Seven for a Secret

by Lyndsay Faye

  Julius approached a house with a pair of red candles in the window. He’d somewhat recovered by that time, though the shoulders that had been knotted with pain days previous were still not merely raw, but tense with worry.

  The door opened to a colored servant girl in a neatly pressed uniform, carrying a third candle.

  “Always best to have another lit, lest one go out,” Julius said.

  She smiled, blew out the taper, and stepped aside.

  We were led into a small sitting room, nicely populated with dark-leafed plants and a white cat presiding over the Indian rug before the fireplace. The chamber’s sole occupant sat in a rocking chair, sewing a button onto a man’s shirt. I’d have been arrested by her appearance anyhow, for she was a black woman of advanced age, with a crown of white hair piled atop her head. But I noted almost immediately that she was stone blind. I might have realized when she never glanced in our direction, only took on an air of listening. Her stitch work was conclusive, though. In the needle thrust, tapping with expert skill at the thimble she wore, never meriting the smallest glance downward.

  “Is that Julius Carpenter?” Her voice was strong but rasping. A pleasantly abrasive sound like the skitter of dry leaves.

  “Mrs. Higgins,” Julius said warmly, bending to kiss her lined cheek.

  “Higgins?” I exclaimed.

  “And you must be Timothy Wilde. I can smell the metal copper star from here. It needs polishing.” She smiled in my friend’s direction, revealing teeth white as her hair. “I fooled him, didn’t I, Julius?”

  “You fool everyone, Mrs. Higgins. Timothy, this is George’s mother, Mrs. Adelphia Higgins. She’s better known as the Candlestick Maker in some circles.”

  I took the hand that had apparently written the note I’d just perused. Her sightlessness explained the odd orientation across the paper, her quiet force the fact I’d stupidly mistaken the writing for a man’s. George Higgins was visible in the regal line of her jaw, the navy sheen of her black skin. Mrs. Higgins’s eyes were focused in the middle distance and slightly to my left, her hair pearlescent in the firelight. She lingered over my hand—reading me, no doubt as well as I could read a stranger with sight intact.

  “I can’t tell you how relieved I am that Delia Wright and Jonas Adams are safe, Mrs. Higgins,” I said.

  “They will need your help, I fear. They will need every ally they can muster. The danger of their position cannot be underestimated.”

  Hesitating, I glanced at Julius.

  “Doubtless you wonder why my son is not present.” Setting her sewing down, Mrs. Higgins rose and smoothed her elegant eggplant-colored skirts. “Delia’s wish, and she will explain it to you. Mr. Wilde, I needn’t tell you to speak of this place to no one, I trust?”

  “On my life I won’t.”

  “So I have been told, by multiple parties. You wouldn’t credit how very difficult it is to gain the respect of Grace Stackhouse, employed by my not very distant neighbors the Millingtons, for example. But you have. Follow me, then. Please keep your conversation as low as is possible; I am entertaining more than one guest at present.”

  Mrs. Higgins walked with sightless ease to the mantel, passing her fingers along its marble lintel before arriving at a door in the far corner. The room beyond proved to be windowless, lit with a single kerosene lamp throwing every manner of shadow, and appeared to be a miniature museum of sorts.

  The collection it housed was unlike any I’d ever seen. Every wall was lined with taper holders and pocket lamps, from the humble bull’s-eye to the most delicately scrollworked silver candlesticks. I spied night lanterns with iron flaps, candles with flared shades to amplify the light, gold-plated chambersticks etched with bountiful wildlife. Simple pewter stands, elaborate sconces that appeared from their floral embellishments to have sprouted from tiny metal seeds. Every variety of illuminative device I could imagine glinted at me from the shadows, their shapes guessed at by reflective edges and half-formed curves. And nary a candle or a box of lucifers in sight.

  Mrs. Higgins walked to a glassed-in shelf full of miniature wall chandeliers and reached behind the display. We heard a small, well-oiled click. The shelf swung open. Our hostess descended a flight of steep stairs in near-total darkness. We followed more carefully, at an uncomfortable disadvantage without light.

  “George’s late father owned a very successful chandlery business,” Julius informed me under his breath. “His collection is often shown as a museum. It’s perfect, really. Why suspect a room serves a double purpose when it’s used for public tours? There’s a handrail along the wall.”

