Seven for a Secret Page 9

  —JOHN JACOBUS FLOURNOY, AN ESSAY ON THE ORIGINS, HABITS, &C. OF THE AFRICAN RACE: INCIDENTAL TO THE PROPRIETY OF HAVING NOTHING TO DO WITH NEGROES, 1835

  At the Ward Eight station house, I knocked, pushed open the door to Val’s office, and sent Delia and Jonas inside. Trembling and wet but undisputedly free. Lucy Adams released a cry without any sound to it. As her family flew toward her, a smile broke over her face that could have lit the Astor House for a year.

  The knot just at the base of my own throat went slack far too quickly, unspooling at a reckless speed. After handing over the station house’s medical kit for Delia’s wrists, I shut the door behind me and slumped against it.

  Mercy, I thought, would have been proud of that night’s work. I pictured her as she’d looked when gliding into rank rookeries and cellar hells. Madly fearless and half-smiling, passing out bread and salt and soap with no regard for the skin shade of the recipient in question. Poor and well-off alike thought her as deranged as she was generous, and she’d terrified me on behalf of her own health. And I’d adored her for it.

  Sucking in a breath, I headed back down the hall.

  “I owe you one,” I said to Valentine, who’d pulled up his tall chair behind the front counter. Setting my hat on the wood, I rubbed at my ruined temple. Of course the instant I’d stopped tensing my right eye in mute worry, half my head throbbed in dull revenge.

  My brother and I were alone by that time. En route to Grand Street, Mr. Piest had peeled off in the direction of his own night circuit—stalwart as ever, though bleary about the eye. The three Committee men had recognized quicker than I’d done that no cab would take all of us and few enough would take the three of them in any case. To my stifled but cinderlike embarrassment. So they’d made the gentlemanly offer of parting ways, after I’d vowed to see the family to a temporary haven in the absence of Charles Adams. And thus the two living New York Wildes—one jelly-spined in relief and the other jelly-spined for self-inflicted reasons—had whisked Delia and Jonas away in an indecently bribed hansom. Paid for by my far flusher older brother. That was irritating. As is everything else Val does.

  “As if I did that for you.” Val smirked, resting his elbows on the counter. “If a riper moll exists than that Mrs. Adams, I will eat an unsalted shoe.”

  “She’s married,” I said with a scowl.

  “Hasn’t troubled me before now. Oh, for God’s sake, dry up, I’m not going fishing in that lake.”

  “Thank you. Wait,” I added. “Do you usually—not that I’d mind.”

  “Mind?”

  I never had minded, had been raised—so far as I’d been raised at all, which was a piss-poor joke—not to care in the smallest. About amalgamation, that is. Blacks and whites exchanging intimacies. Val and I hadn’t money enough to be snobbish toward any living beings save lice when I was a boy, and the Underhill patriarch who took us under his wing was a radical Protestant zealot. Anti-amalgamation sentiments are for people with embroidered cushions and lace antimacassars, or else the sort of low clods who insist Africans are a type of monkey.

  “If she wasn’t married,” I explained, “I’d not care. If you—”

  “Leave off your face before you make it even more of a smashed pudding.” Val slapped my hand away deftly.

  “Don’t talk about my face.”

  “Don’t tug it like a pervert with a gratis spy hole, then.”

  “Sod off. But—I mean to say, do you?” I inquired none too clearly.

  “Sleep with black women?” Val by now looked entirely baffled. “Last time was two or three months back, so far as I can recall. Why?”

  And there we were. The only surprising thing about the conversation was that I’d bothered asking. Valentine can’t be arsed over the gender of his bed partners, as I’d learned to my shock the previous August. So the race could hardly give him pause. I considered adding amalgamation to Val’s list of scandalous acts and found I couldn’t be bothered. Narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion, and sodomy had all alarmed me at one point or another—amalgamation was a trip to the American Art-Union to survey the placider landscapes.

  I’m supposed to mind, though. I’m supposed to mind, according to some, a very great deal.

