Seven for a Secret (10 page)

My head spun a bit. Even if nearby restaurants remained open, I doubted many of Ward Eight’s were unsegregated. We could bluff our way in, but there’s always a risk when blacks pass for white and no one looked to be hungering for excitement.

“There’s an eating house near the Hudson slips on Charlton Street that might do for everyone,” I said skeptically. “But—”

“No, not Radolinski’s rat hole,” Valentine scoffed. “Their dumplings are always lumpy, how I’ll never know, and their veal sauce tastes of bear grease and shame. I’ve got plenty of scran at my ken.”

“Good night, then.” I nodded. “I’ll let you know—”

“Are you lot coming? Or are you going to drag these perfectly decent folk through the snowdrifts like a cat with a dead bird?”

Absorbing the fact Val had just invited us to his residence a block and a half away on Spring Street didn’t take long. The fact I was so glad of it bustled me thoroughly, though. After
not abolitionists
, for one thing, and
Mercy isn’t waiting for you
, for another.

“That would be much appreciated.”

“Then leave off your fireplug imitation and walk,” he ordered.

I did. As for the exhausted crime victims, they trusted me on a basic level by then, and so they followed.

That was a pity. Not only for me, but for them as well.

And I do think of them as well. Very often. If I’d known the sort of trouble that would follow Val’s simple act of decency, I’d have wished my brother a heartless cad in fact and not in theory. Instead, I took Mrs. Adams’s arm and walked straight out the door toward the ice-sharp edge of the known world.

“You owe me two, now,” Val pointed out, winking.

“I’ll remember that,” I replied.

And I did.

•   •   •

“Talk me through
it
from the beginning, slowly,” I said to Delia—who was unmarried, apparently, and whose name was Delia Wright.

“You look troubled.” She took a deep sip of hot Souchong tea.

“I detest writing police reports,” I admitted, fiddling with the quill. So tired that I could barely hear myself explaining my innermost thoughts to a stranger. “Particularly when I’m recording conscienceless things. It’s as if—I can’t explain it. As if when I officially document them, they have to stay with me. Or I give them permanence, or . . . I know it doesn’t make sense.”

Sitting at Val’s oak desk in his parlor, sipping tea whilst sizzling sounds drifted with the smell of browned onions from the kitchen, I’d begun to feel less like a Timothy Wilde–shaped ice sculpture. And strangely communicative. Mrs. Adams, who kept running her fingers through Jonas’s hair, was with him in the kitchen helping Valentine do whatever he was doing. I’m dead certain Val liked that arrangement. Delia Wright sat before me in an overstuffed chair, still wrapped in Higgins’s coat. Neither of us wanted to encounter her torn dress buttons just yet, I believe, though the room was warm. Nor the white strips of bandaging dividing her arms from her hands.

“As if you’re deliberately memorializing something that oughtn’t be remembered at all,” Delia said softly.

“I’ve never phrased it that well.”

We fell silent again as Delia gazed about the room. Valentine owns the second floor of a brick rowhouse in Spring Street—a large kitchen, a parlor with a dining area, and two bedrooms, all of them scrupulously clean. The second bedroom doubles as an office and is stuffed with Democratic Party paraphernalia that has a disturbing tendency to encroach on the rest of the house. For instance, above the sparkling freestone hearth, a framed sign announces
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS THE TRUE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
, and the one above the striped armchair Delia occupied reads
THIS HOUSE VOTES LOYAL DEMOCRAT
. As if that was in question. I’d mock him for it, but there’s no reasoning with a man who has a four-foot painting of Thomas Jefferson in his bedroom. Opposite an oil study of an American eagle armed with arrows in its talons.

“Please tell me about it, howsoever you like.” I dipped the quill in the ink pot. “Take your time.”

Delia took an abrupt interest in the edge of her saucer. “I’d walked Jonas home from school—I teach at the Abyssinian Church along with Reverend Brown—and we were in the sitting room roasting some chestnuts. I like to stay over when Charles is away. The men knocked and when Meg opened the door, they forced their way inside.”

“Had they other accomplices?”

“No. It was just Varker and Coles. I told Jonas to run, but Coles caught him and tied his hands behind his back.” Her expression went brittle, eggshell thin. “I tried to tear him away, but I couldn’t manage it, and by that time Varker was back from shutting Meg in the pantry. Varker pointed the gun at me. Then he said if I kept struggling, he’d take it out of Jonas’s hide.”

