Seven for a Secret

by Lyndsay Faye

“I think I’m the boss of Ward Eight.” Valentine, I realized, never looked at Pocket Watch, but divided his attention between Pince-Nez and Scarred Nose. “I think I’m the flashest goddamn boss of Ward Eight ever to breathe, and I think one of you is up for reelection as our alderman come spring. There are more starving Paddies than you can beat with a stick washing up every day. Thousands of them—more than any man could count. And I’m the cull who feeds them, finds them a steady graft and a ken with a roof, flashes his ivories at their snot-faced kinchin, and they worship me. They’d jump in the river on my say-so, and you think I’ll tell them how fond of you I am if you go through with this? I have slaved for this Party every day since I was sixteen years old. Doing ace work. And for what? To have my kin stolen from a fund-raiser and trussed up like a chicken? Last week I was in Albany, and there are Democrats there who’d break a cove’s skull if he so much as looked at me cutty-eyed. You do not want me peppery at you. Timothy Wilde is off the table. Permanently. Give me back my fucking brother before I lose my temper.”

  Pocket Watch’s chest heaved with fury at the end of this speech. Pince-Nez’s eyes had gone glacial, half homicide and half intelligent calculation. As for Scarred Nose, he looked to be battling a smile.

  “I begin to fear,” Pince-Nez said slowly, “that you are as intractable as your sibling, Captain Wilde. Are you willing to face the consequences?”

  “Get the hell out of here, Val.” God help me, it wouldn’t stay in any longer.

  Valentine stood, resting his stick against the chair. The cigar stump he tossed into the fireplace. Pulling out a pocketknife, he approached my chair and began sawing at ropes. The hemp was so tightly fastened that it snapped readily, audibly. The three Tammany men watched him. Pince-Nez aloof, Pocket Watch livid, and Scarred Nose allowing himself a rueful grin. Blood rushed back into my fingertips. It hurt.

  But then, there wasn’t much of me that wasn’t hurting by that time.

  “You need me,” my brother told them. “You haven’t even dreamed up all the ways you need me yet. Am I right?”

  Scarred Nose tilted his head. “I think very possibly you are.”

  “Bully. We can palaver over some new ones, then. Offer me a drink, for Christ’s sake, it makes for better conversation.”

  Laughing openly, Scarred Nose reached for a decanter and poured a glass.

  My brother hauled me up by one arm and dragged my none-too-steady carcass to the door. Throwing it wide, he said, “Go out through the front, I’ve left it unlocked.”

  He launched me through the opening as if firing me from a rifle. Predictably enough, I fell. Seconds later, the lock slid into place behind me.

  And I was alone.

  • • •

  Thanks to the chloroform, the head injury, and the ebbing panic, I lay stunned for some few seconds. Unsupported, I felt faint. The hallway I’d landed in had a waxed floor, and the building’s lights were out. Those were the two facts I managed to absorb as I lay there, debating whether Val’s odds were better if I left as he’d instructed or if I started up flinging myself against the locked door.

  My instinct was to put my shoulder to it until they let me back inside. Since that was my instinct, I reasoned, it was probably a bad idea.

  You have been remarkably useless, and he’s gotten you out of their sight. Do not ruin it.

  You ruin so very many things.

  Through my semi-conscious haze, I recalled that Neither Here Nor There was presently under siege. Shoving my hands against the floor, I pushed myself viciously upward.

  As I crept along the wall, sentences drifted at random through my rearranged brains. One of them recurred, though. A sentiment I’d not examined with near thorough enough care.

  Silkie Marsh leaked it … I’d like to savvy how she knew, but that’s another matter.

  So I thought about that question. Since my visit to the Greene Street brothel, I’d been aware that Madam Marsh knew where Lucy died, but so much had been at stake since, I’d failed to dwell on a frankly bizarre instance of omniscience. My assumption had been that the murderer had told her—acted at her behest and reported back. But that line of thinking had gotten me nowhere.

  Was another explanation possible?

