The Providence Rider by Robert R. McCammon
“Good man,” said Greathouse. And he added, as they started off side-by-side toward Crown Street: “You’re buying.”
Five
AT what was figured to be nearly half-past one in the morning of the twenty-third of February, four days after Hooper Gillespie had hooked a grouper, a well-known building on the corner of Crown and Smith streets was ripped apart by an explosion.
Its power was fierce enough to blast the roof into flaming pieces and crash them down again in the middle of the street. Shutters and door blew out. The glass of the display window was later found imbedded across the way in the wooden walls of the Red Barrel Inn, which itself took a buckling that made the last drunks within think that God’s fist had come knocking for their sins. The building on the corner of Crown Street did not so much burn as it ignited with a flash, like a torch wrapped with rinds of hog’s fat. The noise of the explosion threw everyone out of their beds from Golden Hill to Wall Street, and even the late-night entertainment at Polly Blossom’s on Petticoat Lane was interrupted by the echoing boom that chased itself across the town.
“What now!” shouted Gardner Lillehorne, sitting up in bed beside his Princess, whose face was smeared with green cream known to restore beauty to the ugliest woman in Paris.
“Damn what a noise!” shouted Hudson Greathouse, sitting up in bed beside a certain big-boned blonde widow who had long ago forgotten what the word no meant.
“Dear Lord, what was that?” asked Madam Cornbury, sitting up in bed beside the bulk of her husband, who was curled beneath the quilt with cork plugs in his ears for his own snoring sometimes woke him up.
And Matthew Corbett sat up in silence in his small but neatly-kept dairyhouse, and he lit a third candle to go along with the two that he kept burning at night to ward off the demons of Slaughter and Sutch. Emboldened by the light, he got out of bed and dressed himself and prepared for the worst, for he had the sure sensation that this blast had claimed something more vital than a warehouse full of ropes.
The flames burned with tremendous heat. The night was filled with sparks and smoke, and lit as orange as an August morn. The bucket brigades worked feverishly. They did their best, but then they had to turn their attention to the surrounding structures to keep the fire from travelling.
And so died the tailor shop run by Benjamin Owles and his son, Effrem.
In its last moments it coughed fire and gasped ash, and standing alongside Effrem in the crowd Matthew watched one black-scorched brick wall collapse and then another, until the rubble covered everything that had meant success in the lives of the Owles family.
“It’s over,” Matthew heard his friend say, in a very quiet voice. Matthew put his hand on Effrem’s shoulder, but it was a small gesture for such a huge tragedy. Nearby, Benjamin Owles stared into the flaring embers; he had been stoic until now, but the end had come and so the tears began to trickle down his face.
A ripple suddenly passed through the gathered throng. Matthew felt it like the passage of a knife’s blade down his spine. Someone shouted something, across Crown Street, but it was unintelligible. A murmur seemed to surround Matthew, like the whispering of a secret with himself at the center. “What is it?” he asked the silversmith Israel Brandier, standing to his right, but Brandier just stared at him through his horn-rimmed spectacles and said nothing. Beside Brandier, the laundress Jane Neville also aimed at him an expression of what could only be called uneasy doubt. Matthew had the sensation of being in a dream painted in shades of gray smoke and red embers. The figures around him were less human and more blurred. Someone spoke his name: “Corbett?” but he couldn’t see who it was through the murk. Then a man in a purple suit and purple tricorn bearing a white feather came through the gathering and caught his arm, and Matthew recognized Gardner Lillehorne.
“Come with me,” said the black-goateed high constable, who held a lantern in his other hand and clasped his lion’s-head cane beneath his arm.
Matthew allowed himself to be guided. At his heels nipped Dippen Nack, who made smacking sounds as if feasting on the meat and bones of an earnest young man. “What’s this about?” asked Hudson Greathouse, coming forth from the crowd. Lillehorne did not bother to answer. “Stop!” Greathouse commanded, but the high constable was in charge and he listened to no one.
Matthew was aware of others following him; he was creating a small wake, like a ship crossing the icy harbor. He caught sight of Berry and her grandfather, whose nose for news for the Earwig must be twitching aplenty. He saw Hudson, of course, close beside him and still mouthing questions at Lillehorne that were not going to be answered. He saw Effrem Owles, who moved like a smoke-stained sleepwalker. He saw the rotund and gray-bearded Felix Sudbury, owner of the Trot Then Gallop. He saw the constable Uriah Blount and the stable owner Tobias Winekoop. And there on his right, keeping pace with this strange procession, were the Mallorys: Doctor Jason and the beautiful Rebecca. They had linked their arms together, Matthew noted. They stared straight ahead, looking to all the world as if they were out on the most relaxed stroll of a midsummer eve. Yet the air was biting and cruel, and so too Matthew saw cruelty in their faces.
The high constable led Matthew to the nearest well, which stood about forty paces east on Crown Street. He released Matthew’s arm, leaned forward under the wooden roof that shielded the well from the elements, and he shone his lantern upward.
“Mr. Problem-Solver?” said Lillehorne, in a voice tight enough to squeeze sap from a stone. “Would you care to solve this problem?”
