Mister Slaughter

Twenty-Six

"Ollie? There' a man asking for you."

He looked up from his work at Priscilla, who had knocked first before opening the door to his workshop at the rear of the house; it was her way never to intrude upon him unless it was important, and he appreciated her value of his privacy. Which meant concentration; which meant productivity; which meant progress.

Oliver set aside his tweezers and lifted the magnification lenses clipped to his spectacles so he could see her clearly. The lenses, ground to his exacting specifications by the optician Dr. Seter Van Kampen here in Philadelphia, could make a gnat appear elephantine and a tiny gearwheel gargantuan. Not that he worked with gnats or elephants; he did not, though gearwheels of all sizes were commonplace on his desktop and now, indeed, were scattered there. But what might have been a disorderly scatter to any other man was to Oliver a comforting variety of challenges, or puzzle parts waiting to be put into their places.

He was a man of many loves. First of all, he loved his wife. He loved the fact that she was five months pregnant, loved her plumpness and her curly brown hair, the sparkle of her eyes, the way she called him Ollie-all prim and proper in daylight, but truth be told at night she made the name sound a little wicked, indecent even, and thus the blessed event approaching-and he loved the fact that she granted him such privacy to do his work, here in the sun-splashed room with its high windows. He loved also the shine of sunlight on tweezers and calipers, metal-shears, pincers, the delicate miniature pliers, wire snippers, files, the little hammers and all the rest of his toolbox. He loved the weight and feel of brass, the grain of wood, the pungent smells of whale oil and bear grease, the beautiful God-like geometry of gear-teeth, the confidence of screws and the jollity of springs. If Priscilla would not think him too odd-and this was also why he valued his privacy-he would have professed that he had names for all his instruments, his hammers and pliers and such, and sometimes he would say quietly as he put two pieces together, "Very well, now, Alfred! Fit there into Sophie and give her a good turning!" Or some such encouagement to succeed. Which, now that he thought of it, sounded indecent too, but who ever said an inventor had to be decent?

Or, for that matter, boring?

He also loved gunpowder. Its rich, almost earthy smell. Its promise and power. Its danger. Yes, that was part of the love, too.

"Who is it?" Oliver asked.

"He just inquired if this was the house of Oliver Quisenhunt. He said it was vital that he speak to you." "Vital? He used that word?"

"He did. He um he's a little frightening in appearance. I'll go back and ask his name, if you want."

Oliver frowned. He was twenty-eight years old, had been a bachelor-a life-long bachelor, he'd assured his friends over ale at the Seven Stars Inn-until he'd met a pretty little plump curly-haired sparkling-eyed girl two years ago whose wealthy father wanted a Dutch clock in their parlor repaired. It had taken him the longest time to fix that clock. It had been strange, repairing a clock and wishing time would stop. At the same time.

"No, that's all right." He pushed his chair back and stood up. "Something so vital, I suppose we ought to find out what, eh?"

She caught his arm. "Ollie," she said, and she looked up at him imploringly. Way up, because he was rail-thin and six-feet-three-inches tall and towered above her plump little self. "He he might be dangerous."

"Really? Well," he said with a smile, "danger is my business. Part of it, at least. Let's go see what he wants."

In the rooms there was a place for everything and everything in its place. One thing that Priscilla had taught him, an artist did not need to live in confusion. Did not need to fill up the house with books and scribbled-upon papers and little gearwheels and sacks of gunpowder and lead balls everywhere and underfoot clay jars full of different varieties of grease that made a terrible mess if they were broken. Indeed, not with the new Quisenhunt coming. So he had his workshop where what she termed confusion was his paradise, and she had the rest of the house, excepting of course the cellar.

He also loved the fact that she called him an artist. The first time she'd said that to him, in her father's garden, he had looked into her face and asked himself what the term life-long bachelor really meant, anyway.

Priscilla had closed the door when she went to fetch him. She stood at Oliver's side, clutching the sleeve of his cream-colored shirt. He opened the door, and the man outside turned around from observing the parade of wagons, carts and passersby on Fourth Street.

