Seven for a Secret (3 page)

Obviously, an artwork had been removed. Eleven miniature portraits hung as a collection, most of vacuous rosy-cheeked dignitaries but some of vacuous rosy-cheeked peasantry. There ought to have been twelve, though. The third from the right in the second column was missing, and the papered wall was dirty from lack of cleaning beneath the absent painting, dark streaks mottled over the sprays of blushing tea roses. Three little parallel smears of ashy grime. I leaned closer, examining the gap.

It looked like a gap.

I lightly worried at the eyebrow bordering my scar as I went to look over the locks on the chamber’s two doorways. “Turley, the chief said
unusual circumstances
.”

“I called it peculiar myself, sir. This room was locked at midnight when I made my nightly tour. I’ve a key; Mr. Millington has a key; Mrs. Thornton, the housekeeper, has a key. They’re all accounted for. And like Mr. Millington said, weren’t we all bleeding searched to our eyeteeth and past yesterday? As if any of us would ever dream of touching this swag.”

I tossed him a wry look as I quit the second—and likewise untampered with—door lock. His stately London vowels had dissolved entirely by this time into Bristol’s River Avon. I was almost fond of him for it.

“They’re worth a fortune, some of them. That miniature certainly is. Nothing has disappeared before now, I take it?”

“Never, sir. There’s none of us as needs the money, not in that way. We’ve fine victuals below stairs, three sick days a year, bonuses every Christmas. And all of us with family away home to support and ten thousand more Irish crawling into the city every day. It’d take a bedlamite to risk being sacked without a character, things as they are.”

Irish were indeed flooding New York as if a Donelly or a McKale were contained in every raindrop of every thunderstorm. No one liked them—no one save for Democrats of my brother Valentine’s stripe, who liked their votes considerably—but certainly not house servants of British extraction who could be on the streets in the breadth of a hat pin should their masters take a turn for the frugal. I sympathized with Turley. His brand of animosity was practical, at least, and not the vicious anti-Catholic paranoia that makes my hackles rise.

But the Irish had commenced starving the year previous, when their potatoes disintegrated. And now it was wintertime, and that particular fellow feeling went beyond sympathy. I’ve Irish friends, Irish fellow copper stars, and I know what missing mealtimes feels like. Val and I once made a supper out of the mushy mass of vegetables a restaurant had strained from a stockpot, kernels scraped from a half-eaten husk of buttered corn, and three street-foraged chestnuts. My older brother had salted it, peppered it, plated it, garnished mine with two chestnuts and his with one, and deemed it salad.

It was unconvincing.

“When you locked up, did you notice anything amiss?”

“It’s a pity, but can’t say as I looked. Last member of the household to use the room was Mrs. Millington, after breakfast.”

“And the only way in is through those two doors and these two windows, unless a duplicate key exists.” I unlatched one of the bow windows.

“Aye, sir. But you police types can tell, maybe, if a key’s been duplicated?”

Biting my lip in annoyance directed almost entirely inward, I leaned out, the sudden chill making my eyes burn. The alley side of the building was brick, with a single ivy strand hauling its way upward, and we were on the second floor. The other window faced frenetic Fifth Avenue. Both difficult to reach without being seen, and both locked anyhow.

Refastening the hasp, I returned my attention to what I’m good at: stories, and the people who tell them to me.

“Do the Millingtons have children?” I asked, ruminating.

“Not them. Just two sets of coronation china, a dozen Wilton rugs, five—”

“Does the master of the house have any unsavory habits? Gambling, women?”

Turley snorted. “His notion of sport is hauling in money as if it’s schools of sardines. Good at it too, as you can see. Better than most.”

“Mrs. Millington. Suppose she had debts?”

“I suppose she’d draw on her allowance. Comes to a hundred a month, excepting December. Then it’s two hundred, if you please, in the spirit of the season.”

How convenient for her if she ever needs a tenth silver bud vase in the shape of a swan.
I glared at the nine arranged on the mantelpiece, fuchsia hothouse buds sprouting tortuously from the creatures’ throats.

Then I caught sight of something more disturbing: a mirror had been hung over the fireplace.

