Seven for a Secret Page 10

  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.

  “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

  When 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.”