The River of Souls

“Will stop. When all of ’em are dead.”

“You can’t kill every one of them!”

“Yes,” said Magnus Muldoon, the iron-gray eyes above the sharp nose and the beastly beard staring daggers through Matthew, “I can.”

“I think,” said the young problem-solver from New York, “that I have come into this play in the second act.” He then happened to look up, and noted with some distress that hanging on leather cords right above his head was the symbol of the night’s festivity, a large painted wooden sword. It was, after all, Charles Town’s famous annual Sword of Damocles Ball.

“All right, then!” growled Magnus Muldoon, oblivious to Pandora’s expression of pleading and her hand across Matthew’s chest as if to protect his heart from being ripped clean out. “How do you want to—”

“I have had quite enough of this,” said the older gentleman who had just come to the side of the mountain, drawn a pistol from under the waistcoat of his dark blue suit, cocked the mean-looking weapon—as it did have a small bayonet beneath the barrel—and placed it alongside Muldoon’s fly-swarmed cranium. “You will withdraw from the sight of my daughter, sir, or blood shall be spilled!”

Matthew felt like a loose button on a tight coat. Indeed, this second act was proceeding apace with him being a central character yet not having a dap of knowledge concerning the script. He felt he must have unwittingly stepped into a role as a Charles Town Player, but whether this was yet to be a comedy or tragedy the problem-solver had no clue.

In this early summer of 1703, as his world seemed poised between gun barrel and grim brawler, Matthew Corbett was all of twenty-four years old, having turned that age in the merry month of May. He sometimes wondered, usually late at night in the silence of preparing for bed in his small residence in New York, how one could be young and old at the same time, for surely some of the things that had both perplexed him, challenged him and attached themselves to his life had the power to dim the candlelight of youthful exuberance and for certainty one’s outlook upon the world. He was older than his years, and more seasoned in his experiences. In the course of his investigations for his employer, the London-based Herrald Agency, he had been by turns fascinated, wary, burdened with despair, jubilant beyond measure and just plain scared nearly to death. And, it must be said, very nearly put to death on more occasions than he might like to recall. Yet recall he must, for such was his mind. He was a constant player at chess, though he might be sitting at no board and facing no physical pieces. It seemed also to him that he had become a constant player at the game of survival, and that this chess match he had unwittingly entered into with the eerie and powerful individual known as Professor Fell went on day and night whether he was present at the game table or not.

Matthew was yet troubled from his encounter with Professor Fell, the emperor of crime whose eyes and appetite had now fallen upon the New World as well as the Old. Back in March on Pendulum Island, in the Bermudas, Matthew’s clock had nearly been wound down. He still carried many unpleasant memories of that excursion into the criminal realm, during which he himself had played the part of a rather wicked individual to mask his role as a Providence Rider. He had wished to withdraw from New York—that seemingly sleepless and perpetually active burg—for a time, to rest and recuperate, and to bask leisurely in the Atlantic breezes that rustled the palm trees of Charles Town and spread the scents of lemon and cinnamon at night through the lamplit streets.

Alas, here stood Magnus Muldoon, smelling neither of lemon nor cinnamon, and though the pistol was aimed at the mountain monster’s brainpan Matthew suspected this was not the end of a story, but the beginning of one.

“Father Prisskitt,” growled Muldoon, with a wry smile pulling at his whiskers, “you won’t kill me. Not the man who’s gonna marry your daughter.”

“Silence, you filthy beast!” came the retort from Sedgeworth Prisskitt, who was slim and tall, gray-haired and handsome in his fifty-third year, his nose and chin carved from the stone of nobility, his forehead graced with the lines of intense thought, his eyes more blue than the compelling violet of his daughter’s. Now, however, they were equally as angry. “I’d have a jackass as a son-in-law before the likes of you!”

“Many jackasses have been standin’ where this one stands,” said Muldoon, with a glance at Matthew. “Look at all the stable cleanin’ I’ve saved you.”

Matthew held stock in the pistol, but not in its holder. A bad sign: the barrel wavered.

“Why do you torment us so? What have we done to you?”

Muldoon’s narrow eyes narrowed still. He pondered this question as if it carried the weight of God’s Kingdom. “You,” he rumbled like an avalanche, “and your dear departed missus have made betwixt you this angel who stands next to a dandified jackass. You have put upon this earth the one female I should have…must have…and will have. The one female who walks through my dreams at night and shatters my sleepin’. But will she have anythin’ to do with me in the light of day? Nossir! I am the dirt beneath her lovely heels…as I am the dirt beneath all your shoes!” This he announced loudly to the assembled and transfixed listeners. “Well…Magnus Muldoon ain’t nobody’s dirt! And when Magnus Muldoon falls in love, as he has fallen such a height for the vision of beauty, this angel Heaven wishes other angels might be, he will not stop ’til he has her in his arms and in his weddin’ bed…no matter how many men he has to kill to win her heart.”

“You’re insane!” sputtered Sedgeworth. “I ought to put a ball between yours ears this instant!”

“Ought to,” replied the mountain monster, “is a far holler from will do. I have challenged this…this whatever it is to a duel. A fair and square fight to the death. Which I’m plannin’ on winnin’, naturally. Duels are legal fightin’, as you know. Now…you kill me and that’s cold-blooded murder. Seems I see a few constables in here amid the highwigs. They’d have to throw you in irons and be knottin’ a noose for your neck, Father Prisskitt. So…I think what you ought to do…is put down that little popper ’fore it goes off and sets you swingin’.”

