DECLA SLOUCHED IN THE shadows of the brownstones lining Twentieth Street just east of Park, keeping an eye on the plain-looking brownstone that stood, windows shuttered against the cold, halfway down the block. It seemed a perfect residence for a clergyman, a dour, ugly structure, shuttered to the street, in a plummy neighborhood miles from the stink of the Mission. Biscuit had sworn this was the reverend’s home, and he was the best tail man she had. Twice, Reverend Considine had, for some unfathomable reason, given him the slip... No, that couldn’t be right; Biscuit must have just been off his game. On the third attempt, he’d followed Considine straight to this residence—and stayed long enough to see the clergyman taking off his outerwear and getting comfortable in a room full of books before the shutters were once again closed to the outside.
She’d arrived early, and she still had a few minutes to wait. Digging into a pocket of her jacket, she pulled out a small, thin chapbook whose cover she had deliberately defaced to be illegible. Angling it toward the light of the nearest gas lamp, she turned the pages, then began to read:
When the world is burning,
Fire inside, yet turning,
While fierce flames uprushing
Over the landscape, crushing
She scoffed, then took out the nub of a pencil, licked the lead, and spat onto the pavement. She crossed out a few words and added others, altering the opening lines of the poem—and in so doing, improving the doggerel significantly.
Seeing movement in the distance, she looked up to see the thin figure of Longshank approaching from the evening gloom. She shoved the book back into her pocket and tucked the pencil stub away.
Decla had spent ten of her first sixteen years alone on the streets of lower Manhattan, begging for food and tagging behind gangs for protection, learning by necessity the cruel street arts of survival. She’d been helped in this by a fearlessness, which the sight of blood encouraged rather than repelled. But then a missionary—at least that was what he’d called himself—had come across her while preaching salvation on a street corner and taken her under his wing. Naturally, she’d been suspicious, but he had been patient and kind and, above all, erudite, and in time she had let her guard down and learned not only to read, but to appreciate the long-dead poets: Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, John Keats. But over time, the man’s lessons began to come at the cost of intimacy: first hinted at, then taken. Decla was so attached to this person she saw as her mentor that at first she hadn’t resisted. But then, as his attentions became more frequent, her repulsion and innate violent nature had risen up against this betrayal. Leaving the bloody remains of the man and his life behind, she returned to the streets of the Five Points, fueled by a fatalistic cruelty that allowed her to rise quickly through the ranks of her chosen gang, which in time caught the attention of Enoch Leng. They had become associates of sorts, enriching each other in many ways. While she did not trust him, she respected his cleverness and the way his cruelty was unvarnished by hypocrisy. He also showed a welcome lack of interest in her private life … And, knowing he was a man of many secrets, she returned the favor.
Seeing Biscuit materialize at the corner of Park, she stepped out of the shadows and began moving down the dark street toward the town house. The three met in a small carriageway that ran alongside the residence. Tom Handy arrived next. Last came Woodstock, who more than compensated for his club foot with an uncanny ability for throwing knives.
“You’re sure it’s the reverend, now?” she whispered to Biscuit, gesturing toward the house.
He nodded in his usual phlegmatic fashion.
“Get to it, then. And keep your peckers up—remember what happened to Scrape.” With four of her lieutenants on hand, she’d decided to let them do the actual job, while she kept lookout. Four against one—that smart-arsed preacher wouldn’t stand a chance; and besides, it would be good practice.
Tom Handy, the picklock, disappeared around the front of the building. Five minutes later, he returned. “No go.”
“What do you mean, ‘no go’?”
“Can’t be done. Like no lock I’ve ever tried.”
Decla cursed under her breath. “And the windows?”
“Barred.”
“Fine bunch of night men you lot are.”
“This one ain’t,” said Woodstock, pointing at a window partway down the façade. Decla crept up and examined it. There were, in fact, no bars—just wooden shutters, closed tight.
“Think you can handle this?” she asked Tom, sarcastically indicating the window frame.
The young man grinned. He pulled out a rag, a cobbler’s hammer, a tiny jar of lard, and some strange-looking tools he’d made for himself, and arrayed everything silently along the ledge. Within five minutes he’d cracked the glass, undone the lock strike, unfastened and pushed aside the interior shutters, then greased up the jamb liner and raised the lower sash halfway.
Decla waited a minute, then peered into the room. It was unlit, but from beyond she could hear a woman’s laugh, then the murmur of voices. Enough light came into the dark room to illuminate Considine’s black cassock and distinctive broad-brimmed hat, hanging on hooks by a fireplace.
She stepped back from the window. “Is this good enough, then, or should I rap on the door and have his nibs ask you lot in for tea?”
Nods in the darkness. She’d roused their spirits, given them something to prove.
“Right, then. Sounds like he’s got a filly with him.” What a surprise—hypocritical cleric bastard. “Do him proper—fast, clean, and quiet. I’ll watch the street and whistle up a signal if I see anything.”
She watched as, one after another, the four slipped quietly through the window and into the town house. Then she moved back to where the alley met Twentieth Street, pulled out her knife, and waited.
