The Knowing E-Book

Emma Hinds

• Herausgeber: Bedford Square Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 456

Beschreibung

A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH 'Vivid, visceral and utterly immersive. Extraordinary' LIZ HYDER author of The Gifts 'You can smell the spit and sawdust rising from the pages of this atmospheric gothic novel.' - RED Magazine 'A Violent, disturbing gothic tale compellingly told.' - The Guardian 'If you love Sarah Waters and dark historical fiction, you will no doubt be hooked.' - Diva magazine In the slums of 19th-century New York. A tattooed mystic fights for her life. Her survival hangs on the turn of a tarot card. Powerful, intoxicating and full of suspense. The Knowing is a darkly spellbinding novel about a girl fighting for her survival in the decaying criminal underworlds. Whilst working as a living canvas for an abusive tattoo artist, Flora meets Minnie, an enigmatic circus performer who offers her love and refuge in an opulent townhouse, home to the menacing Mr Chester Merton. Flora earns her keep reading tarot cards for his guests whilst struggling to harness her gift, The Knowing - an ability to summon the dead. Caught in a dark love triangle between Minnie and Chester, Flora begins to unravel the secrets inside their house. The Knowing is a stunning debut inspired by real historical characters including Maud Wagner, one of the first known female tattoo artists, New York gang the Dead Rabbits, and characters from PT Barnum's circus.

Leseprobe

To Rachel

Please note, THE KNOWING contains themes of sexual violence which some readers may find challenging.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Content Warning

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Five Points, New York, 1866

I dipped the needle into the pot of dark-brown ink and pressed its tip against my ankle, spreading the skin taut as a drum. My hand followed the line of the star, the familiar sharp prick followed by the smallest tap of ink settling, letting me know I had gone deep enough and could remove it with a pulling sting. This was the soothing rhythm of my days; pain and blood and ink mixed together.

‘How’s it coming?’

I winced. Just hearing his voice made me punch the skin too deep and red blood mingled with the ink. I wiped it clean, the brown pigment staining the palest skin on the inside of my ankle. I looked up at Jordan.

‘Nearly done.’

‘Hurry up,’ he grunted. ‘He wants his cards done after.’

He nodded to the man sat shirtless in front of him, receiving a sailor’s tattoo on his shoulder. He looked like a side of beef on the turn, red sunburnt skin curdling with pale sweats as his fingers dug into the splintering arm rests of the chair. A first-timer, that much was clear, but like all navy lads he’d not said a word of complaint.

I turned back to my foot. The star wasn’t my favourite, but it wasn’t my worst. My self-made marks were still shaky, but at least they were mine. Jordan had the run of my back, my chest and neck, my legs, my arms and my ass but he had little interest in my stomach (said the skin was too flabby) or my feet. He didn’t like working on bony crevices. If someone requested these delicate nooks he’d set me to it, saying it was ‘a woman’s work’. As far as I knew, I was the only woman tattooist in New York City, so what he really meant was it was work he was too lazy to do.

‘Now, Florence.’

I knew a warning tone when I heard it. I wiped once again, applying my handmade witch hazel balm, and dropped my needle in a pot of rum for cleaning. I produced my black velvet card bag from my dress pocket and pulled my chair closer to the sailor. He stank – they both did: Jordan of stale smoke and spilled whisky, a bitter scent tinged with a nauseating sweetness that permeated our linen, my dresses, our shop; whereas the sailor smelled like a man who’d not washed for twenty days and had spent every moment of them sweating. I tried to think of the buns I’d bought earlier from the Dutch bakery two doors down. I imagined the fresh honey scent of the dough, breathed through my mouth, and spread the tarot deck on the table between us.

‘I heard about you down at McSorley’s,’ the sailor said. His voice was higher than I’d expected. Looking at him properly, I thought he might not even be eighteen. ‘You’re a real mystic, then?’

‘She is.’ Jordan’s dark eyes followed my hands as I shuffled. ‘Providence brought us together a long time ago.’

Providence could also be called a tall man with a loping stride and a slow smile picking a little girl who could read tarot out of a ragtag pack of foundling gypsies at the Old Brewery, and promising to take her away from the slums. Pity he didn’t mention at the time that ‘away’ only meant adjacent. I stared at the back of his head as he bent to his work, hating the thinning, greasy hair that lay there. Lying bastard.

‘Now you work for the Irish?’ the sailor asked, shooting a wary glance at the clover stamped on the back of Jordan’s hand. I had a similar one on the side of my right breast.

‘Nah.’ Jordan hated the suggestion he worked for anyone but himself. ‘But they make good neighbours.’

Bullshit. The Irish gang, the Dead Rabbits, were not good neighbours and Jordan and I were as thoroughly in their pocket as every other business that backed onto Mulberry Street. He gave them gang signs, the dead rabbit or the clover, I gave them readings and they took a cut and chose not to bash our heads in.

‘How’s it work then?’ The sailor watched the cards sailing through my fingers, mesmerised. Customers liked the sleight of hand. I cut the deck and laid the cards before him.

‘Turn the top three.’

He did so. I read for him, saying the phrases I knew pleased Jordan the most. If I could work in that a tattoo would get this poor sucker a woman, so much the better. It barely mattered what I said, though. Now that I was sitting close, the sailor’s eyes never left my skin, skimming the edges of the short-sleeved, low-cut dress Jordan preferred me to wear in the shop.

‘You’ll be lucky on Friday if you place a bet—’

His eyes found the tiger on my left shoulder.

‘You’ve got a good chance at success for whatever you try your hand in—’

They travelled to the Chinese dragon on my right wrist as I pointed at the Sun card.

