Seven for a Secret (30 page)

She sounded a bit breathless, but surely I was conjuring that myself. Surely men who stride casually about as if their hearts are in their chests and not on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean miss key signals, invent others on the merest whim. Surely she meant to be kind. Mrs. Boehm
is
kind, after all. She’s one of the kindest women I know.

Kindness can account for literally thousands of otherwise inexplicable things,
I decided.

I managed a comradely smile. “I don’t draw strangers either. Unless I’m working.”

Our attention dropped to the paper river between us. The one that now included Mrs. Boehm’s face, planes softened by frostlight and the unearthly sheen of the atmosphere beyond my window. With her head angled and her hair edged in silver.

Pale eyes scrutinized my person. Both from the picture and from the woman before me, kneeling unselfconsciously on my floor.

“
Are
you working?” she asked me.

Bang bang bang.

Mrs. Boehm began to rise, but I caught at her bony wrist without quite knowing why. Stepping over the paper, I passed through my open door to the top of the stairs.

“Who’s there?” I called out.

“Timothy, it’s freezing. You want to see me—I promise.”

Taking the stairs two at a time, I unlocked the door to discover Julius Carpenter. Well-wrapped, a wary look about him. My pulse quickened. Something had changed. The fact that
anything
had changed was nigh miraculous.

“Tell me you’ve solved it,” I requested of my old friend.

“Not today,” he owned.

“Varker and Coles have caught smallpox.”

“Damned if I wouldn’t dance a jig at that prospect, but no.”

“Then tell me Delia and Jonas are alive and well, and like to remain so,” I groaned, leaning against the door in near defeat.

“I can’t speak as to the future,” he answered, lips quirking. “But regarding Delia and Jonas, why don’t you ask them yourself?”

eighteen

I felt the stripes, the last I saw,

Red, dripping with a father’s gore;

And, worst of all, their lawless law,

The insults that my mother bore!

The hounds are baying on my track,

O Christian! will you send me back?

—E. WRIGHT, JR., “THE FUGITIVE SLAVE TO THE CHRISTIAN”

J
ulius Carpenter and
I traveled
in a hack northward along the Bowery as the ailing afternoon gave up the ghost. A hack I’d hailed, of course, while he’d stood two feet behind. We didn’t dwell on that, though. Not when we were about to see Delia Wright and Jonas Adams again. Not when
answers
hovered before us in the air, simple and alluring as hummingbirds and just as elusive to the touch.

The Bowery is a broad, careless, hedonistic street, full of mindless laughter at eight in the evening and the muffled whimpers of lost drunks at two a.m. Packed with revelers lurching helter-skelter in pursuit of unhealthy distractions. Spies and traitors seemed to glide through the slush, their glances arrowing into our hack’s windows. The hotels’ brass-fitted restaurants gleamed maniacally—hotels asking no questions when their patrons returned at four in the morning keeping different company to their companions of the daylight. Upper windows blazing, every guest seated at a skirted table with a mountain of faro chips. Afterward, we came to the seedier gambling halls. The dens masquerading as coffee cellars or poultry vendors by day, floors still littered with burnt grounds and soiled feathers. Places where thin men gathered, betting their families’ suppers on raffle tickets and strings of numbers that would break their hearts.

I asked Julius first whether he’d yet questioned Delia. He said no, he’d not even seen her or her nephew. Then I wanted to know where they were, and he informed me that he’d need to draw the blinds when we approached, no offense meant. Gnawing at the bit, I asked how the devil he’d discovered their whereabouts. He pulled a folded note from his waistcoat.

“I never discovered them. This was delivered to me yesterday.” At my glare of angry surprise, he added, “Stop. George doesn’t know either. Bad wrench, not telling him, but I was instructed to keep my mouth shut. Delia hid them both deep underground, Timothy.”

The note, in a well-educated hand that failed to align itself with the edges of the paper and hung at an eccentric tilt, read:

Mr. Carpenter,

Your company and the company of your rising star is requested, after dark as is customary. Bring no one else. We’ve a large ham and a small ham, and in hopes you will both be pleased by our repast. The supper is to be entirely private. While he has been vouched for through multiple sources, please take precautions ensuring the star arrives safely at our establishment.

