The Providence Rider (11 page)

“Walk before me to the boat,” he repeated. “I would appreciate your compliance.”

Berry caught a movement to her right. She looked to the west along Wall Street, and saw at the intersection of Wall and Smith streets the green-glassed lantern of a passing constable.

“I promise,” said Sirki in a cool, even tone, “to return you and Matthew safely here after his job is done. But if you cry for help or run, I will kill you before the cry leaves your lips and before you take two steps. I will deposit your corpse in the sea, where it shall never be found.” He waited, silently, for her to make her decision.

Matthew was listening also. He couldn’t help her, and he damned himself for it.

Berry watched the lantern’s green glimmer pass away. The cry was so near to bursting free…yet she knew this man standing before her would do exactly as he said, and there was no point in meeting her death this night. She turned her gaze back upon him. “What job does Matthew have to do?” Her voice was shaky, yet she was holding herself together with all the willpower she could muster.

“What he
does
,” Sirki answered. “Solving a problem. Will you walk before me to the boat, please? This cold can be doing you no good.”

She had an instant of thinking she might smash him in the face with the lantern. But he reached out and grasped her wrist, as if reading her thought as soon as it was born, and with a strangely gentle touch he led her out along the pier to the skiff where Matthew was pushed back down to a sitting position by Croydon’s rough hand.

“Squibbs,” said Sirki when Berry had been gotten aboard and situated, “cast off our lines, please.” It was done, and Squibbs stepped back onto the boat. Lanterns were placed on hooks at bow and stern. Two sets of oars went into their locks. Croydon and Squibbs went to work, rowing out into the dark, while Sirki took a seat between Matthew and Berry.

“Where are you taking us?” she asked the giant, and now her willpower was showing cracks and her voice did indeed tremble.

“First, the place you call Oyster Island. We’ll give a signal from there to the ship. Then…outward bound.” When he smiled, the diamonds in his front teeth glittered.

“Why?” Matthew whispered huskily. The question was directed at Berry, who did not answer. Therefore he asked again, from the bruised lips in his battered face.
“Why?”

She couldn’t answer, for she knew he didn’t really wish to hear why a woman—any woman—would leave her safe abode in the cold midnight and undertake a journey at the side of a man she desired more than anything in the world. If she might be able to keep him safe…or keep him
alive
…then that was her own job, worth doing. Hang New York, she thought. Hang the world of safe abodes and warm beds. Hang the past, and what used to be. The future lay ahead for both of them, and though it was for now a forbidding place of dark water and uncertain destiny, Berry Grigsby felt more vital and more
needed
in this moment than ever before in her life.

The oars shifted water. The skiff moved steadily toward the black shape of Oyster Island, and Matthew Corbett the problem-solver could not for the life of him solve the problem of how to get Berry out of this.

The skiff’s bottom scraped rocks. “Out,” said Sirki, and at this command Croydon and Squibbs—two obedient seadogs—fairly leapt from the boat into the icy knee-deep water and dragged the skiff onto shore.

“Gentleman and lady?” Sirki made an expansive gesture with one arm and gave a bow, whether in mockery or with serious intent Matthew couldn’t tell. “We’ll be here only a short while,” the giant explained as he lifted his lantern to shine upon their faces. “I regret the cold and the circumstances. Step out, please, and do mind your footing on the stones.”

So land was reached with a stumble from Berry and a muttered curse from Matthew that would have gained approval at the roughest tavern in New York. Matthew caught her elbow and guided her onward over rocks, loose gravel and the ubiquitous pieces of oyster shells that crunched underfoot.

Standing amid the dead weeds and wild grass of shore, Sirki busied himself opening a leather pouch, from which he removed squares of red-tinted glass. He deftly removed the clear glass insets of his lantern and, shielding the candle’s guttering wick with his formidable body, he then slid the red glass squares into place. “Watch them,” he told the two mongrels, and then he strode off in the direction of the watchtower, which perhaps was only a hundred yards or so distant through the woods.

A signal was about to be given and the ship alerted that this scheme was underway, Matthew thought. He felt Berry shiver beside him, and he put his arm and part of the gray blanket around her.

Lights from the two lanterns held by Croydon and Squibbs wandered over Berry’s body. A bad sign, Matthew thought. “Where are we going?” he asked them, if just to divert their minds from their present—and highly disturbing—destination.

“Somewhere warmer than
this
,” said Croydon. “Thank Christ.”

“A three weeks voyage? To a warmer clime?” Matthew considered the geography; he put a map of the Atlantic in his mind and sought a harbor. “Not the Florida territory, I’m betting. Not into Spanish country. So…”
Outward bound
, Sirki had said. “The Bermuda islands,” Matthew announced. “Is that right?”

“You are a pretty thing,” said Squibbs, putting his light on Berry’s face. “Take off that cap and let your hair loose.”

“No,” Matthew answered. “She
won’t
.”

