Episode 3

The Great Boston Pyre, Part II

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Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts

"Here's to the man of the house and his generous stock of liquor!" Valentine said, lifting a glass of whiskey.

William thought of the folk lying under a thin blanket of dirt in the garden, and he couldn't smile.

Valentine's expression grew more serious. "May God and the angels welcome him and his family, and Mary intercede--"

A horrible gurgling scream interrupted the toast. Glasses shattered on the floor as the men dashed out.

"Conrad!" Valentine shouted.

No answer came.

They ran to the bathroom.* Steam filled the room. Water overflowed the clawfoot tub and turned the carpet into a bubbling marsh. Conrad slumped back in the tub, his head lolling. A torrent of boiling-hot water jetted from the broken pipe at the foot of the bath and buffeted Conrad's unresponsive body.

Conrad wouldn't be enjoying a bath "like a rich man" ever again. The spout of the bath jutted out from his neck. A foamy mix of blood and air dripped onto his chest. He must have settled into the tub and leaned his head back, putting his throat on a direct-line trajectory from the faucet.

His skin hung strangely loose. The water was boiling it away from his body, William realized. The sight made him feel cold and empty and like he'd never enjoy soup again.

Even as they watched, the water sputtered, surged* forward again, and then dwindled to a normal stream.

Valentine squished over to the bathtub. As carefully as if he handled a live firecracker, he reached behind the bathtub and turned the valve to shut off the water. "Luck is with you that you didn't try the tap longer, Patrick," he said quietly.

Patrick turned pale. "What happened?"

Grimly, Valentine said, "Something bollixed the flow. I wonder if it's happening everywhere?"

"We should warn people!" William said.

"Because rich people want help from the likes of us?"

William frowned. "Because my mam says we're supposed to help people."

Valentine found that impossible to refute. "All right, boys, you heard the lad. We've folk to help." More matter-of-factly, he added, "Besides, if the rich folk next door are beyond needing help, they'll start to smell soon. Can't have them dragging down the tone of the neighborhood."

On the way out, Valentine paused in the entrance hall. "I wonder. . . ." He waved them out of the house, pressed the chandelier's push-button switch, and ducked outside. Nothing happened for a moment, and then a slow glow brightened the windows. He shrugged. "Worth checking."

A tinkling crash sounded as the chandelier exploded, sending a sideways rain of crystal prisms through the air. The window cracked from side to side.

After a thoughtful pause, Valentine said, "Today is not a good day to be a rich man."

The next house over, the only survivors were the butler and the cook, an Irish woman who said she and the butler were perfectly fine, thanks much for the warning. She insisted on feeding them cheese and biscuits before they left.

At the house after, the owner still lived. Beyond that, they found out nothing. The owner seemed to agree that it wasn't a good day to be a rich man, but being a rich man, he took it as a personal slight. He answered Valentine's knock at the door with a rifle in his hands and a cornered-rat look in his eyes.

"Good day," Valentine said. "We're looking to see if there's any as need help. Are there wounded here?"

"I don't need help from any damned paddies*!" The owner waved his rifle. "Get off my property! Your kind isn't welcome here."

William pushed forward. "Sir," he said, "we just--"

"Off!" the man bellowed. The boom of the rifle near-deafened William. A cloud of dirt kicked up in front of his feet.

Panicked, he bolted. Valentine's men skedaddled after him, but their legs were longer than his. They rounded the gate first.

The rifle boomed again, splintering the gatepost beside him. Pain shredded William's shoulder. He stumbled and fell, clutching his arm.

Valentine looked over his shoulder, saw the fallen boy, and ran back. He pulled William up and along to safety. They stopped when they were out of sight.

"Let me see your arm, little man," Valentine said, with a gentleness that worried William.

William bit his lip. He let Valentine pull back his shirt to look.

Valentine blew out his breath and smiled. "You're all right. A large splinter hit your arm, but it's right under your skin. It'll only be a minute to get it out."

After the impromptu operation--William was very brave and didn't complain, even though it hurt--Valentine sat back, a jagged four-inch splinter of gatepost in his hand and a dark look on his face.

