Seven for a Secret

by Lyndsay Faye

  Screwing his swollen eyes shut, he let go. Abandoned himself to gravity and tumbled through the air.

  What I remember about catching him wasn’t how courageous he’d just been or how perfectly he landed in my arms. It was that he weighed so little, composed of spirit and ash as he was, that he might have been the charcoal drawing I’d made of him. Just an infinitesimally thin portrait of a sweep and not a boy at all.

  “All right?” I asked, setting him on his feet.

  He swayed for an instant, but soon recovered. Looking up dizzily, he nodded. Then he silently laughed.

  “Then run,” I said, taking his hand and flying for the alley.

  • • •

  I first spied George Higgins half an hour later, mindlessly patrolling the rear yard of his own townhouse. The lights within his residence were blazing very nearly as brightly as the eyes of their owner as Jean-Baptiste and I shut the gate. Reverend Brown sat on a neat pile of firewood, gloved hands folded in his lap. And to my boundless delight, Jakob Piest rested on the steps before the back door, holding a small slab of beef to his jaw.

  “Thank God,” I exhaled. “You’ve no notion how close I came to joining the mitten-mill. Are you all right, Mr. Piest?”

  Piest’s mottled complexion was pale, his mouth actively bruising. “Reveling in the triumph of high adventure and most gratified to hail the conquering heroes,” the Dutchman answered readily.

  Higgins had rooted himself to the ground at the sight of us. “You have them, then? The free papers?”

  Jean-Baptiste reached into his shirt and produced a bundle of decidedly soot-smirched documents. They were among the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. They were without any question the most beautiful things George Higgins had ever seen. For an instant I almost didn’t want him to touch our ill-gotten trophy, though I couldn’t have begun to say why. He reached forward, almost angry in his haste, and the kinchin hastily shied away, dropping his prize. Frightened of a blow. A kick. Something worse.

  When Higgins had shuffled through the stack and found the free papers, however, his face changed to something nearly approaching fondness. Or awe in the presence of a miracle. Akin to both.

  “You took these?” he said to the boy.

  Jean-Baptiste nodded.

  “God bless you. You’ll stay with me from now until we find a proper home for you.”

  He was beaming so wide, the filthy kinchin staring back at him in bewilderment, that scarce anyone heard me say, “Tell me Julius Carpenter is inside.”

  The Reverend Brown coughed, clasping his hands a bit tighter. “I regret to say no. But I must.”

  The silence that spread was much colder than the air surrounding us. And the night was already deeply bitter. Jean-Baptiste looked as if he was failing to shiver only because he’d learned how not to, and Higgins wore the faintest hint of frost upon his coat collar. He passed me back the free papers for safekeeping. Possibly because I hadn’t yet managed to prise my eyes off of them.

  “What happened?” I questioned Mr. Piest as I hid the documents inside my greatcoat. Already cursing myself and my clever, clever plans.

  “We were accosted by Mr. McDivitt and Mr. Beardsley.” Piest shifted on his stair. “They were … extremely combative. They demanded a fight. When they began one, I … I am not proud of this, Mr. Wilde. But I was found lacking.”

  “You weren’t either,” I protested, seeing visions of nooses and impromptu bonfires and simple drowning with stones tied to Julius’s ankles. “What happened?”

  “Mr. Carpenter assaulted Mr. McDivitt somehow. When they and Mr. Beardsley all took to their heels … I cannot apologize enough.” Piest looked distressed as I’d ever seen him. “I don’t know what happened. One instant, I was floored, and the next—”

  “I’d stolen a little remembrance from that leech McDivitt,” Julius interrupted.

  The gate swung closed, creaking mournfully. We all of us wheeled about to peer into the gloom. And there stood Julius Carpenter. Winded, hale, self-satisfied, with his breath puffing into clouds before his lips.

  “I’m not very fast, Timothy, but I’m faster than the rest of your force,” he told me, leaning briefly on the metal of the gate as he recovered himself.

  “Why did they chase you?” I exclaimed, going to him. “It was perfect, however you distracted them. But what on earth …”

  He reached into his coat pocket and flung something on the ground. It had many points and a dark, brassy hue, like a fallen oak leaf half-hid in the cracks of the paving stones.

