The Providence Rider by Robert R. McCammon
She was a painting come to life, he thought. She was a piece of art that could never be confined by frame or glass. To his tastes she was stunningly beautiful. Her face, her hair, her body…all the creation of a master’s hand. She was nearly as tall as he, and she was lithe and long-stemmed and moved with a grace that perhaps was born of silent walking in lush green forests. She wore a slate-gray gown trimmed with red, and a pale blue blouse with a boil of black lace at the throat to compliment the lace on her hat. She looked neither to right nor left as she approached the brothers. Matthew noted that she did not look directly at them either but rather seemed to be staring as if in a dreamstate through them at some scene beyond their reckoning.
Mack spoke sharply. “What’re your eyes findin’ so interestin’…”
“…boyo?” said Jack, just as sharply.
“A very attractive woman,” Matthew answered, with a little of his own defiance in his voice. The girl obviously heard, but gave no reaction to this compliment whatsoever. Her face was slightly downcast, her attention removed from the moment. Matthew had the impression she was hearing a different voice in her head, and possibly it spoke the Iroquois language. “Where she did come from?” he asked, to whichever brother would reply first.
“She’s a fuckin’ squaw,” said Jack.
“Where d’ya think she came from?” Mack’s eyes held a dangerous glitter. “You ain’t too smart, are ya?”
And so saying, Mack Thacker reached out and grasped the girl’s arm, and he pulled her roughly toward him so she was between himself and his brother. Then, his dangerous eyes still focused on Matthew, he began to lick along the girl’s face with a brown-coated tongue, and on the other side Jack took her free arm in a hard grip and he too began to lick the girl’s face with his own ghastly tongue, his eyes also on Nathan Spade the jayhawk-turned-political pimp and purveyor of valuable state secrets.
And between these two nasty and brutish tongues, the Indian girl looked at Matthew with her sad ebony eyes. There was something crushed and defeated in her yet-beautiful face that nearly wrenched his heart out, but he had to keep his mask on and so by the most difficult effort his visage maintained its stone. The two brothers began to laugh as they marked her cheeks with their saliva, and then the girl lowered her gaze from Matthew’s and she was again gone, walking silently through a forest unknown.
Minx Cutter took Matthew by the elbow and guided him toward the formidable oak door, which was being held open for the guests by a black servant in the sea-blue uniform and a powdered wig that must have been three feet tall.
“Come along,” Minx told Matthew, as she linked her arm with his and held it in an unbreakable grip. “You’re with me.”
Seventeen
UNTIL now, Matthew Corbett had thought he understood the balance of the world. Good was its own reward. Evil deeds were punished. God was in His Heaven, and the Devil was evermore forbidden to walk the streets of gold. Yet here, in the realm of Professor Fell, all such platitudes and pieties for the Sabbath pulpit were revealed to Matthew as being echoes of the hollow voices of long-dead saints.
No rich man on New York’s Golden Hill had ever lived thus. He wondered what rich man in London might have earned such a monument. He was standing in what he presumed would be the Grand Entrance, and grand it was. The high arched ceiling might have been a sanctuary for angels, who could hide amid the polished oak beams with their feathered wings kissing the snow-white stones. The flags of many nations hung on poles that protruded from walls on either side, among them the white banner of France, the crowned eagle of Prussia, the tricolor of the Netherlands, and the Spanish arms of Bourbon-Anjou. Matthew noted that none of them were afforded a central location or a height that would emphasize one above the other, not even the English Union Jack. Matthew reasoned that to Professor Fell all countries were meant to be equally plundered.
A marbled floor of black and white squares made Matthew wonder if the professor was a chess player. But of course he was, Matthew decided. Who else would he be if he did not recognize the value of helpless pawns, black knights, crooked bishops, and an errant queen or two in his malignant view of life?
The Grand Entrance opened onto a Great Hallway and Glorious Staircase. White trimmed in gold seemed to be the color of the professor’s love. Well, Matthew mused as he followed Minx Cutter toward the stairs, the professor was his own God, so why not create for himself his own Heaven on earth?
