Seven for a Secret (38 page)

“No!” Jim thrashed once, which only accomplished a trickle of red running from the blade down into his cravat. He stopped, wincing.

“Jim, hold perfectly still and shut your head,” I suggested with deep feeling.

“I will not stand by and
watch
while—”

The knife point deepened, widening the scarlet stream.

“Jim,
stop moving
,” I cried.

We’d run dry of options. In another moment, James Playfair would be dead, and I would have been the death of him. So I stepped up into the hack. Jim’s wide blue eyes followed. Helpless to do aught save resist the invasion of metal into his flesh.

Just as the wall of the enclosed carriage cut off my view of the scene, I heard Jim bite back a cry of pain. McDivitt climbed up after me and swung the door closed. The knife blade he held was red. It had gone deeper than I ought to have allowed. Just
how red
and
how deep
, I realized, I couldn’t bear to know at that moment. I only knew Jim had cried out, and that I ought to have leapt headfirst into the goddamn hackney.

When Beardsley followed his cohort into the vehicle from the opposite side and shoved a chloroform-soaked rag into my mazzard, I only managed an instant of struggle before I began the descent into blankness and black.

“Where are you taking me?” I muttered as my eyes slid shut.

“You’ve an appointment you’ve been neglecting, Mr. Wilde,” Beardsley answered. “Pity. And when we could all have been such fast friends too.”

“They’ll be givin’ him a proper welcome anyhow, won’t they?” McDivitt remarked with icy amusement. “They always do at Tammany Hall.”

twenty-three

I never knew a man of color who was not an anti-Jackson man. In fact, it was their respectability, and not their degradation, that was the cause of their disfranchisement.

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

I
dreamed of a
wedding
at which the magnolias were all a glistening black. Black as the murder of crows at rest in the branches of the flowering tree. Lucy Adams was a bride with a long lace veil that fluttered like an ivory shroud. She smiled, awaiting a man I couldn’t see. Happy. Longing. The bouquet in her hand gleamed dark as onyx, and the sable blooms writhed softly in the sunlight. They horrified me, because I knew they were wrong somehow. But I couldn’t think why, only watched as they multiplied in her hands, twisting and entwining and finally engulfing her. All the while, until her face had been wreathed over with black tendrils, she smiled and smiled still more.

A brief interlude passed when I thought I was dead and being carried to my funeral on a long bier. But after that I fell, and it was colder than it had been previous. A sharp pain pierced my ribs, more than once, and I slipped back into oblivion.

I didn’t wake up due to any overt curiosity as to where I was. It was bound to be someplace unhealthy. I awoke because my head had been replaced by a swollen globe with very thin skin, possibly a bulging oiled sack, and it hurt to keep the sloshing contents within my skull, and generally when my pate is giving me trouble, I press hard at the skin around my scar. Making to do so, I found that my arms weren’t working as they normally did.

Peculiar.

I heard voices and detected the aroma of cigar smoke. Half of me battled to wake. The other half distinctly preferred not to be in a world where my head now resembled an overripe melon, rotten-sweet and oozing flesh from its cracks.

In the end, I didn’t make the decision for myself. A man said, “You see, sir? There. He’s coming round.”

And then he gripped me by the hair and bashed my head into the back of the chair I sat in.

Air flooded my lungs in a gasp, but otherwise I can’t recall how I reacted or how long it took for me to recover. The unfocused origins of returning consciousness are lost to me. All I knew just then was that my skull had exploded like a ship under cannon fire. Minutes or seconds later, I was fully awake.

I appeared to be skillfully lashed hand and foot to a chair. Raw hemp scraped over my wrists. I pulled at the bonds anyhow, everything in me shrieking to
get out.
My fingertips, I noted, were already cold. The room could equally have been the study of a rich man, the antechamber of a clubhouse, or the library of a small university—stately armchairs, portraits of men in high collars who didn’t much care for my looks, leather-bound tomes. I registered decanters on side tables, papers strewn over a rolltop desk. Blinking, I counted the glow of three cigar ends filling the room with haze.

