Seven for a Secret (6 page)

“What’s your name?” Mr. Piest inquired. “I am Jakob Piest, and this is Timothy Wilde.”

The child’s face fell. He gave a pained blink, staring at a moldy wheel spoke, before shoving both hands hard into his pockets.

I’d thought him an orphan. There’s an independence about us, and a gravity, that’s unmistakable. But at least Val and I had been old enough to own our names, no matter that we’d nothing else. Old enough to remember the family who’d named us, as well. A name can make a man. I couldn’t imagine being robbed of anything more personal.

“Surely they must call you something, where you live now,” I reasoned. “What does your sweepmaster call you?”

A shudder passed through him. It left the boy wearing a grimace as if he’d like nothing better than to peel himself out of his own skin.

“Never mind,” I said, before his expression could bring any more of an ache to my ribs. “What sort of name would you like?”

His eyelashes fluttered, soot-dusted and feathery. The line of his mouth grew a shade less taut.

“Capital idea, the very thing!” Mr. Piest agreed.

“Sweepmaster be damned. It’ll belong to you. What’s the bulliest name you can think of?”

The boy took his time about it. Solemn as gravestones, lips pressed into a line. Finally, face all curiosity, he pointed at the shepherdess I held.

“The man who painted this? His name was Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin,” I answered.

The kinchin’s eyes closed as he rolled the sound of it to and fro in his mind. Meanwhile, a wild woodland happiness swept through me. A pleasure like sharp country wind and blown-open winter skies. I’ll never forget the look I shared with Mr. Piest a moment later. Warm as a wordlessly shared flask. And all thanks to a chimney sweep.

“Do you like the name Jean?” I questioned.

From the smile that transformed his face, like a pure crescent moon when the clouds have been swept away, I believe that he most assuredly did.

•   •   •

“To the Millingtons,”
Mr. Piest proposed in my office, raising his cup of gin, “and the ways of old Gotham. In particular, to fat rewards and those who offer them!”

We’d all quit the woods as plump snowflakes began to whirl around us in the late afternoon. Crossing Third Avenue in the accepted semi-suicidal fashion, dodging hacks and gleefully reckless vans, I’d watched the crystals settling, and thought about names and their absolute importance to their owners, and felt pretty near to delighted. We celebrated Jean-Baptiste’s self-christening by buying him the thickest bowl of oxtail stew I have ever seen summarily destroyed and then lingered over the occasion, sluggish with warmth and with firelight.

I’d have done better by him than a hot meal if I could. Children are remarkable creatures, hurtling through savage landscapes of sudden laughter and sharp heartbreaks. It gnaws me bloody to see the city stretch them into leaner, taller, grimmer animals altogether. And there was an innocence to Jean-Baptiste, that wide joy at tiny blessings, I’d have liked to see preserved longer than the next fortnight or so. But taking it upon myself to relocate each and every destitute kinchin I come across would be akin to kneeling at the shoreline and forcing the Hudson back with my fingertips and my will, and at least this one was employed. Housed with his fellow sweeps, presumably, if neither fed nor loved. And thus I shook his hand outside the low saloon, and my fellow copper star flipped him a shilling, and we parted ways.

Piest and I returned to the servants’ door and handed the painting over to Turley. He vanished, returning with a drawstring purse.

“Didn’t you know there was a reward?” he’d asked in response to my complete incomprehension.

So Piest and I split fifty dollars, bestowed for our facility at
finding things
, and he immediately bought the oddest-tasting Dutch gin conceivable. It warmed the throat in a friendly fashion, tasting of dark bread rather than pine.

My Tombs cave had never looked brighter, as the wind howled beyond the great walls like a wolf baying madly at the heavens. I was rich enough to buy thirty or so used books, pay Mrs. Boehm for the carpet I’d borrowed, and set some aside. I was intoxicated with competence at my profession. Mercy Underhill was in London, which meant Mercy was presumably contented. And it was snowing, so I wasn’t unduly worried that my brother’s engine company might be fighting the raging house fire that would finally leave me the only Wilde in New York.

That is to say, I was about as happy as I ever am. Happiness not being any great knack of mine.

“To the Millingtons.” I touched Piest’s cup with mine. “To not having suffered the honor of seeing them again.”

“Oh, come,” he chuckled. “We must view the Millingtons in light of their generosity with rewards and the unlikelihood that they will ever pose us any . . . unfortunate questions.”