‘You’re going to draw someone to you, a lover of great desires and passion—’

They settled on the wheel of fortune below my collarbone. I didn’t need to look up from the Page of Pentacles to feel Jordan’s anger throbbing nearby. If the boy looked away from my chest, we might be able to move on.

‘These all your work, then?’ he asked Jordan.

I stiffened.

‘All mine.’ Jordan’s voice was dangerous and soft as velvet. The sailor didn’t notice.

‘Never seen a girl with so many like that.’ His eyes were still on my wheel. I started to sweat. ‘Never seen a girl with any, apart from people in the West Indies. She lets you do it?’

‘Of course. She likes it.’

I had liked it. In the beginning I would have done anything for him; he was so handsome and kind, and he worked so carefully and gently, whispering how the pain would soon be over and how beautiful I’d look. He’d followed it with kisses and caresses until I didn’t feel the difference; pain and love, it was all together. Then, later on, he’d wanted to ink me in places people would see. That’s when the problems had started.

‘Likes it?’ The sailor’s eyes were wide. ‘Good God, if I could find me a woman who liked pain!’

This boy doesn’t know what he’s doing, I thought, he doesn’t know what he’s costing me. If I could have, I’d have stared him dead in the eye and told him to shut his fucking mouth but looking at him was the worst thing I could do. I stared instead at the sweet-faced page boy on the card, his pink skin grubby now from my fingers, his cup yellow and the sea behind him blue as ink. I wondered where I would have to go to see water that blue.

‘Say, you don’t…’

I felt it before he said it, that this pause before he spoke would ruin my day.

‘… lease her out, do you?’ He sounded so hopeful, I could almost have laughed. He had no idea the man standing beside him had a gun under the floorboards and a fighting reputation. I held my breath.

‘Not for sale.’ Jordan’s voice was so sharp now even the boy noticed. I felt his stiffening posture in front of me and stilled. ‘Go upstairs, Florence.’

Didn’t need to tell me twice. I grabbed my cards and my coat and fled up the sloping stairs, letting the bedroom door click behind me. I waited beside it, listening. He was either going to kill him, or take all his money and kick him out. He might finish up the tattoo before he did either; Jordan never liked to leave a job incomplete. I found I didn’t care much what happened. For me, the end result was the same. It was always my fault. I sat on my side of the grimy mattress and closed my eyes. There was no way out of it. I had stopped trying to find one long ago.

I shivered. The late February wind was whistling through the window, the frame cracked and rotting away. It was always cold upstairs. Even when Jordan would finally heft his drunken, shit-smelling form under the blankets beside me after an evening of drinking, his boiling body wasn’t enough to keep me warm. I pulled my coat on, tugging a squashed bun out of the pocket. I pressed it to my nose, the shiny brown surface of it silky on my skin. They were better fresh, when the hot smell of them was so thick you could taste it, but I bit down happily, the stretchy yellow dough inside melting on my tongue.

I pulled out my cards and cut them, staring idly out of the window as I felt the worn edges in my fingers. I did this out of habit, whenever I was on my own. Jordan didn’t like it. It made me feel homey, or as homey as a child who grew up wild in Five Points could feel, the repetitive slice and shimmy of cards in my hands bringing my mind to a quieter place where the world slowed down. I let the tingling grow at the back of my neck and my breath became unhurried. I watched the cards. The Two of Cups. The couple standing on the card lifted their tiny inked goblets to toast one another, the ink lines around them expanding to fit their movement. Partnership. Union. Then the little figures upturned their cups, spilling the golden ink to reveal the blanched white paper underneath. The Two of Cups reversed, I supposed, though I had not moved the card. A broken relationship. No guesses what that was about. I could see the shades of other meanings pressing into the corners of the room, spirits lingering in the crevices of the rotting window. The chill was intensifying, my breath growing shorter and the steam of my breath thicker so I tapped the card with a trembling finger. Behave. The figures righted themselves and warmth returned.

Even when I was tiny and saw older Romani girls turning cards, I knew what pictures were coming. They told me I had the Knowing. Things people didn’t want anyone to know were whispers I heard or pictures I saw; I didn’t know it was wrong to speak them out loud until I’d had a few beatings. The Knowing made me odd, even among slum orphans. I’d been easy pickings for a man like Jordan.

I heard the shop door slam downstairs. He was coming. I threw off my coat, stuffing the half-eaten bun and my cards underneath it as Jordan’s boots stomped up the stairs. I heard the clink of his belt buckle pulled loose. No use in hiding or protesting, that had only ever made it worse.

‘My Florence, my Flora, my little flower.’

Dangerously too many names. I followed his hands with my eyes. One closed the door behind him, the other swung the belt.

‘Who do you belong to?’ A soft voice, like snow that falls quietly and crushes all the flowers.

‘You.’

Only one answer, but it wouldn’t make it better. At this point, all I hoped for was to make it so bad.

‘Only you, Jordan.’

‘Very good, little one.’

He leaned forward, whisky breath sour on my face, and I could see every broken blood vessel in the slack, stubbled skin around his neck and jaw. He kissed my shoulder and the tiger that growled there, the one the sailor had examined so keenly.

‘So then why was he looking at you, eh?’ His voice was still so soft. ‘Why was he looking at you?’

He always seemed to think I had somehow put the thought of wanting me inside the other man’s head, as if I perversely ushered along what inevitably came next. I lay back and rolled over, pressing my left cheek into the mattress. At the first stinging strike of the belt, I stared at my cards, a few from the scattered pile poking out from under my coat. My fingers itched for them. The belt struck, again and again, and I rose above myself, seeing our bodies below. I watched Jordan drop the belt with a clatter, I saw him pull down his trousers and wriggle my skirt up. Dark figures stood on the edge of my vision, ominous witnesses whose faces I was too afraid to see. I felt their secret anger pressing in on me, as if the very fabric of the world was in my hands and if I only gripped tight enough, I might tear it in two. But I’d learned long ago that listening to the dead came with its own cost, just like everything else. I released my clenched fists and let all that power be wasted. I drifted back into my body, to the deep, dull ache inside and his slimy stomach against my back. I tasted sweet dough and bile and swallowed it down. Pain and love mingled together; if whatever this was could even be called love. I didn’t want to think about that.

