Seven for a Secret Read online

  Temporarily unusable, it seemed. The sweep trotted up to it and threw open the double doors with a flourish.

  “Mother of God,” I whispered.

  The carriage had been converted into a display case. Cracked pieces of bright blue pottery lined the floor, shards of green glass were strung from the upholstery buttons, singular finds including a chipped ceramic rose and a chunk of sparkling river granite rested on the rotting seat cushions. Loose chandelier crystals and broken paperweights and a slender French liquor bottle—a cherished museum of unmourned, unremembered objects. I wondered if, before he’d joined the regiment of chimney dwellers, he’d lived nearby. It was probable. But I supposed I’d never know the answer. Stray children hereabouts are as closely tracked as the ants underfoot.

  The showcase’s pièce de résistance sat propped against the opposite door panel, festooned with a string of cheap amber-colored beads: a tiny painting by Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin. The shepherdess peered coyly at us, her head tilted back against a scandalously rosy summer’s evening. The curves of her fingertips and of her bosom echoed one another, and she seemed to be in the act of repressing a beautiful confession, tasting words of adoration on her tongue.

  The sweep pointed at it in triumph.

  Reaching, I plucked it from the glittering yellow glass. When the boy’s face tensed with worry, I took a seat on the carriage’s footrest and hung my wide-brimmed hat from my knee.

  “This came from a house on Fifth Avenue. You cleaned their chimney, didn’t you?”

  He rubbed at his eyes with ash-covered hands. Stared up again—not at me, but at the painting.

  “You must have known it was stealing, lad. Why should you have taken their property?”

  Furiously, his little fists rent the air. He made about a dozen stabbing finger points in all directions, then circled one hand with the other in a gesture of endlessness and concluded with a fraught, exasperated wringing of his fingers.

  “I know they’ve more art than they know what to do with. I’m sorry. But this painting already has a home.”

  The vitriol in his raw eyes was fully deserved on my part. So it burned me all the worse. I’d tricked him, and now he’d cottoned to the fact. Worse still, I understood him perfectly: the tender young shepherdess was far more passionately beloved in a ruined carriage than she was in that snob art warehouse on Fifth Avenue. I wished to holy Christ I’d never heard the name Millington.

  Tearing my sketch from the memorandum book, I passed it to the scowling youth, who stood digging his boot toe into a patch of frozen earth.

  “This is yours. I’m not going to punish you for stealing, but you must promise me never to do it again. Scavenging is one thing, but thieving could get you croaked. This is your first and final art theft.”

  He reached for his portrait. Like enough thinking my art better than no art at all, and already deft at quick choices.

  “Promise me,” I insisted.

  The boy did, with an enraged little shrug. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Though he wasn’t weeping, or not any more than he did perpetually.

  “What’s your name?” Mr. Piest inquired. “I am Jakob Piest, and this is Timothy Wilde.”

  The child’s face fell. He gave a pained blink, staring at a moldy wheel spoke, before shoving both hands hard into his pockets.

  I’d thought him an orphan. There’s an independence about us, and a gravity, that’s unmistakable. But at least Val and I had been old enough to own our names, no matter that we’d nothing else. Old enough to remember the family who’d named us, as well. A name can make a man. I couldn’t imagine being robbed of anything more personal.

  “Surely they must call you something, where you live now,” I reasoned. “What does your sweepmaster call you?”

  A shudder passed through him. It left the boy wearing a grimace as if he’d like nothing better than to peel himself out of his own skin.

  “Never mind,” I said, before his expression could bring any more of an ache to my ribs. “What sort of name would you like?”

  His eyelashes fluttered, soot-dusted and feathery. The line of his mouth grew a shade less taut.

  “Capital idea, the very thing!” Mr. Piest agreed.

  “Sweepmaster be damned. It’ll belong to you. What’s the bulliest name you can think of?”

  The boy took his time about it. Solemn as gravestones, lips pressed into a line. Finally, face all curiosity, he pointed at the shepherdess I held.

