Seven for a Secret (41 page)

She nodded. I passed her a far better handkerchief than I’d any right to own, which I’d discovered inside the costly jacket, and she pressed it into her eyes.

The next subject was nigh impossible for me to broach. Not due to my white Northerner notions of abolitionism, and not due to my great regard for the quietly weeping woman before me. Not even due to my guilt over having witnessed a tragedy unfolding whilst unable to halt the inevitable climax—indeed, having led the wolves straight to their door. The problem was more personal.

I know what it’s like to have a sibling. And sympathy was burrowing a tunnel right through my ribs.

“Your sister sent you away with Jonas on the pretense of getting your free papers.” I stopped, eyes burning, then forced myself to go on. “When you returned to Val’s apartment alone, Lucy had left you . . . instructions, I take it?”

The shudder that passed through Delia’s body could have broken her back, had she been a different sort of woman. But Delia was formidable. Deadly. And she’d done precisely what she’d had to do in order to save her nephew.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I never meant your brother any harm. Not after he was so unaccountably good to us. Lucy’s note was quite clear. I didn’t understand a syllable of it, but I obeyed. I don’t think I want to understand it. I only knew she had done it for us.”

She pushed her fingers into a pocket of her day dress and passed me a short letter. The writing was palsied, very difficult to read. But read it I did.

Dearest sister,

I pray that this reaches your hands. All is not yet lost. But we are set upon from every direction—last night I was told just how dire our situation has become. I am in the thick darkness now, but recall that where dark is thickest, there is our Lord best felt. When you find me, I will have gone home. Dwell on my release from the shadows that plague us, and be at peace. I love you, and I love Jonas, beyond your comprehending.

Follow my instructions to the letter, I charge by all we have endured together: it must appear that I am the victim of a violent brute. Make it look so in haste. Do this for me and for Jonas. It is your part in the bargain I have made. Set the scene as for a murder and you will both live. I know not why this must be, but trust that I believe in the messenger, and do as I tell you one last time.

Then run, my darling girl. Run and never look back.

I thought about Mercy’s second letter to me. Mercy, who had always known an unaccountably great deal about human nature.

Death ought to mean something, as lives do. Mine will.

“Lucy hanged herself while you were out, and you took her down.” I passed Delia back the note I’d refolded. “You would need to have cut the rope, I imagine, and you used the knife I found sitting on the counter. Did you dispose of the rope later, on your way out?”

Delia nodded, looking me clear in the eye.

“Your sister told you to make it look like a violent brute had attacked her—so you removed her clothing and arranged Val’s dressing-gown tie to look like the murder weapon. You turned over a table and smashed a decanter and pulled down a painting, none of it very systematic. You were too grieved to do it other than quickly, then run for safety. But you trusted her. So you obeyed.”

She added a second hand to the one clasped in mine. Peering at me through long wet lashes, she shook her head in disbelief. “Captain Wilde could have hanged as surely as she did. I want you to know it’s been a terrible weight on me. I can’t think who could want such a thing or why.”

I knew why. But it was a terribly long story.

Footsteps fell in the room beyond. I whisked the gun from her lap, pivoting. But the woman I’d known as Delia Wright had no real need of me. George Higgins came through the door. His eyes were a wreck, his mouth pulled downward as if recovering from a stroke. The carefully sculpted man looked quite lost. Adrift on a sunless sea.

“Help is coming,” he told Delia. “Timothy.” He hesitated. “God help us, I realize you’re a copper star. But in light of—”

“I was never here.” Rising fully, I rested the gun on the table. “What steps are being taken?”

“My mother has resources. Many others have died here, of various ailments. Only not . . . in this fashion. It’s the river for Varker and Coles. We’ll bury Julius at the Abyssinian Church with no one the wiser.”

A spasm passed over Higgins’s face—violent, inexpressibly grieved.

“Tell me,” I said.

“We’d just arrived to take them to the carriage,” he answered. “Varker and Coles burst in on us. They were very full of themselves—swaggering, making boastful speeches. They said you were in the Party’s hands, Timothy, and likely already killed. We were frightened for you—when I think of the look on Julius’s face. Are you all right? There’s blood at the back of your head.”