I’d no wish to snap Val’s quill, but that was getting to be a difficult job. “You might have seen that Varker’s wrist is shattered. I don’t know if you remember. Anyway, I’m pleased to tell you about it.”

Her brown eyes sparked. They were very dark, but lit from within, a late-October sort of color. “Whose doing was that?”

“My brother’s.”

“I’d have killed him,” she said. Flat and even. “If he’d touched my nephew, I’d have murdered him. I don’t care how. I’d have found a way.”

I touched the feather to my lip. Delia Wright, I concluded, was a decidedly different woman from Lucy Adams. Mrs. Adams’s terror for her loved ones had seemed a bottomless pit. Freefalling, almost unmanageable—I was amazed she’d acted as courageously as she’d done. Deeply admiring, in fact. I’d seen such fear in those grey eyes, fear churning and depthless as hell itself. It had rendered her exhausted afterward. Near mute. Delia, though—now the shock had worn off—was furious.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she owned with a half smile. “You’re an easy man to talk to.”

“I’m a rosewood secretary,” I found myself confessing ruefully. “All neat little drawers and dark cubbies people lock their bloodied knives in. I don’t mean to imply—God, I’m sorry. You’re easy to talk to yourself. And you won’t find I’ve any sympathy for that worm. What happened next?”

“They took us away in a carriage. It was all very fast. After they locked us in that room, they left us in the dark for hours, chained to opposite walls. I kept talking to Jonas, telling him to move, that he’d grow too cold otherwise. Reciting poems to him, stories. When Varker came back, he’d evidently been drinking. He told me he needed to test the quality of the merchandise.”

I got it all down. And in my horridly clear handwriting too. But I might as well have been trying to draw blood from the paper, I gripped the quill so hard.

“Then you men arrived. That part . . . you’re right, I don’t remember as clearly. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Miss Wright . . .” I hesitated. “Your sister said something to me earlier, something she hadn’t the time to explain. Have slave catchers kidnapped her previously?”

The look that crossed her face was sky wide, enormous—it didn’t fit within her round lips, within the sun-dappled skin at the edges of her eyes.

“All three of us were stolen. When we lived in Albany. They meant to auction us at the Capital. Not Varker and Coles, of course. Others like them. Charles Adams encountered us there and arranged for our release when he learned we were free. Oh, didn’t you know?” she continued when I frowned in confusion. “Charles Adams is white. Apparently someone or other forgot to mention that to you.” When Delia Wright encountered no worse than a raised eyebrow on my part, she exhaled, her mouth melting into an amiable curve. “Afterward—they grew to like each other. He whisked her to Massachusetts after proposing so that all would be quite official. Not like these common-law marriages the State of New York ignores so resolutely. Thank God he’ll return in two days’ time.”

She was right, of course. Miscegenation is illegal in our state, but prosecuted almost never. Copper stars have existed only for six months, after all, and laymen who object to interracial union would generally rather die than acknowledge it exists. So plenty of poor whites and blacks set up housekeeping, either legally by way of Massachusetts or practically by means of sharing a bed. But for people of Charles and Lucy Adams’s obvious means—it was unusual. Extremely. No matter how pale she was, or how radical his abolitionism.

I was about to observe this fact when footsteps sounded. One set neat and delicate and the other smaller, like its echo. Mrs. Adams approached Val’s dining table carrying a pot with a golden crust crowning it, her burden flooding the air with the scent of butter, Jonas trailing three feet behind her. It was an improvement, those three feet. A recovery. Jonas had a full, somber mouth, the upper lip quite as wide as the lower, and he seemed to have abandoned my overcoat in the kitchen. He gave his aunt and me a brief smile.

“
I
put the crust on the pie, and did it perfectly, and I marked it with an
X
,” he announced.

“Well executed, Admiral Adams,” Delia replied. Adding to me, “Jonas currently boasts a fleet of nine boats.”

“Toy boats,” the lad explained soberly.

“I worked on a ferry myself as a boy and loved it,” I told him.

“Mr. Wilde, I’ve never seen anyone make a shortcrust in under ten minutes, nor season a pigeon pie with white wine, but I can tell you the results seem to be spectacular,” Lucy Adams said with a weary smile.

