Seven for a Secret

by Lyndsay Faye

  Opening a drawer, Matsell flipped through a daybook. I glimpsed several political fund-raisers, dozens of Party meetings. “Rutherford is up for reelection in the spring. And when Silkie Marsh’s involvement is considered … you’re certain she was paid to testify for Varker and Coles?”

  “On multiple occasions.”

  Chief Matsell sighed bleakly, eyes on his memorandums. I’d no hardship divining his thoughts. Yes, Matsell and Val and I are aware Silkie Marsh is a conscienceless aberrance of nature. But she’s plush enough lining for Party pockets that trumpeting the fact without any evidence would have made the star police look either mad or ineffectual. No one else knows her as an animated cancer. Or if they do, they’re mum about it. So crossing her is, in a word, problematic.

  When Matsell looked up, his eyes were steely. “Mr. Wilde, I need you to grasp that you do not make it easy for me to keep you employed. Don’t suppose Party headquarters is unaware of the abolitionist policeman who invades courtrooms and slavers’ dens. In fact, as a personal apology to me for my trouble, you are attending the Democratic Party’s gala ball on Saturday the twenty-eighth of February. And you’ll look as if you’re enjoying it. That’s a direct order.”

  My expression must have turned an unlikely combination of mulish and appalled, because Matsell began to laugh.

  “Welcome to my world, in which one must retain the favor of one’s employers. Solve this crime, report to me and me alone, and in the meanwhile, do not harass Coles and Varker, do not bully Rutherford Gates, do nothing of which your brother would not expressly approve. Captain Wilde comprehends that milk comes from cows, eggs from chickens, and police funding from politics.”

  I turned to go, seething.

  “And Mr. Wilde?” I paused midstride. “Tom Griffen stays where he is. After you solve this case, perhaps I’ll change my mind. Who can say?”

  “You—are you holding a man hostage to keep me in line?” I stammered.

  “No. I am holding a confessed murderer behind bars to keep you in line.” Smiling coldly, Matsell adjusted his wide grey lapel. “It’s going to work too. That’s the wonder and the beauty of it. Good day.”

  I found myself on the other side of Matsell’s door, a thousand prickling barbs lodged under my skin as if I were a straw man hoisted on a stake to frighten away the crows. But Party or no Party, there was work to be done. I’d reached the echoing staircase at the end of Matsell’s corridor when I encountered a welcome surprise—the cannonade of mighty boots preceding him, grey hair streaming in lanky will-o’-the-wisps.

  Mr. Piest came to an ungainly halt upon the landing. “Thank heaven,” he exclaimed. “They told me you’d be with Matsell. Are you all right?”

  “Just a bit dented.”

  “I heard about Mrs. Adams. I was very sorry over it. Mr. Wilde, I have recently burgled your office.”

  Descending the stairs, I joined Piest, who looked more than usually depraved. His thin hair obviously hadn’t been combed in days, streaming about his shoulders in a ragged mane, and his eyes were bulging out of his chinless mazzard. Having clapped him on the arm, I awaited more conversation. Not having had much luck with the previous statement.

  “I’ve been searching for you everywhere,” he said querulously. “It’s too late now, of course, but I swear I did my best. I tried to write you as well, but you were deeply embroiled in—”

  “I’d have come to find you last night if Sean Mulqueen hadn’t decided to kill me, but what in God’s name are you talking of?”

  He deposited a quantity of bills in my hand. The exact balance of my reward from the Millington business, which had been locked in my desk drawer. Then he trotted back down the stairs the way he’d come.

  “Perhaps, Mr. Wilde, it would be better simply to show you. Though it pains me, as a fellow copper star. It pains me very much.”

  “What does?” I asked, alarmed.

  But he only shook his thistledown head.

  We’d soon reached my mouse hole. About a dozen copper stars murmured in its doorway, peering within by turns, and the sight sent a fresh swell of worry through me. Mr. Connell, an Irish roundsman with a square head, scarlet hair tied back in a neat knot, and a strong taste for dog races, loudly cleared his throat when he spied me and the rest fell silent. I like Connell tremendously. We both read the Herald back to front every morning and often share a copy for economy, and he’d once told me a series of limericks that were so bawdy I still found myself smirking at odd moments.

