Seven for a Secret (27 page)

That was nothing compared to the rest of the room, though.

Val’s company taught me most of the filthy slang that exists in the American tongue. But the heights of profanity someone had attained when decorating my walls with scarlet paint set a new standard. The whitewash was covered with invective so hateful it burned my eyes. The word
NIGGER-LOVER
, and the consequences of being a nigger-lover, seemed thematically paramount. Various sexual acts of a nature distasteful to me personally were suggested for my final hours on this earth, before I was to be strung up by the neck or possibly burned to death. The author—
no, authors, two styles of writing, one
generally written lower on the wall—
wasn’t entirely consistent regarding how I was to be slaughtered.

That didn’t matter. The effect was still alarming.

Resting on the ruined desk was a kinchin’s stuffed doll. A hideous disfigurement had been painted over its face, but that pointed detail was secondary to the fact it had been pinned to a board through its torso.

“All right, move along with you all,” came Mr. Connell’s voice. “Ye’ve seen Wilde’s office and it’s better than a trip to Barnum’s. Enough. Kildare, if you could stay a moment? We’ll have to plan out what to do.”

Feet shuffled. A low whistle or two pierced the air. Moments later, only Piest, Connell, and Kildare remained.

“You knew this was going to happen? How?” I questioned when I registered Piest’s hand on my shoulder. “Why—”

“Mr. Wilde, may God strike me dead if I had known what they planned and failed to tell a brother in arms of the danger. No, on my honor, I did not. But I was in the common room, and heard snatches of a conversation, and . . . and you were not here. I could not be sure of myself. I wrote you the note and I burgled your desk. Better to take precau—”

“Thank you. Who was it?” My voice had thickened to a nasty tarlike consistency.

Piest’s grip on my shoulder flexed harder. “I’ve already found a supply of whitewash, Mr. Wilde, and we all of us would be happy to—”

“Bugger whitewashing, I want to know who did this.”

“That the men in question were planning
something
I am certain, but that they actually enacted—”

“Oh, sure enough, they were simply palaverin’ over teaching Wilde a lesson, and then by complete coincidence, someone else broke in,” Mr. Connell sniffed.

Mr. Kildare, the highly competent roundsman whose beat had bordered mine when I’d trudged in circles for sixteen hours a day, tapped his fingers against the door frame. “’Tisn’t as certain a thing as ye’d like to think, Connell. Piest is right. More than one person has cause. Wilde isn’t exactly popular.”

“He’s not
unpopular
either. Friendly enough fella, and a good heart and all. Just . . . folk are a wee bit leery. He not bein’ a Democrat, and us loyal Party scrappers to a man.”

“There’s more to it than that, by Jesus.”

“To be certain. On account o’ he’s exceptional.”

“
Favored
, some would say.”

“Only the petty sort.”

“Will someone for the love of God tell me who wrote
Wilde sucks nigger cock
on my wall?” I exclaimed. “Here, why don’t I start? One of them is only a bit taller than I am and left-handed, and the other five feet eight or nine and probably born in Ireland, since
indorser
is slang for a molley only in the British Isles and in flash it means—” I snapped my fingers. “
Oh.
Mulqueen’s friends,” I realized. “The rabbits he ran with in the Five Points. They must have been doubly eager to be about this business after last night. Who are they?”

I ground to a stop with all of them staring at me, the Irishmen baffled and Jakob Piest beaming as if at a child performing a complicated aria before family guests.

“My name is Virgil Beardsley,” came a smoothly rounded voice. “And this is Mr. James McDivitt.”

Whirling, I saw the formidable black Irishman from the night previous—whose name was apparently McDivitt—standing beside Beardsley, the overgrown tot with the perfectly round face. They stood just beyond my door. Evidently having awaited my arrival. Glaring at me as if a man could peel the skin from another’s face with a withering expression alone, not needing cooking oil.

“You destroyed my office,” I observed.

“You don’t know that.
Someone
did,” Beardsley returned. “And
someone
ought to be given a medal, if you ask me.”