"Oliver Quisenhunt," the man said.

Oliver nodded, when his flinch had passed. He thought he might have heard a note of what? relief in the man's voice. And Priscilla had been right about him: this was a raw-boned and rough-edged leatherstocking straight from the woods, it appeared. Straight from the frontier where Indians hacked your limbs off and boiled them in pots for their suppers. This man looked as if he'd seen a few of those boiling pots. Maybe had barely escaped from one, as well. How old? About twenty-six, twenty-seven? It was hard to tell, with those blue bruises splotching his right cheekbone and forehead. Both his eyes were bloodshot. The left eye had a white medical plaster laid just below it. The dark hollows under his eyes, and the general grim menace of his countenance was he twenty-seven, going on fifty? A few days' beard, a mess of black hair, the palms of his hands wrapped up in dirty leather, torn burgundy-colored breeches and a waistcoat the same color, stained stockings, filthy white shirt and a fringed buckskin jacket scabby with grime. On his feet were honest-to-God Indian moccasins.

He was a scout, Oliver guessed. Someone who goes ahead to clear the way, who takes the risks only the bravest-or most foolhardy-men can face.

He thought they called that kind of man a providence rider.

"My name is Matthew Corbett," said the visitor. "May I come in?"

"Ah well I am very busy at present, sir. I mean to say, it would be best if you came back some other-" "I want to talk to you about one of your inventions," Matthew plowed on. "An exploding safebox." "An exploding oh. Yes. Those. You mean the keyless safe? The thief trap?"

"Whatever you call it. I just want to know how it got into the hands of a killer named Tyranthus Slaughter."

"Slaughter?" Quisenhunt searched his memory. "I'm sorry, I have no recollection of that name. I sold no thief trap to him."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely. I keep strict records of who buys my " He almost said art. But instead he said, "Creations."

Matthew hadn't known quite what to expect from this man. Quisenhunt was thin and gangly, had hands that seemed too big for his skinny wrists and feet like longboats. He had large brown eyes and a topping of blond hair with a cowlick that shot up at the crown like an exotic plant. Thick blond eyebrows arched up over the rims of his spectacles, as if he were perpetually asking a question. Matthew already knew he was twenty-eight years old, from his inquiries, but Quisenhunt seemed younger than that. There was something almost childlike about him, in his slightly-slumped posture, or in the inflections of his voice that seemed to rise on the last word of every sentence. This impression was aided by the multitude of freckles scattered across his cherry-cheeked face. He looked to Matthew to be a strangely overgrown twelve-year-old boy wearing his father's buckled shoes, white stockings, dark brown breeches, cream-colored shirt and yellow-striped cravat. The phrase mishap of nature came to mind.

It was time to roll out the cannon. Matthew said, "I am a representative of the law from New York. In this case, you may consider me an arm of the royal court. I'm looking for Slaughter. You may have information I need."

"Oh," came the hushed response. Quisenhunt rubbed his lower lip. "Well, then why aren't you in company with the Philadelphia officials? I personally know High Constable Abram Farraday."

"Yes," Matthew said. "He sent me here."

"I thought you were an Indian scout," Quisenhunt said, and almost sounded disappointed. "May I?" Matthew made a motion of entrance.

There was an uncomfortable moment where the master of the house looked to his wife to see if she approved letting such a ragamuffin into their domain, whether he was a law man, an Indian scout, or chief of the street beggars. But then she nodded graciously at Matthew, retreated a step, and asked if he might like a nice cup of lemon water.

Quisenhunt took Matthew along a hallway and through the door to his workshop, and there Matthew saw how much a man could love his calling.

Three days ago, in the weak light of early morning, Matthew had stumbled down out of the forest into the village below the watermill. He didn't get very far before a man wearing a brown woolen cap, a gray coat and carrying a torch came out between two houses and hollered, "Who goes there?" Matthew thought it was wise he answer, because the man was also aiming a blunderbuss at him.