  “The man who painted this? His name was Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin,” I answered.

  The kinchin’s eyes closed as he rolled the sound of it to and fro in his mind. Meanwhile, a wild woodland happiness swept through me. A pleasure like sharp country wind and blown-open winter skies. I’ll never forget the look I shared with Mr. Piest a moment later. Warm as a wordlessly shared flask. And all thanks to a chimney sweep.

  “Do you like the name Jean?” I questioned.

  From the smile that transformed his face, like a pure crescent moon when the clouds have been swept away, I believe that he most assuredly did.

  • • •

  “To the Millingtons,” Mr. Piest proposed in my office, raising his cup of gin, “and the ways of old Gotham. In particular, to fat rewards and those who offer them!”

  We’d all quit the woods as plump snowflakes began to whirl around us in the late afternoon. Crossing Third Avenue in the accepted semi-suicidal fashion, dodging hacks and gleefully reckless vans, I’d watched the crystals settling, and thought about names and their absolute importance to their owners, and felt pretty near to delighted. We celebrated Jean-Baptiste’s self-christening by buying him the thickest bowl of oxtail stew I have ever seen summarily destroyed and then lingered over the occasion, sluggish with warmth and with firelight.

  I’d have done better by him than a hot meal if I could. Children are remarkable creatures, hurtling through savage landscapes of sudden laughter and sharp heartbreaks. It gnaws me bloody to see the city stretch them into leaner, taller, grimmer animals altogether. And there was an innocence to Jean-Baptiste, that wide joy at tiny blessings, I’d have liked to see preserved longer than the next fortnight or so. But taking it upon myself to relocate each and every destitute kinchin I come across would be akin to kneeling at the shoreline and forcing the Hudson back with my fingertips and my will, and at least this one was employed. Housed with his fellow sweeps, presumably, if neither fed nor loved. And thus I shook his hand outside the low saloon, and my fellow copper star flipped him a shilling, and we parted ways.

  Piest and I returned to the servants’ door and handed the painting over to Turley. He vanished, returning with a drawstring purse.

  “Didn’t you know there was a reward?” he’d asked in response to my complete incomprehension.

  So Piest and I split fifty dollars, bestowed for our facility at finding things, and he immediately bought the oddest-tasting Dutch gin conceivable. It warmed the throat in a friendly fashion, tasting of dark bread rather than pine.

  My Tombs cave had never looked brighter, as the wind howled beyond the great walls like a wolf baying madly at the heavens. I was rich enough to buy thirty or so used books, pay Mrs. Boehm for the carpet I’d borrowed, and set some aside. I was intoxicated with competence at my profession. Mercy Underhill was in London, which meant Mercy was presumably contented. And it was snowing, so I wasn’t unduly worried that my brother’s engine company might be fighting the raging house fire that would finally leave me the only Wilde in New York.

  That is to say, I was about as happy as I ever am. Happiness not being any great knack of mine.

  “To the Millingtons.” I touched Piest’s cup with mine. “To not having suffered the honor of seeing them again.”

  “Oh, come,” he chuckled. “We must view the Millingtons in light of their generosity with rewards and the unlikelihood that they will ever pose us any … unfortunate questions.”

  “I’m being an ass,” I agreed. “To Jean-Baptiste and
the artistic soul.”

  “Hear, hear!” My friend sloshed more gin into our cups.

  “To that shepherdess,” I added. “Whoever she was. My God.”

  Cackling in a nicely filthy fashion, Mr. Piest drained his spirits.

  “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

  “Yes!” he cried. “Yes, Mr. Wilde! But I so seldom work with watchmen—police, I beg your pardon, old habits—who can differentiate between their arses and their eyelashes. It’s exhilarating. The last time I—”

  My door burst open.

  The woman standing before us was uncannily striking. She’d richly golden skin that, when paired with grey-green eyes and hair the color of imported chocolate, would arrest the attention of male passersby and female alike. Universally.

  “I need a policeman,” she said.

  She didn’t. She needed a miracle.

