Seven for a Secret

by Lyndsay Faye

  “Do you want to explain to me how you accidentally arranged to have your wife murdered?” I asked him. “And don’t tell me the Party found out you’d married an African by chance, and this was all their doing. You knew those women to be slaves. And you told Madam Marsh as much.”

  That galvanized him. Gates’s head snapped toward me. If I was being careful—and I wasn’t, not by that time—I’d have said he was now privy to new information.

  “How on earth can you know that?”

  “Because I’ve worked out how your wife died. You needed a safe distance from her suddenly, and you confided in Silkie Marsh. Surely you realize that terrible things started happening immediately afterward.”

  If I’d slapped him in the mouth, he couldn’t have looked more appalled. “I did … I did relate to Silkie the sad truth of my situation. She’s a dear friend. But—”

  “You must have told her of your new troubles that day we found you at the Astor. Told her Lucy was murdered. What did she say to you?”

  “That she was sorry for my loss, sorry that slave catchers had harassed members of my household. She tried to console me,” Gates protested. His liverish complexion was pinkening in dismay. “She knew nothing of how Lucy ended up strangled.”

  “It’s very simple. After a failed attempt by Varker and Coles to capture Lucy, Madam Marsh simply walked into my brother’s rooms and ordered your wife to kill herself so her kinfolk wouldn’t be sent back to North Carolina. Marsh accomplished this in large measure by telling Lucy that you’d spilled her house-slave origins.”

  The letter Lucy wrote to her sister had revealed relatively little about her plight, but what I could manage to extrapolate was very telling indeed: Do this for me and for Jonas, she had said. It is your part in the bargain I have made. Set the scene as for a murder and you will both live. That meant that an agreement had been reached, a pact so deep I was only beginning to guess its dimensions. A pact orchestrated by none other than Silkie Marsh, who had paid her fateful visit the night before. And who’d realized that the fact Lucy was hidden at Val’s, of all places, was an engraved invitation to foster another sort of unholy mayhem entirely. It must all have looked very neat in Madam Marsh’s head: Lucy would send her family away on a pretense. Lucy would die. Delia would orchestrate the evidence. Mulqueen would arrive shortly thereafter. And then …

  I didn’t feel much up to musing over what would have happened then.

  I know not why this must be, Lucy had admitted, but trust that I believe in the messenger, and do as I tell you one last time.

  I wonder to this day precisely what Silkie Marsh said to Lucy, but the situation that must have been presented was obvious: As a free woman married to Senator Gates, you are unspeakably dangerous. You have escaped us once already. Slavery or death: make your choice.

  Lucy had thought about running, and she had thought about going back. Running would lead to capture. Slavery likewise meant death, a piece at a time. Not the thick darkness where God lives, but the thin, silvery hell in which she could hear nothing beyond her own shrieking. Then she had considered the new option presented to her by Silkie Marsh. It was no less terrible a way out. It was simply the only unspeakable path she could tread alone. And if love for her sister was world encompassing, Lucy’s love for her son was universes of stars with their satellites. She would have done anything, everything, to spare Jonas. Her death had been a gift.

  “Does it surprise you that betraying your wife’s origins got her killed?” I asked.

  Sadly, it shocked him right through to the spine.

  I’ve never been in a war, cannon and brimstone howling all around me. But I think Gates looked as blasted, just then. Ruin had been held at bay with battlements of uncertainty and self-delusion and dumb force of habit, and my news had stripped his remaining defenses. And when the clarity did arrive, it fragmented him. I have done very stupid things in my life, and I’ve also witnessed tragic ones. Never yet, though, has the former directly caused the latter.

  Gates didn’t happen to be so lucky.

  When the few wails had ended, and the muffled sobs, I demanded information. I thought I needed more. In truth, I was a train divorced from its tracks, flying downhill in a smoldering blaze. I could still see Julius’s face before me, still recalled what it felt like to carry this man’s dead wife and bury her in newsprint. I got my wish after a little reviving brandy and some truly alarming tremors.

