Seven for a Secret

by Lyndsay Faye

  “So you won’t tell me how you’re getting on?” she cooed.

  “Badly. You know as much.”

  “Well, never fear, Mr. Wilde.” She touched my hand, and it shot a slick eel from my neck to my toes. “Doubtless your investigation won’t last much longer.”

  She was gone an instant later. Leaving me with the eerie sensation that I already knew she was right.

  You’re missing something enormous. Something right before your eyes.

  The next twenty or so minutes passed in an unpleasant blur of glad faces, swirling coattails, raucous laughter, and impending doom. Everything was more bearable with a champagne flute at ready service, though I was careful. Delia and Jonas were to depart at dawn, and I was to be there. A protector. A public servant. What the copper stars are supposed to look like, to the best of my admittedly patchy ability.

  Just get them away from here, and as for the rest, come what may …

  “If I’d known you’d look quite so spruce decked in that rigging, I’d have invited you to pass out flyers.”

  Valentine landed on the sofa beside me. Likewise equipped with champagne, happily afloat in his natural Democratic element. The piano player appeared to have taken a short break, but my niche was still pretty snug and situated next to a drinks table. I have my priorities, same as Val.

  “I’d have invited you to sod off,” I replied. Not unkindly.

  Val chuckled, eyes drifting over the room.

  “Matsell hinted I’m still employed.”

  “Of course you are. Steps have been taken.”

  “By you, I suppose.”

  Valentine adjusted his ridiculously expensive avian-themed vest with considerable self-satisfaction.

  “Oh,” I said, handing him the house key that Delia had returned.

  “That’s a relief, I’ve been using my pocketknife all this while. Thank you. Everything else running on oiled tracks?”

  Feeling communicative—miraculously communicative, if I am honest—I shook my head.

  “I’ve had a pair of letters from Mercy. Under mysterious circumstances. The gist of them suggests she’s not … faring well overseas.”

  Val nodded, squinting contemplatively. “She’s a sensitive moll. But she’ll muddle through—iron spine, and all that. Don’t fret overmuch, not from New York. It doesn’t fadge in the geographic scope, you savvy.”

  This seemed sage advice. I considered it accordingly.

  Then I noticed that my sibling wasn’t surprised by the news that Mercy had twice written me. Which I thought odd, since the news was … surprising. At least it was newsworthy.

  “Well, I’d best be off,” he sighed. “Hands to shake all round.”

  And then I put two and two together and realized that they spelled Valentine.

  “Oh my God,” I cried, leaping up as he rose to depart.

  Valentine quirked a brow, resting his hands on his hips. “What?”

  “You,” I hissed, pointing furiously. “You’ve been delivering Mercy’s letters. I can’t believe it took me this long to puzzle it through.”

  “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “The fact you’re an infuriating bastard.”

  “Don’t be a nimenog, I’ve no notion what you’re on about. She mailed them to you, didn’t she?”

  “They had no postage! Neither of them. The first had no envelope, for the love of Christ!”

  Val laughed, rubbing a hand over his face. “Really? Bollocks.”

  My expression must have been daunting, for it compelled him to further speech.

  “All right, all right, it was me. She wrote them herself, of course—every word. But she didn’t have your new address, did she, and I’ve lived in Spring Street for years. She figured sending them to you via my ken a neat fix. I’d meant to put them in envelopes and address them to you, deliver them in passing. You’d never have been the wiser, I’m a dab hand at imitating penmanship. What a slubber I am, though, forgetting the postage. Damn. There was plenty of morphine involved the first time, as I recollect it, and the second—”

  The world was awash in red. I would have his blood for this. I would make him pay.

  “That’s why you came to my ken on the morning of the murder,” I realized in awe. “When you called on Mrs. Boehm and I was at the Tombs. You weren’t stopping by, you wanted to see the bloody floor show after I’d heard from her again. Watch me squirm.”

  “What about check all was well?”

  “You mean pick about in my brains. Did you read them?”

