Seven for a Secret (8 page)

“That’s him, all right,” George Higgins answered me. Making it sound as if I’d just called the man an absolutely vile name.

And maybe I had. Long Luke Coles was taller than everyone save Val, but his neck about matched the circumference of my brother’s wrist. His lanky blond hair was tethered with a plain black ribbon, and he’d an equine face and indifferently arranged teeth. But most unnerving of all were his eyes. They tracked constantly, switching from one to the other of us and even between my left eye and my right. Snakes flick their attention helter-skelter so, and the Committee had been right: a more snakelike individual than Luke Coles I’d not yet met. Something about him wanted squashing in the head with a garden shovel.

“Luke, now what’s all this fuss over?” The voice was elegant, unhurried, and deeply Southern. “My word, we’ve callers. And in this weather too. What can I do for you?”

Val’s eyes flashed up from his pearly cane top to the newcomer who’d just emerged from the interior doorway. That tiny glance told me he supposed the greater of the two threats had just arrived. Carefully, I took the fellow’s measure.

My brother, as so often happens, was dead on.

“That makes you Seixas Varker,” I surmised.

If Long Luke were a snake, Varker could easily have been the gopher it lay in wait for. He was certainly of a dull brown hair color and a healthy pinkish complexion. He was nearly as short as I am, but boasted considerably more well-oiled flesh than I’d care to lug about and seemed closer to forty than to thirty. Meanwhile, his features puzzled me. They were handsome if overfed: fine nose, even jaw, clear dark eyes. But I felt a peculiar repulsion at the sight of him, though he smiled with thin, well-shaped lips as he spoke.

Then I realized that the smile itself was wrong. Insincere, but far worse in another way: purposeless. If it had been a deliberate mask, I’d have taken it in easier. No, smiling was just what Varker’s face did when he was inwardly shaking like a rat in a burrow. That smile had the stench of fear all over it—he hadn’t calculated the expression at all. I realized my brother wasn’t wary of Varker because the slave catcher was fearless. The way my brother is wary of his former mistress Silkie Marsh, for instance, because she isn’t tethered to earth by anxiety or affection as normal mortals are. On the contrary. Val had snuck a glimpse of him because Varker was
gutless
.

That makes two men in the room who could try anything at any moment,
I thought.

A snowlike bead of cold sweat formed on my upper neck.

“I take it you’re in the business of capturing escaped slaves,” I began.

“Do you now?” Varker exclaimed softly. “But I run a wine store, Mr. . . . ?”

“Timothy Wilde. And you also collar runaways. That’s a fact.”

“I see, I see, someone’s told you about me,” he reflected. “Well, I’d be foolish to deny it, then—but I don’t like to brag of doing my civic duty, sir. I’m sure you understand, a fellow agent of the law like yourself.”

I let that one go by unanswered.

“But you’re right, Mr. Wilde—I do what I can to restore people’s lost property, give the coloreds the means to go back home where they belong. They’re downright grateful for the opportunity, you know, and I can’t say as I blame them a bit. It’s mighty cold in New York, isn’t it, and mighty hard living. Have you brought me some prodigal sons, then?”

I could practically hear Higgins’s teeth grinding behind me, while the Reverend Brown and Julius remained impassive.

“You know us well enough by now,” Julius said quietly.

The smile floated on Varker’s lips, bobbing like an apple in a barrel. “Know you? I may have seen you hereabouts before, but can’t say as I recollect specifics. Oh, just a moment—aren’t you associated with some sort of free Negro club? That was it, wasn’t it now? Well, you’re . . . certainly something, a credit to your race. I don’t see what you’re doing here, however, nor why you’ve a trio of copper stars.”

“How the devil does a shell
make
mother-of-pearl?” Valentine suddenly wanted to know, eyes following the decorative tip of his cane. “Call me a simon, but I can’t savvy it—seems to be spun out of light and seawater. Is that possible?”

No one had an immediate answer to this question. Least of all me.

Long Luke barked a laugh, eyes flying madly from one to the other of us. “What’s wrong with
him
?”

“He’s a man of science,” I bit out.

“Did the pair of you visit a house in West Broadway today and take custody of two alleged runaway slaves?” Mr. Piest inquired, setting us back on track. I could have kissed the ugly lunatic. “A woman and a child of seven?”

