Seven for a Secret (11 page)

“The place is yours for two nights. I’ll be back to escort you home.”

The sisters stared at each other, as dumbfounded as they were relieved. Jonas made a happy dive for the fireplace and commenced poking at the logs to send brilliant starbursts up the flue. Mrs. Adams shook her head in glad wonderment before hastening after him, murmuring something about the dangers of rogue sparks.

Delia removed Higgins’s overcoat, not so much as glancing at her ruined buttons. She hung it on the nearest chair. That was another recovery, and one I loved seeing.

“When Charles is home, you’ll both come to West Broadway and be thoroughly feted,” she said, smiling. “Between Meg and Lucy and myself, you won’t know what to eat first, nor will your brother. I’ll try not to tease you over it and confine myself to heaping roast pig on your plate.”

“I’d like that,” I said. “I’d like it tremendously.”

Then I went home through weird and wild streets that shone like a full-scale model of New York City carved from ice. All windswept, all abandoned. All mine for once. In seconds, I was snowfrosted and heavy limbed. I didn’t care, not about the bone ache or the wind searing my eyes or the fact that my brother is despicable and incredible in equal measure. I didn’t even care that the snow was piled against my door in Elizabeth Street and that residents are required to clear their own sidewalks as I walked round the back and gamely found Mrs. Boehm’s snow shovel. The world was spinning the way I wanted it to that night, and I’d helped to give it the hard push. For the second time in as many days, I was about as happy as I ever am.

Which ought to have been my first warning: that never lasts very long.

seven

Alas! that we are called to witness American Christians, who are prepared thus to sacrifice long-cherished friendship, ardent and sincere affection, patriotism, country, conscience, religion, all! all! to this visionary and necessarily fruitless war against slavery!

—DAVID MEREDITH REESE,
HUMBUGS OF NEW-YORK: BEING A REMONSTRANCE AGAINST POPULAR DELUSION WHETHER IN SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, OR RELIGION,
1838

W
hen the worst
happened to me—
and by worst I don’t quite mean unendurable, just grimmer than anything I could have imagined—I was trying to solve another mystery entirely. A mystery that was also a miniature miracle.

The morning after the snowstorm, my eyes slitted slowly awake when dawn’s pale glare cannoned off the drifts and through my window. Rolling out of bed, my feet hitting deliciously warm floorboards, there wasn’t a thing I wanted from life but a word with Mrs. Boehm, a day-old roll, a hot cup of coffee, and a new puzzle from George Washington Matsell.

Downstairs smelled of the sweet onions Mrs. Boehm had cooked down and then stuffed into some sort of bread, the name of which always seemed composed entirely of consonants whenever I asked her about it. Mrs. Boehm is half Bohemian and when talking to herself, divides her vocabulary between that language and German. She owns three dresses, to my knowledge, and that morning she wore the plain navy twill with white buttons running from the genial scoop collar down to her toes. The one that makes her hair marginally less ashen but her eyes marginally less blue. She seemed to be awaiting me, for she glanced up just as I finished adjusting the knot in my cravat. The set of her generous mouth seemed troubled.

“Are we at war with Mexico over Texas yet?” I quipped. “Or is it with England, over Oregon?” We’d been flirting dangerously with both for months.

“There are many dead along the Hudson. In the storm. Ships, everywhere crashing. And a new harbormaster who did not know his business.”

“My God. Was it in the
Herald
?”

“Germans next door.”

This was Mrs. Boehm’s most reliable source of information. I had the
Herald
, she had
Germans next door.
I sat down at the worktable, for I wasn’t due at the Tombs for an hour yet.

“Herr Getzler, he works repairing the steamers,” she said. “Engines and such. Losses were very bad, he said to me. Thank you for last night clearing snow.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You’ve a letter.”

She nodded at a piece of folded correspondence resting on the table.

My heart almost stopped.

No, not quite right. It expanded like a balloon and then commenced pulsing painfully. But that’s not quite sufficient to the purpose either, now I think on it.

I could have had a hundred hearts, and they wouldn’t have been sufficient to the purpose.

