Seven for a Secret Read online

  “No, your style is to cripple Whig Party thugs and occasionally blackbirders, and poison yourself half to death, and bed anything that moves, and never lie to me.”

  “If you think I’m going to be interrogated by a doltish runt, you—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” came a beautifully cultured voice from an interior doorway. “He was with me this morning. I’ve moved into a new flat, which is a dreadful enough business without doing it alone. If Val hadn’t helped, I should have simply burnt all my belongings and begun again.”

  “Jim,” I said. Then, “Hello.” The smile on my lips spread until it was an idiotic smear of a grin. It wasn’t worse than what I already knew of Val at all. It was just … more of the same. “Good lord, of all the secrets. It’s nice to see you.”

  “Likewise,” Jim said, mystified.

  Gentle Jim, as he’s called, was taken aback by my good spirits. Admittedly, some men might take more hostile exception to the chap with the indelicate attachment to their only brother. Myself, I can’t be bothered.

  Where Val is concerned, warmhearted molleys are the least of my worries.

  My brother’s friend is a Londoner. Slender and articulate, accent imported direct from the Halls of Parliament. Rather arch. Arch suits me fine where Jim is concerned, though, because he owns a ready smile to make it up to you. I often wonder how he lives and what he does. It’s my opinion, based on particular creases at the edges of his melancholy blue eyes, that eighty percent of his thoughts remain in his head. He wore fitted trousers, an indigo shirt, and a maroon dressing gown of Chinese patterned silk, hastily tied. Jim has dark, burnished hair, and those high-boned features that rest well only on Englishmen and on everyone else look either wicked or feline. Now that he holds a romantic interest in Valentine rather than a recreational one (which from my guesswork seems to have happened two or three months back), he tends to treat me as if I were a fragile document, to be pinched at the corners and held to the light for examination.

  Not that my brother would term it romantic—and, in fairness, Jim is subtler than most. I simply happen to be uncomfortably familiar with obsession and its miens. He emerged from the doorway. One hand on his hip, posture hesitant. As if it were my new digs being invaded and not his at all.

  “Valentine doesn’t bed anything that moves, Timothy,” Jim said testily. “He does draw the line at undomesticated mammals. Risk of hydrophobia, and all that.”

  “Satisfied now? You wanted my alibi, and there he is.” Val threw himself into one of the armchairs, slouching disgustedly. “When a pal needs his entire ken moved, it takes time and muscle. So when my shift at the engine house ended yesterday, I capped in with Jim and we put our shoulders to it.”

  “So it was work, then.” I eyed him, doubtful. “Not … leisure.”

  “Just as you say.”

  “Not that there were no events of the nature you’re referring to, rather later.” Jim coughed, looking somehow both vulnerable and ferociously determined. “I think your brother is loath to discuss having passed the night here.”

  My eyes flicked to Valentine, who appeared not the smallest degree discomfited.

  “I helped him move a piano,” he explained.

  Reflecting over whether to inform my insane brother that most men tend not to accept French favors from svelte artistes as a reward for moving furnishings, I determined to refrain. My head ached. It didn’t need a mental image of the erotic tasks Gentle Jim enjoys setting his mouth to, not when my brother was involved. And not when it had recently occurred to me that my brother is a very … reciprocally inclined individual. Proud of his bedroom prowess. Disinclined to owe debts.

  “That thing is heavy,” Val continued, pointing, “and there was a stairway—”

  “All right, all right,” I protested. “Stop telling me.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to know every detail of the possibly illegal thing I was doing, you utter cow pie.”

  “Well, now I want less details.”

  “Oh, come off it, Tim, it’s just a lark. He’s my closest mate. So what if we like a bit of—”

  “It’s definitely illegal, no maybe about it. Has that occurred to you?”

  “Well, I’m not very likely to arrest him, am I?”

  “Not him! You!” I all but shouted. “It’s punishable by ten years’ hard labor!”

