Seven for a Secret

by Lyndsay Faye

  Actually, she was already known to me, as she’d purchased flowers here for her own household several times. And she was quite unforgettable, Mr. Wilde. A month ago she approached my counter with a certain boldness in her eye I’d not been accustomed to seeing there, as she had always appeared a shy—not to say timorous—lady for all her great beauty. She confessed to me that her little boy spent his days away at lessons now, and that she found herself lonely, and that she knew flowers very well indeed. Had raised them, arranged them, helmed Christmas parties and marriage ceremonies. And I have been in need of assistance for quite some time—my age and rheumatism make repetitive work rather arduous, you see, and it was a great stroke of good fortune that such a capable applicant showed an interest.

  She readily described her previous experience for me. I was much struck by the detail with which she described a wedding celebration she’d worked on—fresh gardenias arranged into an intricate coiffure for the bride, shocking-pink azaleas framing sprays of white moss roses on the tables, magnolia centerpieces—she knew of which she spoke. I hired her on the spot.

  I last saw her on St. Valentine’s Day. It’s the busiest day of the season, of course. She stayed quite late. She oughtn’t to have been there so long, but she insisted upon remaining until the crowds had thinned. There wasn’t an inkling as to any trouble. Lucy was conscientious always, but I can’t imagine she’d have lingered if something was truly troubling her. She appeared quite at peace.

  I have been so horribly worried all this time, Mr. Wilde. I made inquiries, you see, but could discover nothing. None of the other merchants in the area were personally acquainted with her. It seems she kept herself quite private. By the time I realized I didn’t even know her exact address, days had passed.

  Other stories? Told to me by Lucy, you mean? Gracious, I wish I could help you, but we talked only of flowers. Lucy was a wonderful woman, but a reticent one. It’s of no use to a policeman, my relating that Lucy recalled running through field after field of wild orange coneflowers as a little girl and afterward felt as if she spoke their language.

  She was such a lovely creature. Thank you for telling me of her fate at last, Mr. Wilde. To know the truth is better, in the end, howsoever it might hurt us.

  Poor old Timpson was mistaken about that, but I followed him well enough at the time.

  Finally, I wriggled toward a fresh corner and started in capturing Grace of the Millington household. I’d begged a favor of Turley in the mournful afternoon half-light and gained a private conference in the wine cellar, our oil lamp tracing white semi-circles in the bottoms of hundreds of bottles, throwing Grace’s features into sharp relief as she stood before me with her hands tucked neatly behind her.

  Not kittled to see me. Nor any too gladdened that the subject I broached was Why are you frightened of copper stars? Which? Who? Can you tell me the stories?

  I’d explained. I’d cajoled. I told her of Jean-Baptiste’s carriage museum, and she relented a fraction. Finally, I related the death of Sean Mulqueen and she spoke her piece. Probably because being trapped in a wine cellar with a star police for longer than twenty minutes was going to wreak absolute havoc upon the remainder of her schedule.

  It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’ve done. Letting the boy go free and all, and no one the wiser. I’ve seen him hereabouts, though I’ve not hired him since. Not every man would have done the same.

  It just doesn’t matter, you see, Mr. Wilde. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It isn’t enough.

  That Irish copper star, and the slave catchers you spoke of. We know them. We know them plenty well by sight. We know others too, ones you’ve never heard tell of. We walk in pairs and those that have little ones keep them inside after dark and we pray that something comes of our precautions. That numbers will shield us, that daylight is friendlier. None of that is true, the way I figure it. But we imagine it’s so, and so live easier.

  Supposing you stop them, Mr. Wilde? I’d shake your hand, then, and praise the Lord for His mercies. But supposing they stop you? And hear tell as I’ve talked, whether from your lips or someone else’s? What then?

  Folk are disappearing. Melting away. They trickle up from the South too, new escaped slaves arrive every day—singles, pairs, whole groups sometimes. I’m happy for them. They get a second chance. I hope more fight their way through. What’s more, I pray for it. But they don’t matter either. Not to my life and whether or not I get to carry on living it.

