Poe must die

Figg.”

“Man like Jonathan, he ain’t one to fritter away the hours.”

“I would imagine that to be true. I have not seen him but I feel him to be someone who-Rachel, Rachel!”

She ran from the room, hands covering her tear-stained face. “Please, please forgive me. I must leave.”

The door slammed behind her. Poe stared at it, then said, “Mr. Figg, you are here to kill, are you not?”

“You know it to be true.”

“Then kill Jonathan quickly, for I fear if you do not, he will be the cause of harm to her. I shall not involve myself in any of your other planned homicides, but in the matter of Jonathan, count on me to aid you is disposing of him in anyway you deem feasible.”

“For the sake of the woman.”

“For the same reason, Mr. Figg you seek the death of Jonathan. For a woman.”

Suddenly, Figg placed a thick finger to his wide mouth, motioning Poe into silence. Seconds later, Figg had tiptoed to the door and cupped the knob in his huge fist. After a quick look at Poe, Figg yanked the door open.

The brown carpeted hallway, lined with oil paintings and dotted with busts of Roman emperors, was empty.

“’Eard somebody out ’ere.” Figg, his eyes narrowed and alert, looked left, then right.

Poe walked quickly towards him. “Perhaps Rachel.”

Figg closed the door. “No, squire. She’s the missus ‘ere, so she has no call to go skulkin’ around. Anyway she was already inside, hearin’ it all so why should she creep about. Someone else, it was. One of them spies you been carryin’ on about, I dare say. Best you and me get hoppin’. Get to the boardin’ house where the Renaissance Players lays their little ‘eads. After that, I ain’t to sure what we does.”

“I am. Sproul.”

“Why ‘im?”

“To remove the body of Justin Coltman from his clutches.”

“Now why should we want to do that?”

“So that Jonathan will come to claim it. So that you, Mr. Figg, can then kill him. The safety of Mrs. Coltman is important to me and I am convinced she is in danger so long as Jonathan lives.”

“Squire, you are a devious little fellow. ‘Ere I’m thinkin’ I’m leadin’ you and now all of a sudden it’s you what’s leadin’ me. Mind tellin’ me why we don’t just attach ourselves to Mr. Miles Standish and let him lead us to Jonathan.”

“For the same reason we do not follow Hugh Larney or others my intelligence tells me are a part of this foul business. We do not know when Miles Standish will contact Jonathan/Paracelsus. Were we to attach ourselves to Mr. Standish we might have a long wait until he reveals himself and, more important, I prefer that we not merely drift into matters if at all possible. Sproul is our next move.”

Figg grinned as he placed his tall top hat on his shaven head. “Ah, Mr. Poe. You has the makin’s of a right foxy gent, you does.”

Poe, licking his lips, stared at several bottles of alcohol on a sideboard near a bookcase. He wanted …

Then he tore his eyes away, focusing on Figg. “We have work before us, Mr. Figg, for which a clear head is most desirable. Let us be gone from here and God be with us, for we will both have need of Him before this matter is resolved.”

NINETEEN

Manhattan is a thin island thirteen miles long and no more than two and a half miles at its widest point. By 1840, this finger-shaped piece of land contained the world’s worst slum-Five Points-which surpassed the urban horrors to be found in London, Paris or Calcutta. Located at the base of Manhattan and within walking distance of City Hall, Five Points was the name give to the area where five streets-Cross, Anthony, Little Water, Orange and Mulberry-met. By 1848, names and sizes of the streets had changed, but Five Points remained. Now it was the most dangerous place in New York City.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Five Points did not exist. The area had been swamp and marshland until Manhattan’s increasing population, with its resultant demand for living space, forced New York City to drain that land and fill it with earth. Five Points then enjoyed a brief respectability. But because the swamps and marshes had been poorly drained, the tenements above began to slide and collapse into the ground and those families who could afford to move did so quickly.

Those remaining or now entering Five Points were people destined to exist in terrible poverty. Crime as a means of survival was inevitable and the Irish, who formed the majority, were the most visible as murderers, thieves, gamblers and purveyors of the casual violence which became a part of New York City early in its history.

Irish gangs ruled the streets and vice of Five Points under names such as the Kerryonians (from County Kerry), Shirt Tails, Roach Guards, Plug Uglies, Black Birds, Chichesters. In five-story tenements of old and rotting wood, Irish and Negroes lived without heat, gaslight or running water, in buildings on the verge of tumbling into streets where the mud was knee deep when not covered by garbage or packs of wild pigs.

The decaying structures were connected by tunnels which were the site of horrible crimes, in addition to being escape routes for those slum dwellers who had murdered and robbed, thereby bringing down unwanted attention on themselves. Within the tenements, behind windows patched with rags, lived starving men, women and children who endured their miserable existence by staying drunk as often as possible. They fought rats and each other to stay alive in buildings with names like Bucket of Blood, Dead Man’s Place, Gates of Hell, Knife in the Throat. They survived by any means imaginable and at the expense of each other.

Along with grinding poverty, vice was everywhere in Five Points. There were brothels, dance halls, rum shops, gambling rooms and green groceries, supposedly selling vegetables but actually selling homemade whiskey that was as much a health hazard as a stroll through the streets of Five Points alone on a dark night.

Dominating Five Points was the Old Brewery, called Coulter’s Brewery when built in 1792. By 1837, the huge five-story wooden building was ugly and decrepit, surrounded by the horror of Five Points and occupied by more than a thousand Irish and Negro men, women and children who lived in constant danger. The danger came not only from the surrounding slum but from the inhabitants of the brewery, who had no qualms about preying on one another. It was a population of murderers, prostitutes, thieves, and beggars all desperate enough to do anything, all living in shocking sexual licentiousness and decay.

Though it was said for many years that one person was murdered daily inside of the Old Brewery, the crime invariably went unpunished, for police avoided the building out of fear for their own lives. If on rare occasions police did enter the mammoth, foul-smelling structure, it was always in force, with almost no chance of capturing an offender well acquainted with the hidden tunnels and passageways.

Jonathan had come to the Old Brewery to kill Hamlet Sproul’s woman, Ida Sairs, and the two children she’d borne the grave robber. The slum held no terror for Jonathan, for he had completed the ritual.

In the night, Jonathan was a noiseless shadow, travelling as silently as smoke, bringing death to those he had marked for sacrifice, for revenge.

For you, Asmodeus. Their deaths I lay at your feet. Grant me time, demon king, to find the throne, to make the dead Justin Coltman speak.

Ida Sairs, small, with red hair parted and pulled tightly back into a bun, her pale, thin face spotted with freckles, knelt on the floor of her room in front of a bucket of burning charcoal, using a foot-long wooden stick to poke at a piece of blackened pork which was to feed herself and the two boys, aged two and three. When the meat was done, she would heat what was left of the coffee, which would taste of roast peas and chicory and for a sweet there would be hard, stale bread covered in molasses. Not a feast for a king but at least it was something in the belly. She would have liked a pail of beer, but there was not a coin to waste on something like that. Be patient, Hamlet had said. His fortune would soon change and there would be beer to bathe in. Yes, there would be that