  “It’s nary any mystery who’s done it, Mr. Wilde,” Connell said. “Whether we can make them pay for it—’tis another affair entirely, I’m afraid.”

  I elbowed my way into my office. And promptly stifled a gasp.

  It was thorough work, whoever had done it. The chair and the little desk were strewn about like so much hurricane wreckage in a childish display of wanton destruction guaranteed to chafe my hide. I’d dragged the desk with Piest’s help out of a back room at City Hall. Its shards glared up at me accusingly.

  That was nothing compared to the rest of the room, though.

  Val’s company taught me most of the filthy slang that exists in the American tongue. But the heights of profanity someone had attained when decorating my walls with scarlet paint set a new standard. The whitewash was covered with invective so hateful it burned my eyes. The word NIGGER-LOVER, and the consequences of being a nigger-lover, seemed thematically paramount. Various sexual acts of a nature distasteful to me personally were suggested for my final hours on this earth, before I was to be strung up by the neck or possibly burned to death. The author—no, authors, two styles of writing, one generally written lower on the wall—wasn’t entirely consistent regarding how I was to be slaughtered.

  That didn’t matter. The effect was still alarming.

  Resting on the ruined desk was a kinchin’s stuffed doll. A hideous disfigurement had been painted over its face, but that pointed detail was secondary to the fact it had been pinned to a board through its torso.

  “All right, move along with you all,” came Mr. Connell’s voice. “Ye’ve seen Wilde’s office and it’s better than a trip to Barnum’s. Enough. Kildare, if you could stay a moment? We’ll have to plan out what to do.”

  Feet shuffled. A low whistle or two pierced the air. Moments later, only Piest, Connell, and Kildare remained.

  “You knew this was going to happen? How?” I questioned when I registered Piest’s hand on my shoulder. “Why—”

  “Mr. Wilde, may God strike me dead if I had known what they planned and failed to tell a brother in arms of the danger. No, on my honor, I did not. But I was in the common room, and heard snatches of a conversation, and … and you were not here. I could not be sure of myself. I wrote you the note and I burgled your desk. Better to take precau—”

  “Thank you. Who was it?” My voice had thickened to a nasty tarlike consistency.

  Piest’s grip on my shoulder flexed harder. “I’ve already found a supply of whitewash, Mr. Wilde, and we all of us would be happy to—”

  “Bugger whitewashing, I want to know who did this.”

  “That the men in question were planning something I am certain, but that they actually enacted—”

  “Oh, sure enough, they were simply palaverin’ over teaching Wilde a lesson, and then by complete coincidence, someone else broke in,” Mr. Connell sniffed.

  Mr. Kildare, the highly competent roundsman whose beat had bordered mine when I’d trudged in circles for sixteen hours a day, tapped his fingers against the door frame. “’Tisn’t as certain a thing as ye’d like to think, Connell. Piest is right. More than one person has cause. Wilde isn’t exactly popular.”

  “He’s not unpopular either. Friendly enough fella, and a good heart and all. Just … folk are a wee bit leery. He not bein’ a Democrat, and us loyal Party scrappers to a man.”

  “There’s more to it than that, by Jesus.”

  “To be certain. On account o’ he’s exceptional.”

&nbs
p; “Favored, some would say.”

  “Only the petty sort.”

  “Will someone for the love of God tell me who wrote Wilde sucks nigger cock on my wall?” I exclaimed. “Here, why don’t I start? One of them is only a bit taller than I am and left-handed, and the other five feet eight or nine and probably born in Ireland, since indorser is slang for a molley only in the British Isles and in flash it means—” I snapped my fingers. “Oh. Mulqueen’s friends,” I realized. “The rabbits he ran with in the Five Points. They must have been doubly eager to be about this business after last night. Who are they?”

  I ground to a stop with all of them staring at me, the Irishmen baffled and Jakob Piest beaming as if at a child performing a complicated aria before family guests.

  “My name is Virgil Beardsley,” came a smoothly rounded voice. “And this is Mr. James McDivitt.”

