Seven for a Secret (45 page)

During the periods when I’m alone at my kitchen table, trying to siphon words from my brain onto a laptop screen with a bendy straw, it’s of paramount importance to know that there are people cheering me on. My amazing husband, Gabriel, my wonderful family back West, my incredible NYC posse of artists and dreamers and benign lunatics, my worldwide Sherlockian Mafia—they all play a major role in encouraging me to sit-down-and-write-it-for-God’s-sake. I couldn’t accomplish my bookish endeavors without their support.

Amy Einhorn takes dodgy manuscripts and turns them into marvelous books, and it’s an absolute delight to roll up my sleeves and wash my hands and dive into literary surgery with her. Thank you, Amy, not only for your skills as an editor, but for liking the crazies in my head enough to spend so much time with them. The rest of the team at Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, including but certainly not limited to Alexis Welby, Victoria Comella, Gina Rizzo, Lydia Hirt, Kate Stark, and Elizabeth Stein, are the best allies a girl could hope for—not to mention the best company.

I’m at a loss for words as to how amazing my amazing agent, Erin Malone, happens to be—she’s that amazing. Until such time as books can support animated gifs about my feelings, I’ll simply say: thank you, you’re amazing. One day, we will have the technology. I owe a very great deal to Tracy Fisher and Cathryn Summerhayes, who are responsible for spreading Tim Wilde about the globe. To the rest of WME, including Amy Hasselbeck among many others, thank you so much for all the many ways you help me, God knows I need it.

Many thanks to Claire Baldwin and her entire Headline battalion for being utter peaches. And thank you to all my other wonderful foreign publishers for your interest in a scrappy young American copper star.

My research for this book began, as ever, at the New York Public Library, and its librarians have been nothing save dedicated and insightful. While I rely to a great extent on primary sources, historians always light my path for me, and in this case works by Edwin G. Burrows, Mike Wallace, Tyler Anbinder, Timothy Gilfoyle, Leslie M. Harris, Carol Wilson, Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, Jenifer Frank, and David Grimstead made me understand just how widespread and horrifying a practice the kidnapping of free blacks was in the antebellum North. Thank you also to Richard B. Bernstein and to my French language translator, Carine Chichereau, for on multiple occasions keeping egg off my face. As to the atrocities my primary sources endured, I cannot fathom how they found the courage to write them down, and I am deeply indebted to them for their biographies.

Finally, thank you to my readers. My early-draft readers, my new readers, my American readers, my overseas readers, my e-readers, my shiny hardcover readers, and my used-paperback readers. You’re why we do this. Thanks for letting me tell you a story.

Lyndsay Faye is the author of critically acclaimed
Dust and Shadow
and
The Gods of Gotham—
if you were to ask her, she would say she writes hero stories. Faye, a true New Yorker in the sense she was born elsewhere, lives in Manhattan with her husband, Gabriel.

1
Excerpted from George Washington Matsell,
The Secret Language of Crime: Vocabulum, or, The Rogue’s Lexicon
(G. W. Matsell & Co., 1859).