"Shooting at a wee lad! That motherless son! Fine. If that lot don't want our help, we won't try. Let's go back to our mansion."

William pressed his palm against his injured arm. A slow, stubborn anger rose in him, fed by days of walking, looking for any job that would have him. Fed by the way the rich ladies pulled back their skirts when he came by, as if he were an animal. Fed by how tired his mother looked when she came back from the factory job that she was so grateful to have. Fed by endless meals of soup that his mother "stretched" with more water when they had nothing else to put in the stew pot.

Why help the rich?

The question echoed through William. He looked up to find Valentine watching him with an odd expression.

"What's wrong?" William asked.

"This is usually where you chime in and insist we help someone."

William looked away. He tried to shake off his anger. His mam had told him time and again that anger and bitterness weren't the way to a better life. "Accept what is, and work for what will be," she'd say, "and a brighter tomorrow will come along."

A brighter tomorrow didn't seem likely, though surely it couldn't be worse than today. He hoped. After the terrible topsy-turvy day, he could rely on nothing. The world pressed down on him, and he was about as much use as a pebble underfoot.

"Come along, lad."

William trailed after Valentine, his insides knotting more with every step.

He wished he could make his mam feel better, like she always did for him when he sickened. She'd get out the nice wool shawl she'd brought over from Ireland, wrap it around his shoulders, and sing him to sleep. Maybe she'd like to have the shawl now? He could bring it back for her. And the precious tintype photo* of his mam and his da when they first arrived off the boat, all wide eyes and bright hopes, himself a bundle in his mam's arms. And their papers and letters, and his mam's church dress, and the two patchwork quilts they huddled together under when it grew cold, and his mam's best ladle, and--it wasn't much, but it was more than one small boy could carry.

"Valentine, would you help me get a few of my mam's belongings, to make her feel better?"

"Sure and I would! But not tonight."

William thought of the people who shared the one-room apartment with him and his mam: the Tienkens, a newly arrived German family. Mr. Tienken had died on the boat, leaving Mrs. Tienken with four children to tend to. The youngest's nightly cabbage-inspired symphony might irritate William, but the girls were okay, for girls. They helped William's mam with mending and such.

The oldest boy, Robert, was better than okay. Robert had been able to get a job as a newspaper boy, because everyone knew that Germans were hard-working and trustworthy, but Robert said the other newspaper boys were boring. William and Robert stood up for each other when anybody tried to bully one of them. When Robert found a starveling puppy, he brought it home and--with many tears and even more promises that it wouldn't be a burden, that it could live off rats and the scraps of scraps--persuaded the mothers to let him keep it. Robert's puppy grew into a fine spaniel who made the children laugh and their mothers smile and kept their feet warm in the winter.

William hoped they were still alive.

As he thought these things, William followed after Valentine and his gang. By the time he reached the mansion, he'd come to a conclusion. He stopped in front of the porch steps. The men kept going into the house. Valentine only noticed the boy when he turned around to close the door and found William still outside.

"Going back to see to your mam?" Valentine asked kindly.

"We should go to the slums and help the people there," William said. "They won't turn away our help."

Valentine blinked. "Ah...that's a fine idea, but--" he looked at the sky, "--it's coming on sunset. Tonight is not the night for small boys to be out in the street. And we've a nasty job to do here. I brought Conrad into this house, so I owe him a decent burial." He patted William's shoulder. "You should not see it. Your mam must miss you by now."

William stuck out his chin. "We have to help them! Nobody else will, you know that! You have to help them!" He stared at Valentine and Tommy and Patrick and the other men accusingly.

"They'll be fine 'til tomorrow or they'll die anyway," Valentine said. "You go on back to your mam."

Unhappy, William bit his lip. He couldn't help on his own, and he suspected his mam would agree about boys staying in tonight.

Seeing his distress, Valentine softened. "Tomorrow morning we'll go down to the North End, all right? But now you should be going along to Dr. Fallon's house. You and your mam will be fine there, with that great lot of people you gathered."

Valentine had the same stretched look William's mam got when he'd pestered her past bearing, so William reluctantly agreed.

