Seven for a Secret Read Free Page A

minister’s extensive library, so I answered, “The court miniaturist? Later official painter to the king of France?”
    “Oh. Well, then.”
    “What’s it look like?”
    As I was being told that it looked like a shepherdess wearing a straw bonnet with pink ribbons, we arrived at what could only have been the music room, as it was possessed of two pianos facing each other down like duelists, a cello, several decorative lutes, and a winged harp the size of a broom closet.
    “I’m terribly sorry, but I really must be off,” Millington concluded. “See that this policeman’s questions are answered, yes, Turley? You know best what to do from here, Mr. Wilde.”
    I didn’t. But he departed so swiftly, I hadn’t the pleasure of telling him.
    When his master’s footsteps had faded, Turley wriggled his side-whiskers apologetically. “About earlier, sir. I regret—”
    “You could be the queen of the Gypsies for all I care. Besides, they expect it of you. That ghoul of a dead high-court judge act. Just because you can’t flam me doesn’t mean you’re not doing handsome work flamming them. Help me sort this, and we’ll forget about it.”
    He smiled, showing crooked teeth that likely hadn’t glimpsed public daylight since he was hired. “I call that fair play, Mr. Wilde. I suppose first you’ll want to examine the room.”
    Thinking it a spruce idea, I peered about. At the instruments, the bow windows, the pink draperies, the leering dragons guarding the fireplace. I wrestled back an audible sigh.
    It looked like a room.
    Obviously, an artwork had been removed. Eleven miniature portraits hung as a collection, most of vacuous rosy-cheeked dignitaries but some of vacuous rosy-cheeked peasantry. There ought to have been twelve, though. The third from the right in the second column was missing, and the papered wall was dirty from lack of cleaning beneath the absent painting, dark streaks mottled over the sprays of blushing tea roses. Three little parallel smears of ashy grime. I leaned closer, examining the gap.
    It looked like a gap.
    I lightly worried at the eyebrow bordering my scar as I went to look over the locks on the chamber’s two doorways. “Turley, the chief said
unusual circumstances
.”
    “I called it peculiar myself, sir. This room was locked at midnight when I made my nightly tour. I’ve a key; Mr. Millington has a key; Mrs. Thornton, the housekeeper, has a key. They’re all accounted for. And like Mr. Millington said, weren’t we all bleeding searched to our eyeteeth and past yesterday? As if any of us would ever dream of touching this swag.”
    I tossed him a wry look as I quit the second—and likewise untampered with—door lock. His stately London vowels had dissolved entirely by this time into Bristol’s River Avon. I was almost fond of him for it.
    “They’re worth a fortune, some of them. That miniature certainly is. Nothing has disappeared before now, I take it?”
    “Never, sir. There’s none of us as needs the money, not in that way. We’ve fine victuals below stairs, three sick days a year, bonuses every Christmas. And all of us with family away home to support and ten thousand more Irish crawling into the city every day. It’d take a bedlamite to risk being sacked without a character, things as they are.”
    Irish were indeed flooding New York as if a Donelly or a McKale were contained in every raindrop of every thunderstorm. No one liked them—no one save for Democrats of my brother Valentine’s stripe, who liked their votes considerably—but certainly not house servants of British extraction who could be on the streets in the breadth of a hat pin should their masters take a turn for the frugal. I sympathized with Turley. His brand of animosity was practical, at least, and not the vicious anti-Catholic paranoia that makes my hackles rise.
    But the Irish had commenced starving the year previous, when their potatoes disintegrated. And now it was wintertime, and that