Seven for a Secret Read online

  “My morals stem from poverty, not from affluence.”

  “How very biblical of you. In that case, you’ll inherit the earth one day, no doubt. Oh, just a moment, your kind already—”

  “Stop,” Julius ordered sharply. “This isn’t about either of you.”

  That landed with a resounding clang. Higgins and I looked at each other, then looked away, then felt angry at ourselves for looking away and glared at Julius. It was a pretty little morris dance, all told.

  “Valentine Wilde doesn’t enjoy fighting people who don’t fight back,” Julius added, rubbing at a linen compress tied over the cigar burn on his forearm. He wasn’t calling attention to it—Julius can shell oysters like the devil himself for a reason. His hands take pleasure in movement, are fond of being busy. “Man to man? Certainly. As for women and children—it’s beneath him, George, even if the fellow does own a taste for blood and narcotics.”

  I sighed. “Yes, that’s— Thank you.”

  The room fell silent. A gently ticking mantel clock counted out tensely drawn breaths.

  “Timothy, are you suggesting that someone, rather than sending us a message, sent your brother one?” Julius pondered.

  “I don’t know. No one knew Mrs. Adams was there. Though Varker and Coles knew just who was involved in rescuing her kin,” I realized. “So it’s not impossible that they guessed at her hiding place. It was the reason for her being dead baffled me. Until Rutherford Gates came into it. Please, tell me anything you can.”

  “So you can make new discoveries and fail to apprise us?” Higgins demanded. “So you can treat us like partial men? Do you know what I do for a living?”

  I shook my head. Not having been able to work that question out for the life of me. And desperately curious over it, to boot.

  “I’m one of the first graduates from the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, but I trained as a shoemaker because work for educated Negroes does not exist. When I’d saved enough money to leave for Canada, I went to Julius here to say my farewells. He mentioned that most of the drunks you two used to serve were stockbrokers, and I’ve always had a head for finance. Julius found one who’d speculate my money exactly as I like provided he kept a third of my profits. Fellow called Inman. Even minus thirty-three percent, I’ve ample money to live like a king. I can’t testify in court, I can’t eat a meal at the Astor, I make two-thirds of what I ought to earn on Wall Street. And you, Mr. Wilde, will not keep delivering me half the information and then a day late. Not where Delia is concerned.”

  Dazzled, my eyes flew to Julius. Last I saw Inman, I was passing him a plate of oysters with sugared vinegar and his fourth champagne bottle, and he was shrieking at me that Sam Morse’s telegram could make me rich in the amount of time required to take a morning piss.

  “It’s true,” Julius chuckled. “I’d thought best not to mention it at the time.”

  “In fact, I don’t know quite why I just told you all that,” Higgins admitted.

  “My fault, not yours.” I waved my hand dismissively.

  “Never mind, everyone tells him things,” Julius agreed.

  Memories flooded back to me unbidden, of Nick’s Oyster Cellar and what our lives had looked like. Julius, laughing fit to burst because I’d opened a champagne bottle with a saber and drenched three stockbrokers. Julius, beating Val at poker when my brother had stumbled into our establishment so drenched with opiates he could barely see me. Julius, bored and tapping a rhythm on the bar with his palms I couldn’t parse to save my life.

  “You don’t know Timothy, George,” Julius said. “He’s not an angel. But I know him, and I’ll spill if you won’t.”

  “And I’ll tell you everything,” I vowed. “As soon as I learn it, from this point on.”

  We were quiet for a while.

  “If you ask me, Lucy was married for a fact,” Higgins announced, seating himself.

  He did it for Delia. Not because he trusted me and never because he liked me. He did it because suffering my company might—just might—make a difference for her. I often don’t care for people at large, but the sublimely individual things they do will never cease to quicken my heart rate.

  “Are Rutherford Gates and Charles Adams the same person?” I asked. Grateful for a place at the table, however despised my chair.

  “Must be.” Julius ran his fingers across his mouth in thought. “We’ve known Lucy two years, and only ever met her husband at their ken.”

  “Two inches taller than me, brown hair, greying goatee, half-spectacles?”