  When a man lays hands on you, you’re gone. Just like that. Easy as blinking. The way back home is too long, Mr. Wilde, and the light too dim. So I can’t talk to your sort. Because you can’t keep me safe. Maybe you want to, for all that you’re white and I can’t rightly see what difference it makes to you one way or another. But it comes down to luck, caution, and God. You aren’t my kind, you never will be, and you don’t understand what it means to think about it. It won’t ever happen to you. And so I’ll go on about my business and ask you not to be seen hereabouts anymore. For my sake.

  Please try to picture what I mean. If we were stolen for ghosts when we were snatched up, sold for even a shadow of our former selves, that would be something bearable. I could be sold for a ghost. I’d live, I think, though nothing’s certain. But you’re less than a ghost once you’ve been taken. At least ghosts get to keep their own name.

  Growling in frustration, I dropped the stick of charcoal.

  I did my level best every morning not to picture Jonas chained to a wall, watching the unspeakable befall his aunt. As had nearly already happened. Likewise, I tried my damnedest not to imagine the pair of them tethered with leg irons to a narrow ship’s berth, bereft of every human kindness for the rest of their lives on account of not being human any longer.

  At night I pictured it, though. And darkness was fast falling. And my heart was thudding up against my clavicle because I’d tried the only trick I know and the only talent I have that’s ever brought me a moment’s respite from misery and I still wasn’t getting anywhere.

  Tap tap tap.

  “Come in.”

  My door swung to. Belatedly realizing I’d heard Mrs. Boehm’s tread on the staircase, my face snapped upward half a second later.

  “Oh, sorry, I—” Leaping from my ridiculous prone position, I threw a blue waistcoat over my shoddily buttoned shirt and lit the oil lamp. Being reduced to a copper star with a mangled face is bad enough without losing all sense of dignity. “I was working.”

  Mrs. Boehm edged forward, staring at the butcher paper. She wore the plain grey frock of the three I’ve catalogued, with the neat row of white lace at the hem and the four deep pleats at the hips. The one that makes her hair less golden, but her eyes marginally more blue. She placed her right hand on her tiny—really far too thin, but who am I to ask whether a baker is eating properly—waist and raised the back of her wrist to wipe a bead of sweat from her brow. Several translucent locks of her baby-fine hair had fallen in her face, but she avoided touching them, for her nails glowed with butter. How Mrs. Boehm (who is almost precisely a year younger than I am, as I learned in November, making her twenty-seven) manages still to produce goose down from her head is a perennial puzzle. She brought with her an oddly calming aroma of cinnamon.

  “I made franzbrötchen,” she answered in reply to the question I hadn’t asked. “With pumpkin seeds. Too much dough, and maybe you would like one?”

  My landlady had reached the spread-out sheet anchored with four of my five books by this time and sunk absently to her knees, wiping her hands on her ivory half apron. I fell to watching her.

  “These people, they are to do with your problem?”

  I nodded, sitting Indian-style on the opposite side of the brown paper. About two feet divided us. Two feet and four carefully rendered faces, staring back at me in vivid, accusatory detail. I traced the edge of my scar and then dropped my hand. Annoyed. Instead, I picked up the charcoal again and let my fingers wander.

  “You
think with your hands.” The edge of her liberal crescent-moon mouth lifted. Her angular cheekbones had pinkened from the heat of the ovens. “I think also with my hands. But with bread.”

  Glancing up momentarily, I continued drawing.

  “Bird, she, I believe, thinks with her eyes. When closed, when open. Always looking, always remembering, always busy. Filling her head with more thoughts.”

  “There’s plenty of thoughts in that pate already,” I sighed.

  Adjusting her dove-colored skirts in a small fan, she leaned forward. What interest she held in my portraits I couldn’t fathom before remembering Mrs. Boehm loves stories. And my drawings, God help me, are nearly as florid and emotive as is Mercy’s fiction.

  “I worry over that kinchin,” she owned. “But Bird, she is strong. She can handle more thoughts than many children are capable.”

  “Did she tell you about waking up wrong?”

  She tilted her head, a pained yes. Liking the interest of that angle better, I shifted my wrist accordingly.