“Here, now!” Croydon stepped forward and fairly sizzled Matthew’s eyebrows by putting the lamp’s hot glass right up in his face. “No one’s talkin’ to you, are they? Squibbs is just askin’ her to be
friendly
, is all. A cold night and such…what’s the harm of being a little friendly?” He turned the light upon Berry, who couldn’t help but shrink back a step, for she realized these two were not so well-controlled without the East Indian giant giving them orders.

“Let your hair loose,” Squibbs repeated. His mouth sounded thick and wet.

“Sirki will be back any minute,” said Matthew. His body was a tense mass of bruised pain; in his present state he could neither deliver a blow nor take one.

“Any minute ain’t
now
,” was Squibbs’ reply. He reached out, grasped Berry’s cap and pulled it off, and her coppery-red tresses flowed free down her shoulders. “Pretty hair,” Squibbs said after a moment of deliberation. “Bet it
smells
nice.”

“Long time,” said Croydon, “since I smelled me a woman’s hair.”

Matthew took a position between the two men and Berry. He thrust his chin forward, daring a strike. “Sirki won’t like this. We’re supposed to be
guests.
” He spoke the word with dripping sarcasm.

“Ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong,” Squibbs answered, his eyes narrowed and his gaze focused beyond Matthew on the true object of his attention. “Just wantin’ to
smell
. Step aside.”

Matthew balled up his fists, for all the good that would do. His arms were leaden lengths of ache. “I’ll call him,” he promised. “He won’t—”

“Hear you,” said Croydon. “Be a good little shit and step aside.”

“I’m not moving.”

“Oh yes, you are,” said Squibbs, and with a quick powerful motion he grasped the front of Matthew’s coat and flung him aside. Matthew stumbled over his own legs and went down amid the weeds and brush, and once out of the way and out of the light he was a forgotten man.

Squibbs and Croydon pushed forward, and though Berry retreated another step she realized there was nowhere else to go, and perhaps she ought to stand perfectly still and get this over with for surely the giant would be back at any minute. But, as the one man had said, one minute wasn’t now.

They got on either side of her. Matthew said, “Stop it!” and tried to struggle out of what felt like a cluster of thorns. His legs would not obey. The two men got their faces up against Berry’s hair, and as they drew in draughts of woman-perfume she smelled their unwashed odor of dried sweat, salt and old fish.

“Nice,” Croydon breathed, and his free hand came up to stroke Berry’s cheek. “Real fuckin’ nice.”

Matthew tried to get up. His legs betrayed him yet again. “Stop it!” he repeated, but he might have been speaking to the hard stones on the ground beneath him. Squibbs was starting to draw his unshaven face slowly down along Berry’s throat. She made a noise of disgust with a frantic edge in it, and she pushed against Squibbs’ shoulder but he was going nowhere, and now Croydon’s gray-coated tongue flicked out and darted here and there amid the freckles on Berry’s left cheek.

Matthew could bear no more of this. He desperately searched about in the dark for a small rock, a stick, whatever he could get his hands on to throw at the two ruffians. He struggled to stand, and in further desperation he opened his mouth to shout for help from the East Indian giant.

Before he could deliver that shout, Matthew was yanked backward through the brush by a hand that closed on his coat’s collar.

At the same time, another hand that felt as rough as treebark clamped over his mouth, sealing shut all proposed shouts. He was dragged back and further back, the weeds and sawgrass and thorns tearing at his clothes, and then he was tossed unceremoniously aside, more like a beatup sack that needed to be gotten out of the way. A finger pressed hard to his mouth. The message was:
Silence
.

And Matthew knew, even in his state of brain-blasted befuddlement.

Here was the phantom of Oyster Island.

“What in bleedin’ hell was that noise?” Squibbs directed his light into the underbrush. “Hey now! Where’d that boy go to?”

“Shit!” Croydon had almost hollered it. His attention had left Berry’s freckles and was fixed on the empty place where Matthew Corbett had been a few seconds before. “He’s fuckin’ gone!”

“I know he’s fuckin’ gone!” Squibbs sounded near crying. “You don’t have to tell me he’s fuckin’ gone!”

“Run off! God blast it! That ape’ll have your head for this!”

“
My
head? You was supposed to be watchin’ him!”

“I
was
watchin’ him, ’til you started this shit with the girl!” Croydon backed away from Berry, sensing a terrible streak of bad luck coming his way. “Get in there and find that damned boy! He couldn’t have gone far!”

Squibbs surveyed the dark and forbidding expanse of forest. “In
there
?”

“Go on, man! You owe me for that last mess in London!”

Berry saw Squibbs give a little shrug of resignation, as if that last mess in London had forever enslaved him to his partner. Then the hideous man whose breath smelled like spoiled onions and horse dung—and she would
always
unfortunately remember that odor—followed his lantern’s light into the woods.

A few seconds of silence followed. “You got him, Squibbs?” Croydon called.

There was a
smack
.

A quick but brutal sound. Berry thought it sounded like a fist plowing into a bucket of mud. Maybe there was the
crunch
of a bone breaking in there, as well. She winced and tears burned her eyes, for she knew that Matthew could hardly survive a blow like that.