  “Silkie was to arrange everything,” he moaned, squeezing his skull in his hands. “I never meant for Lucy to be hurt. Dear, affectionate Lucy. I was mad to keep her in my own home, mad to marry her in the first place. Even if under a false name. But to think of her cold, in a pauper’s grave … God help me.”

  “I think you’ll have a better chance with the devil,” I growled. “Tell me. Now. What vile arrangement did you enter with Marsh?”

  Lips quivering, he capitulated. “I arrived home one Sunday night when Lucy had been out with her sister. Lucy threw her arms around my neck and told me that she was ready, finally, to leave the house regularly—that she couldn’t conscience Jonas learning to fear the world as she did. Of course in that first instant, I was proud. Enormously so. And Timpson’s isn’t so very far from my residence.”

  “You supported her,” I said through my teeth, recalling Delia’s account. “You asked how her nerves would fare. You ordered champagne. But afterward …”

  “I realized how insane my situation was in truth. Lucy would be seen five days a week working at the flower shop, then returning. She’d be discovered within the fortnight—by her own circle, by men who know me, and I was terrified.”

  “Really? What in holy hell terrified you?” Those words snapped out like the crack of a lash.

  He quailed. “Disgrace, yes, public evisceration, yes, but none of that was paramount—I’ve many political obligations. Some are to monstrous people, vultures. Mr. Wilde, they are conscienceless creatures you’d not believe possible.”

  “Oh, I’d believe them possible, all right.”

  A quake of revulsion passed through him. “You think me the same as the rest of the Party. Grasping, vicious.”

  “No, there’s a difference. You’re too cowardly to do your own dirty work.”

  “It was never meant to be dirty work!” he cried, tearing his spectacles off as fresh moisture rushed to his eyes. “I met with Silkie one night, as an old confidante, one who has ever had my ear and I hers, and we shared a wine bottle and talked. I’d never before unburdened myself of my secret. It felt giddy and sickening at the same time. I once raced a trap when I was terribly drunk, as a boy. It felt the same. Like falling, flying. All at once. If Silkie hadn’t always supported me so ardently, in my life, my campaigns … I’d have shattered apart. And it didn’t seem wrong either. Lucy had lied to me too, after all.”

  “I suppose Jonas gave them away,” I ventured.

  “I wish he had done.” His voice sank to a whisper. “When we married—Lucy was hesitant over intimacy. We didn’t consummate the vows for some six months, in fact. I never pressured her, never dreamed of causing her distress. But we did sleep together and when Lucy dreamed … she didn’t dream of Albany, that much was clear.”

  I have battled the urge to strike a man in the face many times. On that occasion, I’d have done it and gladly, had I not been saving all my strength for another task.

  “Let’s have the rest of it,” I ordered.

  “Silkie—she’s wonderfully sympathetic. I confessed to her that I needed Lucy out of my house. I needed her to disappear. If I’d told Lucy the truth, she would have been angry, perhaps even bitter enough to expose me, God knows what she might have done out of vindictiveness or hurt. But if Silkie could find her a fresh place to start—a real housekeeping position, work as a seamstress or a florist, perhaps, away from the city—then I could even visit her there. As Charles Adams.”

  My vision wasn’t wide and glimmer-edged at this point, because I could barely stand. No.
Human selfishness can be staggering. And every word, every asinine fantasy, had been God’s honest truth in his head.

  “I suggested to Silkie that Lucy be told they needed protection from vicious anti-amalgamationists who’d found us out. That there was no time to lose, and she and Jonas must pack their things. It was more than half true, you realize. If my voters had discovered us, they may well have torn Lucy in pieces or burned down our home. And the Party—they’re capricious, hellishly vengeful, and I’d deceived them. When you told me slave catchers took Delia and Jonas, and that Lucy had been murdered, I felt as if I was dying.”

  “You are one of the stupidest men of my acquaintance,” I said. “I need you to grasp that. My friend was killed over this. Over the fact you are witless.”

  He shook his head frantically. As if that would shake death off him the way a dog shakes off droplets of Hudson water.

  “I never wanted her hurt,” he pleaded. “I loved her. I only wanted her gone. I’m sorry.”

