Seven for a Secret (33 page)

Julius, across the table from me and seated between Higgins and Piest, gripped his friend’s arm. “Think on the fact she’s alive, George. That’s better than we feared at first.”

“Alive and unwilling to speak with me in person.” Higgins extricated his arm with the excuse of rubbing his hand through his beard.

“Didn’t want to cause you undue pain, did she,” Julius reasoned.

“Or herself undue discomfort.”

“She’d no wish to bully you.”

“She can bully me all she likes and she knows it, it’s her refusal to face that fact square on that I can’t abide.”

Hear, hear, and a three cheers besides,
I thought before I could help it, pulling my stub of lead from my pocket. My fingers were positively itching.

“I didn’t like keeping you in the dark, George, but you see how it stood,” Julius added, frowning.

“Oh, yes. I imagine that if anyone ever openly defied an instruction from my mother, they would be struck down from on high within seconds. And the autonomy of her guests is her cardinal rule—they’re guided, arrangements are made, but they’re never dictated to. Delia would be treated no differently than a barefoot runaway. Whether or not I’ve been courting her for nearly two years.” Bitterness was audible at the back of his throat.

“Is Mrs. Higgins called the Candlestick Maker because of your late father’s profession?” I inquired, redirecting the conversation.

“Actually, no,” Reverend Brown answered when his congregant failed to speak. “It’s because she takes souls and conveys them to where their light need not be hid beneath the bushel of slavery.
Candlestick Maker
. I’ve always been fond of that title.”

A silence fell.

“Have you any paper?” I asked Higgins next from the clear blue.

The man didn’t even blink. But it’s extremely disconcerting to have a woman’s countenance emblazoned on the backs of your eyelids, so I didn’t fault him. “Look in the desk, just there.”

Returning with a sheet, I started scribbling. “Reverend, what did you discover while ostensibly distributing tracts door to door?”

Coughing, Reverend Brown pushed a pair of spectacles up his nose. “I was received at five neighboring residences by means of the rear yard, and both servants and their employers proved most amiable people. Very gracious about my pamphlets, and one woman even made a donation to the Abyssinian Church after serving me tea. On the whole, they were as curious about the boarded house as was I. Many eyes are on the place. But I’d not say it’s
watched.
No more than any other empty building, for fear of vagrants occupying it and inviting fire or theft. And to their knowledge, Gates has not returned a single time.”

Eighty-four West Broadway had begun to appear before me in neat charcoal lines. My activity was inviting some bemused glances, but I couldn’t bring myself to give a damn. When I’m wound so tight brainwork actually
hurts
, drawing is the only way I can manage to think at all. “Mr. Piest?”

“Yes!” he exclaimed, lunging awkwardly forward and jarring the table. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

“Never mind.” Hiding a smile, I asked, “How went your investigations?”

“I inspected the fortifications of Eighty-four West Broadway to the minutest degree, all the while taking obvious notes and in broad daylight. That was to a purpose, Mr. Wilde—if seen, I would have been thought a copper star evaluating the security of the residence for a fee, and not a skulking villain seeking an opportunity for rude gain. Windows, doors, locks, back area, side entrances, cellar ventilation—
nothing
escaped my most intense scrutiny. Every brick and smear of mortar is indelibly marked upon my mind, and in my notebook.”

The Committee stared at him. Struck dumb. Whether with admiration or because they’d never seen a star police who resembles a talking crayfish wax poetic over housebreaking, I’m not sure.

“And?” I prompted.

“The place is impenetrable,” he announced. With passion and finality.

“I— Wait a moment. What exactly—”

“The windows are barred with iron to prevent paupers from breaking and entering. Ventilation holes for the cellar are likewise fortified with very thick boards. And were we to attempt entrance via the front or back doorways, we would require either an ax or a battering ram.” He raised a hand, as if for pardon. “I must put the question once—is it possible to
ask
Mr. Gates for permission to enter, without informing him of the whereabouts of the refugees?”