Val appeared, setting plates and a formidable knife on the table. “Pigeon is subjected every day in this city to undeserved atrocities.” He then wandered over to the desk with a hand cocked on his hip, reading my report over my shoulder. A flicker of revulsion tugged at the sack beneath his right eye.

“Pigeons deserve our respect,” Delia affirmed, taking Jonas’s hand and going to the table. “I’ve had terrible pigeon more times than I care to recall. I try not to dwell on those memories.”

“I once had pigeon at the firehouse I thought was strips of boiled belt leather. Boiled, but
dry
, you savvy? Ought to have been impossible, speaking scientifically.”

“A miracle of culinary arts. I can’t think of anything fouler tasting than bad pigeon.”

“All bad food is close akin to a bad tumble. Not only personally offensive, but a horrifying waste of time.”

Following this exchange, it grew impossible not to smile. I couldn’t even manage to temper my expression with a sourly angled eyebrow. Valentine reached for the inner pocket of his swallow-tailed jacket and produced a silver flask, unscrewing the top as it emerged. He took a pull, then dangled it before my nose. I accepted, ready to celebrate the bizarre sensation of actually liking my elder brother by pouring what turned out to be flash-quality rum down my throat.

“I haven’t had your pigeon pie in years,” I recalled.

“Then you’d best look lively,” he advised, “before I yam it all.”

I wish that I’d felt as if dinner that night was something to be savored. But I fancied it repeatable—my brother laughing regretfully, two beautiful and clever women speaking in low but determined swells, and a kinchin who shyly amazed us with his facility at dangling a spoon from his nose and then described the outlandish histories of the boats in his fleet. If I’d known how fast it would pass, swift as a New York springtime, I’d have paid better attention.

I ought to have paid better attention to all manner of things.

After we’d tidied the kitchen, just as I was beginning to fret over finding a decent hotel in a blizzard, Valentine appeared in his parlor with coat, muffler, and top hat donned.

“Where are you going in the middle of the night?” I asked. Not a bit certain I wanted the answer.

“I do have
duties
, you know. When you barge in like a freight train and squander hours of my time, they still exist afterward. I’m on shift with the firedogs.”

I enjoy Val fighting fires about as much as I enjoy him taking ether, but held my tongue, knowing it a lost cause. “We’ll be off, then, to find—”

“My brother,” Valentine said clearly to the exhausted family behind me, “has the manners of a brained squirrel. I’ll rug at the engine house tonight and tomorrow. Extra libbege linen for you lot is in the trunk in my bedroom. I don’t need to add that it’s a flasher play if no one knows you’re here. Take my key.” Metal arced through the air and landed on the table. No one touched it. “If you must leave, leave only by the back exit, and look sharpish first, and best not to touch the laudanum on the bookshelf, that’s . . . special.”

With this earth-shattering announcement, he was out the door. If Valentine had announced his permanent defection to the Whig Party, I don’t think my face would have behaved any differently.

“My God,” Lucy Adams breathed.

I dove after my brother. After scrambling down the short hall, I found myself addressing his broad back as he descended the stairs.

“That’s awfully generous of you.”

“I sleep at the engine house plenty often, anyhow.” He glanced back, an evil smile curling upward. “I’m ruminating on a way you could keep warm yourself tonight, Tim. It’s a long, cold walk back to Ward Six. And the sister seems like she could use some comfort.”

I bit the tip of my tongue, understanding dawning.

“You are a horrible man,” I decided.

“I’m a philanthropist. Give her a taste of the Wilde tonic and see how she perks up again. Try to draw it out a bit if you can manage to after so long, there’s a devilish little trick with a pinky finger where if you—”

“Everything about you is wrong.”

“No, I gunned her over pretty thorough, and she looks a sweet, soft handful of all that’s right in the world to me.”

“I’m not—”

“Just because I savvy you’re right-handed doesn’t mean you need to work the wrist until
everyone
knows it.”

The right hand in question, which I had admittedly grown to know better of late, clenched into a fist.

“We’re never speaking of this again,” I snapped, turning on my heel.

“Sleep well,” came the infuriatingly cheery reply.

I barged back into Val’s ken looking like a thundercloud had just gone eight rounds with a hurricane, but no matter.