Indian trouble, the watchman had told him as they went to see the town's constable, by name Josaphat Newkirk. The town's name was not Caulder's Crossing but Hoornbeck, and according to the watchman was situated on the Philadelphia Pike about four miles away from the city. The Indians have got their warpaint on, the watchman told him as they walked. Matthew still had a pounding headache and his vision blurred in and out, but he could function, more or less. Hey! Did they jump you too?

Who? Matthew had asked.

The Indians, man! They're crawlin' all around here!

Hoornbeck, a small town that overlooked a picturesque lake, was in a state of high alert. Men with guns were everywhere, leading skittish horses. Women stood in groups holding babies or comforting frightened children. By the time Matthew was escorted to the constable's office in the white-washed town hall, a clerk reported that Constable Newkirk had gone out on his rounds to check with the other watchmen. Matthew had no time to waste; he asked to be taken to the town's doctor, so in a few minutes he was at the door of a white house with dark green shutters on the edge of the lake.

Dr. Martin Lowe, a big bearish man with close-cropped brown hair, a brown beard streaked with gray and brown eyes behind his spectacles, took a look at him, rushed him in and put him on a table with three candles on either side of Matthew's head. He began to examine the injuries while his wife boiled water for tea and hot towels.

"Lucky here," said the doctor, in a bass rumble that Matthew could feel in his chest. He touched the sore, blood-crusted area below Matthew's left eye. Matthew hadn't realized before now that Slaughter's fingernails had worked their magic. "You might have lost that eye if those claws had caught you any higher. And that was a bad blow to your head, from the size of the bruise. Very dangerous. How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Three," Matthew said, when he concentrated and half of the man's six fingers disappeared like wisps of smoke.

"Mouth open. Did you swallow any teeth?"

"Sir please listen I'm not here about myself. I'm looking for a man who probably came in " What day was this? "Yesterday." Slaughter was simple enough to describe. "He would have had an arrow in his upper right arm."

"You mean Lord Shelby's land speculator, Sir Edmond Grudge. Constable Newkirk brought him in."

"Sir Edmund Grudge?"

"He had a terrible time of it. Indians ambushed his party. Wiped 'em out, not five miles from town. I sewed up that gash in his head, took the arrowhead out of his arm and did what I could. Gave him a bottle of brandy to ease his pain."

"And where is he now?"

"I said he ought to stay here and let me watch him overnight, but he wanted to get a room at the tavern. The Peartree Inn, alongside the Pike. Damned if he's not a strong-willed man."

"I've got to go." Matthew had started to get off the table, but suddenly there were two bearish, brown-bearded doctors in the room holding him down.

"Not so fast, now. Sir Grudge is due back by ten o'clock, which is a little more than two hours. I'm to check his stitches again. In the meantime, let me work on you, and tell me what the hell happened."

Within five minutes, Lowe was out the door like a shot to track down Constable Newkirk.

It was awhile before they returned, because to add to the confusion of the day Matthew later learned that Newkirk had been out talking to a watchman whose eyes were evidently not so watchful, for his horse had been untied and stolen from a hitching-post on Main Street hardly an hour before. Then Newkirk, a lean gray-haired man with the sad face of a dog that just wants to sleep in peace, listened intently to Matthew's tale, which made him look even sadder. He lit his pipe, blew smoke, and said, "All right, then," with a sigh as if that explained everything. "Let me get some men together, and we'll go pay a visit to Sir Grudge. Whatever his damned name is."

When Matthew heard about the stolen horse, he'd figured of course Slaughter had taken the beast and pounded away the last few miles to Philadelphia. But the constable had a different story for Matthew when he returned from The Peartree Inn.

"Seems your Mr. Slaughter had himself a good meal last night," Newkirk said as he puffed his pipe and Lowe applied the plaster to Matthew's wound. "Everybody wanted to hear about the Indians and pay his bill. He told some big ones. Fooled me, he did. Except the last trouble we had with the red men was more than six, seven years ago. You recall, Martin. They burned down Keltey's barn, set fire to his haystacks."