“There’s to be a ceremony for Sean Mulqueen at St. Patrick’s in the morning, sharp of nine, and a hero’s send-off we’ll give our countryman. Ye’ll be present, I trust?” McDivitt asked, shifting his attention to the other men in the room.

Mr. Kildare shifted his feet. “Them as can, McDivitt, them as can.”

“Them as have Irish blood in their veins will turn out for a patriot dead at the hands of a crazed colored assassin. I wonder,” he added, “if we might have a tiny word with Wilde here? Alone, like. Mr. Wilde, you’re coming with us.”

“He is doing nothing of the kind,” Piest declared.

I’d have found some choice words myself for McDivitt and Beardsley, for the scoundrels who’d defiled the only working space I’d ever been able to call my own with any truthfulness. But to my shock, Piest, Connell, and Kildare now blocked my view of them in a tightly spaced wall. Arms crossed, shoulders thrown back. Looking ready—eager, even—for a fight.

It rendered me entirely tongueless. That sharing a newspaper and flask, or a difficult job and a common desire to make our city a bit safer, cemented men together. That I’d never been in a class at university, or attended a church, or joined a gang, or run with firedogs—and yet here were people who preferred me alive. Other than my family. When I hadn’t asked for help and couldn’t pay them a red cent for it.

The prospect was frankly dizzying.

“We’ll say good day, then,” Connell declared to Beardsley and McDivitt. “To see the pair o’ you—mourning as you are, and Mulqueen not even in the ground, may God rest him. We’d nary dream o’ taxin’ you further. Go see to the plans for his wake.”

“And if we’ve a different agenda?” Beardsley growled.

“It’s Wilde’s wake I’m looking forward to, to be sure,” McDivitt added.

A tiny, hard-edged
click
sounded. Paler than a rifle bolt, unmistakably a small hand pistol being cocked.

“I hereby declare that I am drawing a deadly weapon, and one I do not intend to use unless my hand is forced!”

Mr. Piest, in a development that unknit my muscles from my bones and left me gaping, had pulled a small and extremely ornate gold-plated gun from his coat. The weapon seemed half of a dueling-pistol set, supposing fashionable French heiresses with tiny puppies in their laps require dueling pistols. He aimed it at the ceiling, his face tucked even farther back into his neck than was usual. A squeamish expression. It was clear as glass he didn’t like touching the thing.

“You have a
gun
?” I demanded witlessly.

“Oh, praise mother Mary, that sorts us,” Mr. Kildare said, well satisfied. “McDivitt and Beardsley, stand against either side o’ the corridor, if you would. We are leaving.”

They did as they were told, backing away with loathing on their faces. Connell and Kildare exited first, then myself, and finally Piest. Looking for all the world as if he were wielding an enormous scorpion and didn’t much care for the sensation.

“Say your prayers, Wilde,” Beardsley called after me.

I don’t generally have any. But the suggestion wasn’t without merit.

The four of us made for the nearest exit, earning plenty of questioning looks from clerks and copper stars and lawyers with powdered hair. By the time it occurred to me that it must have seemed I was being kidnapped by a wrinkled Dutchman, we were outside in the thin, wintry air.

“Mr. Piest.” I caught him by the elbow. His gangly limbs were stiff, hair writhing in the faint wind. “They aren’t following.”

Lowering the pistol, he heaved a deep sigh.

“Why do you have a gun that could double as a Russian samovar?” I wanted to know.

Piest chuckled, shoving it deep in his threadbare frock coat. “I found it this morning. Arrested the fellow too. I simply haven’t returned it yet.”

“Is it even loaded?”

“I don’t know. Firearms agitate me, I confess it freely. How does one check?”

Connell was howling with laughter by this time, Kildare chuckling as he rubbed at his side-whiskers. Stifling a smile, for Piest was reddening, I cleared my throat.

“Listen, I wasn’t expecting you fellows to . . .” To my dismay, I felt a blush creeping up the back of my neck and began again. “That is, you needn’t have taken my part in there, and it was . . . thank you,” I finished, giving up on a bad job.

Kildare shrugged. “Mulqueen was a right bastard, McDivitt a dumb beast hitched to his cart, and Beardsley . . .”