  I just stared at him. That level of mewling naïveté could have rivaled a steaming colt’s, and here it was emerging from a grown man. An educated man, who knew his Party and their capabilities. The same man, I reminded myself, who after meeting and growing infatuated with a beautiful black woman, supposed that through caution and careful manipulation of her fears he could encase her in a pretty prison cell for the rest of their natural lives.

  He isn’t too stupid to live, I decided. He’s far worse.

  Gates’s imagination could grasp nothing outside of his own interests. He supposed every story ever told was about him.

  “What did you pay your friend Silkie Marsh to make Lucy disappear? Oh, I beg your pardon—to see her spirited away in safety?”

  “A hundred dollars.” A mouselike whimper escaped his throat.

  “You may not have strung up that rope, but you killed her all the same,” I hissed. “Lucy was a lit match set to a political powder keg, and the person you consulted was the Party’s unofficial mascot? You paid a viper of a woman to make your wife vanish, and you are going to jail.”

  “Please,” he whispered. “I’ve committed no crime, save for the crime of trusting in the wrong ally. Yes, I paid Silkie, but I never told her to hurt Lucy. You can expose me, perhaps. But not arrest me.”

  “I’m not arresting you for murder.”

  Pulling Varker’s still-loaded revolver from my pocket, I trained it on the terrified politico. My arms were clumsy, cotton-stuffed limbs, my vision dark as a button-eyed doll’s. But I managed. Touching that gun was repulsive in every sense, as if I’d accidentally run my hand along Varker’s living skin. But I lacked the physical strength to wrestle a man to the Tombs, and I thought I might walk him against the muzzle of a pistol.

  “Wait,” he gasped. “If you aren’t arresting me for murder …”

  “I’m arresting you for forgery, violation of corporation ordinances, and spouse abandonment. Your marriage certificate is filled out in your own hand, and I’ve possession of it. It’s no matter to me how you come to be locked in the Tombs. The fleas are just as friendly there with falsifiers of government documents as they are with murderers. They’re very democratic.”

  The look he leveled at me was extraordinary. One I’d never seen the likes of, in fact. Half was more or less leprous with self-disgust, the other half flushed with gratitude.

  He didn’t have to make decisions anymore. Standing up, he shrugged into his greatcoat and headed for the door.

  “I’ve one more question,” I said as we quit the hotel room, the gun trained on his kidney. “I spoke with your sister. You once rescued a dog you were very fond of. You sheltered it in a barn loft, and a spider bit you. She said you and the dog were inseparable until you went away to school.”

  “Yes? What of that?”

  “What became of the dog you loved so entirely?”

  I’d puzzled him. He peered back at me, eyes full of Lucy and a hundred dollars changing hands. “I don’t know. I think my parents gave it to a neighboring farm. I could never have kept him at a boarding school. Why?”

  Seizing his elbow in a rough grip, I led him down the hallway to the stairs. I didn’t answer him, and soon he subsided into miserable shock. I thought about what love looks like, and the fact that to Gates love resembled a leash, with the beloved object trailing alongside him in a haze of delirious joy. He felt a finer fellow with an adoring mutt at his side. He walked taller through the streets with a beautiful girl waiting in his home, cupped within his shell like a pearl. He wasn’t an evil man, merely a hopelessly selfish one.

  I wondered, as we journeyed to the Tombs, which sort are capable of the most damage.

  • • •

  George Washington Matsell, when I burst into his office half an hour later, was composing a letter. He dropped the quill when he saw me, half standing and then slowly sinking down again.

  “I need your help,” I said.

  Despite carrying the weight of one of our healthier frontier bison, Chief Matsell had me deposited in his own chair within seconds. I wondered why I should be in his chair and not the wooden one his guests are generally offered. And then, limbs loose as a jellyfish’s, I realized it was because the chief’s chair had arms, and I was less likely to spill myself on his floor like a burst feed bag that way.

  “What in Christ’s name is going on, Wilde?”

  I passed him the key to a Tombs cell. His eyes flew down to the metal in his fingers. Then I set the gun on his desk. I don’t think he could have been any more flummoxed if I’d produced a sack of leprechaun gold.