“I’m being an ass,” I agreed. “To Jean-Baptiste and the artistic soul.”

“Hear, hear!” My friend sloshed more gin into our cups.

“To that shepherdess,” I added. “Whoever she was. My God.”

Cackling in a nicely filthy fashion, Mr. Piest drained his spirits.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

“Yes!” he cried. “Yes, Mr. Wilde! But I so seldom work with watchmen—police, I beg your pardon, old habits—who can differentiate between their arses and their eyelashes. It’s exhilarating. The last time I—”

My door burst open.

The woman standing before us was uncannily striking. She’d richly golden skin that, when paired with grey-green eyes and hair the color of imported chocolate, would arrest the attention of male passersby and female alike. Universally.

“I need a policeman,” she said.

She didn’t. She needed a miracle.

We soon had her seated, with a cup in her unsteady hand. Her distress was a horror you could taste, thick and sluggish as a slow death.

When I asked her what had been stolen, her answer was
My family.
That statement hung gruesomely in the air for several seconds.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“My sister and my son,” she gasped. “Delia and Jonas. They’re gone. Delia stays with me when my husband is away, he travels for his business, and she—she was watching my—”

The tin cup fell to the floor with a light clatter as she covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders trembled in concert with her breathing, ripples over the crests of shallow waves.

“Have you searched—” Mr. Piest began.

“I need
you,
Mr. Wilde,” she said, looking up at me fiercely.

My showing at comprehension was already landing at about nil, but I’ll admit that staggered me.

“Why do you say so?”

“I know who you are and I know what you’ve done. You must help me.”

My lips parted to say
Of course I will
. But they were a fair distance from my cartwheeling brain. I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about.

“They steal people.” Tears filled her eyes, a tincture of misery and rage. “We’re wasting time.”

“But how—”

“I ought to have been at home by then. They’d have stolen me too, and you’d never have heard a word of this. When I did arrive, my cook, Meg, was bound and gagged on the floor of the pantry and my family was gone. They don’t want Meg, she’s lame in one foot, not worth their trouble. I asked a policeman in the front hall where Timothy Wilde was, and he sent me here.”

“And I’m glad you did, but—”

“You saved Julius Carpenter.” She launched herself from the chair, grasping both my lapels.

Then I managed to grasp two things I hadn’t previously.

My friend Julius Carpenter, the quietly brilliant colored oysterman I’d worked with when I was a relatively untroubled bartender, landed in trouble last summer. A pack of starved Irish caught the notion that burning him at the stake would be rare sport. I’d disagreed and been near roasted over it. Not that I’d minded, seeing as Julius had saved me from the fire downtown by sending my brother to dig me out of the smoldering rubble. If we were counting notches, Julius and I stood dead even. So there was half the mystery solved.

The other half of the mystery ought to have been obvious. If I’d been looking as closely as I like to think I do, anyhow.

Lucy Adams, with her honey skin and green-flecked eyes and gorgeous tangle of brown hair, might have claimed Italian parentage. She might instead have been of Spanish descent, though her voice proved a northern American birthplace. And then again, she might have been the exotic blending of a Welsh mother and a Greek father, or a Sicilian and a Swede. But she was none of those combinations. The reason I’d been so damnably slow to comprehend her spine-melting panic was that
I
didn’t much care one way or another
what
she was.

But Lucy Adams did. She cared a great deal. Because Lucy Adams was black.

Not above a quarter, likely less. I’d have guessed at an eighth. A fraction black is still black, though. Legally speaking.

Then I grasped why she wanted my help and none other
.
My fellow copper stars are half wholesale decent folk and half plain villains, granted. But the slave-catching industry—which was the subject we’d been discussing all that while—isn’t just
legal
.

It’s law
enforcement
.

I pulled her hands off my coat, but only so I could have a grip on them. “You’re all free New York citizens, I take it.”

“We hailed from Albany originally. My grandparents bought their freedom some sixty years ago. Slave agents care nothing for that, when the chance for profit is high enough. Delia and Jonas would be worth—”

“How long have they been missing?”

“Two hours by now.”

“And how old is your son?”

“Seven,” she said, nearly choking on the word.

“Wherever he is, he’s with your sister, and we’ll soon find them. Mr. Piest, I can’t ask you to join us, but—”

“If I report to the chief regarding our success today, I ought to be free if it’s to assist you,” Mr. Piest returned, shoving our cups in my tiny desk drawer.