I couldn’t care, not when my friend’s was forming a small lake in the carpet. Not when Julius and I wouldn’t be worrying over each other any longer.

“Please, go on.”

“We were ready to fight them, but no one had yet moved. Jonas was crying, and Varker lifted a hand to slap some silence into him. Julius stepped in front of the boy as a shield. Not aggressively, just—decisively. That yellow-hearted coward started like a hare and then shot him. Just shot him point-blank, in the chest.”

That was as I’d imagined. But none of it was quite bearable. I was near to undone, living only in the silent spaces between heartbeats that chanted
Your doing, your doing, all yours, your—

“Was it long?” I asked, trying to breathe slower. “Before Julius—”

“No, not long,” Delia answered swiftly.

“It was over seconds later.” Higgins wiped a hand across his haggard brow. Sweat stood out at his temples, and I could see the blue veins in his dark skin quivering with rage. “Varker hardly knew what he had done. He’d the gun aimed at me an instant later, and this . . . this young lady lifted the poker in my defense. Varker fell like a stone. She’d snatched up his revolver and turned it on Coles before—”

“Before you could stop me?” she demanded.

Higgins studied her, curled into herself there on the floor. Her polished-oak curls, her eyes blazing through her tears. After choosing words reverently as talismans, he went to the woman who’d called herself Delia and knelt before her. Her lips parted. She hadn’t looked terrified when I’d walked into a bloodbath partly of her making.

She looked terrified now.

“Before I could shoot him for you,” Higgins said. “I’d have spared you that, if I could. I’ve a friend upstairs called Jean-Baptiste, I’ve just fetched him and . . . we’re leaving New York. I can’t stay here any longer. This city is like an illness that seeps in through your skin. I’ll see you and Jonas to Toronto, and after that, you need have nothing further to do with me. I’ll find my own way. I know you supposed that I’d turn my nose up at you if I learned where you came from. I understand why you imagined so, what with all my peacocking, how dandified and pretentious you must have thought me. Bragging about my education, my work, my plans. Bragging about
money.
I’d thought to impress you, and you thought me an arrogant fool of no constancy or substance. That was my fault. You were wrong, though. Mistaken.”

“How exactly was I mistaken?” she whispered.

George Higgins smiled sadly and shook his head.

“I’d follow you to the edge of the world if you asked me,” he told her. “I love you. I only wish I knew your name.”

•   •   •

The carriage that
departed
from the alleyway behind Neither Here Nor There that dawn contained Jean-Baptiste, who’d signed on for the adventure with enthusiasm; Lucy’s son Jonas, whose name I never doubted was real, as it’s impossible to teach a kinchin a new moniker instantaneously; George Higgins, after he and I had seen Julius shrouded and delivered into the shaking hands of Reverend Brown; and a woman whose name I’d no right to ask.

And so I never learned it.

I hope, though, that George Higgins learned it. Hours or weeks or minutes later. I hope that very much.

When the others were safe in the vehicle behind drawn curtains, it proved weirdly difficult to let him go. He stood there finishing a thin cigar while I stared at alley muck, both wondering what to say to each other. As if we’d snagged hooks in each other’s skin and feared tugging at them. Maybe that’s because I respected him and wished him well. Maybe it was because we’d just spent a quiet minute staring into the same waxen face as it grew ever colder, standing on either side of our fallen friend. And that can make you need a person. Someone who’s seen a portion of your mental map—knows where the rapids and the plummeting moss-edged wells are.

I felt as if, when George Higgins departed, Julius would be dead. And I wasn’t doing a man’s job at facing that.

“You’ll write us when you’re safely to Toronto?” I asked when he threw the stub to the ground.

“Of course.” He reached for my hand, and I took it. “I’d not even object if you wrote back. Will you?”

“If you want me to. Though I’d make a paltry substitute for hearing from Julius. He was the best of us, I suspect.”

“I suspect you’re right.” Clearing his throat, he added, “We’ll just have to trust to his sound judgment that he tolerated misfits like you and me for a reason, eh?”