A trio of unfamiliar Tammany men sat before me. All were dressed as if they’d just been summoned from the ball at Castle Garden, in floral silks and cutaway jackets. One was tall and thin and bald, with an imperious hooked nose on which rested a pair of pince-nez. The next was fair-haired and dashing in appearance, though he seemed not much younger, and he glared balefully at his pocket watch. The third had sharp eyes framed with crow’s feet, the body of an ex-pugilist, and a scar across the bridge of his nose where an antagonist had split the skin.

Pocket Watch cast a look at me and then to the side of the room. “You can’t pretend it’s not very annoying. There were dignitaries present,
patrons.
Wasting half an hour after being called away because the man you delivered has been drugged unnecessarily and then bashed in the skull—”

“Begging your pardon, it wasn’t unnecessary.” Beardsley stood off to my left, his hat in hand. Behind him, McDivitt looked no less cowed. “That man there is
dangerous
.”

Scarred Nose sniffed in amusement. “Really, gentlemen. He’s the size of my accounts manager.”

“He’s the reason as Sean Mulqueen rests in the ground,” McDivitt protested.

Pince-Nez keeked down his nose in my direction, openly annoyed. “What we all mean to say is that this business has grown tiresome, and it’s absurd to waste still more time nursing a man back to consciousness because the pair of you were too lazy to wrestle him into a pair of handcuffs. You’re dismissed. Should we require you, we’ll call you back.”

McDivitt opened his mouth to protest and Beardsley scowled. Nevertheless, the door shut with a well-oiled
snick
, and four of us remained.

They pondered me. I considered them in turn.

I was distracted, though. And not just because something sticky was trickling through my hair.

My thoughts were full of Jim and a red knife, as well as Delia and Jonas and the private carriage ride that could be . . . hours away? Seconds? Already passed? I’d have been scared witless by the odd triumvirate, I imagine, if I hadn’t already been quite so hellishly angry.

“Since you’ve tied me to this chair, I expect we’d better get to know each other.” The plan was to go down fighting, I decided. I’d disgust myself to death otherwise. “I’m Timothy Wilde. Copper star one-oh-seven, if it interests you.”

“We know who you are.” Pince-Nez smiled coldly, shifting in his seat.

“Fine. Who are you? And why the chair?”

“You’ve not exactly been acting in our best interests, have you?” Pocket Watch asked tiredly, glancing again at the time.

“Is that my job?”

“Yes,” Scarred Nose answered. He looked amused.

“I supposed you wanted me to solve crimes, which I’ve been doing to the best of my admittedly thin ability,” I replied with all the terseness a recovering chloroform victim can muster. “Which bit chafed your tender parts?”

Scarred Nose started to laugh, a wheezy and rustic exhalation I found not entirely malicious.

“I like him,” said Scarred Nose.

“God, I don’t,” said Pocket Watch, taking a pull from his cigar. His arrogance was diluted by a faint note of petulance.

“He’s a unique specimen,” Pince-Nez said thoughtfully. “But I suspect he might be useless to us. And you know how I feel about useless people.”

A silence fell. The calculating sort.

Scarred Nose leaned forward. “You’re a square player, my man. Yes? So answer me plain: we want you to stop harassing Senator Gates. Is that so much?”

“I’m not harassing him, I’m investigating the murder of his . . . housekeeper.”

“You robbed his home! Or you attempted to, anyway. Do we really have time to argue with this ant?” Pocket Watch asked his colleagues. “McDivitt and Beardsley have been following you for weeks. They’re very old hands at shadowing—Madam Marsh recommended them to us, and they’ve proven most efficient. This all needs to
stop
. It should have stopped
long ago
.”

“Answer the question, Wilde,” Pince-Nez interrupted icily. “We want you to stop
.
Is that so much?”

My skin had turned entirely cold by then. So it was a difficult job answering. I recalled the two sets of footsteps in the alleyway behind Gates’s ken and McDivitt and Beardsley’s appearance at the front of the building minutes later.

McDivitt and Beardsley have been following you for weeks.

And where else had I gone?

“Ah, see?” Scarred Nose asked. “He’s clever. I like clever ones. Yes, Wilde, we are clearing the city of Wrights. Seixas Varker and Luke Coles are en route to the Higgins residence. We don’t give a damn it’s a Railroad station, but that family knows far too much about our Senator Gates. He always was the sentimental sort—to an alarming and dangerous degree, we’re discovering.”