  “I told her she needn’t be alone to be brave.”

  Mrs. Boehm’s head cocked the other way. There was a tiny track of sweat making its slow descent from her neck past her collarbones and downward. Nearly as elusive and shimmering as her hair in the waning daylight. It arrested the corner of my vision for senselessly long.

  “Truth, I think that. One needn’t be alone to be brave.”

  “She said I didn’t believe so myself and then called me a liar.”

  “And are you a liar, Mr. Wilde?”

  “Probably. I’m enough other undesirable things.”

  I thought about the manuscript hidden in my sleeping closet. Those words I’d spent, the hours of effort, all in search of what truly happened last summer. Never having intended for any living soul to read it, I must have been telling the truth therein. Mustn’t I? Could I believe myself truthful when utterly alone? Copper Star 107 had written the same events in police reports, but Tim Wilde had once been told that books could be cartography. They were maps for Mercy, anyhow. Always had been. So why did I sometimes feel as if even that effort was meaningless, merely the blurred vision of a half-blind, sentimental fool?

  One for sorrow, I thought, absently recalling the chiming girlish voices at Bird’s school and the dark augury of seeing a single blackbird. There was a reason that number heralded pain. There’s always a reason, I think, behind the doggerel kinchin chant.

  “Tch. Easy enough to tell if you are a liar,” Mrs. Boehm chided. “You are brave already. Are you alone?”

  Her eyes, when I met them, were entirely colorless as the sun angled lower. Uncanny, the pallor of them, and yet how warm they seemed, softened by a hint of blonde lashes and an indulgent expression as she finally smoothed her hair back behind her ear. Not a thing about Mrs. Boehm’s eyes, I realized just then, made an ounce of sense.

  “Perhaps, as Bird thinks, you walk through life alone in the middle of company. Always a stranger. Only you can know for certain. I don’t give franzbrötchen to strangers,” she added.

  My hand froze.

  She sounded a bit breathless, but surely I was conjuring that myself. Surely men who stride casually about as if their hearts are in their chests and not on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean miss key signals, invent others on the merest whim. Surely she meant to be kind. Mrs. Boehm is kind, after all. She’s one of the kindest women I know.

  Kindness can account for literally thousands of otherwise inexplicable things, I decided.

  I managed a comradely smile. “I don’t draw strangers either. Unless I’m working.”

  Our attention dropped to the paper river between us. The one that now included Mrs. Boehm’s face, planes softened by frostlight and the unearthly sheen of the atmosphere beyond my window. With her head angled and her hair edged in silver.

  Pale eyes scrutinized my person. Both from the picture and from the woman before me, kneeling unselfconsciously on my floor.

  “Are you working?” she asked me.

  Bang bang bang.

  Mrs. Boehm began to rise, but I caught at her bony wrist without quite knowing why. Stepping over the paper, I passed through my open door to the top of the stairs.

  “Who’s there?” I called out.

  “Timothy, it’s freezing. You want to see me—I promise.”

  Taking the stairs two at a time, I unlocked the door to discover Julius Carpenter. Well-wrapped, a wary look about him. My pulse quickened. Something had changed. The fact that anything had changed was nigh miraculous.

  “Tell me you’ve solved it,” I requested of my old friend.

  “Not today,” he owned.

  “Varker and Coles have caught smallpox.”

  “Damned if I wouldn’t dance a jig at that prospect, but no.”

  “Then tell me Delia and Jonas are alive and well, and like to remain so,” I groaned, leaning against the door in near defeat.

  “I can’t speak as to the future,” he answered, lips quirking. “But regarding Delia and Jonas, why don’t you ask them yourself?”

  eighteen

  I felt the stripes, the last I saw,

  Red, dripping with a father’s gore;

  And, worst of all, their lawless law,

  The insults that my mother bore!

  The hounds are baying on my track,

  O Christian! will you send me back?

  —E. WRIGHT, JR., “THE FUGITIVE SLAVE TO THE CHRISTIAN”

  Julius Carpenter and I traveled in a hack northward along the Bowery as the ailing afternoon gave up the ghost. A hack I’d hailed, of course, while he’d stood two feet behind. We didn’t dwell on that, though. Not when we were about to see Delia Wright and Jonas Adams again. Not when answers hovered before us in the air, simple and alluring as hummingbirds and just as elusive to the touch.