Handwriting is a curious thing. Mine is neat and scholarly, as if I’d been whipped about the palms for forgetting to add proper flourishes to my capitals, and that was never the case. I stopped schooling at age ten and commenced devouring the Underhill library wholesale at fourteen. Whether my young self cultivated a steady hand or it was born in me, I’ll never know. The evidence has been erased—I remember that my mother’s receipts for muffins and fried rabbit and the like were neatly penned, but my father was a farmer, and I’ve no notion whether he had his letters at all. My brother’s is shockingly unlike him but very like mine. Regular as typesetting, largely untroubled.

Mercy’s looks like a spider’s web if you had collected its inky threads in the tenderest fashion, rolled them into a ball, and then tried to spread them out again over a piece of paper. Slightly mad, entirely unreadable.

To anyone save me, that is.

“Best it would be if you read it, I think.”

Mrs. Boehm sounded amused. I pulled the letter toward me. “Where’s the envelope?”

She shook her head. “There was none.”

“How could this have been delivered from London without any envelope?”

“It’s from London?”

“Yes.”

She jutted her angular chin as if to say
Read your letter, you ninny.
So I did.

Dear Timothy,

For a man long used to being addressed as
Mr. Wilde
, there was a toweringly spectacular start.

I’ve taken up residence with a cousin of my mother’s in Poland Street, near to the heady curve of Regent Street where the world spins a bit faster than it does everywhere else and the boulevard can’t help but bend to centripetal force. Letters addressed to 12C Poland Street will find me should there be anything you might wish to write about. And supposing that you’d prefer to forget about me, which I don’t like to think of, I’ll simply presume that you are still writing me notes but have consigned them to bottles. I walk a great deal by the Thames and shall keep an eye to the water for them if I fail to hear from you by more conventional means.

I pressed a hand over my lips, guessing my expression to be a bit rich for the breakfast table. Whatever it was.
Letters in bottles and walks by the grey winter river,
I thought. That was Mercy right down to the ground.

Cousin Elizabeth is married to the owner of a quaint little museum of saleable curiosities. Arthur, by inclination if not by trade, is an ardent painter, so to make up a little of my board I’ve taken to opening the shop in the mornings, dusting and nattering and exploring and reading and writing and generally pretending it’s actual work until midday, when Arthur arrives. The leaded glass of the shop door is curved, with tiny bubbles marring the clarity, and if I look through it, I feel as if I am back on the steamer from New York to London, all mist about me and ocean and space and unknowns, and I remember how easy I thought it would be to fall into the waves with arms spread wide and drift down into the cool darkness where I would stop seeing the things we saw and stop remembering who was responsible for them. I don’t look through the glass of the shop door very often.

Arthur,
I thought.

What precisely was cousin Arthur like, and did he believe in marital fidelity? As for the sudden fall into cool, dark water . . . by the time I realized I was gnawing on my knuckle, it was due to my tasting copper, so I stopped. I glanced up at Mrs. Boehm, who stood peering into the hot depths of her bread oven. I kept going.

I volunteer feeding soup to the destitute at several churches in the East End and the men and women wear the same look they did back home, half hungry and half ashamed of being hungry, and I wish I could tell them all that God dearly loves to bless the poor, but perhaps as few people believe that here as they do in New York. The rest of the time I walk, and think, and muse over words. The stories I write here do queer things, beginning as a tale about a seamstress who sews “I love you” in matching thread into the linings of every waistcoat she makes for the merchant she adores, for example, and ending as a conversation between the clever mice who watch her at work and know that the merchant runs his fingers over every stitched letter, but says nothing because he realizes he will die within the year.

I’m not any better when it comes to my poetry either. The phrases that look nicely crafted at first dissolve into nothing upon a second reading, and so I thought I should try my hand at writing letters. Forgive me for it, if you find this unwelcome. We had always used to tell each other of all the mundane breadcrumb-teakettle-washboard little details of our lives, and I feel here as if everything is slightly transparent, and I myself entirely so. There isn’t any weight to me since Papa died, and perhaps if I tell you that this morning I found in the shop a little tortoiseshell box and inside was a clockwork bird painted like a rainbow, and I polished it until it shone, then that will have been real. Or I will be real, or something better approximating myself. Sometimes I think someone else lives here now.