"I recall."

"Ran around hollerin' a little while, shot some arrows into the roof and then they went." Newkirk whistled and made a motion with his hand to represent how fast they had gone. "Back into the woods. Their kingdom. Well, he fooled me."

"He stole the horse," Matthew said. "Is that right?"

"The horse? Oh, Ben Witt's horse? No, I don't think so. Unless he was in two places at once. Your Mr. Slaughter"-Matthew wished he would stop saying that-"took up with a tradesman last night at the inn. Peddler told Daisy-that would be Daisy Fisk, my daughter-in-law-that he was headin' to Philadelphia. Had all his wares in a wagon. Well, your Mr. Slaughter left with the tradesman before somebody stole Ben's horse."

Having delivered that unwelcome news, Newkirk just stood there puffing.

"Constable?" Matthew waved smoke away from his face. "Why don't you send out some fast riders? Maybe they can catch him before-"

"Already in the big town by now," Newkirk replied. "Their problem, now." He scratched his pate and gazed out the window at the lake as if he would give up everything he owned for a morning of fishing. "At last," he said. "You say there're some bodies out in the woods?"

"This young man can't go anywhere for a while," the doctor said. "I'm surprised he can walk."

"The bodies can wait, then," Newkirk decided. "Funny thing, though."

"What's funny?"

"Your Mr. Slaughter. Such a killer and all, you say. Left with a tradesman." Newkirk gave a dry little chuckle. "Fella was sellin' knives."

Matthew stood on the threshold of Oliver Quisenhunt's workshop, three days since his visit to Hoornbeck. He looked into an untidy mess: stacks of books and papers upon the floor, shelves full of strangely-shaped metal pieces and tools, a filing cabinet with more papers spilling out, a desk covered with small brass and wooden gearwheels and more tools, and at the center of the hurrah-rah a chalkboard on wheels. The chalkboard was covered side to side and top to bottom with diagrams of what appeared to be different-shaped hinges and pegs, gearwheels, drillbits and mechanisms he had never seen before. Some of them might very well have come from a distant planet, like the thing that looked like half of a spoked wagon wheel and had two batlike wings extended on either side.

Of course I know Oliver Quisenhunt, High Constable Farraday had told Matthew this morning. He's the crazy clockmaker. Well I say that with all respect. He's actually a very talented inventor. Designed the safebox especially for us. Now, Mr. Corbett tell me again howyou let Tyranthus Slaughter get away?

Matthew took stock of another shelf that held a variety of clockfaces in both metal and wood. "How many of them have you made?"

"My clocks? Twelve. Working on my thirteenth. I make three or four a year, depending on the complexity of what the client wants."

"What is that?" Matthew pointed to the half wagon wheel with the bat wings.

"Part of the inner workings of my thirteenth. I don't believe in bad luck-unlucky thirteen and all that-but with my client's permission I'm making a clock that will um flap its wings like a bat upon every hour. What you see diagrammed there are the rods that the hammers will hit to cause the wings to flap. I'm thinking of creating the entire thing out of black cloth draped around a wooden frame. With a black clockface and possibly red enamel numerals. My client, fortunately, is very open to my designs and already owns two of my creations."

Matthew just stared at him. "Why don't you make it meow? Like a black cat?"

"Well," Quisenhunt said, and studied his knuckles, "the nearest sound approximating that would be from a fiddle. When I get my self-playing fiddle perfected, then maybe so."

"Your self-playing " Matthew decided to let it alone. "I'm not so interested in your clocks," he said, "as in " "The thief trap, yes you said that. Then you know about my other interest?" Matthew nodded. "Farraday told me."

"Ah." Quisenhunt's wife had entered bringing a cup of pale yellow lemon water, which she offered to Matthew. "Take your drink, then," said the inventor, "and I'll show you my cellar workshop."