“I’ll show you to your room,” Minx said, her voice echoing amid the ceiling’s beams.
“I’ll show him to his room.” This was spoken by Aria Chillany, who had come up behind the pair and now caught Matthew by the arm that Minx did not hold.
Minx levelled a calm but icy stare at the interloper. “I should think,” she said, “that you are very tired from your journey, and that a woman of your age needs her rest. So, as we have a dinner tonight and much to prepare for, I suggest you go to your own room and get your…shall I say…beauty sleep?” Her hand tightened on Matthew’s limb, and he thought if it got much tighter he would lose the circulation in his arm. She flashed a quick and totally insincere smile into Aria’s stony and—one might say—stunned face. “I’ll show you to your room, Nathan,” she said, a statement of power as well as of fact, and without a second’s more of hesitation she led him up the staircase with a stride that left a woman of a certain age at her bootheels.
Matthew had just time enough to glance back at Aria, who had recovered her composure to offer him a look that might have said Careful with this one, and guard your throat. He did not have to be so warned, but he was truly on his own now and whatever this game was, he was in deep.
They passed a stained-glass window overlooking the staircase that caught the morning sun and burst it into jewels of yellow, gold, blue and scarlet. It depicted what Matthew had first thought was the image of a suffering saint, but then he saw that it was the portrait of a young boy possibly ten or twelve years of age, his hands folded against the side of his face and tears of blood dripping from his haunted eyes. It was a strange decoration to be a centerpiece of Professor Fell’s paradise, and Matthew wanted to ask who that person might be but then they were past it and climbing up and he let the question go.
Though the stairway continued up to a third floor, Minx guided Matthew into the second floor’s hallway, lined with doors and hung with various tapestries that showed intricately-woven hunting scenes. Matthew thought they must date from medieval times or else be very convincing reproductions. Minx stopped at a white door about midway along the hall. “This is yours,” she told him, and opened the door for his entrance. The room had a canopied bed done up in black. Again, the floor was made up of the black-and-white chessboard squares. An iron chandelier and eight candles awaited his tinderbox flame, and on a white dresser stood another three-wicked candelabra. There was a small writing desk and a chair before it. On the desk was a key, presumably to his door, and a candle clock. Next to the bed was a white high-backed chair with black stitches woven through it in an abstract design. A white ceramic washbasin stood on iron legs with a supply of folded towels as well as a pearl-handled razor and a small round mirror. Matthew picked up the cake of soap next to the mirror and smelled limes. He noted that his baggage had been brought in and placed at the foot of the bed. He wondered if there might be a solid gold chamberpot under the bed, for surely here even the nuggets were worth something. “You might enjoy this,” said Minx, as she opened a pair of louvered doors. The warm seabreeze rushed in, bringing the salt tang of the Atlantic. A small balcony with a black iron railing overlooked the sea that thrashed itself into foam sixty feet below. Matthew had a view to the horizon, which was all empty blue ocean and sparkling waves.
“Very nice,” he agreed, uncomfortably aware that this young woman who was so good with knives had retreated a few paces to stand at his back. He turned to face her. When he did, he was startled to find that she had come up upon him as silently as a cat and was standing only inches away.
Minx peered into his eyes as if studying items for sale beyond a window. She said, “Have you ever seen me before?”
Matthew felt a small tremor. Was this a trick question? Was he supposed to have seen her before? He decided to play this safely. “No,” he answered, “I think not.”
“And I’ve never seen you before, either,” she said, with an arched eyebrow. “You’re a handsome man, I should have remembered you.”
“Oh.” Did he blush a bit? Possibly. “Well, then…thank you.”
“Soft hands, though,” she said, and took his right hand in hers. “You’re not much for handling horses, are you?”
“I haven’t much need to handle them.”
“Hm,” she replied. Her gold-touched eyes had taken on a certain ferocity. “Are you and Madam Chillany together?”
“Together?”
“An item,” she clarified.
“Oh. No…we’re not.”
