The Fatal Flame by Faye Lyndsay

Author:Faye, Lyndsay [Faye, Lyndsay]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-12T06:00:00+00:00

15

Be assured that the “OLD HUNKERS” have drank too deep at the fountain of power—have been fed and pampered too long upon the spoils, and relish them with too keen an appetite, to allow this their last opportunity to pass without a desperate and tremendous struggle.

—NEW-YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 27, 1847

THE RESULTS OF THE legendary mitten-mill between eleven Neptune 9 men and eight Knickerbocker 21s were as follows, as I wrote in my police report that late afternoon:

Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. Arrived on scene of a quelled conflagration at 510 Washington Street. Determined by experts to be incendiary blaze, suspected culprit Miss Sally Woods, printer by trade, sworn enemy of property holder Alderman Robert Symmes. Neptune 9 Engine Company responsible for eradicating fire, having been paid by Symmes direct for protection according to their senior engineman Mr. Drake Todd. These circumstances, in my opinion, deserve further and most immediate scrutiny.

Afterward a fight broke out between the Neptune 9 company and the Knickerbocker 21, the nearest engine house to the site geographically. The altercation escalated due to multiple causes.

I paused. At a profound loss for words.

“Hit a rough patch?” Valentine sneered.

We Wildes sat opposite each other in one of Tammany Hall’s private spaces. Officially, it’s a parlor a few corridors away from the main dining room, concert space, meeting hall, et cetera—all the blithely populace-friendly façades that convince Manhattanites to think of Tammany as a benevolent grandfather with hard candies in his pockets. Unofficially, it’s where my brother convinced his own cronies not to murder me in 1846. The study resembles a men’s club, filled with important books and pictures of doubtless important politicos and carpeted with important-seeming rugs. I sat behind a positively magisterial carved desk, awaiting the powers-that-be who’d summoned us to explain ourselves. Val sprawled in a leather armchair opposite, being about as helpful as a genital rash.

Oh, I was still weak with relief he was alive, mind. But that feeling mingled with the desire to shake him until his head snapped off.

“Need some suggestions?” he added cuttingly, nodding at the report.

“That would be so helpful. What part should I scratch first, then?” I asked him sweetly. “The part where you fainted because you treat yourself like an open sewer, the part where you weren’t conscious while I was getting punched in the guts with brass knuckles—which hurts, by the way—the part where you were asleep when your pal Jack’s head was smashed against your own engine, or maybe the part where you were bloody unconscious when we beat them despite their outnumbering us?”

It had been a quick, nasty thunderstorm of a fight. I’d floored two opponents including Todd—him with a chopper to the eye after landing several other blows and dodging (once unsuccessfully) his gleaming metal knuckles, the other with a doubler to the solar plexus. Thanks in no small part to Val, I’m a feral little fighter. Regardless, when it was over and the hands of the bested

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