Seven for a Secret (14 page)

All was in its rightful place, more or less. Apart from the world being splintered to pieces.

None of it meant anything. But
it
, all of
it
, might mean everything. I never knew such things until the very last moment. And one day, when my luck runs out, I won’t know what things mean until it’s too late.

After cleaning up every trace of chaos as frantically as an underhousemaid who’d offended the mistress, I quit Val’s ken with the intention of locating him in the swiftest manner possible. But on my way to the stairs through the carpeted hallway, I heard the front door of the building opening. As I reached the upper steps, a stocky man approached the lower, placing his hand on the rail. I kept right on going. We met in the middle, looking each other over. Neither with a particularly fond eye.

“Mr. Mulqueen,” I said.

“Mr. Wilde.”

He glanced at my copper star. I glanced at his. It was pinned to a thick brown sack coat, and he wore a blue jacket of Irish manufacture, all pointed tails and brass buttons. His star wanted polishing, but so did mine. Mulqueen has green eyes, much paler than the bottle color my brother and I share. They glistened with something wary.

“Any idea where my brother is hiding himself at the moment?” I asked.

Mr. Mulqueen had been a step below me. Apparently that didn’t suit him, because he abandoned the rail to drift toward the wall and join me. I wasn’t much fussed by his being taller again. In fact, I walked two or three casual steps farther down, just to show that we were mates and I was short and also leaving. His oddly tilted ears burned red from the wind, and he peered down at me with a sour expression.

“Looking for him, are ye?”

“I thought I’d drop by. It’s my day off, you understand. Care to lift a pint down the street?”

“’Tis nine forty-seven in the morning,” he answered, pocket watch in hand to dryly illustrate this fact. “And I don’t drink.”

“Ah. Well, if you’re after my brother, he isn’t in, I’m sorry to say.”

“I’m here due to there bein’ a report of a disturbance. In your brother’s very rooms, can you believe it. Seems there was a fight o’ some kind, maybe a violent one, and they’re after me sortin’ it out.”

“There’s no one in, I tell you.”

“Well,” he said with a smile tender as sandpaper, “lucky thing you’re here, and like enough to know where his spare key is, and we can sort it proper between the pair of us.”

I assumed a worried air. That wasn’t a long walk, for I’d never been so worried in my life. Trotting back up the stairs, I studied Val’s door, wondering how feasible its being left unlocked would look when I opened it. His spare key had been bestowed on Mrs. Adams, of course, and despite a search I hadn’t an inkling where it was.

There was nothing for it, however. I tried the knob and swung the door open. Affected a bit of puzzlement. Mulqueen likewise raised an eyebrow, but then he strode over the threshold.

He examined each room by turn. I stayed by the doorway. Skeptical and irritated. When he returned from the bedroom, I snapped my watch shut in mild reproof.

“There must ha’ been some mistake, to be sure,” Mulqueen murmured. “As ye said, there’s nary a soul here. If that were a prank, ’twas a poor one, eh?”

“Very. A very, very poor prank. Who alerted you?”

“Oh, we all have our little sources, Mr. Wilde. Someone thought there was a row, you understand. Just a citizen doing their part. A relief, though, to find naught amiss after all. Best be off, then?”

Despite the fact that he made every nerve in my body stand up and clang like the City Hall cupola fire bell, I couldn’t have agreed with him more. We returned to the street in silence. Val’s door was left unlocked again, but I couldn’t be bothered about it. If a poppy freak broke in and stole his morphine supply, well, then I would simply have to shake that man’s hand.

“Afternoon,” I said, touching my hat in the briefest possible gesture.

“And to you, Mr. Wilde. Oh,” he added, turning back.

I likewise paused. The morning sun etched every detail of him into my brain, from a barely loose coat button to the almost imperceptible stain at one side of his mouth from chewing tobacco, and I wanted the blankness back. If I was seeing everything again, clear as I normally do, my day was about to get painful. He wore three heavy golden rings on various fingers, and his watch chain was likewise creamy yellow ore.

Odd, on a policeman’s salary. To say the least.

“Whatever happened to that negress?” he asked. “The crime victim from t’other night?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I removed her from a slavers’ den, as you’ve probably heard. But after that, I don’t know. She’s gone.”

“Pity,” he said, smirking coolly. “She was an eyeful.”

