Seven for a Secret (19 page)

And I followed.

eleven

We wonder that the stones of old Bunker Hill do not cry out, when the Union, cemented with the dearest blood of our fathers, is thus publically assailed. But on the whole, this mad folly of the silly fanatics, will operate better than the sly, underhanded works. The people can see their designs, and shun them. It will work out its own cure; in a few years, these ravings will be forgotten, and the men who uttered them will have been consigned to an unlamented oblivion.

—“REGARDING ABOLITIONISM,”
THE NEW YORK
HERALD
, FEBRUARY 17, 1846

W
idely spaced bootprints
in the snow,
those of a man determined to reach his destination with efficiency, proved my breadcrumbs through the forest when I’d exited the engine house. A tiny jewel box of a one-horse cutter flitted past me, the black stallion’s footfalls muted as sleigh rails skimmed the packed grey powder. Ward Eight is well maintained by comparison to my dung heap of the Sixth, and so sporadic gas lamps shone down upon shuttered shop windows and ice crystals dripping from awnings like so many salivating fangs. Muffled strangers hastened past. A butcher with a tweed coat, an Irish peasant clad in the soft, tilted hat and corduroy breeches he’d worn when he stepped off the ship. I followed the path of the footmarks quiet and quick as I could. Before long, however, I reached the wide intersection of Mercer and Houston, and all possibility of tracking disappeared in the riotous snow heaps edging the roadways.

Thankfully, my brother is unnaturally tall. His high black hat bobbed steadily along Mercer, and the pearl head of his stick gleamed in reflected light from the snow. Avoiding a trio of free-roaming pigs and a man scattering white ash with a shovel, I followed Valentine across Houston.

My mind felt slick, frictionless as the ice beneath my boots. What business could my brother have, plunging into Ward Fifteen? At its center is a tranquil little park called Washington Square, saturated with greenery in the summertime and serene in its frosted winter repose, where Mercy Underhill had once flown whenever her mind was unsettled. At the thought of Mercy, a thorny twinge struck me that I wasn’t writing the most heartening letter ever set to parchment. The sensation required considerable quashing. But quash it I did, for Val had no call to visit the rowhouses of Washington Place, nor the quaint Dutch Reformed Church, nor New York University with its parapets and pale students rushing about on stalklike, hose-covered legs.

No, Val’s business is of a more visceral cast, generally speaking. And so I glided along behind him. Half sick over what I might discover.

He turned left on Amity Lane, just before the square. Bare elms with eerily frost-crusted branches were now our only observers. We passed several mews, the backs of the buildings inscrutable, shriveled ivy vines crawling up the brickwork. I kept my distance now, hugging the shadowed wall. A dog howled, longing for the moon’s return, for the clouds lay thickly over us, a smothering weight that could come crashing to earth at any moment.

Val pushed open a whitewashed gate. When he’d shut it again, I crept forward, putting my eye to the slats. A path had been shoveled through the snowfall between the house and the alley. Pulling a key from his pocket, he unlocked the door at the top of four wooden steps and went inside.

I don’t want to know,
I thought.

But I had to know, of course. So I crossed the yard and tried the door. He’d left it unbolted.

Carrying a leaden weight in my belly, I went inside.

I found myself in a darkened hall littered with umbrellas and boxes and overboots. Val’s were propped neatly in a corner. Further along, light spilled through a doorway, pooling on the hardwood.

I walked down the corridor and into the unknown.

The second I passed the threshold, an enormous arm hooked round my throat. I shoved myself backward, but to no avail. My assailant planted his feet and then swept a boot against my ankles, sending me sprawling to the floor.

Stars burst before my eyes. Then I shook my head, clearing it.

“Was that
really
necessary?” I gasped.

My person seemed unharmed, but a mouthful of carpet isn’t high on my list of ways to spend an evening. Twisting onto my back, I glared up at Valentine with lovely visions of pummeling him to a pulp clouding my sight.

“Was it
really
necessary to trail me as if I were some kind of wounded deer?” Val snapped.

We were alone in an empty parlor. Eerie doesn’t begin to describe it. More crates lined the walls, two valises and a steamer trunk resting on a dining table alongside a single pair of men’s kidskin gloves, far too small to fit Valentine’s hands. Why my brother and I were staring daggers at each other in a set of rooms someone appeared to have just moved into was beyond my fathoming. A pair of sky-blue armchairs flanked the fireplace, and the windows were hung with coral damask. But very few furnishings were in evidence. The hulking object draped with a cloth before the window could only be a piano, I surmised.

Not that a piano was comforting. Val doesn’t play the piano.

“Where in bloody hell are we?” I rolled to my feet.

“Are you aware of just how oafish your bird-dogging skills are?” My brother stood with his arms crossed, looking tragic. “I told you I’d wake you in an hour or two. And so you charge after me like a riled steer. Can a man run a single errand in peace?”

“Not while you’re still lying over where you were this morning.”

“Because murdering helpless molls is
just
my style. You vile little tadpole.”

“No, your style is to cripple Whig Party thugs and occasionally blackbirders, and poison yourself half to death, and bed anything that moves, and
never lie to me
.”

“If you think I’m going to be interrogated by a doltish runt, you—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” came a beautifully cultured voice from an interior doorway. “He was with me this morning. I’ve moved into a new flat, which is a dreadful enough business without doing it alone. If Val hadn’t helped, I should have simply burnt all my belongings and begun again.”