  “That’s scarce ever enforced and you know it. Are you collaring me? Anyhow, buggery is punishable by ten years’ hard labor. It isn’t as if I’m bending the boy over the kitchen table. We happen to prefer—”

  “For heaven’s sake, cease tormenting your brother simply because you can,” Jim interjected, drawing a softly shaped hand over the back of Val’s neck before falling into the other chair.

  Valentine blinked, baffled. Clearly that particular thought had never occurred to him.

  Jim stood up again. “Oh, bollocks. I’m sorry, Timothy. There isn’t another—”

  I silenced him by drawing up a sturdy-seeming crate and seating myself. He forbore speaking further in favor of gnawing thoughtfully at his lip as he reclaimed his perch at the edge of his armchair.

  “Well,” I said. Calm. Friendly. “I have one question.”

  “Admittedly a lower figure than I had anticipated,” Jim muttered.

  “Jim’s tastes are no secret to anyone. Neither is the fact that you’re pals. You’re not exactly careful about any of it. For God’s sake, you have his house key.”

  “Those aren’t questions,” Val retorted.

  “Is it safe to say your Party friends know you’re … close?”

  Jim shifted. “I take your point. And yes, I should think so, I’m afraid.”

  Setting my hat on the floor, I rubbed tiredly at my eyelids. “Then you’re right, Val. That would have made for a truly regrettable alibi in the public courts.”

  “I don’t like to—that is to say, Timothy?” Jim began.

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you trailing Valentine to my new flat? And why on earth are you asking him about an alibi?”

  I studied my brother’s elbow while Val scrutinized my right knee.

  “Val, you didn’t just say something about murder, did you?” Jim added softly.

  A few false starts hampered us. But we bit the bullet and told him everything. Jim fared better than I’d expected. Partly I think he appreciated that, when my brother had scented a sharp miasma of danger after hearing the name Silkie Marsh, he’d decided to apprise Jim for caution’s sake. But mostly, I think I’d underestimated him. Just because a fellow has smooth hands doesn’t mean he’s a stranger to violence. Supremely regal accents often belong to men whose heads are being nicked off by a silently descending blade.

  So I stopped treating Jim as if he might be a bloom waiting to wilt. Hoping he might do me the same favor.

  When all had been discussed to everyone’s satisfaction—that is, when we were all mortified and Jim had opened a bottle of gin and passed it round, sipped from the endearing Oriental soup cups that were all he could find—Val and I finally formulated a plan.

  “Right.” I levered to my feet with a will renewed. “We’ll try to catch a public sleigh, though walking isn’t out of the question.”

  “Hold there, bright young copper star.” Valentine pulled out his pocket watch with a frown. “Ten o’clock at night. No. God, no, not now. Meet me at seven at the Tombs, Franklin Street entrance. We’ll start then.”

  “There is a child out there somewhere, possibly about to be shipped off to Georgia to be tortured for the rest of his days, and you’re worried over a sound night’s sleep?”

  Val blinked at me sadly. “No, you donkey. I need time to identify the body.”

  “Christ.” My brain staggered, then fell back into step with Valentine’s. “You’re right. We can’t possibly begin the search before you identify her. Do you need help?”

  “Better if I sort it, all told.”

  “What do you mean, identify?” Jim asked Vale
ntine. He’d turned greyish at our tale but remained remarkably still, like a fencer at the start of a duel. “You knew Mrs. Adams.”

  “Chief Matsell is kindly overlooking our bully little crime spree Tim here orchestrated down at Corlears Hook, which is how we landed in this pile of manure in the first place. Presently it’s the blackbirders’ word against ours we were ever there. Piest would stand by us, he’s the square species of lobster, and we all know what colored testimony counts for. But the chief will be told out for certain if we can’t stick to the bam. Supposing they tumble on me—”

  “If Val’s suspected,” I interrupted for Jim, whose nose was wrinkling in puzzlement, “we’d better have kept to the same line of lies all along.”

  “Thank you.” He tossed me a lofty smile. “I do tend to keep better pace with the conversation, but we aren’t often speaking of crime.”

  Val smirked. “Sorry, Jimmy, old habits.”