"It's awfully dirty down there," the woman cautioned.

"I think Mr. Corbett can handle a little dirt." Quisenhunt paused to light a candle, and then motioned for Matthew to follow.

Along the stairs that led down, Quisenhunt lit a succession of wall candles until they reached the bottom. Matthew had caught the odor of gunpowder as soon as the door was opened. As Quisenhunt continued to walk around and touch fire to a few more wicks, Matthew saw that they stood in a stone-floored shooter's gallery. A half-dozen pistols hung on wall hooks near the stairs. On the other side of the chamber were two canvas-covered circular targets, one large and one smaller, with enough holes in them to show the straw stuffing. Matthew thought Ashton McCaggers would have felt right at home in here with his own pistols and dress-maker's forms Elsie and Rosalind to shoot at.

"I have always been fascinated by firearms," Quisenhunt said when the last candle was burning and yellow light gleamed off the pistols. "These I've designed myself. Here, this is something I've been testing lately." He picked up from a circular table not a pistol but a short sword with an ornately-scrolled grip.

"It's a sword," Matthew remarked.

"Is it?" Quisenhunt made a couple of swipes through the air with his weapon. Then he turned toward the targets. Matthew heard a click as a cleverly-disguised striker was drawn. With a flash of sparks and billow of smoke the pistol barrel constructed along the swordblade fired. A hole appeared near the center of the larger target.

"Interesting," Matthew said. "Bringing a gun to a swordfight."

"That would be the idea, yes. The trigger is hidden in the grip." Quisenhunt showed it to Matthew, as smoke curled from the barrel. "I have high hopes for this, but unfortunately at present it does need work. The problem is keeping both sword and pistol equally-balanced."

Matthew thought a novice swordsman such as himself could benefit from the long reach of that particular blade. He saw a pistol hanging amid the guns on the wall that caught his attention. "May I?" he asked, and when Quisenhunt nodded he took it down. "What is this?"

"My pride and joy," said the inventor.

It was a pistol, Matthew saw, with three barrels-one atop two-but only a single striker. The wooden body of the gun was black and sleek, the barrels a steely blue. Heavy in the hand, but very well-balanced. It was, he thought, awesome.

"You prepare all three barrels at once," Quisenhunt explained, holding his candle closer so the light jumped off the bizarre and beautiful gun. "When the first barrel is fired, you cock the striker again and a gearwheel revolves the second barrel into position. Then, when that is fired, the striker revolves the third barrel into place."

"What do you call it?"

"A rotator."

"Ah." Matthew was definitely impressed. "And all three of these barrels really fire, then?"

"Well " Quisenhunt looked down at the floor and rubbed at a stone with his shoe. "Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I've had considerable trouble with the third barrel, which fires-by my calculations-with only thirty-six percent certainty." He shrugged. "But there's always room for improvement. You'll note that the barrels all share a single flashpan, so unfortunately the shooter does have to prime the pan between shots. If you'll open the compartment in the butt of the handle-it's the little brass lever there-you'll find three small paper cartridges, which hold the necessary powder for three applications to the pan. My intention with this was to speed the firing process as much as humanly possible."

"I'll say." Matthew heard himself sound like a dumbfounded schoolboy. "If you don't mind my asking, what would something like this sell for?"

"It's the better-working model of two in that configuration, but I wouldn't sell it. There's still a lot of work to be done."

Reluctantly, Matthew returned the rotator to its hook. What he would have paid to have a gun like that in the woods against Slaughter! His eye was snagged by another pistol, this one with a long barrel and atop the barrel a brass cylinder that looked to be a spyglass.

"Tyranthus Slaughter," said the inventor suddenly. "Yes! I do recall that name. He was one of the highwaymen they caught was it two years ago?"

"Two years and a little over four months. You made the exploding box for that particular purpose, correct?"