Another curt good-bye followed, and I fled.

Something resembling panic was creeping along the backs of my eyelids. As if I needed a reminder that I was vexed, my scar twitched in petty mockery and I shoved my fingers against it, warding off the tension that would set my head pulsing. I needed my brother. I needed a plan. I needed to blast this day to pieces and sink it beneath the waves like a pirate-ravaged schooner. I needed a cave to crawl into and think things through before the soft edges of the panic hardened and closed round my neck like a noose.

She’s not cold,
I thought as the panic’s slack grip tightened its reins.
She’ll never be cold anymore. And for all you know, you’ll never be warm again.

•   •   •

A conference between
my brain
and my feet to which I was not invited determined that I should go home before I gave the entire affair away by exploding into slivers of ash on some street corner or other. I’m not sorry to have missed the discussion. When I opened my front door, I entered a hearty cloud of orange rind and cinnamon.

After hanging my hat, I found myself peering down at a small girl of around ten or eleven. It’s impossible to be sure. We don’t know her birth date. It occurred to me that she ought, as Jean-Baptiste had done, select one herself. Bird Daly is an equally discerning, independent-minded sort of creature.

“Hello, Mr. Wilde.”

The grin she was wearing belonged on a promontory along the Hudson, to stop more ships being lost in inclement weather. She has a dazzling smile when she likes, and she likes more often now. It changes her entire face, the pale, sober square of it softening into gentle curves. Bird’s dark red hair was done in a prettily worked single plait, and she wore a warm woolen dress of a scarlet hue that didn’t match her tresses in the slightest, having likely come from a Catholic charity box. She resides at the Catholic Orphan Asylum for schooling and takes what comes. The object being that once she’s schooled, she can take what she likes.

When her grey eyes met mine, the joyful expression crashed to earth in a meteoric descent.

“Mr. Wilde?”

“It’s all right. I’m happy to see you. I’m just . . . happy about nothing else at the moment.”

“What’s happened?”

“Is there tea?” I asked of Mrs. Boehm. My voice sounded strangely distant. “Or barring tea, will you pass me the whiskey bottle in my cupboard?”

Mrs. Boehm made a familiar clucking noise that meant she was very concerned about something, but would defer discussion for the moment. Water from a pitcher promptly splashed into a teakettle. Walking to the table, I sat down and palmed a hand through my dirty blond hair.

Bird’s fingers lightly brushed my shoulder. Seconds later, whiskey appeared before me.

A culinary project of continental proportions had been undertaken on the bakery table. The end result looked as if it was going to be tea cakes. Little trays had been set out, dotted with pools of spices and zest and thick batter. Then I recalled that it was Monday, and Bird was missing school in order to visit us thanks to the generous nature of Father Connor Sheehy, and understood.

“The cakes are for your classmates?” I asked. I didn’t bother hazarding a smile. Bird can read me clear as she can a Democratic political poster.

Bird’s snub nose twitched as she worked out how best to handle me. Interrogation versus patience seemed to be at war in her head. Having once been a kinchin-mab, she’s very good at it—the handling of people. Children who earn their living in brothels surviving the attentions of adult men have to be good at such things. But my friend Bird has a knack all her own.

“I thought it would be a flash lark, and Mrs. Boehm didn’t mind.” She squinted, dimpling.

I released the breath I’d not been aware I was holding. Apparently she was going to allow me to pretend that life was normal, at least for a few minutes. A pinched look of worry had settled between her eyes, but she gamely dipped a wooden spoon into the bowl of batter and passed it to me. I wish to Christ that Bird Daly had never been imprisoned and used like an animated doll for men’s amusement. The thought of it will never cease to make me ill. But her strangely adult gravity can be an unexpected reprieve at times, and I found myself grateful, though I’d have traded it for a display of childish temper in an instant.

Dutifully, I tasted the spoon.

“Either you or possibly Mrs. Boehm is the best baker I’ve yet encountered,” I decided. My small friend smiled, a real one. My taller friend shot me an anxious glance.

Later,
I mouthed.

Nodding, she set the teakettle on the stove.

I thought about being a child, and not one like Bird: one with parents. As I once was. Helpless and happily unaware of the fact because someone else was doing the protecting. Then I thought about Jonas Adams. His fleet of wooden ships and his shy smile and his round blue eyes. His exceedingly foreboding absence.