  The Bowery is a broad, careless, hedonistic street, full of mindless laughter at eight in the evening and the muffled whimpers of lost drunks at two a.m. Packed with revelers lurching helter-skelter in pursuit of unhealthy distractions. Spies and traitors seemed to glide through the slush, their glances arrowing into our hack’s windows. The hotels’ brass-fitted restaurants gleamed maniacally—hotels asking no questions when their patrons returned at four in the morning keeping different company to their companions of the daylight. Upper windows blazing, every guest seated at a skirted table with a mountain of faro chips. Afterward, we came to the seedier gambling halls. The dens masquerading as coffee cellars or poultry vendors by day, floors still littered with burnt grounds and soiled feathers. Places where thin men gathered, betting their families’ suppers on raffle tickets and strings of numbers that would break their hearts.

  I asked Julius first whether he’d yet questioned Delia. He said no, he’d not even seen her or her nephew. Then I wanted to know where they were, and he informed me that he’d need to draw the blinds when we approached, no offense meant. Gnawing at the bit, I asked how the devil he’d discovered their whereabouts. He pulled a folded note from his waistcoat.

  “I never discovered them. This was delivered to me yesterday.” At my glare of angry surprise, he added, “Stop. George doesn’t know either. Bad wrench, not telling him, but I was instructed to keep my mouth shut. Delia hid them both deep underground, Timothy.”

  The note, in a well-educated hand that failed to align itself with the edges of the paper and hung at an eccentric tilt, read:

  Mr. Carpenter,

  Your company and the company of your rising star is requested, after dark as is customary. Bring no one else. We’ve a large ham and a small ham, and in hopes you will both be pleased by our repast. The supper is to be entirely private. While he has been vouched for through multiple sources, please take precautions ensuring the star arrives safely at our establishment.

  That’s neither here nor there,

  The Candlestick Maker

  My friend pulled the blinds down. The remaining light was dim but steady, shining from the hack’s four safety lante
rns through broad cracks in the shades. Julius was doing all he could not to smile at my confusion. It can’t have been easy.

  Then the spark hit powder.

  “You said underground,” I realized. “Underground Railroad. My God. Are you part of that network?”

  “Please. My ken wouldn’t hide a cockroach. The Vigilance Committee keeps people from being sent in the opposite direction. George, though—George is a stockholder.”

  “So he said.”

  “No,” Julius corrected me, “a financial contributor to the Underground Railroad system. As is the rest of his family.”

  “Why leave him out, then?”

  “I don’t know her mind, but it troubles me too.”

  “I can’t read this message. Are all communications coded?”

  “The interesting ones.” Julius allowed himself a small smirk. “Can’t read it? You’re better than that, Timothy.”

  I hoped he was right, so I looked again.

  “Rising star is a play on words. Star police. Me, presumably.”

  He said nothing, but he seemed pleased. So I sallied forth.

  “Large ham and a small ham can only be Delia and Jonas. Precautions … you already said I’m not to know where we’re going precisely, though I imagine you’d be taking more care about it if we didn’t know each other so well. But I don’t see why this fellow dismisses everything at the closing.”

  “How so?”

  “He says that’s neither here nor there.”

  “But that’s just where we’ve arrived.” Rapping at the hack’s roof, Julius made to jump out as the cab rattled and slowed. “Neither Here Nor There. Do me a favor, will you Timothy, and don’t tell me about it if you know where I’ve taken you?”

  That we were in the northern suburbs of the Chelsea neighborhood was clear, for the wind spoke more of forest elm than of animal remains, and the Hudson murmured away to my left. Anyway, I’d recognized the subtler glare of Fourteenth Street when we’d turned left off Bowery. But the dwellings, like so many upright redbrick soldiers, were unremarkable. Anonymous. Kerosene lights flickering behind white curtains, cleanly swept wooden doorways featureless above their ash-strewn steps.