Instead, I thought about the half-eaten bun. It was a good thing I hadn’t finished it. Now I had something to hold on to, something to look forward to, after.

Chapter Two

I met Minnie on a Friday. It was my day off, which was how I came to be there, dodging pickpockets and begging veterans around the Battery and trying to find a quiet bench where I could sit and watch the new immigrants coming through the reddish sandstone arch of Clifton Castle. I liked to watch them, imagining the places they might have come from, Italians and Germans setting their shaky, trepidatious boots on American soil. I’d never known anything outside Five Points, but watching the tall ships sitting in the docks, the gulls wheeling around them, allowed me to imagine a world beyond the frozen skies of New York. I stamped the cold out of my feet and pulled my coat closer around me. Manhattan winters were always brutal, but this one had been lingering on for months. It was the first weekend of March; my coat elbows were already thin and patched, and my boots wouldn’t take another blizzard. I frowned angrily at the languorous clouds that pressed down on the horizon, all the way out to Brooklyn, and told the sky: No more snow. It responded by sending a sharp, chill breeze off the grey water. It was too cold to sit and dream. I turned my back on the miserable waters, preparing to walk back uptown to Jordan. As I did, I accidentally caught the shoulder of a tall, thin man.

‘Watch it.’ I sprung away, instinctively recognising the signature bump and grab of many of the desperate con artists who had been spilling into the city since the war, preying on the discharged soldiers and their pensions, but it seemed like he had the same idea about me. He snarled at me, a guttural sound in his throat like an angry bird, and grabbed the arm of my coat. I’d not buttoned it well enough and they were loosely sewn anyway, so it flapped open, buttons rolling off the edge of the harbour to plink like pennies into the water and exposing my tattoos to the world.

‘Get off!’ I spat at him, jerking back, but he gripped harder and growled at me menacingly. ‘Let go, you shit-swine!’

I noticed a splattered pink and white scar splotching up his throat and chin, livid against his dark skin. My first, abstract thought was perhaps his voice box had been scratched out by a bear and I was just wondering how hard I would have to scratch to get him to let go when a voice interrupted our tussle.

‘Hey! What the fuck are you doing?’

The voice came from below my line of sight, causing me to look down. There she was. She was about the height of a ten-year-old girl even though she was clearly a woman and had no lower arms to speak of save a nub below her right elbow that looked like half a hand. I’d seen foundlings in the slums without arms or legs and they mainly begged, and often made good coin from it whilst they were young enough to appeal to the uptowners. I’d seen soldiers who’d been crippled on the battlefield and they seemed to do everything the same as they had before, just made use of their teeth and feet to beg or work on the docks. I’d never seen a person dressed as finely, made so beautifully and staring so haughtily at me as she did now.

‘What’s your goddamn problem?’ she snapped at me. ‘You don’t have to speak to him like that.’

I stared between the two of them, the towering giant of the speechless black man above me and the tiny blonde woman below me, and struggled for my words.

‘He grabbed my coat!’ I said, taking the opportunity of the man’s relaxed body position now that the woman was speaking to rip myself away from his grip.

‘Abernathy?’ She immediately fixed her intense blue eyes on his face.

Abernathy bent towards her and I heard a weird assortment of sounds: barks, whispers and growls. Still, she seemed to understand and turned that piercing gaze on me.

‘You tried to rob him.’

‘Did not!’ I exclaimed. ‘I just bumped him.’

‘Oh, the bump and snatch?’ she snorted. ‘I’ve seen it all. Cheap trick thief, are you?’

I was surprised. She was dressed like a lady – her gown was clearly made custom to fit her petite frame and the rich, velvet fabric had to be a dollar a yard – but she spoke like an urchin. She clearly thought me one.

My mind went in two directions simultaneously. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a copper standing at the edge of the railings, keeping an eye on the harbour. If she called him over I’d be done for. A girl like me didn’t want anything to do with a night in jail. My other thought was of running. I was measuring the distance from here to Five Points, calculating the people I’d have to push past and how quickly Abernathy’s long legs might catch up with me. I didn’t like my odds. I’d just have to show her I wasn’t to be pushed. I straightened my back and glared at her.

‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m a mystic and the only lady tattooist in New York City, at your service.’

I bowed sarcastically, but when I looked up she was eyeing me up and down curiously.

‘Mystic, you say? And a tattooist?’

Her eyes flittered over my exposed neck and collarbone without judgement. I tried to stare down Abernathy over her head but his amber eyes were steady with boredom. Clearly, he was used to staring down more intimidating souls than me every day.

‘Well, you’ve a fine hand,’ the little woman said. ‘Where’d you come from?’

She gave compliments and demands easily, as if she were used to being answered, so I did.

‘The Painted Man, belonging to Jordan Whittaker. On the corner of Mulberry and Chatham. Five Points.’

I expected her to baulk at the address but she only nodded thoughtfully, her lips pursed together. I noticed how perfect her cupid’s bow was and wondered if her lips were so red naturally.

‘Do you take clients, girl?’ she demanded.

‘Yes, I suppose,’ I stammered. I was surprised. I took whomever or whatever Jordan didn’t want. No one had ever come in asking for me, but at the same time, work in a post-war New York was scarce. We weren’t in the position to turn away paying clients.