  Whirling, I saw the formidable black Irishman from the night previous—whose name was apparently McDivitt—standing beside Beardsley, the overgrown tot with the perfectly round face. They stood just beyond my door. Evidently having awaited my arrival. Glaring at me as if a man could peel the skin from another’s face with a withering expression alone, not needing cooking oil.

  “You destroyed my office,” I observed.

  “You don’t know that. Someone did,” Beardsley returned. “And someone ought to be given a medal, if you ask me.”

  “There’s to be a ceremony for Sean Mulqueen at St. Patrick’s in the morning, sharp of nine, and a hero’s send-off we’ll give our countryman. Ye’ll be present, I trust?” McDivitt asked, shifting his attention to the other men in the room.

  Mr. Kildare shifted his feet. “Them as can, McDivitt, them as can.”

  “Them as have Irish blood in their veins will turn out for a patriot dead at the hands of a crazed colored assassin. I wonder,” he added, “if we might have a tiny word with Wilde here? Alone, like. Mr. Wilde, you’re coming with us.”

  “He is doing nothing of the kind,” Piest declared.

  I’d have found some choice words myself for McDivitt and Beardsley, for the scoundrels who’d defiled the only working space I’d ever been able to call my own with any truthfulness. But to my shock, Piest, Connell, and Kildare now blocked my view of them in a tightly spaced wall. Arms crossed, shoulders thrown back. Looking ready—eager, even—for a fight.

  It rendered me entirely tongueless. That sharing a newspaper and flask, or a difficult job and a common desire to make our city a bit safer, cemented men together. That I’d never been in a class at university, or attended a church, or joined a gang, or run with firedogs—and yet here were people who preferred me alive. Other than my family. When I hadn’t asked for help and couldn’t pay them a red cent for it.

  The prospect was frankly dizzying.

  “We’ll say good day, then,” Connell declared to Beardsley and McDivitt. “To see the pair o’ you—mourning as you are, and Mulqueen not even in the ground, may God rest him. We’d nary dream o’ taxin’ you further. Go see to the plans for his wake.”

  “And if we’ve a different agenda?” Beardsley growled.

  “It’s Wilde’s wake I’m looking forward to, to be sure,” McDivitt added.

  A tiny, hard-edged click sounded. Paler than a rifle bolt, unmistakably a small hand pistol being cocked.

  “I hereby declare that I am drawing a deadly weapon, and one I do not intend to use unless my hand is forced!”

  Mr. Piest, in a development that unknit my muscles from my bones and left me gaping, had pulled a small and extremely ornate gold-plated gun from his coat. The weapon seemed half of a dueling-pistol set, supposing fashionable French heiresses with tiny puppies in their laps require dueling pistols. He aimed it at the ceiling, his face tucked even farther back into his neck than was usual. A squeamish expression. It was clear as glass he didn’t like touching the thing.

  “You have a gun?” I demanded witlessly.

  “Oh, praise mother Mary, that sorts us,” Mr. Kildare said, well satisfied. “McDivitt and Beardsley, stand against either side o’ the corridor, if you would. We are leaving.”

  They did as they were told, backing away with loathing on their faces. Connell and Kildare exited first, then myself, and finally Piest. Looking for all the world as if he were wielding an enormous scorpion and didn’t much care for the sensation.

  “Say your prayers, Wilde,” Beardsley called after me.

  I don’t generally have any. But the suggestion wasn’t without merit.

  The four of us made for the nearest exit, earning plenty of questioning looks from clerks and copper stars and lawyers with powdered hair. By the time it occurred to me that it must have seemed I was being kidnapped by a wrinkled Dutchman, we were outside in the thin, wintry air.

  “Mr. Piest.” I caught him by the elbow. His gangly limbs were stiff, hair writhing in the faint wind. “They aren’t following.”

  Lowering the pistol, he heaved a deep sigh.

  “Why do you have a gun that could double as a Russian samovar?” I wanted to know.

  Piest chuckled, shoving it deep in his threadbare frock coat. “I found it this morning. Arrested the fellow too. I simply haven’t returned it yet.”

  “Is it even loaded?”

  “I don’t know. Firearms agitate me, I confess it freely. How does one check?”

  Connell was howling with laughter by this time, Kildare chuckling as he rubbed at his side-whiskers. Stifling a smile, for Piest was reddening, I cleared my throat.