  We soon had her seated, with a cup in her unsteady hand. Her distress was a horror you could taste, thick and sluggish as a slow death.

  When I asked her what had been stolen, her answer was My family. That statement hung gruesomely in the air for several seconds.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “My sister and my son,” she gasped. “Delia and Jonas. They’re gone. Delia stays with me when my husband is away, he travels for his business, and she—she was watching my—”

  The tin cup fell to the floor with a light clatter as she covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders trembled in concert with her breathing, ripples over the crests of shallow waves.

  “Have you searched—” Mr. Piest began.

  “I need you, Mr. Wilde,” she said, looking up at me fiercely.

  My showing at comprehension was already landing at about nil, but I’ll admit that staggered me.

  “Why do you say so?”

  “I know who you are and I know what you’ve done. You must help me.”

  My lips parted to say Of course I will. But they were a fair distance from my cartwheeling brain. I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about.

  “They steal people.” Tears filled her eyes, a tincture of misery and rage. “We’re wasting time.”

  “But how—”

  “I ought to have been at home by then. They’d have stolen me too, and you’d never have heard a word of this. When I did arrive, my cook, Meg, was bound and gagged on the floor of the pantry and my family was gone. They don’t want Meg, she’s lame in one foot, not worth their trouble. I asked a policeman in the front hall where Timothy Wilde was, and he sent me here.”

  “And I’m glad you did, but—”

  “You saved Julius Carpenter.” She launched herself from the chair, grasping both my lapels.

  Then I managed to grasp two things I hadn’t previously.

  My friend Julius Carpenter, the quietly brilliant colored oysterman I’d worked with when I was a relatively untroubled bartender, landed in trouble last summer. A pack of starved Irish caught the notion that burning him at the stake would be rare sport. I’d disagreed and been near roasted over it. Not that I’d minded, seeing as Julius had saved me from the fire downtown by sending my brother to dig me out of the smoldering rubble. If we were counting notches, Julius and I stood dead even. So there was half the mystery solved.

  The other half of the mystery ought to have been obvious. If I’d been looking as closely as I like to think I do, anyhow.

  Lucy Adams, with her honey skin and green-flecked eyes and gorgeous tangle of brown hair, might have claimed Italian parentage. She might instead have been of Spanish descent, though her voice proved a northern American birthplace. And then again, she might have been the exotic blending of a Welsh mother and a Greek father, or a Sicilian and a Swede. But she was none of those combinations. The reason I’d been so damnably slow to comprehend her spine-melting panic was that I didn’t much care one way or another what she was.

  But Lucy Adams did. She cared a great deal. Because Lucy Adams was black.

  Not above a quarter, likely less. I’d have guessed at an eighth. A fraction black is still black, though. Legally speaking.

  Then I grasped why she wanted my help and none other. My fellow copper stars are half wholesale decent folk and half plain villains, granted. But the slave-catching industry—which was the subject we’d been discussing all that while—isn’t just legal.

  It’s law enforcement.

  I pulled her hands off my coat, but only so I could have a grip on them. “You’re all free New York citizens, I take it.”

  “We hailed from Albany originally. My grandparents bought their freedom some sixty years ago. Slave agents care nothing for that, when the chance for profit is high enough. Delia and Jonas would be worth—”

  “How long have they been missing?”

  “Two hours by now.”

  “And how old is your son?”

  “Seven,” she said, nearly choking on the word.

  “Wherever he is, he’s with your sister, and we’ll soon find them. Mr. Piest, I can’t ask you to join us, but—”

  “If I report to the chief regarding our success today, I ought to be free if it’s to assist you,” Mr. Piest returned, shoving our cups in my tiny desk drawer.

  “I’d be grateful. Where are we going, Mrs. Adams?”

  “To see the Committee. My house, Eighty-four West Broadway between Chambers and Warren. You must knock exactly six times, sir, in sets of two.”