“I’d be grateful. Where are we going, Mrs. Adams?”

“To see the Committee. My house, Eighty-four West Broadway between Chambers and Warren. You must knock exactly six times, sir, in sets of two.”

With a small salute, Mr. Piest scudded away. Leaving me to dazed wonderment over who the devil
the Committee
was and what temperature of hot water I’d just landed in. Mrs. Adams took my arm, and we plunged through the door after him. We hurried through stone corridors out of the massive combined prison, courthouse, and ward headquarters, I making every effort to ensure my new acquaintance didn’t plunge headlong down the stairs wearing sopping dress boots.

Then something peculiar happened.

At the mouth of the exit hall, a burly redheaded copper star by the name of Sean Mulqueen peered after us, unmoving. Eyes narrowed in nail-sharp Irish scrutiny. He was flanked, as I’d often before seen him, by a hulking black Irish and by a native New Englander with an eerily rosy, youthful face, both of them Ward Six roundsmen. I nodded to Mulqueen, as I knew him slightly. Whenever we’d spoken, he’d struck me as forceful-minded beneath the layers of gristly muscle.

“Friend of yours, Mr. Wilde?” he surmised.

“Crime victim.”

“Oh, then ye had fain be getting on. Best o’ luck,” he added, voice quite inscrutable.

“Good night,” I called back as we quit the granite fortress and found ourselves smothered in darkness.

Mrs. Adams’s grip tightened as we negotiated the eight slick steps down to the cobbled road. Two gaslights shone nearby, but the rest had blown out due to cracks in the lamps. We hurried south along West Broadway. The snow tumbling beneath what light remained looked faerie-touched, sinister. Shards of airborne glass keen to slice a person in ribbons.

“Were you anxious over harassment from slave catchers?” I questioned over the din of the gale. “Had they threatened you?”

“No. They needn’t have. I’ve been terrified for years that this moment would come one day.”

“Why so?”

“That’s easy enough to answer, Mr. Wilde.” She pulled her fur tighter around her regal neck. “I’ve been kidnapped before, after all.”

four

I felt of my pockets, so far as the fetters would allow—far enough, indeed, to ascertain that I had not only been robbed of liberty, but that my money and free papers were also gone! Then did the idea begin to break upon my mind, at first dim and confused, that I had been kidnapped. But that I thought was incredible. There must have been some misapprehension—some unfortunate mistake. It could not be that a free citizen of New-York, who had wronged no man, nor violated any law, be dealt with thus inhumanly.

—SOLOMON NORTHUP,
TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE
, 1853

T
o the south
of our city
exists a land as unlike ours as it is possible to imagine. A country of lush fields, soft-voiced belles, easy graciousness, and mist-shrouded nights that whisper like the heat of a lover’s breath against your neck. There are moss-draped trees there, I hear tell, and slow winds, and blue skies. And in that land flourishes a trade that festers like an open cancer in our national skin.

We don’t think about that land very often. Or most of us don’t, anyhow. It might as well be a separate nation.

I’ve met a great many Southerners here. Poured neat bourbons for them, added mint to their water in the summertime, talked with them of books and of horses and of trade. Some of them are kindly and genteel folk who would serve up a feast to any flea-ridden midnight stranger who knocked at their door and then ask the chap to stay over for the week. Some are fiery scoundrels who’d as soon duel you as shake your hand. Exactly the same as New Yorkers, therefore—pretty evenly divided between knights and knaves.

With one cardinal difference.

In the North, blacks are a free but steadily trod-upon race. And in the South, they are livestock. Cattle, but a universe of suffering worse than cattle: cattle that can think. Our small but vocal set of abolitionists are at pains daily to point this out, and they get putrid tomatoes and jagged rocks lobbed at them for their trouble.

The rest of us simply don’t want to dwell on it. We’re cowards of the human imagination. Soft as fresh cheese. We don’t want to think about breeding people as if they were racehorses. We don’t want to think about kinchin pried from their mothers and traded for farm equipment. We’ve no desire to think about branding fellow humans, nor of laboring in the Louisiana sun in an endless daily cycle, nor of being flogged to death if the party objects too loud or too often to this scheme, nor of escapees being torn apart by dogs. So the general population doesn’t think much about it. And grows hotly annoyed when forced to pry open an eye and stare slavery in the face.