He walked down the hill with many reproachful looks over his shoulder. But Valentine had closed the door, and if anybody watched him from the windows, William couldn't tell.

He reached Dr. Fallon's home safely, but the night was not made for sleeping. He curled up in a chair beside his mam and listened to her breathing. Dr. Fallon's laudanum let her sleep through the night, but not him. William would drift off easily enough, but then he would wake with a start, convinced his mam had stopped breathing. He had to hold his breath and wait until his heart stopped racing before he could hear her soft exhalations. He lost track of how many times he woke in the night.

The people camped on Dr. Fallon's lawn also slept poorly. Some woke screaming from their sleep, which set all the babies crying. Farther away, shouting and the sound of breaking glass and screams bore out Valentine's warning. William hoped that none of the troublemakers would bother the men who'd rescued his mam.

#

William rose when the first fingers of dawn stretched under the door. His mam slept on, her breathing even and undisturbed. He kissed her on the forehead and slipped outside.

Most of the people outside had fallen into a restless sleep. Here and there, a person or a pair sat and watched the sun rise. The forgiving golden light of earliest morning washed across the survivors on the lawn. It erased worry lines and cleansed grime-coated skin. The red-gold sun rose, promising new hope and new beginnings.

Except.

Thin rivulets of dark smoke trickled up into the sky across the city, putting the lie to sunrise's promise. Fires had broken out overnight--though they did not seem to be spreading.

William gathered his courage and walked back to the mansion that Valentine and his lads had taken over. The streets were quiet, but it was a listening-for-danger quiet. Windows had been smashed out in many of the mansions that lined the street. A dead body lay on the lawn in front of the house that they had been rebuffed from the evening before. It wasn't the owner. Gas lights flickered and flared and died behind windows. Water oozed out from under one door and streamed down the hill. William crossed the street to avoid walking in it.

When William entered the blue and white mansion, he noticed a hodgepodge of precious things that hadn't been there the previous day. They didn't seem to match the furnishings of the house, but he supposed they might have been found in the attic.

The men who were awake greeted him with cries of "Ho there!" and "Hey!" and "There's our little man!"

Valentine sprawled across the parlor sofa. The shouting roused him. His eyes opened. He yawned and scratched his balls and waved his hand in greeting.

Tommy walked down the stairs wearing a very satisfied expression. A woman with disheveled hair and a shawl wrapped around her bare torso leaned over the balcony and called, "Mind ye be careful out there, Tom!" Seeing William, she added, "I beg your pardon, I didn't see the lad," and retreated back to the bedroom.

Patrick ambled out of the kitchen with a napkin full of biscuits. He offered one to William. William would have politely refused, but his stomach answered before he could. Noisily. Patrick laughed and gave him two biscuits.

A black eye bloomed gloriously on Patrick's face. Tommy and Valentine both had split knuckles. Yet they all seemed to be in a fine humor.

"Can we go now?" William asked, as soon as he'd devoured the biscuits. "To help the people in the North End?"

"If there are any left in the North End," Patrick mumbled.

"Patrick speaks true, lad," Valentine said. "Most of the North End has left for finer surroundings."

"All the more reason that we should help the ones who are still there!" William looked up at the men. "And I'd like to take a few things to my mam, but there's too much for me to carry on my own, and--"

"Of course we'll be helping you!" Tommy said. "You've brought us our good luck!"

"But first we've to empty our bladders and fill our stomachs," Valentine added.

They all avoided the water closet. The men went into the back garden and pissed over the fence, making sport of a grim situation. It embarrassed William. His mam had always insisted he wait to use the outhouse, though there was only the one for the whole building*, and filth crusted its floor. The other boys pissed in the alley, "like the animals they call us," his mother said. "My son will not."

Before leaving, Valentine and his gang--and William, too--breakfasted well on smoked ham and the last of the cornbread the cook had made before her final encounter with the stove.

Walking through Beacon Hill, the men strode down the street six abreast, as if they owned it. Even the bruises added a certain flair.