‘How’s your afternoon?’ she asked. ‘Could you fit me in?’

Her tone was so imperious and the look on her face so commanding, I didn’t think about the true answer to either of those questions.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.

That made her grin. A row of teeth, a little crooked, but very white.

‘No need to call me ma’am. I am Wilhelmina.’

She offered her half-hand. I grasped it and was surprised to feel her few fingers curling around my palm to grip me tight.

‘Wilhelmina the Magnificent Armless Wonder. Let’s go to your shop.’

At her words, I had the strangest sensation of the world around me suddenly re-starting, as if our conversation had been happening upon a small stage and the audience were as still as dark statues around us. As Wilhelmina began to walk towards uptown, I became aware of the people stepping aside to let her past. Some were laughing, some recoiling in disgust, but they all moved, and Wilhelmina the Magnificent Armless Wonder marched ahead. She was astonishing, sauntering like any fine lady three times her height, the purple feathers on her hat bobbing along jovially. She turned on the edge of Broadway, calling back to me:

‘I’m not biding all damn day, girl!’

I jerked forward, obeying without thinking, and led the strangers into Five Points.

‘This way.’

Five Points was sinking, everybody knew that. The shabby tenements of the slum leaned lopsidedly against each other as if, like many of their tenants, they no longer had the energy to stand. As Manhattan grew up around us, it felt like the only home I had ever known was rotting slowly into the ground. The smell of overused outhouses and too many unwashed bodies was as familiar to me as the scent of ink and blood. At the centre of it all was the Old Brewery, the derelict brewery that had once housed great, churning machinery and now played filthy home to a thousand of New York’s poorest. I remembered how it felt to live in those stuffy, hop-scented basements, crammed into spaces divided by makeshift walls and sleeping with all of your worldly possessions under your head for fear of thieves. Until I’d moved into Mulberry Street, I knew no other home. It was a place where people were born and lived and died in the same gutter. It was unsurprising that their ghostly spirit remains lingered too, but the Knowing was no weapon against groping boys and girls who nicked my boots when I slept. My life with Jordan might not be a delight, but at least I was no longer roused by tussles taking place next to my head or a whore doing business inches away. I picked our way over drunks rolling out of doors and ducked under decaying beams. We passed the amputee soldiers, their frayed caps held upturned to passers-by, begging for charity.

‘Fought at Antietam,’ they croaked. ‘I was there at Gettysburg, miss, spare some coin.’

I glanced over my shoulder, watching as Wilhelmina lifted her beautiful hem over stinking puddles with an unworried expression on her face. She didn’t look at them with the dismay you often saw on the face of out-of-towners. She wasn’t a lady, but she wasn’t like any woman I knew either.

‘Where are you from, miss?’ I asked.

‘Wilhelmina,’ she corrected, passing easily under a ladder that Abernathy had to crouch beneath. ‘Call me Minnie. We’ve been all over. I have my own troupe of performers.’

‘Like Barnum?’

I had seen Barnum’s Museum on Broadway and Prince Street, but never been inside. The posters outside were full of girls in skimpy outfits flying from trapezes, the famous little man Tom Thumb and freaks with strange bodies. Wilhelmina the Armless Wonder wouldn’t be out of place in that cast of characters. Neither would I, I supposed.

‘No, I am not like Barnum. I only work with girls,’ Minnie sniffed.

‘Oh.’

It seemed Barnum mainly worked with girls too, but I didn’t say that. I sensed Minnie didn’t think much of Barnum and the stacks of money he must have made from people like her.

‘So you’re a mystic?’ she asked, falling into step beside me as we crossed a road.

‘You could say that.’ I hated the word but Jordan said we attracted more customers when he painted it on the window. ‘Sort of.’

‘Palms? Séances?’

She spoke so naturally, as if it were completely normal for a woman like her to be strolling in a slum like Five Points and talking about calling the dead. She didn’t gawk and stare around her like the uptown snobs who came down for walking tours. They stumbled over shit and gasped and clasped scented handkerchiefs over their mouths. Minnie walked the slums as if we were strolling through midtown.

‘Just cards. I don’t do palms much, but I can do.’

As a child, scathing boys used to beat me whenever I spoke of ghosts. I’d learned to turn my eyes away from dark corners where spirits might lurk. The Knowing was like having a broken bone that never healed quite right. It twinged. Occasionally the world would slow and the shadows would lengthen, my breath would catch in my windpipe and my heart would lurch, but I would look away. Growing up in Five Points had knocked the truth into me: there was safety in not knowing.

‘For customers?’

‘And for the Rabbits.’ I guided us onto Chatham, dodging the carriages that rolled along, relieved at least for Minnie’s hem to be out of the sludge of the slum drains.

‘The Dead Rabbits?’

Minnie’s voice displayed no surprise, but I caught the glimmer of a glance between her and Abernathy.

‘Yes, we do their marks. I do their cards, sometimes.’

I tapped the clover on the rise of my breast, now visible thanks to Abernathy’s assault on my poor coat.

Minnie nodded thoughtfully.

‘You’re Irish, like them?’

‘I’m Roma,’ I said, ‘but our shop is on their patch.’

I instinctively looked around me, searching for familiar gang marks, flat caps and watchful eyes among the passing New Yorkers. Speak of a Dead Rabbit, see one that minute, or so the superstition went. If they were lurking, watching me escort a woman in a too-smart dress and a black giant onto their corner, they were letting it happen.

‘Is that it?’

