The Providence Rider Page 4

  Decorum was lost and dancing forgotten in the rush upon Nassau Street. Matthew was out the door amid the throng, finding himself behind John Five and John’s bride Constance. Berry bumped into Matthew’s side as they all looked toward the dockfront at smokeclouds and bursts of flame roiling up into the night.

  “Oh my Jesus!” Gilliam Vincent cried out. He began to run southward along Nassau Street toward the point of conflagration perhaps nine blocks distant. Matthew saw Vincent’s wig fall off, exposing a pallid scalp where a few sprigs of gray hair stood upright like shocked soldiers on a barren battlefield. For all his vanity, Vincent cared not for the wig so much as he cared for the fate of his beloved Dock House Inn, where he was the narrow-eyed and supremely arrogant king of his domain, and so he put wings to his heels and was off hollering “Fire! Fire! Fire!” all the way.

  Cries of alarm were quickly echoing across the town. From Manhattan’s previous experience, flame was a disastrous enemy. Matthew surmised that if indeed it was the Dock House Inn that had somehow ‘blown up,’ as Vincent had put it, there might not be very much left of the guests who’d been sleeping there. The fire shot yellow and orange tendrils a hundred feet into the air. If clouds had not already slid in to mask the moon, the dark plumes rising from New York would have blackened Selene’s lunar face. “Come on, men!” someone shouted, a call to fetch buckets and get to the wells that stood here and there on the cobbled streets. Some went back into Sally Almond’s tavern to get their coats, scarves, gloves, caps, tricorn hats before they started off. Matthew took his black fearnaught from a hook on the wall, donned his gray gloves and woolen cap and with a quick glance at Berry that said I think dancing must wait he was away among the men fast striding or outright running for the scene of fiery destruction.

  The houses were emptying their people onto the streets. Many folk wore their flannel robes and were bare-legged against the cold. Lanterns swung back and forth, a midwinter congregation of summer’s fireflies. Night watchmen scurried around rather helplessly, showing their green lamps of authority for whatever they were worth. At the corner of Broad and Princes Streets Matthew nearly collided with elderly Benedict Hamrick, an ex-soldier of the realm with a white beard that hung to his spit-polished belt-buckle. Hamrick marched around blowing into an ear-piercing tin whistle and shouting incomprehensible orders to anyone who would listen, which meant he had utterly no troops to command in his fantasy of the Coldstream Guards.

  For all its everyday chaos, nattering of merchants, horse manure in the streets and slaves in the attics, New York at a moment of crisis became a purposeful juggernaut. Much as ants will boil over from a heel-kicked nest and begin feverish defenses, so were the Manhattanites. Buckets materialized from houses and barns. A horse wagon hauling buckets came clattering down Broad Street. Teams of men gathered, took hold of buckets and set off at a run to station themselves at wells. Somehow, the chains of the bucket brigades solidified within minutes of Gilliam Vincent’s first cry. Water began moving, faster and faster along the line. Then the line split into two and three and thus multiple dowsings of water were thrown upon the fire, which turned out not to be consuming the Dock House Inn but to be eating a Dock Street warehouse where nautical ropes were made and stored.

  And it was surely a hot fire. A fire with a white center, and a power to scorch the eyebrows and puff the faces of those at its edge. Even Matthew, working with the other feverish ants a block north of the scene, could feel the waves of heat rolling past him in dusty swells. The labor continued on, the buckets moving as fast as muscle would allow, but very soon it was apparent that the warehouse was a goner, and all liquid must be used to wet the surrounding structures thus to prevent a disaster of the worst kind. At one point old Hooper Gillespie appeared, ranting about an attack by the Dutch, but no one paid him any attention and so he slinked away scowling and spitting toward the harbor.

  Hollers and shouts went up when the last wall of the warehouse collapsed. The sparks that flew up were stomped under boots when they landed. More water was thrown upon the soggy, steaming wood walls of the buildings to left and right, and finally as the hours passed and the muscles weakened, the southernmost portion of the town was saved but the rope merchant Johannis Feeg wept bitter tears over his pile of smouldering ashes.

  The work was at last finished. The tavern owners brought out kegs of ale and opened them in the street; one never knew when one might need a bucket brigade, and it was safer to be on the good side of the citizenry rather than pinch ale pennies at a time like this. Matthew scooped up a drink in a wooden cup he’d been given, and along with other bedraggled fire fighters he walked toward the smoking remains.

  There was very little left but smoke. Matthew saw other men walking through the ashes, kicking embers between the eyes and then crushing them for good measure. The smell of acrid smoke, dust and heat was like coarse flannel in the lungs. Men who had been closest to the fire staggered around blackened and nearly cooked, and they nodded wearily as others put cups of ale into their hands.

  “Now this was a merry moment, wasn’t it?”

  Matthew turned to see who’d spoken, but he’d already recognized the voice of Gardner Lillehorne, which tonight was the hum of a wasp seeking a place to sting.

  The spindly-framed high constable was in less than his usual perfection, for ashes marred his overcoat of bright holly green, trimmed at the collar and cuffs with bands of scarlet. Alas, the cuffs were filthy and his white shirt the color of dirty teeth. His holly green tricorn was dark with ash and its small red feather burned to a wisp. Ashes streaked his long, pallid face with its narrow black eyes, small and pointed nose, precisely-trimmed black-goatee and black mustache. Even the silver lion’s head that topped his ebony cane seemed to be scorched and dirty. Lillehorne’s eyes left Matthew’s and scanned the wandering crowd. “A merry moment,” he repeated. “For Mr. Feeg’s competitors, that is.”

  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 mission.

  “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 Earwig 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.”

  Four

  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.