  “Of course I read them. Are you daft? Mercy Underhill is your version of religion and here she starts up scribbling you cracked messages from abroad and expecting me to deliver the dross. I’m not any too kittled with her at the moment, come to that, I had half a mind to burn them and be done with it. But read them? Yes, Timothy. I couldn’t very well predict how likely you’d be to take a nap in the East River without reading them.”

  “Spying!” I snapped. “Forgery!”

  “Why in hell are you counting?” he wanted to know, staring at the two fingers I’d just counted off on my left hand.

  “Narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion, sodomy, spying, and forgery,” I spat back. “A nice even dozen now.”

  “Oh.” He smiled, teeth gleaming. “Nacky system you’ve got there. Add lying, I’d no intention of ever telling you. How else could I have kept on reading them? That’ll be a baker’s dozen.”

  “I’m going to murder you right here, in front of the entire police department.” My fists had sunk deep in his lapels by this time, and I gave them a vicious shake.

  “You are adorable,” he said fondly.

  “Fuck you.”

  “If you don’t let go of me, my Tim, I’m going to put your pate in that punch bowl yonder,” he advised. “You don’t want that to happen. Neither do I, come to think of it.”

  He walked away.

  Describing my mental state for the next quarter hour wouldn’t be to any purpose. Suffice it to say that I located a dripping champagne bottle along with my green greatcoat and decided I preferred a river view to an interior one. I found myself sitting on a bench under the stars. Watching both the intoxicated passersby and the waves all smashing mindlessly against one another in the dark. The promenade was cold, and someone had vomited in the snow a few feet from my bench. But it was better than any building my brother occupied. Guests milled about, taking the air or resting on benches gazing out at the bay.

  I’d spent ten minutes planning vengeance when I spied a slim silhouette coming down the walkway. Likewise woolgathering, in a black London-cut suit with a white waistcoat and wearing a rose in the buttonhole of his open greatcoat.

  “Jim?” I called.

  When my brother’s friend spied me, he cautiously approached.

  “Why, Timothy. May I?”

  Seating himself at my behest, his sharply chiseled face softened. “What a surprise. Had I expected you, I should have sought you out. Don’t think me unmannered, I beg.”

  “I hadn’t expected to see you here either. How did you come to be in bed with these scoundrels?”

  The instant I said it, I must have winced, for Jim favored me with an indulgent smile.

  “How, indeed. I work for them. I don’t suppose you had reason to pay especial note to the piano, but—”

  “I did.” I smiled back at him. “It was very good. Not that I’m any judge, but … I liked it. Is that how Val knows you?”

  He nodded shyly, pulling a thin pipe from his coat pocket.

  “Gentle Jim, the Democratic Party’s official pianist,” I mused.

  “Only Val calls me that, actually.”

  “Oh?”

  I waited. He pulled at the pipe. So I leaned my elbows back against the bench and linked my fingers in an easy, attentive posture. Badly in need of a distracting influence. And frightfully curious about the one beside me.

  “Well,” he said a
t length, “I was playing for a group of donors at a private club—I say donors, but I mean brutes, really, Timothy, let us be sincere—and sometime around four in the morning or thereabouts they decided to stage a dogfight.”

  “Ah,” I said. Being helpful.

  “Within minutes they’d procured a half-starved street mutt and one of the guard dogs from the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum wing of New York Hospital. I suggested they let the stray go, or I’d fight them. I was about to have my nose broken when Valentine bet twenty dollars against the stray that he could win it in a billiards game. And there you are. He then teased me over my … refined sensibilities. We restored the creature its freedom to piss all over Broadway an hour later, of course.”

  Morphine and hemp weed, I thought, regarding the night in question. Hemp weed makes Val magnanimous.

  “Timothy?”

  “Sorry. Yes, that sounds like him.”

  “You weren’t wondering how I came to be associated with the Party, however. You would fain know why I’m polluting New York with my presence and not London.”

  “I’d not put it like that.”

  Again I waited, the cold breeze ruffling our hair. He intrigued me severely, and he was going to talk within seconds. It was like watching a tightly wound, ornately detailed clock winding up to the midnight chime.

