The Gods Of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye Read Free Book Online Page A

three-foot pine plank up the arse end of a vegetable grocery, I’ll drink to your fortune. But you’re likelier to be hired on at Barnum’s American Museum as the Man Who Lost Part of His Physog than you are to tend bar at a hotel.”
    I bit the end of my tongue hard, tasting gunmetal.
    I wasn’t thinking any longer about ways to earn money so I wouldn’t have to eat Valentine’s goddamned chicken fricassee. My brother can cook as well as he cleans. I wasn’t even figuring the odds of my being able to stand up long enough to punch him in the jaw.
    No,
I was ruminating,
it seems that two days back you had a pile of silver and a whole face.
    I wanted Mercy Underhill like I wanted to breathe air, and then in the same heartbeat hoped she’d never see me again. Mercy could have her pick. And I’d gone from being a man with a great many things in his favor to another sort: a highly disreputable fellow whose sole possessions were a scar I couldn’t imagine seeing for myself without my neck flushing clammy, and an equally disgraceful brother who earned his bread giving concussions to somber swallowtailed Whigs.
    “I hate you,” I said with very careful clarity to Valentine.
    That was comforting, like bad whiskey burning my throat. Bitter and familiar.
    “Then take the sodding job, so you don’t have to sleep in my ken,” he suggested.
    Valentine dragged his fingers through his tawny hair, ambling over to his desk to pour himself a measure of rum. Completely, entirely unmoved, which so happens to be the most infuriating thingabout my infuriating older brother. If he cares a rotten fig that I hate him, I wish to Christ he’d be more visible about it.
    “The Sixth Ward is hell’s privy pit,” I pointed out.
    “August first.” Valentine drained his spirits and then adjusted his braces with a second snap of impatience. His green eyes raked over me as he went for his beautifully shining black coat. “You have ten days to find a ken in the Sixth Ward. If you were political, I could’ve done better, settle you here in the Eighth, but you aren’t, are you?”
    He raised his brows while I attempted to look properly defiant about my political shortcomings. But it hurt my head, so I relaxed against the pillows again.
    “It’s five hundred dollars a year, plus whatever you can make by way of rewards or letting the flusher rabbits you nab grease you. Or you can always foist off the brothels. I don’t give a damn.”
    “No,” I agreed.
    “Like I said, I arranged it all with Matsell. You and I both start August first. I’m to be a captain,” he added with more than a touch of brag. “A respected metropolitan figure, and making steady chink at it, too, and plenty of time left for fighting fires with the lads. What do you think of that?”
    “I think I’ll see you in hell.”
    “Well, that’s true enough,” Valentine shot back with a smile that would have looked cold on an undertaker. “You’ll be living there, after all.”

    The next morning , when I was sober enough to see straight, I awoke to my brother snoring on a flat pallet before his fireplace, smelling vividly of absinthe, and a copy of the
Herald
set out for me on the side table next to the bed. Val could read a lawyer’s own briefand then argue him into an early grave if he liked, but he’s better used to making news than mulling over it in print. So I knew the paper was mine. And here is what I read, after gasping my way through a burn so fierce that I thought my face must surely have been newly afire:
    EXTRA New York Herald, THREE O’CLOCK P.M: TERRIBLE CONFLAGRATION: The greatest, the most terrible fire that has occurred in this city since the great conflagration of December 1835 has spread destruction throughout the lower part of the city. Three hundred buildings, according to the best calculation, have been burned to the ground… .
     
    My eyes faltered, not wanting to follow any further.
    It is a close estimate to set the loss at from five