  “Listen, I wasn’t expecting you fellows to …” To my dismay, I felt a blush creeping up the back of my neck and began again. “That is, you needn’t have taken my part in there, and it was … thank you,” I finished, giving up on a bad job.

  Kildare shrugged. “Mulqueen was a right bastard, McDivitt a dumb beast hitched to his cart, and Beardsley …”

  “Beardsley is a walking arsehole,” Connell finished.

  Piest appeared dumbfounded. “Mr. Wilde, you wear the badge of the star police with the utmost honor, and I personally consider it much to my own credit that I was able to assist in any way. Despite my … reluctance when it comes to weaponry that may or may not explode.”

  “Ye may wish to give the Tombs a bit o’ distance, mind,” Connell advised, frowning.

  “We’ll show Matsell your office,” Kildare added. “He’ll never mind you keepin’ snug for the time being.”

  I stared up at the Tombs from under the brim of my hat. It’s a savage place, really. Sweltering in summer, frigid in winter, reeking perpetually of filled-in swamp and unfiltered despair. Delivering people into its clutches always wrenches my guts wrong, and it’s a seven-minute walk at a ready clip to buy a decently brewed cup of coffee. Mine, though. The Tombs was mine. I felt quarantined, excluded, and wanted very badly to make someone pay for it. I knew just the proper scapegoat too. I shook hands with my colleagues. Putting some warmth in it, for they’d just proven themselves a set of admirably square fellows.

  “Take care, Mr. Wilde,” Piest called after me gravely. “Be on your guard and contact us at once if you require any assistance. You’ll do nothing rash?”

  “Of course not,” I returned, marching through the ivory-hued winter morning in the direction of Silkie Marsh’s bawdy house in Greene Street.

  sixteen

  Nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see her suffer, and more than once, when Epps had refused to sell her, she has tempted me with bribes to put her secretly to death, and bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp.

  —SOLOMON NORTHUP, TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE, 1853

  A portrait of Silkie Marsh hangs in her foyer above a potted fern with leaves as fragile as a half-remembered dream, and I looked over it as I entered. She wears an emerald dress in the oil study, lying on a simple black divan, ethereal blonde hair falling about her shoulders, her eyes fixing the viewers with breathless anticipation. The painting is a flawless copy. That isn’t because the artist was a geni
us, though he was certainly competent. But unlike most painters, who require both poetry and skill in order to invest their subjects with lifelike animation, he had an easy job of it.

  There isn’t any soul residing behind Silkie Marsh’s eyes to paint. So the likeness is more or less exact.

  In her parlor, I studied myself in the floor-length Venetian mirrors that line her walls. I didn’t look too well. Chest tight and lips furious and eye still swollen shut. A girl of sixteen or seventeen was reading a novel in one of the armchairs, its purple upholstery rich as the petals of spring irises. Glancing at the copper star, she bit her lip in distress.

  “I don’t mean you any harm,” I assured her. “But tell me truthfully—how old is the youngest person employed here at present?”

  “I think Lily’s fifteen,” she murmured.

  “No kinchin?”

  She shook her head.

  “Good. Please tell your madam Timothy Wilde wants a word.”

  I hadn’t long to wait. Silkie Marsh appeared within three minutes, wrapped in a red-velvet dressing gown with hints of rose-hued satin keeking through the gaps. Hair braided in a long plait down the side of her neck, lovely face affecting blank curiosity.

  “Why, Mr. Wilde, what an unpleasant surprise.” She went to the carved sideboard next to the pianoforte and poured a pair of brandies. “Are you here to stampede through my rooms in a misguided search for kinchin, as you did last time? I assure you, the exercise is unnecessary. I have learned the value of hiring girls who own greater experience in the art of pleasure. Would you care for a sample?”

  “I’d care to know what the hell is going on.”

  She passed me the snifter, which I took. I needed it. And I don’t fear her harming me, not directly—she’s vowed to ruin me, but that wouldn’t prove much entertainment for her if I weren’t around for the ordeal. Her eyes with their narrow circle of clear blue within the hazel lingered on my face.

  “I wonder who’s given you a beating,” she said pleasantly.