The Providence Rider Read online

  It sparked, hissed, and the fire began to travel. Hooper stepped back a few paces, as he’d been told. The fuse burned down. When it disappeared into the vent hole there was a sizzling sound like bacon in a frypan, followed by a weak little pop and a puff of smoke that floated away as delicately as a lady’s lace handkerchief.

  “Well, that ain’t right!” Hooper moaned. “Jazus save me, I’ve pulled a boner!”

  He peered into the vent hole. There was no spark visible. Either the fuse had gone out or the powder was bad. He went to the cannon’s business end and put his face to the muzzle. He could smell a smouldering, but where was the flame? “Damn me!” he hollered, as the thought of his heroism at this time of New York’s need turned to ashes around his soggy boots.

  A scant three seconds after Hooper pulled his face away from the cannon, there was a gout of fire from the vent hole and the gun went off.

  The blast of smoke itself almost knocked him crazy. The noise slapped his ears deaf. He staggered back, gasping like a hooked grouper, and fell on his butt. Dazed, he saw blue fire and sparks whirling up from the cannon toward heaven, and then he saw something else that nearly made every sprout of wild hair jump from his head.

  Something exploded across the bay in town. A building, looked to be down toward Dock Street. Hooper couldn’t hear the noise, but he saw the red fire leap up. Whatever it was, it was burning hot with a white center. Pieces of roof came down. Parts of the building were still flying upward like fiery bats.

  “Oh no,” Hooper whispered, though he couldn’t hear it. “Oh no, oh no!” His first thought was that he’d forgotten and put a ball in the cannon and blown something up himself, but then he remembered there was no ball in the cannon, and how in the name of bleedin’ Jazus could somebody forget about that?

  No, it had to be the Dutch. They had just fired on New York, and the war had begun.

  He scrambled up. It was time to vacate these premises. Still there was no sign of the warships, no battle lamps or cannon flame. He didn’t care. He ran to his rowboat, which was still up on the rocks. As he pushed it off and got in he realized something else very strange.

  The three small mackerel and the nice-sized striper in the bucket?

  They were gone.

  It was the ghost, Hooper thought. The phantom that walked out here. It was why he’d been given this job, because nobody else wanted it. The last watchman had left the island the night his overcoat had been stolen from a post next to the outhouse. Whoever had the watchman’s job, they weren’t alone. Hooper had never seen evidence of the phantom before, but here it was.

  “Christian of ye to leave the damn bucket!” he shouted toward any listening ears, though his own were still fried and sizzling.

  He was quits with this Godforsaken place. He took the oars and put his wiry muscles to the labor, and with hammering heart and fearful soul and wild smoke-scorched hair old Hooper Gillespie rowed for Manhattan, with red flames before him and the dark sea at his back.

  Two

  AS a crab scuttled amid rocks in the liquid dark, so Matthew Corbett danced across the plank floor of Sally Almond’s tavern by golden candlelight. Perhaps he was not as ungainly as the crab, and perhaps he did comport a certain amount of grace and style, yet there was definitely room for improvement in his technique. In its largest room the tavern’s tables and chairs had been pushed back and space arranged for a right fair gathering. A fire crackled in the brick hearth to warm the air, though the heat of energy filled the place. Two fiddlers played, a squeezeboxer squeezed, and a drummer rattled his bones at a merry pace. The stately gray-haired figure of Sally Almond herself had joined the festivity, clapping her hands to the bounding beat.

  Round and round went the swirl of dancers, among them the blacksmithing apprentice and Matthew’s friend John Five and his bride Constance, the potter Hiram Stokely and his wife Patience, the Munthunk brothers Darwin and Davy and their corpulent but surprisingly light-footed Mother Munthunk, Dr. Artemis Vanderbrocken who at seventy-six was content to mostly sip the spiced punch and enjoy the music, Felix Sudbury the owner of the Trot Then Gallop tavern, the printmaster Marmaduke Grigsby, Madam Kenneday the baker, another of Matthew’s good friends Effrem Owles the tailor’s son, and Jonathan Paradine the undertaker who was thin and pale and seemed to slink from place to place on the floor rather than actually dance. His ladyfriend, a newly-arrived widow by the name of Dorcas Rochester, was equally thin and pale and slinked just the same as her beau, so the couple seemed to all to be well-matched.

