Seven for a Secret by Lyndsay Faye Read Free Book Online Page B

you live now,” I reasoned. “What does your sweepmaster call you?”
    A shudder passed through him. It left the boy wearing a grimace as if he’d like nothing better than to peel himself out of his own skin.
    “Never mind,” I said, before his expression could bring any more of an ache to my ribs. “What sort of name would you like?”
    His eyelashes fluttered, soot-dusted and feathery. The line of his mouth grew a shade less taut.
    “Capital idea, the very thing!” Mr. Piest agreed.
    “Sweepmaster be damned. It’ll belong to you. What’s the bulliest name you can think of?”
    The boy took his time about it. Solemn as gravestones, lips pressed into a line. Finally, face all curiosity, he pointed at the shepherdess I held.
    “The man who painted this? His name was Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin,” I answered.
    The kinchin’s eyes closed as he rolled the sound of it to and fro in his mind. Meanwhile, a wild woodland happiness swept through me. A pleasure like sharp country wind and blown-open winter skies. I’ll never forget the look I shared with Mr. Piest a moment later. Warm as a wordlessly shared flask. And all thanks to a chimney sweep.
    “Do you like the name Jean?” I questioned.
    From the smile that transformed his face, like a pure crescent moon when the clouds have been swept away, I believe that he most assuredly did.
    •   •   •
    “To the Millingtons,”
Mr. Piest proposed in my office, raising his cup of gin, “and the ways of old Gotham. In particular, to fat rewards and those who offer them!”
    We’d all quit the woods as plump snowflakes began to whirl around us in the late afternoon. Crossing Third Avenue in the accepted semi-suicidal fashion, dodging hacks and gleefully reckless vans, I’d watched the crystals settling, and thought about names and their absolute importance to their owners, and felt pretty near to delighted. We celebrated Jean-Baptiste’s self-christening by buying him the thickest bowl of oxtail stew I have ever seen summarily destroyed and then lingered over the occasion, sluggish with warmth and with firelight.
    I’d have done better by him than a hot meal if I could. Children are remarkable creatures, hurtling through savage landscapes of sudden laughter and sharp heartbreaks. It gnaws me bloody to see the city stretch them into leaner, taller, grimmer animals altogether. And there was an innocence to Jean-Baptiste, that wide joy at tiny blessings, I’d have liked to see preserved longer than the next fortnight or so. But taking it upon myself to relocate each and every destitute kinchin I come across would be akin to kneeling at the shoreline and forcing the Hudson back with my fingertips and my will, and at least this one was employed. Housed with his fellow sweeps, presumably, if neither fed nor loved. And thus I shook his hand outside the low saloon, and my fellow copper star flipped him a shilling, and we parted ways.
    Piest and I returned to the servants’ door and handed the painting over to Turley. He vanished, returning with a drawstring purse.
    “Didn’t you know there was a reward?” he’d asked in response to my complete incomprehension.
    So Piest and I split fifty dollars, bestowed for our facility at
finding things
, and he immediately bought the oddest-tasting Dutch gin conceivable. It warmed the throat in a friendly fashion, tasting of dark bread rather than pine.
    My Tombs cave had never looked brighter, as the wind howled beyond the great walls like a wolf baying madly at the heavens. I was rich enough to buy thirty or so used books, pay Mrs. Boehm for the carpet I’d borrowed, and set some aside. I was intoxicated with competence at my profession. Mercy Underhill was in London, which meant Mercy was presumably contented. And it was snowing, so I wasn’t unduly worried that my brother’s engine company might be fighting the raging house fire that would finally leave me the only Wilde in New York.
    That is to say, I was about as