That’s neither here nor there,

The Candlestick Maker

My friend pulled the blinds down. The remaining light was dim but steady, shining from the hack’s four safety lanterns through broad cracks in the shades. Julius was doing all he could not to smile at my confusion. It can’t have been easy.

Then the spark hit powder.

“You said
underground
,” I realized. “Underground Railroad. My God. Are you part of that network?”

“Please. My ken wouldn’t hide a cockroach. The Vigilance Committee keeps people from being sent in the opposite direction. George, though—George is a stockholder.”

“So he said.”

“No,” Julius corrected me, “a financial contributor to the Underground Railroad system. As is the rest of his family.”

“Why leave him out, then?”

“I don’t know her mind, but it troubles me too.”

“I can’t read this message. Are all communications coded?”

“The interesting ones.” Julius allowed himself a small smirk. “Can’t read it? You’re better than that, Timothy.”

I hoped he was right, so I looked again.

“
Rising star
is a play on words. Star police. Me, presumably.”

He said nothing, but he seemed pleased. So I sallied forth.

“Large ham and a small ham can only be Delia and Jonas.
Precautions . . .
you already said I’m not to know where we’re going precisely, though I imagine you’d be taking more care about it if we didn’t know each other so well. But I don’t see why this fellow dismisses everything at the closing.”

“How so?”

“He says
that’s neither here nor there
.”

“But that’s just where we’ve arrived.” Rapping at the hack’s roof, Julius made to jump out as the cab rattled and slowed. “Neither Here Nor There. Do me a favor, will you Timothy, and don’t tell me about it if you know where I’ve taken you?”

That we were in the northern suburbs of the Chelsea neighborhood was clear, for the wind spoke more of forest elm than of animal remains, and the Hudson murmured away to my left. Anyway, I’d recognized the subtler glare of Fourteenth Street when we’d turned left off Bowery. But the dwellings, like so many upright redbrick soldiers, were unremarkable. Anonymous. Kerosene lights flickering behind white curtains, cleanly swept wooden doorways featureless above their ash-strewn steps.

Julius approached a house with a pair of red candles in the window. He’d somewhat recovered by that time, though the shoulders that had been knotted with pain days previous were still not merely raw, but tense with worry.

The door opened to a colored servant girl in a neatly pressed uniform, carrying a third candle.

“Always best to have another lit, lest one go out,” Julius said.

She smiled, blew out the taper, and stepped aside.

We were led into a small sitting room, nicely populated with dark-leafed plants and a white cat presiding over the Indian rug before the fireplace. The chamber’s sole occupant sat in a rocking chair, sewing a button onto a man’s shirt. I’d have been arrested by her appearance anyhow, for she was a black woman of advanced age, with a crown of white hair piled atop her head. But I noted almost immediately that she was stone blind. I might have realized when she never glanced in our direction, only took on an air of listening. Her stitch work was conclusive, though. In the needle thrust, tapping with expert skill at the thimble she wore, never meriting the smallest glance downward.

“Is that Julius Carpenter?” Her voice was strong but rasping. A pleasantly abrasive sound like the skitter of dry leaves.

“Mrs. Higgins,” Julius said warmly, bending to kiss her lined cheek.

“Higgins?” I exclaimed.

“And you must be Timothy Wilde. I can smell the metal copper star from here. It needs polishing.” She smiled in my friend’s direction, revealing teeth white as her hair. “I fooled him, didn’t I, Julius?”

“You fool everyone, Mrs. Higgins. Timothy, this is George’s mother, Mrs. Adelphia Higgins. She’s better known as the Candlestick Maker in some circles.”

I took the hand that had apparently written the note I’d just perused. Her sightlessness explained the odd orientation across the paper, her quiet force the fact I’d stupidly mistaken the writing for a man’s. George Higgins was visible in the regal line of her jaw, the navy sheen of her black skin. Mrs. Higgins’s eyes were focused in the middle distance and slightly to my left, her hair pearlescent in the firelight. She lingered over my hand—reading me, no doubt as well as I could read a stranger with sight intact.

“I can’t tell you how relieved I am that Delia Wright and Jonas Adams are safe, Mrs. Higgins,” I said.

“They will need your help, I fear. They will need every ally they can muster. The danger of their position cannot be underestimated.”

Hesitating, I glanced at Julius.

