The Providence Rider (18 page)

Matthew sensed uneasily that their speed was becoming dangerous on this already-dangerous road. There were no walls nor railings; if two wheels on the cliffside went off, so would follow the berline.

And then Jack Thacker in a red-cheeked frenzy began to whip the team of Matthew’s coach to more reckless speed. Matthew realized with a start of fear that their whipstruck driver must have abandoned his seat and reins. They were sitting in a runaway coach only a few inches from disaster. Minx Cutter realized it at nearly the same time because she cried out a most unladylike
“Shit!”
and Matthew reckoned that under the circumstances it could be a command.

An enraged cry flew from Aria Chillany’s mouth toward the boisterous brothers: “Stop it!”

But that, Matthew reasoned in his cool center at this moment of heat, was like asking the breeze to cease blowing and the ocean to quit waving, for the Irish twins were now both red-faced and crazed in this drama of their own making and there was no stopping them until…
what
? Nathan Spade’s coach went over the cliff?

As if to emphasize this thought, the whip struck out again and hit the edge of Matthew’s window, knocking loose a chip of black paint.

The runaway horses surged forward at an even more frantic gallop, and now the wheels of the Thackers’ speeding coach hit those of Matthew’s berline, rim to rim, and a shudder passed through the framework that made the joints moan.

“Those bastards!” Aria seethed. She thrust herself across Matthew’s lap and halfway out the window. “Stop it!” she screamed at the brothers. “Stop it or you’re
dead
, do you hear?”

It occurred to Matthew that threatening the Thackers with death was not quite the way to resolve this problem, particularly from the way they laughed and snorted at this pronouncement and also due to the fact that they were not in the coach on the cliff’s edge. Now the road was curving. The coach began to swing to the right and the precipice just beyond. Aria pulled herself back in and looked into Matthew’s face, her eyes wild and black hair windblown. “Do
something
!” she shrieked.

“For the sake of
Christ
do something!” Pons implored with a similar shriek, the lines of his face brown with whuffie-dust and his eyes wet with terror behind the magnifiers.

There was a crash up underneath the coach on the right rear side. Matthew was sure one of the wheels had left the road. The berline shook so hard Pons’ spectacles vibrated off his face and hung by his ornamented ear. His jowls nearly slapped him silly. Matthew’s heart was a constant drummer. He felt the coach leaning toward the gates of heaven…or wherever this bunch would end up. Jack Thacker swung his whip back and forth between the two teams, absorbed in a race that seemed to Matthew to be wholly and terribly one-sided, and as a flame of anger burst into barely-controlled rage he realized that if he went over the side in this shuddering berline he would never set eyes upon Professor Fell and never know why he’d been brought here, and both Berry and Zed would likely be murdered and buried somewhere on this island, and everything—his entire life and all his struggles—had been for naught.

“The hell you say,” he spoke to himself, in a voice that seemed torn from the throat of Nathan Spade.

He was going to have to get up there, find the reins and take control of the team. And he had to go
now
.

He couldn’t get the berline’s left-side door open, for the wheels of the other coach were already scraping the paint away. As if reading his mind and intent, Jack cracked the whip nearly through Matthew’s window into his face; the smell of burned air rushed past his nose. Matthew countered by angling his body to the right and kicking the opposite door open. Then he pushed himself past the two women and grabbed hold of the open door in an effort to climb atop the berline. The sea glistened sixty feet below his boots. The right rear wheel was balanced on the precipice. He started climbing up the coach’s side and saw the driver clinging to dear life on top, arms and legs spread out and fingers grasping anything that afforded a grip. How fast the horses were going now, Matthew didn’t dare guess but the wind of progress up here was terrific. The road was curving again. There was a high thin skreeling sound of contact as the wheels of the Thackers’ coach once more gouged paint and wood splinters. Matthew’s coach lurched further to the right and he heard Augustus Pons give his own high thin skreel of terror from within.

