The Providence Rider (3 page)

We have a mutual acquaintance
, Rebecca Mallory had said to Matthew one day on a quiet waterfront street while her husband silently stood watch.
We believe he’d like to
meet you
.

When you’re ready
, the woman had said,
in a week or two, we’d like you to come
visit us. Will you do that?

And what if I don’t?
Matthew had asked, because he knew full well to what acquaintance Rebecca Mallory must be referring.

Oh, let’s don’t be unfriendly, Matthew. In a week or two. We’ll set a table, and
we’ll be expecting you.

“
I’ll
certainly be glad to have cider with you, Berry!” said Effrem Owles, pushing past Matthew in his eagerness to inhale the girl’s essence. His eyes were large and round behind his spectacles. The tailor’s son was dressed simply but elegantly in a black suit, white shirt and white stockings. His teeth gleamed at the center of his giddy smile. Though Effrem was only twenty years old, premature gray streaked his brown hair. He was tall and thin. Gangly would be the proper word. An excellent chess player, but the only game he was playing tonight had to do with Cupid. Tonight he was obviously hanging onto the hope that Berry would grace him with the opportunity to watch her drink cider and eat sugar cakes. Effrem was in love. No, more than love, Matthew thought. Effrem was obsessed with Berry. He talked about her incessantly and wanted to know everything of her comings and goings, and did Matthew ever put in a good word for him and say how much money an able tailor could command and all such nonsense. Between Effrem and the town’s eccentric but highly-efficent coroner Ashton McCaggers, Berry had her choice of ardent pursuers.

“Well…” Berry made it sound like not only a deep subject but also one that greatly perplexed her. “Matthew, I thought—”

“Go ahead,” Matthew told her, if only because he feared getting saliva on his sleeve from Effrem’s tongue. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Grand!” said Effrem as he positioned himself beside Berry for the stroll into the other room. She went along, because she did like Effrem. Not in that way he wished to be liked, but because Matthew counted him a good friend and she saw in Effrem the loyalty of friendship she considered among the highest blessings in the world.

In the departure of Berry and Effrem, Hudson Greathouse leaned lightly on his stick, cocked his head to one side and gave Matthew a grin that was also half-cocked. “Brighten your candle,” he advised. “What’s wrong with you?”

Matthew shrugged. “I suppose I’m not in a festive mood.”

“Well,
get
in one. My God, boy!
I’m
the one who can’t dance anymore! And I’ll tell you, I could shake my shillelagh in my younger days. So use it while you have it!”

Matthew stared at the floor between them. Sometimes it was hard for him to look Hudson in the face. Because of greed and a bad decision, Matthew had allowed Slaughter to get the drop on them. Greathouse got along fine on his walking-stick, for sure, and sometimes he could get along just fine without it if he was feeling more like a stallion than a gelding, but being stabbed four times in the back and then three-quarters drowned had a way of aging a man, of slowing him down, of thrusting the bitter truth of mortality in his face. Greathouse of course had always been a man of action, and thus knew the pitfalls of putting himself in harm’s way, but Matthew still blamed his mendacity for the darkness that sometimes passed across Greathouse’s face like a shadow, and made the man’s deep-set black eyes seem yet more ebony and the lines around them more numerous. To be certain, a diminished Hudson Greathouse was still a force to be reckoned with, if anyone dared try. Not many would. He had a ruggedly handsome, craggy face and wore his thick iron-gray hair in a queue tied with a black ribbon. He stood three inches over six feet, broad of shoulders and chest and also broad of expression; he knew how to conquer a room, and at age forty-eight—having turned so on the eighth of January—he possessed the canny experience of a survivor. And well to be so, for the wounds and the stick had neither made him put quit to his work with the Herrald Agency nor made him any less desirable to any number of New York females. His tastes were simple, as attested to by his gray suit, white shirt and white stockings above unpolished black boots that knew how to kick a tail or two, if need be. Matthew mused that Mr. Vincent should consider himself lucky to have gotten out of the room with just an insult, because since Matthew had saved his life Greathouse was the finest of friends and the fiercest of protectors.

Yet, still, there was the nit to be picked.

“Are you that much of an idiot?” Greathouse asked.

“Pardon?”

“Don’t play dumb. I’m talking about the girl.”

“The girl,” Matthew repeated, dumbly. He glanced to see if he was still the center of attention from Doctor Jason and the beautiful Rebecca, but the Mallorys had moved to a different position and were conversing with the ruddy-faced sugar merchant Solomon Tully, he of the Swiss-geared false choppers.

“The
girl
,” said Greathouse with some force behind it. “Can’t you tell she’s got it set for you?”