  I pushed through a door, dizzy and lost, and found myself in a deserted restaurant, pale starlight edging the windows. I’d never been to Tammany Hall, but it’s a popular gathering place, where concerts and lectures and Punch and Judy shows are held as well as political rallies. The ceiling loomed high above me, chandeliers hanging like nocturnal predators. Quick as I could, I picked my way past the potted ferns and the upside-down chairs.

  I was midway across the room when one possible theory explaining Silkie Marsh’s strange prescience occurred to me, and I nearly set the whole place crashing down like a row of dominoes when I walked into a table.

  “No,” I said out loud, gripping the edge. To steady it or myself, I couldn’t guess. “No, that isn’t right.”

  All the air seemed to have left the room. There were stars behind my eyes again, the chamber lurching in sickly spins and contortions like an asylum inmate caught up in an ecstatic dance.

  Because I’d just recalled something else.

  You’re what he wants, I’d said to Delia Wright regarding George Higgins. Though I shouldn’t have, for it was none of my affair.

  George wants a figment of his imagination, she’d answered.

  Telling me, as usual, far more than the speaker intended for me to know.

  Memories flooded back to me. Of speaking with every relevant party I could muster and wrongly supposing they’d told me nothing useful. Of reasons people kill and die and which are the strongest. The simplest. Of waking up time after time from dreams of magnolias with an uneasy feeling I didn’t understand. Of asking Silkie Marsh, face to face, whether Lucy’s name had been Wright or Adams.

  That question is impossible to answer.

  Screwing my eyes shut, I pictured the seven free blacks whose lives had needled and pierced and threaded into my own—the three Committee men, Lucy and her son and her sister, and Jean-Baptiste—and with a faint surge of hysteria it occurred to me that antique omens about sighting blackbirds ought not, could not, be trusted. Particularly when we were speaking of people. Not ravens on the wing at all.

  And yet, in this particular case, I could have worked it all out from a nursery rhyme. Were I a different man. A mad one.

  Seven for a secret, never to be told.

  “It isn’t real,” I whispered. “None of this is real. It was all a lie.”

  Charging for the door, I found it unlocked as Val had said it would be. The man clearly possesses a great many keys. I plunged into the intersection of Nassau and Frankfort that faces diseased City Hall Park at an angle, touching Chatham Street. Desperate for a hack. I could tell it was nearly dawn, for a milkman with a wagon full of jugs was drawing water from a nearby Croton pump to lengthen his profits, topping off the milk and the cream. Approaching five in the morning, then.

  I was only late for my appointment by half an hour.

  Perhaps there was still time.

  She’s with God now, if sooner than she should be, Julius had told Delia.

  Is she? the sister had replied in a voice like her own spectre’s.

  “Stupid, stupid,” I whispered as I ran.

  Finding a hack proved simple enough, and within a quarter hour I was in Chelsea, the stars fading above me as the night began to wash away, facing the doorway of Neither Here Nor There.

  It was open.

  I went in, my footsteps far too loud. The silence—God, that silence. It was suffocating.

  Hesitant, I stopped in the hall.

  “Mrs. Higgins?”

  No one answered me.

  “Is anyone here?”

  The quiet wrapped itself around me, from head to foot like a white winding sheet, over my nose and my mouth and my ears. Freezing me in place.

  I thought a cry sounded from a distance.
But it was so faint the direction couldn’t be determined, nor if it was simply the soft mewling of the cat. Unable to bear the stillness any longer, I raced through the parlor, through the museum, and down the secret stairs into the hidden Railroad station.

  As with much of the rest of this investigation, I never made a police report about what I found below.

  But it was important, so very important, the story, what happened and why, more important to me than I can begin to convey, because I don’t have a great many confidants to my name. One of them, and one of the brightest and the bravest men with whom I’ve ever shared company, was born a free black in New York City and christened Julius Carpenter. He wasn’t like a brother to me, because Christ knows how terribly complicated I find that particular simile, but he was something I’d needed nearly as much—he was my friend. From the day I met him, he was effortlessly kind, the sort of person who makes you less alone in the world without leveling demands or challenges, who is so at home within himself he needn’t question why or whether you’re fond of each other. He was once ordered to give up his name, and he refused. I’ll never forget that.