“Don’t,” I gasped. “They’re . . . I’m getting them out of your way. This morning, in fact. That job is already done.”

“And what of your own precious convictions, Mr. Wilde?” Pince-Nez queried pointedly. “We know your abolitionism to be most passionate. What guarantee have we that you’ll act with discretion, that you’ll not expose the good Senator Gates for the romantic idiot we now suspect him to be? He is a highly important figure. An asset. You are not the former, and you may not be the latter either.”

“There are people bitter over Sean Mulqueen’s death, but I’m a reasonable man,” I protested.

“Are you?” Pince-Nez mused. “I’m just wondering. In light of your wrists, you understand.”

I failed to follow him, and I think he guessed that.

“You could certainly be a
reasonable
abolitionist and we’d have nothing further to discuss here. A measured, sedate, effective abolitionist, with a free conscience. Beholden not just to his ideals but to his employers. And here you are scraping your wrists off the instant we mention a pair of Negroes who’ve been causing
you
grave woes. Is that
reasonable
?”

I didn’t need to see myself to feel pain, didn’t need their ironic exchange of glances to know that chloroform, a likely kick or three to the ribs, and a head injury had all done their dirty work on my poker game. Which isn’t generally so abysmal as the one I’d just displayed. I didn’t need to feel the rope burn to understand these people already appreciated my loyalties.

I did need to solve it, though. And fast.

“I’ll leave Gates alone if you leave the Wrights alone,” I attempted.

“Regrettably, this isn’t a negotiation, Mr. Wilde,” Pince-Nez replied.

“Why can’t it be? You’ll lose nothing by it.”

“Oh, we intend to lose nothing by it. Gates’s position is most crucial. And a colored mistress kept as a wedded wife . . . Whether he’s guilty of actually legalizing the union or not, and we still aren’t certain, I shudder to think of the scandal that would rock this Party. It would be widespread, divisive, ruinous. Quite unthinkable.”

“I’ll forget all about Gates, but it can’t matter to you whether the Wrights live in Canada or Kentucky,” I pleaded.

“And why does it matter to
you
?” Pocket Watch sniffed.

“Loyalty is important to us, Mr. Wilde,” Scarred Nose declared. “It might even be of primary
importance to us. Well, to me, anyhow.”

“It is to me too.” I forced myself still and lowered my voice. “So is decency, though.”

“We want a personal pledge, Mr. Wilde,” Pince-Nez said, drumming his fingertips against one another. “If it involves a degree of sacrifice, well, that is precisely the means by which we will know you trustworthy. Is that so difficult to grasp?”

“No, it isn’t. But it proves me untrustworthy in quite another direction.”

Pocket Watch glared with time-pregnant emphasis at Scarred Nose, who sighed. Pince-Nez pulled his eyepiece from his nose and wiped it clean with a cloth. Then he likewise angled a look at Scarred Nose, twitching one shoulder in a minute shrug.

“Oh, very well, though it is a pity.” Scarred Nose appeared disappointed in me. “I hate killing the clever ones.”

“Sometimes killing the clever ones is very interesting indeed,” Pince-Nez observed.

“Let it be one of us, though—McDivitt and Beardsley are out for vengeance. They’ll botch it, try to break every bone they can find first. It’s tedious and unmanly. One of us should get rid of him the quick way.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Pocket Watch said, eyes glinting. “You’ll both be wanting to see to the Castle Garden donations.”

“I can’t make this right for you, nor for anyone else, if I’m dead,” I choked out.

They weren’t listening.

“You don’t think painful cautionary tales have meaning?” Pince-Nez wondered philosophically.

“Certainly cautionary tales have meaning. I’ve watched you slice all ten toes off a rabbit, send another’s hand through a sausage grinder, but they both lived,” Scarred Nose argued. “Yes, that was valuable, but the story had a narrator. This won’t.”

“I’m putting the wretch in the river, where he won’t trouble us further,” Pocket Watch grumbled. A door opened behind me. “We haven’t the time, so nothing of the sausage grinder ilk is going to happen.”

The door closed again.

“No. It won’t,” announced an unnaturally calm voice.