Seven for a Secret (28 page)

When next I looked at Varker, sweat trickled down his neck like tears from a frightened kinchin. I hated him for it. Even as I was bruising his sternum, my fist lodged against his damp, doughy chest.

“I presume you took Julius Carpenter simply because he’s a nuisance to you,” I said. “Was there another reason?”

“No, no. I swear it. What other reason did I
require
?” he whined. “That wretched boy costs me more time and trouble—”

“Then I’m going to ask you once more where Delia and Jonas are.”

“And then you’re going to leave,” Silkie Marsh added, as if to a recalcitrant child. “Do answer him, Seixas, he’s growing very tedious.”

“But I don’t know!” he cried. “Do you suppose I wish to encourage you to—to abuse me in this manner? Do you think I
want
to be mauled like a savage, when I could simply tell you the whereabouts of two niggers? I
don’t know.
I wish I did, so that you’d consider unhanding me.”

Around then, I let him go and he slid down to the floor. For all I knew, every word spoken to me inside that brothel had been a calculated lie. Strand after strand thrown out, every line woven into a net to drag me under. But I was either going to be the sort of copper star who crushed wrists to get what I wanted or the sort who didn’t.

Anyhow, Varker was telling the truth. Or so the chalky, fear-dulled whites of his eyes told me.

Hardly closer to my goal and sick at heart over it, I headed for the front door. Steps sounded behind me. Soft, prettily measured steps. The footfalls of a dancer or a devil. When I’d crossed the threshold into the blinding midday sunshine, I turned back to Madam Marsh.

“Only tell me
why
Lucy was killed,” I said.

“Is that question a torment to you, Mr. Wilde?” she asked. Her fairness of hair and of complexion were radiant in the reflected snowlight, hovering above scarlet velvet as supple as the best French wine.

“Yes,” I admitted. It was a thorn in my side, tight skinned and swollen.

“How marvelous,” she concluded, shutting the door.

•   •   •

Sitting on a
bench in the long,
narrow hallway of the Catholic Orphan Asylum that afternoon, hands resting in my lap, I allowed my mind to wander. Flat-faced saintly icons surrounded me. I wondered whether the Catholic God actually preferred His martyrs ornately adorned following their gruesome deaths. And whether the martyrs themselves might find it all rather superfluous. I’d just conjured an image of Lucy Adams in the blue garb of a Madonna, a shimmering halo illuminating the brutal purple neck bruise and the still more brutal inscription carved into her chest, when thankfully I was interrupted.

“Mr. Wilde? Are you all right?”

Bird stood before me, her small square face aghast, with a set of schoolbooks tucked under her arm. She wore shallow-necked blue serge with vertical black stripes, and it made her freckles stand out against her pale skin like pink pepper on an egg.

“Don’t worry a bit over it. I’m fine.”

“But can you
see
?”

“More or less. And anyhow, I won.”

“Why have you a new greatcoat?”

Explaining that my previous greatcoat had been drenched in rancid cooking oil would have been about as pleasant as telling her that my previous jacket had burned in my chief’s fireplace. So I refrained. Anyway, the new garments were better than the ones I’d bought when penniless. I pulled open the greatcoat’s dark green collar.

“See? I’ve a new jacket too. There’s reward money to be had, on occasion. I’ll be a rum-togged swell before you know it.”

She sat down beside me. As usual, I came blessedly uncoiled a bit in her company. And, as usual, we began by not saying anything. It suits us.

A cluster of girl kinchin passed us by, giggling and tugging one another’s threadbare sleeves, chanting an ancient rhyme about counting crows. As much a spell as a number game, and one I’d always found sinister.

One for sorrow,

Two for joy,

Three for a girl,

Four for a boy.

Five for silver,

Six for gold,

Seven for a secret, never to be told.

A silly, harmless incantation, I grant, but given my all too present predicament, even the thought of
blackbirds
raised my hackles.
Blackbirder
in flash patter, though I’d never ruminated much over the word, was a cruel term for a crueler practice. And an apt one. As the high, reedy voices faded, they left a bitter feeling in my pate, an ache all along the edges of my unsolved problem. Quelling a dark sigh, I directed my attention to the Bird I had actually managed to protect on occasion, the one at my elbow.

“Who came at you on the muscle?” she wanted to know at length, nudging my ankle.

“I don’t think you’re meant to speak flash,” I reminded her.

