by Lyndsay Faye
“Something happened to alter everything. You were sold, weren’t you? And to the same plantation?” I reasoned when I could speak.
She sighed. “My father decided a new horse and buggy were also required. Yes.”
“How soon afterward did you leave that place with Lucy and Jonas?”
“I was an unbroken nuisance, my sister unbalanced, and Jonas valuable. We were given to a broker after barely a fortnight, to be auctioned in the Capital.”
“And how did you escape?”
“My sister saved us. She was very brave, or … I thought she was. She didn’t know that she was, she thought herself a coward, but— I’m sorry. Wasn’t she brave, though? Wasn’t she?”
Delia wept into her sleeve for several moments before I reached out and touched her wrist. It was a tiny, inadequate gesture. But I feared offering more. When she looked up again, shoulders shaking, she took my hand.
“She was braver than I’ll ever be,” I told her.
The rest of the tale was simple. The slave brokers entrusted with the women and child were crude, underhanded men. They were en route to a District of Columbia slave pen to auction the family and return to the plantation with the money, pocketing a percentage as a fee, when Lucy had spied Rutherford Gates riding in the same direction. Though she was near to the breaking point and chained in the back of an uncovered wagon, she had seen something in his eyes. A sympathy, perhaps. Perhaps a weakness. In any case, she had screamed to Gates that the three travelers were kidnapped free blacks from Albany and not slaves at all. She had begged him for help.
And to her shock, he had actually believed her.
“The look in his eyes,” Delia remembered. “As if he’d been given a sacred mission. I’ll never forget it. When he threatened to drag the slave agents to the nearest magistrate, they hatched a scheme. They explained—always in sideways language, dropped hints—that magistrates were very busy people. That witnesses would have to be called, that weeks would pass and everyone the worse for it, since the three of us would be forced to pay for food all the while we awaited adjudication—that’s the law in the Capital, and naturally we hadn’t a cent. The brokers were right, meanwhile, and so Charles—Gates—took out his purse and paid them two hundred dollars for the three of us.”
“As a bribe larger than the commission they’d have earned delivering you,” I clarified. “Not as payment for property.”
“Precisely.”
We fell briefly silent. There wasn’t much remaining I didn’t know. But that didn’t mean I was overeager to reach the conclusion.
“We stayed in his house in West Broadway for three months, living out the story we’d told him, writing letters to imaginary kin in Albany,” Delia recalled. “Shushing Jonas whenever he spoke of the plantation. I honestly don’t think he remembers it any longer. At first we were terrified and grateful in equal measure, but Gates was kind to us, and seemed … I still can’t believe he never cared for my sister. It’s monstrous. In any case, he proposed, and she liked him very much by that time. I think no less she reasoned it would be … sensible … to be married. To have her new name on another official record.”
Gates had arranged for them all to be given new free papers, doubtless through the Party, having been told that the kidnappers destroyed their Albany documents. Lucy agreed to marry him in Massachusetts, and the family had traveled across Connecticut and celebrated with a small ceremony at an abolitionist church in the rolling countryside. Upon returning to Manhattan, Delia and Lucy had joined the Abyssinian Church, where Delia taught and Jonas learned alongside other colored youth, and they had been reasonably safe. Contented, though Lucy still suffered attacks of nameless, overwhelming fear.
Then Lucy found work at Timpson’s Superior Blooms, Gates departed on one of his journeys, and all fell to pieces.
“Varker and Coles were engaged to get rid of your sister,” I said to Delia. She was gripping my hand in a frenzied clench. “One black woman and her child, residing at Eighty-four West Broadway. They mistook you for her.”
She nodded. I passed her a far better handkerchief than I’d any right to own, which I’d discovered inside the costly jacket, and she pressed it into her eyes.
