The Providence Rider (21 page)

Not today, at least.

For it seemed to Matthew that a cannon-guarded, walled fort on the island owned by Professor Fell must hold something the emperor of crime did not care to be viewed by the inhabitants of his drowsy dreamworld.

Well, Matthew thought, there was always tomorrow. By now he was used to kicking over ordinary rocks and finding extraordinary horrors scuttling from underneath them in a desperate search for the protective dark. He reined Athena in and sat for a moment staring down the road that sat between two poles and two skulls. He marked that this place was about four miles from the professor’s castle, by the route they’d taken. Within him his sense of curiosity and desire for discovery began to vibrate; he was attuned to a question that needed to be answered.

Minx said firmly, “Come along. We shouldn’t linger here.”

Indeed not, Matthew thought as he got Athena moving again. For he had the sure sensation that they were being watched from somewhere in the trees, and even the guests at this strange conference of criminals could find their skulls separated from their necks by following that particular road into the unknown.

But, of course, following the unknown road was part of his business. His nature, also.

Another time
, he promised himself.

And he knew that, whatever dangers and intrigues he might face at this bizarre dinner planned for tonight, his promises were for keeping.

Caution doubled. And redoubled. A bell was being rung by a servant who walked along the hallway. It was time for dinner. Time for Matthew to slip into the skin of Nathan Spade and button himself up in it, just as now he buttoned his shirt. When he was done, he slipped into the coat of his forest-green suit and also buttoned that up. It seemed he could not have enough security, nor buttons enough. One popped off as he was wrestling it. The bell called him to hurry. He appraised his look in the mirror. His face had become darkened by the sun, which made the bear-claw scar on his forehead stand out as a pinker line. Also more on the pinkish side was the newer and smaller mark under his left eye, put there by his adventure in the exploding house on Nassau Street. His hair was brushed, his teeth were cleaned, he was freshly-shaved and he was ready for the moment. Yet…there was something about himself that was a recent arrival, he thought. It was a steely glint in his eyes that had not been there before…what? The last gasp of Tyranthus Slaughter? It was the glint of a sword ready to parry another, or quickly strike if need be. It was the steel of survival, forged from his experiences to the point of standing here before this mirror.

The sound of the calling bell had receded.

Dinner was ready. And so was Matthew Corbett.

He pulled in one long breath, let it slowly out, and then he left his room.

In the hallway, a woman glided up beside him and took his right arm. Aria Chillany pressed close against him, her fragrance like the last embers of a smoky fire. She was wearing a black gown trimmed with red lace. Her ebony hair flowed down in brushed waves and her sapphire eyes sparkled, yet her beautiful face was tight and her mouth a hard line. “Nathan,” she said quietly as they walked, “do you know your part?”

“I do,” he answered, just as quietly. These doors they were passing might have ears.

“Let us hope,” she said, and added: “Dear boy.”

They descended the stairs like criminal royalty. Matthew allowed the woman to guide him, as he was certainly a stranger here. They walked through a hallway that held alcoves displaying what appeared to be the skeletons of various types of fish mounted on stands. Then the hallway ended at a short staircase descending to a large banquet room with blue-painted walls and ceiling and, upon that ceiling, painted clouds with painted cherubs gazing down upon the denizens of earth.

The assembled group of six sat before silver placesettings at a polished table that seemed to Matthew as long as a New York block. Above it was a brass chandelier ablaze with candles, as the night had fallen over Fell’s festival, and also spaced along the table were brass candelabras that gave off a lovely light upon the unlovely throng.

Where to begin? It was Matthew’s question to himself, as he and Madam Chillany came down the stairs and their presence brought to a halt the banquet room’s already-restrained conversation. He was wondering where to begin gathering impressions, and was aided in this regard when Aria announced to the group, “Let me introduce our new arrival, Nathan Spade.”

No one sat at the foot of the table, nor at the head. The first person seated on the left was a dashing-looking gentleman in a shimmery gray suit and a vivid scarlet neckscarf, his age probably in the late forties, his hair black and gleaming except for streaks of gray along the temples, his chin sharp, nose narrow and his deep-set eyes dark brown beneath arched black brows. He stood up, smiled showing good white teeth, gave a crisp bow and extended a hand. “Cesar Sabroso,” he said, in a voice that made Matthew think of warm oil at the bottom of a lamp. The better to lubricate a monarch’s imagination so as to get at the Spanish treasury beyond it, Matthew thought. He shook the man’s hand and then gave his attention to the person seated on the right.