“I don’t think I’m meant to have visitors with black eyes.”

Smiling, I replied, “A man I had an argument with.”

She slammed her books on the bench in an exasperated huff. That was fair, I reasoned.

“Fine. He wanted to capture a free black woman and sell her for a slave. And I objected.”

Leaning back against the wall, she kicked idly at the air with worn brown leather boots. “Father Sheehy says to the nuns when he thinks we’re not minding him that slavery is an abomination against the soul. That it’ll cause a war. Will there be a war?” she asked softly, an unsettled line appearing between her eyes that was regrettably all too familiar to me.

I hesitated. Picturing Bird Daly in the midst of a metropolis turned battleground, Manhattan occupied by a callous army who took what they wanted when they wanted it, as had happened during the Revolution. It rattled my skull considerably. George Washington Matsell wasn’t a cold-hearted Democratic bully, I realized. There were just one or two people, maybe more, whom he cared for very much. That was all.

“I hope there won’t be a war, but Father Sheehy is right. Slavery has to be ended.”

“Why are there slaves in the Bible, in that case?”

“I’m no expert. But I don’t think God much cares for everything that happens in that Book.”

Bird shifted to peer up into my face. “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant? You’re not Irish, so I s’pose you must be a Protestant, even if you are a dead rabbit.”

Linking my fingers, I meditated on this question. Kinchin, I have been learning, greatly tax the adult brain. At twenty-eight, I could barely keep up with Bird. By the time I was forty, I’d never savvy a word she said. And while I could certainly understand why she thought me a dangerous sort, I’d never asked myself whether I was Protestant or not. The whole query was pretty confounding.

“I’m just a copper star,” I told her. “God and I get on fine, but we don’t palaver much. We’re . . . neighborly.”

“Eamann who lives over in the boys’ wing says that the Negroes aren’t the same as humans—that they’re thicker in the head, like a monkey or a horse, and that means that they’re happier as slaves.”

“Well, Eamann is repeating something told to him by a ripe idiot. Colored people are people. Would
you
be happier as a slave?”

A brief silence fell.

“Don’t be warm at me,” Bird whispered thickly. “I’ve never spoken with a colored person. I didn’t know.”

Glancing down at her, I mentally kicked myself seven or eight times over. Bird was never fragile. But she went from working a profession I wouldn’t wish on anyone to living for a month with Mrs. Boehm and myself to being an orphaned asylum student—and all in a summer thunderstorm spell of time. It makes for a volatile personality. She used to fling teacups, ready bottles, anything breakable within smashing distance. Still does on occasion. On the night before she’d moved the short distance to the orphanage, she’d destroyed Mrs. Boehm’s sole cobalt vase whilst sobbing that we only wanted to be rid of her. And each separate time she sees me again, a little wave of glad surprise passes through her from head to toe. In short, our problems weren’t about to be solved by my turning snappish enough to make her cry.

“I’m sorry, Bird. Of course you haven’t. You lived in a house, and then were hidden in another one, and now you’re at a Catholic school. You ought to be warm at me and not the other way around.”

I think I’d have heard her response better if her face hadn’t suddenly been mashed up against my vest. My arm fell around her shoulders in alarm.

“Bird?”

She remained there, half under my coat lapel—shaking, muscles knotted and face invisible—for two or three minutes. I didn’t grudge it to her, but something obviously troubled the girl beyond my predictably clumsy endorsement of abolitionism. Waiting to discover what it was grew excruciating. By the time she’d settled, I’d planned out exquisite revenges on whoever was tormenting her.

“I wake up wrong,” she murmured.

“What?” I asked, certain I’d misheard her.

Her freckled face reappeared, grey eyes brimming and nose red. “I know I live here,” she whispered, nodding tiredly at the nearly empty hallway. “I savvy it’s real when I’m awake. But in the morning, before my eyes open, I don’t sometimes. In my head, I still work. For
her.
There’s no Father Sheehy, or Neill, or Sophia, or my new pal, Clara. There’s no Mrs. Boehm. There’s only the work and the madam just before I open my eyes, so I don’t want to open them at all. You’re gone too. You’re
gone
. I think I still live where I did before, and it
hurts
.”

She was right. It hurt like the devil.

And how wonderful it would have been to tell her that one day she’d cease recalling brothel work. I’d have given a great deal to say so with any certainty. Considerably more than I’d have given for the assurance of never again screaming at the sight of my own charred bones, only to discover my body was, in fact, abed and drowning in cold sweat. But what is carved in our skin—though not always visible—can be equally as permanent for not being seen.

