The Providence Rider (4 page)

Matthew felt someone coming up behind him. He turned his head and saw Berry, her hair wild in the smoky breeze and ashes on her freckled cheeks. She was bundled in a brown coat. She stopped when he saw her, as if understanding a statement not to get too close.

At nearly the same time, Matthew noted the presence of the nasty little watchman and general troublemaker Dippen Nack coming up like a small creeping predator beside the high constable, who seemed to be his idol in all things either arrogant or assinine. Matthew considered the barrel-chested, red-faced Nack a brutal bully and, worse, a coward who used his black billyclub to wallop only those who could not return the blow.

“What’s the tale?” Lillehorne asked Nack, indicating that the high constable had recently sent his devilish devotee out on a misson.

“Number a’ people heard it, sir,” Nack answered, in the manner of slump-shouldered subjugation, be it ever so false. “Yessir! A cannon blast is what they all said it was!” And he added, just to polish the worm-holed apple:
“Sir!”

“A cannon blast?” Instantly Matthew’s curiosity had spun toward this information like an arrow on a weather vane. “From where?”

“I don’t have that information yet, thank you for asking.” Lillehorne’s nostrils wrinkled, and he gently patted them with a green handkerchief. Over the reek of smoke Matthew caught the reek of a too-sweet perfume water.

“Some folk say they thought it come from out thataway.” Nack motioned with his club toward the south. “Then this thing blew up.”

“‘Blew up’?” Matthew asked. Nearly the same choice of words that Gilliam Vincent had made. “Why do you put it that way?”

“Just
look
at it,” Nack answered, the anger never far from his curdled surface. “Ain’t no regular fire! Pieces layin’ all up and down the street!” He gave a mocking grin for Lillehorne’s benefit. “I thought you was supposed to be such a
brain
!”

Matthew kept his attention directed to Lillehorne, even though the gypsies had arrived at the scene and stood nearby scratching their squalling fiddles while their dark-haired girls danced for coins amid the ale-drinkers. “You’re saying a cannonball did this?”

“I am saying that a cannon was
heard
to be fired. Corbett, restrain your interest. I’ve already sent some men to watch the harbor, if indeed it was the signal from Oyster Island. The town is not paying for your abilities tonight.
Keep that noise down!
” Lillehorne shouted at the gypsy fiddlers, but the volume altered not an ear-spike.

Matthew gazed out over the ashen plain. There were cannons on the walls at what had been Fort William Henry, now called Fort Anne, at New York’s southernmost point; they were manned day and night and aimed at the sea. The single cannon on Oyster Island was used as an early signal of invasion by the Dutch fleet, even though commerce and profits had made steady companions of London and Amsterdam. No one ever truly expected a Dutch armada to try to retake their once-possession, but…why had the cannon fired?

“I have no earthly idea,” said Lillehorne, and only then did Matthew realize he’d asked the question aloud. “But I’ll get to the bottom of this without your so-called
professional
assistance, sir.”

Matthew then saw another element of interest in this cold night’s play. Off beyond Lillehorne, lit by the lamps they carried, were the handsome Doctor Jason Mallory and the beautiful Rebecca. They were talking quietly and surveying the ruins, but did both of them now glance in his direction? Did they speak again, and then glance again before they turned their backs and moved away?

A whistle blew, loud enough to be heard over the caterwauling of gypsy fiddles.

Then blew once more, stronger, with a demanding note. And a third time, equally demanding.

“What the
devil
?” Lillehorne’s gaze was searching for the annoying source, as well as did Matthew, Nack and Berry. A group of onlookers was coming around, intrigued by the noise. Matthew saw Marmaduke Grigsby, the old inkslinger and editor of the
Earwi
g broadsheet, step up beside his granddaughter, his eyes large and questioning behind his spectacles in the moon-round face. The whistle continued to blow, stridently now.

“Over
there
, sir!” It was Nack who pointed toward the other side of Dock Street and just east of the destroyed warehouse.

Matthew saw Benedict Hamrick standing next to a wall of brown bricks, which was part of a storehouse for tarbarrels, anchors, chains and other nautical goods. Hamrick’s beard and crusty coat blew in the rising wind. He was manning his whistle as if commanding an attack of grenadiers. And furthermore, he was pointing to something written on the bricks.

At once Matthew was following Lillehorne toward the whistle-blower, with Nack almost stepping on his heels. “Matthew!” Berry called out, but he didn’t stop though he thought that, oddly, she was telling him not to go.