  To my surprise, my knuckles struck smooth paper and not the packed earth or mortared stone of a cellar. No gusts of chill air rose to greet me, no sickening hint at the laughable state of our metropolis’s sewage system. Treading in Julius’s footsteps with my fingers tracing a waxed wooden handrail, I made for the glow at the bottom of the staircase.

  When our feet reached level ground and a thick carpet, we turned a corner. And a sight I’ll never forget if I live to be a thousand years old appeared before me.

  New Yorkers almost never see escaped slaves. For plentiful reasons, most of them obvious. Refugees keep to the woods for fear every stranger they meet may be a bounty hunter with a bloodhound. And anyhow, they’re ill equipped for cities. They’ve no chink, no proper clothing, and no notion of how to scavenge for food in a weird world of zigzagging streets and towering straight lines, a godless forest built of brick and stone. A man adept at stealing farm eggs to save his skin doesn’t necessarily have the skill to raid an iron-barred grocery after hours. Cities are dangerous. Packs of roving urban dwellers inhabit them, their glances calculating and feral. So we see runaways but seldom. And most are glad of it.

  This particular escaped slave, a woman of no more than twenty, inhabited a bed sheltered from the rest of the room by a Chinese screen. The room itself was low ceilinged and underground but otherwise a study in normalcy. Framed pressed flowers, braided rugs over pine floors, chintz wall hangings printed in russet and turquoise. The woman rested uneasily atop the coverlet in a nightdress and soft dressing gown, tossing her braided head to and fro on the goose-down pillow, both feet bandaged in thick cotton matting. I didn’t have to ask what had happened to them. She’d fled from the South through fields and swamps and thickets and rivers in the dead of winter without any shoes. Her eyes flicked open just as I entered the room.

  “Are you the doctor?” she asked me. Her voice was heavily accented, drawl so thick it spilled like molasses from her cracked, ashen lips.

  “He’s been and gone, dear.” Mrs. Higgins ducked around the screen. “You’ll keep both feet, we think. We were so glad of it. Do you remember?”

  “However did she make it here?” I marveled.

  The bravery of the concept—the geography, the risk—left me smaller than usual and tongue-tied with admiration. Aside from ferry travel to Brooklyn and back, and rare journeys to Harlem and Staten Island, I’ve never left New York in my life. It’s a common local ailment. And here she’d traveled hundreds of miles. Equipped with, presumably, nothing.

  “She’d the Railroad signals—lanterns and such, when she neared towns. Otherwise she followed the stars,” Julius answered.

  “Weren’t stars, most nights. I followed the moss,” she moaned.

  Mrs. Higgins’s mouth twisted worriedly. Feeling for the bedside, she placed the back of her hand against the sick woman’s brow.

  “This is Sugar,” she said, voice directed at Julius and eyes trained on the wall. “Sugar, you’re very warm. Do you need me to call for the doctor again?”

  When Mrs. Higgins pulled back a fraction, I saw Sugar’s face entire. Her eyes wandered feverishly, bandaged hands feeling all around her on the surface of the quilt. What she was searching for I couldn’t fathom, nor could I begin to calculate the size and shape of what she’d lost in order to gain her freedom—her family, friends, the space she’d slept in, the unmatchable blue o
f the sky outside her door.

  Julius pulled at my elbow, and we entered a short hallway. Away from the gentle comforting sounds and the stifled whimpers that pierced them. I stopped my friend when he reached the next door. A question burned at the back of my throat.

  “Do the kinchin ever survive the journey? I don’t see how it would be possible.”

  For far too long, he simply looked at me. “In spring and summertime, yes. In the winter, with luck. But you can’t very well wait for summer if you’re to be sold away from your kinchin on the morrow.”

  It made sense. It all made logical, heartless, insane sense.

  “Think on what we can do, not what we can’t,” Julius advised, entering the next room.

  Delia Wright sat in a combined bedroom and sitting room, her elbows on the table before her and her eyes pinned to her nephew. Having met the pair only once, my relief at seeing them hale swelled admittedly out of all proportion. Jonas was curled in the double bed, clutching the edge of the blanket though for all appearances he slept. Delia’s hair had been neatly arranged atop her head, and the forest-green day dress Varker had abused repaired meticulously. She was perfectly buttoned and hooked, brown eyes wracked and raw. I saw in her a general who has suffered unspeakable casualties planning his retreat in dress uniform. Seeing us, she rose, nodding a warning toward the kinchin. Julius embraced her, quick but fierce, and she led us through to still another room.

