Seven for a Secret (43 page)

Silkie Marsh was right, so I didn’t bother to argue with her.

“Mulqueen was always your man, wasn’t he? I thought he worked for Varker and Coles at first, but I’d lay money that you invented the whole filthy system. Mulqueen the copper star, Varker and Coles the dealers, and all you had to do was appear in court when they needed you.”

Adjusting a fold of her exquisite robe, Silkie Marsh shrugged. She seemed tired. Worn. “I didn’t like losing Sean—he was quite capable. He signaled me when the woman calling herself Lucy Adams was at last alone in the apartment as well. Delia Wright or whatever her name was led him in plenty of circles thereafter, but Sean had already done his duty.”

“Who gave Gates away to the Party?”

“I did, of course, after the sister and son disappeared. They appreciate the power of secrets, as I do. Exposure could have been devastating for multiple campaigns, the scandal would have rippled endlessly—better to be prepared for the worst. It would have been madness to leave Tammany in the dark. From the moment Rutherford told me of his endangerment, I saw an opportunity to be of use to them. I took it.”

“Along with his blood money.”

“All money is blood money, Mr. Wilde,” she snapped, impatient rather than hurt.

“You told Lucy the truth that night, didn’t you? That Gates was being groomed by the Party, that the job in the flower shop was too public, that she was an escaped slave who had to be eliminated from the picture. And then you were inspired to strike a deal. If she made my brother look a heartless killer, you’d leave her kin alone. You as good as held them hostage—their lives for one faked garroting.”

“She agreed soon enough,” Silkie Marsh said, picking at a thread that clung to her robe. “It was childishly easy. It was the least messy option left to me, in fact, compelling the problem to solve herself.”

“Why in hell’s name would you make it seem Val’s doing?” I didn’t quite mean to ask the question, but it bloomed forth of its own volition. “You once loved my brother, and you walked into his rooms and instructed an innocent woman to frame him for murder.”

“To see what you’d do, of course.” She yawned, blocking her mouth with the back of her delicate wrist.

I’d guessed so. Imagined that Silkie Marsh had seen a marked woman in Val’s home and grasped at a singular opportunity for destruction. Still, it numbed me to the bone, hearing it said so carelessly.

Smirking at my obvious dismay, she touched her fingertips to her collarbone. “You didn’t disappoint, Mr. Wilde. Your moving the body was
vastly
entertaining. Not as entertaining as watching you sit through Valentine’s arrest would have been, but overall this has proven a thoroughly delightful experience. I’ve heard Seixas and Luke are missing, which is a bad sign. But they really weren’t very bright. I’m terribly pleased overall.”

I clenched my fingers over my leg, mind awhirl. The question
Are you pleased with yourself?
wasn’t the one I wanted answered. It was of enormous importance, though, to learn whether her loathing for me had infected her feelings for my brother. Because if affection for Val lurked somewhere in the echoing cavern of her own emptiness, then I thought it just possible to call a cease-fire until I could decide what to do with her. If I could make her see that her sick notion of sport could have ended in a noose and a trapdoor, then maybe more people wouldn’t have to die because of me. I could visit Julius’s grave, stare at the fresh churn of earth with the worms burrowing through it, and tell him,
I’m endlessly sorry. But I promise you that this is never going to happen again.

“Valentine could have hanged.”

“Oh, that was hardly likely, was it?”

“Hardly
likely
?” I cried. “God,
listen
to yourself. Half of police work is best guesses, convicting obvious suspects, and you painted him a killer without a second thought.”

She rolled her head on her neck, cupping a hand over her nape. “If I got Val arrested for murder, I could have gotten him off again just as easily. Bribed his way out, or testified for him perhaps. He’d have been so grateful to me.”

“He could as easily have been sentenced to death.”

“If Val had been hanged for murder, I’d have mourned him. But I’d have survived it. Would
you
?”

Silkie Marsh commenced braiding her hair. She did it unhurriedly, as if bored with the conversation. It was such a simple, womanly activity, so natural the way she wove the pale strands together. The easy domesticity of her fingers in her tresses ought to have been pleasant to look at. Instead, it was horrifying.

“You are unspeakably cruel,” I said.

Her hands froze. Regarding me dispassionately, the little blue circles within her eyes alight, she smiled.

“I’m merely a businesswoman. And you are very, very bad for my business, Mr. Wilde.”

