asked.
“I’ve been looking at your paintings. I like them.”
There weren’t any paintings, but I could see what she was getting at. Ever since I was a young kinchin I’ve scrawled things on any spare paper I could find when my brain wants quieting. And every day before the start of police work I’d drawn something. Going out in the heat made my face burn, and I hadn’t wanted people. I’d taken the Madison Line omnibus to the northeast frontier of the city, to Bull’s Head Village at Third and Twenty-fourth, where all the pens, cattle yards, and butchers migrated when driven off Bowery. It reeked of recent death there, and the animals screamed a good deal. But they had thin brown paper to wrap meat in for next to nothing, and I bought a pretty huge roll of it. Then I took a sack and filled it with spent coal from an abandoned brazier near the sheep yard.
Shortcuts. I know how they’re done.
“You need to leave, so I can dress.”
“This one,” she said, walking up to a brown swath tacked to the wall depicting the Williamsburg Ferry leaving Peck Slip beneath a lowering July thunderstorm. Just precisely as I like to think of rivertravel, the way it still echoes in my mind—a boat cutting through a wide, placid river, seconds before a delirious collision of sunlight and rain. “I like it particular. This one is flash. How’d you learn?”
“Hand me my shirt,” I commanded. “There’s one by the washbasin.”
She carried it over, smiling. A genuine smile, I thought, but double-purposed: it was real charm coated on top of a measuring device. How was I going to respond to simple friendliness? Did I like that? I’d sized people up so myself, but I was better at it. Inwardly, I shook my head. This girl had been soaked in gore not eight hours previous, been subjected to God knows what beforehand, and I was worried about my apparel.
“I’m Timothy Wilde. What’s your name?”
“Everyone calls me Little Bird,” she said with a tilt of one shoulder. “Bird Daly. I can say the real one for you if you’d like me to, though.”
I said certainly, go on ahead, as I pulled on my shirt and wondered with an increasingly mortified feeling where my trousers had got to.
“Aibhilin ó Dálaigh. I didn’t used to be able to say it proper, so I called myself Bird because Bird is easier. But they mean the same thing exactly, only different languages, so Bird is just as good as the other, is what I think. What do you think?”
Trousers
, I thought. I now owned two pairs, and they’d never seemed so very important. Finally, my bare foot hit black worsted and I pulled them on quick as I could.
Now Bird was staring at a large sketch of a cottage in the forest, obviously and violently on fire. The woods surrounding were a blackly burned-out no-man’s-land, a dreamscape, and the whole thing smelled of incineration. I’d done it in spent fuel, after all. Whatever den she hailed from, she’d peered at paintings before. Her eyes were comparing new art to art she’d already seen. Not a Five-Pointer, then, fromour blackest pit of all, and not from the saltwater East River dives either. Too well fed, expensively dressed, and critical of charcoal studies.
“We need to talk about yesterday,” I suggested gently. “About what happened to you, and your nightdress, and where you belong.”
“Did you do this one when you were younger? It looks different.”
“No, they’re all pretty new. We’ll go and find Mrs. Boehm, see about some tea while you tell me what upset you last night.”
Bird paused before another patch of paper-covered wall, frowning. It was a simple portrait of a pale woman with black locks and a scholarly air, her cleft chin in her hand, looking off with wide-set eyes. Just Mercy, caught in a brown study.
“You like her,” Bird announced darkly. “You probably kiss her quite a lot, don’t you?”
“I … as a matter of fact, I don’t. Why—”
Pondering the sketch, I realized that the
“I’ve been looking at your paintings. I like them.”
There weren’t any paintings, but I could see what she was getting at. Ever since I was a young kinchin I’ve scrawled things on any spare paper I could find when my brain wants quieting. And every day before the start of police work I’d drawn something. Going out in the heat made my face burn, and I hadn’t wanted people. I’d taken the Madison Line omnibus to the northeast frontier of the city, to Bull’s Head Village at Third and Twenty-fourth, where all the pens, cattle yards, and butchers migrated when driven off Bowery. It reeked of recent death there, and the animals screamed a good deal. But they had thin brown paper to wrap meat in for next to nothing, and I bought a pretty huge roll of it. Then I took a sack and filled it with spent coal from an abandoned brazier near the sheep yard.
Shortcuts. I know how they’re done.
“You need to leave, so I can dress.”
“This one,” she said, walking up to a brown swath tacked to the wall depicting the Williamsburg Ferry leaving Peck Slip beneath a lowering July thunderstorm. Just precisely as I like to think of rivertravel, the way it still echoes in my mind—a boat cutting through a wide, placid river, seconds before a delirious collision of sunlight and rain. “I like it particular. This one is flash. How’d you learn?”
“Hand me my shirt,” I commanded. “There’s one by the washbasin.”
She carried it over, smiling. A genuine smile, I thought, but double-purposed: it was real charm coated on top of a measuring device. How was I going to respond to simple friendliness? Did I like that? I’d sized people up so myself, but I was better at it. Inwardly, I shook my head. This girl had been soaked in gore not eight hours previous, been subjected to God knows what beforehand, and I was worried about my apparel.
“I’m Timothy Wilde. What’s your name?”
“Everyone calls me Little Bird,” she said with a tilt of one shoulder. “Bird Daly. I can say the real one for you if you’d like me to, though.”
I said certainly, go on ahead, as I pulled on my shirt and wondered with an increasingly mortified feeling where my trousers had got to.
“Aibhilin ó Dálaigh. I didn’t used to be able to say it proper, so I called myself Bird because Bird is easier. But they mean the same thing exactly, only different languages, so Bird is just as good as the other, is what I think. What do you think?”
Trousers
, I thought. I now owned two pairs, and they’d never seemed so very important. Finally, my bare foot hit black worsted and I pulled them on quick as I could.
Now Bird was staring at a large sketch of a cottage in the forest, obviously and violently on fire. The woods surrounding were a blackly burned-out no-man’s-land, a dreamscape, and the whole thing smelled of incineration. I’d done it in spent fuel, after all. Whatever den she hailed from, she’d peered at paintings before. Her eyes were comparing new art to art she’d already seen. Not a Five-Pointer, then, fromour blackest pit of all, and not from the saltwater East River dives either. Too well fed, expensively dressed, and critical of charcoal studies.
“We need to talk about yesterday,” I suggested gently. “About what happened to you, and your nightdress, and where you belong.”
“Did you do this one when you were younger? It looks different.”
“No, they’re all pretty new. We’ll go and find Mrs. Boehm, see about some tea while you tell me what upset you last night.”
Bird paused before another patch of paper-covered wall, frowning. It was a simple portrait of a pale woman with black locks and a scholarly air, her cleft chin in her hand, looking off with wide-set eyes. Just Mercy, caught in a brown study.
“You like her,” Bird announced darkly. “You probably kiss her quite a lot, don’t you?”
“I … as a matter of fact, I don’t. Why—”
Pondering the sketch, I realized that the
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