Seven for a Secret Page 6

  That would be one reason we loathe slave catchers.

  New Yorkers enjoy being told what to do about as much as we enjoy a plummeting stock market. And thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, we’re required to hand runaways over to Southern slave agents as if we’re returning a spooked thoroughbred. In 1840, a shockingly moral Albany law granted alleged fugitives in New York State the right to a jury trial. And in 1842, Prigg v. Pennsylvania nationally revoked the right of any colored fugitive to a jury trial. Thus, in 1846, up is down and straight is crooked and black is blacker than black has ever been. Right and wrong are left suffocating, beached fish in a barren legislative no-man’s-land.

  It’s all so illogical that every man does pretty much as he pleases. And that was my plan, as Lucy Adams rapped carefully in three sets of two upon her lightly snowbanked front door before turning her key in the lock.

  To do as I pleased.

  Damask curtains masked the windows in her parlor. The gas burned low. Barely a yellow flicker to mark the furnishings or the floral carpet beneath my feet. The fire in the grate had been stoked up, though, sending restless shadows dancing across the comfortable chamber. A profound sense of emptiness, of something missing, permeated the room. I’d have thought I’d intruded upon a wake, but wakes are considerably noisier.

  Three men rose to greet us. All of them black and one of them known to me.

  “You’ve found him, then,” my friend Julius Carpenter said to Mrs. Adams, shaking my hand. “How are you, Timothy?”

  I smiled despite the gravity of the setting. When we’d worked together at Nick’s Oyster Cellar in Stone Street, which seemed millennia ago, Julius shelled upward of a thousand gleaming oysters a night. He’s quick and contemplative, with a calm, round face and deep-set eyes under inquisitive brows. My friend wore the clean but loose-fitting clothing of a carpenter after work hours, and he’d fragrant tea leaves braided into the rows of his hair. If it was a shock to see him, at least it was a pleasurable one. We’d worked together for so long, I think the pair of us could still serve a hundred stock jobbers blindfolded and never break a sweat. We’re sympathetic that way. In tune.

  “Julius, what in hell are you doing here?” I gripped him by the arm. “And what have you been doing with my reputation?”

  “Nothing it didn’t deserve, I calculate. Everyone, this is Timothy Wilde, Ward Six copper star. Meet the Reverend Richard Brown and George Higgins, of the New York Committee of Vigilance. And the third member would be me.”

  City dwellers are inordinately fond of committees. Committees for temperance and against it, organizations supporting everything from the expulsion of the Irish to all-vegetable diets to secret fraternities. But I’d never heard of this one. “You’re part of a club?” I asked.

  “No, a cause. We do what we can to keep free blacks alive and well and in the North, where they belong,” Julius explained. “People of color run the risk of capture every time they step outside. We do what we can to reduce the danger. It’s all run on a volunteer system, and any donations go toward keeping the streets safe. Mainly organizing patrols and night watches in colored neighborhoods, providing legal advice to blacks who find themselves in hot water with slave agents, that sort of thing. We try to take care of our own.”

  “You’re an unofficial watchman?”

  I shouldn’t have marveled, for Julius is square as they come, but the thought took a moment to settle. Smiling gravely, he tapped his forefinger against his chin, a wonderfully familiar little gesture he employs whenever I am surprised for no good reason.

  “But for how long?”

  “Nigh about three years by this time, I’d figure.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Julius shrugged one shoulder. “I didn’t want it getting around. You remember Nick—fair enough as bosses go and always paid us on time, but he liked me better the less he saw of me.” My old friend brushed his palms down his shirtfront. “Sit down, everyone. There isn’t much in the way of time.”

  We seated ourselves—Julius and I in a set of matched armchairs with our backs to the fire, and Mrs. Adams, Reverend Brown, and Mr. Higgins spanning the settee. Richard Brown was thin and scholarly, with the bulge of a miniature book straining his waistcoat pocket, though I didn’t need the tiny Bible or Julius’s introduction to set him down as a minister from eighty yards. His face was worried but strangely peaceful—as if he’d accepted that the outcomes of his trials were in hands other than his.