Minnie pointed to the tattered sign of The Painted Man with its peeling lacquer and Jordan’s name painted on the window. I stopped on the sidewalk, Abernathy pushing past me with a bump and a grunt. They drew closer, her bright violet dress lurid against the brown and grey of the street. Jordan was inside. I had never brought back a client, a stranger or even – not that I had any – a friend of some kind, but I knew in my bones he would not like it. When I looked at Minnie’s small figure, her blonde head held high as she bobbed along, I knew there was something here not to like. I tried to breathe deeply, but just drew in a mouthful of foul air, hot with horse dung, and coughed.

‘You all right, girl?’ Minnie’s blonde eyebrows produced a tiny crease over her nose.

‘Don’t tell him you met me,’ I blurted out. ‘Please. Say you’re just coming in for some ink, not that you saw me or anything, please.’

Those eyebrows rose. I had never met anyone who talked so little from their mouth and so much with their eyebrows, but there was understanding there; a flash of something, woman to woman. She nodded slowly.

‘After you,’ she said.

I nodded my thanks and rushed forward to go back inside, feeling oddly like a spring being stretched, as if I were pulling away from something that would inevitably bounce back and hurt. The bell jingled on entry and Jordan looked up from his table. He was counting takings in between the untidy pots of ink, the smell of stale coffee filling the shop.

‘Where have you been?’ he grunted.

‘Nowhere.’

I quickly sat down, distancing myself from Minnie and Abernathy, but I could already see that it would never cross Jordan’s mind to assume someone had followed me anywhere. Jordan took one look at Minnie, snorted, and pointed down the street.

‘Walking tour of Five Points begins at Chatham Square, miss. Though I doubt you’ll be able to keep up with them.’ He eyed Minnie up and down wryly and then his black eyes rested on Abernathy. ‘Perhaps the kind gentleman can carry you.’

Minnie deflected his rudeness with a tilt of her chin and a flick of her blonde curls.

‘I’m here for some art,’ she said.

I saw Jordan frown at her business-like tone. Women never came in and he liked it that way. Women were for serving drinks and bedding, not inking, unless they were me. As if it knew I was thinking about it, my most recent tattoo began to sting.

‘I heard you were the best needle artist in the city,’ Minnie continued. It was a smart choice to flatter him. Jordan lit a cigarette and leaned back, appraisingly.

‘Aye, it’s true,’ he nodded, ‘but we don’t get many of your type down here.’

‘My type?’ I heard the edge in Minnie’s voice. Jordan did too.

‘Uptowners.’ Jordan blew smoke towards her. ‘I’ve heard fine ladies were having art done, in secret, like, but I doubt they would come to the likes of me for it.’

‘Well, I’m not from uptown,’ Minnie stated.

She sat herself on a stool and I watched in amazement as she deftly removed her boots with her one hand and then, with her bare feet, right there in the shop, lifted her toes with unbelievable dexterity, to unbutton her coat and give it, clenched between her toes and the balls of her feet, to Abernathy who was waiting by.

‘I’m a performer.’ Minnie smiled.

I gazed at her white foot, so clean and pale with no red rubs on the heels, chilblains or dirty nails. What would it be like to touch it? Jordan did not look impressed by this performance at all.

‘Seen better at Barnum’s.’ Jordan glanced at Abernathy. ‘And what does he do? Hold your coat? Or is he a specimen from the Indies?’ He smirked. ‘Does he carry a spear and show the ladies his cock?’

Abernathy growled at Jordan, the same menacing sound he had used on me. Abernathy looked younger than him but he was two heads taller and maybe twice as broad in the shoulders. Jordan didn’t move, simply puffing smoke towards Abernathy’s imposing form. Regular entanglements with the Dead Rabbits made him difficult to scare and he liked a brawl. He wore a tarnished signet ring on his middle finger and enjoyed breaking teeth with it. I had a scar in the shape of it just behind my right ear.

‘He doesn’t speak.’ Minnie pulled her shoes back on. ‘He used to be a fire-eater and burned out a part of his throat.’ Jordan’s eyes flicked to Abernathy’s prominent scar.

‘Worse things, I suppose.’ Jordan shrugged, uncaring. He clearly didn’t feel the same nauseating anxiety I did when he saw that shiny skin amongst the dark flesh, imagining the searing heat required to melt it.

‘So, what are you wanting, little lady? Just a little prick, is it?’

He grinned lasciviously, appreciating the scoop of her neckline as she re-set her dress. There was no one he wouldn’t leer at.

‘A little prod with something sharp?’ He laughed at his own joke, smoke billowing out of his nose.

‘Not quite.’ Minnie’s smile was sugary. ‘I want your girl to do it, alone.’

‘Florence? Why?’ Jordan stopped laughing.

‘Because it’s what I want.’

Minnie’s voice was sharp but calm. I had never heard a woman speak as she did. Abernathy dropped a stack of bills on the work table. I could see it was easily triple what a regular would pay, but Jordan sat back, suspicious.

‘I thought you were coming for my hand, eh?’ I felt the edge of his gaze on me and turned away, mixing my inks and trying to look busy. ‘What are you wanting my girl for? She’s no talent, I can assure you.’

Might not be, I thought bitterly, but at least I can do fucking elbows, Jordan.

‘A precaution. I’m a woman, she’s a woman; I’m sure you understand.’ Minnie smiled at him, her white teeth shining. ‘Why else do you employ her, if not for this?’

She was smart to use that tone; a little fancier than how she’d spoken to me, strolling up Chatham. She could clearly turn it on when she wanted and it looked to be working. I could see him calculating the risk in that dark mind of his. Letting me be alone with her, with anyone, letting me be given anything by someone else was something he hated, but there was also a fist fight tonight at McSorley’s.

‘It’s only a small one,’ Minnie said. ‘Won’t be ten minutes if she’s good.’

That cinched it. The lure of gambling won.

