Terra Incognita

New York

Chapter One

    Blood was flying in the pit of The Barking Iron, but Lily Vane had eyes for only one man—the tall stranger with the sharp, silvered beard and eel skin shoes, winking like cracked beetle backs through the drifting haze. The gallery above the boxers was a rat’s nest. Choked with smoke, with bodies jostling, men leaning far over the splintery rail, women behind them, shoving, edging in for a spot, all spitting and screaming and cursing, as much at one another as at the men trading blows beneath them. Lily slipped through the crowd easily, dodging elbows and errant hands, finding every shadow cast and wrapping herself in its comfort. Two women, copper-clawing, fell and blocked her—beer was slung, cat screeches matching the knock ’em dead jeers—and she lost sight of the velvet-roped viewing box, though not its occupants. Lily backtracked and cut around a prickly oak post studded with fraying notices, and jockeyed through the tightening throng as it surged around her, its attention briefly split between the fights above and below. She skimmed along the clapboard wall, ducking beneath flickering gas sconces, weaving her way through the dandies with handkerchiefs clutched to their faces, the horrified ladies shuddering in shot silk, regretting their desire for a night of kicks, and finally emerged through the crush with her quarry back in sight. Lily gulped at a pocket of fresh air, made sure she was still shrouded in the brume and crept closer to listen.

     “See! You see there? What a nutcracker! That’s what I’m talking about! I took one look at the hackles on your covey there and I knew he was on the muscle. Knew he could take the shine out of that white feather, Flynn. I could smell the fight on him like a dog.”

     Lily sidled up to the two men, superficially cordoned from the rabble by the sagging ropes. Squat chairs with scuffed legs and torn upholstery had been kicked aside by Jack Sullivan, pressed against the slatted railing and balancing his great bulk on his tiptoes, craning his neck to watch the men below, circling one another like slinking beasts. Jack was yelling at the man beside him, standing ramrod straight, but with roving eyes so blue they could have been chipped from the stained-glass windows of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But if the stranger was keeping up his end of the conversation, Lily couldn’t tell. All she could hear over the roar of the match was Jack, wheezing and pounding on the rail.

     “Like a dog, I say! And I should know. Used to fight the dogs down there. Right there, same pit and all. And bait the rats. God, what a show that was. You think this is a bang? You should’ve seen this one terrier I kept. In his prime, Bully could kill a hundred rats in six minutes. No lie. Made a caravan off that animal, I did.”

     Lily’s eyes flickered from the red smear of Jack’s mouth to the stranger’s pale, drawn lips, nearly concealed beneath his twitching mustache. Neither man seemed to notice her, even though the rope on Jack’s side of the box was cutting into Lily’s hip as she leaned in close. But why would they? Even though she knew Jack Sullivan, and Jack knew her, tonight she was just another faceless woman in a sea of drab clothes, malnourished limbs, and unwashed skin. A body among stinking bodies in a boiling, raucous crowd. In all the chaos, even her most recognizable features—red hair and crocodile eyes, a slash of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the long ripple of a scar always visible at her throat—were unremarkable.

     “Now Maddy—”

     The crowd gasped in unison and Lily spared a look over the rail. The Irishman, Tommy Flynn—whose grandfather, incidentally, had come over on the same coffin ship as Lily’s—was beating his chest with fists the size of boiled hams and crowing like a razor-strapped cockerel. She’d seen him fight before, not just on the East River waterfront, but down the gullet of Bandit’s Roost and in the open-air arena of Paradise Alley, slicing its crooked grin through the heart of Gotham Court.

     Six months ago, looking down from her rookery perch—a coveted corner attic tacked on to the top floor of a Cherry Street tenement, where light seeped in from two windows and an unheard-of cross breeze stirred the air—Lily had witnessed Tommy kill a man in a brawl over a hot corn girl with sausage curls. She knew his pride was his weakness. As Lily watched, the other fighter, also stripped to the waist, but wearing leggings of buckskin over his trousers, clutched his stomach, swayed, began to topple, but then caught himself and flung his head back. His loose hair was soaked with sweat and snapped against his deeply tanned neck like a pair of crow’s wings. The rotting boards beneath Lily’s boots shook as the crowd stamped and whistled. Tommy circled his staggering opponent once and then turned his head to flash a gap-toothed smile at his current moll, Mary Kelly, cheering him on from the ring of spectators barely kept at bay by Jack’s roughs. In the split second that he looked away, the unknown fighter’s raw knuckles connected with Tommy’s jaw and the sporting hall erupted in a roar. Lily cut her eyes to Jack, continuing his story now that the fight was back on.