Matthew got beside Lillehorne and, with an inward shudder of what might have been precognition, he looked up along the candlelight.
And there.
There.
Painted in white on the underside of the roof.
Matthew Corbett, for all to see.
“It wasn’t noticed at first.” Lillehorne’s voice was not so tight now as it was simply matter-of-fact. “Not noticed until the fire was almost done. I think, Mr. Problem-Solver, that you most certainly have a problem.”
“What the hell is this?” Hudson Greathouse had thrust himself under the roof to peer upward, and Matthew had to wonder if the man’s guts didn’t clench just a bit, being so close to what had almost killed him in October. Greathouse at once answered his own question. “This is a bagful of shit, is what it is!”
“I seen it first!” said a man who stepped forward from the onlookers. Matthew recognized the twisted-lip face of Ebenezer Grooder, a notorious pickpocket. Grooder’s mouth was full of broken teeth, and he sprayed spittle when he spoke. “Does I earn meself a reward?”
“You surely do,” said Greathouse, who then hit the man so hard in the mouth that the remaining stubs of Grooder’s teeth flew from his head and he went out of one of his stolen boots on his way to an unconscious landing.
“Hold! Hold!” Lillehorne shrieked, like the high register of a little pipe-organ. He had no hope of holding Hudson Greathouse and neither did any other man present. But several men did take the opportunity of picking up Grooder’s limp carcass and tossing him aside, but not before one of them got a few coins and an engraved silver ring out of the unfortunate’s pocket. “Greathouse, mind you don’t end up behind bars tonight!” Lillehorne warned, because his position demanded it. He then quickly returned his attention to the roof’s underside. Matthew was still staring up at his own name, trying to figure out why the Mallorys had done it. Because Matthew had refused—and still refused—their invitation to dinner?
“It makes no sense,” said Matthew.
“No sense, agreed,” said Lillehorne, “yet there it is. What’s the message here, I wonder?”
“I don’t know.” Yet Matthew was beginning to get an idea of it. Come to us or we will turn this town to ashes.
He looked around for the doctor and his wife, but they had slunk away. Probably in triumph, Matthew thought. He was aware of others coming forward to see what was to be seen: Effrem did, and left without a word; Marmaduke Grigsby did, and made a s
“I didn’t do anything!” Matthew said; he was speaking to Lillehorne, yet pleading his innocence to the whole of New York.
“Of course you didn’t!” said Greathouse. And then to the high constable: “Damned if you believe he did! What do you think, he’s causing these fires and signing his work?”
“I think,” replied Lillehorne, in a weary tone, “that I will soon be summoned before Lord Cornbury again. Dear me.” He aimed his lantern at Matthew’s face. “All right, then. I know you didn’t do this. Why would you, unless…your recent adventures with a madman scrambled your brains?” He let that hang in the air for a few seconds before he continued. “Tell me: do you know any reason this is being done? Do you know any person who might be doing this? Speak up, Corbett! Obviously these buildings are being destroyed in your name. Do you have anything to say?”
“He’s not on trial!” Greathouse fired back, with rising heat.
“Hold,” said Lillehorne, “your temper and your fists. Please.” His small black eyes found Matthew once more. “I asked you three questions. Do you have at least one answer?”
Matthew thought, Not one answer, but two suspects. He frowned in the candlelight. There was no way to link the Mallorys with this. Not yet, at least. And to reveal what he felt true about the connection between Jason and Rebecca Mallory and Professor Fell…no, he wasn’t ready for that yet either. Therefore he looked the high constable square in the goateed and sharp-nosed face and said calmly, “I do not.”
“No opinion? Nothing?”
“Nothing,” said Matthew, and he made it sound very believeable.
Lillehorne pulled the lantern’s light away. “Damn me,” he said. “Corbett, you must be ill. Perhaps you really did scramble your brains out there in the wilderness? Well, you can wager that if Cornbury summons me again, I’m summoning you again. I shall not look upon that countenance alone. Do you hear me?”
“We hear you,” Greathouse answered, in a gravelly voice.
“That’s all I have with you, then.” Lillehorne gave the name one more appraisal. “Someone find me some whitewash!” he shouted toward the commonfolk. “I’ll paint this out myself, if I must!”
Matthew and Greathouse took the moment to get away. They slid through the crowd. On the other side they walked east the rest of the way along Crown to the waterfront, where they turned south on Queen Street with the cold salt breeze in their faces.
“You’re keeping something back,” said Greathouse after they’d gotten clear of all listening ears. “You might throw a frog into Lillehorne’s pocket, but you can’t frog me. Let’s have what you know.”
Matthew was close to telling. He thought that with the next stride he would tell his friend everything, but…he did not. To pull Hudson into this, when there was no proof? To rouse the man up to action against…what? Shadows? Or against a perceived smirk on the faces of Jason and Rebecca Mallory? No, he couldn’t do it. This was a personal duel, himself versus them, and he would have to fight this particular battle quietly and alone.
“I don’t know anything,” he replied.
Greathouse stopped. In the faint light from the lanterns of New York, his expression was impassive and yet the intelligent coal-black eyes knew. “You’re lying,” he said. “I don’t take kindly to lies.”