‘Fine.’ Jordan snatched the bills. ‘But your bodyguard sticks with me until you’re done. That will be my precaution.’

‘It seems fair. We have an accord.’ Minnie smiled.

Abernathy did not look like it seemed fair. He looked at Jordan like he was horse shit and I could have sworn he rolled his eyes.

‘I’ll take him over the way for a brew.’ Jordan rose, pulling on his brown jacket and crumpled hat. ‘Like it dark, do you?’

Abernathy snorted and held the door open.

‘Work quick,’ Jordan commanded me, placing his hand on the back of my neck as he moved past. To anyone else it might have looked like a gesture of sweetness, a stroke of affection between lovers, but I felt the clamp of his hand and knew what it was for: to remind me of punishments delivered whilst he held me down.

‘We’ll wait outside.’

I nodded, trying not to let my breathing show my thundering heartbeat. A tingling had begun down the back of my neck, the same feeling I got before a storm came. The sense of something beginning. The door closed and Minnie and I watched through the glass as the two men crossed over Chatham, dodging carriages and other walkers, to duck into the Italian coffee shop on the other side of the road.

‘He’s gone,’ Minnie said, quietly. She was watching me carefully. I tried to relax my shoulders. I had never been in the shop alone with a customer. I looked at her, admiring the way her soft features and curved outline set off the mundane bits of furniture around the shop so nicely. It all seemed cheerier without the harsh straight lines of Jordan’s body and expressions, lurking over his table and filling the air with furious tension.

‘Let’s move these chairs, I want to sit with my back to the window,’ Minnie commanded me. ‘I don’t want your husband to see me talking when they get back.’

Her eyes were flitting backwards and forwards between me and the coffee house. It felt like a clock had begun ticking somewhere and only Minnie was aware of how long we had.

‘He’s not my husband,’ I said automatically, yet I did exactly what she told me to.

Later, I would wonder at what moment my allegiance switched from him to her, but I cannot pinpoint it. Somewhere in the walk from the Battery, stepping over drunks in Five Points, and the moment the door had closed on Jordan’s back, I became tethered to her and I could not explain why.

‘What is he then?’ Minnie asked me, sitting in my chair.

‘He’s… he’s Jordan.’ I picked up my needle, hardly eager to elaborate. ‘What tattoo do you want?’

‘Can you do me a pair of wings on my leg?’ Minnie crossed one leg over the other, pulling her skirts up. ‘Right here.’ She tapped her thigh.

I watched the white flesh wobble slightly, like milk curds. I was surprised by how much I wanted to touch it.

‘Any type?’ I asked, throat dry.

‘You choose.’

I’d done a sketch last week of the archangel Michael for one of the Dead Rabbits, a huge back piece, but the wings were probably transferable. I pulled it out and traced it onto rice paper, before turning back to Minnie to show it to her.

‘All right?’

‘Perfect.’

She wasn’t really looking. I got the feeling she didn’t really care. I saw her eyes drift back to the coffee place. I could see that Jordan and Abernathy were walking back now, cups in their hands and cigarettes in their mouths. I turned to my work. Taking a deep breath, I dipped my cloth in the alcohol and washed the springy flesh of her thigh. I pressed the stencil on and rubbed it, her bare skin cool and slightly pimply under my warm palm. I peeled it away, inspecting the faint pencil marks. I stared at the downy blonde hair on her skin. I had never tattooed a woman. My world was men, with their grabbing hands and sharp shoulders. I picked up my needle, coughing to find my voice.

‘You’ll feel a sharp prick,’ I said.

I set the tip against skin, feeling the bounce of resistance followed by the pop of the needle entering.

‘I was expecting to.’

Her voice contained a smile and was warm on the top of my head. I couldn’t think of the last time someone had breathed on me like this and I had found it pleasant. I tried to do what Jordan did, maintain a steady patter of conversation, but could think of nothing. I was too nervous.

‘Why wings?’ I finally managed to say.

‘It’s what they used to call these in my childhood in the circus.’ Minnie waved her arm at me, the fine lace at the end of the sleeve trailing prettily over her half-hand. ‘My wings. Thought I could fly for a spell. Soon learned different.’

I chuckled weakly but with each rise and fall of the needle, each dip in the pot, I was calming down. The world was shrinking faithfully to the skin and the ink, and as she began to question me I began to answer, as inevitably as the breaking of flesh beneath the needle.

‘He did all of yours?’

‘Most.’ I licked my lips. ‘I’ve done some.’

I could feel her pulse through her thin, porcelain skin. As my needle passed over it, I imagined following one teasing blue vein all the way to her dexterous feet.

‘For how long?’

‘Years.’

I had been Jordan’s so long I barely remembered life before.

‘How old are you?’

I heard the sympathy in her tone and didn’t look up.

‘I don’t know.’

I knew that the year I had come to Jordan was 1859. It was the year before war broke out, the year the city was filled with the sound of church bells mourning John Brown. I had only just started bleeding. That was seven years ago, but the rest of it was all guesses.

‘Did you want every single one?’ Minnie asked. ‘Every tattoo he gave you?’

I sucked in my breath, trying not to let my concern show on my face. Jordan was only separated from us by a thin pane of glass. I could see the tight curl of his lip on the cigarette, the tense muscles of his neck.

‘Don’t worry, he can’t see your face. I’m in the way,’ Minnie reassured me. ‘Trust me.’

I realised I did.

‘No.’ I let my breath out slowly. ‘Not every single one.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you?’

I looked into her face. I didn’t think anyone could see the dark and intricate bonds of blood and bruises that tied me and Jordan together. She held my eye for a moment but didn’t say anything. Slowly she pointed to my chest, where my coat still flapped open from lost buttons.

