The Fatal Flame

The Fatal Flame by Lyndsay Faye

Book: The Fatal Flame by Lyndsay Faye Read Free Book Online
Authors: Lyndsay Faye
Ads: Link
at her!”
    “The course of true love never did run smooth!” Mr. Piest cackled.
    Kildare stood at stark attention, almost leaning after the moll who’d just spent a solid ten minutes threatening to kill him. She returned to the front of her ragged band, red-gold curls dancing in the wind, staring with hard but amused grey eyes at a genuinely pathetic batch of star police.
    Then, grinning broadly, she cried, “Caoilinn!” and threw her slender arms wide into the air as if about to take flight.
    More cheers went up, a “Bravo!” from Mr. Piest as Kildare made a low bow. But recalling with a queasy sensation our unfinished business, I plucked at my brother’s coat sleeve and we returned to the front parlor, away from the shrill whistles and the friendly insults and the most disturbing courtship it has ever been my sincere privilege to witness. The alderman, of course, was long gone. Val raised his agile eyebrows expectantly.
    “Symmes,” I said.
    “Ah,” he said.
    “That was . . .”
    “Necessary.”
    “Couldn’t be helped.”
    “Seeing as I can’t diary the last time I was offered a free rape in lieu of a thank-you note and I’ve wanted to put that looby’s head in my chamber pot since he went into politics, no, it couldn’t,” he growled.
    “He tried to kill me once. It isn’t as if I’m fond of him.”
    “I have not forgotten the occasion,” my brother said in a voice I can describe only as knifelike.
    “But what are we going to
do
?”
    The Party works on a system. If you have chink, buckets and barrels of it, and you give plenty to Tammany, and you own the flexibility of a Chinese acrobat when it comes to morals, you can be a politico with a smile on your mazzard and your thumbs tucked into your braces. If you’re dangerous and hardworking and intelligent and loyal, you can be a ward heeler or a copper-star captain.
    Trouble is, the hierarchy is inviolable.
    “I don’t know yet,” Valentine answered.
    My lips parted in dismay.
    “Dry up, bright young copper star. I said
yet.
Meanwhile, Symmes is an ambulatory sack of mouse droppings and a goddamn Hunker to boot.”
    The nigh-successful bloodbath over Texas, combined with the highly contested condition of Oregon—both of which might as well be their own continents they’re so bafflingly immense—has started up a bare-knuckled regional battle. Whig or Democrat now makes no difference. It’s North versus South in the Capitol, and it’s Southern sympathizers versus Northern ones in the free cities above the Mason-Dixon. The Hunkers, in brief, are of the mind that the South should be coddled, or we’d face a devastating war rather than regular fisticuffs in the Senate. This position is not unrelated to the fact that plantations produce cotton, and New England produces cloth, and our manufactories produce slave clothing out of the cloth, which the South purchases in bulk. Like a poisonous snake biting its own tail. The Barnburners think the new territories should be kept slave-free and that the Hunkers are a pack of yellow-livered cowards with their pebbly capitalist arses hanging bare in the wind for the South to wallop as it pleases.
    The Wilde brothers, for once in concert, believe the latter. I don’t tend to have political opinions. Other than that politics is a pretty ripe joke. But I have plenty of antislavery opinions, and Val thinks of Hunker complacency the way sharks think of bleeding minnows.
    “Stop looking like a sheep caught in a bramble patch,” Valentine ordered irritably. “I’ll think of something.”
    “Symmes had a point regarding your reputation. You could be more careful about your person.”
    I once thought my brother would sleep with anything that breathes. But that isn’t true. He sleeps with gorgeous free black women, beautiful emigrant molls with lusty appetites, high-spirited Bowery girls, and an aristocratic male English pianist by the name of James Playfair, with whom he practically lives, though they

Similar Books

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

The Heart of Haiku

Jane Hirshfield

Passenger to Frankfurt

Agatha Christie

Jack of Spies

David Downing

The Juliet Spell

Douglas Rees

Beauty and the Beast

Laurel Cain Haws