  In 1834, we hosted one of the most enthusiastic riots Manhattan has ever witnessed. As we’ve quite a collection, that’s saying something. One of our leading white abolitionists invited a black clergyman to church one gorgeous spring morning when the great blue bowl of the sky was cupped tenderly over our holy Sunday goings-on. And not only to hear the sermon, but to sit in the abolitionist’s very own pew. When the white congregants made to shuffle their guest into a colored pew, their minister made the mistake of protesting that Christ Himself must have been of a Syrian complexion.

  The implication that Jesus our Lord might have been anything other than pale as a dogwood flower set off such a chaos of violence, arson, and general savagery that we got to the point where handbills with planned routes for havoc were distributed in public marketplaces. No police, of course, so the New York First Division cavalry finally quashed the uproar. And on every sneering rioter’s lips was the word amalgamation. I was sixteen years old, Valentine twenty-two, and I can still hear their voices—swollen thick with tar fumes and whiskey and spite.

  Let the amalgamators have their way and no place will be safe for our women, not even our churches—

  Blondes are particular susceptible, they say, it’s the very blackness as does it, how opposite they are, a blonde girl will turn fascinated and then—

  Did you know that their lady parts can rip it right off a man, though if you ask me any amalgamator who suffered that would get what’s coming to—

  It’s mainly Irish who’d sink so low, and just think of the brutes they’ll be breeding, between colored brains and Irish character I can’t bear to—

  “Anyhow, it isn’t my appetites that need palavering over,” Valentine declared with a bruising finger jab at my chest. “You, young Tim, need a ladybird.”

  I wrenched my brain dizzily onto this new topic.

  “Oh, God. We aren’t discussing this,” I protested in genuine alarm.

  “What sort do you hanker after? I know plenty of pretty lunans would leap at the—”

  “No. Please, no.”

  “If you get any more stiff-necked, your spine will snap like a wishbone. We’re finding you a moll. What about that landlady of yours, Mrs. Boehm? Widows, eh?”

  “Leave my landlady out of whatever this is.”

  “But you’ll admit she’s a charmer, if you like the bony sort of bloss. God, don’t you ever wonder what that mouth would look like—”

  “Stop talking.”

  “Mercy Underhill isn’t in London waiting for you.” Val was quiet but certain, as if reading tides from an almanac. “She’s just living. As she’s always done.”

  “Fuck ether,” I said with deadly sincerity. “The morphine I can manage, but—”

  “Or here’s a suggestion—why don’t you wait until your nuts shrivel off and then mail them to Mercy by transatlantic post as a remembrance? Because that’s more or less what you’re doing now.”

  “That isn’t the way it is.”

  “And I say you’re wrong, and you’d better change the way it is, my Tim, or it’s a sorry pass you’ll come to.”

  As far as I can tell, I didn’t want to throttle him just then because he was obnoxious, or sailing on a sea of pleasurable poisons, or even because he was my brother. I wanted to throttle him because I suspected he was right.

  Part of the problem was that I couldn’t picture a girl wanting someone so scarred up that his only waking thought other than Mercy Underhill was police work. And my stomach flopped like a fish every time I imagined trying my luck with an actual girl and finding out I was right. But as for the other part of it …

  The space Mercy’s absence created in me was a voracious hole. Not a neutral erasure, but a gleaming bla
ck bonfire. Had I taken a keek in my chest, I’d have seen bluish flames skittering along ribbons of ebony pitch. The sensation was pretty specific. It wasn’t just about my libido, on my life it wasn’t—she’d been my closest friend. I missed Mercy as if she were a phantom limb. So rather than dousing the dark inferno, I kept shoveling fuel like an engineman. Terrified by the nullity that would be left inside me if ever I lost it. Trivia fed the fire—that Mercy had once crossed this street with me, that she was obsessed with first snowfalls, that she stared down torch-wielding brutes as if they were bowling pins, that she’d always passed me any pieces of parsnip from her plate with a wry smile of distaste.

  So possibly, I’d have been better off scouting out a cure. It’s a ridiculous affliction, being unable to glimpse a waterfront without calculating the number of waves between myself and her. Ridiculous, and impractical. New York is an island. But I was so far advanced a case that the usual sciences seemed not to apply.

  “Gentlemen, it would be a miracle if I could express my thanks to you,” a velvety voice announced.

