Seven for a Secret (20 page)

So I stopped treating Jim as if he might be a bloom waiting to wilt. Hoping he might do me the same favor.

When all had been discussed to everyone’s satisfaction—that is, when we were all mortified and Jim had opened a
bottle of gin and passed it round, sipped from the endearing Oriental soup cups that were all he could find—Val and I finally formulated a plan.

“Right.” I levered to my feet with a will renewed. “We’ll try to catch a public sleigh, though walking isn’t out of the question.”

“Hold there, bright young copper star.” Valentine pulled out his pocket watch with a frown. “Ten o’clock at night. No. God, no, not now. Meet me at seven at the Tombs, Franklin Street entrance. We’ll start then.”

“There is a
child
out there somewhere, possibly about to be shipped off to Georgia to be tortured for the rest of his days, and you’re worried over a sound night’s sleep?”

Val blinked at me sadly. “No, you donkey. I need time to
identify the body
.”

“Christ.” My brain staggered, then fell back into step with Valentine’s. “You’re right. We can’t possibly begin the search before you identify her. Do you need help?”

“Better if I sort it, all told.”

“What do you mean,
identify
?” Jim asked Valentine. He’d turned greyish at our tale but remained remarkably still, like a fencer at the start of a duel. “You knew Mrs. Adams.”

“Chief Matsell is kindly overlooking our bully little crime spree Tim here orchestrated down at Corlears Hook, which is how we landed in this pile of manure in the first place. Presently it’s the blackbirders’ word against ours we were ever there. Piest would stand by us, he’s the square species of lobster, and we all know what colored testimony counts for. But the chief will be told out for certain if we can’t stick to the bam. Supposing they tumble on me—”

“If Val’s suspected,” I interrupted for Jim, whose nose was wrinkling in puzzlement, “we’d better have kept to the same line of lies all along.”

“Thank you.” He tossed me a lofty smile. “I do tend to keep better pace with the conversation, but we aren’t often speaking of crime.”

Val smirked. “Sorry, Jimmy, old habits.”

“Apology not necessary, but entirely accepted. Just a moment. I’d not thought that, for copper stars, bending laws was quite so . . . frowned upon as for citizens? I hope I don’t sound overly blunt, but why should it matter that what you did at the slavers’ den was illegal? Copper stars answer to copper stars, after all.”

“Copper stars answer to the Party. It doesn’t matter a straw that it was illegal,” Val agreed. “It matters that it was against our platform. And anywise, not yet knowing who’s leaky . . . before we question outsiders, I’m going to need a story about discovering the innocent’s name. Safer all round.”

“Innocents,” I said as I returned my hat to my head, “are corpses.”

“That’s positively ghastly,” Jim remarked.

“Yes, it is. Evening, Jim, and apologies for invading your ken like a barbarian.”

“Oh, invade away.” He put a wistful hand on his knee and tucked himself farther back into the chair. “You may be the most civil barbarian with whom I am acquainted.”

“You haven’t known him for long enough,” Val sniffed. But there was no malice in it. Just habit. Giving them a small wave, I turned away.

How Val meant to identify Mrs. Adams, I didn’t ask. Now I’d a moment to myself, I knew precisely what needed doing. Trudging up and down the streets of Manhattan in search of a woman and child was practically impossible before Val had identified Mrs. Adams and I could consult the Vigilance Committee as to likely hiding places, and then interrogate Varker and Coles with a plan in my head and the ground firm under my feet. Not a soul had been imprisoned with Julius, and I couldn’t yet ask her friends where Delia lived. Better, as my brother had suggested, to wait a few hours. But day and night, in every season, in the company of others or alone in the filthy, glittering streets, the bones in my fingers throb to be doing something toward making Mercy Underhill happy. The thought of a specific task, one that she’d all but requested when she hinted she hoped I’d write to her, was thrilling. Half crusade and half prize already won.

“Be careful,” I said at the door. “About all of it.”

“I’m always careful.” Val’s indistinct smile turned wolfish. “You just haven’t noticed that yet.”

•   •   •

I hailed one
of Kipp and Brown’s
public sleighs at Broadway and crowded into the huge ten-horse contraption, wedged on a seat between a skinny snake-oil salesman who’d thickened his hair with shoe polish and a shopgirl with glazed eyes. Both looked as if February had been the month they’d at last been forced to buy coal instead of hot lunches. Both had visible holes in their boots. Both wore cotton.