Matthew said nothing. How could he? There was no use flinging another lie at the truth.
“I’m going home,” Greathouse announced after another moment. Home being the boarding-house on Nassau Street operated by the kindly but rather nosy Madam Belovaire. Matthew had already wondered if Greathouse was sneaking the widow Donovan into his abode, or if she was sneaking him into hers. Whichever, there was likely a lot of sneaking going on. “Home,” Greathouse repeated for emphasis. He drew the collar of his coat up around his neck. “When you decide to stop lying, let me know. Will you?” He took a stride in the direction of Nassau Street before he turned toward Matthew again, and Matthew was amazed to see on the great one’s face a mixture of anger and hurt. “Remember,” Greathouse said, “I’m always on your side.” And then he walked away with stiff-backed dignity, following the stick that tapped lightly on the earth.
Matthew stood as a solitary figure against the wind.
His thoughts were jumbled. They were as confused as he felt his life to be in the present. He began walking home, north on Queen Street. He passed by the masted ships and the slave market. The wind, stronger and colder, came at him from different angles as if to upset his balance on the world. Passing the last of the docked ships, his shoulders hunched forward and his chin tucked in, he cast his gaze toward the darkness of the sea. So much darkness, he thought. It was an immense dark, and he felt it pulling at his soul. He felt it grasping at him, taunting him, making a mockery of his name and a falsehood of his desire for truth.
And that darkness also had a name, he mused.
That name was: Professor Fell.
He stopped abruptly, and peered out into the black.
What had that been? Just that quick flash of red? Far, far out, it had been. If it had really been, at all. Was he seeing red signal lamps in his mind? Was he going the path of Hooper Gillespie, and the next step would be muttering to himself in the aloneness of his mind? He waited, watching, but the red lamp—whatever it had been, if so—did not reappear.
He recalled what Hudson Greathouse had told him about Professor Fell. It may be that by now Fell is on the cusp of creating what we think he desires: a criminal empire that spans the continents. All the smaller sharks—deadly enough in their own oceans—have gathered around the big shark, and so they have swum even here…
This big shark, Matthew thought, had big teeth and big eyes. It saw everything, and it wanted to eat everything. Even—perhaps most especially—the heart of a young man who had begun life born to a Massachusetts plowman and his wife, both dead early, and then sent to the pig farm of an aunt and uncle on Manhattan island. Escaping that prison of pigshit and drunken abuse on a haywagon, he had fallen in with a group of urchins on the waterfront, later to be caught literally in the net of the law and bound over to the town’s orphanage. There he had been educated by an intelligent and kindly headmaster, yet there was more misery to come. Of course, more misery…such was the essence of life. It either built or broke a character. And then finding himself clerk for two magistrates, and at last being offered the position of problem-solver for the Herrald Agency by none other than Katherine Herrald herself. At last? No, Matthew was certain the story of his life was far from being finished, yet at the moment he felt himself lost in a kind of limbo, a gray kingdom that demanded the right choice and proper action for his release yet he knew not what that was to be.
And swimming out there in the dark sea, the big shark. Circling and circling, getting ever closer.
A hand touched his shoulder. He almost shot out of his boots.
“I’m sorry!” said Berry, drawing back. She was wearing a black coat with a hood, and nearly was one with the night. “Were you thinking?”
“I was,” he managed to answer, when he was certain he could speak intelligibly. His heart was still a snare drum being whacked by a madman’s fist. “Don’t you know better than to sneak up on a person?”
“Sorry,” she said, and added with a touch of hot pepper, “again.”
Matthew nodded. It was best to retreat a bit rather than risk the wrath of a redhead. “All right, then. It’s done.” He shrugged; his heartbeat was settling down, more of a trot now th
“Matthew?”
“Yes?” He’d been looking at the ground, and now he raised his eyes to hers.
“Do you have any ideas? I mean…really. Do you?”
“None,” he answered, a little too quickly.
She came a step closer. Her gaze was intense and no-nonsense and she would not take none for an answer. “That’s not like you,” she told him. “You always have ideas. Some perhaps better than others…” She paused. He knew she was thinking of a certain trick involving horse manure they’d used to avoid having their faces ripped off by hawks in a rather frightening experience last summer. “Some much better than others,” she went on. “But you always have ideas. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be…” She paused again, thinking. “Who you are,” she decided to say. “So if you do. Have any ideas, I mean. I would care to hear them, if you would care to tell.”
He stared at her, from a distance that seemed both terribly long and at the moment uncomfortably close. She was asking him to trust her, he realized. Because she could look into his eyes and see that he had something hidden there, in that brain of his, and she was wanting to be part of it.
For a few seconds many things went through Matthew’s mind. What he might say. The right choice of words, the proper tone of voice. A complicated sentence that skirted the truth, to hold her curiosity at bay and certainly keep her out of danger. But what he came up with was as simple as two words.
“I can’t.”
Then he turned away from her and walked toward Crown Street and the Trot in search of a late-night drink.
Berry remained where she was. The wind seemed colder; she drew her coat tighter around herself. Oh Matthew, she thought. Where are you going?