That would be one reason we loathe slave catchers.

New Yorkers enjoy being told what to do about as much as we enjoy a plummeting stock market. And thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, we’re required to hand runaways over to Southern slave agents as if we’re returning a spooked thoroughbred. In 1840, a shockingly moral Albany law granted alleged fugitives in New York State the right to a jury trial. And in 1842,
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
nationally revoked the right of any colored fugitive to a jury trial. Thus, in 1846, up is down and straight is crooked and black is blacker than black has ever been. Right and wrong are left suffocating, beached fish in a barren legislative no-man’s-land.

It’s all so illogical that every man does pretty much as he pleases. And that was my plan, as Lucy Adams rapped carefully in three sets of two upon her lightly snowbanked front door before turning her key in the lock.

To do as I pleased.

Damask curtains masked the windows in her parlor. The gas burned low. Barely a yellow flicker to mark the furnishings or the floral carpet beneath my feet. The fire in the grate had been stoked up, though, sending restless shadows dancing across the comfortable chamber. A profound sense of emptiness, of something
missing,
permeated the room. I’d have thought I’d intruded upon a wake, but wakes are considerably noisier.

Three men rose to greet us. All of them black and one of them known to me.

“You’ve found him, then,” my friend Julius Carpenter said to Mrs. Adams, shaking my hand. “How are you, Timothy?”

I smiled despite the gravity of the setting. When we’d worked together at Nick’s Oyster Cellar in Stone Street, which seemed millennia ago, Julius shelled upward of a thousand gleaming oysters a night. He’s quick and contemplative, with a calm, round face and deep-set eyes under inquisitive brows. My friend wore the clean but loose-fitting clothing of a carpenter after work hours, and he’d fragrant tea leaves braided into the rows of his hair. If it was a shock to see him, at least it was a pleasurable one. We’d worked together for so long, I think the pair of us could still serve a hundred stock jobbers blindfolded and never break a sweat. We’re sympathetic that way. In tune.

“Julius, what in hell are you doing here?” I gripped him by the arm. “And what have you been doing with my reputation?”

“Nothing it didn’t deserve, I calculate. Everyone, this is Timothy Wilde, Ward Six copper star. Meet the Reverend Richard Brown and George Higgins, of the New York Committee of Vigilance. And the third member would be me.”

City dwellers are inordinately fond of committees. Committees for temperance and against it, organizations supporting everything from the expulsion of the Irish to all-vegetable diets to secret fraternities. But I’d never heard of this one. “You’re part of a club?” I asked.

“No, a cause. We do what we can to keep free blacks alive and well and in the North, where they belong,” Julius explained. “People of color run the risk of capture every time they step outside. We do what we can to reduce the danger. It’s all run on a volunteer system, and any donations go toward keeping the streets safe. Mainly organizing patrols and night watches in colored neighborhoods, providing legal advice to blacks who find themselves in hot water with slave agents, that sort of thing. We try to take care of our own.”

“You’re an unofficial watchman?”

I shouldn’t have marveled, for Julius is square as they come, but the thought took a moment to settle. Smiling gravely, he tapped his forefinger against his chin, a wonderfully familiar little gesture he employs whenever I am surprised for no good reason.

“But for how long?”

“Nigh about three years by this time, I’d figure.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Julius shrugged one shoulder. “I didn’t want it getting around. You remember Nick—fair enough as bosses go and always paid us on time, but he liked me better the less he saw of me.” My old friend brushed his palms down his shirtfront. “Sit down, everyone. There isn’t much in the way of time.”

We seated ourselves—Julius and I in a set of matched armchairs with our backs to the fire, and Mrs. Adams, Reverend Brown, and Mr. Higgins spanning the settee. Richard Brown was thin and scholarly, with the bulge of a miniature book straining his waistcoat pocket, though I didn’t need the tiny Bible or Julius’s introduction to set him down as a minister from eighty yards. His face was worried but strangely peaceful—as if he’d accepted that the outcomes of his trials were in hands other than his.

George Higgins was much more intriguing a fellow. Taller and thicker built, with a kingly jaw and a very dark, almost blue-black complexion. He wore a carefully trimmed beard, a silver watch chain, and a green silk cravat, though his hand was calloused where it dangled from one crossed knee. The calluses could have meant anything—local blacks tend to average three jobs at minimum. But this Mr. Higgins was wealthy. Had the watch chain possibly been an inheritance, I wouldn’t have leapt to such a conclusion, but it was fashionably long and slender. Anyhow, silk cravats are capable of surviving a single New York month at best, and his gleamed sumptuously at me. He’d widely spaced, clear brown eyes with something flintlike gleaming at the back of them. They scraped over me as if uncertain what lay beneath my skin.

