Seven for a Secret (9 page)

“
Attempt
, you said?” Valentine asked me darkly. I nodded. “That’s flash, then. Because frankly, this talking shit sack rubs me a bit wrongways, and if it wasn’t
attempt
—”

“You subject me to the basest of slanders!” Varker squealed. “I—a man has to check, doesn’t he, see that he’s collared the right—”

“I have an idea.” My brother set the toe of his boot on Varker’s chair seat between the Southerner’s ample thighs. “Give the useless bit of meat between your teeth a holiday before I feed it to the nearest stray pig along with the useless bit of meat between your legs. How does that suit you? Because it suits me right down to the ground.”

Silence gathered around us. Thick and hostile as the snow without. Long Luke subsided into a furious quiet like a kettle just turned off, while Varker directed his eyes to the floor.

About ten seconds later, the Committee men appeared with the stony-eyed captives. Jonas in my coat, and Delia in George Higgins’s far superior one. She’d lifted her nephew into her arms. The five traveled around the desk, giving the slave catchers a wide berth but paying them not a single dram of attention otherwise. It was admirably done.

Only Delia looked back at Varker. But that glance seared the air like a lightning bolt. I found myself shocked the expression hadn’t blasted a hole square through his skull.

“Right, then,” I said to the slave agents. “The pair of you are under ar—”

“Finish that sentence and I will rearrange your teeth,” Val growled. “They’ll say they misidentified their captives by accident and be out of the Tombs in jig time, and the Party will have our bollocks.”

“Or worse,” the Reverend said quietly, “they’ll put up a fight for them and these folk will starve in a Tombs cell until they’re subjected to an identity trial.”

“She’s the victim of assault,” I spluttered, “and—”

“Attempted assault,” Val corrected me. “Get that to stick in court, why don’t you.”

Buzzing with outrage, I slowly realized, was accomplishing nothing. And when I looked to Higgins standing next to Delia, expecting to find him an ally, he remained silent. Only glared back with the sort of long-suppressed fury that could wear a fellow’s bones down to silt. Forcibly calming myself once more, I turned away.

“It’s your decision. Are we through here?” I asked Julius.

“We’re through,” he agreed.

“Bully. Tim, return the maggot’s pistol,” Val ordered. That made not an ounce of sense to me. When I didn’t oblige quick enough, he added, “It’s
stealing.
Hell if I care, but I know you do. Toss it in the road if you like.”

My brother was right, so I walked to the entryway and opened the door, throwing the Colt into the snow. A chill like the hand of sudden death swept into the room. Julius led Delia and Jonas out, followed by Higgins and Brown. We copper stars filed more slowly toward the exit, eyes locked on Long Luke and Varker.

“I’d get that hand looked at if I were you,” Valentine suggested as he motioned me and Piest outside, standing in the threshold with his fingers on the knob. “I’d also forget we paid you a visit. Evening, all.”

The breath of relief I sucked in when we dove into snowdrifts once more burned my throat. But it felt free, fierce, downright glorious. No matter that the cold sliced so deep into my bones as to be painful. Our hacksman had long since saved himself and his horse, so we hastened up Walnut Street toward Grand, where if we were blessed by sublime luck, another desperate cabman might be trying to snatch the last of the fares before the sleighs had been turned out. We hadn’t gone a block before I heard a very familiar sound from behind me.

“Why are you laughing
now
?” I demanded of my brother.

“You were going to steal that sick son of a bitch’s revolver.” When I glanced back at him, he was shaking with mirth and wincing as if he’d been shot.

“I was not,” I retorted. My heart wasn’t in it, though. He’d just thrown me his scarf and then yanked his fur collar up around his ears.

“You were,” he gasped. “What we just did is bollocks-out illegal, and
then
, young Tim, you wanted to leg it with a bit of fast swag. I knew you had it in you.”

“Had what, Captain?” Mr. Piest asked, beginning to chuckle.

“A taste for mayhem, buried deep down. Eh, Timothy?”

Mr. Piest gave a muffled snort.

“Were you keener to pawn it or keep it? You, my Tim, are one shady palmer of illicit goods,” Val concluded with wicked delight.

“It isn’t funny.” I wrapped the extra scarf round my neck, grinning reluctantly.

“No,” Valentine agreed. And then he laughed all the harder.

six

Had New-York, been but free from coloured people, how peaceful would she be! what a saving to her people in expense of a police! Had Philadelphia—ditto! But New-York, not being so overstocked as Charleston and New Orleans, leaves some difference to her credit. Still she is quite lamentably stocked, and hence her violent reputation throughout our Union.

—JOHN JACOBUS FLOURNOY,
AN ESSAY ON THE ORIGINS, HABITS, &C. OF THE AFRICAN RACE: INCIDENTAL TO THE PROPRIETY OF HAVING NOTHING TO DO WITH NEGROES,
1835

A
t the Ward
Eight station house,
I knocked, pushed open the door to Val’s office, and sent Delia and Jonas inside. Trembling and wet but undisputedly free. Lucy Adams released a cry without any sound to it. As her family flew toward her, a smile broke over her face that could have lit the Astor House for a year.