“Adam Wilson,” spoke this slight, pale and nearly invisible creature, who wore small square-lensed spectacles and had a long, somber and horse-like face. His voice was like the echo of another voice spoken in another room. He wore a baggy suit the shade of bleached-out hay, and his tight cap of hair pulled back into a painful-looking queue was nearly the same color. His pallid blue eyes refused to meet Matthew’s, but rather angled off a few inches to the side even as he offered a hand the size of a child’s. Matthew’s impression was that this man could sit in a corner without moving for a time and be forgotten by everyone else in the room, and therefore he carried around with him his own disguise.

“Edgar Smythe,” announced the next gent on the left, in a voice like a bucket of gravel being pounded by an iron mallet. It made Matthew’s eardrums throb. Smythe, the selfsame gray-bearded and gray-haired man who had climbed the stairs past Matthew this morning, looked supremely bored. He was again in his black suit, with a ruffled blue shirt. He neither rose from his chair nor offered a hand, but immediately returned his attention to a glass of red wine he was nursing like a beloved child.

Matthew noted gold-lettered placecards on the table. The one across from Smythe read
Dr. Jonathan Gentry
, but the seat was empty. The physician, Matthew mused, was yet upstairs healing himself. Then next to Smythe was another empty chair and the placecard for
Minx Cutter
, who likewise had not yet arrived. Across from Minx’s chair, the card read
Nathan Spade
, and next to that place
Aria Chillany
. Next to Minx were three empty chairs, the closest to her being for
Mack Thacker
, the next for
Miss Fancy
, and the third for
Jack Thacker
. This will be a lovely scene, Matthew thought grimly.

“Our daring savior!” said Augustus Pons, who sat one chair down from Aria’s place. The triple-chinned face grinned, as candlelight played on the lenses of his spectacles and gleamed upon his bald pate. “You and Miss Cutter taught those bad boys a lesson, eh?” He opened his mouth and the twig-thin young man with curly brown hair who sat between him and Madam Chillany’s chair tipped a glass of the red wine over lips that glistened like garden slugs. The young man wore a powder-blue suit and had ruddy cheeks like those of the painted cherubs gamboling above. His eyes were bright blue, and they sparkled merrily for his master.

“Thank you, Toy,” said the fat man, when the glass had been lowered and the young man had blotted Pons’s third chin with a napkin. “Mr. Spade, do sit down and tell us all about your escapades in London!”

“Keep your business to yourself, Mr. Spade,” said the white-haired woman who sat on the other side of Pons. “His mouth has been known to get people into trouble.”

“It is other people’s mouths that get
me
into trouble,” Pons protested, without much vehemence. “Isn’t that right, Toy?”

Toy giggled, a nasty sound.

“Come speak to me, Mr. Spade,” said Mother Deare. “Let me take your measure.” She was a broad-shouldered, thickly-set woman in a copper-colored gown with frills of red and blue lace at the neck and cuffs. Matthew thought the gown fit her as much as two pairs of silk slippers fit a drayhorse. He went to her side, as she pushed her chair back from the table and turned it to regard him with froggish brown eyes in a wide, square-chinned face. Matthew reasoned she was likely sixty years old or thereabouts, with deep lines across her forehead and radiating from the corners of her eyes. She appeared to have known a life of hard work, probably performed outside under a hot sun. She wore red lace gloves, perhaps to hide hands that had been worked to the point of broken knuckles. The cloud of her cottony hair was done up with golden pins. She smiled at him, in a motherly way. Matthew had the desire to step back a pace or two at the sight of this peg-toothed smile, but he held himself in check as he thought rudeness here would be an unforgiven sin.

“A handsome young lad,” Mother Deare decided. She had a quiet voice, yet there was some element of the bludgeon in it. “I suspect you are no stranger to the wiles of women.”

The moment of real truth had arrived. Everyone was listening. Matthew’s heart was pounding, for he thought surely this bulgeous-eyed woman was able to see through his mask. He kept his face composed and reached deep for a reply. “The wiles of women,” he said, “are my business. And in
my
business, the stranger the better.”

Pons gave an amused little laugh. Aria Chillany followed that one with her own. Mother Deare’s smile was unbroken, but she nodded ever so slightly. “Well said,” she told him. She motioned toward his chair. “Join us.”

Matthew took his place.

Aria sat to his right. A black servant in the sea-blue uniform and high wig emerged from a door artfully concealed in a wall at the far end of the room, bringing a basket full of various kinds of freshly-baked bread cut into slices. After he had served these to whomever desired them, he went around the table refilling wine glasses from bottles of red and white already on display. Matthew chose a glass of red, as that seemed to be the drink of choice among this bunch. When he took his first sip a thrill of terror shot through him…not at the sense that he might be taking a sip of poison, but at the fact that suddenly he was so damned comfortable in this masquerade. It astounded him, how far he had come from being a lowly law clerk, to being…what? It seemed to him that he wasn’t quite sure what he was on his way to being. And that too caused a kink of unease down where the red wine drifted.

