Seven for a Secret (31 page)

“She’d the Railroad signals—lanterns and such, when she neared towns. Otherwise she followed the stars,” Julius answered.

“Weren’t stars, most nights. I followed the moss,” she moaned.

Mrs. Higgins’s mouth twisted worriedly. Feeling for the bedside, she placed the back of her hand against the sick woman’s brow.

“This is Sugar,” she said, voice directed at Julius and eyes trained on the wall. “Sugar, you’re very warm. Do you need me to call for the doctor again?”

When Mrs. Higgins pulled back a fraction, I saw Sugar’s face entire. Her eyes wandered feverishly, bandaged hands feeling all around her on the surface of the quilt. What she was searching for I couldn’t fathom, nor could I begin to calculate the size and shape of what she’d lost in order to gain her freedom—her family, friends, the space she’d slept in, the unmatchable blue of the sky outside her door.

Julius pulled at my elbow, and we entered a short hallway. Away from the gentle comforting sounds and the stifled whimpers that pierced them. I stopped my friend when he reached the next door. A question burned at the back of my throat.

“Do the kinchin ever survive the journey? I don’t see how it would be possible.”

For far too long, he simply looked at me. “In spring and summertime, yes. In the winter, with luck. But you can’t very well wait for summer if you’re to be sold away from your kinchin on the morrow.”

It made sense. It all made logical, heartless, insane sense.

“Think on what we can do, not what we can’t,” Julius advised, entering the next room.

Delia Wright sat in a combined bedroom and sitting room, her elbows on the table before her and her eyes pinned to her nephew. Having met the pair only once, my relief at seeing them hale swelled admittedly out of all proportion. Jonas was curled in the double bed, clutching the edge of the blanket though for all appearances he slept. Delia’s hair had been neatly arranged atop her head, and the forest-green day dress Varker had abused repaired meticulously. She was perfectly buttoned and hooked, brown eyes wracked and raw. I saw in her a general who has suffered unspeakable casualties planning his retreat in dress uniform. Seeing us, she rose, nodding a warning toward the kinchin. Julius embraced her, quick but fierce, and she led us through to still another room.

We found ourselves at last in a subterranean library. Well lit, replete with heavy armchairs and heavier bookshelves. Delia closed the door behind us.

“He’s hardly slept,” she confessed. Her tone was clear, but so very, very low.

“We can’t tell you how sorry we are, Delia,” Julius said. “For you and Jonas, for your sister.” Hesitating, he searched for words of comfort. “She’s with God now, if sooner than she should be.”

“Is she?”

A cruel shudder passed through Delia’s torso, and she crossed a hand over her stomach. Going to the fire, she added a small log, though the blaze crackled brightly already. When she turned back, she’d swept the thoughts from her eyes.

“We searched everywhere for you,” Julius told her. Urgent, but not reproachful. “Never dreamed you’d be Neither Here Nor There—how could we have guessed you were with George’s
mother
? He’s nigh out of his mind.”

“As have I been.”

“I’ve only managed to keep it from him by avoiding him. Mrs. Higgins is a better liar than I am. And why should you have asked that George—”

“I’ll explain it.” She seated herself in a fireside armchair. A candle burned beside her, and she moved the taper to the low table in the middle of the room. “Mr. Wilde, there is a favor I must beg of you.”

“I’m at your service.”

“As reparation?” she asked, dry as chalk. “Or simple goodwill? I do read the newspapers, you know.”

I’d seen it coming. But knowing you’re about to suffer a blow doesn’t lessen the effect, I’ve found. On the contrary. Either Delia Wright had been present and afterward taken hostage when her sister was murdered, or she had discovered the body in Val’s bed and fled with her nephew. No other explanation for their absence was sensible. Apparently, the latter had taken place. But I’d no words to explain why I’d dropped her loved one’s corpse in the rank snow under a pile of piss-stained newsprint.

“I hope you can forgive me for moving her,” I said fervently. “Though I don’t expect you will. What I thought was right at the time isn’t easily—”

“Please, Mr. Wilde.” She adjusted her hems in aggrieved impatience, and I recalled how decisive Delia Wright was in actual life. She was riveting. “Spare me your explanation of what it feels like to have a sibling. I recall it. Do sit down, you’re both unsettling me.”