  With a small salute, Mr. Piest scudded away. Leaving me to dazed wonderment over who the devil the Committee was and what temperature of hot water I’d just landed in. Mrs. Adams took my arm, and we plunged through the door after him. We hurried through stone corridors out of the massive combined prison, courthouse, and ward headquarters, I making every effort to ensure my new acquaintance didn’t plunge headlong down the stairs wearing sopping dress boots.

  Then something peculiar happened.

  At the mouth of the exit hall, a burly redheaded copper star by the name of Sean Mulqueen peered after us, unmoving. Eyes narrowed in nail-sharp Irish scrutiny. He was flanked, as I’d often before seen him, by a hulking black Irish and by a native New Englander with an eerily rosy, youthful face, both of them Ward Six roundsmen. I nodded to Mulqueen, as I knew him slightly. Whenever we’d spoken, he’d struck me as forceful-minded beneath the layers of gristly muscle.

  “Friend of yours, Mr. Wilde?” he surmised.

  “Crime victim.”

  “Oh, then ye had fain be getting on. Best o’ luck,” he added, voice quite inscrutable.

  “Good night,” I called back as we quit the granite fortress and found ourselves smothered in darkness.

  Mrs. Adams’s grip tightened as we negotiated the eight slick steps down to the cobbled road. Two gaslights shone nearby, but the rest had blown out due to cracks in the lamps. We hurried south along West Broadway. The snow tumbling beneath what light remained looked faerie-touched, sinister. Shards of airborne glass keen to slice a person in ribbons.

  “Were you anxious over harassment from slave catchers?” I questioned over the din of the gale. “Had they threatened you?”

  “No. They needn’t have. I’ve been terrified for years that this moment would come one day.”

  “Why so?”

  “That’s easy enough to answer, Mr. Wilde.” She pulled her fur tighter around her regal neck. “I’ve been kidnapped before, after all.”

  four

  I felt of my pockets, so far as the fetters would allow—far enough, indeed, to ascertain that I had not only been robbed of liberty, but that my money and free papers were also gone! Then did the idea begin to break upon my mind, at first dim and confused, that I had been kidnapped. But that I thought was incredible. There must have been some misapprehension—some unfortunate mistake. It could not be that a free citizen of New-York, who had wronged no man, nor violated any law, be dealt with thus inhumanly.

  —SOLOMON NORTHUP, TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE, 1853

  To the south of our city exists a
land as unlike ours as it is possible to imagine. A country of lush fields, soft-voiced belles, easy graciousness, and mist-shrouded nights that whisper like the heat of a lover’s breath against your neck. There are moss-draped trees there, I hear tell, and slow winds, and blue skies. And in that land flourishes a trade that festers like an open cancer in our national skin.

  We don’t think about that land very often. Or most of us don’t, anyhow. It might as well be a separate nation.

  I’ve met a great many Southerners here. Poured neat bourbons for them, added mint to their water in the summertime, talked with them of books and of horses and of trade. Some of them are kindly and genteel folk who would serve up a feast to any flea-ridden midnight stranger who knocked at their door and then ask the chap to stay over for the week. Some are fiery scoundrels who’d as soon duel you as shake your hand. Exactly the same as New Yorkers, therefore—pretty evenly divided between knights and knaves.

  With one cardinal difference.

  In the North, blacks are a free but steadily trod-upon race. And in the South, they are livestock. Cattle, but a universe of suffering worse than cattle: cattle that can think. Our small but vocal set of abolitionists are at pains daily to point this out, and they get putrid tomatoes and jagged rocks lobbed at them for their trouble.

  The rest of us simply don’t want to dwell on it. We’re cowards of the human imagination. Soft as fresh cheese. We don’t want to think about breeding people as if they were racehorses. We don’t want to think about kinchin pried from their mothers and traded for farm equipment. We’ve no desire to think about branding fellow humans, nor of laboring in the Louisiana sun in an endless daily cycle, nor of being flogged to death if the party objects too loud or too often to this scheme, nor of escapees being torn apart by dogs. So the general population doesn’t think much about it. And grows hotly annoyed when forced to pry open an eye and stare slavery in the face.