Seven for a Secret Page 24

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Oh, Mr. Wilde.” She laughed, an effortlessly musical sound. “You’ve always been far too clever for a simple girl like me. You’re right. The late Mr. Mulqueen appears to have made a thorough job of it. He was quite the model of a copper star, wasn’t he? So dedicated to his work.”

  I went to the chair the stargazer had been occupying and sat.

  “And how is the eccentric Miss Underhill faring overseas?” she asked softly, reclining on the settee and swirling the liquor cradled in her bone-china hands.

  My head snapped back a fraction. That disgusted me plenty. Because I ought to have been expecting the question. The one Silkie Marsh knew would mortify me, calling to mind as it did my first foray into the brutish destruction of a woman’s privacy.

  I’d discovered Mercy there the previous summer, the night her father burned her novel to ash. She’d hidden away in one of Madam Marsh’s back bedrooms. In a gentleman’s company. Well, I can hardly say gentleman, since no gentleman would demand such favors in return for the money she needed to escape the cascading ruin of Reverend Underhill’s mind. As for me, I’d played the territorial canine baring its little yellow teeth, ruining trouser legs and acting a tragic nuisance. The realization that the woman you love is as worldly as you are ought to be shocking—according to spinsters and newspaper moralists. But I grew up in the mud. I’m no clerk with a dry little bottle-brush moustache wanting a silent mouse to cook and scrub and lie still for me. Why I’d supposed Mercy free from the most predictable desire imaginable is outside my own reckoning.

  What I do understand is that I treated her shamefully when she needed me most. An atrocity tailor-made to knock me windless just thinking of it. So of course Silkie Marsh had brought it up.

  She ran a finger along the lip of her glass. Waiting me out. Head tilting gently, mouth pointedly not smirking at me. As if she’d decided to be kind. Meanwhile, my patience was worn to a tender nub, and my options limited, and we were not discussing Mercy Underhill.

  “Whatever game is in play here, you’re behind it,” I said. The expression of sad patience remained. “You’ve connections to Gates through Party ties, to Varker and Coles through money, and you seem to know all about Mulqueen’s doings as well. My career has taken quite the plunge since this began. You’re terribly pleased by that, I imagine. And when I say game, I mean exactly that—we’re all tin soldiers for you to smash into one another.”

  “You give me immense credit for being a master puppeteer.” She made puppeteer sound complimentary. “Are you here to congratulate me, then?”

  “I’m here to question you. And you’re going to tell me the truth.”

  “Why should I do such a thing?”

  I leaned forward. “Because you’ll enjoy it. Just like you’ve savored watching me bleed.”

  She sipped her spirits, lashes lowering on an exhale when the brandy slid down her throat, looking as if I’d just kissed the hollow at the base of her neck. A glimpse of the golden glow of pleasure the men who bought her were allowed to see. But I was getting the genuine and not the fabricated article. I don’t know whether or not Silkie Marsh enjoys renting out passion. I can’t imagine she possibly could, though she’s rich enough to pick and choose her partners. But she sure as politics is crooked relishes games. Particularly when she’s the stick and I the spinning hoop crashing along the thoroughfare.

  “Here’s what I think,” I mused. “I think that when I ruined your business selling corpses of stifled kinchin, you wanted a new source of income.”

  She inclined her head, waving her snifter under her nose.

  “Varker and Coles offered to pay you to wrongly identify kidnapped blacks. There’s an enormous amount of money in it. Mulqueen provided the copper-star presence and helped to capture the merchandise.”

  “All true,” she said sweetly. “You’re really doing very well so far. Pity you had to drag your magnificent brother into such a sordid matter.”

  She’d meant to bait me and nearly succeeded. But it was actually an opening. I took it.

  “Pity he’s aware you’re behind it all. It hasn’t seemed to endear you to him. Do you know, I have never once in my life seen him turn down a free fuck.”

  Her eyes turned instantly to glass. Not with moisture, but with a hardness like polished crystal. I could see myself reflected in them, being torn oh so slowly into ribbons.

  Now keep talking, I willed her silently. And tell me something. Anything.

  Silkie Marsh chuckled gently, unwinding her slender legs. “It’s sweet really, how often you speak of your brother, Mr. Wilde. But you actually want to know about Lucy. Don’t you? You want to know how she died. I do assume that you know where she died, though not many do.”