When they reached the warren of tenement houses in the North End, however, they slowed down and bunched together. Valentine hefted the shillelagh that he'd acquired overnight.

In the slum, the evidence of disturbances was more--disturbing. Windows had been broken from the inside. People's belongings were strewn out into the street like rubbish.* Somewhere, a baby cried weakly.

Mounds of bodies lurked in the alleys, waiting to catch an unwary glance. Most had the arched bodies and bloodied faces of those who had died in the storm, but a few bore wounds from knives, guns, or fists. A few wore clothing too fine for the North End. William saw one young man whose arms were extended, his fingers curved into claws, as if he'd been trying to pull himself out of the pile when he died. Stains patched the street. Dead animals lay in the gutter, cats and dogs and rats forming a peaceful kingdom in death. *

The rats who survived ate well.

"This way." It came out in a whisper. William cleared his throat and tried again. "This way!" He led them into the tenement house he and his mam lived in.

Once, it had been a fine house for a family. Then their landlord bought it and divided it up into rooms-to-rent with partitions that preserved the appearance of privacy, but nothing else. Everybody heard the fights between couples, and the making-up after. One colicky baby could ruin everyone's rest, though the residents learned to sleep through the tromping of feet up the stairs as workers returned from the night shift. Everybody smelled everybody else's cooking. (All the residents agreed that Mrs. MacDougal was the best cook.)

Mrs. MacDougal's closet-sized room was on the first floor. Her door was ajar, and the smell of burnt scones hung in the hallway.

The hinges squealed as William pushed the door open.

The room appeared to be empty. William let out a pent-up breath--and then he saw the foot. A single, naked foot poked out from under the mound of Mrs. MacDougal's bedding. He stepped closer.

Patrick put out a hand to stop him. "Here now, lad, there's no need for you to see this. We can--"

The bed exploded with a screech. A tangle of blankets flew through the air and resolved into a sullen-mouthed girl wrapped in one of Mrs. MacDougal's quilts. She pressed a fitful babe to her chest.

"Get out!" she yelled.*

"Where's Mrs. MacDougal?" William asked.

A little sympathy came into the girl's expression. "She's dead now, isn't she? Died in the storm."

"And you just moved into her room?"

"She wasn't using it, was she? And the baby fussed so much that my brothers threatened to throw me out in the street if I couldn't quiet him." She shuddered. "'Twasn't a good night to be in the street."

"Where's her--" William swallowed."Where's her body?"

The girl jerked her head to the window that looked out over the alley..

"You tossed her out like trash!?" William sputtered.

The girl stared at him, open-mouthed. "What else can we do? We're not the ones in charge." Her baby started squalling, and she put him to her breast.

"Come along, lad. Let's leave the colleen* be." Valentine pulled William into the hallway and gently closed the door on the girl nursing her babe.

"It's not how it ought to be!"

"No, that it's not. But she had the right of it when she said we're not the ones in charge. We can hardly bury all the North End's dead. There's not enough stones in the city to make a cairn big enough."

William looked at the narrow, dark hallway and the small, unlit rooms. "It's a cairn already."

"The bodies will cause disease if they're not taken care of proper," Patrick said unexpectedly. "When they rot."

Valentine raised an eyebrow.

"That's what Dr. Fallon said. Fire or earth, that's what it takes to keep disease from rising among us and killing even more." Patrick's face did a funny thing, as if it were trying very hard not to allow a smile to escape. "She's awful clever."

William only remembered bits and pieces from when the disease swept through the slum and killed his da, but he knew how tight his mam's face grew when it was talked of, and how memory shadowed her eyes.

He remembered other things, too. How tired his mam was when she got back from the factory. The few times she'd come home without her basket or with a new tear in her sleeve, though she'd shrugged it off as, "Rowdies too drunk to know what they're doing." How the noise and the heat and the smells of the tenement house wore on her.

"The whole city's rotting," he said. His arm ached.

He looked at the narrow warren of rooms that had suffocated the dreams of so many. "Burn it."

"Burn the bodies?" asked Patrick. "They're too close to the walls. The buildings would catch fire."