  We found ourselves at last in a subterranean library. Well lit, replete with heavy armchairs and heavier bookshelves. Delia closed the door behind us.

  “He’s hardly slept,” she confessed. Her tone was clear, but so very, very low.

  “We can’t tell you how sorry we are, Delia,” Julius said. “For you and Jonas, for your sister.” Hesitating, he searched for words of comfort. “She’s with God now, if sooner than she should be.”

  “Is she?”

  A cruel shudder passed through Delia’s torso, and she crossed a hand over her stomach. Going to the fire, she added a small log, though the blaze crackled brightly already. When she turned back, she’d swept the thoughts from her eyes.

  “We searched everywhere for you,” Julius told her. Urgent, but not reproachful. “Never dreamed you’d be Neither Here Nor There—how could we have guessed you were with George’s mother? He’s nigh out of his mind.”

  “As have I been.”

  “I’ve only managed to keep it from him by avoiding him. Mrs. Higgins is a better liar than I am. And why should you have asked that George—”

  “I’ll explain it.” She seated herself in a fireside armchair. A candle burned beside her, and she moved the taper to the low table in the middle of the room. “Mr. Wilde, there is a favor I must beg of you.”

  “I’m at your service.”

  “As reparation?” she asked, dry as chalk. “Or simple goodwill? I do read the newspapers, you know.”

  I’d seen it coming. But knowing you’re about to suffer a blow doesn’t lessen the effect, I’ve found. On the contrary. Either Delia Wright had been present and afterward taken hostage when her sister was murdered, or she had discovered the body in Val’s bed and fled with her nephew. No other explanation for their absence was sensible. Apparently, the latter had taken place. But I’d no words to explain why I’d dropped her loved one’s corpse in the rank snow under a pile of piss-stained newsprint.

  “I hope you can forgive me for moving her,” I said fervently. “Though I don’t expect you will. What I thought was right at the time isn’t easily—”

  “Please, Mr. Wilde.” She adjusted her hems in aggrieved impatience, and I recalled how decisive Delia Wright was in actual life. She was riveting. “Spare me your explanation of what it feels like to have a sibling. I recall it. Do sit down, you’re both unsettling me.”

  Finding no further words, I obeyed. Julius and I took the settee, and we all leaned forward an inch or two. Three conspirators, bending toward a tiny open flame.

  “The man who murdered your sister will pay, Miss Wright,” I vowed. “Only tell me how and who.”

  Delia’s mouth opened upon a mirthless gasp of hysteria. “Ah, Mr. Wilde.” She was still smiling. Shaking her head in a pitying way, beautiful and exhausted and clearly inches from the end of her rope. “How I wish I knew.”

  The silence that settled was thick with disappointment. I’m not proud of that, and Julius took a brief look at his boot toes. But we wanted vengeance by that time. For Lucy, for Delia, for the boy gripping the edge of his quilt as if it were a sword hilt.

  “You needn’t make useless protestations of your brother’s innocence either, now you know I’m at as much of a loss as you are.” Delia’s fraught smile at last faded. “I will forever remember that Captain Wilde was kind to us, and I cannot credit that he suddenly returned to his home in a murderous rage. Not after all he had done. We could scarcely believe our good fortune that night—that the Committee, Julius, and the star police, Mr. Wilde, had taken such drastic measures to free us. And then to house us, no less. Well. But I shall tell you all I can, and then perhaps you’ll see some light where I see none.”

  It can’t matter that she doesn’t know the culprit, I thought above the unmanly protests over the unfairness of fate shrieking in the back of my head. When you know what happened, you’ll understand who.

  Of course you’ll know the murderer’s identity. You’ll finally know Lucy’s name.

  And this is the story she told me.