  “Apology not necessary, but entirely accepted. Just a moment. I’d not thought that, for copper stars, bending laws was quite so … frowned upon as for citizens? I hope I don’t sound overly blunt, but why should it matter that what you did at the slavers’ den was illegal? Copper stars answer to copper stars, after all.”

  “Copper stars answer to the Party. It doesn’t matter a straw that it was illegal,” Val agreed. “It matters that it was against our platform. And anywise, not yet knowing who’s leaky … before we question outsiders, I’m going to need a story about discovering the innocent’s name. Safer all round.”

  “Innocents,” I said as I returned my hat to my head, “are corpses.”

  “That’s positively ghastly,” Jim remarked.

  “Yes, it is. Evening, Jim, and apologies for invading your ken like a barbarian.”

  “Oh, invade away.” He put a wistful hand on his knee and tucked himself farther back into the chair. “You may be the most civil barbarian with whom I am acquainted.”

  “You haven’t known him for long enough,” Val sniffed. But there was no malice in it. Just habit. Giving them a small wave, I turned away.

  How Val meant to identify Mrs. Adams, I didn’t ask. Now I’d a moment to myself, I knew precisely what needed doing. Trudging up and down the streets of Manhattan in search of a woman and child was practically impossible before Val had identified Mrs. Adams and I could consult the Vigilance Committee as to likely hiding places, and then interrogate Varker and Coles with a plan in my head and the ground firm under my feet. Not a soul had been imprisoned with Julius, and I couldn’t yet ask her friends where Delia lived. Better, as my brother had suggested, to wait a few hours. But day and night, in every season, in the company of others or alone in the filthy, glittering streets, the bones in my fingers throb to be doing something toward making Mercy Underhill happy. The thought of a specific task, one that she’d all but requested when she hinted she hoped I’d write to her, was thrilling. Half crusade and half prize already won.

  “Be careful,” I said at the door. “About all of it.”

  “I’m always careful.” Val’s indistinct smile turned wolfish. “You just haven’t noticed that yet.”

  • • •

  I hailed one of Kipp and Brown’s public sleighs at Broadway and crowded into the huge ten-horse contraption, wedged on a seat between a skinny snake-oil salesman who’d thickened his hair with shoe polish and a shopgirl with glazed eyes. Both looked as if February had been the month they’d at last been forced to buy coal instead of hot lunches. Both had visible holes in their boots. Both wore cotton.

  Drifting, I imagined the world Matsell had described, the one without cotton to wear or sell or cut or sew. The sleigh’s lanterns shone like polished bells and its bells rang bright as lanterns, and the shop windows in the great stone buildings flashed past in a streak of gold. And then I was home, having walked east along Walker dreaming of a Party boss with his moneybags stuffed full of cotton, cotton bursting from his seams and pockets and ears and mouth. A scarecrow. A puppet hero with glass-bead eyes.

  The bakery was dark. Mrs. Boehm retires early and is up before dawn. But I found a tea cake shimmering with pink sugar crystals, under which lay a note. Half prim, clear handwriting—left hand, I noted, smiling—with Germanic a’s. Half loopy scrawl of a ten-possibly-eleven-year-old girl.

  Mr. W—

  You are presented this cake with our compliments, as you were called away. Some artistic disagreements we would have been glad to consult you over arose, but in the end results are very fine you will agree.

  MR. WILDE this one is yours tho I’d wanted yours to be bigger I tried but it wouldn’t rise you see and was sticky in the center. Next I come we are bradeing bread like hair. Won’t that be interesting I think it can’t be done but MRS. BOEHM says wait and see.

  —Mrs. E. Boehm

  —MISS AIBHILIN ó DáLAIGH

  Unlooked-for kindnesses can cut deep as cruelties if they come at the wrong time. It was a sweet note, but it robbed me of half my spine. Anger and fear can wind a man up, propel him forward. That small piece of gentleness deflated me as if I were a tent collapsing. So I tucked it inside my new frock coat and headed upstairs after retrieving Mercy’s letter. I wrapped the cake in a napkin. Something about its innocence burned my eyes.

  Lighting the lamp, I pulled my rush-bottomed chair up to my table. I waited for words to come, rubbing a quill over my lower lip, staring at Mercy’s tangled penmanship.