A group of people congregated around Hamrick, who abruptly ceased his tin-whistling and pointed with a thin, gnarled finger at the two words written about head-high on the wall. The white paint had trickled down, making the words look like crawling spiders.

The first word was
Matthew
.

The second was
Corbett
.

Matthew felt his heart stutter as Hamrick’s hand moved, and the finger pointed at him.

Lillehorne took a lantern from the nearest citizen and lifted it to shine a direct light upon Matthew’s face. He stepped forward, his eyes further narrowed, as if to examine something he’d never seen before.

Matthew could do nothing, nor could he speak.

“Yes,” said the high constable. He nodded. “You can be sure I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

I would sincerely love to hear an explanation,” said the man in the lilac-colored gown with blue lace trimming the neckline. To the silence that followed, his painted lips smiled faintly. Under his elaborately-curled and coiffed wig, his blue-shaded eyes ticked from person to person in the room. “Please,” he said, with a lift of his white silk gloves, “everyone should not speak at
once
.”

Gardner Lillehorne cleared his throat, perhaps a bit too explosively. He held his pumpkin-colored tricorn in his hands, that color being his hue of the day. “Lord Cornbury,” he said, “the facts are as I’ve told.” Matthew thought he sounded a bit nervous, and in truth when one looked into the face of Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, Governor of the colony of New York and cousin to Queen Anne herself, one did feel one’s breakfast tumble in the gut.

“Told,” said the well-dressed man behind his desk, “but not made
sense
of.” The white silk fingers steepled together. The horsey face might have broken any mirror in town. “That mumble-mouthed fool made no sense, either. What’s all this about red lamps and a Dutch invasion and fish being stolen from a boat?”

Hooper Gillespie had just given his statement a few moments ago, before his nervous agitation had caused him to stagger and fall upon the floor. He’d had to be taken out of Lord Cornbury’s office on a canvas stretcher. And his statement? That too seemed to Matthew to be in need of a stretcher, or perhaps it was already stretched.

The fourth man in the room pursed his lips and let out a sound like a wet fart.

“You wish to speak, Mr. Greathouse?” the governor asked.

“I wish to
complain
,” the great one answered. He wasn’t leaning on his stick this morning; it was crossed over his right shoulder. Matthew had noted the dark hollows beneath his tarpit eyes. It appeared to him that Hudson had fought his own fire last night, after being roused out of Abby Donovan’s cottage by the conflagration and noise, and the more intimate flames had fairly scorched him. “As a character witness for Matthew, I—”

“Why exactly are you
here
, sir?” came the interruption, which Matthew knew dared violence, even against a lord in a dress.

“I’m
here
,” came back the response, which was dangerously close to a sneer, “because I was in our office when the high-and-mighty constable barged in there and all but arrested my associate. Then dragged him over here for what he called a ‘hearing.’ Well, I came along of my own free will.”

“Couldn’t stop him, I fear,” said Lillehorne.

“Couldn’t
be
stopped,” said Greathouse, his grim gaze directed to the gowned governor. “I don’t know what happened last night and neither does Matthew. Yes, his name was painted on a wall across from the fire. But he had nothing to do with that! With any of it! How could he, when he was at Sally Almond’s tavern
dancing
when that building…blew up, or whatever happened to it.”

“There was a
dance
last night?” Lord Cornbury asked Lillehorne, with a plaintive note in his voice. “My wife and I love to dance.”

“The common folk’s dance, my lord. Not to your liking, I’m sure.”

Matthew had to sigh at this exchange. True, he’d been brought here by Lillehorne from the Herrald Agency’s office at Number Seven Stone Street about thirty minutes ago. To avoid having to look at this scene of foolishness, he gazed out the window to his right, which gave a view of the town along the Broad Way. A light snow had begun falling before dawn, and now in the gray glow of nine o’clock the roofs were white. A few wagons trundled up and down the Broad Way. Citizens wrapped up in their coats were going about their business. The steeple of Trinity Church was outlined in white, and white robes covered the sleepers in Trinity’s graveyard. At Wall Street, City Hall was getting a white frosting upon its yellow-cake paint, and Matthew wondered if up in his attic wonderworld of skeletons and grotesqueries the eccentric coroner Ashton McCaggers was firing his pistol at one of his dress dummies in order to measure the bullet hole.