If I read this over, the meaning will melt and I may possibly become a pillar of salt, and so I’ll send it without looking backward. I hope you are well—I hope so not often, but once and continually. If you wish me not to write, please don’t tell me so. Just burn them unread.

Nearly invisibly,

Mercy Underhill

“Mr. Wilde, are you all right?”

Mrs. Boehm was speaking to me, apparently. Or so I gathered from the pale shadow brushing my jacket sleeve.

“I—yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I wasn’t. Something was pooling in my breast, hot and treacle-thick and bitter like burnt sugar.

“From who is this letter? May I ask?”

“From a childhood friend of mine. She lives in England now.”

“And she is well, this friend of yours?”

When I didn’t answer, a steaming cup of tea appeared in my peripheral vision. I think I thanked her for it. I hope so.

After all Mercy went through last summer, Reverend Underhill’s death and previous to that his descent into madness, I couldn’t be surprised that she felt less than her usual self. She’d survived her own beloved father nearly killing her, after all. And I’d probably have been unhinged at abandoning everything and everyone I knew. She’s always been one of the bravest individuals of my acquaintance, however, and so she’d fulfilled a lifelong dream and simply left us. Abandoned America for the land of her mother’s birth. I don’t think she could stomach the sight of Manhattan anymore. I didn’t blame her for that, didn’t blame her for the sort of courage it took to leave us all behind. Leave me behind. But I felt a frenzied surge of ownership after reading that she was in any way unhappy.

It’s my job to see that doesn’t happen.

“So she is not happy.” Mrs. Boehm leaned with her bony hips pressing against the chair opposite me. “I am sorry. Can you do anything?”

I rose to slide Mercy’s letter into my allotted drawer of the sideboard. Thinking of our breadcrumb-teakettle-washboard trivialities, all the nonsense we’d used to share on a near-to-daily basis. If one person on earth has catalogued the things that lift her spirits, I am that man.

And I can write a letter as well as the next fellow.

“I certainly intend to try,” I answered, passing my fingers over Mrs. Boehm’s hand as I set out for the Tombs.

“How is it can a letter travel across the ocean without an address or stamp?” she called after me.

“Magic,” I answered, donning my coat. “Dark alchemy. Fey spirits. True love. I haven’t the faintest idea.”

•   •   •

The Tombs loomed
above me
like castle ramparts rising from the drifts. Feudal, vaguely warlike. Generally a crowd of babbling misfits occupies its front steps—attorneys and bail runners and reporters and street rats, all about their inexplicable business. But the snow had muffled us, gagged the hubbub with a wet white cloth. No one was there. Which made it all the more surprising when I’d reached the entrance and a voice plucked me from the reverie,
Are envelopes ever stolen when letters are delivered, and if so, why in hell—

“Mr. Wilde.”

I skidded to a halt. “Mr. Mulqueen. Good morning.”

Sean Mulqueen had last addressed me when I was escorting Mrs. Adams from the Tombs; previous to that, we’d spoken twice. About the pernicious nature of too-tight boots when walking in circles for sixteen hours, when we were first appointed roundsmen. And then about the remarkable nature of the telegraph and when it would be finished and whether it might destroy civilization, et cetera. He’s a County Clare man—of medium height but broad shouldered, ruddy hair cut above his ears, ears tilted backward like a hissing cat’s. He looked plenty pleased about something. I’ve seen butchers mull over slaughtered steers in like fashion.

“I think ye’ll be finding that Chief Matsell wants a private word,” he reported.

“Thank you. Regarding?”

“A source o’ great pride it has been, to watch you rise so quick and easy to the rank of . . . well, what, in fact, are you?” His lips cracked into a smile. “But that’s all like enough to be over now, more’s the pity. Sometimes fast flames make for spent fuel. I’m sure ye’ll find work elsewhere quick enough, a handsome lad like yourself.”