  It very much resembled a copper star.

  “Give that back to the blackguard, if you like,” Julius said with a heartfelt smile. “I don’t mind in the slightest. I can’t keep it, after all. Since we’re together again at last, shall we go inside?”

  twenty-one

  When we eat rice white man no give us to drink … when Sun Set white men give us little water … when we in havana vessel white men give rice to all who no eat fast he take whip you … a plenty of them died.

  —LETTER WRITTEN TO NEW YORK ABOLITIONIST LEWIS TAPPAN BY AMISTAD SURVIVOR KALE, 1840

  As a reward for my successful plan, I was elected one of the party to deliver Jonas’s free papers the next morning and trusted with the actual address of Neither Here Nor There.

  As a punishment for his foolishness over falling brutally in love, George Higgins elected himself to accompany me.

  I met him before his mother’s residence in the spun-sugar February dawn, sunlight pale as an oyster shell and the dull little sparrows trilling pleasantries to one another from the naked treetops. Higgins finished a thin cigar as I alighted from the hack, tossing it in a puff of sparks on the cobblestones, clearly having just walked from his own rooms near Washington Square. After I’d paid the driver, I swung my eyes to Higgins and inspected him again. Considering.

  He looked about as well as most condemned men at the Tombs do when their breakfast arrives on hanging days. Near enough to the end to decide brave façades aren’t particularly useful.

  “How is Jean-Baptiste settling in?” I asked by way of greeting.

  “My housekeeper and I have bathed him upward of ten times. He needs seven or eight more, but at least he’s amenable. Splashes about like a fish, laughing when we try to drag him out again.”

  “Well, there’s a glimpse of the world as it should be.”

  Higgins sighed. “Perhaps you’re right. But I can’t help but think it should all have been different somehow.”

  My jaw tensed, because that was just it. Different somehow. I agreed with Higgins. Some aspect yet eluded me, some mistaken figure was ruining the balance sheet, and the world entire was beginning to look slightly askew. Meanwhile, the poor man’s beard was lengthening around its architectural edges, and there was a fragile, tender look to his active eyes. Tucking his striped silk cravat farther into his vest, he shook his head at his mother’s house. “And not just because I wish it so. I can’t trace where it began to go so utterly wrong.”

  With Lucy Adams’s murder, I thought, surprised.

  Then, No, the initial kidnapping by Varker and Coles. And after that, Vicious words carved into a beautiful woman long ago.

  As Higgins glared in anguish at his family home, I realized I hadn’t the faintest notion either. And that alarmed me.

  Something is missing.

  “We can still get them away from here.”

  “And what does that make us? Sending them off into the wild because they’ve asked us to?” Higgins peered beneath my hat brim with fresh interest.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Higgins. Worthy of them, maybe?”

  “Hmm.” He started toward the door. “Really, we’ve been through enough by now … call me George, nearly everyone else does. Even that Inman rascal down at the ’Change, confound him.”

  My step hitched. George Higgins was as much fortress as man, composed of walls and moats, and his tone suggested I was being given a password to call down the drawbrid
ge. “Really?”

  “Unless you want me to keep addressing you as Mr. Wilde, in which case I retract the offer.”

  “No, call me whatever you like. Anyway, I’d supposed you called me that whey-brained copper star or something similar. Worse.”

  “I did indeed.” He gave me a tight smile, removing his hat and gloves as the door swung open. “But I’ve decided that Timothy is considerably more efficient. Don’t think me too admiring of our police force, now—I’m not about to start voting Democrat anytime soon.”

  In the parlor, George Higgins kissed his mother warmly on her wrinkled cheek. If he was angry at her failure to tell him Delia’s whereabouts, he failed to show it. As for Mrs. Higgins, she sat with a small tray before her, finishing spiced tea and a buttered biscuit, wearing a red shawl tucked neatly about her shoulders.