It grew useless to even attempt speech about then. So I swallowed, and he stepped toward the carriage.

“Good-bye, Timothy. By the way, I mean to write my housekeeper that you can have your pick of my library.”

Clearly, I’d misunderstood. Chloroform and a gash that likely resembled a traffic accident had quashed what little was left of my faculties. It only remained to check myself into an asylum and have done.

“You—but—
why
?” I stammered.

He smiled, dark eyes gentling. “Because you were staring at my books as if you were looking at a vault full of bullion. They’ll be cumbersome and difficult to ship and worth little enough. They aren’t rare or even old. I’ll simply buy new ones.”

“But I can’t—”

“Are you going to be dense about this?” he asked pointedly.

It was, as usual, a fair question.

“No,” I said. “Thank you. It means a great deal to me.”

When Higgins opened the carriage door, he cast another, shrewder look back in my direction. Pulling his fingertips down his clipped beard, he paused.

“I don’t get the impression that you let go of things easily. Timothy, are you about to do something dangerous?”

He sounded concerned. I was more than a little touched. But the smile I attempted must have been a death’s mask variety, if his sudden look of dismay was any judge.

“Good-bye, George,” I said, turning to go. “Be well.”

After several lingering seconds, I heard the carriage pull away. I didn’t look back. Looking back, as Lot’s wife learned, can prove unhealthy. I know my new friend wanted to stop me. That he even considered it. But I’d put fleeing to Canada with two kinchin and the woman I love pretty high toward the top of the list myself, and he felt likewise. So he let me go.

That’s how it happens that, about half an hour later—and even dressed as if I belonged there—I paid a call at the Astor House.

twenty-five

If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.

—FREDERICK DOUGLASS,
NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE,
1845

I
’m usually fairly
sharp at recalling trivia.
When I didn’t remember Rutherford Gates’s room number—possibly because it seemed someone had taken a flaking rust-orange railroad spike and driven it through my neck and into my brain—I was vexed at first. Then I looked down, recalled what I was wearing, and loftily demanded his room number from the desk clerk, citing secret Party affairs.

Within five minutes, I stood outside his door.

If someone had asked me why I was determined to speak with Gates, I’d not have managed a sensible answer just then. But I’d been given a panorama, a mural of stories leading one into the other. In short, I suspect I wanted to see Rutherford Gates because of his sister, Leticia.

She had said,
It frightened me so, the sight of his tiny hand swollen into a ghastly red paw. . . . Rutherford had his way after he recovered, of course. That dog was his inseparable companion until he departed for university.

I’d a question to pose on that subject: I wanted to know the dog’s whereabouts. And I meant to have the answer.

The railroad spike drove a bit farther into my head with every step I took. I tested the door. He hadn’t locked it, so I stepped inside.

Astor House living quarters happen to be as splendid as we’re all led to believe. My boots sank into a Turkish carpet, and the morning sunlight nosed its way into soft folds of mossy curtains. I entered a parlor—nothing like the Millingtons’ showy monstrosity, but carefully decorated with patterned paper and soft blue furnishings—and discovered my quarry.

Gates sat in an armchair, smoking. The man who’d once struck me as healthy-complexioned had been coated in the fine silt of grief and fear. The silvering goatee remained waxed, the brown hair combed, the spectacles neatly placed on his nose. He didn’t give a good goddamn that was the case anymore, though. If not for force of habit, I don’t think he’d have donned a waistcoat and attended the Castle Garden soiree at all. He’d been out all night, for he hadn’t changed clothing, and his brown eyes stared through a misty wall of regret and champagne at me.

“Mr. Wilde. To what do I owe this surprise?”

“Pretend to me that it’s a surprise and I’ll fight you here and now in this hotel room.”

I meant it wholeheartedly, but that didn’t stir Gates much. He gestured to a chair opposite. I ignored him. If I sat down, I didn’t like my odds of getting up again.

“Do you want to explain to me how you
accidentally
arranged to have your wife murdered?” I asked him. “And don’t tell me the Party found out you’d married an African by chance, and this was all their doing. You knew those women to be slaves. And you told Madam Marsh as much.”

