walls of Patience’s roach-infested room. The jumping fleas on the straw mattress, specks of darkness in the dim lantern light.
“And, yes,” the professor added, “if the clientele felt one of their own had been exposed to disease, they would take what revenge they deemed appropriate. Burning was one way. There were others. They might paint the wall by the body, as an explanation. Or a warning to the rest.”
“But it wasn’t their fault. The soldiers brought the disease.”
Ramis gave an expansive shrug.
“These were young men drunk on revolution, battling a foreign tyrant and forging a new nation. What’s the worth of a penniless slum-row prostitute compared to that? They could do as they pleased on Holy Ground, with no consequences and no regrets. So, they did just that.”
Worthless. Disposable women, disposable lives. Seelie’s stomach clenched. Patience had found someone who thought otherwise, though. Her “Lady,” with her promise to take the wide-eyed girl away, to build her a new home on a faraway mountain.
Stop thinking about this like it’s a real thing, Seelie told herself. It was a dream. That’s all. You must have learned about Holy Ground in a documentary years ago, filed it away and forgot it, and your subconscious wove it into a story.
“What happened to the place?” she asked. “That neighborhood’s a lot nicer today.”
“The Great Fire of 1776 happened. A firestorm swept through the streets overnight and consumed everything in its path. A third of the city, gone in the snap of a finger, including all of Holy Ground. Sad for the people there, but a fitting end to the district. If I believed in such things, I’d say hell itself rose up to swallow it whole.”
“What caused the fire?”
“No one really knows, and most likely we never will. General Howe had taken Manhattan and forced General Washington up to the village of Harlem just two weeks earlier. They accused Washington of being a sore loser, who in turn steadfastly maintained he ordered the city not be burned. He was planning on taking it back, you see. Meanwhile, patriots who stayed behind reported seeing redcoats looting houses during the fire, the British said they caught patriots looting houses, and everyone saw the Hessians looting left and right. Opportunity, or a planned ransack? Your guess is as good as mine.”
Seelie thought back to the suicide video. The woman grunting, leaning into her shovel while the camera captured her last night on earth.
“German prick.”
“I’m Hessian, actually.”
“Hessians?” she asked.
“Mercenaries. The British bolstered their forces with mercenaries recruited from the European states of Hesse-Kassel and Hesse-Hanau. Not an uncommon practice, there’s hardly an empire in history that hasn’t benefited from soldiers of fortune, but the Hessians were…a breed unto themselves. They had a reputation for savage, even sadistic brutality as well as peerless battlefield prowess. American soldiers quickly learned never to surrender to Hessian jägers in the field, no matter how dire the fight. Good way to get hacked to pieces. Or worse.”
A modern-day Hessian mercenary is hunting modern-day Culper spies, Seelie thought. Which makes Leda Swan…King George? Okay, the parallels start to break down there.
“This is a long shot,” she said, “but are there any lists of the businesses that operated in the Holy Ground district?”
“Nothing like a period phone book—no phones yet—and details are sketchy at best, but I may be able to find something. What are you looking for?”
She didn’t know Patience’s last name (Patience who isn’t real, she reminded herself, the rational part of her mind stomping an irritated foot), but their conversation had given her a different lead.
“A brothel,” she said, “run by a woman named Madame Blanchette. She might have had a girl working for her, around my age, named Patience.”
Ramis looked dubious. “Common names for the time, especially the latter. Bit of a needle in a paper-stack, but I’ll see what I can find. Is this…relevant to our shared situation?”
“Might be,” Seelie said, though she couldn’t come up with a reason why. Her intuition was in charge, telling the annoyed logician in her head to sit in the back seat and let her take a turn behind the steering wheel.
And now it was time to say her goodbyes and get the professor out of the line of fire. She saw trouble coming in from across the quad, making a beeline straight for her.
32.
“Are you…certain you’re all right?” Ramis asked, peering at her. He had picked up on her sudden anxious shift.
Meanwhile, bad news was coming their way. She didn’t want him to