The knot just at the base of my own throat went slack far too quickly, unspooling at a reckless speed. After handing over the station house’s medical kit for Delia’s wrists, I shut the door behind me and slumped against it.

Mercy,
I thought,
would have been proud of that night’s work.
I pictured her as she’d looked when gliding into rank rookeries and cellar hells. Madly fearless and half-smiling, passing out bread and salt and soap with no regard for the skin shade of the recipient in question. Poor and well-off alike thought her as deranged as she was generous, and she’d terrified me on behalf of her own health. And I’d adored her for it.

Sucking in a breath, I headed back down the hall.

“I owe you one,” I said to Valentine, who’d pulled up his tall chair behind the front counter. Setting my hat on the wood, I rubbed at my ruined temple. Of course the instant I’d stopped tensing my right eye in mute worry, half my head throbbed in dull revenge.

My brother and I were alone by that time. En route to Grand Street, Mr. Piest had peeled off in the direction of his own night circuit—stalwart as ever, though bleary about the eye. The three Committee men had recognized quicker than I’d done that no cab would take all of us and few enough would take the three of them in any case. To my stifled but cinderlike embarrassment. So they’d made the gentlemanly offer of parting ways, after I’d vowed to see the family to a temporary haven in the absence of Charles Adams. And thus the two living New York Wildes—one jelly-spined in relief and the other jelly-spined for self-inflicted reasons—had whisked Delia and Jonas away in an indecently bribed hansom. Paid for by my far flusher older brother. That was irritating. As is everything else Val does.

“As if I did that for
you
.” Val smirked, resting his elbows on the counter. “If a riper moll exists than that Mrs. Adams, I will eat an unsalted shoe.”

“She’s married,” I said with a scowl.

“Hasn’t troubled me before now. Oh, for God’s sake, dry up, I’m not going fishing in that lake.”

“Thank you. Wait,” I added. “Do you usually—not that I’d mind.”

“Mind?”

I never had minded, had been raised—so far as I’d been raised at all, which was a piss-poor joke—not to care in the smallest. About amalgamation, that is. Blacks and whites exchanging intimacies. Val and I hadn’t money enough to be snobbish toward any living beings save lice when I was a boy, and the Underhill patriarch who took us under his wing was a radical Protestant zealot. Anti-amalgamation sentiments are for people with embroidered cushions and lace antimacassars, or else the sort of low clods who insist Africans are a type of monkey.

“If she wasn’t married,” I explained, “I’d not care. If you—”

“Leave off your face before you make it even more of a smashed pudding.” Val slapped my hand away deftly.

“Don’t talk about my face.”

“Don’t tug it like a pervert with a gratis spy hole, then.”

“Sod off. But—I mean to say, do you?” I inquired none too clearly.

“Sleep with black women?” Val by now looked entirely baffled. “Last time was two or three months back, so far as I can recall. Why?”

And there we were. The only surprising thing about the conversation was that I’d bothered asking. Valentine can’t be arsed over the gender of his bed partners, as I’d learned to my shock the previous August. So the race could hardly give him pause. I considered adding amalgamation to Val’s list of scandalous acts and found I couldn’t be bothered. Narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion, and sodomy had all alarmed me at one point or another—amalgamation was a trip to the American Art-Union to survey the placider landscapes.

I’m supposed to mind, though. I’m supposed to mind, according to some, a very great deal.

In 1834, we hosted one of the most enthusiastic riots Manhattan has ever witnessed. As we’ve quite a collection, that’s saying something. One of our leading white abolitionists invited a black clergyman to church one gorgeous spring morning when the great blue bowl of the sky was cupped tenderly over our holy Sunday goings-on. And not only to hear the sermon, but to sit in the abolitionist’s very own pew. When the white congregants made to shuffle their guest into a colored pew, their minister made the mistake of protesting that Christ Himself must have been of a Syrian complexion.

The implication that Jesus our Lord might have been anything other than pale as a dogwood flower set off such a chaos of violence, arson, and general savagery that we got to the point where handbills with planned routes for havoc were distributed in public marketplaces. No police, of course, so the New York First Division cavalry finally quashed the uproar. And on every sneering rioter’s lips was the word
amalgamation
. I was sixteen years old, Valentine twenty-two, and I can still hear their voices—swollen thick with tar fumes and whiskey and spite.

Let the amalgamators have their way and no place will be safe for our women, not even our churches—

Blondes are particular susceptible, they say, it’s the very blackness as does it, how opposite they are, a blonde girl will turn fascinated and then—

Did you know that their lady parts can rip it right off a man, though if you ask me any amalgamator who suffered that would get what’s coming to—

It’s mainly Irish who’d sink so low, and just think of the brutes they’ll be breeding, between colored brains and Irish character I can’t bear to—

“Anyhow, it isn’t my appetites that need palavering over,” Valentine declared with a bruising finger jab at my chest. “You, young Tim, need a ladybird.”

I wrenched my brain dizzily onto this new topic.

“Oh, God. We aren’t discussing this,” I protested in genuine alarm.