That galvanized him. Gates’s head snapped toward me. If I was being careful—and I wasn’t, not by that time—I’d have said he was now privy to new information.

“How on earth can you know that?”

“Because I’ve worked out how your wife died. You needed a safe distance from her suddenly, and you confided in Silkie Marsh. Surely you realize that terrible things started happening immediately afterward.”

If I’d slapped him in the mouth, he couldn’t have looked more appalled. “I did . . . I did relate to Silkie the sad truth of my situation. She’s a dear friend. But—”

“You must have told her of your new troubles that day we found you at the Astor. Told her Lucy was murdered. What did she say to you?”

“That she was sorry for my loss, sorry that slave catchers had harassed members of my household. She tried to console me,” Gates protested. His liverish complexion was pinkening in dismay. “She knew nothing of how Lucy ended up strangled.”

“It’s very simple. After a failed attempt by Varker and Coles to capture Lucy, Madam Marsh simply walked into my brother’s rooms and ordered your wife to kill herself so her kinfolk wouldn’t be sent back to North Carolina. Marsh accomplished this in large measure by telling Lucy that you’d spilled her house-slave origins.”

The letter Lucy wrote to her sister had revealed relatively little about her plight, but what I could manage to extrapolate was very telling indeed:
Do this for me and for Jonas,
she had said.
It is your part in the bargain I have made. Set the scene as for a murder and you will both live.
That meant that an agreement had been reached, a pact so deep I was only beginning to guess its dimensions. A pact orchestrated by none other than Silkie Marsh, who had paid her fateful visit the night before. And who’d realized that the fact Lucy was hidden at Val’s, of all places, was an engraved invitation to foster another sort of unholy mayhem entirely. It must all have looked very neat in Madam Marsh’s head: Lucy would send her family away on a pretense. Lucy would die. Delia would orchestrate the evidence. Mulqueen would arrive shortly thereafter. And then . . .

I didn’t feel much up to musing over what would have happened then.

I know not why this must be,
Lucy had admitted,
but trust that I believe in the messenger, and do as I tell you one last time.

I wonder to this day precisely what Silkie Marsh said to Lucy, but the situation that must have been presented was obvious:
As a free woman married to Senator Gates, you are unspeakably dangerous. You have escaped us once already. Slavery or death: make your choice.

Lucy had thought about running, and she had thought about going back. Running would lead to capture. Slavery likewise meant death, a piece at a time. Not the thick darkness where God lives, but the thin, silvery hell in which she could hear nothing beyond her own shrieking. Then she had considered the new option presented to her by Silkie Marsh. It was no less terrible a way out. It was simply the only unspeakable path she could tread alone. And if love for her sister was world encompassing, Lucy’s love for her son was universes of stars with their satellites. She would have done anything, everything, to spare Jonas. Her death had been a gift.

“Does it surprise you that betraying your wife’s origins got her killed?” I asked.

Sadly, it shocked him right through to the spine.

I’ve never been in a war, cannon and brimstone howling all around me. But I think Gates looked as blasted, just then. Ruin had been held at bay with battlements of uncertainty and self-delusion and dumb force of habit, and my news had stripped his remaining defenses. And when the clarity did arrive, it fragmented him. I have done very stupid things in my life, and I’ve also witnessed tragic ones. Never yet, though, has the former directly caused the latter.

Gates didn’t happen to be so lucky.

When the few wails had ended, and the muffled sobs, I demanded information. I thought I needed more. In truth, I was a train divorced from its tracks, flying downhill in a smoldering blaze. I could still see Julius’s face before me, still recalled what it felt like to
carry this man’s dead wife
and bury her in newsprint. I got my wish after a little reviving brandy and some truly alarming tremors.

“Silkie was to arrange everything,” he moaned, squeezing his skull in his hands. “I never meant for Lucy to be hurt. Dear, affectionate Lucy. I was mad to keep her in my own home, mad to marry her in the first place. Even if under a false name. But to think of her cold, in a pauper’s grave . . . God help me.”

“I think you’ll have a better chance with the devil,” I growled. “Tell me.
Now.
What vile arrangement did you enter with Marsh?”