“What’s set for me?”

“It!”
Greathouse’s scowl was a frightening thing. “Now I
know
you’ve been working too much! I’ve told you, haven’t I? Make time for
life
.”

“My work is my life.”

“Hm,” said the great one. “I can see that carved on your gravestone. Honestly, Matthew! You’re
young
! Don’t you realize how young you are?”

“I haven’t thought.” Ah, yes! There was the quick glance from Rebecca Mallory again. Whatever she was thinking, Matthew knew he was never far from it. Of course, owing to events revealed to Matthew after the deaths of Slaughter and Sutch, it was clear to him that the Mallorys were somehow involved with the personage who seemed to be becoming a dark star on the horizon of Matthew’s world. That personage being Professor Fell, emperor of crime both in Europe, England and now desirous of a place of control in the New World, the better to spread his clutching tentacles like his symbol the octopus.

We have a mutual acquaintance
, Rebecca Mallory had said.

Matthew had no doubt the Mallorys knew Professor Fell much better than he. All he knew of the man was that he had a slew of nefarious plans—some of which Matthew had already upset—and that at one time Professor Fell had laid a ‘blood card’ down upon the young problem-solver’s life: a bloody fingerprint on a white card that meant Matthew was marked for certain death. Whether that threat still held true or not, he didn’t know. Perhaps he should stroll across the room and ask the Mallorys?

“You’re wandering off from what I’m saying.” Greathouse shifted his position so that he stood between Matthew and the handsome couple who hid their secrets. Matthew had said nothing of any of this to his friend; there was no need, as yet, to pull him into this intrigue. Particularly now that the great one was somewhat less great and much more human in his vulnerable flesh. “And if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,
stop
thinking it.”

Matthew looked Greathouse in the eyes. “What might that be?”

“You know. That you still carry a burden, and you blame yourself and all that. It happened, it’s done and it’s over. I told you before, I might have done the same thing in your shoes. Hell,” he growled, “I’m
sure
I would’ve. I’m all right, believe me. Now let that go and come back to life. I don’t mean just halfway. I mean
all
the way. Hear me?”

Matthew did. Greathouse was right; it was time to let those things of the past go, because they were corrupting both his present and future. Maybe it would still be awhile before he could come back all the way, but he forced himself to say, “Yes.”

“Good boy. Good
man
, I mean.” Greathouse leaned in a little closer. His eyes caught candlelight and glinted with devilish humor. “Listen,” he said quietly, “that girl favors you. You know she does. She’s a mighty comely girl, and she could make a man excitable if you know what I mean. And I’ll tell you, she hides more than she shows in that area.”

“What area?” In spite of himself, Matthew felt a smile pushing at the corners of his mouth.

“Love.”
It had been nearly a whisper. “You know what they say: Gap between the teeth, hot between the sheets.”

“Oh, they say that, do they?”

“Yes.
Definitely
yes.”

“Hudson?
There
you are!” The person who’d just spoken was a woman, and she came forward with a rustle of lemon-colored skirts and an expression of bemusement. She was tall and willowy and had a lush garden of blonde hair that in defiance of the proper ladylike fashion fell unconfined about her bare shoulders, which of itself spoke volumes of both her nature and the future of modern women. Upon seeing a small heart-shaped birthmark in the hollow of her throat Matthew thought they would have seized on this rather brazen female as a witch in the since-departed town of Fount Royal. He doubted she would’ve gone nicely to the gaol. She got up alongside Greathouse and actually put her arm around his shoulders. Then she stared at Matthew with her warm and inviting brown eyes and said, “This is the young man.” No question, just statement.

“Matthew Corbett, meet the widow Donovan,” said Greathouse.

She offered an ungloved hand. “Abby Donovan,” she told him. “I arrived last week from London. Hudson has been so helpful.”

“He’s a helpful sort,” Matthew said. His hand would remember the woman’s remarkably firm squeeze.

“Yes, but he does get away from you. Particularly when he says for you to get cider and that he’ll return in a moment. I don’t think ‘a moment’ is the same for Hudson as it is for other men.” All this was said with the slyest hint of a smile and the brown eyes fixed on the man of the moment.

“Never was,” he admitted. “Never will be.”

“I admit, he’s one of a kind,” said Matthew.

“Don’t I know it!” answered the lady, who when her smile broadened into nearly a laugh displayed a gap between her front teeth that made Berry’s appear a crevice compared to a canyon. It shocked Matthew that his first thought was wondering what might fit in there, and then he got redfaced and had to swab his temples with his handkerchief.