"Correct. High Constable Farraday and some of the town officials came to me to ask that I help them catch the highwaymen who were terrorizing the Pike. They knew of my interest in firearms, but being Quakers they wanted something non-lethal. Something that would startle the highwaymen, possibly daze them long enough to be overcome."

"I see. And do you always sign your work?"

"All my finished work, yes." Quisenhunt answered. "I'm proud of my creations."

Matthew took a drink of the lemon water and found it more sweet than sour. But even so, it did make the healing cut inside his mouth pucker. After his realization that Slaughter had successfully escaped Hoornbeck, Matthew hadn't known what else to do. He could search Philadelphia, of course, and he'd already been to the stables to ask for anyone of Slaughter's description, but essentially the trail had gone cold.

Except for one thing.

The exploding safebox that had held Slaughter's ill-gotten treasure. The safebox that bore, burned across its underside, O. Quisenhunt, Phila., followed by a number: 6.

Matthew said, "I know there's a striker device inside the box that ignites the gunpowder. And the hammer that falls makes the gunshot sound. But tell me how someone opens the box without the striker being tripped."

"Simple enough. The latches operate on springs. There are two versions of the triggering mechanism. In one, if the latches are turned any way but horizontally before they're opened, the mainspring is released and trips the striker. In the second, the latches have to be turned vertically, or the striker trips. The latches are designed to give some resistance; sort of an early warning to a potential thief, so to speak."

Matthew saw the intent, which was to blow smoke and sparks into the faces of the highwaymen, leading to-hopefully-a quick arrest. He recalled that the box Greathouse had opened-with some difficulty, as he remembered-had its latches turned vertically, which meant its 'safe position' would have been if the latches had been horizontal. Obviously, Slaughter had known which version he possessed. "How many boxes did you make?

"Six. The first had an unforeseen flaw and suffered a premature combustion. The second fell off a coach and was broken. The third and fourth actually were in use for several months, but never um served their purpose before the highwaymen were caught."

"And what about the fifth and sixth?"

"I recall I sold those, for quite a nice price. To one of my clients for whom I have also created a clock."

"Then you're saying the fifth and sixth boxes were never used by anyone but this client?"

"As far as I know. She said she had need of a thief trap herself, because she didn't have complete trust in some of her workers. Actually, she decided to buy the pair."

"She?" Matthew prodded. "What's the name?"

"Mrs. Gemini Lovejoy," said Quisenhunt. "She owns Paradise."

"Paradise," Matthew repeated.

"Mrs. Lovejoy owns the Paradise farm," Quisenhunt explained. "It's on the south side of town, a few miles out between Red Oak and Chester."

"A farm." Matthew thought he must be sounding like an idiot.

"It's titled a farm," said the inventor, "but Mrs. Lovejoy-a very generous, charming woman, by the way-takes care of elderly people there."

"Elderly people." Stop that! Matthew told himself.

"That's right. It's a place where how shall I put this elderly people in need of care are brought by their families, who can no longer keep them."

"You mean they're ill?"

"Possibly that. Possibly they are hard to handle. To control. Like children can be. Hard to feed, or to um well, many things. She's told me all about it."

"Is this a Quaker institution?"

"I think she receives some money from the town, if that's what you mean. But she originated the concept. She believes it will become more popular an idea as time goes on."

"Quite a concept," Matthew said quietly. He regarded the pistols again. His mild expression masked the jolting memory he'd had of Greathouse reading off Slaughter's aliases from the article of possession that first day at the Westerwicke hospital: Count Edward Bowdewine, Lord John Finch and Earl Anthony Lovejoy.

Lovejoy.

Quite a coincidence, as well.

"Listen," Quisenhunt said, scratching the back of his neck. "You're telling me that one of the thief traps I sold to Mrs. Lovejoy wound up in the possession of this Slaughter criminal?"

"I am. It was number six."

"That's very odd. I sold them to her well, it's written in my ledger upstairs but I'm sure it was long before the highwaymen were caught. And I've seen her many times since then, but she's never mentioned being robbed, or the box being stolen."

