The Providence Rider (5 page)

Matthew and Greathouse came to a place where could be seen through the masts and between the hulls the foggy outline of Oyster Island. Greathouse stopped, staring toward that unlovely isle, and Matthew also paused.

“Curious,” said Greathouse.

“A general statement?” Matthew asked when no more was offered. “I’d say more than curious. I’d say my name written on a wall before a burning building is downright mysteri—”

“The phantom of Oyster Island,” Greathouse interrupted. “You know the stories, yes?”

“What there are.”

“And you of course have figured out that this phantom has only come to be noticed in the past two months. Cold weather set in. He needed a coat, and he needed food. Though he, I’m sure, is an able hunter and fisherman. But perhaps the game out there has become more wary, and the shoreline’s fish have moved because of the cold? And now one would need a boat to catch fish from deeper water?”

Matthew didn’t speak. He knew exactly who Greathouse was referring to; it had already crossed his mind. It had already, as a matter of fact, been ninety percent settled in his mind.

“He was a strong swimmer,” said the great one. “Maybe no one else could get there from here, but Zed did. I have no doubt he’s our phantom.”

Again, Matthew held his silence. He too stared out toward the island, abandoned by its watchman. Zed owned the place now, if just for a short while. A freed slave in possession of part of a crown colony! It tickled the pink.

Back in the autumn, Matthew had watched as the massive, mute and scar-faced Zed had—upon realizing from Berry’s language of artful drawings that he was free—run to the bitter end of one of these wharves and leaped with joyful abandon into the water. Zed had been at one time the slave to Ashton McCaggers, until Greathouse had paid for his freedom and secured the writ of manumission from Lord Cornbury. Greathouse’s interest in Zed had not been entirely altruistic, for Greathouse had realized due to the tribal scarring that Zed was a member of the West African Ga tribe, some of the fiercest warriors on earth, and it had been the great one’s desire to train Zed as a bodyguard for Matthew. But such was not to be, for the hulking warrior was obviously determined to get back to Africa or die by drowning. It seemed now, though, that Zed’s journey had been interrupted for a time, as he sat out there in the wilderness of Oyster Island, most likely in some shelter he’d created for himself, and pondered how a huge, black-skinned, mute, scarred and absolutely fearsome son of the Dark Continent might follow the star that beckoned him home.

Even though Zed might not know much about the world, Matthew figured he knew he was very far distant from where he longed to be, and so Zed stole himself a coat and ate fish and, hunkering down in his shelter, waited for his own favorable tide.

That was Matthew’s theory, at least, and though they’d never discussed it he was pleased that Greathouse had come to the same conclusion.

“Strange business, your name upon that wall,” said Greathouse, at last coming around to the problem at hand. It wasn’t the first time they’d discussed it, but now they were problem-solvers under warranty to the governor and, of course, the townspeople who would be paying their fee. “Let’s walk,” Greathouse suggested—more of a command, really—and again they were off under the bowsprits of the nested vessels.

After a few strides measured by Greathouse’s stick, the question came: “Do you have any ideas?”

Yes I do
, Matthew thought at once.
I have an idea a snake disguised as a doctor and his equally-reptilious wife have something to do with this, yet
I have no proof and I have no sense of what their motive might be
.
Minus either of those, I am as far from solving this problem as Zed is from walking on the shore of Africa.

Therefore he answered, “No, I don’t.”

“Someone,” said Greathouse, “doesn’t like you.”

Yes
, Matthew again thought, his jaw set and grim, his face whipped by a cold wind.
And that club seems to be getting larger by the day
.

They came upon a new ship that had evidently just arrived in the past hour or so, for the gangplank was lashed down and the crew was staggering off one after the other in search of their landlegs. A pair of empty wagons stood at the ready, but no cargo was being served to them. On the wagons were painted in red the slogan
The Tully Company
. Referring, as the problem-solvers knew, to Solomon Tully, the sugar merchant, he of the false choppers and a grand and glorious windbag to boot. Yet he was not such a bad sort when reciting his tales of visits to the Caribbean sugarcane plantations, for he could bring forth a heartening description of the tropical sun and the azure water and thus was welcome in any tavern on a winter’s day. And there stood on the wharf the stout and ruddy-cheeked man himself, wearing a brown tricorn and over what was assuredly an expensive suit a beautifully-made tan-colored overcoat of the finest weave from the Owleses’ tailor shop on Crown Street. Solomon Tully was very wealthy, very gregarious and usually very happy. This morn, however, he was sorely lacking that third attribute.

“Damn it, Jameson! Damn it all to Hell!” Tully was raging at an unfortunate, thin and ragged individual whose beard appeared to be formed from different colors of mold. “I pay you a fine sum for
this
sort of thing?”

“Sorry, sir…sorry, sir…sorry,” the unfortunate Jameson replied, eyes downcast and demeanor wretched.

“Go on and get cleaned up, then! File a report in the office! Go on, before I change my mind and send you packing!” As Jameson trudged away, Tully looked toward Matthew and Greathouse. “Ho, there! You two! Wait a moment!”