“It
is
warm, this close to the fire,” observed the widow Donovan, who Matthew figured might have burned her dearly departed to cinders under the sheets. But anyway, it was up to Greathouse now to brave the flames, for the woman stood close against him and stared desirously at the side of his face, so much so that Matthew wondered how a week might pass so intensely heated for some and yet so frozen with blue ice for others.

“Excuse us,” Greathouse said at length. He shifted his balance, perhaps because he had to reposition his stick. “We’ll be going now.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Matthew said.

“Oh,” said the woman with a lift of her blonde brows, “when Hudson gets going, there’s no stopping him.”

One week! Matthew thought. And here he was, brooding over the great one’s disabilities! Perhaps it was true, Greathouse could no longer dance. Standing up, that is. But otherwise…

“Goodnight,” said Greathouse, and he and his new kitten—cat, really, for she was likely in her late thirties but very well assembled for her age—went out of the room as close-stepped as two people could be who were not in a military parade. Then Matthew got upon his mind the matter of salutes of a certain kind, and so he was redfaced again when a female voice beside him quietly said, “Matthew?” and he turned to set eyes upon a person whose presence he would not have predicted from now until the impossibly distant twenty-first century.

The girl had her hands clenched before her, either revealing she was nervous or that she’d taken a posture of supplication. “Hello, Matthew,” she said, with a trembly smile. “I did what you said. I come here to find that Number Seven Stone Street.” She swallowed hard. Her blue gaze, which he recalled to be nearly crackling with energy, now seemed timid and fearful, as if she was sure he must have forgotten. “Don’t you remember? I’m—”

“Opal Delilah Blackerby,” Matthew said. Of course he remembered. She was one of the girls on the staff at Paradise, the ‘velvet prison’—as she’d called it—for the elderly operated by Lyra Sutch in her incarnation of Gemini Lovejoy. If it were not for Opal, the black heart of Lyra Sutch’s operation would not have been revealed, and Tyranthus Slaughter would now not be in his grave. So, Matthew thought, all praise to this brave young girl who’d really risked her life to help him.

He reached out and took her hands, at the same time offering her his warmest smile. “How long have you been here? In New York, I mean.”

“Just one day,” she answered. “Well, not a
whole
day yet. I got here this mornin’. I know you told me ’bout comin’ to that Number Seven placey, but I was kinda fretful of just showin’ up there. So I been askin’ around ’bout whose place that is and all, and a fella told me your name. Then I seen the broadsheet ’bout this dance, and I thought maybe…” She shrugged, hopeless in her explanation of why she was here.

“I understand.” Matthew remembered she was the girl who’d longed for warmth in Paradise, and perhaps a dance was the place she could find it on a cold winter’s night in New York. As thanks for her help, he had given her a gold ring with a small red stone that may or may not have been a ruby; whatever it was, it had been part of Slaughter’s hidden treasure that had led Matthew and Greathouse nearly to their deaths.

“It’s so good to see you,” Matthew said, and he meant it. He took quick stock of her and saw that she’d decided to alter her appearance somewhat, by removing the small metal rings that had ornamented her lower lip and right nostril. She was a small girl, slim and wiry, and when Matthew had met her she’d been nearly quivering out of her shoes with what might be termed indecent energy. Now her jet-black hair had been brushed back and was decorated with a modest tortoise-shell comb. Her blue eyes, so eager to get Matthew behind Paradise’s church for a tryst in the woods, were diminished by lingering doubt that, he surmised, she had no place either here or at Number Seven Stone Street. She wore a gray dress with a white collar, not very different from her uniform at Paradise, which made Matthew wonder if she’d made use of the gold ring and red stone.

He was about to ask her that question when Hell broke loose.

Or, at least, a small portion of Hell confined to the other room, for in the next instant there was a tremendous crash, the sound of breaking glass, and a chorus of startled cries both male and female. Matthew’s first thought was that the floor had given way, or that a cannonball had smashed through the ceiling.

He rushed past Opal to see what had happened, and she followed right at his heels.

The floor was still firm and no cannonball had come sizzling from the night, yet certainly disaster had struck. The table that had been holding the fine glass bowl of cider, the clay cups and the Indian-blood platters of sugar cakes had, plain and simply, pitched over like a horse with a broken leg. Apple cider spread in a small flood across the planks. The sugar cakes were being crushed under the feet of dames and dandies alike. Glass and broken crockery was everywhere and it was truly a mess.

“I swear!” came the agonized voice of Effrem Owles. “I hardly leaned on the table! Hardly at all!”