“I’d not wish to scrape against the likes of you,” I informed her instead, carefully schooling my voice. “To think that you’ve been waking up wrong all this time and never told a soul. Anyone else would have been blubbering all over the school. Hell,
I’d
have been scared witless.”

Sniffing indulgently, she pulled away a fraction. “You’re ribbing me.”

“I’m not. Most folk are unadulterated milksops next to you.”

Bird heaved a great sigh.

“But don’t do that anymore, all right? You know you don’t need to lie on my account. You don’t need to keep mouse either, if something eats at you. Tell me, or Mrs. Boehm, or anyone else you like. Being brave and being alone aren’t the same thing.”

“There’s nothing I’d not do to keep from going back there,” she muttered. “I’d die sooner.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“I’d do terrible things, Mr. Wilde.”

“You’d not need to. I’d do them for you.” I gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Listen, I’ve a very difficult case I’m working on. The one I just told you about. If I miss seeing you during the next week or so, that’s the reason. I’m hard at the copper starring, but I’d rather be keeping you company.”

“You’re still warm at me.” She frowned. “I hate when you’re warm at me.”

“I’m warm at the slack-jaw who schooled your friend Eamann to parrot trash. Never at you.”

Bird hopped off the bench. I only hoped she was minding me thoroughly.
Never at you.
A fair percentage of my small friend’s life had been a wide-awake nightmare. But if I could remake her into simply a little girl with grey eyes and high cheekbones and a splash of freckles across her face and shoulders instead of a melancholy adult with the untroubled complexion of a child—I’d do it in a heartbeat, but that doesn’t make me any less fond of the Bird who exists now.

She hoisted her books and tucked them back under her arm. A doubtful shadow lurked at the edges of her eyes.

“Do you really believe that, Mr. Wilde?” she asked, dabbing her face with her sleeve. “That being brave isn’t the same as being alone?”

“Every word of it.”

Bird took a long moment to gaze at me. Thinking nigh-bottomless thoughts with a mind that had been wrenched wide open long before it was ready.

“And you call
me
a liar,” she concluded as she walked away.

seventeen

A negro, who had escaped with a boat from Virginia to New York, was reclaimed; and was condemned, upon his return, to be hanged for stealing the boat. It was exactly as if a man whose horse had been stolen had gone off with the horse, and had afterwards been executed for stealing the bridle that happened to belong to the thief. He had a wife and eight or nine children in New York.

—E. S. ABDY,
JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE AND TOUR IN THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA, FROM APRIL 1833 TO OCTOBER 1834

I
decided that speaking
to
as many associates of Lucy’s as was possible would quickly solve my problems.

It didn’t. Not quickly, that is.

Over the course of the next four days, from February 18 to 21, I avoided the Tombs. That wore me a bit rawer every hour, which was an unexpected confirmation of fondness for the horrible place. Each evening, I met with the Vigilance Committee. First at the Reverend Brown’s comfortable parsonage, then at Julius’s ken, and last at the fashionable apartments north of Washington Square belonging to one George Higgins, who owned an art collection that young Jean-Baptiste would have swum the Atlantic for. But no significant progress was made. Lucy and Delia’s neighbors were all questioned; their friends contacted; their homes watched. None of it proved profitable. Delia and Jonas were still as vanished as possible, Lucy unavenged, and the rest of us a long and weary day older.

George Higgins, for my money, had about a week left before he came unstitched like a poorly made stocking. The tracks at the edges of his eyes had deepened, and his costly shoes went unpolished as he tramped through the mire in search of her.

“Get some sleep, George,” Julius would advise every evening.

“When this is finished,” he’d answer.

We’d all part with solemn handshakes and unspoken oaths to try again next morning. Then we’d make our dull ways homeward, avoiding the avalanches that had begun sliding off the townhouses. Already feeling about as buried as the poor devils who are dense enough to walk under the eaves of rooftops in February.

I made repeated efforts to see my brother and was told by the men at his station house that he was
out doing a spot of delicate investigating
. That I didn’t know the specifics maddened me, but Val can smell danger the way wolves smell blood, and I received the odd note from him, and thus knew him to be alive if not well. The first said, in his very civil hand:

Heard about the mitten-mill down Five Points way. Try vinegar poultice on the eye. Mulqueen is lucky to have died so easy.