"Yes," Matthew agreed. "Odd."

"How can that be explained, then?"

Matthew thought the question over. Turned it this way and that. And at last he posed his own question: "Do you know where I might buy a suit?"

Twenty-Seven

"My dear Mr. Shayne!" said the woman who rose from her chair at his entrance into the room. "So very good to meet you." She came forward slowly and gracefully, offering her hand, and as Matthew took it and gave it the obligatory kiss he wondered if she was thinking of how she ought to kill him.

But she was smiling warmly enough. "Sit down, won't you?" She motioned toward the chair on the other side of the black-lacquered desk. "Opal?" This was directed to the young girl who'd shown him in. "Take Mr. Shayne's hat and cloak, please. And bring him what would you like, sir? Tea? Coffee? A glass of brandy?"

"Tea would be fine. Very strong, if you please." He turned to glance at the serving-girl, who he imagined shot a look at his crotch. Matthew removed his newly-bought charcoal-gray cloak and dark green tricorn and gave them to the girl, who-and this was no imagining-rubbed her hip along his own as she turned to leave. Matthew thought she'd had much practice at this sort of thing, because she'd covered the maneuver with his cloak and it was over and done so quickly nothing was left but the tingle.

"Sit down, sit down!" said Mrs. Lovejoy, motioning toward his chair. She was still smiling, still warm, and perhaps she didn't want to kill him after all. Perhaps she knew nothing of any monster named Tyranthus Slaughter; perhaps there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for Slaughter's possession of the sixth thief trap that Oliver Quisenhunt had made and sold to her.

Perhaps, perhaps; but Matthew still intended to pass today as a young lawyer named Micah Shayne, and he intended to make it stick. Shayne after the name Faith Lindsay had given him, Micah after the first name of a very kind and energetic tailor on Spruce Street. The tailor had taken a look at the gold coin Matthew had offered and set to work altering a dark green suit left over in the shop when the young merchant it was going to had lost a substantial sum betting on dog-versus-rat fights out in the woods north of town. A little bringing in here and letting out there, and this dog was ready to fight.

Two more days had passed since Matthew's visit to the inventor's house. A shave and a hot bath had done wonders. Also, his bruises had faded to mere murmurs of themselves, though they would still enter themselves into any conversation, and of course the plaster would remain below his left eye for awhile longer. Last night, in his room at Mrs. Angwire's boarding house on Fifth Street, he had unwound the leather from his palms and feet and found everything sufficently healed. His thoughts went to Greathouse's condition; he hoped the great one had been so fortunate. But now he had to think only about tomorrow, and his meeting with Gemini Lovejoy.

Thus this cool, sunny morning he had secured a horse from the Fourth Street stable, ridden along a pleasant pastoral route with its gentle wooded hills, its rich farmfields, its wide pastures and meticulous stone walls, and just past the Speed The Plow tavern turned his mount onto a well-kept road toward the northwest. Soon enough he saw straddling the road a huge wrought-iron arch, painted white, with the word Paradise in blue letters above his head as he passed beneath. He had obviously arrived at someone's idea of Heaven.

"I presume we shall be feeling the first touch of winter soon," said Mrs. Lovejoy, having seated herself across from him.

"I'm sure," said Matthew.

"I do enjoy the autumn. The crispness of the air makes one feel so fresh, so alive, after the doldrums of summer."

"Absolutely alive." He had seen her gaze drift over the bruises and the plaster. "You have a letter for me, then?"

"Yes, madam, I do." Matthew retrieved the envelope from an inner pocket of his coat. On the envelope, Quisenhunt had written To My Dear Gemini Lovejoy, Concerning Mr. Micah Shayne. It never hurt to have a proper introduction. Matthew gave her the envelope. Mrs. Lovejoy opened it with one quick snap from a brass blade on her tabletop and, as the lady read the letter, Matthew attempted to also read the lady.