  My breath seized.

  Of course she knew. Of course. She was behind it all, must always have been behind it, had been the author of the most putrid narratives I’d ever learned in my life, and for all that she wanted Valentine back, she wanted me crucified and then resurrected so she could do it again. I’d a horrible sensation that everything I touched from then on would crumble and decay, that I was a plague-ridden stranger in the midst of a healthy town.

  “How generous of your brother to offer his rooms as a haven. Valentine is nothing if not predictably gallant where beauty is concerned.” Acid bled through the creamy tone, but an instant later she was composed again. Gleeful, even. “You’re perfectly right, Mr. Wilde, what fun. I’m enjoying this tremendously.”

  The blood quickened in my veins. Impossibly, my scheme was actually working. Silkie Marsh so enjoys tormenting me that simply paying her a call was illuminating the conspiracy in sharp flashes of lightning in the darkness. Glimpses. If I could only get the right angle on the landscape, I could learn everything.

  “Just a moment. You didn’t kill Lucy—is it Wright, or Adams?” I amended.

  “That question is impossible to answer.”

  Surely it wasn’t, but I let that go. “You never murdered her. You’re not strong enough for that kind of force.”

  “How wonderful to see that you need not attribute every heinous act on earth to me.”

  “Oh, it was your doing. Just not your hands.”

  She sighed, smoothing her fingertips over the pink satin lining the gap in the dressing gown at her breast. Lips half-parted. Looking for all the world like a lazy diva being pleasured by a suitor.

  “Who did your dirty work for you?” I asked lightly. “My money is on Sean Mulqueen.”

  “Poor Sean—I shall miss him. He was very useful to Seixas and Luke, and you know them to be friends of mine. One is upstairs, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’m not, darling. You seemed sure enough agitated when you left. I was worried over you.”

  My head snapped to the side as Seixas Varker approached us. Wearing an expensive robe that didn’t fit him—probably had never fit any man who’d been forced to throw it on in a heated moment—and freezing in horror at the sight of me.

  Silkie Marsh forestalled any insult I might have lobbed about their sleeping together by winking at me in a roguish fashion and then smiling at Varker adoringly. But suddenly I couldn’t manage to pay Madam Marsh quite so much attention. I’ve read her cover to cover already. She’s constructed out of porcelain and rot—exterior flawless, interior remarkably uncomplicated. Money, power, and vengeance are all she knows.

  Varker, though. I wondered about Seixas Varker. All his high rhetoric about civic duty, about saving runaways from our heartless streets. He’d been smug but earnest. As if convincing himself it were true. That half smile, his terror of physical harm, the way he carried himself as if always vaguely afraid of falling. Sins are burdensome only to people with scruples, and I suspected Varker owned an inconvenient conscience he’d long been smothering. He was so repulsed by his own mortality, so averse to risk. His diseased attempt at serving justice hung so wrongly from his shoulders that the man was grotesque at first sight. Here was a God-fear
ing slave catcher, I reasoned, one with an appetite for wealth and an easy means to come by it, who’d no idea where he’d wake up when the Reaper divorced him from his plump hide.

  “My word, but you’re an unlooked-for nightmare,” Varker gasped. His wrist was still braced with wood and pale linen. “I suppose you’re here to break other pieces of me as yet left intact?”

  “Oh, Seixas,” Silkie Marsh purred. “That isn’t Mr. Timothy Wilde’s forte. Just look at him. You’re thinking of Valentine. But he really ought to be leaving now.”

  “Where are Delia and Jonas?” I questioned, approaching the slave catcher. “The pair you kidnapped. Where are they now?”

  He backed away smiling, pudgy frame all aquiver. “Why in heaven’s name should you think—”

  “Answer the goddamn question.” My fist had closed over the crossed lapels of his dressing gown before I quite realized how it had arrived there. “I want them back. They don’t belong to you.”

  “My goodness. Anyone would think they belonged to you,” I heard coolly stated from behind me.

  Varker’s back struck one of the Venetian mirrors an instant later. The glass shivered violently but failed to shatter. I closed my eyes, impelling rational thought by sheer force of will.

  This isn’t about you. None of it is about you. Calm the fuck down before you ruin it all.

  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 qu
ery 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.