It isn’t that I was worthy of a block of marble being devoted to my face previous to the explosion. But faces are personal, and I’d preferred mine intact. The reflection gave me back my dark blond hairline with its sweeping double arcs, the downward-edged crescent stamped on my chin, the narrow but curving lips above, the straight nose, the deep-set green eyes. But it also gave me a healed-over torrent sweeping across my temple, as if a penny had been thrown in a pool.

“The house servants,” I said, wrenching my eyes away. “Who are they?”

“Myself, and at your service, Mr. Wilde,” he listed, counting on his fingers. “Mrs. Thornton, the housekeeper. Agatha, the cook. Amy, Grace, Ellen, Mary, and Rose, the maids. Stephen and Jack, the footmen. Lily, the scullery maid. That’s without the coach driver and grooms who bunk at the hostelry.”

“Anything you’d like to tell me about any of them? Anything . . . interesting?”

Turley dissected this. Hope shone like a distant lighthouse in my breast.

“Agatha’s knee can tell her when a storm’s coming,” he answered me shrewdly. “That’s always terrible interesting. It acted up something fierce this morning, so we’re in for a parcel of trouble, Mr. Wilde.”

He hadn’t the faintest idea.

•   •   •

By the time
I’d interviewed
all of the servants and trudged in defeat out of 102 Fifth Avenue that afternoon, I had, in fact, learned several interesting things.

First off, the household had sunk into a clawing panic of self-preservationist accusations. According to Ellen (a downstairs maid), who was a breathless Cockney lass fresh from the Thames, it must have been Grace who took the miniature. Because, well,
Just look at her
. According to Grace (an upstairs maid), who was a short black girl who stood always with her hands neatly behind her back, it must have been Ellen. For Ellen talked funny, and the Irish talked funny, and
Everyone knows how the Irish are
. Then Ellen had called Grace an uppity wench who went with all the fastest gadabout coloreds in the city, and Grace had called Ellen a dry little prune who’d be lucky to give it away for free disguised as a hat, let alone sell it or marry it off.

I left them both teary-eyed and regretful, staring horrified at each other from either side of the kitchen table. Each of them minus a friend.

Next I called round to the hostelry on Fifteenth Street where the Millingtons’ coach staff resided. Grace did indeed have a male caller: one of the two black groomsmen, whose name was Jeb, paid his respects every afternoon and would marry her when he’d enough coin for a farm plot in Canada. The white coachman suggested as we parted ways that Jeb might have a motive there.

Predictably enough.

Blacks are accused of thievery every ten or so seconds in these parts. Almost as often as the Irish are accused of witchcraft. And I’ve sweated alongside too many free blacks, in ferry yards and restaurants and the like, for that not to lodge in my craw sideways. It’s infuriating. They own the same wrenching ambition that drives Yidishers to sew sixteen hours a day. Anyway, I grew up haunting the Underhill rectory, and you’d be hard-pressed to dig up a more bullish clan of abolitionists.

So I chalked up my interviews to less than useless and went on about my day.

Still . . . nothing any of the servants had said surprised me. This city plays with its residents a mortal game of musical chairs, and when the clanging pianoforte stops, the consequence for the loser is either a slow death or a short one. There is simply
not enough
here. Not enough work, enough food, enough walls with roofs topping them. Maybe there would be if we filled in half the Atlantic. But today, there aren’t enough chairs for the tens of thousands tearing their way into the parlor for a try. And if only one seat out of a dozen is marked
FOR COLOREDS
, and that identical seat is the only one marked
FOR IRISH
 . . .

Then it’s a question of who pitches whom on the hardwood first.

After some herring and potatoes at the nearest dining hall, I returned to the main house to conduct my own search, including a heart-hammering interlude digging through Mrs. Millington’s bureau while she was out delivering calling cards.

No painting.

I went home and drank three glasses of New England rum. That seeming the useful thing to do.

And thus, when February 14 dawned, atmosphere wildly clear with a silken grey sheet of sky spread high above, I’d the sensation that today held a trip to the barber’s to have a rotten tooth pulled.