Drifting, I imagined the world Matsell had described, the one without cotton to wear or sell or cut or sew. The sleigh’s lanterns shone like polished bells and its bells rang bright as lanterns, and the shop windows in the great stone buildings flashed past in a streak of gold. And then I was home, having walked east along Walker dreaming of a Party boss with his moneybags stuffed full of cotton, cotton bursting from his seams and pockets and ears and mouth. A scarecrow. A puppet hero with glass-bead eyes.

The bakery was dark. Mrs. Boehm retires early and is up before dawn. But I found a tea cake shimmering with pink sugar crystals, under which lay a note. Half prim, clear handwriting—left hand, I noted, smiling—with Germanic a’s
.
Half loopy scrawl of a ten-possibly-eleven-year-old girl.

Mr. W—

You are presented this cake with our compliments, as you were called away. Some artistic disagreements we would have been glad to consult you over arose, but in the end results are very fine you will agree.

MR. WILDE this one is yours tho I’d wanted yours to be bigger I tried but it wouldn’t rise you see and was sticky in the center. Next I come we are bradeing bread like hair. Won’t that be interesting I think it can’t be done but MRS. BOEHM says wait and see.

—Mrs. E. Boehm

—MISS AIBHILIN ó DáLAIGH

Unlooked-for kindnesses can cut deep as cruelties if they come at the wrong time. It was a sweet note, but it robbed me of half my spine. Anger and fear can wind a man up, propel him forward. That small piece of gentleness deflated me as if I were a tent collapsing. So I tucked it inside my new frock coat and headed upstairs after retrieving Mercy’s letter. I wrapped the cake in a napkin. Something about its innocence burned my eyes.

Lighting the lamp, I pulled my rush-bottomed chair up to my table. I waited for words to come, rubbing a quill over my lower lip, staring at Mercy’s tangled penmanship.

Nothing happened.

You can write police reports about kinchin whores, kidnapping, assault, and murder, but you can’t write ten words for her sake. You’re a prize catch, Tim Wilde.

Helpless to do any better, I read Mercy’s missive again.

. . . perhaps if I tell you that this morning I found in the shop a little tortoiseshell box and inside was a clockwork bird painted like a rainbow, and I polished it until it shone, then that will have been real. Or I will be real, or something better approximating myself. Sometimes I think someone else lives here now.

Ten minutes later, I discovered I’d sketched a clockwork bird in the corner of my blank sheet, my chin in my hand. It was the identical bird she’d described. I knew for a fact. It must have been the exact duplicate, a portrait of a treasure I’d never seen—because that’s just the sort of thing Mercy would put in a story, and alongside the blood in my veins, her tales occupy a separate system of channels. Her ink has long pulsed through my frame. I wondered what it meant that she couldn’t feel her own stories, couldn’t find them real, and I practically taste them.

There was a thought.

The salutation daunted me. But I’d nothing to lose, and anyhow she knew I loved her. So I took a deep breath and the quill struck the page, words falling in measured, careful rows.

Dear Mercy, who will never be invisible to me,

Last week, I was engaged to find a stolen painting. I despaired at first, but ultimately there was an adventure in the woods and a happier end than I’d ever expected . . .

Then I told her of the miraculous disappearing transatlantic envelope. And of Val’s Irish family. And of Bird’s cake.

I signed it
Yours, Timothy
.

I dreamed that night Mercy could draw. She can’t—she pens the most ludicrously deformed sketches it was ever my privilege to laugh at. But in my vision, she was painting a shepherdess with ribbons in her hair, on a canvas ten yards wide, against a fantastical violet and green sunset.

The dream didn’t turn ominous until the peasant girl came to life under Mercy’s fingers. She smiled cruelly, while her flashing eyes promised that the rush of a first kiss would be delivered over and over and over again. I tried to warn Mercy to stop painting Silkie Marsh’s likeness—that it was dangerous to reproduce her, that I’d a manuscript I worried might be cursed. But the words caught in my throat. By the time I’d managed to call out, Madam Marsh had already stepped off the canvas and was walking away from us with a pleased glint of intention in her gaze.

•   •   •

“I ought to
tell him,
I think,” I announced to my brother the next morning. “I’ve been dreading it, so I must be obligated. He’ll want to know . . . God, what will Charles Adams want to know?”

Valentine didn’t answer. I don’t think he was listening. He shrugged in a twitchy fashion, tapping his stick against the pavement just outside the Tombs. His silence didn’t much bustle me, considering the time of day.