*
Woodstock was last inside, but he was used to being last—the other lads didn’t give him extra consideration, but they also knew better than to make any jokes about his being a gimp.
By practice and silent agreement, the four waited in the darkness to make sure their entrance had roused no curiosity and to let their eyes, and their limbs, prepare. They knew what Decla expected of them. Even if they wouldn’t admit it, they were all afraid of her—except perhaps for Longshank, and that was only because he was too stupid.
The voices continued as before. The door of the dark room was partway open, and beyond lay a plain hallway. The voices came from down the hallway, to the right—what Woodstock assumed was a bedroom.
Biscuit, leader in Decla’s absence, looked at each of them in turn to make sure they were ready. Everyone had their blades out; Woodstock had two of his heaviest throwing knives ready, with another in reserve. Quietly, they made their way across the room, through the door, and then—slowly, in single file—out into the hall. Woodstock hadn’t known what to expect, exactly, but the hallway looked as barren as a prison. There was a strange odor in the air: smoke, but sweet smelling.
Out here, the voices were much clearer: they were coming from a room at the end of the hall, from which also came light that, it seemed to Woodstock, must be the result of many candles. He listened to the exchange going on beyond the door.
“Why, Reverend, I don’t think I should.” A giggle, half-awkward, half-coquettish. “I mean, given what we’ve said, what we’ve done—”
“And what we have still to do, Anna. Remember, please call me Percy.”
“It seems sinful to do so. But then everything feels so sinful—I mean, we only met three days ago, and—”
“And that makes me the luckiest man on earth. Imagine, if I hadn’t been there by the train station, and you hadn’t been on your way back to your father’s flax mill in Greenwich, we might never have met.”
“And I would still be a good girl.”
“No, Anna, no—you would have been, pardon my saying so, an ignorant girl, unaware of all the sensations that God in His goodness confers on us … if we only open ourselves to them.”
The four had been creeping toward the door during this exchange, and now they formed a half circle around it: Biscuit, Longshank, Tom, and Woodstock. Through the partially opened door, Woodstock could glimpse only a portion of what was indeed a bedroom, spare and severe, but with a massive church candelabra of brass, with its candles throwing off a mellow, flickering light.
“Is that from one of your sermons?” Another nervous giggle.
“No—although there’s no reason it couldn’t be. God works in mysterious ways, as He is doing here with the two of us—and with your art.”
Biscuit looked at them each in turn, making sure they were ready. He held up three fingers, then lowered one of them, silently counting down.
“What do you mean?” came the female voice.
“I’m showing you how to express yourself in a new medium—oil paints instead of yarn. As for me, I have an excellent exemplar in John Donne. He was dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and a most excellent cleric. But he also wrote several elegies that would make the saints in that cathedral’s whispering gallery blush despite their marble skins. One in particular, ‘Going to Bed,’ is particularly apropos: ‘To teach thee, I am naked first; why then / What needst thou have more covering than a man?’”
But this quotation was punctuated by the splitting of wood as Biscuit kicked open the door and the four of them poured into the room. The sight that greeted them, however, gave even the unflappable Biscuit pause. A woman of about twenty sat before a painter’s easel, one hand holding a brush up to the canvas, the other holding a palette. She was entirely naked, hair down, a chemise gathered carelessly at her ankles. A somewhat older man—apparently the model, and most certainly the reverend Considine—reclined on a nearby settee, naked as well. Although the man was thin, his body looked surprisingly strong, its chiseled musculature brought into high relief by the candlelight.
Woodstock took all this in during the fragment of a second when everything remained still. And then, instantly, all was sound and motion. The woman screamed, dropping the palette; the man leapt off the settee with remarkable speed, threw the silken coverlet on which he’d lain over Biscuit, then plunged a knife that appeared out of nowhere into the coverlet—once, twice—and yanked the coverlet off again as Biscuit sank toward the floor, blood spurting from his neck. Throwing the easel in the path of the onrushing intruders, the naked man seemed to vanish into the walls. The remaining three halted, frantically casting about, frozen in shock, while Biscuit writhed on the floor. The naked woman fled down a far hall. And then, suddenly, Considine appeared again, now in a billowing silk robe, darting out from, apparently, a hidden entrance. Instinctively, Woodstock whirled and threw a knife; the man dodged it, then yanked the knife from the wall and, with an odd spinning motion that looked almost like ballet, cut Tom’s throat from ear to ear. Woodstock skipped backward, raising the other knife and aiming for a second throw, but with a bound Considine covered the distance, grabbing Woodstock’s wrist with one hand and twisting it with the other, breaking the bone. “Mind if I borrow this?” he whispered as he wrenched away the knife, flipped it round, then thrust it into Woodstock’s eye with the soft pop of a rupturing grape.
Woodstock staggered back with a hideous scream and fell upon the hard floor just in time to hear Longshank’s own gurgling screams begin to rise. In agonizing pain, Woodstock coiled himself into a fetal position, both hands cupping the blade that protruded from his eye, joining in with the other screams, hoping this was just a bad dream and, given all the noise, he would soon wake up.