  “Hello, Mr. Wilde,” she said before I’d announced myself. “George, dearest, you won’t be tiresome? Betrayal of a confidence—”

  “I’m not being tiresome, Mother.” His voice might as well have emerged from the bottom of a crypt. “You did what you thought best. But I’ll see Delia before she goes, if she’s to be relying on me for the means to settle up north.”

  “She expects you,” his mother assured us, wiping crumbs from her fingers. “The arrangements are quite settled—Mr. Wilde, if you would do us the favor of seeing that their departure goes smoothly, I’d be much obliged to you. It will be two mornings from this one. March the first.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “I warn you, Mother, I’ll be in attendance as well, if only for my own peace of mind,” Higgins said. Though his tone indicated he’d never possess the commodity peace of mind again.

  Reaching, she found his hand. “I wish you’d been spared this, my boy. Much more than you know.”

  Pressing her fingers, he made for the door beyond. We passed through the museum, the shrine to illumination with its countless lamps and bright hints of crystal. No one greeted us upon the narrow hidden staircase, and the sickroom that had so recently housed the escaped slave was quite empty. When we reached the inner sitting-room door, Delia’s voice called us through.

  She sat in the widest armchair, with Jonas’s small body tucked up against her side, reading to the child. Delia had rearranged her hair, passing one strand about her head in a braid like a coronet, the effect quite queenlike. The arch to her brow wasn’t superior precisely, and the slim bow of her lips was far from aloof or unfeeling. But she appeared to have molded herself into the shape she wished to be in when the blow fell. If Lot’s wife had been given time to craft the exact attitude of her transformation, had she adopted an insolent spine and a sweetly curved hand when cruelly transformed into salt, she might have looked so. She might have glanced back at the only home she had known with just such an expression. I spent a meandering moment attempting to recall the name of Lot’s wife before realizing she hadn’t been granted one.

  “Mr. Wilde.” She placed the book on the table and passed a hand over Jonas’s cheek. “You remember Mr. Wilde, Jonas. He’s done it, I think. He’s taken back what we need to get away.”

  “I don’t care.” Jonas’s eyes looked similar to Jean-Baptiste’s, so swollen were they with weeping.

  “You will care, love.” Rising, she kissed him on the top of his head. “Doing as I asked doubtless must have required enormous effort. I apologize, Mr. Wilde. And I thank you.”

  “You needn’t do either.” I pulled the free papers from my coat pocket and passed them to her.

  When she took them, her hand faltered. She smoothed the other across her hip, swaying a little. At last she smiled. A broken smile, as if a gemstone had cracked down the middle. It hurt to look at.

  “Hello, George,” Delia whispered without meeting his eyes. “I thought you would come yourself.”

  Taking her wrist, he lightly kissed her cheek. There was such a force of affection in that minuscule gesture, it could have felled armies. I stepped toward the fireplace, wanting to notice less about my surroundings.

  But I was still missing something. The hairs at the back of my neck whispered so.

  “I’ve brought what you asked.” He produced a quantity of paper money. Rather than giving it to her, he went to the nearest table and set it down. “There’s extra here, in case of later emergency.”

  Delia had begun to look faint. “I’ll pay you back when I reach Canada. I can find work teaching. I must, for us to live. I’ll pay it all back.”

  George Higgins huffed another stony laugh. “This is a gift.”

  “No, it must be a loan. I will make you restitution.”

  “I insist.”

  “I am aware of your opinion of loan defaulters and bad creditors,” Delia shot back, sounding almost angry. “It is not a fond one.”

  “Don’t insult me.”

  “It isn’t an insult. It’s my life. It’s paying you what my life costs.”

  “Don’t fight, you make me sick,” Jonas shouted.

  The kinchin tore out of our sight. He left behind him the feeling that an enormous clock had chimed. An immediacy entered the room when he left it, breathed down our spines with fiery gusts and stale teeth. A child’s future was at stake. He was free only so long as we kept our heads.

  Higgins flinched at the carpet. “Please accept my apology. Surely you know yourself to be priceless in my estimation. Only tell me if you want anything further of me.”

  Delia’s lips began to quiver. The barest vibration, like the tremble of a candle flame.

  “I can ask nothing more of you, George. You’ve been so generous already.”