I stood up to go, already knowing what bottomless loathing looked like. My ribs ached, my head yet pounded, and my scar burned eerily, an echo of past hurts. Silkie Marsh reached for her letter, and I reached for my hat, knowing that impossible choices were ahead of me and somewhat awed at the paths my mind was wandering. I’d never previously been quite so keen on the notion of cold-blooded murder.

“What are you reading?” I asked offhandedly.

“Rutherford is planning to withdraw his bid for reelection, citing nervous exhaustion. All that mayhem was for nothing after all. What can possibly have gone wrong?”

When she’d said it, she looked startled, as if the words had flown from her mouth unawares. I smiled.

“Oh, I can explain that. I threw him in a Tombs cell and it ketched him a bit. But the Party will be told it was all in their service. That will likely endear me to them, I’d wager. And I’ve been wondering what it would be like to go on endearing myself. Because one way or another, whether through flood, fire, plague, or Tammany, I am going to bring you down.”

“A
Tombs
cell? You’ve ruined everything, you beastly little worm,” she growled, all pretense of civility gone. “He was my only link to Albany. Rutherford was invaluable, and he’d have been reelected come spring. Do you hear me? I could have expanded my connections, my clients, my— You
imprisoned him
?”

“You’ll come to know what that feels like. One of these days.”

And that parting shot could have been the end of the interview. I’d like to say that I left Silkie Marsh with a snarl on her lip and the letter crushed in her fist. The sole owner of the last word.

I can’t, though. Because one riddle remained unsolved. By the time I’d belatedly realized the fact, Madam Marsh had schooled her fury into a mocking smile, hidden the crushed letter in her skirts, and was deftly continuing the braid in her hair.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I admitted. “Beardsley and McDivitt were always Mulqueen’s thugs—the Party claimed you recommended them personally. So you must have known where the Wrights were all this while. After I gave away their location, you could have sent Varker and Coles to recapture them at any moment. Instead, you allowed them to remain hidden until the Party gave the word. That gained you nothing save risk and a lost commission. Why?”

Silkie Marsh had finished with her plait. She dropped the braid and let it hang loose, sliding gentle fingers over it. A tiny line formed between her sculpted brows as she considered. Looking for all the world like a lost girl, wandering dappled summer forest paths in an unhurried search for the right direction. She’d assumed that expression for my sake on countless occasions. But I knew this to be true bewilderment. Flesh and bone and no trace of art. It prickled down the back of my neck as nothing else had.

“Lucy was lovely, wasn’t she?” Silkie Marsh wondered softly. “All the while I was speaking with her that night . . . I’d never met her, of course, and I couldn’t credit how lovely she was. You’ll never believe it of me, but I offered her what comfort I could. She was so frightened, but resolute nevertheless, and . . . I think it was that, her resolve, and naturally I pitied her having thrown her lot in with a weakling like Rutherford, but, oh, how lovely she was, and I do cherish beauty, you see. I took her hand, and when I felt it shaking, I swore to her if she did what I asked, I would help her family. When I went to the Party and told them to make use of Sean’s friends, I asked them to be patient if anything should come of it. To wait for you to manage things yourself, Mr. Wilde. I’d made a promise, and I thought you could devise the best end for them, you see. But Tammany can be so impatient. How did it end, after all?”

From the next room, a clock chimed, reverberating from the many mirrors. I stood in silent wonderment with my hat in my hand and felt the warm flush of my anger creeping away like flood tides. Dazzled and not a little sick. Her words had wound around my throat somehow, soft as a cashmere glove.

“I can’t possibly tell you that,” I breathed.

“Ah.” She nodded, still pensive. “I can see why you would think so, though I do hope they escaped. You had better leave, then, hadn’t you, Mr. Wilde?”

Somehow, I reached the door without faltering. Somehow, I found myself on the street once more. Staring up at the sky and wondering whether the stars were reeling away from us, or I’d simply lost my earthbound bearings. My pulse throbbed in my ears, a faint reminder of the sharper pain in my head.

After all that she’d done to me, it’s mad to say that a small act of mercy made me more frightened of Madam Marsh than I’d ever been before. Kindly whims thoughtlessly acted upon shouldn’t turn a man’s stomach over in his belly. But hers did. I’d thought I understood her, right down to the gouged-out center. I’d thought I could predict what she wanted if not how she’d act.

I’d been wrong.