  Nothing happened.

  You can write police reports about kinchin whores, kidnapping, assault, and murder, but you can’t write ten words for her sake. You’re a prize catch, Tim Wilde.

  Helpless to do any better, I read Mercy’s missive again.

  … 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.

  Ten minutes later, I discovered I’d sketched a clockwork bird in the corner of my blank sheet, my chin in my hand. It was the identical bird she’d described. I knew for a fact. It must have been the exact duplicate, a portrait of a treasure I’d never seen—because that’s just the sort of thing Mercy would put in a story, and alongside the blood in my veins, her tales occupy a separate system of channels. Her ink has long pulsed through my frame. I wondered what it meant that she couldn’t feel her own stories, couldn’t find them real, and I practically taste them.

  There was a thought.

  The salutation daunted me. But I’d nothing to lose, and anyhow she knew I loved her. So I took a deep breath and the quill struck the page, words falling in measured, careful rows.

  Dear Mercy, who will never be invisible to me,

  Last week, I was engaged to find a stolen painting. I despaired at first, but ultimately there was an adventure in the woods and a happier end than I’d ever expected …

  Then I told her of the miraculous disappearing transatlantic envelope. And of Val’s Irish family. And of Bird’s cake.

  I signed it Yours, Timothy.

  I dreamed that night Mercy could draw. She can’t—she pens the most ludicrously deformed sketches it was ever my privilege to laugh at. But in my vision, she was painting a shepherdess with ribbons in her hair, on a canvas ten yards wide, against a fantastical violet and green sunset.

  The dream didn’t turn ominous until the peasant girl came to life under Mercy’s fingers. She smiled cruelly, while her flashing eyes promised that the rush of a first kiss would be delivered over and over and over again. I tried to warn Mercy to stop painting Silkie Marsh’s likeness—that it was dangerous to reproduce her, that I’d a manuscript I worried might be cursed. But the words caught in my throat. By the time I’d managed to call out, Madam Marsh had already stepped off the canvas and was walking away from us with a pleased glint of intention in her gaze.

  • • •

  “I ought to
tell him, I think,” I announced to my brother the next morning. “I’ve been dreading it, so I must be obligated. He’ll want to know … God, what will Charles Adams want to know?”

  Valentine didn’t answer. I don’t think he was listening. He shrugged in a twitchy fashion, tapping his stick against the pavement just outside the Tombs. His silence didn’t much bustle me, considering the time of day.

  The garbage my brother ingests is always obvious to me—I can practically see tarry slick pumping through the thick bluish vessels of his neck, whatever o’clock it may be—but before noon, it’s obvious to everyone. The light of early morning never treats Val cordially. His hat hadn’t a wide enough brim to shield him from pinkish dawn sunshine, a glare that shone perversely cold but still dazzling. I could have weighed the bags under his eyes on a scale, and the eyes themselves were shot through with blood beside the clear green. He’d reverted to Bowery style, with an amethyst cravat and a turned-down shirt collar, waistcoat teeming with foxglove sprays. Which could only mean he’d taken the tiger by the tail and returned home.

  “I mean to say, it isn’t—”

  “If you could close that gap in your head for thirty or so seconds, I’d be much obliged to you,” Val suggested, leaning on his stick in earnest.

  I sighed, crossing my arms. My annoyance highly grating and all the more abrasive for being so familiar.

  “World spinning?”

  “Shut up.”

  I obliged. It’s generally faster. Anyhow, my brother had apparently spent the previous half hour at the Tombs requesting of Chief Matsell that I help the captain of Ward Eight investigate a shocking crime. A crime that, if the press got wind of it, could greatly unsettle the locals. Considering the public scrapes I’d been entangling myself in lately, I’d have been flabbergasted if Matsell ate a word of what he was fed. But he trusts Valentine. And so I was now assigned to solve the murder of a beautiful mulatto female who’d been found tragically strangled in an alleyway between King Street and Hammersley.

  I studied my brother, who was still the color of glistening chicken fat.

  “Ready yet?”