  George Higgins was much more intriguing a fellow. Taller and thicker built, with a kingly jaw and a very dark, almost blue-black complexion. He wore a carefully trimmed beard, a silver watch chain, and a green silk cravat, though his hand was calloused where it dangled from one crossed knee. The calluses could have meant anything—local blacks tend to average three jobs at minimum. But this Mr. Higgins was wealthy. Had the watch chain possibly been an inheritance, I wouldn’t have leapt to such a conclusion, but it was fashionably long and slender. Anyhow, silk cravats are capable of surviving a single New York month at best, and his gleamed sumptuously at me. He’d widely spaced, clear brown eyes with something flintlike gleaming at the back of them. They scraped over me as if uncertain what lay beneath my skin.

  He was anxious, and not from abstraction or gallantry. He was anxious personally. I wondered for whom.

  “Post me,” I requested. “Mrs. Adams told us that her sister and son have been kidnapped for more than two hours. As reported by her cook, Meg, who was forcibly tied and left within the house.”

  “Meg went home just now, shaken up and with a stiff leg but otherwise fine,” Julius answered. “Seems that two men, one with a Colt pistol, barged into the house after she answered a knock at the door. Tied her down and tossed her in the pantry. She heard one or two screams, then nothing.”

  “Can she identify the assailants?”

  “Oh, we know who they were well enough.”

  “I mean, could she peg them in court as kidnappers of New York citizens?”

  If I’d stood up and blown a shrill whistle blast, the others couldn’t have looked more dumbfounded. The expression melted into anguish on Mrs. Adams’s face, rancid disgust—quickly mastered—on Mr. Higgins’s, and simple disbelief on Julius Carpenter’s.

  “Your friend the copper star is a real prize, Julius,” George Higgins drawled.

  “How would he know, after all?” Julius leaned forward with his fingertips touching. “Timothy, how well Meg saw them doesn’t matter. Black testimony isn’t admissible at fugitive slave trials. Only a white can officially identify a black in court. As for a black identifying a white kidnapper—I’ve never even heard it tried.”

  My jaw dropped for long enough to say, “But that’s ludicrous.”

  “Yes, that’s rather the point, isn’t it?” Mr. Higgins asked acidly. “Mr. Wilde, we’re grown men and not afraid of facing down these vermin, nor fearful of a fight if it comes to that. But we want this rescue to come to some good, you see. We don’t need your help doing what’s right. We’ve done that before, a score of times. We need your help doing what’s legal, now there are copper stars.”

  A score of times.

  “You’ve rescued upward of twenty people?” I asked, startled.

  “We’ve begun to, though not all were saved in the end,” Reverend Brown confessed. “Sometimes we succeeded, but as for the rest … their court cases fell through. The poor souls are in Georgia or Alabama by now, may God grant them strength.”

  I passed my fingers through the arch of my hairline, skimming normal skin and skin resembling badly cured alligator hide. This assembly was clearly better than capable of minding their own affairs. If the fact they’d no legal way of doing so made me ill, it must have sent a brushfire burn through their guts when they looked at a pint-sized white star police.

  Six raps spaced into pairs reverberated from the foyer, and Mr. Higgins pushed to his feet with a worried glare.

  “It’s my colleague, but let me be s
ure,” I said.

  When I threw the door open, it was indeed Piest, half-frostbitten and his squashed face red as a boiled lobster. He stamped his boots and followed me into the parlor without a word wasted.

  “This is Jakob Piest, as good a copper star as you’ll find,” I said, making the necessary introductions. “Now. Obviously, I’m at sea here. Who’s responsible, and what have you done in the past to counter them?”

  Reverend Brown put his elbow on the arm of the settee, a finger tensed before his lips. “Their names are Seixas Varker and Long Luke. Slave catchers, they would tell you. We would say otherwise.”

  “They’re snakes,” Mr. Higgins snapped. “And we’re wasting valuable time.”

  Mrs. Adams shuddered.

  “Well, whatever their species, their names are Seixas Varker and Long Luke Coles, and I believe they hail from Mississippi,” Julius put in smoothly.