“Why do you two always seem to be…” Cornbury paused, tapping his chin with a finger in order to urge the proper word loose. “
Afflicted?
With
trouble
,” he quickly added, seeing the storm brewing in Greathouse’s face. “I mean to say, why are you always followed by trouble?”

“It’s our business,” Greathouse answered. “Just as yours is sitting here trying to blame Matthew Corbett for something he had no part in.”

“Mind your mouth, please!” Lillehorne warned, though it came out more as a shaky request.

“I’m not blaming anyone, sir.” When he needed to, Cornbury could display ample composure. His bosom seemed somewhat ample today as well, but Matthew chose not to linger a gaze or thought on that subject very long. “I’m simply trying to understand
why
his name was there. As in:
who
painted it upon the bricks? And also: for what reason? You must admit, this is a very peculiar situation. First that…that Gillespie person nearly faints dead away telling me he has seen a red signal lamp drawing a Dutch armada in to the attack, that he’d…how did he put it?…‘pulled a boner’ on his cannon, and that the phantom of Oyster Island stole his codfish.”

“Three mackerel and a striper,” Greathouse corrected.

“All right, whatever they were. Then this warehouse burns to the ground and the young man’s name is there on the opposite wall. And I will tell you, sir, that Johannis Feeg was first in my office this morning, with his lawyer, and the talk of monetary restitution reached a rather high volume.”

“Monetary restitution?” Greathouse’s scowl was a fearsome sight. “From whom? Matthew? Feeg and his lawhound will have to bore a hole through my body to get past me!”

“Let me hear,” said Cornbury in a quiet voice, “the silent one speak. Mr. Corbett, do you have anything to say?”

Matthew was still staring out the window, watching the snowflakes fall. He wished he were a thousand miles away from this ridiculous room. Again, since becoming a killer everything seemed so small and unimportant. Ludicrous, really. He mused on the fact that Professor Fell had not only controlled Lyra Sutch and Tyranthus Slaughter, but now also had a hand in his own destiny. Matthew was not who he had been, and he wondered if he would ever find his way back.

“Mr. Corbett?” Cornbury urged.

“Yes?” Then Matthew realized what was being asked of him. His mental wheels were clogged today. Three hours of fitful sleep would muddy up the best brain. He rubbed his forehead, where the crescent scar of a bear’s claw would forever remind him of the price of being someone’s champion. “Oh. All right,” he said hazily. “I was dancing at Sally Almond’s. No,” he corrected, “I was standing at the table that had gone over. Everything spilled. Effrem was there. The girl. Opal. And she cut one of her fingers on the glass.”

There was a short pause.

“Oh dear,” said the governor to Lillehorne. “Is he related to that Gillespie creature?”

By an effort of will and concentration, Matthew righted his foundering ship. “I had nothing to do with that fire,” he said, with some heat behind it. “Yes, my name was painted on the wall. By someone.” Or more than one, he thought. But the Mallorys had been at the dance when the warehouse had gone up. How could they have been responsible, and what would be the point? “Someone wished to…implicate me, I suppose? Or something else? Because I had dozens of witnesses and, besides, why would I be fool enough to sign my name to a warehouse-burning? Why would I want to set fire to a storehouse of ropes?” He waited for a reply. When there was none, he shot the question at them again:
“Why?”

“Listen to him,” said Greathouse, the loyal friend.

The moment hung.

With a rustle of stiffened muslin, Lord Cornbury rose to his high-heeled feet. He went to the window and aimed his shadowed stare at the dance of white flakes that swooped and swirled from the gray ceiling of clouds.

After a measure of reflection, the governor said in a low voice not suiting his suit, “Damn this. I understand none of it.”

Welcome to my world
, Matthew thought.

After a spell of what seemed like deliberation but may have only been hapless and aimless thought of what color sash went with what color gown, Lord Cornbury turned toward the high constable. “Can you handle this, Lillehorne?”

For once, the high constable sought his rightful level of truth. “I’m not certain, sir.”

“Hm,” came the reply; a decision had been made. The rather unsettling gaze ticked between Matthew and Greathouse. “You two are the problem-solvers. Solve the problem.”

“We’d like to do that,” Greathouse replied without hestitation, “but our business requires a fee.”

“Your usual fee, then. Nothing too exorbitant for the town’s coffers, I trust.” A gloved finger was lifted. “Now both of you listen to me before I dismiss you. If I discover that you have worked this situation in order to wrench money from my pockets, I shall have your stones boiled in oil before they’re cut off with a dull knife. Do you understand me?”