  Mrs. Adams stood before us with her kin. Viewing Lucy and Delia next to each other, I suddenly knew just what their mother looked like—tall and graceful, with generous lips and cheekbones like the gentle sweep of a bough in an apple orchard. Lucy’s pale eyes and Delia’s blithe freckles were the only striking differences between them. Mrs. Adams stood about two inches taller than her sister, clutching at Delia’s elbow as if her sibling might be whisked away again.

  The kinchin was barely visible in his mother’s skirts. But the fraction in view looked a fine boy. Clever hands, thin frame. Quick, curious brows under a mop of dark curls. Jonas was very like his mother, though with a wider-set mouth and perfectly round blue eyes.

  “No thanks necessary,” I assured her. “I wish I could take you home, but you heard Julius and the other Committee men. It’s not safe before your husband returns. We need to find you temporary lodgings. And I need your statements, even if they’re to be unofficial—if Varker and Coles are kidnapping free blacks on a regular basis, I have to spread word at the Tombs. Apologies for making a wretched night even longer.”

  Jonas—or the pair of eyes afloat in a sea of cobalt velvet—commenced studying me over. As any practical person will do when confronted with the natives of a hostile foreign land.

  “Are we really meant to find a hotel in this weather?” Delia asked worriedly.

  “I can escort you,” I offered.

  “That’s a ripe peach of an idea,” Valentine sniffed. “Why don’t you prance up and down the streets in a blizzard with three people who’ve no luggage—and two of them no winter coats? You’ll find a proper hotel in seconds.”

  “They can’t go home until Mr. Adams returns, not with that pair of mongrels loose.”

  My brother shrugged in agreement. I didn’t add a principle that I was only just beginning to grasp based on my conversation with the Committee men: and anyway, the word of two colored women isn’t worth a straw against the word of two white men. If only a white could identify a black in a court of law, I wanted the family as far away from the courthouse as possible. Varker and Coles, I theorized, could be dealt with in due course. Personally.

  “We’ll go to church, Lucy,” Delia suggested, fingers tracing her sister’s hand. “I’m sure they’ll let us heat one of the choir rooms.”

  “Our church will be locked this time of night,” Mrs. Adams answered doubtfully.

  “But it’s only ten blocks, and it’s true, we’ve no coats, and—”

  “Right,” Valentine declared in what I think of as his political voice. It’s the tenor he uses to convince Irishmen they’d best turn out on Election Day or the Party will suffer crushing defeat. He lifted the hinged countertop. “I am famished. A dose of kitchen physic is what’s called for.”

  My head spun a bit. Even if nearby restaurants remained open, I doubted many of Ward Eight’s were unsegregated. We could bluff our way in, but there’s always a risk when blacks pass for white and no one looked to be hungering for excitement.

  “There’s an eating house near the Hudson slips on Charlton Street that might do for everyone,” I said skeptically. “But—”

  “No, not Radolinski’s rat hole,” Valentine scoffed. “Their dumplings are always lumpy, how I’ll never know, and their veal sauce tastes of bear grease and shame. I’ve got plenty of scran at my ken.”

  “Good night, then.” I nodded. “I’ll let you know—”

  “Are you lot coming? Or are you going to drag these perfectly decent folk through the snowdrifts like a cat with a dead bird?”

  Absorbing the fact Val had just invited us to his residence a block and a half away on Spring Street didn’t take long. The fact I was so glad of it bustled me thoroughly, though. After not abolitionists, for one thing, and Mercy isn’t waiting for you, for another.

  “That would be much appreciated.”

  “Then leave off your fireplug imitation and walk,” he ordered.

  I did. As for the exhausted crime victims, they trusted me on a basic level by then, and so they followed.

  That was a pity. Not only for me, but for them as well.

  And I do think of them as well. Very often. If I’d known the sort of trouble that would follow Val’s simple act of decency, I’d have wished my brother a heartless cad in fact and not in theory. Instead, I took Mrs. Adams’s arm and walked straight out the door toward the ice-sharp edge of the known world.

  “You owe me two, now,” Val pointed out, winking.

  “I’ll remember that,” I replied.

  And I did.

  • • •

  “Talk me through it from the beginning, slowly,” I said to Delia—who was unmarried, apparently, and whose name was Delia Wright.

  “You look troubled.” She took a deep sip of hot Souchong tea.