Descending the stairs to the banquet room came Minx Cutter, wearing tan trousers, a dark blue waistcoat and a white blouse. She took her time about it, and then she seated herself directly across from Matthew as per her placecard. She nodded at Mother Deare and Pons but directed her attention to her choice of wine from the servant instead of to any of the other guests, and to his surprise Matthew felt a pang of envy toward the bottled grape.

A minute or so after Minx’s arrival, came a bellow of noise and the slamming of bootheels on the stairs and thus the Thackers arrived with Fancy held fast by either arm and pressed between them. The brothers wore identical red suits—a shock to any civilized eyeball—with black waistcoats and gray shirts. Fancy was draped in a dark green gown with a black bodice, and she wore elbow-length gloves of black cloth. She was manhandled along until she was shoved down in the chair between the Thackers, and they were laughing like hyenas and snorting like bulls all the way. Matthew noted with a certain satisfaction that Jack’s right hand was bound up with a cloth bandage. The two brothers took their places and sprawled in their chairs, and Fancy wore a blank stare on her lovely face and kept her head lowered.

Mack and Jack went after the bread and spilled as much wine as they poured. When Minx reached for the bread basket the servant had left on the table, Jack suddenly reached into his coat with his left hand, brought out a knife crusted with blood and, standing up and leaning forward, plunged it into the basket’s contents.

“There ya go,” he said sweetly to Minx. “Wanted to return what ya gave to me—”

“—so kindly,” Mack finished, and then he swigged a glass of red.

Minx’s expression remained placid. She pulled the basket toward her, removed the knife and chose a slice of bread marred by Jack’s crusty lifejuice. She ate it while staring at Matthew, after which she calmly slid the blade into her waistcoat.

The eyes of the Thackers settled on Nathan Spade.

“Hey, boyo!” Jack called. “Enjoy your coach ride?”

“Thrilling,” Matthew replied. “Thank you.”

“We wasn’t tryin’ to
thrill
ya,” said Mack, as he dipped bread into a bowl of brown sauce the servant had left. “We was tryin’ to—”

“—
kill
ya!” Jack finished, and he gave a harsh chortle. “Naw, just jokin’ there, boyo! We knew you wasn’t gonna go off the edge!”

“And how did you know that, please?” Madam Chillany had regained the fire in her eyes and the ice in her voice.

Mack answered, “Somebody as smart as he’s supposed to be, playin’ with the whores and all, he ain’t gonna go so easy as that! Naw, ma’am! ’Course, it helped him to have—”

“—a knife-thrower at his side,” said Jack, with a quick and disdainful glance at Minx. “Problem is, maybe she ain’t always gonna
be
at his side!”

“Maybe not.” Matthew took another drink of his wine before he spoke again. “What do you two gents have against me? You’re simply angry because I made you wait a few weeks?”

“They don’t like anyone with three attributes they don’t have,” said Mother Deare. “Good manners, good looks, and good sense. Pay them no further attention. You are feeding a fire that should be left untamped.”

“Listen to her, Spadey,” said Mack, with brown sauce on his chin.

“Yeah, she’s big enough to fight your battles for ya, ain’t she?” Jack grinned in the most sarcastic way. Then his eyes flared like flaming tinderboxes, he grabbed Fancy by the hair and kissed her mouth, Augustus Pons said, “Oh my God,” Toy squirmed in his chair, and Mack then grasped Fancy’s chin and smashed her lips with his own. After the bully-boys’ statement of ownership was done, they went back to their drinking and Fancy again lowered her head and stared at the surface of the table as if it were a new world she was fixated on either exploring or escaping to.

“Well,
I
don’t enjoy having to wait for anyone!” It was spoken by the hammer-crushing-gravel voice of Edgar Smythe. His face was a wrinkled mass of barely-confined anger. “Here nearly a month! After that damnable voyage from Plymouth! The seas so high I was swimming in my fucking bed! And then I get here and am told I have to wait for
him
before we can start our business?” A finger stabbed toward Matthew. “A damned
boy
?”

“Watch your words, please,” Mother Deare advised. “We are all equals here.”

“The money I bring in
has
no equal,” Smythe fired back, his bearded chin lifted in defiance. “You know that’s true, and so does
he
!”

He
meaning the professor, Matthew surmised.

“Settle yourself,” Mother Deare said quietly, but the bludgeon was ready. “Have another glass of wine, breathe deeply of this exalted air, and remark to yourself how fortunate you are—as we
all
are—to be at this table.