He was anxious, and not from abstraction or gallantry. He was anxious personally
.
I wondered for whom.

“Post me,” I requested. “Mrs. Adams told us that her sister and son have been kidnapped for more than two hours. As reported by her cook, Meg, who was forcibly tied and left within the house.”

“Meg went home just now, shaken up and with a stiff leg but otherwise fine,” Julius answered. “Seems that two men, one with a Colt pistol, barged into the house after she answered a knock at the door. Tied her down and tossed her in the pantry. She heard one or two screams, then nothing.”

“Can she identify the assailants?”

“Oh, we know who they were well enough.”

“I mean, could she peg them in court as kidnappers of New York citizens?”

If I’d stood up and blown a shrill whistle blast, the others couldn’t have looked more dumbfounded. The expression melted into anguish on Mrs. Adams’s face, rancid disgust—quickly mastered—on Mr. Higgins’s, and simple disbelief on Julius Carpenter’s.

“Your friend the copper star is a real prize, Julius,” George Higgins drawled.

“How would he know, after all?” Julius leaned forward with his fingertips touching. “Timothy, how well Meg saw them doesn’t matter. Black testimony isn’t admissible at fugitive slave trials. Only a white can officially identify a black in court. As for a black identifying a white kidnapper—I’ve never even heard it tried.”

My jaw dropped for long enough to say, “But that’s ludicrous.”

“Yes, that’s rather the point, isn’t it?” Mr. Higgins asked acidly. “Mr. Wilde, we’re grown men and not afraid of facing down these vermin, nor fearful of a fight if it comes to that. But we want this rescue to come to some good, you see. We don’t need your help doing what’s right. We’ve done that before, a score of times. We need your help doing what’s legal, now there are copper stars.”

A score of times
.

“You’ve rescued upward of twenty people?” I asked, startled.

“We’ve begun to, though not all were saved in the end,” Reverend Brown confessed. “Sometimes we succeeded, but as for the rest . . . their court cases fell through. The poor souls are in Georgia or Alabama by now, may God grant them strength.”

I passed my fingers through the arch of my hairline, skimming normal skin and skin resembling badly cured alligator hide. This assembly was clearly better than capable of minding their own affairs. If the fact they’d no legal way of doing so made me ill, it must have sent a brushfire burn through their guts when they looked at a pint-sized white star police.

Six raps spaced into pairs reverberated from the foyer, and Mr. Higgins pushed to his feet with a worried glare.

“It’s my colleague, but let me be sure,” I said.

When I threw the door open, it was indeed Piest, half-frostbitten and his squashed face red as a boiled lobster. He stamped his boots and followed me into the parlor without a word wasted.

“This is Jakob Piest, as good a copper star as you’ll find,” I said, making the necessary introductions. “Now. Obviously, I’m at sea here. Who’s responsible, and what have you done in the past to counter them?”

Reverend Brown put his elbow on the arm of the settee, a finger tensed before his lips. “Their names are Seixas Varker and Long Luke. Slave catchers, they would tell you. We would say otherwise.”

“They’re snakes,” Mr. Higgins snapped. “And we’re wasting valuable time.”

Mrs. Adams shuddered.

“Well, whatever their species, their names are Seixas Varker and Long Luke Coles, and I believe they hail from Mississippi,” Julius put in smoothly.

“Where would they have taken their captives?” Mr. Piest leaned with one shoulder against the doorway. “And what can we do about it?”

“We’ve one great cause for hope tonight.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The storm,” Mrs. Adams whispered, touching the curtain.

Beyond the pane, snow poured like grains through an hourglass, wind whipping drifts into sinuous eddies that broke in white-crested waves. It was terrible out there. And getting worse. Already, ships had dashed themselves to pieces along our coastline, and sailors with talismans clenched in their fists searched the horizon in vain for a lighthouse, a harbormaster, a haven, a crest of rock. To no avail. February 14 of 1846 was a cruel night. One that would be long mourned. But even if I didn’t yet know of the massacre the Hudson had wrought, I took their meaning plain.