Seven for a Secret by Lyndsay Faye Read Free Book Online

confess it freely: I cast out bait no fish would have been able to resist. Maybe I needed the Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin back, and maybe I wanted to give the kinchin ten minutes of fun. Probably both motives were true, and neither pure. In any event, within a short space of time, I’d completed a small portrait of a chimney sweep.
    A sweep who now stared at me with the soft light of wonder in his swollen eyes.
    “What do you think?” I prompted.
    The boy explored his face with his fingertips, brushing them carefully over his even brow, his sharply edged lips, the bridge of his up-tilting nose. Lacking a mirror but clever enough not to need one. A smile bloomed across his features as he searched.
    I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of my facility myself. It’s generally a useless knack altogether.
    “That is the most magnificent artwork that I have ever seen,” Mr. Piest announced.
    Grimy fingers hovered over the memorandum book. When I moved it away, the sweep’s face snapped to mine. Quivering with desire and asking the most direct question I’ve ever seen rather than heard.
    “All right. It’s yours, but I need payment.”
    He seized the broom and bell.
    “No, I don’t have a chimney to clean. As I told you, I’m very fond of art. I’ve shown you a painting. Now I want you to show me one, as a trade. Have you anything worth looking at yourself?”
    He lit up as only a six-year-old boy can. Before permanent lines are drawn between victims and tormentors, before suffering quite registers as cruelty. Before the falsehoods adults tell acquire a tinny ring.
    Meanwhile, a generous splash of vinegar seeped into my belly. Lying to him shamed me, but I hadn’t much of an alternative. And I thought to make it up to the lad.
    The sweep flew across Third, barely pausing for traffic as we hastened after. A dogcart swerved, an open landau filled with champagne-swilling ladies in dark furs nearly flattened Piest, and we stopped once in the middle of the road to allow for a speeding omnibus. But all three emerged unscathed from the perilous avenue. When the boy sped north along the road’s margin, we kept pace with him, the spreading oak trees casting blurred shadows into the milky light.
    After ten or twelve blocks, we’d quit the developed city for the farmlands surrounding Bellevue Almshouse. We like our benevolent institutions much farther afield than our blinding rainbow array of vices. Only the fanatical reformers brave the streets as Mercy did, a basket over her shoulder and a ferocious calm in her eyes. By the time the boy veered off of Third into the woods, the streets intersecting the avenue were no longer paved. They were hints at the grid design—square forest canvasses, blank pages in a diary. Now roots caught at our feet, and the slender elms and maples grew scattershot. Birds called out from the branches rendered in sable ink against the ice-hued skyline, and every so often a wild creature crashed away through the bracken. I glimpsed the red tail of a fox, trotting over the undulating ground in search of supper and shelter and rest.
    Before us, the tiny black figure flew onward like a gap in space. A cutout, the silhouette of a boy running through the undergrowth.
    I hadn’t the smallest notion what to expect, of course. But when he’d reached our destination, I took a moment to blink in astonishment.
    “By all the saints,” Mr. Piest exclaimed softly.
    Many years earlier, from the looks of the waxy ivy and the trailing brown vines, a carriage traveling up Third Avenue suffered an accident. Likely the horses had panicked. It happens all too frequently. The beasts had crashed into a barely visible ditch in the middle of a theoretical block within a glade no one occupied, almost in sight of the East River. I didn’t bother wondering why the owners had abandoned it, for the back axle thrust at a wrecked angle up through the dead leaves. And even if no humans had died there, it was obvious from