And Matthew saw Berry standing there beside him, blushing to the roots of her hair, her eyes darkened by the events of the moment. He knew what she was thinking: her bad luck, which had knocked the stuffing out of so many of her suitors and otherwise complicated her life in a series of misfortunes, had reached out and—like Mr. Vincent’s glove—given poor innocent Effrem a smack on the noggin. And what a smack! For someone who was for the most part very shy and wished to be anywhere but at the center of attention, this was truly Effrem’s nightmare. And him trying to impress Berry so much! It hurt Matthew’s heart to even think of it, much less witness it.

“It’s all right! We’ll get it cleaned up!” said Sally Almond, who was already summoning a serving girl to bring a towel.

But Matthew saw the tears of shame jump behind Effrem’s glasses. He started to go forward and put a hand of comfort on his friend’s shoulder but he was nearly shouldered aside by Opal Delilah Blackerby, who waded into the cider, knelt down to the floor and started gathering up pieces of broken glass into the apron of her dress.

“Opal!” Matthew said, pushing his way to her. “What are you
doing
?”

She looked up at him, and then at Sally Almond who was also staring dumbfounded at her. Opal stood up, clutching glass fragments in her dress. She had a hazy expression in her eyes, as if for a moment she’d forgotten where she was. “Oh!” she said to Matthew. “I’m sorry! I just…I mean to say…I’m so used to cleanin’ up messes…I just…that’s what I do, y’
see
?”

“You’re a
guest
here,” said Sally. “Not a servant.”

“Yes’m.” Opal frowned, perplexed. “I’m sorry, but…I don’t think I know how to be a guest.” She was still holding the front of her dress with the pieces of glass in it, and as the regular serving-girl came to sop up the spilled cider with a bundle of towels Opal reached out to take one of the cloths and, startled, the girl pulled away.

“Opal!” Matthew said, grasping her elbow. “You’re not expected to clean up anyone’s mess. Come on now, let’s get out of the way.”

“But…Matthew,” she said. “That’s what I
do
. That’s what I was doin’ just yesterday, at a tavern on the pike. I mean…that’s all I’ve
ever
done.
Oh,
” she said, and she looked at the fingers of her right hand. They were leaking blood. “I suppose I’ve cut myself a little bit.”

Matthew was quick to pull out his handkerchief.

But he was not quick enough.

“Here, miss! Let me see!”

And Matthew witnessed something he had no idea would ever take place. When the blue eyes of Opal Delilah Blackerby and the brown eyes of Effrem Owles met, you could almost hear a distinct
pop
, as if a pinecone had burst in the overheated hearth. Matthew was certain Effrem was only being his gentlemanly self, and perhaps thinking he was to blame for this girl cutting herself, but in that instant there was something more. In that instant there was an exchange of something, maybe a recognition, something…a powerful instant, and Matthew saw the girl who knew only how to clean up messes and had been searching so long for a little bit of warmth flutter her eyelashes, and the shy young tailor’s son who liked to play chess and wished desperately to mean something to someone’s heart reddened a little on the cheeks and had to look away from her, but she had offered her hand and he took it, and as he pressed his own handkerchief against the injury he brought his eyes back upon hers and Matthew saw him smile—just a small, shy smile—and Effrem said, “We’ll get this fixed.”

“Ain’t nothin’,” Opal replied, but she didn’t pull her hand away.

Matthew glanced at Berry, who also had taken note of this exchange. She nodded almost imperceptibly, as if to say,
Yes, but it may yet be something after all
.

And in that instant Matthew felt the world tremble.

Or, to be more precise, it was the floor that trembled. He was not the only one who felt it, for conversations halted and Berry blinked in surprise because she’d also felt it. In its aftermath the floor’s planks growled like old brown lions stirred from sleep. Then the front door crashed open and from the bundle of his black coat and beneath the tilt of his yellowed wig the white face of Gilliam Vincent painfully shouted, “The Dock House Inn has blown up!”

Decorum was lost and dancing forgotten in the rush upon Nassau Street. Matthew was out the door amid the throng, finding himself behind John Five and John’s bride Constance. Berry bumped into Matthew’s side as they all looked toward the dockfront at smokeclouds and bursts of flame roiling up into the night.

“Oh my Jesus!” Gilliam Vincent cried out. He began to run southward along Nassau Street toward the point of conflagration perhaps nine blocks distant. Matthew saw Vincent’s wig fall off, exposing a pallid scalp where a few sprigs of gray hair stood upright like shocked soldiers on a barren battlefield. For all his vanity, Vincent cared not for the wig so much as he cared for the fate of his beloved Dock House Inn, where he was the narrow-eyed and supremely arrogant king of his domain, and so he put wings to his heels and was off hollering “Fire! Fire! Fire!” all the way.