  Julius Carpenter died in the early morning on the first of March, 1846. He was felled by a gunshot wound to the chest, and I discovered him still warm on the floor of the subterranean sitting room.

  Ten feet away lay the equally lifeless corpse of Seixas Varker, whose head had been smashed in with a nearby poker.

  Long Luke Coles was slumped with gangly arms askew against the far wall, a bullet hole in his head.

  Delia sat very still in the middle of the carpet, surveying her surroundings. The gun she held was a Colt revolver, and it had belonged in life to Varker. I’d once stolen it and then given it back.

  “I told you I’d kill them if they touched Jonas,” she said when she looked up at me.

  I slumped to my knees on the rug before her. Too horror-struck to answer, at least at first. Anyhow, speaking with her was problematic for another reason entirely.

  I didn’t even know her name.

  twenty-four

  Another woman, to save her children, who would all have been doomed to slavery, if her claims to freedom had been rejected, precipitated herself from the top of a house, where she was confined, and was so dreadfully mutilated and mangled that she was suffered to escape, because she was no longer fit for sale. There was no doubt that she was a free woman; but she knew a whole family of young slaves was too valuable a property not to turn the scale against her.

  —E. S. ABDY, JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE AND TOUR IN THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA, FROM APRIL 1833 TO OCTOBER 1834

  At first the ticking of the clock was the only sound. I listened. Just breathing, my hands on my legs as I knelt on the carpet. Seeing the gun. Seeing Julius in my periphery. Surrounded by death, though only one that I’d grieve over.

  I reached for the sofa, leaning, and I pulled a cloth from its arm. Coles and Varker could be sprawled like so many slaughtered chickens, but not Julius. Carefully draping the lace over his features, I pressed his hand for a moment. It was still warm, still pliant. Just no longer him.

  When I had to speak or go mad, I posed the question.

  “Will you tell me who you are?”

  All the blood had drained from Delia’s warm complexion, leaving her grey. Drawing her fingers over the gun she held limply in her lap, she gave me the briefest of glances.

  “Varker and Coles gave me away to the Committee just now. But however did you find out?”

  “It was Mr. Timpson, partly.” My tongue felt clumsy, overlarge. “He told me about a wedding Lucy had worked on—magnolia centerpieces, gardenias in the bride’s hair. It was a Southern wedding he was describing, where such things grow. He even mentioned a memory of Lucy’s, running through fields of coneflowers when she was a little girl. Though he didn’t know it, he was painting a picture of the South. Where?”

  “North Carolina,” she whispered.

  Closing my eyes, I nodded.

  Silkie Marsh hadn’t said it was impossible to answer whether Lucy’s name was Wright or Adams because she didn’t know if the marriage was legal—Lucy Wright never existed. I thought about Long Luke whining to us weeks before that the women were escaped slaves and realized that, if I’d listened to the right party, I could have known the truth all along. I’d been charging into battle with flaming sword held high, assuming all the righteous anger of the law was on my side when, in fact, I was classed with cracksmen and sneakthieves.

  “We didn’t realize until I was fourteen and my sister sixteen, you know.” Her voice was as lifeless as the gun in her hand.

  “Realize what?”

  “That we were slaves, of course.”

  I stared back at her, mute. The woman I knew as Delia Wright was fine-boned and lovely, as lovely as Lucy had been. Her pear-shaped brown eyes with the gay freckles surrounding them were clear, her hand quite steady. I thought about Bird Daly suddenly, and what she’d said to me about returning to brothel work.

  There’s nothing I’d not do to keep from going back there… . I’d die sooner. I’d do terrible things, Mr. Wilde.

  “Is Jonas all right?”

  I went to sit before her, seeing the room as if from a great distance. As if I were viewing a Herald sketch of a crime I’d never set eyes on. As if it weren’t my life at all.

  “He’s in an upper bedroom with Mrs. Higgins. She’s trying to settle him.”

  “Where’s George?”