A recipe followed. Whether or not having your head fried with cheap grease was an easy death by comparison to whatever Val had in mind didn’t bear mulling over. But I did make the poultice. My swollen eye deflated to a lurid but perfectly functioning organ within half an hour. The next, two days later, read:

Getting somewhere, though this business is dim as glimsticks. Heard from Matsell—it’s a close shave you aren’t sacked yet, and you’re to keep clear of the Tombs. Best greetings to your landlady.

The matter was, just as Val said, about as dim as a bad candle. I interviewed as many relevant individuals as I could, and a few irrelevant ones. The information collected made for the most baffling picture I’d ever tried to squeeze into a sane shape. So on the afternoon of February 22, a mere six days before I’d be forced to attend my first official Democratic Party event, I spread a sheet of butcher paper over the floor of my room, half listening as Mrs. Boehm’s pleasantly grainy voice crooned a Bohemian song in the kitchen below. Next to the butcher paper, I opened my notebook so I could stare simultaneously at the appropriate statements.

Then I threw myself facedown on the floor in trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves. The boards were plenty warm on account of the evening rye loaves, my windows frosted over with floral sprays of improbable ice. A cozy setting for some serious thought.

Selecting a bit of charcoal, I started sketching. First came Meg, the cook who’d been manhandled by the likes of Varker and Coles on the day of the kidnapping, as she’d looked in the Reverend Brown’s parlor with him and Julius and Higgins and me staring thirstily at her. Parched for knowledge. Her body was divided as if on a plumb line: half a hale black woman of around forty, half a curled-up root of an arm with a stiff hip and a turned-in foot. She’d a pretty face, dark as could be, with a flat nose and a too-small chin that lent every expression an elfin quality.

As I sketched Meg, I read my notes. She’d been subjected to outlandish church rumors about the murder, and so her testimony emerged as much a defense of her household as a statement of facts.

Mrs. Adams hired me, some two years back. Yes, sir, Mrs. Charles Adams, and don’t you say otherwise. People are gossiping something terrible—that she was only his mistress, that he threw her out on the streets and she died there, that she’d taken a shine to a new man. It’s not right, not a bit right. Mr. Adams loved her plenty.

Mrs. Adams, she was looking for colored help, but the quality cooks get snatched up plenty quick, you understand. The way she looked at me said I seemed too good to be real from my references and here I was a cripple! How was I to do for them? I said you give me one day, ma’am. Just one day. I can clean faster than any pert-headed Irish miss, and I can fricassee a rabbit good enough to shut your eyes and then melt down your throat. Well, she smiled, and said any help could face her down with that sort of vinegar didn’t need any “day” to test her mettle. Worked there ever since.

Sure enough, I cooked for Mr. Adams’s parties. Made it all ahead of time and he’d go on and hire the servers. Do I look like I’m fit to serve at table?

But that can’t be the way of it. It can’t. When Mr. Adams got home of an evening, he never did have eyes for a thing save her. Used to trail after her like a puppy. It made me blush to see them.

Oh, he was kind enough to Jonas. The boy was from another marriage, though, from when Mrs. Adams was young. It’s hard for a man to raise a strange chick in his nest. But he wasn’t ever harsh nor cold to the child. Just . . . distant, maybe. Distance isn’t cruelty. There’s those who can tell you firsthand.

Rutherford Gates? No, I never did hear that name.

No, I tell you. Not once.

Oh, Lord have mercy.

I forced a bit of air through my teeth, shading the turned-in crook of her withered hand.

Meg wasn’t helping.

As I’d been told not to disturb Rutherford Gates, I’d lost no time in wringing his sister like a wet mop. Miss Leticia Gates of Twelfth Street and Third Avenue greatly resembled her brother. Pink-cheeked and fresh, with nut-brown hair, delicate pince-nez
,
and a direct manner. Beginning with her raised hand as she’d pulled the wool of her needlepoint through the canvas, I drew Miss Gates sitting on her settee, answering my many questions.

Yes, it’s a dreadful business about Rutherford’s housekeeper. Oh, I’ve heard, of course I have. He can hide nothing from me. We’ve adored each other since we were little, you know. And I’m the elder, so it’s always my first instinct to mother him, and he seemed so very distraught the day he found out. His reaction to her death was . . . well. I don’t suppose I should say any more.