The next subject was nigh impossible for me to broach. Not due to my white Northerner notions of abolitionism, and not due to my great regard for the quietly weeping woman before me. Not even due to my guilt over having witnessed a tragedy unfolding whilst unable to halt the inevitable climax—indeed, having led the wolves straight to their door. The problem was more personal.
I know what it’s like to have a sibling. And sympathy was burrowing a tunnel right through my ribs.
“Your sister sent you away with Jonas on the pretense of getting your free papers.” I stopped, eyes burning, then forced myself to go on. “When you returned to Val’s apartment alone, Lucy had left you … instructions, I take it?”
The shudder that passed through Delia’s body could have broken her back, had she been a different sort of woman. But Delia was formidable. Deadly. And she’d done precisely what she’d had to do in order to save her nephew.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I never meant your brother any harm. Not after he was so unaccountably good to us. Lucy’s note was quite clear. I didn’t understand a syllable of it, but I obeyed. I don’t think I want to understand it. I only knew she had done it for us.”
She pushed her fingers into a pocket of her day dress and passed me a short letter. The writing was palsied, very difficult to read. But read it I did.
Dearest sister,
I pray that this reaches your hands. All is not yet lost. But we are set upon from every direction—last night I was told just how dire our situation has become. I am in the thick darkness now, but recall that where dark is thickest, there is our Lord best felt. When you find me, I will have gone home. Dwell on my release from the shadows that plague us, and be at peace. I love you, and I love Jonas, beyond your comprehending.
Follow my instructions to the letter, I charge by all we have endured together: it must appear that I am the victim of a violent brute. Make it look so in haste. Do this for me and for Jonas. It is your part in the bargain I have made. Set the scene as for a murder and you will both live. I know not why this must be, but trust that I believe in the messenger, and do as I tell you one last time.
Then run, my darling girl. Run and never look back.
I thought about Mercy’s second letter to me. Mercy, who had always known an unaccountably great deal about human nature.
Death ought to mean something, as lives do. Mine will.
“Lucy hanged herself while you were out, and you took her down.” I passed Delia back the note I’d refolded. “You would need to have cut the rope, I imagine, and you used the knife I found sitting on the counter. Did you dispose of the rope later, on your way out?”
Delia nodded, looking me clear in the eye.
“Your sister told you to make it look like a violent brute had attacked her—so you removed her clothing and arranged Val’s dressing-gown tie to look like the murder weapon. You turned over a table and smashed a decanter and pulled down a painting, none of it very systematic. You were too grieved to do it other than quickly, then run for safety. But you trusted her. So you obeyed.”
She added a second hand to the one clasped in mine. Peering at me through long wet lashes, she shook her head in disbelief. “Captain Wilde could have hanged as surely as she did. I want you to know it’s been a terrible weight on me. I can’t think who could want such a thing or why.”
I knew why. But it was a terribly long story.
Footsteps fell in the room beyond. I whisked the gun from her lap, pivoting. But the woman I’d known as Delia Wright had no real need of me. George Higgins came through the door. His eyes were a wreck, his mouth pulled downward as if recovering from a stroke. The carefully sculpted man looked quite lost. Adrift on a sunless sea.
“Help is coming,” he told Delia. “Timothy.” H
e hesitated. “God help us, I realize you’re a copper star. But in light of—”
“I was never here.” Rising fully, I rested the gun on the table. “What steps are being taken?”
“My mother has resources. Many others have died here, of various ailments. Only not … in this fashion. It’s the river for Varker and Coles. We’ll bury Julius at the Abyssinian Church with no one the wiser.”
A spasm passed over Higgins’s face—violent, inexpressibly grieved.
“Tell me,” I said.
“We’d just arrived to take them to the carriage,” he answered. “Varker and Coles burst in on us. They were very full of themselves—swaggering, making boastful speeches. They said you were in the Party’s hands, Timothy, and likely already killed. We were frightened for you—when I think of the look on Julius’s face. Are you all right? There’s blood at the back of your head.”