The garbage my brother ingests is always obvious to me—I can practically see tarry slick pumping through the thick bluish vessels of his neck, whatever o’clock it may be—but before noon, it’s obvious to
everyone.
The light of early morning never treats Val cordially. His hat hadn’t a wide enough brim to shield him from pinkish dawn sunshine, a glare that shone perversely cold but still dazzling. I could have weighed the bags under his eyes on a scale, and the eyes themselves were shot through with blood beside the clear green. He’d reverted to Bowery style, with an amethyst cravat and a turned-down shirt collar, waistcoat teeming with foxglove sprays. Which could only mean he’d taken the tiger by the tail and returned home.

“I mean to say, it isn’t—”

“If you could close that gap in your head for thirty or so seconds, I’d be much obliged to you,” Val suggested, leaning on his stick in earnest.

I sighed, crossing my arms. My annoyance highly grating and all the more abrasive for being so familiar.

“World spinning?”

“Shut
up
.”

I obliged. It’s generally faster. Anyhow, my brother had apparently spent the previous half hour at the Tombs requesting of Chief Matsell that I help the captain of Ward Eight investigate a shocking crime. A crime that,
if the press got wind of it
, could greatly unsettle the locals. Considering the public scrapes I’d been entangling myself in lately, I’d have been flabbergasted if Matsell ate a word of what he was fed. But he trusts Valentine. And so I was now assigned to solve the murder of a beautiful mulatto female who’d been found tragically strangled in an alleyway between King Street and Hammersley.

I studied my brother, who was still the color of glistening chicken fat.

“Ready yet?”

Val blew out a breath and started walking. Steady enough for travel, if not a tightrope. “Fire away.”

“I mean to say, it isn’t as if we can tell Charles Adams the truth.”

“If Charles Adams doesn’t know
something’s
afoot by now, he’s spooney,” Val noted as we strode along Franklin toward West Broadway. “His wife disappeared from both her ken and her graft, and hasn’t been seen since. With his stepson and sister-in-law, no less.”

“I’d be worried half blind if my wife disappeared from her house and her work, but that doesn’t mean he knows she’s been murdered. Or that his stepson has vanished.”

“True. Unless Delia and Jonas fled home yesterday and informed him, that’ll be a surprise.”

I nodded, it having likewise occurred to me that our missing acquaintances might simply have returned to West Broadway. “Did you identify Mrs. Adams?”

A pair of mabs passed us by with their arms linked, faces painted white and scarlet like divas in an opera. Franklin Street was already alive with traffic, the milkmen and stevedores and chandlers on their way to a day’s wages passing the gamblers and bartenders and faro dealers stumbling home for a few hours of sleep.

“I didn’t identify Mrs. Adams. Glazebrook did, when he came on shift.” Val rolled his eyes heavenward and then winced at the light. “I could replace that roundsman with a wheel of cheese and no one would notice until the cheese solved a crime. I asked him to go through her togs for me in search of clues, and can you believe the luck? Her calling card was in her dress pocket.
Mrs. Lucy Adams, Eighty-four West Broadway, at home Tuesdays and Saturdays
.”

I smiled at my deranged, brilliant sibling. “Aces. Was it printed or handwritten?”

“Don’t cast doubts on my thoroughgoing nature, Tim. I used printer’s blocks. It took me twenty minutes. They’re only a hair crooked.”

We turned onto West Broadway. On the opposite side of the street stood a clock-and-watch emporium, while beside us a window hung with dozens of gilt and silver cages trembled with the fluttering of dozens of pet birds. Many well-dressed blacks traversed the sidewalks alongside the whites, dark men in fine chequered greatcoats and brown-eyed women with hand-tooled scarlet leather shoes nudging at their lace skirts. Poorer blacks too—hacksmen combating the lingering snow, servants and grocers, and one sheet-music salesman out crying his wares. But the street was highly respectable. It beat my neighborhood by leagues.

“That’s the house.” I nodded at it, recalling the fraught meeting in the midst of the storm. “Wait, that’s him. It must be.”

My first glimpse of Charles Adams was from just across the street. He proved a white man of medium build, with a hearty complexion and neatly cut brown hair and side-whiskers. A pair of silver half-spectacles rested on his slim nose, and his chin was adorned with a goatee that was well on its way to wholly grey. Tucking his walking stick under his arm, he turned back to lock his front door.