‘It’s a tarot card, isn’t it?’

I barely knew her, but I could feel she had an excellent way of seeing the darkness in people. My chest piece was the tattoo I hated the most. It was a brand, and both Jordan and I knew it. It seemed Minnie knew it too.

‘Wheel of Fortune,’ I said, dropping my eyes back down to her thigh. I wiped some blood away with my cloth. ‘Card for change.’

She didn’t speak and I was lulled again by the repetitive motion of the needle, the familiar cramp between my wrist and thumb knuckle as I held it steady. One wing done. The other was smaller, tucked behind the first.

‘He can’t hear us,’ she whispered.

Soothed, I allowed myself to carry on speaking.

‘When we met, I was flipping cards for coins.’ The second wing was taking shape, the ink almost purple when it was fresh like this. ‘He came up and turned the wheel. Asked me if it meant he could take me for a dance. I said yes.’

He had stood over me with those dark, smiling eyes and the most handsome face I’d ever seen. The great wheel on the card contained all of heaven and earth inside of it and the crouching demon that squatted upon it had eyes flaming red in warning. A card with infinite possibilities in the rise and the fall, but a heavy price.

‘Living in the Old Brewery, were you?’ Minnie asked.

‘How did you know?’

My hand stilled for a moment, a little too much ink sinking under the skin, leaving a darker mark. Minnie gave me a small, knowing smile.

‘Where else would a slum gypsy orphan live in Five Points?’ she said.

‘Oh.’

I didn’t ask how she knew I was an orphan. I supposed it was written on my face, plain as day. An unwanted, tetherless child, adrift in the world. If it hadn’t been Jordan, it would have been someone else.

‘Why did you say yes?’ Minnie’s voice was soft, like sand trickling through an hourglass.

The honest answer was because I’d liked his face, and I was sick of the leery drunks who grabbed my blossoming body and the slobbery kisses from the street boys who were starting to look at me like I was prey to be caught. I sighed.

‘Because I was dirty and lonely and hungry,’ I replied. ‘And I had no one else.’

I’d had someone, once. I was sure of it. Someone had warned me to keep quiet about the Knowing and put cold cloths on my swollen lip after one too many beatings. Yet it had been so long ago and Five Points was full of people who disappeared. Now they were nothing more than the memory of the smell of warm skin close to mine, a remembered gesture that felt like belonging. When I’d met Jordan I had just been one of hundreds of foundlings slowly dying in Manhattan. I couldn’t see what lay ahead, even with the Knowing. If I had, I thought vehemently to myself, I would have just carried on dying.

‘You’re done,’ I said.

I set my needle down and wiped her skin. The black ink left a bluish residue around the lines and I dabbed them with rum, feeling her flinch, before smoothing my witch hazel balm on. I could feel the inflamed edges of the wings under my fingers. I heard the sharp hiss of breath pulled through teeth.

‘Sorry, I know it stings,’ I said, ‘but this will help with the swelling. Rub it with oil and don’t scratch.’

‘Thank you.’ Her voice was close to my ear. ‘It’s beautiful.’

I looked up and caught her eye, suddenly aware that my fingertips were touching her, stroking her, and I pulled them away. Again, I felt that tingling at the back of my neck. The soft, ballooning sense of premonition. I turned back to my table, eyes blind to ink pots, paper, needles, overwhelmed by the scent of her body: a musky smell with a hint of flowers that reminded me of expensive fabric shops. The smell of wealth.

‘If you can, wrap it with a dry bandage at home,’ I said. ‘You could use a garter to hold it in place if you want.’

I was rambling, but she didn’t seem to notice. She sat in the chair, her blonde head tilted slightly to the side, her tall hat feathers quivering. She reminded me of an inquisitive bird.

‘He called you Florence,’ she said. ‘Is that your name?’

‘Flora.’ The roof of my mouth was sticky. ‘You can call me Flora.’

‘Won’t you read my cards, Flora?’

I didn’t want to. The air was too close now, her breath was hot and sweet, and I felt shadows lingering in the crevices of the floorboards, awaiting whispers. They had words for me, I was sure of it, those spirits that lingered, but I did not want to hear them. I shook my head, glancing to the window, Jordan’s hard profile visible through the red painted letters. Minnie’s eyes followed mine but she didn’t turn her head.

‘If you don’t want to do it now, why not come to me uptown?’

Minnie leaned her head closer, under the pretence of inspecting her tattoo, and I could feel her warmth filling the soft space between our close bodies and bent heads.

‘I may have an offer for you, Flora,’ she said quietly. ‘I could use a girl with skills like yours.’

‘An offer?’

‘A chance.’ Her hand tapped the wheel on my breastbone. I didn’t move, though I felt that little tap reverberate through my bones. I swallowed heavily.

‘A chance for what?’

She leaned in quickly. For a cold, blinding moment I thought she might kiss me and I couldn’t move.

‘To start again.’

Then, whilst my body sat quiet and still under her words, I felt the soft puckering of a dry kiss on the edge of my cheek, below my ear. The pressure of it carried in my blood and I felt a responding tug in my abdomen so sharp I wondered if it was women’s cramps. I stared at those lips, watching them turn into a knowing half-smile. I shivered.

‘We’re at the corner of sixty-sixth, Hamilton Square. Abernathy will be waiting for you.’ Minnie shuffled her skirts back into place, wincing slightly as she stood up. ‘Bring your cards.’

She never asked me if I would come. Perhaps she knew from the moment her lips touched my face and I didn’t recoil that I was somehow hers. I sat in stunned silence as she left, nodded to Jordan, and she and Abernathy walked purposefully away towards Chatham Square.

‘Uppity cripple bitch,’ Jordan snorted, slamming his way back in before taking his new cash influx to the pub for drinking and betting. ‘What did she have?’