Matthew crawled over the trembling driver, who bore a bright scarlet welt across the side of his face. Then the whip came at Matthew, striking left and right, as Jack Thacker aimed to knock Nathan Spade off his perch. “Stop it, you damned fool!” Aria shouted through the left-side window, but the stridency of her voice only added more cotton to Jack’s tinderbox. He began whipping the runaways as Mack gave a shrill laugh and popped the traces on their own team. Matthew kept his head down and inched toward the driver’s seat; he figured it was all a ghastly joke to those two, but the way the berline was rocking back and forth, the joke might be on himself, Aria, Pons and Minx Cutter. He could imagine the Indian girl frozen in her seat in an attitude of silent acceptance, while Jonathan Gentry might be curled up on the floorboard singing a song of sixpence.

Well, Matthew thought grimly, it was time to show what a Soggy Ass could do.

He reached the driver’s seat and got up on his knees. But where the hell were the reins? Dragging somewhere beneath the horses? The team was throwing up dust and gravel from under their hooves. Matthew saw the road ahead continuing to curve, and now once more the coach was sliding toward the bitter edge.

He heard the crack of Jack Thacker’s whip almost in his ear. At the same time, a searing pain striped across the left side of his neck. It was enough for him to lose his senses and his position on the seat, and suddenly he was falling to the right in a wild flailing of arms and legs.

Even in his pain and panic Matthew realized the only thing between him and the sea below was the berline’s open door, and it was swinging erratically. He reached out for it as if trying to grasp God’s own hand. He caught the windowframe and clung desperately to it as his boots dangled over the edge. He heard what sounded like pistol shots: the spokes of the right rear wheel breaking loose.

“Here!” came a woman’s shout. “Grab hold!”

He looked up at Minx Cutter, who stood crouched over and braced in the coach’s doorway. Her right arm was outstretched toward him, her fingers clawing at the air in an effort to reach his.

He hooked one arm through the window and with the other hand grasped Minx’s. She pulled him toward her but he decided he was not going back into the coach, but rather back into the fray, and the bully boys be damned. He let go of her fingers when he could get his boots on the doorframe’s edge. Then he climbed back up the berline’s side and hauled himself to the top where the coachman still sprawled in abject terror. It occurred to Matthew, as he fought off the pain of his whipstung neck, that working for Professor Fell in any capacity was an exercise in throwing caution to the wind.

Jack’s whip searched for his skin as Matthew crawled once more toward the driver’s seat. What these two were trying to prove was beyond reckoning, or perhaps they simply delighted in deadly games. Call it life-or-death chess, Matthew thought. Fair enough.

The coach suddenly tilted to the right, and both Matthew and the driver had to grab hold of anything their fingers could latch onto. There was a grinding, shrieking noise under the berline. Matthew thought that both right-side wheels had gone off the edge. The horses were fighting to keep from being pulled over by the berline’s weight. For a few horrific seconds it seemed the horses were going to lose, but then they righted the coach and the terrible enterprise kept on shuddering at breakneck speed along the hellish road with the demonic Thackers grinning from crimson faces.

Matthew continued his crawl for the driver’s seat as the whip cracked over his head. Again he searched for the reins, and determined that indeed they were down amid the horses somewhere. His mind deserted him; he had no idea what to do. Without the reins, the horses were beyond control. He thought he must do
something
to slow the berline, but what it was he
could
do was another matter. The whip came at him once more, and he ducked to avoid having an eye extinguished.

“Get out of the way!”

Matthew looked over his shoulder. Minx Cutter was on her feet atop the coach, daring Jack Thacker to strike at her. “Get out of the way!” she repeated in a shout, her curly hair flying in the wind and her face a firm-jawed, rather frightening visage of raw determination.

He drew himself aside so she could get past him. A glance at Jack Thacker showed the elder brother with his teeth clenched, and rearing his arm back to swing the lash again upon either Matthew or the young woman.

But Minx Cutter was faster.

In a blur, her hand went into her waistcoat. It reappeared with an extra finger of sharp silver. She turned the knife in her hand to seize the grip. She hardly seemed to take aim. Her throw of the knife across the distance between the coaches, taking into account the speed, the whirling dust and the shuddering of the damaged berline, was nothing short of awesome. The blade flashed with sunlight on its arrow-straight path to the hand that held the whip, and when it pierced the flesh between forefinger and thumb Jack Thacker’s fingers opened and he howled like a dog.

Then Minx Cutter leaped past Matthew and landed upon the back of the first horse on the right. She grabbed hold of the flying mane and leaned down so far Matthew thought surely her legs would lose their grip and she would be lost beneath hooves and wheels. But then she came up with dust on her face and the reins in her hand. She put her shoulders and back into slowing the team, all the time shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” in a voice that made Matthew think her lungs must be made of leather.

