The Providence Rider Read online

  “Mr. Corbett?” Cornbury urged.

  “Yes?” Then Matthew realized what was being asked of him. His mental wheels were clogged today. Three hours of fitful sleep would muddy up the best brain. He rubbed his forehead, where the crescent scar of a bear’s claw would forever remind him of the price of being someone’s champion. “Oh. All right,” he said hazily. “I was dancing at Sally Almond’s. No,” he corrected, “I was standing at the table that had gone over. Everything spilled. Effrem was there. The girl. Opal. And she cut one of her fingers on the glass.”

  There was a short pause.

  “Oh dear,” said the governor to Lillehorne. “Is he related to that Gillespie creature?”

  By an effort of will and concentration, Matthew righted his foundering ship. “I had nothing to do with that fire,” he said, with some heat behind it. “Yes, my name was painted on the wall. By someone.” Or more than one, he thought. But the Mallorys had been at the dance when the warehouse had gone up. How could they have been responsible, and what would be the point? “Someone wished to…implicate me, I suppose? Or something else? Because I had dozens of witnesses and, besides, why would I be fool enough to sign my name to a warehouse-burning? Why would I want to set fire to a storehouse of ropes?” He waited for a reply. When there was none, he shot the question at them again: “Why?”

  “Listen to him,” said Greathouse, the loyal friend.

  The moment hung.

  With a rustle of stiffened muslin, Lord Cornbury rose to his high-heeled feet. He went to the window and aimed his shadowed stare at the dance of white flakes that swooped and swirled from the gray ceiling of clouds.

  After a measure of reflection, the governor said in a low voice not suiting his suit, “Damn this. I understand none of it.”

  Welcome to my world, Matthew thought.

  After a spell of what seemed like deliberation but may have only been hapless and aimless thought of what color sash went with what color gown, Lord Cornbury turned toward the high constable. “Can you handle this, Lillehorne?”

  For once, the high constable sought his rightful level of truth. “I’m not certain, sir.”

  “Hm,” came the reply; a decision had been made. The rather unsettling gaze ticked between Matthew and Greathouse. “You two are the problem-solvers. Solve the problem.”

  “We’d like to do that,” Greathouse replied without hesitation, “but our business requires a fee.”

  “Your usual fee, then. Nothing too exorbitant for the town’s coffers, I trust.” A gloved finger was lifted. “Now both of you listen to me before I dismiss you. If I discover that you have worked this situation in order to wrench money from my pockets, I shall have your stones boiled in oil before they’re cut off with a dull knife. Do you understand me?”

  Greathouse shrugged, his way of saying he did. Matthew was still wondering where Cornbury’s pockets were.

  “Get out,” said the Lord Governor, to all three of them.

  “Good fortune to you gentlemen,” said Lillehorne as he stood at the top of the stairs and the two problem-solvers descended. He tapped the silver lion’s head against the palm of his hand. “I shall be watching you to make sure all is right in your investigation.”

  “You should be watching the Princess,” Greathouse answered, speaking of Lillehorne’s rather shrewish wife. “I have it on good authority that she is still on intimate terms with Dr. Mallory, and not for medical reasons this time.” He gave a brief catlike smile to Lillehorne’s stone face, his statement referring to a case in October wherein Maude Lillehorne was secretly visiting the handsome Dr. Jason for a ‘women’s health’ cure that involved an unhealthy dose of coca leaves.

  Outside, with their coats wrapped around them against the cold and whirling snowflakes, they walked away from the governor’s mansion toward the Broad Way.

  “Is she really?” Matthew asked, his gray woolen cap pulled down over his ears. “Maude Lillehorne,” he reminded Greathouse. “Involved with the doctor?”

  Greathouse frowned, the brim of his black tricorn catching snow. “What do you think? If you were Jason Mallory, would you give the Princess one look? Especially if you had that wife of his to warm your cockle every night?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I know not. I just said that to give Lillehorne something to think about. Stretch his mind a little. He needs it.”

  Speaking of warming a cockle, Matthew thought, how goes the merry widow? But he decided there was valor in silence. Plus, on his mind he had this warehouse blaze and levity was not welcome there today.

  “Walk with me a ways,” said Greathouse, though they already were. Matthew knew this was the great one’s method of saying there were serious things to be contemplated and talked about, and so they would walk a crooked route through the town’s streets in search of a straighter path.

  Though the snow flew and flitted and did its work of whitening the bricks, stones, timbers and dirt, Matthew thought that today New York seemed to be gray upon gray. A gray fog seemed to lie close to the earth, with gray clouds above and gray buildings between. Windows blurred the candles behind them. From the multitude of chimneys rose the morning smoke, drifting with the wind toward the winter-sheared woodland across the river in New Jersey. Wagons on the streets moved back and forth in near silence, their horses snorting steam and their drivers hunched forward, shapeless in heavy coats and weather-beaten hats. The boots Matthew and Greathouse wore crunched snow. The great one’s stick probed ahead for treacherous footing.

  They turned to the right along Beaver Street, Matthew following his friend’s lead, and headed toward the East River. A bright red parasol coming in their direction startled the eye and for an instant Matthew thought it had to be Berry underneath it, but then came clear the tall and handsome figure of Polly Blossom, the owner of the rose-colored house of ladies of the evening on Petticoat Lane. Actually, truth to be told, also ladies of the morning and the afternoon.

  “Hello, Matthew,” said Polly, with a polite smile and a nod. Matthew had done a favor for her in the summer, regarding a member of her flock, and thus had what she called a ‘season’s pass’ to her establishment, though he had not yet ventured so deeply into that territory. Then, for Hudson, her smile became a little wicked and her eyelashes fluttered. “Good morning to you,” she said, and as she passed she gave him a little hip-bump that made Matthew think he ought to get himself a walking stick and pretend to be in need of tea and sympathy.

  “Don’t say it,” said Greathouse as they walked on, and so Matthew did not. But it occurred to him that some afternoons when the great one was supposed to be uncovering an investigation he must instead be investigating an uncovering.

  They found themselves walking in the snow along Queen Street, heading southward toward Dock Street and the Great Dock where the masted ships rested, groaning softly in their cradles of ropes. Yet even in this wintry weather the work of a maritime colony continued, for several new vessels that had recently arrived were still being unloaded by the dock crews and several scheduled to leave on the next favorable tide were being loaded. There was, as always every day of the year, much activity and shouting of orders. Someone had built a fire from broken pieces of lumber and a few men stood around it warming themselves until they were shouted back to work. Ropes that ended in iron hooks moved cargo from place to place. Wagons stood ready to accept the freight or give it up. And as always, the higglers and their fiddles and tambourines were present to urge coins from the seafaring music-lovers, yet today their music was gray and not a little sad, as befitting God’s picture this morning of New York.

  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 sprongi
ng 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.