“Did those darkies tell you that?” Varker mused. He’d been standing near the door, but now he approached us. “If I were you, I’d think mighty hard before listening to anything they have to say. I haven’t seen a liar yet can beat a free Negro at telling tales. And even if we did, well then—why the fuss? You can’t blame a man for wanting his property back, can you? Or us for doing lawbreakers a kindness and helping them find their way home?”

Julius took a single step and was at my side. I’m grateful to say so, because whatever was about to emerge from my mouth would have been breath wasted.

“Enough. Through that door and on into the back,” he said, angling his chin. “That’s where we’ll find them.”

“If anyone did happen to be back there, it would be a misguided ingrate with no legal right to set foot on this here soil,” Varker said, smiling and smiling and still smiling. “And you’d do well to mind your tongue, boy, before someone comes along to mind it for you.”

I’d like to say that all hell broke loose at that instant. But it didn’t, not really. It just appeared so.

As the talk had seemed tranquil enough for a set of men who loathed one another, I hadn’t noted Varker edging silkily toward his desk. I ought to have done, though. Simultaneously, my brother behind me had ceased his study of the miraculous capabilities of mollusks and had begun slinking forward. If I’d grasped either one of those clues, nothing would have been startling about what happened next.

It was barely possible to register Varker’s hand tearing open his desk drawer and retrieving a Colt revolver. He didn’t capture my eye for long, though. That’s because Valentine’s weighted stick was already tracing a blurred arc above his head.

The cane struck the back of Varker’s wrist with the firecracker snap of a delicate bone breaking.

Varker howled an instant later, and the gun fell heavily. He began gasping in a wounded, panicked fashion, and for the best of reasons: Valentine had his broken wrist pinned to the desktop, pressing with both palms on either end of the leaded cane.

I think everyone save me took an awed breath, and Long Luke shied away in fright. I couldn’t find it in me to blame him overmuch. Whimpering, Varker looked up at Val and made a timid effort to pull his hand free.

We heard a grind of loose bone, followed by a tiny shriek. My throat constricted.

My brother is a dangerous man.

“I haven’t been paying attention,” Val remarked in a conversational manner. “Damned if there wasn’t something else on my mind. So tell me—what play were you aiming to make with that snapper, drawing it like a heathen without a fair warning?”

Sickly sweat had broken out all over Varker’s pudgy face. The smile was gone, replaced by what had always been beneath it: purblind terror.

“No play,” he panted. “I was afeared for my life, and—I meant nothing, sir. Please let me—”

“It’s only that I’ve heard tell of coves in this ward who’d quiet a rabbit first and let the river solve what followed. You weren’t thinking along those lines, were you? Making us easy and then trusting to the devil?”

“No, no, as a gentleman—”

“A gentleman? A
gentleman
, he says. Do you know what I think of blackbirders?”

Valentine was smiling himself by now. A terrifying smile, an ocean’s distance from Varker’s blankly scared smirk. Varker said nothing. Probably couldn’t, by then.

“I think they’re men who couldn’t scrape together enough coin by whoring out their mothers and elected to try a less noble profession.”

“Do you now,” the slave catcher moaned. It wasn’t a question. “Well, that’ll give me something to sure enough ruminate on.”

When I reached for the pistol and slipped it inside my coat, Val let him go. I think that’s what he’d been waiting for. Varker fell into the chair, cradling his hand with his mouth hanging open. The Committee of Vigilance kept their peace. Possibly horrified, possibly preferring to have broken his wrist themselves. I could sympathize in either direction. Val is a simon-pure, dyed-in-the-wool thug.

“Quick,” Julius said, starting forward.

“Can you and Piest manage here?” I asked Valentine.

My brother crossed his arms, draping the stick over one shoulder. “If me and the sea urchin couldn’t lace this pair of maggots, I’d throw myself in the river and save them the trouble.”

I rushed with the Committee into the adjoining chamber. It proved a wine storage space, lined with crates wrapped in grey wool blankets. But in the opposite wall loomed a door. It was locked, with a small iron bar drawn through a bolt.

Not a lock meant to keep filchers away from your property. A way to keep your alleged property
in.