"The slums?" Valentine said wonderingly. "Well, now, I think the lad has a most interesting idea. They cannot force us back here if there's no here to force us to. And it's not like there's much here worth, ah, retrieving."

"It's no proper burial," Tommy protested.

"The Church makes allowances," Valentine said. "And since when have you worried about your every action being right with God?"

The other men looked uneasy, too.

"Would you let them sit out and rot like meat gone bad?" Valentine demanded.

Their faces went from uneasy to queasy.

"There are corpses in the better part of town to see to, too," Patrick said.

Why help the rich?

"Not near so many. And the rich will take care of their own."

Why should the rich be spared what the poor suffer?

"Not just the slums. Burn it all," William said, his eyes sharp and glittering with unshed tears.

Valentine frowned. "That's a harsh thing to say, lad. And think of all the fine houses and all the fine things in them."

"Fewer fine things than there used to be," Tommy said, residual guilt lingering in his tone.

Valentine pulled William aside a bit, and squatted down to talk to him face-to-face. "William, we've fallen into hard times. My lads believe you've brought us luck. You, ah, persuaded us to help those folk yesterday, and last night, well, we fared far better than most others on the street. Casting bread upon the waters, like. Your presence was why Dr. Fallon agreed to help us, and she's the one who told us of our fine new house. You couldn't bear to look at the chandelier, so I told the lads not to light it up. If we had, it would have sliced us to bloody ribbons. Since surviving that storm of death, we're all a mite more superstitious. If you say we should burn the city, they'll give it a serious try."

William glared, his face hot and hard. "You think the rich deserve better?"

"Dr. Fallon's in a rich part of town. She's tending to your mam. Would you burn her house, too?"

"I--"

"Mind you, I think burning the slums is a fine idea. We live packed in here, and any who stay here now will be cheek-to-jowl with their neighbors' corpses. That's not a healthy thing for a body. Think on it, though, before you goad the lads on."

William reluctantly nodded.

"Good lad." Valentine patted William's shoulder. "Don't fret. We have plenty to do here--helping people, right?"

Valentine stood and walked back to the others, with William at his side. "Right, then, lads! We're going to help William gather his mam's things--and then we're going to burn the North End to the ground!"

The men cheered. How could they resist the appeal of burning something right down to the ground?

"We'll need to go through each tenement house room by room to make sure all the survivors are out before we burn it."

"What will we do with them?" Patrick asked. "Dr. Fallon's home is full."

Valentine cut his eyes at William. "Let's ask our luck. Where will they be safe from burning, William?"

William's stomach tightened and his skin heated, but he kept his voice level when he said, "The Common." Boston's central park was large enough for everyone to have a patch of ground to spread their blanket out on.*

"A good choice. Patrick, go back to Dr. Fallon's house and see if you can get volunteers to help us: some to herd survivors away, and some to aid the injured. And don't spend overmuch time chatting up the clever doctor," Valentine added dryly.

Patrick nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to escape.

Valentine, Tommy, and the other lads went down the hallway of the tenement house. William walked ahead, shouting, "Fire!" It was the one thing that slum-dwellers feared even above rent-collecting bullyboys.

Some might have hesitated if a harsh-sounding man tried to get them out of their rooms, but nobody suspected a child of lying. And he wasn't, not precisely.

The few surviving inhabitants fled their rooms clutching whatever was most precious to them. Facing hard men who still bore the marks of recent battle, they chose not to argue about leaving.

At first, Valentine and the lads checked every room carefully, making sure that no survivors hid inside. Despite the mounds of dead outside, corpses yet lay concealed behind flimsy doors: a man face-down in his bowl of soup; a woman sprawled across her mending; an old man who'd been abed with his liquor bottle when he was stricken; a half-clothed child whose dead mother still held its dress; a couple entwined together whose lovemaking had ended in death spasms; and other, more pedestrian corpses.

Some few they found injured or unconscious. It didn't take close inspection to tell the difference between the softly crumpled insensate and the rigor-locked dead*.

As with the corpses on the street, not all had died on the fire.