  “George went for help,” she said. Then, tears spilling onto her cheeks unheeded as she glanced at Julius, she added, “They grew up together. George isn’t well.”

  “I’ll listen if it helps. If it’s useful. Not otherwise.”

  Delia’s face twisted in surprise. Finally, she pulled her knees into her chest, resting her chin on them.

  She looked very young just then. In the way that Bird had once looked very young and endlessly sad. Sadder than health and youth ought to allow.

  “Our father was a wealthy white doctor in a small town. The coneflower field was part of his property. I used to run through it too.”

  I nodded. Recalling when Greenwich Village was a village and my parents alive and how I’d run through switchgrass by the river. Run for no reason at all.

  “He hadn’t many slaves,” she said, frowning, “and we lived in the house with the doctor and my mother. We’d lessons, though not at the school—he hired a private tutor from Philadelphia.”

  “I did wonder about your accents.”

  “Did you? My father studied medicine in the North. Much of our time was spent at our lessons, and our father appreciated that we spoke so well. Differently from our friends among the slave children. We’d no idea we were just like them. My mother was a quarter African … the doctor called her darling and us his little sweethearts. Then another doctor arrived in town. One with, as it’s said, airs and graces. He laughed at my father for living with a black mistress, mocked him relentlessly among their colleagues and began stealing his patients, and my father decided to take a white wife instead to save his practice. He was bettering himself, I suppose.”

  To say I am as ignorant of the realities of slavery as I am regarding the realities of New York City politics would be a bald lie. Mercy and her late father the Reverend Underhill had kept me well informed. They’d told me repulsive things. Things I’d wanted to pluck gently from Mercy’s whimsical mind as if removing a worm from an apple. So I’d heard tales of unspeakable cruelty.

  I wasn’t inured to such stories, however. On the contrary.

  “He also decided that he needed improved furnishings,” Delia continued. “Doctors ought to maintain a certain standard. So he sold my mother to a man traveling home to Missouri and my sister to a neighboring plantation, and I was put to work with his other house slaves. I often saw my sister, when she could manage time away. If I hadn’t, I think we’d both have gone mad.”

  “Lucy was also a house slave, I take it.” Regardless of her true
name, she would always be Lucy to me. “She arranged flowers and helped with banquets and celebrations.”

  “All the vases and arrangements fell under her care eventually. She’d always been clever with flowers. She loved them.”

  “If I could kill the son of a bitch who carved words into your sister, I wager I’d do it,” I swore under my breath.

  Wherever Delia’s mind had been, I’d jarred it badly. She started, lifting her chin from her knees.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Those words.” As many as I love I rebuke and chasten, be zealous therefore and repent. “The man who punished her by carving a Bible verse into her chest ought to be shot like a dog.”

  Delia laughed suddenly. It was such an incongruous sound in that room, she might as well have fired the revolver. When she kept laughing, she tried to stop, covering her mouth with her hand. Eyes shining with fright at the unnatural peals of mirth fighting to escape.

  “I’m sorry,” she said a moment later. “No man carved that message into my sister’s skin. She did it on her own with a dirty piece of metal. She was so beautiful, you see.”

  Delia’s words came clearly. Marched straight as foot soldiers who no longer fear death as they did once. If I live to be a hundred, and God knows that isn’t going to happen, I’ll never erase the image of her giving me the key to a riddle I’d never had any right to try to solve.

  “Everyone on that plantation wanted a piece of her, of something beautiful. Everyone wanted her, and a great many of the men in the house took what they wanted. She said that they wouldn’t look her in the eye when it happened, and they wouldn’t speak to her either, her masters, and so she left a message where they couldn’t miss it. I think when they sold the children their violence inevitably produced, she lost her mind a little. I’ve two nieces and another nephew, all auctioned while she lived in that hell. I’ll never see them again.”

  My throat worked, but no sound emerged. Nothing visible about me changed that day. I was the same scarred copper star at the end as the beginning, for all I’d seen and heard. But almost without meaning to, I made a decision.

  If a war was required to end such stories, then I wanted a war.