  “I detest writing police reports,” I admitted, fiddling with the quill. So tired that I could barely hear myself explaining my innermost thoughts to a stranger. “Particularly when I’m recording conscienceless things. It’s as if—I can’t explain it. As if when I officially document them, they have to stay with me. Or I give them permanence, or … I know it doesn’t make sense.”

  Sitting at Val’s oak desk in his parlor, sipping tea whilst sizzling sounds drifted with the smell of browned onions from the kitchen, I’d begun to feel less like a Timothy Wilde–shaped ice sculpture. And strangely communicative. Mrs. Adams, who kept running her fingers through Jonas’s hair, was with him in the kitchen helping Valentine do whatever he was doing. I’m dead certain Val liked that arrangement. Delia Wright sat before me in an overstuffed chair, still wrapped in Higgins’s coat. Neither of us wanted to encounter her torn dress buttons just yet, I believe, though the room was warm. Nor the white strips of bandaging dividing her arms from her hands.

  “As if you’re deliberately memorializing something that oughtn’t be remembered at all,” Delia said softly.

  “I’ve never phrased it that well.”

  We fell silent again as Delia gazed about the room. Valentine owns the second floor of a brick rowhouse in Spring Street—a large kitchen, a parlor with a dining area, and two bedrooms, all of them scrupulously clean. The second bedroom doubles as an office and is stuffed with Democratic Party paraphernalia that has a disturbing tendency to encroach on the rest of the house. For instance, above the sparkling freestone hearth, a framed sign announces THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS THE TRUE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE, and the one above the striped armchair Delia occupied reads THIS HOUSE VOTES LOYAL DEMOCRAT. As if that was in question. I’d mock him for it, but there’s no reasoning with a man who has a four-foot painting of Thomas Jefferson in his bedroom. Opposite an oil study of an American eagle armed with arrows in its talons.

  “Please tell me about it, howsoever you like.” I dipped the quill in the ink pot. “Take your time.”

  Delia took an abrupt interest in the edge of her saucer. “I’d walked Jonas home from school—I teach a
t the Abyssinian Church along with Reverend Brown—and we were in the sitting room roasting some chestnuts. I like to stay over when Charles is away. The men knocked and when Meg opened the door, they forced their way inside.”

  “Had they other accomplices?”

  “No. It was just Varker and Coles. I told Jonas to run, but Coles caught him and tied his hands behind his back.” Her expression went brittle, eggshell thin. “I tried to tear him away, but I couldn’t manage it, and by that time Varker was back from shutting Meg in the pantry. Varker pointed the gun at me. Then he said if I kept struggling, he’d take it out of Jonas’s hide.”

  I’d no wish to snap Val’s quill, but that was getting to be a difficult job. “You might have seen that Varker’s wrist is shattered. I don’t know if you remember. Anyway, I’m pleased to tell you about it.”

  Her brown eyes sparked. They were very dark, but lit from within, a late-October sort of color. “Whose doing was that?”

  “My brother’s.”

  “I’d have killed him,” she said. Flat and even. “If he’d touched my nephew, I’d have murdered him. I don’t care how. I’d have found a way.”

  I touched the feather to my lip. Delia Wright, I concluded, was a decidedly different woman from Lucy Adams. Mrs. Adams’s terror for her loved ones had seemed a bottomless pit. Freefalling, almost unmanageable—I was amazed she’d acted as courageously as she’d done. Deeply admiring, in fact. I’d seen such fear in those grey eyes, fear churning and depthless as hell itself. It had rendered her exhausted afterward. Near mute. Delia, though—now the shock had worn off—was furious.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” she owned with a half smile. “You’re an easy man to talk to.”

  “I’m a rosewood secretary,” I found myself confessing ruefully. “All neat little drawers and dark cubbies people lock their bloodied knives in. I don’t mean to imply—God, I’m sorry. You’re easy to talk to yourself. And you won’t find I’ve any sympathy for that worm. What happened next?”

  “They took us away in a carriage. It was all very fast. After they locked us in that room, they left us in the dark for hours, chained to opposite walls. I kept talking to Jonas, telling him to move, that he’d grow too cold otherwise. Reciting poems to him, stories. When Varker came back, he’d evidently been drinking. He told me he needed to test the quality of the merchandise.”