A body came flying out of the woods like dirty laundry being thrown from a hamper.

It landed nearly at Croydon’s slime-crusted boots. “Jesus!” Croydon yelled, for his light fell upon Squibbs’ face and the knot that was already turning purple at the center of the forehead. Squibbs’ eyes had rolled back and showed the whites; he was not dead, for his chest heaved in ragged inhalations of troubled air, but his life-candle had nearly been knocked cold.

And then the phantom of Oyster Island, followed closely by Matthew Corbett, stepped out of the darkness into the quivering orbit of Croydon’s lamp.

The massive freed slave Zed wore a ragged black coat over the same baggy brown breeches he’d worn when he’d leaped off a pier into the water back in November, and had last been seen swimming in the direction of Africa. He wore no shoes. A slice of bare chest showed between the straining buttons of his too-small coat. In the light from Croydon’s lantern, Zed was even more fearsome a figure than three months before. Though he had lost some muscle in his hulking shoulders, he had gained a wild black beard. His skull was still perfectly bald, having been scraped clean with perhaps a sharpened shell, and across his broad ebony face—imprinted upon cheeks, forehead and chin—were tribal scars that lay upraised on the flesh, and in these were the stylized Z, E, and D by which Ashton McCaggers had named him.

Now, however, Zed’s master was no longer Ashton McCaggers. A writ of manumission from Lord Cornbury had secured Zed’s freedom. This stony and wooded patch of earth might well have been the ex-slave’s kingdom, if he could not yet reach the golden shore of Africa. In any case, the scowling expression on Zed’s face spoke to Croydon, and it said in no uncertain terms:
Get off my land or pay in blood
.

Croydon understood that message, for he turned tail and fled for the skiff. Unfortunately for Croydon, the king of Oyster Island was not in a mood to treat a trespasser with a welcome hand. Even as Croydon reached the skiff and clambered into it, Zed was upon him. The flat of a hand against the back of Croydon’s head sent a spray of saliva from the man’s mouth and perhaps caused the teeth to snap shut on the tongue because there was a plume also of scarlet liquid. Then Zed followed that with a fist to the middle of the forehead, same as had been delivered to Squibbs. As Croydon slithered down like a gutted fish, Zed picked him up bodily from the boat and swung him onto the shoreline’s rocks, where the body made a hideous series of crunching sounds and began to twitch as if Croydon were dancing to Gilliam Vincent’s abusive direction.

“Ah!” came a voice with a quiet lilt. “What is
this
?”

Matthew and Berry saw that Sirki had returned from his task. Bloody light from his red-glassed lantern had fallen upon Zed, whose fathomless black eyes took in this new intruder and seemed to glow with centers of fire.

“A
Ga
,” said Sirki, with a note of true admiration. Obviously he knew the origin of the tattoos and the reputation of the Ga as supreme warriors. “I am pleased,” he went on, “to make your acquaintance. I see you have taken up for my guests. And now,” he said with a red-sparkly smile, “I suppose I shall have to kill you.” He hooked the lantern’s wire handle over a low-hanging tree branch, which would have been out of the reach of normal-sized men. Then he reached into his cloak and brought out a curved dagger whose grip gleamed with various precious stones. Its outer slashing edge was formed of vicious sawteeth. Matthew wondered if Sirki would have used it on Mrs. Sifford and Mr. Dupee if the tea had failed to put them under. Still smiling with murderous intention and delight, Sirki advanced upon Zed, who plucked up an oar, thrust out his chest and stood his ground.

There was nothing either Matthew or Berry could do. Sirki kept striding forward, now through the ankle-deep water, as if on a simple mission to cut open an extra-large grouper.

By the red light, the two forces neared conflict. Zed waited with the oar ready to strike, and Sirki’s blade made circles in the air.

Suddenly they were upon each other, with the same swiftness in the same second; whoever had made the first move was impossible to tell. Sirki dodged a swing of the oar and came up underneath it, his knife’s point going for Zed’s belly. But Zed retreated through the shallow water and turned aside, and the knife did no more damage than popping a button from his coat. When the energy of the thrust had been expended, Zed brought the oar’s handle up to slam against Sirki’s shoulder. The East Indian giant gave a hiss of pain, but no more than that, and as he staggered back to get out of range he was already swinging the blade at Zed’s face to imprint another initial upon the flesh.

Zed was faster still. The sawteeth missed his nose by an African whisker. The oar was in action again, coming at Sirki’s head. The giant threw up an arm and the oar’s shaft cracked and shattered across it, bringing from Sirki a small grunt as one might make stubbing a toe on a garden stone. The knife’s angle changed direction in midair and what had begun as a strike to the shoulder now became a quest for throat’s flesh. Zed’s free hand caught the wrist. A fist slammed into Zed’s jaw and made his knees wobbly but he stayed on his feet and thrust into Sirki’s midsection with the oar’s jagged end.