“With Lucy in the ground?” Julius shook his head. “The risk is too high.”

George Higgins scowled in complete agreement.

“Free papers can be forged,” Reverend Brown said cheerily. Earning my eternal respect and a puff of appreciative amusement from Jakob Piest.

“Delia and Jonas are at enough risk already, whatever in hell is going on here, without bad documents hastily come by,” Julius argued.

I went back to my sketch. The others fell to murmurs, suggestions among themselves I half listened to.

If you force your way in with a cannon and a copper star, the Party will apparently kill you if Val doesn’t get to you first.

If you ignore the question and go back to your life, it will haunt you until you are, in fact, dead.

If you break into the Astor House and steal Rutherford Gates’s keys—

The pencil fell from my hand. I’d just reached the roofline of the brownstone, the snow-crusted edge of its tiles.

“Gates boarded his dwelling in February.” My voice sliced through the low chatter. Higher than usual, really nothing like my normal tone. “A cold February. This has been a
very
cold February.”

“Yes?” Higgins drawled, the question somehow both mocking and hopeful.

Finding the nub of lead again, I tapped it against my rendering of the impenetrable house. “The kidnapping was the night of the storm. When all those ships foundered. Dozens of them. It was the worst gale in years.”

“It was and then some,” Julius agreed.

“We all met at Eighty-four West Broadway before setting out for the docks, and we left in a tremendous rush. No one, in a practical sense, used the place thereafter. It was simply closed by hired men.”

“What on earth has that to do with
cold?
” Reverend Brown asked.

“He’s coming to it,” Mr. Piest answered, beaming.

Staring down at the sketch, I began to smile myself.

It was a very dangerous idea. It was the only idea, however, that I appeared to have wrestled from the ether. And considering the weather and the often slipshod behavior of workmen hired to secure a private house, it had every possibility of working.

“Is there generally space for applicants at the Colored Orphan Asylum?”

If Mr. Piest was an object of wonderment before, this query sealed my status as resident curiosity.

“They take whatever orphaned and half-orphaned charges they can, but winter is difficult. Money is always a useful commodity, if time is pressing,” the reverend replied when no one else could find his tongue.

I nodded. “Suppose I knew of someone who can get us into this place, but who would require an immediate change of address afterward for safety’s sake? If I did, would one of you be willing to bribe his way into the Colored Orphan Asylum?” Angling a look at our host, I continued, “I ask as a salaried copper star with a secondhand coat, addressing my question to a gentleman of substance. Mr. Higgins.”

He thought about being amused. In fact, a quick smirk appeared on his lips before he’d managed to whisk it away again.

“Take the whole sodding pile and gladly, Mr. Wilde,” he announced.

“Mr.
Higgins
,” the reverend objected, mildly shocked.

Higgins shrugged and fell back to scrutinizing his house. It was well furnished, with embellishments designed for comfort not snobbery. He’d shelves and shelves of books, the scope of reading material I’d used to enjoy at Mercy’s residence. I’d have loathed him for those books if I were that sort of man. And I realized that—while the room’s décor had once been a mark of status, maybe—he’d transformed it in his mind into a jewel box. Higgins had conjured Delia’s brown eyes keeking out through the window, the crook of her arm grazing the table over buttered toast of a September’s morning, on countless occasions. Now the house was merely a house, its color bleached away into faint shapes that once had been gifts for a loved one. Every vibrant thread superfluous, every delicate tassel stripped of meaning.

I’d the evening previous, in a ruminative episode typical of me for being utterly useless, forgotten the name of Mercy’s first published short story—the premiere installment of
Light and Shade in the Streets of New York
. It couldn’t possibly matter to anyone save myself whether I knew the title, and yet
I
was the one punishing myself over it. The workings of my brain were beginning to resemble the exertions of a man at hard labor, turning a heavy wheel for the benefit of no one.

Looking at George Higgins, I watched in silent dismay as his own gristless mill began to grind.