  Matthew Corbett had been in some demanding predicaments in his twenty-three years on earth. He had weathered the attack of a bear whose claw had left a crescent scar from just above the right eyebrow into the hairline. He had outrun a triad of hawks determined to remove his eyeballs in the most ungracious fashion. And he had literally managed to keep his face situated on his skull in a millhouse fight with the brutal killer Tyranthus Slaughter, among many other moments of dramatic danger. But at this moment, in the golden candlelight of Sally Almond’s tavern with the music playing and the dancers stepping through their paces, Matthew thought his own feet were perhaps the most dangerous enemies he’d yet faced, for the crossover mirror reels were treacherous in their complexity and the elaborately bewigged dance master Gilliam Vincent—who also served as the prissy proprietor of the Dock House Inn—wielded a leather glove on the end of a hickory stick to slap the heads of imperfect offenders.

  And, as Matthew made a slight stumble, here came the stick and glove. Smack upon the back of his skull. When Matthew turned his head to give Gilliam Vincent a glowering stare, the dance master had lightly moved away and so was Matthew moving away as well, caught up in the procession. Yet Mr. Vincent bore a smirk beneath his bony snoot that said he enjoyed the correcting perhaps a bit more than he ought to.

  “Pay no mind to him!” said Berry Grigsby as she came up alongside Matthew on their right-shoulder pass. “You’re doing fine!”

  “A relative term,” he answered.

  “Better than fine,” she corrected as she moved past. “Wonderful.”

  Now that, he thought as he continued along the path this particular reel required, was skinning the onion and calling it a potato. Then he turned to find himself face-to-face with the two-hundred-and-forty pound shock of woman called Mother Munthunk, and she gave him a black-toothed grin under her hatchet nose and a whiff of breath a goat could not suffer.

  What a joy this evening was, Matthew thought when his eyes had ceased their watering. He regretted accepting this invitation from Berry, though he had twice before declined her note. Matthew, she’d said at his door last week, I’m only going to ask you once more, and if you say no I’ll never—never—ask again.

  And what could he do then but accept? Not only was Berry breaking what seemed like the law of God by inviting a male to a social gathering, but also implicit in the tone of her request and the low fire in her dark blue eyes was the suggestion that not only would she never ask him again, she would never speak to him again. Which would be a problem for him, since he lived in a converted dairyhouse just behind the Grigsbys’ abode and he took supper there on occasion with Berry and her moon-faced and usually ink-stained grandfather Marmaduke. So in respect with keeping the peace and the more selfish ambition of keeping his place at a very hospitable supper table, what else could he do but accept?

  “Half reels of three!” Gilliam Vincent announced, with an expression that verged on a sneer. “Then we shall turn to the left, give both hands, make a complete clockwise circle and assume our places for the Mad Robin!”

  This was supposed to be enjoyable, Matthew thought grimly. Berry had taught him the positions and steps last week, but with the fiddling and the drumming and Gilliam Vincent’s stick poised to strike a blow for artful perfection it was torment for a young problem-solver who would much rather be studying the pieces on a chessboard or, for that matter, be out on a task somewhere for his employer, the London-based Herrald Agency.
r />   Onward! he told himself. His feet were more or less where they needed to be. He mused upon cocking a fist at Gilliam Vincent if that stick came near his skull again, but he had had enough of violence lately to last him a lifetime.