“What sort do you hanker after? I know plenty of pretty lunans would leap at the—”

“No. Please, no.”

“If you get any more stiff-necked, your spine will snap like a wishbone. We’re finding you a moll. What about that landlady of yours, Mrs. Boehm? Widows, eh?”

“Leave my landlady out of whatever this is.”

“But you’ll admit she’s a charmer, if you like the bony sort of bloss. God, don’t you ever wonder what that mouth would look like—”

“Stop talking.”

“Mercy Underhill isn’t in London
waiting for you
.” Val was quiet but certain, as if reading tides from an almanac. “She’s just living. As she’s always done.”

“Fuck ether,” I said with deadly sincerity. “The morphine I can manage, but—”

“Or here’s a suggestion—why don’t you wait until your nuts shrivel off and then mail them to Mercy by transatlantic post as a remembrance? Because that’s more or less what you’re doing now.”

“That isn’t the way it is.”

“And I say you’re wrong, and you’d better change the way it is, my Tim, or it’s a sorry pass you’ll come to.”

As far as I can tell, I didn’t want to throttle him just then because he was obnoxious, or sailing on a sea of pleasurable poisons, or even because he was my brother. I wanted to throttle him because I suspected he was right.

Part of the problem was that I couldn’t picture a girl wanting someone so scarred up that his only waking thought other than
Mercy Underhill
was
police work.
And my stomach flopped like a fish every time I imagined trying my luck with an actual girl and finding out I was right. But as for the other part of it . . .

The space Mercy’s absence created in me was a voracious hole. Not a neutral erasure, but a gleaming black bonfire. Had I taken a keek in my chest, I’d have seen bluish flames skittering along ribbons of ebony pitch. The sensation was pretty specific. It wasn’t just about my libido, on my life it wasn’t—she’d been my closest friend. I missed Mercy as if she were a phantom limb. So rather than dousing the dark inferno, I kept shoveling fuel like an engineman. Terrified by the nullity that would be left inside me if ever I lost it. Trivia fed the fire—that Mercy had once crossed this street with me, that she was obsessed with first snowfalls, that she stared down torch-wielding brutes as if they were bowling pins, that she’d always passed me any pieces of parsnip from her plate with a wry smile of distaste.

So possibly, I’d have been better off scouting out a cure. It’s a ridiculous affliction, being unable to glimpse a waterfront without calculating the number of waves between myself and her. Ridiculous, and impractical. New York is an
island
. But I was so far advanced a case that the usual sciences seemed not to apply.

“Gentlemen, it would be a miracle if I could express my thanks to you,” a velvety voice announced.

Mrs. Adams stood before us with her kin. Viewing Lucy and Delia next to each other, I suddenly knew just what their mother looked like—tall and graceful, with generous lips and cheekbones like the gentle sweep of a bough in an apple orchard. Lucy’s pale eyes and Delia’s blithe freckles were the only striking differences between them. Mrs. Adams stood about two inches taller than her sister, clutching at Delia’s elbow as if her sibling might be whisked away again.

The kinchin was barely visible in his mother’s skirts. But the fraction in view looked a fine boy. Clever hands, thin frame. Quick, curious brows under a mop of dark curls. Jonas was very like his mother, though with a wider-set mouth and perfectly round blue eyes.

“No thanks necessary,” I assured her. “I wish I could take you home, but you heard Julius and the other Committee men. It’s not safe before your husband returns. We need to find you temporary lodgings. And I need your statements, even if they’re to be unofficial—if Varker and Coles are kidnapping free blacks on a regular basis, I have to spread word at the Tombs. Apologies for making a wretched night even longer.”

Jonas—or the pair of eyes afloat in a sea of cobalt velvet—commenced studying me over. As any practical person will do when confronted with the natives of a hostile foreign land.

“Are we really meant to find a hotel in this weather?” Delia asked worriedly.

“I can escort you,” I offered.

“That’s a ripe peach of an idea,” Valentine sniffed. “Why don’t you prance up and down the streets in a blizzard with three people who’ve no luggage—and two of them no winter coats? You’ll find a proper hotel in seconds.”

“They can’t go home until Mr. Adams returns, not with that pair of mongrels loose.”

My brother shrugged in agreement. I didn’t add a principle that I was only just beginning to grasp based on my conversation with the Committee men:
and anyway, the word of two colored women isn’t worth a straw against the word of two white men.
If only a white could identify a black in a court of law, I wanted the family as far away from the courthouse as possible. Varker and Coles, I theorized, could be dealt with in due course. Personally.

“We’ll go to church, Lucy,” Delia suggested, fingers tracing her sister’s hand. “I’m sure they’ll let us heat one of the choir rooms.”

“Our church will be locked this time of night,” Mrs. Adams answered doubtfully.

“But it’s only ten blocks, and it’s true, we’ve no coats, and—”

“Right,” Valentine declared in what I think of as his
political
voice. It’s the tenor he uses to convince Irishmen they’d best turn out on Election Day or the Party will suffer crushing defeat. He lifted the hinged countertop. “I am
famished
. A dose of kitchen physic is what’s called for.”