  “That bastard,” Higgins growled. “That filthy bastard.”

  “Could his wife and her sister have been aware of his second identity?”

  “That’s a sizable lie for an entire family to keep.”

  “Maybe easier for three than for one?”

  Higgins shook his head, wincing a little. “They never spoke of politics, never blinked an eye at his tales of the open road. It doesn’t match. And when Jonas went to school of a morning, his aunt walked with him. Delia sometimes sent the lad home in the company of the reverend or another friend, but I could count the times I’ve seen the boy with his stepfather on one hand.”

  “I need facts, dates, but better yet, a story,” I pleaded. “I’m much handier with those.”

  Julius glanced at his ceiling, considering. “Round two years ago, I was contacted by a woman who’d just married in Massachusetts and now lived on West Broadway. Asked me to tea. Her family, not to mention George here, was part of the Reverend Brown’s Abyssinian Church.”

  “But Lucy attended services without Gates?”

  “Why, Mr. Wilde,” Higgins drawled, “you’d never suggest a white man and a colored one share the same church pew, would you?”

  “Heaven forbid,” I agreed. “Tell me about the meeting.”

  “Friendly enough,” Julius replied. “Lucy was … skittish. Very recently, she’d lived through an abduction. So she wanted to contribute to our Vigilance cause.”

  “For safety’s sake?” I questioned.

  “Could be. I think … like-mindedness would be closer. She wanted to talk with people who understood. Knew the way her outlook had changed.”

  My thoughts flashed to letters carved in a woman’s chest and a wide-eyed panic that in retrospect made all the sense in the world.

  “She introduced herself as Lucy Adams, and that mongrel introduced himself as Charles Adams.” Higgins abandoned the chair to resume prowling. “He seemed as passionate about our cause as she was.”

  Several items of note emerged from the ensuing conversation. Lucy, after having been kidnapped outside of Albany with Delia and Jonas for sale at the Capital, had been altogether crippled so far as venturing outdoors was concerned once the family was transplanted to New York. Barely keeked her head past a drapery for fear of being spied by wholesale villains. But the marriage itself never suffered a wrinkle over her reclusiveness, so far as the Committee men could tell. Adams—Gates, as we began to call him—had seemed besotted with his supposed wife. At least, insofar as Julius and Higgins could report from their own interactions with the couple inside the walls of 84 West Broadway.

  “Who else was generally present, when you were entertained there?” I asked.

  “Delia, Jonas. Between three and five other friends from church,” Higgins answered.

  “All black?”

  He nodded once.

  “And when Gates hosted the rare political soiree, you were never invited.”

  “Thought him a salesman for a new French-designed mechanical sewing apparatus, the lot of us,” Julius reported in an arid tone. “He traveled a great deal in that line of work.”

  “How could he have hid Lucy on the few occasions Party members were present?” I marveled, half to myself.

  “I can answer that,” Higgins replied readily. “Lucy detested being around strange white men. They frightened her. Gates would simply have sent her upstairs with the boy, dismissed the cook, and done
just as he liked—she’d not have marveled over a feast being delivered for his clients.”

  I sat with my eyes closed, a despicable picture forming. “Tell me how often she left the house.”

  “For church, weekly, with Delia and Jonas. That was at first. She grew more relaxed as time went on. Less fragile,” Julius recalled.

  “Whose notion was that? The solitude?”

  “She’d every reason to be cautious,” Higgins answered. “And that lying snake supported her, or seemed to.”

  “Supported her caution or his secrecy?”

  Higgins descended, weary eyed, into another of Julius’s hand-worked chairs.

  “Was she ever in public with Gates—on his arm, as a couple?”

  “Can’t say as to that,” Julius replied slowly. “I’d guess at a no.”

  “God, this is hideous,” Higgins lamented. “How could I have been so blind?”

  “She’d been hurt beyond our imagining when kidnapped,” I posited. “Gates genuinely feared for her, perhaps. The rest was a wet tissue of lies, and she never knew who he truly was. But suppose he did care about her and Jonas’s well-being: who could say which motive for hiding in a townhouse played the bigger role? What I can’t ignore is that Gates would be far more likely to panic over a real wife than a misled housekeeper. Because God knows it looks to me as if Gates either killed her or paid someone else to do it, considering what happened last month.”