  He still had nightmares of Mister Slaughter. In some of them, he was being chased across a black bog by the killer, his feet and legs were sinking into the muck, he couldn’t get himself free to move fast enough, and when he looked back through the red-tinged nightmare gloom he saw the approaching figure and the glint of a knife gripped in the right hand. And then from the opposite side another figure was coming toward him: a leonine woman with an axe in one hand and under her other arm a burlap bag marked in crimson paint Mrs. Sutch’s Sausages, Sutch A Pleasure.

  “Places for the Mad Robin!” Gilliam Vincent called out. “Find your places!” You idiot children, he might have added.

  Matthew moved, but he sometimes felt dazed and unsure of his direction. Sometimes he felt as if he belonged to another world that the people in this room knew nothing about. Sometimes he felt that even though both Mister Slaughter and Mrs. Sutch were dead, part of them kept clawing at him deep inside as if he were the entrance to their crypt and they desperately wished to open him up so they might rejoin the living. For in a way he was their brother now.

  He was a killer.

  Of course Tyranthus Slaughter had died due to the combined efforts of Matthew, the vengeful boy Tom Bond and the Iroquois tracker Walker In Two Worlds, but Matthew had cleaved an important portion of Lyra Sutch’s head from her shoulders with an axe, and he would never forget the expression of hatred on her bloodied face and the way the scarlet rivers had flowed. That hideous cellar was a memory bad enough to drive any man to madness. Since it had happened Matthew could never again sleep in the dark. A candle—or better, two—had to be burning all through the night beside his bed.

  “Step lively!” commanded Vincent. The curls of his wig were as big as cotton balls. “Corbett, wake up!”

  He was awake, yet was he? When he got this horrible business on his mind reality became fogged, like a dirty glass. He recalled speaking to Sally Almond about how the great fans of Mrs. Sutch’s sausages were reacting now that there were be no more of the spicy things laid out on the dark red—Indian blood, they were called—platters Hiram Stokely supplied to Madam Almond. Most are faring well, the lady had told him. But a few who seemed to crave those sausages beyond all reason tell me they sweat at night and do not sleep very soundly.

  “They’ll get themselves in order,” Matthew had answered, but he was thinking he should get the names of those particular sausage-lovers so he might studiously avoid them in the streets and alleyways of New York.

  A pity that Mrs. Sutch left the country so suddenly, said Sally Almond.

  “Yes, and most likely it was a one-way destination,” Matthew had replied, leaving Madam Almond to frown with puzzlement for a few seconds before she gave a shrug of finality and returned to her kitchen.

  “Step! Step! Step! Pause!” shouted the bewigged tyrant, who was doing his best to make a pleasant pasttime into an onerous odyssey.

  Matthew Corbett wore tonight a plain dark blue suit with a white shirt and white stockings, his shoes buffed to a polite shine. He was no longer interested in presenting himself as a cock-of-the-walk, as had been the case back in the flush of autumn. He was absolutely fine with his current position in life, which was as a problem-solver tasked to do many various things for the Herrald Agency, some as mundane as carrying land deed papers to a particular personage and others as interesting as had been the incident of the Four Lamplighters just this past December. Problems such as Lord Mortimer, the wealthy man who’d hired Matthew to help him cheat death, and the tricky—yet sadly comic—situation faced by Lady Pink Manjoy had helped Matthew put some distance between himself and the Slaughter tribulation, yet he still felt he had many miles to go.

  He moved within the flow of dancers yet felt himself drifting apart. Even when Berry passed him once more and gave him a lingering appraisal, he saw only the fact that he had taken a human life. And perhaps it had been his life or the wretched life of Mrs. Sutch in the balance, but still…he remembered asking his friend Walker In Two Worlds the question How are you insane?

  And the Indian’s answer, which seemed more appropriate now to Matthew’s state of mind: I know too much.