William looked in the first room they found that had a kicked-in door. He gulped. He hadn't liked the woman who lived there much--she'd been able to afford a whole room to herself, for one thing, which seemed terribly greedy--but nobody should die like that. She'd survived the storm, but not the other survivors.

After that, he didn't look.

No man among them was hardened enough to remain unaffected. They went from careful searches to glancing looks that could catch the essentials--dead or alive--without absorbing the details.

In that way, they worked through the tenement house until William stood in front of the door to the room he shared with his mam and the Tienken family. He cleared his throat.

"Fire," he tried to say, but it came out a squeak.

"Do you want me to go ahead and check?" Valentine asked.

William shook his head, his throat too tight to speak.

The men broke down the locked door as gently as possible.

Best get it over fast, William thought. He charged into the room--and halted. Another boy had charged forward at the same time and stopped as abruptly. Now he stood, staring, the knife in his hand hanging down by his side.

"William?" Robert Tienken said. His spaniel dodged past him and jumped up to lick William's hands. "You're alive!" Robert sat down abruptly. The knife fell from his grasp. "I didn't know what was going on, and there were the most terrible noises. . . ."

"How--how are the others?" William asked.

Robert pressed the heels of his hands hard against his eyes. "It's just me and Lena now." His sister crept out from her hiding place in the corner and curled up beside him. The spaniel wagged his tail and licked her tear-stained face.

William swallowed hard. He had guessed Mrs. Tienken dead when he saw Robert alone, with a knife in hand. That he'd lost one sister and his little brother too*--

William felt about two feet tall when he remembered how much he'd teased Robert's brother about his unfortunate reaction to cabbage.

"They're in the bed," Robert said, pointing. A green quilt ("the color of Irish grass," his mam had called it) covered three mounds.

"Come with me," William said. "My mam will be happy to see you and your sister. Choose what you want to take and these men will help us."

"This is home." Robert hugged his sister closer to him.

"We'll burn it down once the people are out. Too many died here."

"Mam has to be buried proper in consecrated ground!"

Valentine stepped into the room. "The church gives dispensation for special circumstances.* A priest will say a blessing over the ashes, and the ground will all be consecrated. Lad, you must look out for your sister, and the way to do that is to go to William's mam. Choose what you wish to take."

They took the little money they had and the things that held good memories or family history, but little else. The grass-green quilt they left.

They were last out of the house. A handful of survivors huddled together in a clutch. Others began walking to the Common, their belongings knotted up in quilts and slung over their backs.

Grinning, Tommy sloshed the contents of an unmarked brown bottle onto the wall. The reek of cheap alcohol filled the air. He struck a lucifer* and poised it on his fingertips, ready to flick into the puddle of alcohol at the base of the wall.

"Not yet, you daft fool!" Valentine seized Tommy's arm. "It'll catch the other houses on fire before we can clear them!"

Too late.

His sudden movement sent the match flying. The world seemed to stop, holding its breath, as the match turned end over end. It struck the puddle with a hiss and a fizzle--and then the fire flared to life, crackling like the flames of hell.

The shoddy wood made excellent tinder. The fire ate the alcohol-soaked wood hungrily and climbed higher, seeking more food. The survivors stared at the flames licking their way up the building. One woman screamed. They started to run.

William grabbed Robert's hand. Robert grabbed his little sister's hand. "This way!" William shouted, tugging them toward Beacon Hill.

"Wait!" Valentine said. He stared at the fire. "I've burned--ah, this is, I've seen a fair number of fires, and something about this isn't right."

He picked up a wooden spoon dropped in the scuffle, narrowed his eyes, and strode forward to stand as close as he could get to the burning building. Heat burnished his skin a cherry red. He threw up one arm to protect his face, but he held the wooden spoon out until it nearly touched the fire.

And stood there.

"Madness," Tommy muttered, but he waited to see what would happen, as did William.

The answer was--nothing. The fire didn't lick out to swallow the spoon.

Valentine backed away. "The fire is sticking close to what it burns." He brandished the unscorched wooden spoon. "It will not be jumping to other houses unless they actually touch."