  “This was Seixas Varker’s weapon. Three people are dead, including Varker and Coles. It’s being taken care of, you can tell the Party. Discreetly. Bodies already disposed of. The colored family in question has left New York, and they’re not returning. Supposing Tammany won’t miss Varker and Coles too keenly, I’ve fixed it all up plumb for them.”

  “Then why do you need my help, and who’ve you arrested?”

  “Rutherford Gates.”

  The troughlike furrows at either side of Matsell’s nose and mouth tensed, then shook with a mix of outrage and alarm.

  “I had to,” I whispered. “He paid Silkie Marsh to eliminate his wife, and she was bullied into hanging herself. It was crueler than murder. I know someone will free Gates before a trial is even spoken of, that it isn’t a crime to terrify a woman to death. If you hurry, he’ll have been jailed for under ten minutes. I’ll never say a word, on my honor.”

  Cursing under his breath, Matsell pocketed the key in his sack coat. Instead of running for the cells, however, he went to a pitcher of water sitting beside a small bowl and came back with a wet handkerchief.

  “Hold this in place,” he said, guiding it to my head. “If today is the day you finally faint in my office, Wilde, I will assign you to patrol the Five Points for the remainder of your natural life.”

  Fending off a wave of nausea, I nodded. Pressing the cool cloth into my head felt wretched and heavenly at the same time. The final sound I heard as Matsell departed was the scrape of the lock on his office door.

  Rutherford Gates, it seemed, wasn’t the only man newly locked in the Tombs.

  In an effort to remain conscious, I thought about the lockup: it’s 148 cells of about seven feet by fifteen. A male wing and a female, each featuring cast-iron water closets, ripely pickled bedding, and a strong stench of despair. When you can smell the despair beneath the reek of seeping sewage, that is. What comes up from theoretically solid ground in these parts smells as if Hades needs expanding and is annexing more territory via fissures in our prison floor. They’re vile little holes.

  Putting Rutherford Gates in one ranked with the most satisfying experiences of the previous month.

  My vision began to swim again. The clock ticked and the sun rose and snow began to fall outside the window, the tiny gems that deal a sting like pinpricks. Soon I’d lost any delineation between the spreading clouds in my eyes and the storm in the c
ity beyond.

  It’ll be no easy task, digging Julius’s grave with the ground frozen, I thought. And then lost still more of my sight for an entirely different reason.

  When I heard the door unlocking, well over an hour must have passed. And it wasn’t Matsell who entered.

  Valentine strode inside in a hurry. Whatever spirits I might have been keeping up crashed into a ravine when I saw his face. His mouth was set in a grim line, eyes darkened by resentment so profound the pouches beneath twitched in disgust. Everything about him was angry, from his ramrod spine to the bullish angle of his neck. My brother looked as if he planned to hack someone to death with a hatchet and enjoy the exercise. And when he’s in that humor, he isn’t shy over starting dustups that leave people with their brittle bits splintered.

  I swallowed hard, pressing my sleeve to my eyes when I realized Delia had kept my handkerchief. I’m almost never afraid of him now I’m grown. But I was then.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Val didn’t answer me. He pulled the cloth away from my head and shifted my hair with careful fingers. Parts of it stuck together in a nasty fashion, but he took considerable time about the project. Doubtless finding the spot that could deck me with a single swing.

  “Matsell fetched me here,” he said. “Gates has been released, though he looks to be contemplating a stroll in the Atlantic. This split needs needlework.”

  God help me, even his voice was furious. If I was judging by appearances, he’d eject me from Matsell’s office and then plunge into the hearty business of never speaking to me again. Panic sent dark tendrils streaming along my skin.

  “Please,” I choked out. “I’m sorry, so sorry, but I couldn’t stop myself. Gates as good as murdered her, and Silkie Marsh made it look your doing to spite us.”

  Val took the cloth to the basin and started rinsing and wringing. Refolding it, he turned back. Even his stance crackled with disdain.

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Of course you are, why wouldn’t you be, you’re practically gnashing your teeth you’re so bloody furious! Don’t look at me like that and then tell me you’re not cursing the day you ever made me a copper star. Just say it, damn you, I—”