Taking a breath deep enough to reach my toes, I wrenched myself back into some approximation of attentiveness.

“You’ve been studying sewing,” I mused.

Bird’s lips pursed. “How do you reckon?”

“Because you’ve two pinpricks on the fingers of your left hand, and no one told you that you ought to finish off a button with the little knot on the underside instead of the top of your sleeve.”

“And so? You’ve been spying like a simon-pure nose,” she scoffed.

“Why the devil do you say that?”

“Mr.
Wilde.
It’s from the charity togs.
Anyone
could have been learning to sew on this frock. You passed by the schoolroom, and you looked through the window last Friday. I spotted your hat. It
was
me mending it, of course,” she added ruefully. “I’m rubbish at sewing.”

Smiling didn’t seem quite so difficult suddenly, though I knew the sensation would be very short-lived. “Tell me about school,” I requested.

She pegged me for desperate, so she obliged. Bird is generous like that.

Some time later, when the cakes were cooling and awaiting decoration, when I’d listened to her tales of earthworms and grammar and the horrible boy who called her a beetle-eyed vixen, I was near enough to myself again. Mrs. Boehm likewise listened attentively, nodding when I advised that the horrible boy ought to be teased mercilessly for paying any attention to Bird whatsoever and questioned in the closest detail in front of his mates as to why he was looking at her in the first place. Apparently, whiskey at my elbow and a pair of watchful allies are all it takes to pull me back from the edge of mental ruin. That was a nice thing to know about. Comforting.

“Are you growing to be happy there?” I asked.

A second or two passed before Bird’s chin jutted up and down in a forceful nod. “I’m very happy. You’d not believe how happy. I’m chaffey as you please.”

Biting my lip, I hesitated. Bird isn’t allowed to lie if it’s for my sake, since I’m keen to shoulder whatever burdens she passes me. But Bird hammers lies into shields to hide behind, weaves falsehoods into little ships to keep herself afloat, and I couldn’t spot out whether that last fabrication had been for her or for me. Nor how to ask without bullying her. Beneath the queasy anxiety over my discovery that morning, it mightily troubled me.

“Mr. Wilde,” Bird whispered when Mrs. Boehm had stepped out to feed the yard chickens. She hovered, thrumming with unspoken questions, a few inches from my right elbow.

“Yes?”

Her voice fell yet further. “Something happened to you. Was it something like . . . did you find more kinchin, say? Buried in the woods?”

Bird and I tend to stay about a foot away from each other—she carries herself as if an invisible battalion surrounds her, and I understand why. That is, we keep our distance, barring exceptional circumstances. But this was one, for I’d neglected entirely to imagine what she must have been thinking. So I smoothed a tiny strand of her hair behind her ear in apology.

“That’s not going to happen anymore.”

“Do you promise?”

She spoke guiltily. As if her enduring fear might offend me. That broke my heart a little.

“I said it already,” I replied as Mrs. Boehm returned. “I don’t need to promise.”

I hit some mark or other, whether or not it was the bull’s-eye. She nodded. Satisfied, at least for the next five or six seconds. And then, because in several ways Bird and I are very alike, I realized that I needed confession too, of a kind.

“Bird, might you go up to my room and gather the charcoal and paper? We’ll draw something.”

“Do you really want those things?” she couldn’t help but ask me.

“No,” I admitted.

I’d made it the most obvious ruse possible, knowing she would see through it. Bird—as a deft and experienced liar—can spot a hummer a mile away. But she went anyhow, because Bird is plumber than most anyone else I can think of.

“
Bitte,
” Mrs. Boehm hissed on the instant Bird had vanished up the stairs to my room. She sounded almost angry. I wondered why. “What in God’s name has happened?”

Softly as was possible, I spilled the story wholesale.

If I could say why I did that, I’d be deeply comforted. At knowing my interior so well and all. I can’t, though. Maybe the events were too big for me and would have seeped out through little splits and fissures if I hadn’t employed the more usual outlet of my mouth. Maybe Mrs. Boehm was a woman to whom the worst had happened already, the unendurably worst, and I didn’t fear hurting her. Her husband and child were dead, after all. Whatever it was, I posted her entirely. Telling the tale was insane, I know. But it felt like necessity nevertheless.