“Beardsley is a walking arsehole,” Connell finished.

Piest appeared dumbfounded. “Mr. Wilde, you wear the badge of the star police with the utmost honor, and I personally consider it much to my own credit that I was able to assist in any way. Despite my . . . reluctance when it comes to weaponry that may or may not explode.”

“Ye may wish to give the Tombs a bit o’ distance, mind,” Connell advised, frowning.

“We’ll show Matsell your office,” Kildare added. “He’ll never mind you keepin’ snug for the time being.”

I stared up at the Tombs from under the brim of my hat. It’s a savage place, really. Sweltering in summer, frigid in winter, reeking perpetually of filled-in swamp and unfiltered despair. Delivering people into its clutches always wrenches my guts wrong, and it’s a seven-minute walk at a ready clip to buy a decently brewed cup of coffee. Mine, though. The Tombs was
mine.
I felt quarantined, excluded, and wanted very badly to make someone pay for it. I knew just the proper scapegoat too. I shook hands with my colleagues. Putting some warmth in it, for they’d just proven themselves a set of admirably square fellows.

“Take care, Mr. Wilde,” Piest called after me gravely. “Be on your guard and contact us at once if you require any assistance. You’ll do nothing rash?”

“Of course not,” I returned, marching through the ivory-hued winter morning in the direction of Silkie Marsh’s bawdy house in Greene Street.

sixteen

Nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see her suffer, and more than once, when Epps had refused to sell her, she has tempted me with bribes to put her secretly to death, and bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp.

—SOLOMON NORTHUP,
TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE
, 1853

A
portrait of Silkie
Marsh
hangs in her foyer above a potted fern with leaves as fragile as a half-remembered dream, and I looked over it as I entered. She wears an emerald dress in the oil study, lying on a simple black divan, ethereal blonde hair falling about her shoulders, her eyes fixing the viewers with breathless anticipation. The painting is a flawless copy. That isn’t because the artist was a genius, though he was certainly competent. But unlike most painters, who require both poetry and skill in order to invest their subjects with lifelike animation, he had an easy job of it.

There isn’t any soul residing behind Silkie Marsh’s eyes to paint. So the likeness is more or less exact.

In her parlor, I studied myself in the floor-length Venetian mirrors that line her walls. I didn’t look too well. Chest tight and lips furious and eye still swollen shut. A girl of sixteen or seventeen was reading a novel in one of the armchairs, its purple upholstery rich as the petals of spring irises. Glancing at the copper star, she bit her lip in distress.

“I don’t mean you any harm,” I assured her. “But tell me truthfully—how old is the youngest person employed here at present?”

“I think Lily’s fifteen,” she murmured.

“No kinchin?”

She shook her head.

“Good. Please tell your madam Timothy Wilde wants a word.”

I hadn’t long to wait. Silkie Marsh appeared within three minutes, wrapped in a red-velvet dressing gown with hints of rose-hued satin keeking through the gaps. Hair braided in a long plait down the side of her neck, lovely face affecting blank curiosity.

“Why, Mr. Wilde, what an unpleasant surprise.” She went to the carved sideboard next to the pianoforte and poured a pair of brandies. “Are you here to stampede through my rooms in a misguided search for kinchin, as you did last time? I assure you, the exercise is unnecessary. I have learned the value of hiring girls who own greater experience in the art of pleasure. Would you care for a sample?”

“I’d care to know what the hell is going on.”

She passed me the snifter, which I took. I needed it. And I don’t fear her harming me, not directly—she’s vowed to ruin me, but that wouldn’t prove much entertainment for her if I weren’t around for the ordeal. Her eyes with their narrow circle of clear blue within the hazel lingered on my face.

“I wonder who’s given you a beating,” she said pleasantly.

“No, you don’t.”

“Oh, Mr. Wilde.” She laughed, an effortlessly musical sound. “You’ve always been far too clever for a simple girl like me. You’re right. The late Mr. Mulqueen appears to have made a thorough job of it. He was quite the model of a copper star, wasn’t he? So dedicated to his work.”