‘Wings.’ I cleaned my pots and packed my needle box. ‘She’s got no arms.’

‘Delusional.’ Jordan lit another cigarette. ‘I’ll be back later.’

He left, just like Minnie had done, and I was left alone, wondering if any of it had really happened. I tidied the shop and washed up the coffee pot. I sewed fresh buttons onto my coat (ones scrounged off an old waistcoat of Jordan’s) and turned the shop sign to ‘Closed’. The sun was casting its sharp orange evening glow down Chatham, the puddles and piles of fresh dung glistening with it. That’s when I felt it. A tingling in my spine, a thinning of the edges of my vision. Light pierced the window, bringing the smears and nicks into focus and illuminating the floating dust in a slow waltz around me. I closed my eyes and pulled my cards from the pocket of my dress. I shuffled them through my fingers intuitively, the worn edges as soft as feathers. When I looked down at the top card, my breath caught. A whisper of an invisible premonitory finger trailed down the back of my neck. It was the Wheel of Fortune. Sometimes, the dead find a way. I felt my resolve click into place inside my chest like a dislocated bone snapping back in its socket. It was time to leave.

I took my cards; I took some buns and a spare dress. I took my box of needles and ink and lifted up Jordan’s secret floorboard with the knot the size of a chestnut. I tried not to disturb the prime leaf tobacco, the small revolver and the items Jordan had always used to stop pregnancy, including a particularly loathed bottle of brown ‘women’s tonic’ that had made me bleed like I was dying. I grabbed his old knife and a small stash of cash and replaced the floorboards, wondering if he would be angrier I had left or angrier that I had stolen from him.

Outside, I locked the shop door behind me and then dropped my key down a drain. No going back now. As I trudged through the evening churn of mud, I felt eyes on my neck and back and wondered how long it would take the Dead Rabbit outposts to get word back to Jordan that his girl had walked out of his shop at twilight and not come back. The thought caused an unpleasant nervous tingling behind my knees but I didn’t stop walking. I set my eyes on Fifth and followed it like a pilgrim. Beside me, in the shade of buildings and gaps of horses’ legs, they came. I would not look at them and I dared not see their eyes, but they followed me as earnestly as they had done every day of my childhood. I took the spirits with me.

Chapter Three

Uptown, the air smelled of other things. As I walked along the dark sidewalk, I heard trees whisper above me and inhaled deeply: the sharp, green smell of living things and the sooty finish of machinery, the ever-present smoke from the trains. Hamilton Square was robed in darkness and silence, an eerie quiet that I knew only came with money. Standing on a stoop, with curls of grey smoke furling up from his hat in the orange glow of the streetlight, was Abernathy. I coughed. He turned, cigarette hanging in his mouth and nodded towards the house. He’d been waiting for me. I stared up at the great door, towering above us both with its stone crown of carvings and flourishes. I thought of the tilted walls of The Painted Man. This house certainly didn’t look like it was sinking. I followed him inside.

I had two thoughts on entering: that I hadn’t known houses could be this warm; and that it had the most doors I had ever seen. They lined up, great oak faces repeating down the hallway. Before I could consider what I’d got myself into, Abernathy’s hand reached in front of me to push a door open.

‘Florence!’ Minnie turned to face me, eyes bright and expectant. ‘How nice of you to join us.’

Minnie looked like one of the dolls you saw in the winter displays in the uptown department stores. I’d stood outside them before, my fingers absurdly hot with itchy chilblains and my toes aching as freezing sludge leaked into my boots, mesmerised by the shiny things inside. The people I was faced with were arranged like a display too, with Minnie in the centre. Then I saw their shifting eyes in the flickering firelight, eyes that raked over my sodden boots and snarled black hair, their lustrous pearls and shining shoes rebuking my dirtiness. I flushed. I was glad I was wearing my coat and my tattoos were covered.

‘Chester, wasn’t I just telling you about the mystic I had found?’ Minnie said.

‘You were,’ a tall, fair-haired man answered. He stood at the fireplace, one hand on the mantle. He tilted the glass in his hand from side to side, the golden liquid inside sloshing helplessly, as he looked me over. I didn’t like his eyes: eager and hungry. That was a look I knew all too well.

‘Mystics are a special interest of yours, aren’t they, Mr Merton?’ The woman sat to Minnie’s left pursed her lips. I saw, queasily, how the white face powder she’d used had congealed with her sweat and now sat like mushed-up newspaper on her upper lip. It takes a lot of money to be that fucking ugly, I heard Jordan say.

‘How intriguing!’ she cooed. ‘This child has the gift, does she?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Minnie nodded. She smiled at me encouragingly, but I clamped my jaw shut and glared at her. If I wanted to earn my bread in humiliation I might as well have stayed in Five Points. At least they didn’t look at me like I was a stain on the carpet down there.

‘Florence, come to the card table for me.’ Minnie gestured to me regally with the nub of her hand. ‘Abernathy will take your coat.’

My chest tightened. I was only wearing my work dress, designed for maximum exposure. I swallowed hard.

‘If I could just change my dress…’

Just as when you wash a shirt clean and hang it back up only to see the filth of all the others, when I spoke I heard the common tone of my voice for the first time. I had thought that because I didn’t curse so much and I was trying my level best to practise my reading now and again, I might pass as a bit educated, at least in a midtown way, but it wasn’t true. The very lilt of my voice, its tone and bite, gave me away: Five Points, through and through. I could see them smirking. I swallowed back words, not wanting to say more, and instead tried to plead my case to Minnie with my eyes: don’t make me do this. Minnie just shook her head. Abernathy tugged at the back of my coat with an urgent grunt.