The Committee men outpaced me by yards. George Higgins threw the bolt, diving within as his friends did the same. I followed more slowly. Pretty sure of what I’d see and equally sure I’d not stomach it well.

That was a selfish reluctance. But then, I’m not any too adapted to police work.

Very little light spilled through the doorway. But what light there was illuminated a godless scene. Bare walls—though here and there old blood spatters gleamed, their mute throbs yet permeating the air. There was nothing else in the room save for chains. And by nothing, I mean a vile and merciless
nothing
. No pallet, no sink, no chair, no window. No lamp. No chamber pot.

Nothing.

Just a room with four walls, one air vent, and many shackles fixed to the plaster with hooks.

I’d been on the verge of telling my brother that he’d overplayed his hand, but that room snuffed the feeling. Only a devil could have imagined the place. And only a human could have actually made use of it.

In the corner, a boy had curled himself into the smallest shape possible, as if he were nestled in a shell. He was gagged with a cotton rag and tethered to the wall with a leg iron. Reverend Brown had already reached him. Touching his arm, speaking in soothing tones.

The woman—likewise gagged, and chained to the opposite wall—was fighting against a pair of wrist shackles as if she could saw through them using her own flesh. George Higgins reached out, but she thrashed away from him unseeing. Fighting anyone and anything that touched her.

Then I saw why. The top six buttons of her dark green bodice had been ripped open. Methodically too. The buttons were scattered, but the fabric was intact.

“That miserable worm,” I said through my teeth.

“Delia? You’re all right now.” Higgins changed his posture. Curved it into a calm, quiet shape and backed away a few inches. “It’s me. You’re all right. It’s George.”

“Get those things off her. She’s hurting herself,” Julius called out as he cast his eyes about for a pick or a tool or a crowbar.

He was right. George or no George, Delia was determined to snap the shackles off her wrists and lose no time about it. No matter how many bones she shattered.

I left the room. Half tempted to rip Varker’s hand the rest of the way off. But that wasn’t as important as snatching up the set of keys I’d observed hanging from a hook in the shadowy corner of the storage room. As I returned with them, it occurred to me that barreling forward like I was about to thrash someone senseless wouldn’t calm anyone, and so forced myself to slow down.

“Here.” Kneeling next to the boy, I unlocked the rankly sour metal cuffs and then tossed the key ring to Higgins. Jonas and his aunt had been taken without their coats, and the child shivered uncontrollably. Whatever heat permeated the other two rooms was lost through the prison’s air vent. I shrugged my greatcoat off and the minister wrapped it about Jonas’s shoulders.

“There now,” I heard Higgins say as more chains fell to the ground. “You’ll be all right. It’s nearly over.”

I levered myself to my feet. Julius had succeeded in untying the fabric forced between Delia’s lips, and Higgins held a flask to her mouth. She was no less lovely than her sister—though smaller framed, and with a generous splash of freckles surrounding her dark brown eyes. Once free of the shackles, she calmed considerably. Or it seemed she did. I’d have taken in her mental state much better if my eyes hadn’t kept dragging themselves down to the blood streaming from both wrists.

“I’m going out there for a last word with Varker and Coles,” I said with deliberate, nigh jaw-snapping calm.

“Steady on, Timothy,” Julius warned. “When everyone is well enough to walk out of here, we’ll leave as fast as we can manage.”

My feet carried me back into the front room of the wine shop without measurable help from my brain. It being too occupied with wondering whether burning the place down would be at all satisfying. I found Mr. Piest keeping a cool, silent watch in the center of the room. Valentine leaned against the desk, one of the cups in his hand and the half-full wine bottle by now quite drained.

“Everyone healthy?” Val asked, setting the cup down.

“Healthy enough.”

“They’re escaped slaves!” Long Luke whined. He sat huddled against the wall. “Aren’t they, Seixas? Seixas says they are. You lot can’t take them. You
can’t.
Prigg versus Pennsylvania—
”

“It’s entirely illegal,” Varker managed to hiss from his chair. “Monstrous, on my word it is. You can’t just steal a pair of reclaimed runaways from their legitimate captors.”

“How legal is it to attempt to rape a New York citizen, would you say?” I shot back.

Varker’s lip curled, half pretended outrage and half hot shame. “I never—of all the
revolting—
”