“Doubtless you wonder why my son is not present.” Setting her sewing down, Mrs. Higgins rose and smoothed her elegant eggplant-colored skirts. “Delia’s wish, and she will explain it to you. Mr. Wilde, I needn’t tell you to speak of this place to no one, I trust?”

“On my life I won’t.”

“So I have been told, by multiple parties. You wouldn’t credit how very difficult it is to gain the respect of Grace Stackhouse, employed by my not very distant neighbors the Millingtons, for example. But you have. Follow me, then. Please keep your conversation as low as is possible; I am entertaining more than one guest at present.”

Mrs. Higgins walked with sightless ease to the mantel, passing her fingers along its marble lintel before arriving at a door in the far corner. The room beyond proved to be windowless, lit with a single kerosene lamp throwing every manner of shadow, and appeared to be a miniature museum of sorts.

The collection it housed was unlike any I’d ever seen. Every wall was lined with taper holders and pocket lamps, from the humble bull’s-eye to the most delicately scrollworked silver candlesticks. I spied night lanterns with iron flaps, candles with flared shades to amplify the light, gold-plated chambersticks etched with bountiful wildlife. Simple pewter stands, elaborate sconces that appeared from their floral embellishments to have sprouted from tiny metal seeds. Every variety of illuminative device I could imagine glinted at me from the shadows, their shapes guessed at by reflective edges and half-formed curves. And nary a candle or a box of lucifers in sight.

Mrs. Higgins walked to a glassed-in shelf full of miniature wall chandeliers and reached behind the display. We heard a small, well-oiled
click.
The shelf swung open. Our hostess descended a flight of steep stairs in near-total darkness. We followed more carefully, at an uncomfortable disadvantage without light.

“George’s late father owned a very successful chandlery business,” Julius informed me under his breath. “His collection is often shown as a museum. It’s perfect, really. Why suspect a room serves a double purpose when it’s used for public tours? There’s a handrail along the wall.”

To my surprise, my knuckles struck smooth paper and not the packed earth or mortared stone of a cellar. No gusts of chill air rose to greet me, no sickening hint at the laughable state of our metropolis’s sewage system. Treading in Julius’s footsteps with my fingers tracing a waxed wooden handrail, I made for the glow at the bottom of the staircase.

When our feet reached level ground and a thick carpet, we turned a corner. And a sight I’ll never forget if I live to be a thousand years old appeared before me.

New Yorkers almost never see escaped slaves. For plentiful reasons, most of them obvious. Refugees keep to the woods for fear every stranger they meet may be a bounty hunter with a bloodhound. And anyhow, they’re ill equipped for cities. They’ve no chink, no proper clothing, and no notion of how to scavenge for food in a weird world of zigzagging streets and towering straight lines, a godless forest built of brick and stone. A man adept at stealing farm eggs to save his skin doesn’t necessarily have the skill to raid an iron-barred grocery after hours. Cities are dangerous. Packs of roving urban dwellers inhabit them, their glances calculating and feral. So we see runaways but seldom. And most are glad of it.

This particular escaped slave, a woman of no more than twenty, inhabited a bed sheltered from the rest of the room by a Chinese screen. The room itself was low ceilinged and underground but otherwise a study in normalcy. Framed pressed flowers, braided rugs over pine floors, chintz wall hangings printed in russet and turquoise. The woman rested uneasily atop the coverlet in a nightdress and soft dressing gown, tossing her braided head to and fro on the goose-down pillow, both feet bandaged in thick cotton matting. I didn’t have to ask what had happened to them. She’d fled from the South through fields and swamps and thickets and rivers in the dead of winter without any shoes. Her eyes flicked open just as I entered the room.

“Are you the doctor?” she asked me. Her voice was heavily accented, drawl so thick it spilled like molasses from her cracked, ashen lips.

“He’s been and gone, dear.” Mrs. Higgins ducked around the screen. “You’ll keep both feet, we think. We were so glad of it. Do you remember?”

“However did she make it here?” I marveled.

The bravery of the concept—the geography, the risk—left me smaller than usual and tongue-tied with admiration. Aside from ferry travel to Brooklyn and back, and rare journeys to Harlem and Staten Island, I’ve never left New York in my life. It’s a common local ailment. And here she’d traveled hundreds of miles. Equipped with, presumably,
nothing.