Lips quivering, he capitulated. “I arrived home one Sunday night when Lucy had been out with her sister. Lucy threw her arms around my neck and told me that she was ready, finally, to leave the house regularly—that she couldn’t conscience Jonas learning to fear the world as she did. Of course in that first instant, I was proud. Enormously so. And Timpson’s isn’t so very far from my residence.”

“You supported her,” I said through my teeth, recalling Delia’s account. “You asked how her nerves would fare. You ordered champagne. But afterward . . .”

“I realized how insane my situation was in truth. Lucy would be seen five days a week working at the flower shop, then returning. She’d be discovered within the fortnight—by her own circle, by men who know me, and I was terrified.”

“Really? What in holy hell
terrified
you?” Those words snapped out like the crack of a lash.

He quailed. “Disgrace, yes, public evisceration,
yes
, but none of that was paramount—I’ve many political obligations. Some are to monstrous people, vultures. Mr. Wilde, they are conscienceless creatures you’d not believe possible.”

“Oh, I’d believe them possible, all right.”

A quake of revulsion passed through him. “You think me the same as the rest of the Party. Grasping, vicious.”

“No, there’s a difference. You’re too cowardly to do your own dirty work.”

“It was never meant to be dirty work!” he cried, tearing his spectacles off as fresh moisture rushed to his eyes. “I met with Silkie one night, as an old confidante, one who has ever had my ear and I hers, and we shared a wine bottle and talked. I’d never before unburdened myself of my secret. It felt giddy and sickening at the same time. I once raced a trap when I was terribly drunk, as a boy. It felt the same. Like falling, flying. All at once. If Silkie hadn’t always supported me so ardently, in my life, my campaigns . . . I’d have shattered apart. And it didn’t seem wrong either. Lucy had lied to me too, after all.”

“I suppose Jonas gave them away,” I ventured.

“I wish he had done.” His voice sank to a whisper. “When we married—Lucy was hesitant over intimacy. We didn’t consummate the vows for some six months, in fact. I never pressured her, never dreamed of causing her distress. But we did sleep together and when Lucy dreamed . . . she didn’t dream of Albany, that much was clear.”

I have battled the urge to strike a man in the face many times. On that occasion, I’d have done it and gladly, had I not been saving all my strength for another task.

“Let’s have the rest of it,” I ordered.

“Silkie—she’s wonderfully sympathetic. I confessed to her that I needed Lucy out of my house. I needed her to disappear. If I’d told Lucy the truth, she would have been angry, perhaps even bitter enough to expose me, God knows what she might have done out of vindictiveness or hurt. But if Silkie could find her a fresh place to start—a real housekeeping position, work as a seamstress or a florist, perhaps, away from the city—then I could even visit her there. As Charles Adams.”

My vision wasn’t wide and glimmer-edged at this point, because I could barely stand. No. Human selfishness can be staggering. And every word, every asinine fantasy, had been God’s honest truth in his head.

“I suggested to Silkie that Lucy be told they needed protection from vicious anti-amalgamationists who’d found us out. That there was no time to lose, and she and Jonas must pack their things. It was more than half true, you realize. If my voters had discovered us, they may well have torn Lucy in pieces or burned down our home. And the Party—they’re capricious, hellishly vengeful, and I’d deceived them. When you told me slave catchers took Delia and Jonas, and that Lucy had been murdered, I felt as if I was dying.”

“You are one of the stupidest men of my acquaintance,” I said. “I need you to grasp that. My friend was killed over this. Over the fact you are
witless
.”

He shook his head frantically. As if that would shake death off him the way a dog shakes off droplets of Hudson water.

“I never wanted her hurt,” he pleaded. “I loved her. I only wanted her gone. I’m sorry.”

I just stared at him. That level of mewling naïveté could have rivaled a steaming colt’s, and here it was emerging from a grown man. An educated man, who knew his Party and their capabilities. The same man, I reminded myself, who after meeting and growing infatuated with a beautiful black woman, supposed that through caution and careful manipulation of her fears he could encase her in a pretty prison cell
for the rest of their natural lives.