     “Maddy was sired by Bully, and he was a real rum bugher, just like his father. When he cocked his toes up, though, that was it. The raids were getting to be every night, shutting me down every other. I was shelling out so much sop just to stay open, I could barely scrape in a profit. Weren’t worth the trouble, ’specially when the crackdown came in, what, ’84? Better off pitching men at one another, let me tell you.”

     Jack’s paunch, straining against his checked tweed waistcoat, jiggled obscenely as he chortled. The frown lines bracketing the stranger’s lantern-jawed face only scythed deeper. The weathered skin stretched over his pronounced cheekbones grew taut, but still he appeared to say nothing as he fiercely tracked the fight below.

     “Funny how some folks get their knickers all in a twist ’bout some dogs and rats but got no problem with two men chucking up fives in the same ring. Some call that progress, I suppose.”

     Jack pointed across The Barking Iron with a stubby finger, the mustard nail chewed down to the quick.

     “Still got Maddy with me, though. Maddy the Mad Dog. You see him?”

     The stranger’s head moved slightly, but not to take in Maddy, stuffed and posed in a snarling rage at the end of the varnished bar, keeping company with a jar of pickled eggs. He was fixated on the fighter ducking and dancing around Tommy Flynn, and Lily risked another peek over the balcony. The Irishman was solid, but slow, and his opponent was holding his own. It was clear from the way the dark-haired man moved across the sawdust floor that he wasn’t used to boxing for sport but was still no stranger to a fight. Yet, Lily got the impression that he wasn’t trading blows because he wanted to, but rather because he had to. He twisted away from Tommy’s lunge and punched him square on his already broken nose. As Tommy stumbled backward, hand to face, blood oozing through his fingers, the other man raised his swollen, half-lidded eyes to scan the gallery above. His gaze swept blindly over Lily, but she still quickly turned away to hide her face. With her head down, she leaned in even closer, straining to hear. Jack’s companion had finally spoken in a low voice—saturated with London privilege, tinged with a proud Welsh lilt, and laced with impatience.

     “I believe we’ve had enough here, Mr. Sullivan. It’s time we concluded our affair.”

     Jack stepped away from the railing and tugged at the lapels of his rumpled sack coat. Jack—owning The Barking Iron, The Union, half the side pockets and all the Shanghai cribs from Peck Slip up to Catherine Street—was not used to taking orders. He was used to giving them and having them followed. By his millers in the pit, his cappers in the crowd, his girls popping men in and out of the rooms lining the back hallway. He was also accustomed to being the best-dressed man in the room, but standing next to the Englishman, towering over him in a dove-gray cutaway coat, deerskin gloves and a silk top hat, Jack appeared only tawdry and brash. His piggy eyes squinted first with jealousy and disgust, then narrowed down to slits shining with guile. Lily could read Jack as clearly as she could the headlines of the Herald and it was obvious that, despite their difference in station, Jack had something the other man wanted. No—Lily looked closer as Jack’s lips stretched into a smirk and a strained muscle in the stranger’s cheek twitched—something he needed. Lily sighed with relief even as she shoved back at a butcher, still aproned, trying to force her aside to better see the fight. Finally, they were getting down to their business. And then she could get down to hers.

     Jack wrinkled his nose and sneered, tipping his soot-spackled derby in a mock salute.

     “I’ll say when it’s time, Sir Ashmore Bedivere. I don’t care if you did come all the way ’cross the bloody Atlantic, as you keep going on about. I’m marking this match all the way to the windup, whether you like it or not.”

     The crowd in the gallery rippled with taunts and boos, and Jack swung back toward the pit. Lily frowned and continued to study Sir Ashmore. She’d spent too much time listening to Jack Sullivan over the years, sifting for tips through the boastings of a blowhard, and she could remember most every name she’d ever heard him curse. Ashmore Bedivere was not one of them. Lily had been paying particular attention to Jack, and the Notched Hatchets he lorded over, ever since she’d traded his top shake, Rosina, a gold hatpin for the tip-off that Jack would be selling something of great value during The Barking Iron’s weekly pit fight. Lily hadn’t heard so much as a coded whisper about an Englishman, but she was sure this Sir Ashmore was Jack’s buyer.