“You may not think so,” she answered. Then she let his hand go. “If you’d like some lessons, I’d be glad to offer them.”
“Lessons?”
“In handling horses. The professor keeps a very fine stable. I might show you the island, if you’d like.”
“Yes,” he agreed, and gave her a wisp of a smile. “I would like.” Immediately he thought he had just taken a plunge into the deepest water yet, but still…such a sea should be explored.
“Meet me downstairs in one hour.” She was already moving toward the door. Yet she paused on the threshold. “That is,” she said, “if you can manage a tour. After your voyage, I mean.”
“I can always sleep tonight.” As soon as he voiced this, he noted an expression on her face that said he might be wrong about this as well as wrong about Aria Chillany’s interest in him.
“All right.” Minx gave him back his wispy smile. “One hour then.” And she added his name after the briefest of pauses: “Nathan.”
When the girl had gone and the door closed behind her, Matthew let out a long exhalation of breath and had to sit down on the bed, damp breeches be damned. The room seemed to be rocking on the Atlantic waves. He had his doubts about staying aboard a horse very long, but the offer of a guided tour of Pendulum Island was too good to reject. If he toppled from horseback, at least his excuse would pass Minx Cutter’s judgment. He stood up, went to the washbasin, poured water into it from a pitcher and splashed some into his face. Then he wet a portion of a towel and used it to cool the hot whipsting on his neck. It wasn’t so bad, but he could do with a little poultice of honeysuckle to calm the fever. He needed to get out of these clothes and…what?…send them downstairs to be cleaned? He imagined it would be that simple.
He thought of how many things could go wrong on his excursion with the girl. But then again…he had to have faith in himself. He had played parts before, notably as Michael Shayne with Lyra Sutch or, more correctly, in her own guise as Gemini Lovejoy. It occurred to him that Professor Fell had faith in him. Then he thought he must be going mad to be affirming the professor’s questionable attributes, or possibly it was the island’s sultry air clouding his mind.
He dressed in his other suit, this one of a velvety forest green, with a white shirt and white stockings. When he’d finished fastening the last shirt button he was aware of a shrill calling of seagulls from outside, and therefore he strolled out upon the balcony to have a look at what was stirring the birds up.
She was sitting cross-legged atop a large rock in the sea, her perch some twenty feet above the waves. Over her shining black hair the gulls spun around and around, perhaps disturbed at their roost being claimed by a human. She was entirely nude, her brown skin wet and glistening in the sunlight. Matthew grasped the balcony’s railing with both hands. She was sitting about forty feet below him, her chin resting on her folded hands, her face aimed seaward, her attitude remote and absolutely solitudinous in her nudity. Matthew could only stare at this display of removal from the world. Where had she disrobed and left her clothes? Obviously she was unconcerned about being an object of attention from any of the other guests…or, Matthew thought after another moment, she simply had ceased to care.
They call her Fancy, Minx had said.
Of course that was a made-up name, Matthew reasoned. A nearly-sarcastic name imposed upon her if not by the Thacker brothers then by whoever else had lured her over the Atlantic from her tribal home. He wondered how she’d fallen into their hands, and wound up between their dirty tongues.
She was such a beautiful girl, he thought. And there she sat, still alone.
He very suddenly had the sensation that the balcony had given way beneath his feet and he was falling, and yet he gripped the railing harder and he was not falling at all but still…he thought that in the space of a few startling seconds he had indeed travelled from one risky position to another equally as dangerous.
“Oh my God,” he said quietly, to himself and to whomever might be listening, even here in this place of Professor Fell’s self-worship.
He had already voiced the thought in his head, when he’d first seen the Indian girl in the coach.
It was a shame, that such a pretty girl should sit alone.
He recalled the tale of his Indian friend, Walker In Two Worlds, who had departed from this life and gone to walk the Sky Road. Walker had told him about the Indian girl called Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone. The girl who had been taken from her tribe and accompanied him and the doomed Nimble Climber in their journey across the Atlantic to England, where she had been seized by two men and put into a coach while he went on to portray a parody of the savage redskin on the lamplit English stage.