I went to the chair the stargazer had been occupying and sat.

“And how is the eccentric Miss Underhill faring overseas?” she asked softly, reclining on the settee and swirling the liquor cradled in her bone-china hands.

My head snapped back a fraction. That disgusted me plenty. Because I ought to have been expecting the question. The one Silkie Marsh knew would mortify me, calling to mind as it did my first foray into the brutish destruction of a woman’s privacy.

I’d discovered Mercy there the previous summer, the night her father burned her novel to ash. She’d hidden away in one of Madam Marsh’s back bedrooms. In a gentleman’s company. Well, I can hardly say
gentleman
, since no gentleman
would demand such favors in return for the money she needed to escape the cascading ruin of Reverend Underhill’s mind. As for me, I’d played the territorial canine baring its little yellow teeth, ruining trouser legs and acting a tragic nuisance. The realization that the woman you love is as worldly as you are ought to be shocking—according to spinsters and newspaper moralists. But I grew up in the mud. I’m no clerk with a dry little bottle-brush moustache wanting a silent mouse to cook and scrub and lie still for me. Why I’d supposed Mercy free from the most predictable desire imaginable is outside my own reckoning.

What I do understand is that I treated her shamefully when she needed me most. An atrocity tailor-made to knock me windless just thinking of it. So of course Silkie Marsh had brought it up.

She ran a finger along the lip of her glass. Waiting me out. Head tilting gently, mouth pointedly not smirking at me. As if she’d decided to be
kind.
Meanwhile, my patience was worn to a tender nub, and my options limited, and we were not discussing Mercy Underhill.

“Whatever game is in play here, you’re behind it,” I said. The expression of sad patience remained. “You’ve connections to Gates through Party ties, to Varker and Coles through money, and you seem to know all about Mulqueen’s doings as well. My career has taken quite the plunge since this began. You’re terribly pleased by that, I imagine. And when I say
game
, I mean exactly that—we’re all tin soldiers for you to smash into one another.”

“You give me immense credit for being a master puppeteer.” She made
puppeteer
sound complimentary. “Are you here to congratulate me, then?”

“I’m here to question you. And you’re going to tell me the truth.”

“Why should I do such a thing?”

I leaned forward. “Because you’ll enjoy it. Just like you’ve savored watching me bleed.”

She sipped her spirits, lashes lowering on an exhale when the brandy slid down her throat, looking as if I’d just kissed the hollow at the base of her neck. A glimpse of the golden glow of pleasure the men who bought her were allowed to see. But I was getting the genuine and not the fabricated article. I don’t know whether or not Silkie Marsh enjoys renting out passion. I can’t imagine she possibly could, though she’s rich enough to pick and choose her partners. But she sure as politics is crooked relishes games. Particularly when she’s the stick and I the spinning hoop crashing along the thoroughfare.

“Here’s what I think,” I mused. “I think that when I ruined your business selling corpses of stifled kinchin, you wanted a new source of income.”

She inclined her head, waving her snifter under her nose.

“Varker and Coles offered to pay you to wrongly identify kidnapped blacks. There’s an enormous amount of money in it. Mulqueen provided the copper-star presence and helped to capture the merchandise.”

“All true,” she said sweetly. “You’re really doing very well so far. Pity you had to drag your magnificent brother into such a sordid matter.”

She’d meant to bait me and nearly succeeded. But it was actually an opening. I took it.

“Pity he’s aware you’re behind it all. It hasn’t seemed to endear you to him. Do you know, I have never once in my life seen him turn down a free fuck.”

Her eyes turned instantly to glass. Not with moisture, but with a hardness like polished crystal. I could see myself reflected in them, being torn oh so slowly into ribbons.

Now keep talking,
I willed her silently.
And tell me something. Anything.

Silkie Marsh chuckled gently, unwinding her slender legs. “It’s sweet really, how often you speak of your brother, Mr. Wilde. But you actually want to know about Lucy. Don’t you? You want to know how she died. I do assume that you know
where
she died, though not many do
.
”

My breath seized.