     And she hoped he would hurry up and buy whatever it was he’d come for. The crowd was beginning to kite, growing restless as the fight dragged on; the boxers were too evenly matched to satisfy the spectators’ bloodlust. They wanted to slap their bets down on men torn apart and it wasn’t happening fast enough. Lily could smell the reek of unease slithering across the sporting hall. Another skirmish broke out—two molls again, fighting for a pail of beer—and over the din Lily heard the jar of pickled eggs smash, followed by a braying shriek. Heads on the balcony snapped from the match in the pit to the squall in front of the bar and Jack leaned far over the railing to assess the commotion. Sir Ashmore’s right hand suddenly shot out and, for a moment, Lily was sure that the Englishman was going to push Jack Sullivan over. The furrow lodged between his eyes and the sneer of revulsion curling up through one side of his mustache certainly betrayed that he was considering it, but instead Ashmore sunk his long fingers into the meaty side of Jack’s neck and squeezed. Jack squealed and spun around.

     “Jesus Christ and Joseph! Are you asking to get pinked?”

     Jack rubbed at the reddening bulge of flesh puffed above his tight collar and yellow silk cravat. Sir Ashmore tipped his head slightly, his eyes lathed down to needles, boring into Jack’s skull. Lily, holding her breath now, was fascinated by the Englishman’s audacity. The last man who had laid hands on Jack had been found belly up, bobbing in the East River a week later.

     “I ought to bust you a fat lip for that.”

     Ashmore’s voice was dangerously low, and Lily struggled to hear him over the butcher—now wedged in next to her—screaming for Flynn to claret the gage and jabbing her in the ribs with a flailing elbow.

     “No. What you ought to do is give me the ring. Then take your compensation and hope that I never have reason to share company with you again.”

     The ring. Lily’s eyes jumped to Jack’s little finger and the gold band squeezed over the swollen knuckle. So, it was the ring being brokered between them. She’d noticed Jack wearing it a few days ago, when she was slinking around Long Sally’s, picking up tidbits of useful information and marking sailors for later. Jack had been enthroned on his usual stool at the end of the bar, drinking rye, surrounded by cronies on one side, lackeys on the other and alternating bellowed orders with tall tales no one dared dispute. The ring was ugly, no more than a dull black stone, chipped and chalky, too large for the band and clunky in a beveled setting. Now that she was able to see it more closely, Lily realized that the dark stone—lacking the luster of jet or onyx—was an intaglio, a cameo carved in relief. The image appeared to be typical and utterly ordinary, simply a woman’s face in profile.

     Even had she guessed wildly that the ring was of value, Lily had more sense than to steal straight from Jack Sullivan himself. She’d been born with the mark of St. Dismas, taught to steal by rote as other children learned their letters, and it was second nature to know a milk cow was worth more than a steer. She didn’t need to pinch Jack and his Hatchets if she could steal further on down the line and then keep coming back to the top for more.

     “Do we understand one another, Mr. Sullivan?”

     Ashmore slid his hand into the breast pocket of his satin-trimmed coat as Lily’s eyes leapt to the entrance to the sporting hall, scanning for trouble. She was fairly certain that once he had the ring, Sir Ashmore’s night of fun at The Barking Iron would be over. As long as Lily didn’t lose Ashmore in the crowd, it would be a simple matter of a stumble-and-snatch to relieve him of his purchase. After a quick trip across Pearl Street to Picket Mags at Mother’s Saloon, she’d be heading back home to Cherry with a pocketful of coin. Maybe not as much as she’d hoped, considering the look of the ring, but it couldn’t be helped. Lily knew better than to hang on to trinkets, holding out for a better buyer who might never come along.

     “I am a patient man, as evidenced by my humoring you tonight.”

     Sir Ashmore’s frown deepened as he withdrew a thick leather wallet.

     “But you have worn my patience thin. Please know that I am only buying this from you because I would prefer to avoid the complications that might arise from other, less ethical, measures. But understand, too, that I am not averse to employing methods one might find disconcertingly unpleasant. Either way, I will have what is mine.”

     Ashmore leaned forward and extended the wallet toward Jack.

     “Shall we proceed?”

     This was it; Lily kept her eyes on the ring. For a moment, Jack looked as though he was going to protest, but the procured wallet proved too much for him and he snatched it out of Ashmore’s hand. With a grunt, Jack twisted and tugged on the ring, painfully working it free. Lily followed it, pinched between Jack’s fingers, settling into the gloved palm, and then taking the place of the wallet inside Sir Ashmore’s gray coat. Ashmore turned to leave—Lily turned with him, already his shadow—but before she could take a single step to follow, the gates of Hell burst open, and all the devil’s fiends were loosed.

All Materials Copyright Steph Post 2024