Finding no further words, I obeyed. Julius and I took the settee, and we all leaned forward an inch or two. Three conspirators, bending toward a tiny open flame.

“The man who murdered your sister will pay, Miss Wright,” I vowed. “Only tell me how and who.”

Delia’s mouth opened upon a mirthless gasp of hysteria. “Ah, Mr. Wilde.” She was still smiling. Shaking her head in a pitying way, beautiful and exhausted and clearly inches from the end of her rope. “How I wish I
knew
.”

The silence that settled was thick with disappointment. I’m not proud of that, and Julius took a brief look at his boot toes. But we wanted vengeance by that time. For Lucy, for Delia, for the boy gripping the edge of his quilt as if it were a sword hilt.

“You needn’t make useless protestations of your brother’s innocence either, now you know I’m at as much of a loss as you are.” Delia’s fraught smile at last faded. “I will forever remember that Captain Wilde was kind to us, and I cannot credit that he suddenly returned to his home in a murderous rage. Not after all he had done. We could scarcely believe our good fortune that night—that the Committee, Julius, and the star police, Mr. Wilde, had taken such drastic measures to free us. And then to
house
us, no less. Well. But I shall tell you all I can, and then perhaps you’ll see some light where I see none.”

It can’t matter that she doesn’t know the culprit,
I thought above the unmanly protests over the unfairness of fate shrieking in the back of my head.
When you know
what
happened, you’ll understand
who
.

Of course you’ll know the murderer’s identity. You’ll finally know Lucy’s name.

And this is the story she told me.

Delia and Lucy had remained in Valentine’s home for all of the first day and most of the second. There had been eggs for frying, salted pork, mysterious spices, and a jug of table wine they reasoned they’d pay him for after returning to their homes. The sisters talked while Jonas constructed a fleet with kindling masts and newsprint sails, only to decimate his armada in a fiery battle within the small sea of Val’s hearth. When conversation wearied them, they perused the clean but otherwise neglected library (why Val owns books when he reads them but once and remembers them perfectly puzzles me extremely) and watched the passersby braving drifts in Spring Street. Then it belatedly occurred to the women that, should Meg have given the alarm, there must surely be people worried about them.

“George often misses church for business reasons, and it wouldn’t have occurred to either of you to reassure our congregation if poor Meg appealed to them in hysterics, and so I suggested attending Sunday night services.” Delia took a slow breath, gazing into the fire without seeing it.

“Your sister was against the idea,” Julius surmised.

“Lucy was frightened.” Delia dashed an errant tear from her eye with an angry little swipe. “But I will tell you something about my sister—on each occasion she was frightened around
Jonas
, she either compelled herself to stop or sent him away. She couldn’t bear the thought that she would influence him in a cowardly direction. It haunted her perennially. As if she could help her instinctual reactions! On that particular evening, she couldn’t work herself up to leaving through the back alley and walking to our church in West Broadway. And so she
insisted
that I take my nephew. Lest he grow to startle at shadows.”

Delia’s voice remained measured during this account of her sister’s unique stamp of courage. Nevertheless every word, piece by piece, built to a soaring monument. She hadn’t simply loved her sister. Lucy had been Delia’s heroine.

“But no one at the Abyssinian Church saw you,” Julius prompted.

“No.” She shifted her eyes in my direction. “Someone followed us. After we had reached Spring Street.”

I moved forward again, aching for fresh material. “Go on.”

“We ducked into an alleyway. I pulled Jonas through the back door of a chophouse and we rushed across the crowded dining area. When we reached the street again, we simply ran. I took us in circles. Perhaps twenty minutes passed, all told. By the time we arrived back at the alley behind your brother’s house and raced indoors, I saw no one behind us.”

The rabbity flutter of my pulse heightened. “Can you describe your pursuer?”

“I caught the hint of a copper star on his greatcoat shining in the lamplight. Tall as Julius, maybe. I’d the impression he had red hair.”

Sean Mulqueen,
I thought. Not at all surprised.

“When we arrived back at the house, we were quite shaken. But my sister wasn’t alone. There was a woman with her. She was strikingly beautiful—pale, almost angelic, with blonde hair and a sweet, assured manner.”

Apparently I started in shock, for Julius cast a questioning look at me. I’d told him all about Silkie Marsh and her blessedly rare species of malevolence, of course. Though they’d never met apart from Julius’s mockery of a fugitive-slave trial, he’d a vivid recollection of the woman who’d almost stolen his life.