To Matthew’s heart-stopping horror, the little popper was lowered and Sedgeworth Prisskitt gave him a sad-eyed look that said I am sorry you have to die.

And no one was more sorry than Matthew, that he had come to this place and moment in time. How he wished to be walking on The Broad Way, even though it be dappled with horse apples! How he wished to be drinking a glass of wine at the Trot Then Gallop, and playing chess with his friend Effrem Owles. He even wished to be back in the office at Number Seven Stone Street, listening to Hudson Greathouse go on and on about the charms of his own lady love, the lusty widow Abby Donovan. Or…the worst of his wishes yet one he wished he might correct…suffering the cold winds of silence that eminated from Berry Grigsby, the print-master’s granddaughter and—truth be told—a red-haired adventuress who had more than once caused trouble for Matthew. Yet Matthew knew he had more than once caused trouble for her, and at present wished to keep her out of trouble. And yet she bridled at his efforts, misunderstood his meanings and had the ability to pierce his tongue upon the thorns of language, and now they were two icebergs that passed in the night.

So be it.

Matthew faced his mountainous foe with an expression of impassive dignity, his chin uplifted not in defiance but because the fellow was so lofty. He was tall and slim, with a lean, long-jawed face and cool gray eyes that held hints of twilight blue. His thatch of fine black hair was neatly combed, as suited this evening of fine graces. As suited also the fine company, his pale candlelit countenance bespoke his intellectual qualities of reading and chess-playing, both interests that claimed many hours. He had been well-educated in a New York orphanage, and better educated by his experiences so far in the rough and rugged world. He was by profession a problem-solver, and well-tempered by such rigors as an ex-magistrate’s clerk would have never dreamt—or feared—to know. One lasting mark of his journey through an uncertain and certainly demanding life was a crescent scar that curved from just above the right eyebrow into his hairline, a gift that Magnus Muldoon was now regarding with obvious interest.

“Bear got you?” the mountain asked.

“Not all of me,” was Matthew’s calm reply. The claw slash from Jack One Eye when he was trying to save Rachel Howarth—his “nightbird,” so to speak—from being burned as a witch not far from this very town was yet a painful memory, but still…only a memory.

“Hm,” said Muldoon. “Mebbe you ain’t a pure dandy after all, to be carryin’ such a token. But no matter. You have got to die for darin’ to bring my angel to this gatherin’.”

“I won’t allow it!” spoke the violet-eyed angel, with some devilish heat. “Magnus Muldoon, you don’t own me! You can’t be trying to win a woman’s heart with bloodshed! It’s not…not…” She hesitated, struggling for words.

“Natural. Nor is it Christian,” Matthew supplied.

“Oh, you’re wrong there!” came the answer from the growly-throated voice within the busky beard. The eyes above that black forest glittered with feverish intent. “It is natural for a man to use bloodshed when he has seen the woman he loves more than the stars love the night. More than the river loves the sea. More than a bird loves the free wind. It is natural, if that’s the only way to win her…by killin’ every damn pretender to her heart who dares to take her arm and sport her about like a silver button on his cuff. And it is Christian, you low-assed heathen, for even Jesus shed blood in the name of love…”

“His own blood,” Matthew said, to no avail.

“…and I’m riddin’ this world of those men who can’t carry a candle to the torch of her beauty, and they dress ’emselves up like jouncy crows and hop hither and yonder tryin’ to prove they’re made of some mettle, when right before her stands a man of pure iron!”

“A little rusty, I think,” said Matthew. He regarded the circling flies and wrinkled his nose at what they swooned upon. “And musty, also.”

“He won’t be the last,” Pandora said to her hulking suitor. This did not go over very well with Matthew, who nevertheless remained silent. “I would never marry a beast like you! I want a civilized man of refinement…a man to be proud of, not a…not a…”

“Man not to be proud of,” Matthew supplied.

“That,” said the most beautiful woman in the world.

The grim-faced head nodded. “I’ll kill every man livin’ who stands in my way, Pandora Prisskitt! Sooner or later…I’ll be the last man standin’.”

“You can stand on your head or stand on a pile of gold! I can’t bear to look at you, much less smell you!” She put a hand to her throat and reached out for a handkerchief. “Father!” she cried, and staggered toward him. “I’m going to be ill!”

“Your time has come,” said the bearded beast to Matthew Corbett. “I challenged you to a duel, and if you’re any kind of man you’ll accept that challenge. If not, turn tail like the yellow-belly I figure you to be and light out of here this minute. Many others have, and everybody at this social loves a good laugh. So I’m askin’ you…what weapon do you choose? Sword? Pistol? Axe? What are you wantin’ to fight me with, you little pale piece ’a parchment?”

The pallid problem-solver pondered this. He looked up once more at the Sword of Damocles that dangled above his skull. Then he stared into the eyes of Magnus Muldoon and saw there something he had not seen before. Something, perhaps, he had not expected to see. He decided, then, what was his choice. But before he spoke it, Matthew thought of how he had come to this place and this moment, and how when he got home he was going to give Hudson Greathouse such a kick in the pants that the squabbling ghosts of Number Seven Stone Street would stop their eternal fight to applaud his determined application of the boot.