  Fifty-eight … fifty-nine …

  “I don’t imagine you’ve ever been banished.” Jim assumed a bright, optimistic look that seemed hewn out of marble. “I shouldn’t recommend banishment, Timothy, for all there’s something … oh, I don’t know. Romantic about it.”

  “Romantic?” I repeated, stricken.

  “Shakespearean, perhaps. Charmingly quaint.”

  “It killed the equivalent of ten thousand Tybalts.”

  “It did at that. There you are, then. Very old-fashioned and impracticable, to die over such nonsense.” He pushed his fingers through his dark hair. “Val didn’t tell you about this? No, silly of me, I wouldn’t come up in polite conversation.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. My brother’s conversation is never polite.”

  He laughed sharply. “Granted.” Jim fiddled with the pipe, considering. “My family is an influential one. Cabinet ministers and useless titleholders and the like, trailing most of the alphabet after their names.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Oh.” He looked somewhat discomfited. “James Anthony Carlton Playfair. How d’ye do.”

  I shook his hand again, amused.

  “Are you capable of actually opening this?” He glanced down at the champagne bottle resting between us.

  I had it uncorked within five seconds, with a sharp push and a steady wrist. That being how it’s done. Taking a drink, I handed it over to my companion.

  “God, thank you.” He tilted the bottle at me before taking a swig. “Your servant. Anyhow, there was a gentlemen’s club I’d used to frequent that catered to men of my … persuasion. Beautiful little place, all drawn curtains and tiny pink hothouse roses and finger sandwiches and the latest newspapers. They’d a piano, and I confess myself to having been rather popular among the young rakes. One young rake in particular, a bright-eyed boy with pale curls who bred hounds at his family’s estate. He wasn’t in London often, but on the fourth occasion he visited, we spent twelve days together, and I decided by the end that I could not exist in his absence, that I would shrivel to a rind, et cetera, and that steps would have to be taken. Then I did something quite uncharacteristically stupid, I’m afraid.”

  “What was that?”

  “I told him so. In a letter. What a monumental imbecile I was, you’re thinking. You are thinking it is a miracle I manage to shave of a morning without slicing my head off.”

  “I’m thinking you’re a man who wrote a love letter,” I answered quietly.

  “Apparently his valet was in the habit of reading his mail. Typical story, quite a dull one, really. The valet rudely demanded a meeting and then rudely demanded a great deal of money. I politely invited him to go to hell, not believing the coward would have the bollocks to make good his threat. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Father threw me out on my arse with a ticket for a steerage berth on a ship bound for America and three hundred pounds. When I arrived, I bought a piano so as to give private lessons. Soon after, I was hired to play at a Democratic Party meeting and that proved rather more lucrative. As for my family, I haven’t spoken to any of them since, though I’ve been writing for two years now. I miss my mother and sister rather dreadfully,” he added in a polished-brass voice that failed to mask the bleakness beneath. “But this is the sort of life men lead when they have once been very stupid.”

  “Not deservedly.”

  “I was terribly lucky, actually,” he corrected me. “Buggery is a capital offense in London. I’d hardly have been the first molley strung up by the neck and sent to hell that much faster. Oh, I beg your pardon.”

  “No, it’s not you.” I shook my head, echoes of London, London, London pounding inside of it. “It’s just … the more I know of the world, the less I like it.”

  “Ah.” Jim’s clever blue eyes studied my features, looking for I knew not what. “Forgive me, but which … element met with your disapproval? Christ, what a rotter you must think me. I’ve really no wish to offend you, and—”

  “You haven’t,” I insisted. “I’d simply not have wished to see you hanged.”

  Gentle Jim, or James Playfair as I could now name him, froze and then released a small exhalation. Thanks or relief I couldn’t say, though I believe something of each was at work. It was rudely unsettling. Realization dawned that a fellow who apparently bore lifelong banishment with grace and philosophy would have been unsurprised if I’d spit in his eye. Jim gave me a well-bred nod, and I saw him as he must have looked gliding about Westminster, a Vivaldi tune pursing his lips into a breezy whistle.