“She’d introduced herself as a Miss Marsh, and she was on her way out already.” Delia’s expression pulled taut, her freckles standing out in stark constellations. “I’ll be very brief, for the subject . . .” Her eyes fell shut. “Charles Adams was not who we thought he was. Perhaps you’re aware already—”

“There, take a breath, now,” Julius said.

“Rutherford Gates was his name, apparently.” Standing, Delia crossed to the mantel, running palsied fingers over its framed illustrations. “It was a lie. All of it. Lucy’s marriage, her
life.
Or so we were told. Miss Marsh claimed Charles Adams was a state senator. God, to think of it, of Lucy’s face . . . She was devastated. Heartbroken. I was witness at her marriage ceremony in Massachusetts. You can’t imagine how happy she was. Miss Marsh left soon after warning Lucy.”

“
Warning
her?” I exclaimed.

“Lucy said she’d advised us to flee the city. We couldn’t know if my sister’s marriage held any claim—if she was Lucy Adams or Lucy Wright. But Miss Marsh insisted in very feeling language that we run for our lives, for danger—Varker, Coles, worse perhaps, but she wouldn’t say how or why she knew of it—waited to pounce on us every instant we remained in town.”

Delia peered at my lips as if expecting me to comment. She was disappointed, though. Of the many questions that swarmed in my pate, angry and stinging as individual blood flies, none would have made sense to the woman before me.
Why in holy hell would pure vice in the shape of a pretty brothel madam warn you of danger?
wasn’t practical, though it was to the purpose.
What game was Silkie Marsh playing in your head?
wouldn’t solve my worries either.

So I kept my mouth shut. Listening.

“We were no way prepared for flight, however,” Delia murmured. “Lucy and Jonas’s free papers were at West Broadway, and to travel without them . . . we may as well have surrendered to Varker. Lucy was in such a panic that she proposed I take Jonas at once to a safe house. Here, naturally.” She gestured, a sad and futile spasm of the wrist. “I was to return and accompany her to West Broadway after I’d fetched my own free papers from my lodgings. We knew you’d arrive that morning, Mr. Wilde, and trusted you’d do us the courtesy of escorting us there and seeing no harm would come to us for it. I won’t prevaricate with you—Lucy also wished to see Charles. To see her husband, if he was such. She could not have abandoned him, on the word of a stranger, without ensuring the allegations were true.”

“Nor could you leave without her and your nephew’s free papers,” Julius agreed.

“But by the time I’d arrived back at Captain Wilde’s residence after leaving Jonas here . . . You saw what I saw, Mr. Wilde. You must have, since my sister later ended up in an alleyway. You were due to call on us that morning, and who else had reason to move her?” Delia stroked her fingers over her throat as if over the purple stain across her sister’s neck. “I fled. We must have missed each other by minutes.”

Exhaling slowly, I stitched together facts as the fire hissed to itself and Delia paced. Bits of truths and half-truths, fragments of stories, the earnest accounts of those I trusted and those I didn’t. Motives, actions, consequences. None of it could be heard above the blaring fanfare of unanswered questions. So I asked a few key ones.

“When your sister found work last month, did Gates raise objections?”

“I see your mind, but I can confirm nothing. He asked her if she thought she could handle the strain and Lucy said yes, she was certain she could. Then he ordered a brace of pheasant and two champagne bottles from the restaurant down the road to celebrate her success.” She fluttered one hand exhaustedly. “But we also believed him to go by the name of Charles, so I suggest you ask me more useful questions, Mr. Wilde. Time runs short.”

“What explanation did Silkie Marsh give for knowing you were at Val’s?”

She paused midstep, raising an eyebrow. “Is she not your brother’s mistress, then? Lucy said Miss Marsh claimed—”

“Of course she did,” I muttered disgustedly.

Silkie Marsh,
I thought,
is a snake charmer who had four vipers in her basket. Varker, Coles, Gates, and Mulqueen. If only I knew which of them sunk his fangs into Lucy the next morning.

I shook my head, clearing it. “What favor did you wish to ask of me, Miss Wright?”

She sat down again and faced the pair of us. “I want Jonas’s free papers. They’re in Gates’s house, and I’m effectively trapped here. I want you to bring them to me. I retrieved mine on my way back to Spring Street.”