“They’ve done it,” she said. “Pearl Street is burning.”
Cormac dressed quickly in warm clothes, with beaver hat and lined gloves, for it was a frigid night, pocketed a sketchbook and pencils, and went out. High up on Duane Street, he could smell smoke, carried by the north-blowing wind, and peering down Broadway he saw a glow in the skies above the First Ward. He heard the dong-donging of warning bells and shouts of alarm and the strangled din of human voices. He turned his back to the wind, which blew more fiercely as he came closer to the harbor, clogging his eyes with cold tears. Thinking: Fire again. Like the fire that took my father’s body to the Otherworld. Like the fire that destroyed the earl’s mansion in Ireland. Like the fire that leveled the fort in 1741. Or the fires from the start of the Revolution, those great blazing, wind-driven fires that even toppled Trinity Church. Earth, air, fire, and water: the elements of the world.
When he arrived at Pearl Street, the firemen were already wild with panic. The icy wind whipped the flames, shifting, turning, creating immense orange flames and whirlpools of fire, as if playing some evil game with the puny structures made by men. The pumps didn’t deliver the water that was needed. The water itself was frozen beneath the ground, in the shallow wells, in the rotting wooden pipes of the Manhattan Company. The water that did flow quickly froze in the canvas hoses. In the orange light of the flames, Cormac saw cobblers and coopers backing away from their burning homes, blankets draped across their shoulders, their children wailing, their wives mad with loss. A woman in a shawl raced toward the flames, screaming, “Our silver, our wedding silver!” A fireman tried to stop her, but she plunged through the great orange wall and didn’t come back.
“Fucked,” a fireman said. “Too much wind and too little water. We’re absolutely fucked.”
And so they were.
For hours, with his fingers freezing in their gloves, Cormac moved through the crowds, swollen now by other New Yorkers who had come to witness the calamity (or to bring blankets and soup to the dispossessed). There was no control, nobody in charge. Sparks and embers rose into the purple sky, and to Cormac looked oddly beautiful, like very slow fireworks. Those sparks and embers fell upon the shingled rooftops of other buildings. Beams crackled, bottles exploded and popped, and then there was a great whooshing sound as a roof came down upon an upper floor. Followed by the sound of an immense coal chute as the roof brought down everything with it: beds and books and nightgowns, silverware and tools, crockery and etchings, boots and crinolines and andirons. Some people wailed as the artifacts of their lives vanished. Some looked too stunned for human feeling. The smoke made all of them choke and cough, and Cormac tied a handkerchief across his mouth and nose. Men were leading horses to safety up Broadway, but he could smell burned horseflesh from the midst of burning buildings. Dogs howled. Men cursed. Carts arrived to help evacuate houses in the path of the flames, the cartmen tripling their prices for the night. Cormac the painter made sketches. Cormac the newspaperman made notes. One fireman told him that the fire had started at 88 Pearl Street, near the corner of Exchange, and was discovered by a watchman named Hayes. Another said that fifty buildings had been burned in the first fifteen minutes. Some citizens blamed the volunteer firemen for the chaos, saying they were nothing but amateurs, if not criminal gangs. And what was more, some were looting the burning homes, stuffing their pockets with silver and tools and pistols.
“We shouldn’t pay them,” one outraged citizen shouted. “We should hang them!”
This had some truth to it. Around two in the morning, he saw Hughie Mulligan and his boys moving out of buildings on the far side of the densest fire. All wore the leather helmets of the volunteer fire departments. All wore heavy coats with bulging pockets. They moved quickly, darting in and out of smoke, then vanishing toward their carts.
About four in the morning, Cormac hurried to the Post on Pine Street and wrote a story (one of three that made the newspaper that morning), left some broad-brushed sketches for the engraver Fasanella, and then returned to the fire. It burned for two days, and firemen came to help from as far away as Philadelphia. When it was over, twenty square blocks and 697 buildings had been destroyed. It wasn’t known how many died, because no bodies were found in the ashes. Twenty-two of the city’s twenty-four insurance companies went bankrupt. The stench of the fire lay over the downtown streets for months, and one thing was absolutely certain: The old wooden town was gone forever.
“I warned you,” said the Countess de Chardon as Cormac stretched in her bath on the afternoon of the seventeenth and tried to scrub the soot and grime out of his hair and off his exhausted body.
“And I kept my word and kept my silence.”
“So you did.”
“But you’re in danger, Countess. You must understand that.”
“Why am I in danger?” she said in an amused way.
“Because they know that you know.”
She pondered this, her face darkening. “I know more than just this, alas. The Wax Man loves to babble.”
“That’s the problem.”
That night she decided that it was time for a vacation in Paris. She would place a friend in charge of the house and vanish for a year. Would Cormac come with her? She could show him all the secret places that she saw when she was sixteen. They could try to meet this writer named Balzac whose name was in all the gazettes. He wanted her to stay but knew she had to leave. Cormac told her that he couldn’t go to Paris. But he would be waiting for her in New York when she returned.
“It’s nice of you to say that,” she said in a melancholy way.
“I’ll be here. I swear it.”
She shrugged. And began the rituals of departure. She packed trunks. She went alone to purchase a ticket on the Black Flag packet that went south to the Caribbean before crossing the winter sea to Le Havre. She said that a heavy, sweet-voiced woman named Sara Long would run the house, and introduced her to Cormac. “She’s a delight,” the countess said, while the woman blushed. “Particularly in bed.” Then she wrote out a long letter filled with what she knew about the conspiracy to set the fires and sealed it, appropriately, with wax.
“Before I leave, I’ll let the Wax Man’s friends know that this exists,” she said. “And that it will be made public if anything happens to me. If anything does happen, I want you to put this in your newspaper.”
“I’ll do my best. It’s never up to me.”
“Yes. I understand. I know, better than most, who decides what goes into newspapers….” She sighed. “Just do your best.”
She then opened a panel above the bed, slipped the letter into a small safe, and handed Cormac the key. Then she sat down hard on one of her chairs, while snow fell steadily beyond the windowpanes behind her.
“I don’t want you to go,” he said.
“But for us, the timing might be right, no?”
“What do you mean?”
He sat beside her and she huddled against him while he played his fingers in her hair.
“I mean something has happened to us,” she said. “When Monsieur Breton arrived, it meant that each of us had a past, and that was too much to carry. The fire was just… a kind of way to end things.”
“I can’t accept that.”
“You didn’t think we would grow old together, did you? Sitting in chairs somewhere, gray and full of years, looking at the sea?”
“No.”
“Nor did I.”
“But you could move with me somewhere else for a while. Say you’re going to Paris and actually live in a house up on top of the island until they forget you. They’ll know you’ve said nothing because there’ll be nothing in the newspapers.”