us to sink of same rear tenement, where infant had been placed.
    Arrested Mrs. Rafferty, who continued to display incomprehension of events, though she had by this time grown most emotionally disturbed. Called at once for aid by way of Reverend Underhill, and first to arrive on scene were Roundsmen York and Patterson, who summoned the coroner.I escorted Mrs. Rafferty to the women’s wing of the Tombs, where she was incarcerated under prisoner number 23398 and awaits questioning.
     
    Stopping, I marveled at my handwriting. Perfectly clear. What an appalling thing that was. Unfeeling in a way that made my gut twist, repulsed by the even letters. I supposed reasonably that they’d need it legible, and next thought that any man who was capable of writing it all this neatly was a disgrace.
    Official coroner’s report on body of Aidan Rafferty, aged approximately six months, pending; marks on the neck clearly indicate strangulation as the most apparent cause of death.
     
    My script stared back at me, a monument to steady-handedness. Revolting. When I saw how crisp the sentence looked, how distant-minded, I took the cursed star badge off and hurled it against the whitewashed wall as hard as I could.

    Walking home that night under blazing August stars with the dead copper star in my pocket, I wondered how best to make my brother pay for bringing about the day I’d had. I was thinking pretty hard, thinking
God damn Valentine Wilde
over and over again as I reached Elizabeth Street and Mrs. Boehm’s bakery.
    Then something soft and frantic drove itself right into my knees.
    My hands reached for the little girl’s arms before my brain registered that the collision had been with a little girl. It was a good thing, too, for she was pulling at her hair, touching a piece that had come loose from a top knot, and she would have crashed to the spattered cobbles. When I set her upright, she looked at me as if fromon a ship’s deck midriver. Not really there. Not really anywhere,
yet.
In-between.
    Then I noticed that she was wearing a night shift, and it was soaked in either tar or blood. A lot of it.
    “My God,” I murmured. “Are you hurt?”
    She didn’t answer me, but her square face was working on something other than words. I believe she was trying not to cry.
    Maybe a professional policeman, like the ones in London, would have marched right back to