  “Where would they have taken their captives?” Mr. Piest leaned with one shoulder against the doorway. “And what can we do about it?”

  “We’ve one great cause for hope tonight.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The storm,” Mrs. Adams whispered, touching the curtain.

  Beyond the pane, snow poured like grains through an hourglass, wind whipping drifts into sinuous eddies that broke in white-crested waves. It was terrible out there. And getting worse. Already, ships had dashed themselves to pieces along our coastline, and sailors with talismans clenched in their fists searched the horizon in vain for a lighthouse, a harbormaster, a haven, a crest of rock. To no avail. February 14 of 1846 was a cruel night. One that would be long mourned. But even if I didn’t yet know of the massacre the Hudson had wrought, I took their meaning plain.

  “I’d suppose kidnap victims are normally spirited away without bothering over a trial, if possible,” I ventured. “But no sane person would dream of setting sail in this weather.”

  Julius nodded. “Varker and Coles have a side business in wine distribution. They’ve a dockside shop in Corlears Hook, equipped with plenty of bottles in the front and a cell in the back. They hold people there when a ship isn’t ready to hand.”

  “And that’s legal?” I demanded.

  A host of simmering looks met my eyes.

  “Next time I say something stupid, cuff me in the ear,” I requested of Julius. “What’s first on our agenda?”

  “Lucy needs a hiding place. This house isn’t safe,” Julius answered.

  “But I’m going with you,” she said with a deadly look in her eyes.

  “That would be an insane risk,” I objected.

  “He’s right.” George Higgins dug his nails into his palm. “There could be violence. And so we really ought to be leaving. Where’s best for Lucy to wait?”

  “The station house, for my money,” I said, rising.

  “No!” she cried, aghast. “No, not the Tombs. After sending Meg for the Committee, I came there for you. They’ll—”

  “Not that station house.” I exchanged a look with Julius. “I’ve a suggestion. No offense meant, but you said legal help. Think of the copper stars as your hired bruisers. If a fight breaks out and we get the worst of it, you men throw down gloves—but if not, it’s cleaner to leave any milling to the star police. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  A seething sort of trouble percolated in Mr. Higgins’s eyes, but Reverend Brown set a hand on his shoulder. “If we’re wanted, we’ll fall in,” the clergyman agreed.

  “Aces. Mr. Piest, how are you at pugilism?”

  “Ah,” he said doubtfully. “Well. Very willing to employ fisticuffs in a good cause, Mr. Wilde, in fact none more willing, but—”

  “There’s a kinchin at risk here, and the kidnappers are armed, and visiting the Hook is its own set of risks. Mr. Piest, we’re fetching one more copper star.” I offered my hand to Mrs. Adams, who took it without looking at me. She’d gone quiet as a stone.

  “Then we three will go at once to the wine shop and keep guard.” George Higgins leapt up, pulling on his gloves. “If something should happen before you arrive, Mr. Wilde, I warn you—we’ll do whatever we must.”

  “I certainly hope so. We’ll meet you there in force and storm the gates. Mrs. Adams, we’re taking a hack to the Ward Eight station house.”

  “And why Ward Eight?” Higgins queried pointedly.

  “Because Mrs. Adams doesn’t trust copper stars, and you don’t trust copper stars, and I need another copper star who’s flash on the muscle and runs a loyal station house. That means the captain of Ward Eight. Think of him as my brother instead of as police if you like,” I suggested as we all converged on the door and the tempest beyond. “Or as a Republic of Texas–sized version of me, whatever you please. Just so long as we get your family back, Mrs. Adams, I don’t mind if you think of Valentine as a trained grizzly.”

  “And anyway, that wouldn’t be too far off the bull’s-eye,” Julius muttered amiably as we shut the door behind us.

  • • •

  Hacks were scarce in the violence of the storm. But so were pedestrians, and within ten minutes I was seated in a drafty cab with Mr. Piest and Mrs. Adams. Our hacksman must have driven close to blind despite his lamps, for the snowfall formed an arctic curtain of bitter lace. More than one bone-snapping bump sent Mrs. Adams’s hand clutching for the strap handle.