  “Last month?” Julius repeated.

  “She got a job.” Higgins’s eyes grew wide. “Outside the house, where she could speak to anyone. Lucy was hired on at Timpson’s. I’m going to wring that mongrel’s neck with my bare hands.”

  “Gates claims his housekeeper, Lucy Wright, was glad of a better position,” I reminded them. “Finding her own digs, her own life. Was their relationship over?”

  “Not so far as Lucy knew,” Julius said.

  “Did Gates object to her finding work?”

  “Not as she ever mentioned.”

  “Did anyone set eyes on Lucy, Delia, or Jonas after the night of the abduction? Did they go to church on Sunday?”

  Higgins shook his head. “They must have kept indoors—for all the good it did them.”

  Unable to keep still any longer myself, I wandered over to the fireplace, hearth neatly swept with a poster bearing the emancipationist emblem AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER? tacked over the mantel. Several other objects rested there. With a start, I recognized the turnip used to gag Julius the previous summer, along with a brick with a smear of blood on it, a leather tawse, a rock the size of a child’s fist, and the set of tattered clothing he’d been forced to wear in the courtroom, folded in a compact pile. I recalled asking my friend in August why in the devil’s name he carried the turnip in his pocket, walking away from the construction site where he’d nearly been burned to death.

  Because I’m still here, he’d answered. I got a brick, a leather strap, and a rock from a slingshot too, all on a shelf. But look at me. I’m right here.

  “Wringing Gates’s neck isn’t our first order of business,” Julius reminded us, smiling at me when I turned away from his macabre collection.

  “We have channels,” Higgins agreed. “Systems in place to try to bring people back when we act fast enough. It was the courts entering into it we were worried over when we consulted you, Mr. Wilde. Copper stars are …” He hesitated, seeking out the right word. “A new variable. We didn’t know quite what to make of you all.”

  My thumb traced the star pin, as if I needed reminding it was there. “We know Varker and Coles are connected to Silkie Marsh, and that Marsh is also connected to Gates; we don’t yet know whether Gates and the slave catchers have ever exchanged words. But the kidnapping and the murder, so close on each other’s heels … it can’t be coincidental. We need more evidence. I don’t care if you send me to hell itself—all I ask is that you permit me to help fix this.”

  “And if they’re in South Carolina?” Higgins asked in the tone of a man who could very possibly have lost everything. “The storm has long passed, ships in and out of the harbor just as usual. What if they’re gone?”

  “Then we’ll not rest until we’ve tracked them,” I answered. “And in the meanwhile, redirect our focus to your earlier suggestion. The one involving Rutherford Gates’s neck.”

  • • •

  I left the Committee men by way of the burnt district. Wound tight as a fishing line and needing to think things through. A list in my pocket naming Lucy’s few close contacts promised me immediate work, but another line of inquiry nagged at me.

  Mulqueen, my mind kept insisting. Mulqueen at the scene of the crime. I’d been in such a whirlwind when he’d appeared on Val’s steps that I’d failed to press him. That was unconscionable. If he was involved—sent to find the corpse or even returned to check his handiwork—I would run him to ground. And if not, I needed to press him over who’d given the alarm. From the looks of Val’s room, there had indeed been a struggle. That boded ill for Delia and Jonas, who could well have been dragged out by their hair. There would have been noise. Val, who is sly if not a bit discreet, would need to question his neighbors—possibly one had, in fact, alerted a copper star.

  But Mulqueen was my responsibility. I hastened my steps, for snow had begun falling again, fat flakes caressing the edges of my hat.

  The fire last year destroyed thirty buildings in a charred swath of destruction that will doubtless awe us for decades. My walk through the blankness was disquieting, for many walls yet crumbled while half-conceived replacements rose in skeletons beside them. Scattered construction continued, mostly of the demolition variety, for the ice made brickwork difficult and third-story aerial acts downright suicidal. I avoided Stone Street, where I’d lived before. I think I’d a right to. Instead, I watched men with strong Irish jawlines and coal-black hair pushing handcarts filled with smoky waste along the cobbles. Their hands were flaking and bloody from the cold. But they’d buy bread for their kinchin that night.