  Matthew was tall and slim, yet with the toughness of a river reed about him. Surely, he knew by now the virtues of bending with the flow of events. He had a lean, long-jawed face and a thatch of fine black hair that was now brushed and tamed for the civilities of the evening. His pale candlelit countenance attested to his interest in books and nighttime games of chess at the Trot Then Gallop. His cool gray eyes with their hints of twilight blue were on this night thoughtful upon matters more of flesh-and-blood than music and dance. Yet he was here, in a way, on a mission.

  When he and his problem-solving associate Hudson Greathouse had been assaulted by Tyranthus Slaughter and had wound up at the bottom of a well in the ruins of a Dutch fort, Matthew in his efforts to escape death and save his friend’s life had been fortified by the image of the lovely, intelligent, artistic and quite willful young woman who had just passed by his right shoulder. In fact, he had fixed upon her as he had attempted time and again a precarious spider-like climb to the top of the well, which had seemed at the moment as far away as Philadelphia. During that struggle to survive he had made the vow to invite her to a dance if indeed he lived through the episode. And he had vowed to dance the floor to woodshavings in appreciation of a life returned to him. Mayhaps it had been Berry doing the inviting, and the dancing was more regimented than he would have liked, but nevertheless he felt he was alive because of her, and so he was here—dancing with her, every few turns of the reel—and he was in his own way ecstatic to still be a citizen of this earth.

  So when Berry passed next to him the following round—she of the curly coppery-red tresses, blue-eyed and fresh-faced and all of nineteen years old with a scattering of freckles across her nose and a gap between her front teeth that Matthew found not only endearing but exciting—he raised his face to her and smiled, and she smiled back at him, and he thought she looked radiant in her sea-green gown adorned with purple ribbons on the front, and perhaps an errant thought of what her lips would taste like when they were kissed crept in and surprised him, and caused him to lose the pace, for he stumbled against Effrem Owles and suddenly Gilliam Vincent was there glowering his disapproval and the stick was coming down to swat Matthew’s noggin with the leather glove.

  But before the glove could smack home, the length of hard hickory met with resistance in the form of a gnarled black walking-stick that got in its way. There was a little crack of wood against wood, more like the horns of two rams clashing.

  “Mr. Vincent?” Hudson Greathouse had stepped forth from the throng of perhaps twenty or so onlookers to this slow death called a ‘dance.’ He spoke quietly, so that only Matthew and the dancemaster could hear. “Have you ever had a glove up your ass?”

  Vincent sputtered. His cheeks reddened. Maybe the answer was yes. It was hard to tell.

  In any case, the hickory stick went down.

  “Time, everyone!” Vincent announced. “Time, please!” And then, to no one in particular, “I’m going out to get some air!”

  “Don’t rush back on our accounts,” Greathouse said as Vincent departed with a wobble in his wig.

  The little commotion caused a hiccup in the music and, the pacing lost, the company of reelers banged and bumped into each other like a caravan of carriages that had thrown their wheels. Instead of the kind of indignation that Vincent might have shown at this lack of dancely decorum, the collisions brought forth laughter both brassy and silvery and thus revealed was the true metal of friendship among the Mad Robins of New York.

  The musicians decided to rest their fiddles, drums and squeezebox. The dancers dispersed to get their share of apple cider and sugar cakes from
the table in the other room. Berry came up alongside Greathouse and Matthew and said with appreciable generosity to the young man, “You’re doing very well. Better than you did at the house.”

  “Thank you. My feet don’t believe you, but thank you anyway.”

  She gave a quick glance at Greathouse and then focused her attention again on her object. “Cider?” she asked.

  “In a minute.” Matthew was aware he was not the most genial of company this night; perhaps it was the fact that he’d just seen the Mallorys—the devilishly-handsome, gentlemanly Doctor Jason and his beautiful black-haired wife Rebecca—standing across the room pretending to be talking but actually keeping their eyes on him. Those two had been haunting him seemingly wherever he went ever since he’d returned from the Slaughter incident.

  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-efficient coroner Ashton McCaggers, Berry had her choice of ardent pursuers.