What about you troubles the woman you love so?
I wondered past a rush of fellow feeling.

But there was nothing to be done about love, anyhow, and there was a kinchin to consider. Two, if I was counting my chosen collaborator in crime. When I leaned forward in my chair and traced a small triumphant circle around the chimney, Mr. Piest began to cackle wildly, giving me a slap, hard and congratulatory, on the back.

After all,
I told my already-grumbling conscience,
it isn’t as if you’ll be teaching Jean-Baptiste how to steal.

twenty

It is a subject of deep regret to me that proper measures were not taken to ascertain the cause of the death of one of the unfortunate youths, at the time the rest were stopped. There is no doubt upon my mind, but that he was cruelly and barbarously murdered.

—RICHARD STOCKTON REGARDING KIDNAPPING VICTIM JOE JOHNSON, WHO WAS FLOGGED TO DEATH WITH A CART WHIP,
AFRICAN OBSERVER,
1827

T
he following night
we set out
to find Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin. The living black chimney sweep, not the dead French painter. Whether our oh-so-orderly plans would be met with abject failure in the form of a locked chimney grate, we knew not. But my hopes were high. The last people to use the sitting room, presumably, were those assembled on the night of the abduction. And God knows we hadn’t bothered with securing the fireplace. That meant, supposing flue safety had occurred to neither Gates nor his day laborers, a clever sweep could break into the place without breaking anything whatsoever.

An elegant solution. Though a perilous one. I liked the risk to our small friend about as much as I liked being forced to rob a house.

“He can still say no,” I remarked to Jakob Piest and Julius Carpenter as we snaked through alleyways. Too narrow for horses, plenty wide enough for rats to scuttle across our feet.

“Of course he can,” Julius replied. He was just ahead of me, his blue winter cap bobbing along through alleys festooned in grime. “But this is the only decent notion we’ve come up with.”

I skidded on a patch of snow melt that had frozen, melted, mixed with putrefying slime, and frozen again. Several times. We were in Ward Nine not far from the Millington residence, heading southeasterly away from the Fifth Avenue shrines to lucre, back toward humbler terrain. The neighborhood where Grace Stackhouse claimed Jean-Baptiste’s sweepmaster held court.

Crossing Greenwich Lane, we found ourselves in the labyrinth off Factory Street, traveling under a stone archway. We picked our way through used books spilling helter-skelter from the passage. Their motionless owner thrust a box of more marketable items—corn plasters and odd buttons—in our direction. He’d no customers, nor did he seem likely to find any. Overhead the darkening skies shifted queasily.

“Do not suppose for an instant, Mr. Wilde, that I like this either,” Piest remarked. “But I do suspect that the child knows his business by now well enough to wish to be rid of it.”

I agreed. Jean-Baptiste must have been talented at scaling chimney walls to remain yet unscathed by them. But who would want such a life, given a choice? Thinking a silent plea that we’d not be the cause of his first irretrievable mishap, I skirted a horde of patchy cats yowling over a rubbish barrel. Half-starved and better than half-frozen.

“Here we are.” Julius came to a halt in the middle of the passageway.

Political posters covered the surface of what I assumed was a very drafty wooden door. Slogans of yesteryear dissolving, the words
FREEDOM
and
CORRUPTION
disintegrating alike in dangling peels of streaky paper. It’s an ugly method of windproofing, but it works and costs only a few pennies’ worth of horse glue. Knocking, we entered. Julius in the lead, this time, I and Piest at his heels.

“Clear off. We’re closed for the night. Copper stars,” the sallow-faced mulatto sweepmaster added in disdain, noticing the pins Piest and I wore. “Christ almighty, what this city is sinking to. I paid the tax already, last week. You’ll shake not another penny out of me.”

Neither Piest nor I could claim surprise at this assumption. We did exchange a dark glance, though, and Piest’s nose twitched in repugnance.