I couldn’t care, not when my friend’s was forming a small lake in the carpet. Not when Julius and I wouldn’t be worrying over each other any longer.
“Please, go on.”
“We were ready to fight them, but no one had yet moved. Jonas was crying, and Varker lifted a hand to slap some silence into him. Julius stepped in front of the boy as a shield. Not aggressively, just—decisively. That yellow-hearted coward started like a hare and then shot him. Just shot him point-blank, in the chest.”
That was as I’d imagined. But none of it was quite bearable. I was near to undone, living only in the silent spaces between heartbeats that chanted Your doing, your doing, all yours, your—
“Was it long?” I asked, trying to breathe slower. “Before Julius—”
“No, not long,” Delia answered swiftly.
“It was over seconds later.” Higgins wiped a hand across his haggard brow. Sweat stood out at his temples, and I could see the blue veins in his dark skin quivering with rage. “Varker hardly knew what he had done. He’d the gun aimed at me an instant later, and this … this young lady lifted the poker in my defense. Varker fell like a stone. She’d snatched up his revolver and turned it on Coles before—”
“Before you could stop me?” she demanded.
Higgins studied her, curled into herself there on the floor. Her polished-oak curls, her eyes blazing through her tears. After choosing words reverently as talismans, he went to the woman who’d called herself Delia and knelt before her. Her lips parted. She hadn’t looked terrified when I’d walked into a bloodbath partly of her making.
She looked terrified now.
“Before I could shoot him for you,” Higgins said. “I’d have spared you that, if I could. I’ve a friend upstairs called Jean-Baptiste, I’ve just fetched him and … we’re leaving New York. I can’t stay here any longer. This city is like an illness that seeps in through your skin. I’ll see you and Jonas to Toronto, and after that, you need have nothing further to do with me. I’ll find my own way. I know you supposed that I’d turn my nose up at you if I learned where you came from. I understand why you imagined so, what with all my peacocking, how dandified and pretentious you must have thought me. Bragging about my education, my work, my plans. Bragging about money. I’d thought to impress you, and you thought me an arrogant fool of no constancy or substance. That was my fault. You were wrong, though. Mistaken.”
“How exactly was I mistaken?” she whispered.
George Higgins smiled sadly and shook his head.
“I’d follow you to the edge of the world if you asked me,” he told her. “I love you. I only wish I knew your name.”
• • •
The carriage that departed from the alleyway behind Neither Here Nor There that dawn contained Jean-Baptiste, who’d signed on for the adventure with enthusiasm; Lucy’s son Jonas, whose name I never doubted was real, as it’s impossible to teach a kinchin a new moniker instantaneously; George Higgins, after he and I had seen Julius shrouded and delivered into the shaking hands of Reverend Brown; and a woman whose name I’d no right to ask.
And so I never learned it.
I hope, though, that George Higgins learned it. Hours or weeks or minutes later. I hope that very much.
When the others were safe in the vehicle behind drawn curtains, it proved weirdly difficult to let him go. He stood there finishing a thin cigar while I stared at alley muck, both wondering what to say to each other. As if we’d snagged hooks in each other’s skin and feared tugging at them. Maybe that’s because I respected him and wished him well. Maybe it was because we’d just spent a quiet minute staring into the same waxen face as it grew ever colder, standing on either side of our fallen friend. And that can make you need a person. Someone who’s seen a portion of your mental map—knows where the rapids and the plummeting moss-edged wells are.
I felt as if, when George Higgins departed, Julius would be dead. And I wasn’t doing a man’s job at facing that.
“You’ll write us when you’re safely to Toronto?” I asked when he threw the stub to the ground.
“Of course.” He reached for my hand, and I took it. “I’d not even object if you wrote back. Will you?”
“If you want me to. Though I’d make a paltry substitute for hearing from Julius. He was the best of us, I suspect.”
“I suspect you’re right.” Clearing his throat, he added, “We’ll just have to trust to his sound judgment that he tolerated misfits like you and me for a reason, eh?”