“Oh my God,” Matthew repeated, in case that entreaty to hear him had been missed the first time.
He had no idea how old the girl was who sat upon the rock below him, under her moving crown of seagulls. Walker had not told him exactly how old the girl was when they left the tribe together. We three children, Walker had said. Matthew had judged Walker’s age at around twenty-six or twenty-seven. Therefore…if this indeed might be the same Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone, then she could be the same age or younger by a few years. Or, perhaps, she was the same age as Matthew, twenty-three. In any case, it was possible…just possible…that before him was the very same Indian girl who had made that daunting voyage with Walker, and who had been removed by rough hands into a rough life that led her here, between two orange-haired ruffians who thought themselves the owners of a beautiful…yes, the word that Mack Thacker had used…squaw.
But still…certainly other Indian maidens had been brought over from the New World in all the many years since Walker’s journey. Of course. Many of them, brought over to be curiosities or servants or…whatever.
That this young woman could be the same one…
It boggled the mind.
Suddenly she must have caught a prickling sense of Matthew’s mental thornpatch, for she turned her head toward him as surely as if she had heard her name spoken, and they stared at each other seemingly not only across space, but also across time.
Fancy stood up. She rose to her full height. Brown and gleaming she took one step forward and flung herself into the air like one of Walker’s arrows leaving his bow, and as she came down into the sea she tightened her body and narrowed it and entered the churning foam with the bravery and ease of a creature born to be part of nature and perhaps desirous of a return to the childhood dream.
She did not surface. Though Matthew stood for several minutes scanning the boisterous waves there was no sign of her reemergence to the realm of air-breathers. He wondered if she was part fish, and once in the security of the blue world her fins and gills had grown, her tail had taken shape, and she had gone down with vigorous strokes to the silent bottom of the bay, where a pretty girl might once again sit alone. He had a moment of panic, thinking he should call someone to help her. But it occurred to him that no one without Indian courage would dare a dive into that deep, and if she would rather dream in the peaceful solitude o
Matthew left the balcony and closed the louvered doors. He took the key, went out of his room and locked it, then he walked along the corridor back to the stairs. A tall, slim and hollow-cheeked man with a trimmed gray beard and a smooth sheen of gray hair tied back in a queue was coming up. He was dressed in a black suit and smoking a clay pipe. The man’s eyes, equally gray in a heavily-lined and craggy face, barely registered Matthew’s presence. But Matthew registered the distinct odor of unwashed flesh.
Another bad ingredient in this odious stewpot, Matthew thought as he descended the stairs. Who might that be, and what was his role for Professor Fell?
Or…had it been Professor Fell?
Keep going, he told himself. Whatever you do, don’t look back. We don’t wish to become a pillar of salt today.
Minx was waiting for him under the flags of many plundered nations. She still wore the man’s brown breeches, the cream-colored blouse and the high-topped brown boots, but had put on a tan waistcoat decorated with small gold-colored paisleys. Matthew wondered how many knives were concealed underneath there. Her first expression upon seeing him was a frown, followed by the question, “Don’t you have any riding clothes?”
“This will have to do,” he answered, and decided to add: “Unless you’d like to loan me some of yours?”
“Hm,” she said, with a darting glance at his crotch. “No, I think you’d be too small for my breeches. Shall we go?”
It was a brief walk to a very well-appointed stable, where a black attendant saddled their horses and wished them pleasantries for a good ride. Then they were off, Minx on a sleek black mare the attendant had called Esmerelda and Matthew on a broader-chested sorrel mare called Athena. Minx took the lead and obviously knew where she was going, guiding her horse onto a trail that crossed the estate in the direction of the road. Matthew dutifully followed, finding Athena not too hard to handle in spite of her namesake being a Greek goddess of war. The trail led them across the road and onto the plain of windswept seagrass. But a verdant green wilderness awaited a hundred yards beyond, and they entered it and rode for a while without speaking as the sunlight streamed down through the treelimbs overhead and strange birds called in the ferns.