Tully was on them before they could decide whether to stand still or pretend they hadn’t heard. Tully’s face was flaming with the last of his anger. “Damn this day!” he raged. “Do you know how much money I’ve lost this morning?” His false teeth with their Swiss-made gears might appear perfect, Matthew thought, but they made strange little metallic whining noises as Tully spoke. Matthew wondered if the springs were too tight, and if they broke would Tully’s teeth fly from his head and snap through the air until they bit hold of something.

“How much?” Greathouse asked, against his better judgement.

“
Too
much, sir!” came the heated reply. Steam was wafting around Tully’s head. Suddenly Tully leaned toward them in a conspiratorial pose. “Listen,” he said more quietly, with an expression of pleading, “you two are the problem-solvers—”

Who seem to be much in demand today
, Matthew thought.

“—so do me the favor of thinking something over, will you?”

Greathouse cleared his throat, a warning rumble. “Mr. Tully, we do charge a fee for such efforts.”

“All right, hang the damned fee! Whatever you feel is proper! Just hear me out, will you?” Tully looked as if he might stomp his feet on the dock timbers like a child deprived of a sweet. “I’m a man in distress, can’t you see?”

“Very well,” said Greathouse, the picture of calm solidity. “How can we help you?”

“You can tell me,” Tully replied, either tears or snowflakes melting on his cheeks, “what kind of pirate it is that steals a cargo of sugar but leaves everything else untouched?”

“Pardon?”

“Pirate,” Tully repeated. “Who steals sugar.
My
sugar. The third shipment in as many months. But left behind are items you’d think any brigand of the sea would throw into his bottomless pot of greed! Like the captain’s silverware, or the pistols and ammunition, and anything else of value not nailed to the deck! No, this ocean wolf just takes my
sugar
! Barrels of it! And I’m not the only one affected by this either! It’s happened to Micah Bergman in Philadelphia and the brothers Pallister in Charles Town! So think on this for me, gentlemen…why does a rat of the waves wish to steal my sugar between Barbados and New York? And
only
sugar?”

Greathouse had no answer but a shrug. Therefore Matthew stepped into the breech. “Possibly to resell it? Or to…” Now Matthew had to shrug. “Bake a huge birthday cake for the Pirate King?” As soon as he spoke it, he knew he had not done a very good thing.

Greathouse suffered a sudden fit of coughing and had to turn away, while Solomon Tully looked as if his most-trusted dog had just peed on his boots.

“Matthew, this is no laughing matter,” said the sugar merchant, every word spaced out like cold earth between graves. “This is my
life
!” The force with which that word was spoken caused a spronging noise from within Tully’s mouth. “My God, I’m losing fistfuls of money! I have a family to support! I have obligations! Which, as I understand, you gentlemen do not share. But I’ll tell you…something’s very strange about this situation, and you can laugh all you please, Matthew, and
you
can cover up a laugh with a cough, Mr. Greathouse, but there’s something wicked afoot with this constant stealing of sugar! I don’t know where it’s going, or why, and it troubles me no end! Haven’t you two ever faced something you
had
to know, and it was just grinding your guts to find out?”

“Never,” said Greathouse, which immediately collided with Matthew’s “Often.”

“A two-headed answer from a one-headed beast,” was Tully’s observation. “Well, I’m telling you, it’s a problem to be solved. Now I don’t expect you to ship yourselves to the sugar islands, but can’t you put some thought to this and tell me the
why
of it? Also, what I might do to prevent this from happening next month?”

“It’s a bit out of our realm,” Greathouse offered. “But I’d suggest the crew taking those pistols and ammunition that are likely locked up in a chest and using them to blast the shit from between a pirate’s ears. That ought to do the trick.”

“Very good advice, sir,” said Tully with a solemn expression and a curt nod. “And surely they would appreciate that advice from their watery graves, since the damned sea roaches have already made it clear that cannons win over pistols any day, even on the Sabbath.” He touched the brim of his tricorn with a forefinger. “I’m going home now to have a drink of hot rum. And if one drink becomes two and two become three and on and on, I’ll see you sometime next week.” So saying, he turned himself about and began to trudge off toward his fine house on Golden Hill Street. In another moment he was a vague figure in the flurries, and a moment after that it was just flurries and no figure.

“I share the need for some hot rum,” said Greathouse. “How about a stop at the Gallop?”

“Fine with me,” Matthew answered. He might peg a game of chess there, to get his brain working as it should be.

“Good man,” said Greathouse. And he added, as they started off side-by-side toward Crown Street: “You’re buying.”

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 sound that reminded Matthew of an inkstamp hitting paper; Berry did, and she bit her lower lip for a moment and gazed at him with sorrowful eyes before she withdrew; and then others came and went, until it seemed to Matthew that the whole town had peered under the roof of this well, and at last Gilliam Vincent thrust his bewigged head forward to take a gander and then regarded Matthew as one would look smelling a piece of spoiled cheese. Matthew came very near playing out the role of Hudson Greathouse and knocking Vincent wig over tailbone, but he restrained himself.

“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.