I forced my feet to move. Soon, I found myself striding at top speed. And seconds later, I broke into a light run, dodging potholes and frozen banks the color of lead. Because going to Greene Street had reminded me how I’d gotten into this mess in the first place, and I needed to conduct a long-overdue conversation. One I, at last, understood well enough to form the right words.

Checking my watch and seeing that evening mass at the Catholic orphanage would end in half an hour, I hastened through the ugly winter streets in the direction of the little girl who had started it all.

•   •   •

The wind turned
dry
as old bones after the snowfall. Standing with my hands in my pockets, I awaited Bird Daly in the open courtyard between the chapel and the dormitories. The sandlike flecks had frozen in queer drifts against the benches, glittering wickedly in the shadows of marble archways. An owl perched on one of the parapets hooted softly, a mournful and lovelorn sound. Drifts of cloud cover concealed and revealed the moon, leaving me one moment a silhouetted copper star and the next merely a deeper patch of nightfall.

Then the peace of the evening was rent by the clatter of kinchins’ voices mingled with the stamping of small boots.

Bird marched in a disorderly line with her schoolmates. She’d just found a long stick, the variety begging to be a sword or a wand or a scepter, and she carried it in slack fingers. Her face was so neutral, so . . . not happy . . .
accustomed . . .
that I grew still more acutely aware of my surroundings. From the particular pulse of my headache to the specific grind of my boots against the paving stones, because this moment was important to me. Her maroon dress called back the gore of our first encounter, when she’d been covered in a boy’s blood and running for her life, and she was perfect. That was what I needed to say to her. Lucy Adams had taught me a lesson, though one I’d never be able to thank her for. Bird, like Lucy, could never go back. And Bird, like Lucy, was perfect. As beautiful and heartbreaking as an unsent letter.

Everything about her.

Seeing me, she smiled. Waved to the nun and started running. And before I knew quite what I was doing, one of my knees was on the grimy stone and I’d an armful of Bird Daly. For a moment, she froze.

Then she hugged me back. Just about as hard as she could.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know how,” I said over her shoulder. She smelled faintly of liturgical incense and of something warm and entirely her own. “But you don’t wake up
wrong.
You wake up
you
, no matter where you suppose you are. I’d erase it all if I could, but that doesn’t mean I want
you
to be different. The Bird here now is the right Bird. Do you understand what I mean?”

I wanted her to know what I meant as I’ve wanted very few things. And every bit as much as the ones that were for me.

When I’d managed to stop strangling the poor kinchin, she pulled back a little. Eyed my scar and clearly thought about touching it. She didn’t, though. She just smiled in her sober, measured fashion. Set her small hands on my shoulders and squeezed.

And then she said, “I understand.”

There’s a reason,
I thought, pulling her close again,
that the number two means joy in the blackbird poem.

There always is a reason, after all, in children’s rhymes.

twenty-seven

Men may write fictions portraying lowly life as it is, or as it is not—may expatiate with owlish gravity upon the bliss of ignorance—discourse flippantly from armchairs of the pleasures of slave life; but let them toil with him in the field—sleep with him in the cabin—feed with him on husks; let them behold him scourged, hunted, trampled on, and they will come back with another story in their mouths.

—SOLOMON NORTHUP,
TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE,
1853

H
aving slept until
afternoon
at Val’s ken, and with thoughts swarming my head like a cloud of midges, I walked a great deal after parting from Bird. Aimless, grieving. But still here. Even in the middle of the night, the streets were alive with sinners, circling one another in a dance of nameless strangers.

When I arrived home very late, the lights in the bakery were aglow. Odd. Elizabeth Street was relatively quiet, though the Germans next door had located an accordion and a man who knew how to use it. Shrill, happy strains of a waltz pirouetted out of their windows and leapt down the street. The first stair before my front door creaked, and I mulled over finding a few nails and fixing it on the morrow. I pulled out my key.

The door flew open.

Mrs. Boehm stood before me. Eyes wild, unleashing a torrent of the most guttural and emphatic invective I’ve ever heard. Still more emphatic than Mrs. Boehm’s languages generally sound, that is. Which is saying something. When she stopped, I stared at her stupidly for several seconds.

“I don’t speak Bohemian,” I said, baffled. “Or German. Was . . . was that
both
?”

Snarling, she turned on her heel and I followed, shutting the door.

Mrs. Boehm stormed into the bakery, hands perched on the hard ledges of her bony hips. She wore the third of the dresses I’ve catalogued, the snow-white wool with the small bands of grey lace at the low neck and the short sleeves. The one that heightens her coloring, makes her hair nearly blonde and her eyes nearly blue.