Greathouse shrugged, his way of saying he did. Matthew was still wondering where Cornbury’s pockets were.

“Get out,” said the Lord Governor, to all three of them.

“Good fortune to you gentlemen,” said Lillehorne as he stood at the top of the stairs and the two problem-solvers descended. He tapped the silver lion’s head against the palm of his hand. “I shall be watching you to make sure all is right in your investigation.”

“You should be watching the Princess,” Greathouse answered, speaking of Lillehorne’s rather shrewish wife. “I have it on good authority that she is still on intimate terms with Dr. Mallory, and not for medical reasons this time.” He gave a brief catlike smile to Lillehorne’s stone face, his statement referring to a case in October wherein Maude Lillehorne was secretly visiting the handsome Dr. Jason for a ‘women’s health’ cure that involved an unhealthy dose of coca leaves.

Outside, with their coats wrapped around them against the cold and whirling snowflakes, they walked away from the governor’s mansion toward the Broad Way.

“Is she really?” Matthew asked, his gray woolen cap pulled down over his ears. “Maude Lillehorne,” he reminded Greathouse. “Involved with the doctor?”

Greathouse frowned, the brim of his black tricorn catching snow. “What do
you
think? If you were Jason Mallory, would you give the Princess one look? Especially if you had that wife of his to warm your cockle every night?”

“I suppose not.”

“I
know
not. I just said that to give Lillehorne something to think about. Stretch his mind a little. He needs it.”

Speaking of warming a cockle, Matthew thought, how goes the merry widow? But he decided there was valor in silence. Plus, on his mind he had this warehouse blaze and levity was not welcome there today.

“Walk with me a ways,” said Greathouse, though they already were. Matthew knew this was the great one’s method of saying there were serious things to be contemplated and talked about, and so they would walk a crooked route through the town’s streets in search of a straighter path.

Though the snow flew and flitted and did its work of whitening the bricks, stones, timbers and dirt, Matthew thought that today New York seemed to be gray upon gray. A gray fog seemed to lie close to the earth, with gray clouds above and gray buildings between. Windows blurred the candles behind them. From the multitude of chimneys rose the morning smoke, drifting with the wind toward the winter-sheared woodland across the river in New Jersey. Wagons on the streets moved back and forth in near silence, their horses snorting steam and their drivers hunched forward, shapeless in heavy coats and weather-beaten hats. The boots Matthew and Greathouse wore crunched snow. The great one’s stick probed ahead for treacherous footing.

They turned to the right along Beaver Street, Matthew following his friend’s lead, and headed toward the East River. A bright red parasol coming in their direction startled the eye and for an instant Matthew thought it had to be Berry underneath it, but then came clear the tall and handsome figure of Polly Blossom, the owner of the rose-colored house of ladies of the evening on Petticoat Lane. Actually, truth to be told, also ladies of the morning and the afternoon.

“Hello, Matthew,” said Polly, with a polite smile and a nod. Matthew had done a favor for her in the summer, regarding a member of her flock, and thus had what she called a ‘season’s pass’ to her establishment, though he had not yet ventured so deeply into that territory. Then, for Hudson, her smile became a little wicked and her eyelashes fluttered. “Good morning to
you
,” she said, and as she passed she gave him a little hip-bump that made Matthew think he ought to get himself a walking stick and pretend to be in need of tea and sympathy.

“Don’t say it,” said Greathouse as they walked on, and so Matthew did not. But it occurred to him that some afternoons when the great one was supposed to be uncovering an investigation he must instead be investigating an uncovering.

They found themselves walking in the snow along Queen Street, heading southward toward Dock Street and the Great Dock where the masted ships rested, groaning softly in their cradles of ropes. Yet even in this wintry weather the work of a maritime colony continued, for several new vessels that had recently arrived were still being unloaded by the dock crews and several scheduled to leave on the next favorable tide were being loaded. There was, as always every day of the year, much activity and shouting of orders. Someone had built a fire from broken pieces of lumber and a few men stood around it warming themselves until they were shouted back to work. Ropes that ended in iron hooks moved cargo from place to place. Wagons stood ready to accept the freight or give it up. And as always, the higglers and their fiddles and tambourines were present to urge coins from the seafaring music-lovers, yet today their music was gray and not a little sad, as befitting God’s picture this morning of New York.