  “Timothy, is that why you work as a copper star? Because the world runs helter-skelter?”

  “That’s to do with poverty and owning a fractional face.”

  “No, that’s why you became a copper star. That isn’t the same thing at all.”

  The objection was mildly stated, I grant. But mildly stated by a chap who could have leapt out of an illustration advertising milled soap. It was all I could do not to take him by his perfectly hewn chin and shove my face into his and force him to comprehend me.

  “For God’s sake, you of all people haven’t the slightest idea what looking like this feels like,” I grated out. “Everything—work, women, all of it—has to do with my finances and my looking like a marauding barbarian.”

  Jim began to chuckle heartily. I’m endeared to the man for a number of reasons. But being snickered at by a fine-featured sophisticate during a conversation about severe fire scarring is plenty mortifying.

  “Do you truly suppose that scar renders you at all unpalatable?”

  “I don’t suppose it, I know it.”

  “Oh, if you know it, I shan’t trouble you further,” he said airily. “Know it. How silly of me. But I wonder why the girl exploring the grounds just now, the one with the obscenely large brown eyes, was studying you so assiduously before she departed with her chaperone? Perhaps you reminded her of her dear departed brother lost at sea or some such coincidence. No matter. Do you see that fellow in the grotesquely fashionable orange breeches? He’s a molley by the name of Augustus Westerfield, runs an insurance concern. Just over there, on the bench?”

  I glanced in the indicated direction to discover a pair of eyes staring directly back into mine. I blinked. And then returned my attention to James Playfair with all speed.

  “Poor Auggie, such a lonesome boy. I suppose you remind him of his dear departed brother lost at sea too,” Jim sang teasingly.

  “Evening, gents.”

  My head shot upward in startlement.

  Directly before us, wearing ordinary street togs with copper stars pinned to their jackets, false smiles pinned likewise to their faces, stoo
d McDivitt and Beardsley. Beardsley looked pleased from his blushing baby cheeks down to his muddied boots, and McDivitt’s black-Irish glare blazed forth in perfect counterpoint. His copper star was new. Of course it was—Julius had stolen the other, and I’d left it in the mud where it belonged.

  I slowly stood, sensing Jim rise behind me. But he wasn’t involved in my troubles. And so that needed fixing.

  “Jim, go back inside,” I said.

  “Do you know these men?” I felt Jim shift closer. “But of course, they’re your colleagues.”

  McDivitt shifted the tone of the conversation when he caught Jim by the arm and yanked him bodily forward. I didn’t require Val’s friend to tell me verbally he’d just discovered a knife blade was tracing his ribs. There’s a pinched look of terror about the eyelids, a small gasp as the point registers.

  “Let go of me at once. What the devil do you mean by it?”

  They ignored him. I thought about apologizing but decided to spend my energies saving his hide instead. Supposing I could manage it.

  “Your pal stays,” Beardsley informed me, puffy cheeks glowing. “For now. Let’s walk to shore.”

  Hanging back, I nodded.

  “And wouldn’t that make for a fine time, you trailin’ along after. You’re going first, Mr. Wilde,” McDivitt snapped, jutting his chin, “and don’t think I’ll not loosen this fellow’s kidneys from their moorings.”

  As I returned to Manhattan along the ridiculous carpeting, followed by Beardsley and McDivitt and a silent James Playfair, I adopted and discarded a number of plans. But when we’d reached the darkness of the area abutting the bridge entrance, I realized I’d been played doubly for a fool. A hacksman with a chestnut mare glanced up at our footsteps. As if he’d been paid to wait.

  “You saw the man. Quick march,” Beardsley ordered.

  Knowing that if either myself or James were placed in that carriage, our odds of survival would drastically lower, I spun abruptly on my heels instead.

  By the time I’d turned, the knife in McDivitt’s calloused hand had shifted from Jim’s back to his throat.