Turning, she aimed a finger at me. It was like staring down a rifle barrel.

“That you are in danger, I know,” she snapped. “Men chasing you everywhere, men hitting you. And you go to this ball, where are dancing and drinking these men who want to break your bones, and you
disappear.
No note! No message! All night and all day, and now night again. Nothing. I am thinking to myself,
Find Mr. Wilde
, and I wonder how, and then I am thinking,
Mr. Wilde would know, he is police
, but you are
gone.
How can I send you to find you if you are not here?”

Sighing, she straightened her shoulders. “I was worried,” she admitted.

I kissed her so hard she took half a step backward before I caught her around the waist, my other hand traveling from her shoulder up her neck to the shell of her ear. I’d have pulled away to make sure of my welcome, but her head tilted almost instantly, her wide lips parting even as I felt their edges lift into a familiar smile.

The fact it was already a
familiar
smile sent an aching but golden twist through my chest.

I found out a number of important facts about my landlady just then. For instance, her tongue is something of a marvel. Warm, inviting, pliant. Vaguely joyful when it brushed the roof of my mouth. Or it was that night, anyway.

So I kept kissing her. I kissed her until her thighs hit the bread table and she parted them and I lifted her onto the floury pine and stepped between her knees and broke away from her lips to find out whether the hollow of a baker’s throat tastes like hot buttered bread.

It does.

“I never want to get married again,” she gasped. “I loved Franz.”

I stopped, looking up at her with my fingers tracing her jaw.

“I’m in love with a girl called Mercy who writes me mad, beautiful letters.”

Mrs. Boehm’s response to this information was to push my coat off my shoulders. So the clear thing to do was to go back to kissing her.

I make a great many hotheaded decisions as a copper star. But that one, I think, was the right choice.

•   •   •

Elena Boehm smokes
very small cigarettes.
She rolls them herself, carefully tucking fragrant tobacco into tiny sheets. When she smokes them, her eyes half close on the inhale, and her lips press gently into the slender tip of the white paper. When she smokes them in bed—my bed, as I’d no wish to make any presumption of being welcome in hers—she holds her left hand above her head, between the bedposts, so as not to get ash on the sheets.

It ought to look awkward. It doesn’t.

I was spending my time on the depression created at the edge of her hipbone when she lies on her back. There’s a little white spot there, like a freckle reversed, and I was tracing the edge of it with my thumb. It had been so long since any female had expressed an interest in my perusing her anatomy, I was keen to take as long a spell over it as was possible. And an ardent, hasty, splendid tumble with a sweet-faced woman propped on a bread table with her knees around my waist while we both remained almost fully dressed was not going to be sufficient to the grand cause. No. I like Elena tremendously and was keen to provide her with evidence of the fact. So I now know that there is a white spot beside her left hipbone, and that brushing my fingers across the inside of her elbows provokes a breathy laugh, and that beneath the covers where all is dark, she tastes of a tea brewed from the soft white hearts of meadow grass.

“What are you thinking?” she asked. Watching me and alternately watching the smoke from her cigarette slither through the air.

“I’m thinking that the gentlemanly thing to do would be to clean your kitchen table for you.”

Elena chuckled. “I have been with no one since Franz. I am thinking we should leave the table as it is for now, yes?”

I didn’t feel like arguing over that. Outside my window, the sky was turning a melancholy shade of lavender. I wondered what the reversed freckle tasted like and saw no reason not to investigate that matter further. As any self-respecting copper star would do.

“I will tell you something,” Elena announced. “Silly, you might think it. But your London friend’s stories—I imagined myself in them. The scullery maids and shopkeepers and princes. After Audie and Franz died, I ran from my life. Hurt was always in front of me, always behind me. Running from the hurt only to meet it halfway. When I read
Light and Shade
—I wasn’t anymore. You see? No past I’d buried, fading. No future, alone. Only feelings from other people borrowed. I liked that.”

She was speaking of the short tales Mercy had penned and then published anonymously in a long-running series. The ecstatic fables and homespun fairy tales populated by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Something pricked at the back of my eyes.

“I didn’t know it was her when I read them,” I confessed. “Until the last. But I always dreamed of living in her tales. Not just feeling them through a page.”

Elena thought this over. When she thinks hard about something, her slender mouth tucks down at the edges, though it looks nothing like a frown. Her cigarette finished, she crushed it carefully against the bedpost. After realizing she’d nowhere to put it, she frowned at the stub in earnest. I plucked it from her fingers and threw it against the wall.