Within ten seconds of her handling the reins and shouting for order in this scene of chaos, Minx Cutter was obeyed. The horses began to slow. The offending coach sped on past with a final scraping of wheels, as Mack slapped the reins and Jack held his bleeding hand to his chest like a wounded dove.

Minx stayed aboard her horse until the berline had rolled to a creaking and clattering stop. It sounded to Matthew as if the entire framework was about to fall to pieces, yet miraculously it held together. The horses nickered and jostled each other, still nervous from their run, but Minx held them with a steady hand. When she was satisfied, she slid off her mount to the ground and walked around to look at the battered right-side wheels, her own boots about three inches from the precipice.

“My God!” Matthew had to say. He was nearly sputtering with admiration. “How did you
do
that?”

She gave him a narrow-eyed glance that said she didn’t suffer fools, and that she ranked him highly on that low list.

“Get out! Get out!” Aria Chillany shouted. In response, Augustus Pons made it out of the coach before tossing his breakfast in long streams over the cliff. His face had taken on a green cast to match his blouse. Minx Cutter aimed her most reproachful gaze at him, hard enough to slap his jowls without lifting a finger, and then she called for the coachman, who peered over the berline’s side like a terrified child.

“Come down here and look at these wheels!” she commanded. “Can we keep going or not?”

The coachman, a sweating bundle of raw nerves, obeyed in spite of his obvious desire to cling to safety as long as possible. Matthew eased himself off the driver’s seat to the ground, where his knees begged to give way. Yet he thought that one stumble and fall today was already one too many, and to show weakness before the formidable presence of Minx Cutter would not do honor to the dirty reputation of Nathan Spade.

“I’ll have them killed!” seethed Madam Chillany as she staggered from the coach. She stared along the dusty road in the direction the Thackers had gone. “No matter who they think they are, they are
dead
!”

“I believe…we can go on,” said the coachman, which might have been the most difficult six words he had ever spoken. He followed this statement with a more cautious, “If we go slow.”

“Just get us to the castle as quick as you can!” Aria blotted her face with a frilly handkerchief. Her eyes were ablaze. “Pons, stop that! Wipe your mouth and get back inside!”

The fat man, whose legs were almost freakishly short, crawled into the berline as if he were closing about himself the spiky confines of an Iron Maiden. He sat with his head tilted back, his eyes squeezed shut and both hands clasped to his mouth.

“Nathan!” Aria snapped, to coax Matthew from his reverie. “Get in!”

Matthew’s knees were still trembly. “When I’m ready!” he snapped back, only half-acting. He had a hand on the whip’s sting to his neck; the pain had eased a little, but the welt was going to be worthy of some soothing ointment. He planted himself in front of Minx, aware that one step to his left would send him to find out how his old employer, Magistrate Isaac Woodward, fared in the Great Courthouse Beyond. “I asked you how you
did
that,” he said.

“I jumped,” she replied cooly. “How else?”

“Not that.
Anyone
could’ve done that,” he lied. “I was about to do the same thing.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he answered, feeling his oats. “I mean with the knife. How did you throw the knife like that?”

She got up close to him and stared him in the eyes. Her golden-hued gaze was both solemn and yet touched with a shade of humor, though the expression on her face remained absolutely impassive. She let a few seconds expire, during which Matthew began to feel extremely uncomfortable. Then she said, nearly in a whisper, “It’s all in the wrist.” She strode past him and swung herself up into the coach.

Matthew had the thought he was still in the water, and maybe in far too great a depth for either comfort or safety. He had the feeling of being a small fish at the mercy of any number of predators. But where was there to go from here, except deeper still? He waited until the coachman had secured the reins, positioned himself back in his seat and the horses were ready, as much as they could be after that wild frenzy of whipping and the pounding of hooves. Then Matthew got into the coach and after a bemused and careful glance at Minx Cutter closed his eyes to think more clearly. But just before his eyes shut he saw her turn her head to take him in, and he had the distinct feeling that she would be examining him as he sat drowsing, and—a dangerous feeling—she might be thinking she knew him from somewhere yet could not decide where the meeting had taken place.