  Wrong answer, I thought.

  He backed away, gazing at her. Placed the hand that still held his gloves on the door frame and allowed himself the slightest shake of his head, jaw clenched. The last hot meal before the executioner’s arrival had clearly ended. George Higgins twisted his gloves with an expression of finality and then struck them hard against the wood.

  “Godspeed to you both, in that case. Timothy, I’ll see myself out.”

  When he had disappeared and the echo of his feet above our heads had faded into nothing, Delia Wright sat upon the chair and covered her mouth with her hands.

  “Miss Wright, I’ll not trouble you much further. Though I will be present day after tomorrow, to see that you depart safely.”

  I received no answer. She rocked back and forth once, pressing her fingers to her lips. Then she stopped. Dropping her hands to her lap, she forced herself to look in my direction.

  “Does George Higgins frighten you?” I asked. “Please tell me the truth.”

  “He frightens my pride,” she rasped. “I’ve a considerable stock of it, and he treats me as if I were a champagne flute.”

  “That isn’t all,” I insisted.

  “No.” She bit at her nail, then pressed her hands together hard. “But Lucy’s death had nothing to do with George, if that’s what you’re implying. He has offended me personally, in a way I’d not wish to discuss.”

  Since she appeared wholly sincere, I’d no answer for her. Instead I offered her the rest of my plunder. When she saw I held another paper, her brow furrowed—but as she took it, bemusement faded. With a single finger, she traced over the letters her sister had written.

  “I never meant it for a trophy,” I said. “Keep the marriage certificate between Lucy Wright and Charles Adams if you like. Only tell me, if there is more to discover. That’s all I ask. I owed you the free papers, but … please, Miss Wright. If there is aught to tell me, tell me.”

  Refolding the Commonwealth of Massachusetts certificate of marriage, she extended her arm, and I took the document back. It had been in the precious pile along with one or two old letters and receipts, the small stack of paper Jean-Baptiste had stolen.

  I’d thought that it mattered, somehow. Counted.

  “We imagined it real,” she answered. “I don’t want any part of that piece of paper. It isn’t my fault Charles Adams never existed, M
r. Wilde.”

  And no—it wasn’t. She was manifestly a good person, had worshipped a sister who was taken untimely away, and What are you still doing here, Timothy Wilde? Demanding she wrest clues from marriage certificates? My own failures seemed stacked about me like walls. Was I so desperate for a rope to be thrown down that I expected Delia to solve my mystery for me?

  I shook her hand. And for good measure I kissed her hand. Because I liked her and I’d liked her sister, maybe more than I should have for crime victims I was aiding, if I’m honest, and then I stalked to the door.

  When I’d reached it, I thought of Mercy as last I’d seen her. Before she’d left me and then swiftly learned that the deep waters of a boundless sea can seem one’s friends if one is wracked enough, and suddenly I couldn’t bear to leave the room. Mercy had been drained, grief-sick. Beautiful. She’d been my whole world, and she’d stood there and let me send her away, she’d thought that better, the wiser route, she’d taken my offer of help and watched me turn from her, she’d gazed at my back as I retreated and she’d gone to London, and in the ugliest hours of fitful nights, that makes me angry enough to want to stab something.

  “Is this the only way for it to end?” I asked.

  Something shifted in Delia’s throat. Then she tilted her shoulders at me. The cautious, self-measuring shake back and forth to loosen the muscles before a boxer enters the ring. I ought to have recognized it.

  “How dare you ask me that?” was all she said.

  It should have been enough. That tone would have frozen me solid, had I not already been hot enough under the collar to barge in where I wasn’t desired or—in fact—effectual.

  “You can ask anything of George Higgins,” I told her, knowing myself a fool even as I said it. “He wants you to. It’s none of my business, but—Miss Wright, he doesn’t want to give you money. He wants to give you everything.”

  “How can I request that of him?” she cried, half-closed fist working at the base of her slender throat. “Here he has wealth and stature. Here he has a claim. Here, in New York. A life of his own, a place. I won’t ask him to abandon it.”

  “You do love him,” I realized. “How can you not understand that you’re what he wants?”