“We’re looking for a sweep. It’s urgent,” Julius explained.

“Caught wind of inspectors coming tomorrow, eh? Unless you’ve a down payment for a rushed appointment, all the lads are booked through the week’s end.”

The sweepmaster sat behind a desk.
Desk
being descriptive of the function. I could equally have described it as a
pile of cast-off bricks
, with a tabletop crowning it. He took a sip from a tumbler resting next to a ceramic jug. His face was dour and jaundiced beneath the natural bronzing of his mixed blood, his hair held neatly in place with bear grease, his mouth cruelly slender, his eyes calculating. Not that he looked at us a second time. He merely scribbled away at an accounts ledger.

“We’ve a down payment,” Julius assured him. “But we need a particular sweep.”

“Ah.” Setting the bedraggled quill down, he linked his hands behind his yellowed shirt collar. “A
particular
sweep, is it now. Well, for
particular
sweeps, the rates are higher, naturally. It’s Tomcat you’ll want, then, yes? He’ll not mind, supposing you give him extra coin as well and offer a drink or two first to take the edge off. He’s like to scratch otherwise,” he concluded, winking.

The sourly curdled feeling in my stomach was wholly familiar. My work as a copper star had occasioned it time after wretched time. But always previous, I’d either arrested the bastard who’d caused it or else made off with every kid I could find trailing along behind me.
Tim’s stray cats,
my brother calls them, though I believe he approves of the practice. But now . . . now we were on a mission, and I was banned from the Tombs. So I fixed my tongue between my teeth and commenced furiously scheming.

“That’s not the way of it,” Julius said, a thin stripe of steel running under his tone. “We need a boy about six years old—mute, though not deaf.”

The sweepmaster tilted his sullen face back, bewildered. “The Cockroach? What can you possibly want with the Cockroach? Well, it’s none of my business, if you fancy the little freak. He’s never been asked for after hours, but we’ll persuade him, won’t we? Right this way.”

I watched my feet follow after my friends. Along a corridor, through a doorway, and down a flight of dank stairs, as the shadows fled from the sweepmaster and his swinging lantern. The cellar had a ceiling of about four and a half feet. Ancient roots halfheartedly scraped from the walls reached out like sinister fingers. The cave had been dug to house potatoes and cured pork in the winter months, a cold haven for summer apples and salted cheese wrapped in bright wax.

Instead, the frozen hole in the ground boasted two levels of bunks crammed up against either frigid, flaking dirt wall. And it housed tiny colored boys instead of foodstuffs. The adults crowded forward, bent at the waist and keeking as best we could through the consuming darkness. A thick stench of coal dust suffused the cavern. Not because fuel was stored there, but due to the sweeps themselves.

“Cockroach!” the sweepmaster yelled, sending a wave of disquiet through the sleeping chamber.

Several hollow, red-rimmed sets of eyes stared back at us. An older boy of perhaps eight with the characteristic forward-bending spinal deformity pushed himself up to see what the trouble was. Another, who’d been caught out of bed, shuffled back to his bunk, his knees and ankles fused permanently outward.

Then the tiny shadow of a body rolled off a lower bunk from beneath his thin cotton sheet, landing sprawled in startlement on the raw earth. Half a second later, he straightened, walking toward the conscienceless churl holding the lantern. Blinking, obviously frightened. But not very surprised.

“Cockroach, see?” The sweepmaster was pleased. “Quick as lightning, but never makes a sound. Same color too, the inky little pest. Cockroach, these people want you.”

Jean-Baptiste’s hands curved into angry talons.

“Come on, then.” The sweepmaster turned back to ascend the stairs.

“Jean-Baptiste, is it?” Julius whispered.

The lad’s mouth dropped, forming a circle as the light retreated. He took two steps toward Julius, uncomprehending. Then his sleepy and inflamed eyes lit on myself and Piest, and he gasped.

“We’ll explain in a moment,” I told him.