  Delia and Lucy had remained in Valentine’s home for all of the first day and most of the second. There had been eggs for frying, salted pork, mysterious spices, and a jug of table wine they reasoned they’d pay him for after returning to their homes. The sisters talked while Jonas constructed a fleet with kindling masts and newsprint sails, only to decimate his armada in a fiery battle within the small sea of Val’s hearth. When conversation wearied them, they perused the clean but otherwise neglected library (why Val owns books when he reads them but once and remembers them perfectly puzzles me extremely) and watched the passersby braving drifts in Spring Street. Then it belatedly occurred to the women that, should Meg have given the alarm, there must surely be people worried about them.

  “George often misses church for business reasons, and it wouldn’t have occurred to either of you to reassure our congregation if poor Meg appealed to them in hysterics, and so I suggested attending Sunday night services.” Delia took a slow breath, gazing into the fire without seeing it.

  “Your sister was against the idea,” Julius surmised.

  “Lucy was frightened.” Delia dashed an errant tear from her eye with an angry little swipe. “But I will tell you something about my sister—on each occasion she was frightened around Jonas, she either compelled herself to stop or sent him away. She couldn’t bear the thought that she would influence him in a cowardly direction. It haunted her perennially. As if she could help her instinctual reactions! On that particular evening, she couldn’t work herself up to leaving through the back alley and walking to our church in West Broadway. And so she insisted that I take my nephew. Lest he grow to startle at shadows.”

  Delia’s voice remained measured during this account of her sister’s unique stamp of courage. Nevertheless every word, piece by piece, built to a soaring monument. She hadn’t simply loved her sister. Lucy had been Delia’s heroine.

  “But no one at the Abyssinian Church saw you,” Julius prompted.

  “No.” She shifted her eyes in my direction. “Someone followed us. After we had reached Spring Street.”

  I moved forward again, aching for fresh material. “Go on.”

  “We ducked into an alleyway. I pulled Jonas through the back door of a chophouse and we rushed across the crowded dining area. When we reached the street again, we simply ran. I took us in circles. Perhaps twenty minutes passed, all told. By the time we arrived back at the alley behind your brother’s house and raced indoors, I saw no one behind us.”

  The rabbity flutter of my pulse he
ightened. “Can you describe your pursuer?”

  “I caught the hint of a copper star on his greatcoat shining in the lamplight. Tall as Julius, maybe. I’d the impression he had red hair.”

  Sean Mulqueen, I thought. Not at all surprised.

  “When we arrived back at the house, we were quite shaken. But my sister wasn’t alone. There was a woman with her. She was strikingly beautiful—pale, almost angelic, with blonde hair and a sweet, assured manner.”

  Apparently I started in shock, for Julius cast a questioning look at me. I’d told him all about Silkie Marsh and her blessedly rare species of malevolence, of course. Though they’d never met apart from Julius’s mockery of a fugitive-slave trial, he’d a vivid recollection of the woman who’d almost stolen his life.

  “She’d introduced herself as a Miss Marsh, and she was on her way out already.” Delia’s expression pulled taut, her freckles standing out in stark constellations. “I’ll be very brief, for the subject …” Her eyes fell shut. “Charles Adams was not who we thought he was. Perhaps you’re aware already—”

  “There, take a breath, now,” Julius said.

  “Rutherford Gates was his name, apparently.” Standing, Delia crossed to the mantel, running palsied fingers over its framed illustrations. “It was a lie. All of it. Lucy’s marriage, her life. Or so we were told. Miss Marsh claimed Charles Adams was a state senator. God, to think of it, of Lucy’s face … She was devastated. Heartbroken. I was witness at her marriage ceremony in Massachusetts. You can’t imagine how happy she was. Miss Marsh left soon after warning Lucy.”

  “Warning her?” I exclaimed.

  “Lucy said she’d advised us to flee the city. We couldn’t know if my sister’s marriage held any claim—if she was Lucy Adams or Lucy Wright. But Miss Marsh insisted in very feeling language that we run for our lives, for danger—Varker, Coles, worse perhaps, but she wouldn’t say how or why she knew of it—waited to pounce on us every instant we remained in town.”

  Delia peered at my lips as if expecting me to comment. She was disappointed, though. Of the many questions that swarmed in my pate, angry and stinging as individual blood flies, none would have made sense to the woman before me. Why in holy hell would pure vice in the shape of a pretty brothel madam warn you of danger? wasn’t practical, though it was to the purpose. What game was Silkie Marsh playing in your head? wouldn’t solve my worries either.