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

to six millions of dollars …
     
    Now, there was a fact I already knew instinctively, couldn’t fail to have grasped despite my sorry physical state. A great deal of money had gone up in smoke over the Hudson. That was apparent. It wasn’t dollars or buildings that plagued my unconscious brother, though, tracing a line between his brows though he must still have been drunk as a lord. Val’s single redeeming quality consists of his method for calculating fire losses. And the code is stamped deep in his ribs, somewhere gripping and permanent. Thus I felt a hurt greater than my own real wounds, a raw and sympathetic sensation, when I read:
    It is supposed that many lives have been lost by the terrible explosion.
     
    The number, thank Christ, was thirty when all was said and done—a low figure of fatalities when the unholy chaos was considered.
    But it wasn’t low enough for Valentine. Nor for me. Not by a long mile.

THREE
    The popish countries of Europe are disgorging upon our shores, from year to year, their ignorant, superstitious, and degraded inhabitants, not only by tens, but by hundreds of thousands, who already claim the highest privileges of native citizens, and even the country itself.
    •
American Protestant in Defence of Civil and Religious Liberty Against Inroads of Papacy
, 1843 •
     

     
    T he key to being poor in New York is to know how it’s done: you make shortcuts.
    Valentine and I, when we were sixteen and ten, respectively, and one day woke up the only Wildes, learned that life-or-death trick fast. So three days after the fire, perfectly able to walk about but flinching like a gutter cat every time a loud noise set my ears humming, I knew my options were limited to taking Val’s offer of police work or else moving to the interior and learning agriculture. So I decided that, as I’d apparently woken up in a permanentnightmare, I’d start with the police work. And quit the instant I found something better.
    On the morning of July twenty-second, a strong wind from the ocean cutting through the summer stench, I headed down Spring Street, past the pineapple vendors and the barrel-organ man in Hudson Square, to find a dwelling place. One with shortcuts. I was going to need plenty of shortcuts on five hundred a year. Nick’s had paid me still less, but that hadn’t been a problem. Not when all the extra coin had been considered, the half-a-neds and coachwheels and deuces slipped into my palm by madmen in French shirtsleeves, the jacks that clinked in Julius’s and my pockets as we parted ways at the end of a shift. Wages were different—stable and frightening. I was looking at a fraction of what I’d earned previously, supposing I wasn’t inclined to extort madams for extra chink.
    Neighborhoods in New York change quicker than its weather. Spring Street, where Val lives, is a mix of people in the usual everyday sense: blue-coated Americans with their collars over their lapels and their hats neatly brushed, laughing colored girls waking your eyes up with canary yellow and shocking orange dresses, complacent ministers in brown wool and thin stockings. There are churches in Spring Street, eating houses smelling of pork chops with browned onions. It isn’t Broadway north of Bleecker, where the outrageously wealthy bon ton and their servants peer down their noses at one another, but it isn’t Ward Six either.
    Which is where I was headed.
    When I entered the district via Mulberry Street with two dollars of Val’s money poisoning my pocket, I knew first that there were no shortcuts to be taken advantage of in that row of godforsaken Catholic misery. Second, I thought,
God save New York City from the rumor of faraway blighted potatoes.
    As for the swarms of emigrants gushing ceaselessly onto the South Street docks, I’d found out their next stopping place: theentire block consisted of Irish and dogs and rats sharing the same fleas. Not that I hold any truck with Nativists, but I couldn’t prevent