“Jim,” I said. Then, “Hello.” The smile on my lips spread until it was an idiotic smear of a grin. It wasn’t worse than what I already knew of Val at all. It was just . . . more of the same. “Good lord, of all the secrets. It’s nice to see you.”

“Likewise,” Jim said, mystified.

Gentle Jim, as he’s called, was taken aback by my good spirits. Admittedly, some men might take more hostile exception to the chap with the indelicate attachment to their only brother. Myself, I can’t be bothered.

Where Val is concerned, warmhearted molleys are the least of my worries.

My brother’s friend is a Londoner. Slender and articulate, accent imported direct from the Halls of Parliament. Rather arch. Arch suits me fine where Jim is concerned, though, because he owns a ready smile to make it up to you. I often wonder how he lives and what he does. It’s my opinion, based on particular creases at the edges of his melancholy blue eyes, that eighty percent of his thoughts remain in his head. He wore fitted trousers, an indigo shirt, and a maroon dressing gown of Chinese patterned silk, hastily tied. Jim has dark, burnished hair, and those high-boned features that rest well only on Englishmen and on everyone else look either wicked or feline. Now that he holds a romantic interest in Valentine rather than a recreational one (which from my guesswork seems to have happened two or three months back), he tends to treat me as if I were a fragile document, to be pinched at the corners and held to the light for examination.

Not that my brother would term it romantic—and, in fairness, Jim is subtler than most. I simply happen to be uncomfortably familiar with obsession and its miens. He emerged from the doorway. One hand on his hip, posture hesitant. As if it were my new digs being invaded and not his at all.

“Valentine doesn’t bed
anything
that moves, Timothy,” Jim said testily. “He does draw the line at undomesticated mammals. Risk of hydrophobia, and all that.”

“Satisfied now? You wanted my alibi, and there he is.” Val threw himself into one of the armchairs, slouching disgustedly. “When a pal needs his entire ken moved, it takes time and muscle. So when my shift at the engine house ended yesterday, I capped in with Jim and we put our shoulders to it.”

“So it was work, then.” I eyed him, doubtful. “Not . . . leisure.”

“Just as you say.”

“Not that there were no events of the nature you’re referring to, rather later.” Jim coughed, looking somehow both vulnerable and ferociously determined. “I think your brother is loath to discuss having passed the night here.”

My eyes flicked to Valentine, who appeared not the smallest degree discomfited.

“I helped him move a
piano
,” he explained.

Reflecting over whether to inform my insane brother that most men tend not to accept French favors from svelte artistes as a reward for moving furnishings, I determined to refrain. My head ached. It didn’t need a mental image of the erotic tasks Gentle Jim enjoys setting his mouth to, not when my brother was involved. And not when it had recently occurred to me that my brother is a very . . . reciprocally inclined individual. Proud of his bedroom prowess. Disinclined to owe debts.

“That thing is
heavy
,” Val continued, pointing, “and there was a stairway—”

“All right, all right,” I protested. “Stop telling me.”

“You’re the one who wanted to know every detail of the possibly illegal thing I was doing, you utter cow pie.”

“Well, now I want less details.”

“Oh, come off it, Tim, it’s just a lark. He’s my closest mate. So what if we like a bit of—”

“It’s definitely illegal, no maybe about it. Has that occurred to you?”

“Well, I’m not very likely to
arrest
him, am I?”

“Not him! You!” I all but shouted. “It’s punishable by ten years’ hard labor!”

“That’s scarce ever enforced and you know it. Are
you
collaring me? Anyhow,
buggery
is punishable by ten years’ hard labor. It isn’t as if I’m bending the boy over the kitchen table.
We
happen to prefer—”

“For heaven’s sake, cease tormenting your brother simply because you can,” Jim interjected, drawing a softly shaped hand over the back of Val’s neck before falling into the other chair.

Valentine blinked, baffled. Clearly that particular thought had never occurred to him.

Jim stood up again. “Oh, bollocks. I’m sorry, Timothy. There isn’t another—”

I silenced him by drawing up a sturdy-seeming crate and seating myself. He forbore speaking further in favor of gnawing thoughtfully at his lip as he reclaimed his perch at the edge of his armchair.

“Well,” I said. Calm. Friendly. “I have one question.”

“Admittedly a lower figure than I had anticipated,” Jim muttered.

“Jim’s tastes are no secret to anyone. Neither is the fact that you’re pals. You’re not exactly careful about any of it. For God’s sake, you have his house key.”

“Those aren’t questions,” Val retorted.

“Is it safe to say your Party friends know you’re . . . close?”

Jim shifted. “I take your point. And yes, I should think so, I’m afraid.”

Setting my hat on the floor, I rubbed tiredly at my eyelids. “Then you’re right, Val. That would have made for a truly regrettable alibi in the public courts.”

“I don’t like to—that is to say, Timothy?” Jim began.

“Yes?”

“Why are you trailing Valentine to my new flat? And why on earth are you asking him about an
alibi
?”

I studied my brother’s elbow while Val scrutinized my right knee.

“Val, you didn’t just say something about
murder
, did you?” Jim added softly.

A few false starts hampered us. But we bit the bullet and told him everything. Jim fared better than I’d expected. Partly I think he appreciated that, when my brother had scented a sharp miasma of danger after hearing the name
Silkie Marsh
, he’d decided to apprise Jim for caution’s sake. But mostly, I think I’d underestimated him. Just because a fellow has smooth hands doesn’t mean he’s a stranger to violence. Supremely regal accents often belong to men whose heads are being nicked off by a silently descending blade.