I’d smiled sadly, and poured her more tea, and confessed I knew just how she felt, I’d a brother too—leaving out that he discovered an interesting German tonic called
morphium
at the age of sixteen and may possibly be a molley—and within half an hour we were fast friends. Miss Leticia Gates, spinster, was right back to the natural order: shoveling confidences in my ears as if I were a tale-burning oven.

I began sketching her face, with its even, almost handsome features, framed by sleek brown hair done in an unassuming knot at the base of her neck.

A sister can always tell, you see. Perhaps it’s the same for brothers, though I do suspect a part of it may be womanly intuition. But I’m so attuned to Rutherford. When he was a boy, I’d know at once when something vexed him—I could sense it, as if his distress were a scent or a sound. He was always such a sensitive little chap and wouldn’t hurt a fly, the dear thing. I recall once—but you won’t wish to hear an old maiden lady’s sentimental stories.

She’d been mistaken. I’d eaten a ratafia cake (reeking of almond and rosewater, no comparison to Mrs. Boehm’s airy delicacies), announced it perfection, and said by all means, tell me a story.

If you insist, Mr. Wilde. Oh, do take another—you’re a bachelor, I see, and I make them small just for the purpose of guests eating more of them. Well, we were rambling through the woods—goodness, that would have been our summer home on Long Island, of course—and we came upon a puppy that had been caught in a game snare. Half-starved, the poor creature. All white, with blue eyes and a single floppy ear marked with brown. After extricating it, my brother nursed it back to health, and he couldn’t hear a word about finding it a new home without tears coming to his eyes. Our father, who was never an animal lover, insisted. And it seemed there was an end to the matter.

The night Papa meant to give it to a neighboring farmer, I woke from a dead sleep certain that something was amiss, and I raced downstairs to find the house turned upside-down, and both Rutherford and the puppy missing. Knowing all my brother’s hiding places, I was soon able to find them in the eaves above the horse stalls, with a week’s supply of food stolen from the pantry. Rutherford meant to wait it out, you see, the rest of the holiday. But a spider had crawled from the straw and bitten my little brother upon the hand. Can you believe it? That was why I had felt the jolt of panic, Mr. Wilde. I will always believe so. His hand was already dangerously swollen, and still he hadn’t wanted to seek help at the house, he loved that puppy so. I screamed for my parents, and thank God I did. Rutherford nearly died of the fever stemming from the wound.

Oh, please don’t mind me, I always get a bit carried away when I tell this story. It frightened me so, the sight of his tiny hand swollen into a ghastly red paw. He was only six at the time. You’re very kind. There. Now I’m quite cheerful again. Rutherford had his way after he recovered, of course. That dog was his inseparable companion until he departed for university.

So you see . . . I know Rutherford. I’d assumed . . . oh, it’s so difficult. I’d imagined he had a mistress, you see. In Albany. There was something about his step, about his smile when the softer emotions were spoken of. My brother was in love, I knew it in my bones. And I confess it to you—my reasoning led me to believe that this mysterious Albany woman I’d invented was some kind of actress or musician. The wildly lovely, untamable sort who’d have made a very poor match for a politician. So I allowed him not to tell me about her, for fear of embarrassing him.

If only he’d confided in me that Lucy Wright was, in fact, his paramour. We dined together on the day he learned of her death, you see, and I can hardly bear to think of how anguished he sounded when he spoke of it. Far more distressed than he would have been at the tragic loss of a domestic, however capable. He said nothing directly to the purpose—but Rutherford hasn’t been the same since. I can’t bear to think of him alone in those first hours of mourning, with no solace save his own strength of character.

Met his housekeeper? No, never. The poor soul. Murdered . . . I can’t bear to think of it. No, Rutherford visits me habitually, but not the other way round. He says he misses me and my little domestic touches—I am known for being an exceptional hostess, Mr. Wilde, and I say so with neither pride nor false modesty—but now I cannot help but wonder if he meant to keep me well away from her. I’d have known, of course. If I’d seen them together. I’d have known in an instant that there was no Albany woman.

Oh, must you? Return anytime you wish, Mr. Wilde, and you’ll find yourself most welcome. I do pity the poor woman, you must realize—I picture her often. Blonde hair, soft blue eyes, efficient but graceful. I regret not meeting Lucy Wright, Mr. Wilde. I wish Rutherford had trusted me. No matter how low her birth or her station, I would not have disappointed him.