It grew useless to even attempt speech about then. So I swallowed, and he stepped toward the carriage.
“Good-bye, Timothy. By the way, I mean to write my housekeeper that you can have your pick of my library.”
Clearly, I’d misunderstood. Chloroform and a gash that likely resembled a traffic accident had quashed what little was left of my faculties. It only remained to check myself into an asylum and have done.
“You—but—why?” I stammered.
He smiled, dark eyes gentling. “Because you were staring at my books as if you were looking at a vault full of bullion. They’ll be cumbersome and difficult to ship and worth little enough. They aren’t rare or even old. I’ll simply buy new ones.”
“But I can’t—”
“Are you going to be dense about this?” he asked pointedly.
It was, as usual, a fair question.
“No,” I said. “Thank you. It means a great deal to me.”
When Higgins opened the carriage door, he cast another, shrewder look back in my direction. Pulling his fingertips down his clipped beard, he paused.
“I don’t get the impression that you let go of things easily. Timothy, are you about to do something dangerous?”
He sounded concerned. I was more than a little touched. But the smile I attempted must have been a death’s mask variety, if his sudden look of dismay was any judge.
“Good-bye, George,” I said, turning to go. “Be well.”
After several lingering seconds, I heard the carriage pull away. I didn’t look back. Looking back, as Lot’s wife learned, can prove unhealthy. I know my new friend wanted to stop me. That he even considered it. But I’d put fleeing to Canada with two kinchin and the woman I love pretty high toward the top of the list myself, and he felt likewise. So he let me go.
That’s how it happens that, about half an hour later—and even dressed as if I belonged there—I paid a call at the Astor House.
twenty-five
If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE, 1845
I’m usually fairly sharp at recalling trivia. When I didn’t remember Rutherford Gates’s room number—possibly because it seemed someone had taken a flaking rust-orange railroad spike and driven it through my neck and into my brain—I was vexed at first. Then I loo
ked down, recalled what I was wearing, and loftily demanded his room number from the desk clerk, citing secret Party affairs.
Within five minutes, I stood outside his door.
If someone had asked me why I was determined to speak with Gates, I’d not have managed a sensible answer just then. But I’d been given a panorama, a mural of stories leading one into the other. In short, I suspect I wanted to see Rutherford Gates because of his sister, Leticia.
She had said, It frightened me so, the sight of his tiny hand swollen into a ghastly red paw… . Rutherford had his way after he recovered, of course. That dog was his inseparable companion until he departed for university.
I’d a question to pose on that subject: I wanted to know the dog’s whereabouts. And I meant to have the answer.
The railroad spike drove a bit farther into my head with every step I took. I tested the door. He hadn’t locked it, so I stepped inside.
Astor House living quarters happen to be as splendid as we’re all led to believe. My boots sank into a Turkish carpet, and the morning sunlight nosed its way into soft folds of mossy curtains. I entered a parlor—nothing like the Millingtons’ showy monstrosity, but carefully decorated with patterned paper and soft blue furnishings—and discovered my quarry.
Gates sat in an armchair, smoking. The man who’d once struck me as healthy-complexioned had been coated in the fine silt of grief and fear. The silvering goatee remained waxed, the brown hair combed, the spectacles neatly placed on his nose. He didn’t give a good goddamn that was the case anymore, though. If not for force of habit, I don’t think he’d have donned a waistcoat and attended the Castle Garden soiree at all. He’d been out all night, for he hadn’t changed clothing, and his brown eyes stared through a misty wall of regret and champagne at me.
“Mr. Wilde. To what do I owe this surprise?”
“Pretend to me that it’s a surprise and I’ll fight you here and now in this hotel room.”
I meant it wholeheartedly, but that didn’t stir Gates much. He gestured to a chair opposite. I ignored him. If I sat down, I didn’t like my odds of getting up again.