  But she said nothing. And comfort unasked for is often comfort unwanted. So we listened to the whistling gusts until the driver reined his horse, cab wheels skidding dangerously and the half-frozen creature whimpering with nerves. Prince Street was drowning in white. After paying the driver his two bits with a few pennies extra to wait for us, I could scarce find the neat brick station house’s door.

  Inside, the fireplace crackled hotly behind the hinged pine countertop with the quill and inkstand where my brother was meant to be presiding. Granted, according to my pocket watch, his shift had just ended. We’d passed nine o’clock at night by then. But the station felt oddly abandoned, for the roundsmen were freezing their eyebrows off trudging in circles and their captain was nowhere to be seen.

  I gestured at the bench. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll just check the office.”

  Mr. Piest commenced a slipshod but kindly meant tale of the formation of the copper stars to the hollowed-out Mrs. Adams as I set off. Halfway down the hall, I paused. A muffled scraping noise met my ears. Then a chirping birdlike giggle. I threw open the office door.

  My brother Valentine was seated in a wide oak desk chair. So was a ravishing girl of about twenty. Plump everywhere that mattered, red-gold hair falling about her bare shoulders, with her back to Val’s chest and her left arm crooked up around his neck. Laughing as if the fact of his palm cupped inside the swell of her canary-yellow corset was more amusing than anything else she could think of.

  Maybe she was right, and she couldn’t. But I didn’t have time to talk it over.

  “Jesus Christ, Val,” I growled. “In the station house?”

  “Timothy!” Val waved a friendly cigar at me with his free hand. Not bothering to desist from any activities being performed by the other. “Tim, meet Miss Kelly Quirk. Kelly, this is my brother—as plumb a pin basket as they come.”

  After those few seconds, I understood the following pieces of truly disturbing news.

  First, from the languor of his towering frame and the constricted pupils within the vivid green circles of his eyes, my brother had just indulged in the usual evening recreation: sipping enough morphine tonic to float a barge down the Hudson. Second, from plumb pin basket—which loosely translates from flash into good little brother—the upswing of an absolutely soaring state of loose-limbed euphoria was gaining momentum. I can force sobriety on the man during the downward spiral, but not before. That would require divine intervention, and God doesn’t indulge me on that particular front. Last, he’d been scraping his fingertips through his dark blond hair, sending the tip of his widow’s peak up in a boyish scruff, which meant that a hefty
dose of ether had also been involved.

  Ether makes Val tactile. Before he starts seeing things, that is.

  Of the six substances Valentine combines with morphine that I’ve documented, ether is trickiest to navigate. I loathe the stuff. Literally anything could happen to him—from loss of consciousness to winning an impromptu boxing match to deciding that wearing clothing is a hypocritical act. If I’d been anxious before over our mission, now a spoiled lemon had magically appeared in my gut.

  “Miss Quirk here was nabbed on suspicion of stargazing.” The near-scarlike bags beneath Val’s eyes quivered with amusement. “She’s explaining why she’s no bat, and I think she’s got a nacky argument. Where’s the whoring if it’s for free sport and not a little hard cole clinking in the pocket?”

  Kelly Quirk nodded sagely, then emitted a happy squeal that presumably had something to do with my brother’s whalebone-obscured right hand. I wasn’t eager to dwell on the subject.

  “You. Out.” I jerked my thumb at the door. “Charges are dropped. Congratulations.”

  Her mouth curved into a tiny pout. “I want to stay. I like him. What’s wrong with your brother, Valentine? He’s not a molley, is he?”

  I’d a pretty tart reply on my lips as to which one of us could be accused of amatory tendencies toward men with any validity. But I swallowed it in the nick of time.

  “Can’t I stay?” She fluttered her eyelashes at me. “I like you too, you know.”

  “Christ almighty,” I groaned. “Get out, or the vagrancy charges are reinstated. I’m sorry. Have a pleasant night.”

  Frowning prettily, she retrieved her long-sleeved jacket bodice and flounced her way through the door. Sticking her tongue out at me for good measure.