The men laughed with relief. Tommy ruffled William's hair--as if he'd had anything to do with their narrow escape from becoming mass murderers.

William tried to recall his science lessons. "As if there's not enough fire aether to let it spread?" He vividly remembered one demonstration. His teacher had lit a match, and a stack of kindling a foot away had exploded into flame. Only the tube of aether between them made the transmission of fire possible.

Patrick spoke up. "It's all aether-related things that the storm damaged, Dr. Fallon says."

Valentine nodded slowly. "If the aether surged, it could explain the torrent of water that killed Conrad, and the exploding chandelier."

"Dr. Fallon thinks the dead might have been killed by their own bone aether, too." Patrick cleared his throat. "Er, she hoped we'd bring her a body to examine."

Valentine raised his eyebrows. "Oh, she did, did she? There are enough dead on Beacon Hill that if your ladylove wants a special gift, you can get it and wrap it up for her closer to home."

"I didn't--. She's not--. It's not--." Patrick stuttered until Valentine laughed hugely and relieved him of the need to answer.

"What about the bodies in the alley?" William asked. "Will they still burn?"

"Most of them touch the wall. As far as the others," Valentine grinned, "we'll set every tenement house in this cursed slum afire! Burning timbers, stones, falling embers. . .the bodies will burn." Valentine narrowed his eyes. "When you strike a match, things burn. While you're back up on Beacon Hill with your mam, you be thinking about that before you say something to my lads that will start a fire you won't be able to put out."

#

Boston Harbor, Boston, Massachusetts

The circus members stared out across the city and watched it burn. A thick pillar of dark smoke billowed up from Boston's North End, and thin rivulets straggled up into the sky from elsewhere in the city.

The skeleton man swallowed hard against the lingering bite of acid in his throat. Jonathan hadn't looked forward to returning to Boston, but he'd never imagined anything like this!

Lacey Miller, the equestrienne, squared her shoulders and touched her hat quickly, as if to be sure it sat at the perfect angle. A fine time for her to be concerned with fashion! "The situation calls for us to keep level heads. Perhaps this Mr. Roderick White can advise us as to our best course. There must be a reason his name was on the ringmaster's list."

In that moment, her unshakable upper-class composure made Jonathan hate her a little. Stiff upper lip and noblesse oblige* be damned, the situation seemed to him to call for some old-fashioned screaming and running around waving your arms in the air.

Lacey turned to the fortune teller. "Mrs. Wershow, who do you think we should send?"

Good choice, Jonathan admitted. The old witch always had a suggestion or six ready for anyone who asked. Uncanny accurate they were, too, based on things she had no business knowing.

"So kind of you to ask an old woman, dearie!"

Jonathan carefully didn't snort. Her ears were far too sharp, her movements far too quick (when she wanted them to be), and her eyes were far too keen for her to be that old. He rubbed his arm, remembering The Fried Chicken Incident. His elbow had been a reliable barometer of bad weather for six months after. She might act old if she pleased, but nobody could tell what she really looked like under all her scarves and shawls and paste jewels, and her veil concealed her face.

"You should go, for one," the fortune teller told Lacey.

Lacey's eyes widened. "I? Surely we should send someone with authority in the circus!"

"Hmm, yes. Dear, you're so achingly genteel that sometimes you make my back teeth hurt. Isn't that what we need to speak with someone close to the mayor?"

"I--I shall do my best."

Jonathan coughed to conceal a laugh.

"And for the second person--" the fortune teller's eyes gleamed through her veil, "Jonathan Matzke, the skeleton man."

Jonathan tried to swallow his laugh, but it went down the wrong way and wound up as an all-too-genuine coughing fit.

"Not me!"

"You were raised in Boston, and you still keep contact with some of your old friends. You'll have a much better idea of what's really going on."

Jonathan glared, but the fortune teller's veil foiled his attempt to stare her down. He'd never told anyone that he grew up in Boston, much less that he still wrote letters home. What else did she know?

"There's another important question that we must consider," the fortune teller added. "Who will act as ringmaster now that Mr. Loyale is dead?"

(To be continued in Episode 4, Who's Running the Show?)

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