Cries of alarm were quickly echoing across the town. From Manhattan’s previous experience, flame was a disastrous enemy. Matthew surmised that if indeed it was the Dock House Inn that had somehow ‘blown up,’ as Vincent had put it, there might not be very much left of the guests who’d been sleeping there. The fire shot yellow and orange tendrils a hundred feet into the air. If clouds had not already slid in to mask the moon, the dark plumes rising from New York would have blackened Selene’s lunar face. “Come on, men!” someone shouted, a call to fetch buckets and get to the wells that stood here and there on the cobbled streets. Some went back into Sally Almond’s tavern to get their coats, scarves, gloves, caps, tricorn hats before they started off. Matthew took his black fearnaught from a hook on the wall, donned his gray gloves and woolen cap and with a quick glance at Berry that said
I think dancing must wait
he was away among the men fast striding or outright running for the scene of fiery destruction.

The houses were emptying their people onto the streets. Many folk wore their flannel robes and were bare-legged against the cold. Lanterns swung back and forth, a midwinter congregation of summer’s fireflies. Night watchmen scurried around rather helplessly, showing their green lamps of authority for whatever they were worth. At the corner of Broad and Princes Streets Matthew nearly collided with elderly Benedict Hamrick, an ex-soldier of the realm with a white beard that hung to his spit-polished belt-buckle. Hamrick marched around blowing into an ear-piercing tin whistle and shouting incomprehensible orders to anyone who would listen, which meant he had utterly no troops to command in his fantasy of the Coldstream Guards.

For all its everyday chaos, nattering of merchants, horse manure in the streets and slaves in the attics, New York at a moment of crisis became a purposeful juggernaut. Much as ants will boil over from a heel-kicked nest and begin feverish defenses, so were the Manhattanites. Buckets materialized from houses and barns. A horse wagon hauling buckets came clattering down Broad Street. Teams of men gathered, took hold of buckets and set off at a run to station themselves at wells. Somehow, the chains of the bucket brigades solidified within minutes of Gilliam Vincent’s first cry. Water began moving, faster and faster along the line. Then the line split into two and three and thus multiple dowsings of water were thrown upon the fire, which turned out not to be consuming the Dock House Inn but to be eating a Dock Street warehouse where nautical ropes were made and stored.

And it was surely a hot fire. A fire with a white center, and a power to scorch the eyebrows and puff the faces of those at its edge. Even Matthew, working with the other feverish ants a block north of the scene, could feel the waves of heat rolling past him in dusty swells. The labor continued on, the buckets moving as fast as muscle would allow, but very soon it was apparent that the warehouse was a goner, and all liquid must be used to wet the surrounding structures thus to prevent a disaster of the worst kind. At one point old Hooper Gillespie appeared, ranting about an attack by the Dutch, but no one paid him any attention and so he slinked away scowling and spitting toward the harbor.

Hollers and shouts went up when the last wall of the warehouse collapsed. The sparks that flew up were stomped under boots when they landed. More water was thrown upon the soggy, steaming wood walls of the buildings to left and right, and finally as the hours passed and the muscles weakened, the southernmost portion of the town was saved but the rope merchant Johannis Feeg wept bitter tears over his pile of smouldering ashes.

The work was at last finished. The tavern owners brought out kegs of ale and opened them in the street; one never knew when one might need a bucket brigade, and it was safer to be on the good side of the citizenry rather than pinch ale pennies at a time like this. Matthew scooped up a drink in a wooden cup he’d been given, and along with other bedraggled fire fighters he walked toward the smoking remains.

There was very little left but smoke. Matthew saw other men walking through the ashes, kicking embers between the eyes and then crushing them for good measure. The smell of acrid smoke, dust and heat was like coarse flannel in the lungs. Men who had been closest to the fire staggered around blackened and nearly cooked, and they nodded wearily as others put cups of ale into their hands.

“Now
this
was a merry moment, wasn’t it?”

Matthew turned to see who’d spoken, but he’d already recognized the voice of Gardner Lillehorne, which tonight was the hum of a wasp seeking a place to sting.

The spindly-framed high constable was in less than his usual perfection, for ashes marred his overcoat of bright holly green, trimmed at the collar and cuffs with bands of scarlet. Alas, the cuffs were filthy and his white shirt the color of dirty teeth. His holly green tricorn was dark with ash and its small red feather burned to a wisp. Ashes streaked his long, pallid face with its narrow black eyes, small and pointed nose, precisely-trimmed black-goatee and black mustache. Even the silver lion’s head that topped his ebony cane seemed to be scorched and dirty. Lillehorne’s eyes left Matthew’s and scanned the wandering crowd. “A merry moment,” he repeated. “For Mr. Feeg’s competitors, that is.”