  I wondered how many of them Val had employed. I wondered why I’d never questioned why everyone treats him as if he were a deity. Mere pugilism could never have accounted for it, nor firefighting fame. Then I wondered why I work with such apparent enthusiasm at being a first-class idiot.

  In Cedar Street, I stopped before the whimsical façade of the new post office. It’s fronted with thousands of gilt-edged panes, numbered windows into tiny worlds, where the merchants can peer to see whether they’ve any correspondence. Mercy decreed it magical when it opened and promptly mailed an anonymous love letter to a businessman she didn’t know, just to see it lodged in its little glass cage. I went inside and passed ten cents to the clerk to mail my letter to London. Thinking it more efficient than her suggestion of a bottle hurtled into the sea.

  I felt better after that—like a man with one mission accomplished.

  Thoroughly snow-caked by the time I reached the Tombs, I headed for the records room. Mulqueen’s route took him down Orange Street, through the sinkhole of the Five Points itself. Rendering it nigh impossible for him to have arrived at Val’s by happenstance.

  Frowning, I shut the ledger and hurried to my private nook to check whether I’d any communiqués. There were two, in fact, on my little pine desk. The one in Matsell’s braying hand demanded reading first.

  Wilde,

  Judge Sivell has asked that I pass along his compliments to you over justice served. He also desires to fine you for contempt of court. Your brother has promised me a full report within the week regarding what in hell is going on, and thus—because he often knows our business better than we do—I have agreed not to question you for the time being. In the meanwhile, be aware that your position is as precarious as the existence of the copper star force itself, and that turning runaway slave trials into three-ring circuses is not appreciated by the powers that be. You tread a thin line. A very thin line indeed.

  As for me, I likewise congratulate you over freeing an innoce
nt man. Sivell believes I have docked you a week’s pay. I will dock you a month’s pay and take the remaining balance out of your bollocks if you make me look in the smallest degree foolish. I haven’t looked foolish since 1822.

  Expectantly,

  Chief of Police G. W. Matsell

  I blew out a breath and tucked the note in my pocket. It would never do for him to barge into my office and see it in the dustbin. The next was from Piest, in angular writing slanting weirdly to the left.

  Dear Mr. Wilde,

  I hear stirrings afoot, patriot, which disturb me greatly in mind. Since our escapade, I have myself largely eluded censure, but rumors grow apace regarding your own heroic role. I would be the lowest of dogs not to inform you of such. More cannot be said here, wariness is the handmaiden of courage, as you know, and I will impart to you greater detail at your earliest convenience. You know where best to find me, and as the reverse is untrue, I urge you to seek me out with all timely haste.

  Best regards,

  Jakob Piest

  Ten seconds passed wondering whether Piest’s warning should produce laughter or heart palpitations. Calling it a draw, I slid it next to Matsell’s. Piest went on shift at ten, and I could find him somewhere along Chambers Street.

  I cut south through the Tombs. The wind picked up when I stepped beyond the shelter of thick granite walls, tunneling through the streets, keening like a wraith. I followed Leonard Street to Centre, pausing for the train to pass. It was brimful with passengers, its horses shaking the snow from their shaggy manes as they hauled the tram cars north.

  In the cancerous epicenter of Ward Six, not far from my lodgings, I began my search. Twice over, I walked Mulqueen’s route, once in each direction. Twice over, I endured the stench of Paradise Square—the heart of the Five Points, paved in shit of many origins and populated by the shades of what were once emigrants and blacks. A body lay sprawled beneath the bone-colored edifice of the Old Brewery that I at first took for dead, but merely suffered starvation and alcohol stupor. It was a mulatto boy of about eighteen. If he was lucky, he would survive and come morning pawn his shoes for another jug of spirits. If he wasn’t, he would be in the ground the next day and not alone in that destination. His thin shirt and blue trousers were crafted of cotton, and he cradled a bottle of rum under his elbow.