“You are in her stories,” she concluded, passing her fingers over the boot marks on my ribs. “You were part of her life, so you were part of her words. What I am remembering is the apothecary from maybe two years ago? You recall it?”

I recall all of them. But I’d no notion what she was talking about.

“In that installment of
Light and Shade
, there is an apothecary who makes for people medicine. Very popular. They talk to him while he blends their tonics, measures their pills. They tell him all about their lives, then take home the powders and syrups. They feel better. A mistake one day happens, a woman gives her baby the wrong tonic and the baby dies. She blames the apothecary. Innocent he is, but the people are sad for the mother and so they believe. He is thrown in jail and a new apothecary takes his place. The people go to this new man for their drugs, but they do not feel better. They still feel ill. Bad humors. They felt better before not because of the medicine, but because the first apothecary helped them feel less alone. That was you.”

Shifting forward, I settled myself above her. Elena blinked calmly up at me. There’s a little scar on my shoulder from where I caught myself on a nail in the stable as a boy, a scar I don’t mind thinking of because my mother patched me up again. She pressed it experimentally with her forefinger and I liked the chalky mark still more.

“That apothecary was an old Russian man,” I pointed out.

She shrugged.

“He was you anyway,” she told me. “You are now old Russian man, with great yellow-stained beard.”

What must have been a peculiar smile crept over my face. I didn’t believe that matters were quite so simple as my landlady had made them out to be. Just because I often feel like an unwilling confessor doesn’t mean that Mercy ever noticed. I spent my days collecting her smallest details, and not the other way around. Still. If Elena was right, even partially right . . . then maybe I hadn’t been such a tangential shadow after all.

“When you are looking like that, sad and smiling at once, you should be kissing me,” Elena suggested.

She’s very clever, Mrs. Elena Boehm. So I kissed her while the sun was rising. And for a blessedly long string of minutes, everything else went away.

•   •   •

Though the following
day
proved bright and razor sharp, what snow remained had been largely trampled by pedestrians and street pigs, and the cries of the Rockaway sand vendors had been replaced with grocers hawking sweet Carolina potatoes shipped up from the South. I haggled my way into buying a bushel of them for seventy-five cents and left the creamy yellow knobs in Mrs. Boehm’s larder, knowing she’d find them there. Afterward I fixed the front step, noting with absent pleasure that an emerald-green crocus blade was keeking out from a crevice in the none too regular sidewalk. Then I sat at my desk and I wrote a letter. A lot of thoughts yet plagued my head, and I needed to tell Mercy Underhill about them.

The problem, as I saw it, was that I’d never been able to speak to her in plain English. Before, I’d been terrified of upsetting the delicacy of our equilibrium, and after . . . there simply wasn’t time. But I was through with standing in the front row with the groundlings, the bearer of a permanent free ticket to watch myself act like a fool.

So I decided to tell her the truth.

When I was through writing, I traveled back to Castle Garden.

The shoreline was whipped by a bright March wind that late afternoon, reddening the noses of passersby and stealing hats from careless dandies. The carpeting was gone, but the decorative boughs remained. They’d been buffeted by salt air and looked about as festive as sunburned shipwreck survivors. I crossed the bridge and sat on the same bench I’d shared with Jim, staring out at the great silver monster of a river. It roiled and frothed in the wind, depths churning with secrets. I thought of the night I’d met Lucy Adams, when so many had lost their lives in the waters I find grimly beautiful. I could have sat there for hours, letting the salt blast me clean.

But I’d a letter to send. I pulled it out.

I read back over it as the pedestrians milled about me, long woolen cloaks dragging through cigar ash and spent vestas, shoes skirting the grey pools of melting snow.

Dear Mercy,

That I’ve been in love with you for a very long while won’t surprise you much. But I’ve learned things since you left, new things. If words can be maps, as you said they can, then my life lately is an enormous geography, and one hard to capture in letters. I can’t help but suspect you’re keener at this than I am. I’ll do my best.

The notion of protecting you used to occupy so much of my brain that I never realized how often you were protecting me. You may not remember, or you may have done the same for everyone, but I could scarce spend three minutes in a dark mood in your company before you’d passed your latest poem to me for frank evaluation or demanded I read with you a scene from
The Tempest.
I confess I can see better from a distance what your company meant to me. And I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life that you were there.