I kicked off my bedsheet. My chambers are above Mrs. Boehm’s Fine Baked Goods, which means that my landlady’s bread ovens bake my floor in the wintertime. Bless the woman, my rooms are like June. They’re also briefly inventoried: a secondhand four-poster under the window, a claw-footed table my brother scavenged from a fire, a chair I found in a ditch, a rug from Mrs. Boehm’s attic. And finally, a chest of drawers I’d gritted my teeth and purchased on the fourth occasion I found local insect life thriving in my neatly folded togs. The room doesn’t look empty, though, maybe because its walls are plastered with charcoal drawings. I sketch scenes when I’m troubled.

I sketch a great many scenes.

The tiny “sleeping chamber” hasn’t any windows. So I’ve lined it with shelves, with Mrs. Boehm’s permission. Five books reside there at present. But I’m working on that. I’m accustomed to a much bigger supply.

A strange object that isn’t precisely a book also lives there: a long manuscript I wrote about what happened last summer, as a handy alternative to screaming my lungs raw about it in a public square.

Last August, a little girl by the name of Bird Daly collided with my knees. She was brave and terrified and inexplicably covered in blood, and I’d about as much notion of what to do with her as I’d have over a malfunctioning threshing machine or a wounded sparrow. But I was broken myself, after the fire. My world had vanished. And so I would speak with Bird as if she weren’t a kinchin whore, and she would look at me as if I weren’t a freak, and we made sense to each other. She was running for her life from a brothel madam called Silkie Marsh, who has a fair face and golden hair and no trace of a heart that I’ve been able to discern.

I wrote it all down—the unspeakable mass grave in the woods to which Bird led me, everything. Unlike writing police reports, which I detest, the words emerging from my pen siphoned off the pressure in my skull by small degrees. I’ve no notion what to make of that stack of parchment or why I didn’t burn it upon stabbing the final period into the page. But humans are largely inexplicable and I’m no exception. So there it lies.

Bird yet flits in and out of my mind like a firefly in the dim, and I’m glad of it. Often enough, I see her in person, and I’m gladder still of that. She’s much more sensible than I am. But at times, thoughts come unbidden of a madam smiling at me. Not with malice either. With comprehensive indifference. As if I were a sum to be calculated or a fish to be gutted for supper. And when I think of Silkie Marsh, I shut the door to the sleeping closet, as if the manuscript about her were possessed of mystical eyes.

I was feeling just enough out of sorts on the morning of February 14 to pull it closed with a dull
thud.

After dressing, I marched downstairs to find Mrs. Boehm slamming a rolling pin with obvious satisfaction into a ballooning ball of dough. It pillowed in the center, emitting a honeyed yeast smell.

“Good morning,” she said without looking up.

Something about my landlady’s failing to spare me a glance feels comforting—as if I’m
expected
to be somewhere, anywhere, and her lack of surprise means I’m in the right place. Mrs. Boehm’s eyes are rather too big, rather too wide, and the soft blue color of a dress wrung out to dry in the sun for too many Junes, and they’d used to track me everywhere. Keenly too. Now I could parade a brass band through the door and she’d go on sifting flour. Her hair looks grey in low gaslight, but it’s a strawlike blonde, wispy as the tips of pussy willow wands, and I found myself addressing the part in the center of her head.

“Good morning. What’s that, then?”

“
Hefekranz
,” she said happily. “Special order, by Germans next door, for a birthday celebration. Sugar it has, yeast, eggs. Very rich. Into a braid it goes, then in the oven. I like very much making this. Find anyone wicked?”

Endearingly, my landlady has a taste for sensationalist literature. And thereby for my career.

I picked up a day-old seeded roll on my way out. “I can’t even find an oil painting.”

“But you will,” she called, smashing the pale ball again with a childlike smirk on her face.

Seconds afterward, I realized I’d have paid good money for that confident little smile. Without even having been aware I’d needed it. Meanwhile, I stopped, blinking up at the dawn.

I’d not the slightest idea where I was going.

Admittedly, I paced for a few blocks in grim circles, skirting the malarial murk produced by the nearby Five Points, stewing over the futility of ever returning to the Millington residence. But then it came to me: I know someone whose wholehearted passion is
finding things.
Lost objects are his relics and pawnshop records his hymnals.

Finding things is what Jakob Piest
does.

And so I strode with a purpose up Elizabeth Street toward Mr. Piest’s beat. Practically whistling in relief as I went, and entirely unaware that Mr. Piest and I were about to meet the most fascinating human being either one of us had ever encountered.