Ghostly Echoes (Jackaby #3)(18)
“What were you talking to Mama Tilly about?” I asked, keeping pace.
“Hm? Just making some arrangements. Miss Lee was not entirely truthful about her state of affairs. She is in tremendous pain. She has at least one fractured rib and serious bruising on her legs and arms, possibly more serious injuries beneath—she needs medical attention. We happen to know a capable nurse. This should be a perfectly simple house call for Mona O’Connor—at least compared to the last one she performed for us.” Miss O’Connor’s last patient had been only mostly human. “I gave Mama Tilly Mona’s information and advised her to charge the services to me.”
I nodded. “That was kind of you.” We walked on for a few more paces. “Was Miss Lee really . . .” I hesitated.
“What?” Jackaby looked back at me.
“Miss Lee was really a boy, wasn’t she? Underneath?”
He slowed and then came to a stop and looked me square in the eyes. “That’s up to her to decide, I suppose, but it’s not what I saw. Underneath, she was herself—as are we all. Lydia Lee is as much a lady as you or Jenny or anyone. I imagine the midwife or attending doctor probably had another opinion on the matter, but it only goes to show what doctors really know.”
“Shouldn’t a doctor be able to tell at least that much?”
Jackaby’s expression clouded darkly. “I have great respect for the medical profession, Miss Rook,” he said soberly, “but it is not for doctors to tell us who we are.”
Chapter Eight
The sun slipped down to meet the horizon as we pressed on through New Fiddleham, the sky darkening like a dying ember. A lamplighter was making his way from streetlight to streetlight as we passed. My feet were beginning to ache and I had a stitch in my side, but Jackaby’s inner fires seemed only to have been stoked by our encounter with the thugs. He marched forward briskly and I began to lag behind.
A hansom cab rolled past with rubber wheels that glided smoothly along the cobblestones behind its horse. The couple seated within looked impossibly, almost arrogantly comfortable. “Have you ever considered hiring a driver, sir?” I called ahead breathlessly. “It’s just that we do seem to do quite a bit of traveling.”
“There is a great deal to be experienced in this city,” he answered, not looking back. “No reason to limit the scope of our vision.”
“The scope of my vision,” I said, panting, “is not quite the same as the scope of yours, Mr. Jackaby. And I have experienced blisters before.”
He paused at the end of the street and waited for me to catch up. I half expected him to be cross with me, but he looked sympathetic. “There is quite a lot to miss,” he said. “Do you know that long before it was ever called New Fiddleham, this area was already inhabited?”
“You mean by Indians?” I said.
He leaned against a wrought iron hitching post and nodded. “Do you see that?” He pointed at the empty road. At midday, this stretch of Mason Street would be a blur of carriages and pedestrians clamoring to and fro, but in the dwindling light of dusk it was abandoned. “Just there,” Jackaby prompted, “in the middle of the lane.”
Between the worn path of countless carriage wheels, a single weed had pushed up through the paving stones. “I see a little green plant, if that’s what you mean” I said.
“And I see the spirit watching over it,” he said. “The Algonquian peoples would call it a manitou. It is older than any of these buildings, older than the city, older even than the tribes who named it. I would wager it will be here long after all of these bricks have crumbled to dust.”
He began to walk again, but slowly. “There is something humbling about knowing that an entity capable of moving mountains and reshaping continents still takes the time to tend to the smallest patch of dirt. Little things matter. Footsteps matter.” He stepped a little farther down the block and I followed. “There,” he said. “The flower shop. Do you see the little alcove in the wall?”
“Yes,” I answered. It was an inconspicuous break in the masonry, an indentation only a foot deep, topped by a simple awning of red stone. I might have taken it for a bricked-up window.
“This whole block had become home to predominantly Chinese immigrant families until about the 1880s, when the ungentle gentry saw potential in the neighborhood and bought the property out from under its denizens. Most of the Chinese inhabitants who stayed in New Fiddleham relocated to the burgeoning tenement district a few blocks south. But not everyone left.”
He put his hands together and bowed respectfully to the hollow. “Tu Di Gong is a modest figure, but a noble one. He’s there now, still looking over his village like a kindly grandfather. That was where they kept his shrine. He serves his little corner of New Fiddleham in whatever ways he can these days, though his influence is overlooked and misunderstood. I find it all too easy to sympathize.”
We came to the end of the block, where the city opened to accommodate a broad park bordered by streetlights. The sun was setting on us—it was no time to be wandering in the darkest quarters of the city, but the shadows were not so intimidating here. The lamps shone brighter around the park than they did in the rest of the city, and the whole park hummed with pleasant energy.
“This is Seeley’s Square,” said Jackaby. “Mayor Spade’s only successful foray into his grand electrical city. Do you know for whom the park is named?”