Jean-Baptiste trotted willingly enough up the stairs. Ahead of us, a
clang
from the sweepmaster’s lantern hitting his tabletop sounded just before a furious flipping through of accounting ledgers. When we entered the front room, our host was running a thorny finger down the columns of a separate book, one taken from a shelf. Grunting, he wrote the words
Cockroach: Private Services
.

“That one had better be healthy enough to climb a chimney tomorrow,” he advised.

Grinding my teeth to sand began to seem imminent when Jean-Baptiste shot us a glance of alarm. Piest placed a finger aside his nose with a subtle wink, and the moment passed.

Clucking sadly, the sweepmaster took another swig of liquor. “I mean it. Nothing to ruin the next day’s wage. Trust to your own natural delicacies where he’s concerned and think feelingly of my sorrows, gentlemen. I lost another to the cancer last week, and we’re short till I can find another.”

The cancer,
my ever-helpful brain supplied.
Chimney sweeps’ cancer. Cancer of the scrotum due to sweat mingled with soot that’s never washed away, beginning in an open sore and ending in death.

Julius paid for Jean-Baptiste’s time. How much, I’ve no idea. The chink belonged to Higgins, anyhow. Words were exchanged. Not that I listened to them. I was busy with my usual dilemma, wondering whether to clap the nameless sweepmaster in irons, evacuate his establishment and raze it, or else to attend to the actual business at hand.

Before I quite knew what had happened, we were all in the alleyway, Jean-Baptiste looking up at us with a mystified expression. Piest sank to his haunches with a hideous, overwhelmingly kind smile.

“What a scoundrel you work for. You remember me and Mr. Wilde, yes?”

Jean-Baptiste nodded.

“We’ve a proposal, Jean-Baptiste, and we hope that you will consider the mission with due care,” my fellow copper star continued. “We wish you to climb down one last chimney and remove some papers from a house. Papers that belong to noble parties unable to retrieve them. It would be hero’s work, the essence of chivalry, and afterward you would be placed in a school and never sweep a chimney again. God and fate willing. What say you?”

He said not a word, of course. It took us ten minutes, in the mouth of that unholy crack in the sea of brick, to convince the boy that we truly meant to take him away from his sweepmaster. That we were copper stars, lawless lawbringers, and so cared not one whit about indentures or apprenticeships. That he didn’t “belong” to anyone. And that I wanted him to steal something when I’d explicitly instructed him
never again.
The challenge of speaking half English and half bizarrely comprehensible sign didn’t aid matters.

My ethics didn’t help either. I’d not known, not until seeing it, the sort of scars he’d earn in that dungeon. And by the time we’d near to convinced him, I felt filthy. I didn’t blame Piest or Julius; they’re good men, the best of men, and kinchin drift through our streets like so many bits of river trash along the shore. I’m not exceptional, on the contrary.

I’ve simply been river trash. And I can’t abide bullying.

“Stop,” I said at last. All eyes swept to me. “Stop all of this. Jean-Baptiste, you’re leaving that bastard’s employ either way. You don’t have to help us. I’ll find you a new ken.”

My friends shifted their feet.

“He’s right.” Julius smiled. “You’re not going back.”

The boy’s eyes made every effort to widen, but scratched against coal dust and blinked frantically.

“As to the quest—it’s once, and once only,” Piest said. “You make the choice. There’s risk, but we’ll do everything we can to protect you.”

“It’s for someone the same age as you,” I said softly. “Another boy, called Jonas. This is wretchedly unfair and I’m sorry for it. But you can rescue him. Are you willing?”

The kinchin drove the back of his wrist into his watery eyes and rubbed hard. Gave a little heave of his shoulders. Smiled faintly.

“You have to say yes or no,” I admonished.

He nodded.

“Good man,” Julius said to the boy, shaking his hand.

We fell into a line as we set off for West Broadway. A moment later, my friend Mr. Piest noticed that I was in serious difficulties. He sidled over and touched my arm.