Of course she knew.
Of course.
She was behind it all, must always have been behind it, had been the author of the most putrid narratives I’d ever learned in my life, and for all that she wanted Valentine back, she wanted me crucified and then resurrected so she could do it again. I’d a horrible sensation that everything I touched from then on would crumble and decay, that I was a plague-ridden stranger in the midst of a healthy town.

“How generous of your brother to offer his rooms as a haven. Valentine is nothing if not predictably gallant where beauty is concerned.” Acid bled through the creamy tone, but an instant later she was composed again. Gleeful, even. “You’re perfectly right, Mr. Wilde, what fun. I’m enjoying this
tremendously.
”

The blood quickened in my veins. Impossibly, my scheme was actually working. Silkie Marsh so enjoys tormenting me that simply paying her a call was illuminating the conspiracy in sharp flashes of lightning in the darkness. Glimpses. If I could only get the right angle on the landscape, I could learn everything.

“Just a moment. You didn’t kill Lucy—is it Wright, or Adams?” I amended.

“That question is impossible to answer.”

Surely it wasn’t, but I let that go. “You never murdered her. You’re not strong enough for that kind of force.”

“How wonderful to see that you need not attribute
every
heinous act on earth to me.”

“Oh, it was your doing. Just not your hands.”

She sighed, smoothing her fingertips over the pink satin lining the gap in the dressing gown at her breast. Lips half-parted. Looking for all the world like a lazy diva being pleasured by a suitor.

“Who did your dirty work for you?” I asked lightly. “My money is on Sean Mulqueen.”

“Poor Sean—I shall miss him. He was very useful to Seixas and Luke, and you know them to be friends of mine. One is upstairs, as a matter of fact.”

“I’m not, darling. You seemed sure enough agitated when you left. I was worried over you.”

My head snapped to the side as Seixas Varker approached us. Wearing an expensive robe that didn’t fit him—probably had never fit any man who’d been forced to throw it on in a heated moment—and freezing in horror at the sight of me.

Silkie Marsh forestalled any insult I might have lobbed about their sleeping together by winking at me in a roguish fashion and then smiling at Varker adoringly. But suddenly I couldn’t manage to pay Madam Marsh quite so much attention. I’ve read her cover to cover already. She’s constructed out of porcelain and rot—exterior flawless, interior remarkably uncomplicated. Money, power, and vengeance are all she knows.

Varker, though. I wondered about Seixas Varker. All his high rhetoric about
civic duty
, about saving runaways from our heartless streets. He’d been smug but earnest. As if convincing himself it were true. That half smile, his terror of physical harm, the way he carried himself as if always vaguely afraid of falling. Sins are burdensome only to people with scruples, and I suspected Varker owned an inconvenient conscience he’d long been smothering. He was so repulsed by his own mortality, so averse to risk. His diseased attempt at serving justice hung so wrongly from his shoulders that the man was grotesque at first sight. Here was a God-fearing slave catcher, I reasoned, one with an appetite for wealth and an easy means to come by it, who’d no idea where he’d wake up when the Reaper divorced him from his plump hide.

“My word, but you’re an unlooked-for nightmare,” Varker gasped. His wrist was still braced with wood and pale linen. “I suppose you’re here to break other pieces of me as yet left intact?”

“Oh, Seixas,” Silkie Marsh purred. “That isn’t Mr. Timothy Wilde’s forte. Just look at him. You’re thinking of Valentine. But he really ought to be leaving now.”

“Where are Delia and Jonas?” I questioned, approaching the slave catcher. “The pair you kidnapped. Where are they now?”

He backed away smiling, pudgy frame all aquiver. “Why in heaven’s name should you think—”

“Answer the goddamn question.” My fist had closed over the crossed lapels of his dressing gown before I quite realized how it had arrived there. “I want them back. They don’t belong to you.”

“My goodness. Anyone would think they belonged to
you
,” I heard coolly stated from behind me.

Varker’s back struck one of the Venetian mirrors an instant later. The glass shivered violently but failed to shatter. I closed my eyes, impelling rational thought by sheer force of will.

This isn’t about you. None of it is about you. Calm the fuck down before you ruin it all.