She was probably in her mid-forties, and very handsome in the way of a lioness. Matthew of course had never seen a lioness but he had read descriptions of them. Mrs. Lovejoy fit the bill. The proud crown of tawny hair that was pulled back from her face and arranged in a display of curls about her shoulders was probably more appropriate for the male lion, but there it was nonetheless. The gray was not so outspoken yet, though it had begun to announce itself at the temples. She was not a small woman, nor was she oversized; she had big bones, and she made no attempt to hide them by wearing a gown with voluminous folds and frills. She was dressed simply, in a very beautiful indigo-dyed gown with a puff of tasteful cream-colored ruffle at the throat and cuffs, and on her feet were sensible black shoes decorated with black ribbons.

Matthew watched her read. She was devouring every word, and had one hand up to rest her chin upon. He could envision her, like a lioness, reclining on her throne of rocks on some African hillside, and peering into the ruddy distance for the dust trail of a weaker beast. He'd already noted that her eyes were clear green, wide-set and slightly almond-shaped, and that her jaw was square and firm and her forehead high as would befit a regal cat. Her nose was long and sharp-tipped, her mouth large enough to gnaw a bone or two. Dear God, he thought, he was thinking with Hudson Greathouse's brain. As yet Matthew hadn't gotten a close look at her teeth, and wasn't sure he wanted to. She blinked slowly, taking her time. He saw she wore no rings, but on both wrists were filigreed gold bracelets.

With the help of one of the coins Slaughter had left him after the Lindsay massacre, Matthew had made sure he would hi mself stand up to scruti ny. The new suit, the new cloak, the new tricorn all were necessary for the deception. The investigation, as it were. On his feet were a pair of black boots that his tailor friend had found for him from a shoemaker friend, at a reasonable price. The moccasins had had their day; when Matthew had taken them off they'd been nearly ready to fall apart.

"Mr. Shayne," the woman suddenly said, as if just to repeat the name. She didn't divert her attention from the letter. "How is my friend Oliver?"

"He's fine. Did you know that Priscilla will be having her baby in four months?"

"Yes, I did. I saw her at the market oh that was late August." She put the letter aside with a brief and unrevealing smile. "Here's our refreshment."

Opal the hip-grazing crotch-glancer had returned, bringing a silver tray that bore his cup of tea. He accepted it and the linen napkin that was also offered. In the exchange of tea and napkin he caught Opal staring right at him, her pink lips slightly parted, and he wondered who really was the lioness in the room. She was wearing a gray muslinet gown and a shapeless gray mob cap that did nothing for a woman's charm and perhaps was meant so. Under the cap Opal's hair was jet-black and the eyes that stared so piercingly into Matthew's were a bright blue almost crackling with their heated appraisal. She was the proverbial mere slip of a girl, slim and wiry and standing maybe two inches more than sixty even in clunky black heels. Matthew saw small metal rings stuck through her lower lip and her right nostril. She scared the hell out of him.

"Thank you, Opal," said Mrs. Lovejoy, who was returning the letter to its envelope. "I won't need you here any longer. Go to the laundry house and help there."

"Yes, mum." Opal gave a quick curtsey to both of them and took the tray back through the doorway again.

"Always something to be done," the woman explained. "The washing, the cooking, the general maintenance. But it's my life now, Mr. Shayne. My calling."

"And an admirable calling it is, according to Oliver." He winced inwardly, and cautioned himself that it was better not to be so very damned eager.

"Sometimes admirable, sometimes just difficult." She tilted her head slightly, as if to examine him from a different angle. "I want you to understand that Paradise is very expensive. My guests-I always refer to them as my guests, for that's how much I respect them-require the best in food, care and consideration. But before I quote you a one year's fee, which would be our least expensive arrangement, let me ask you to tell me the particulars of your situation."

Matthew paused for a drink of tea, and then he forged ahead. "I am opening a law office after the first of the year. My wife and I will be-"

"In Philadelphia?" she asked. "Your office?"

"Yes. My wife and I will be moving down from New York. We have one son and another child on the way." "Congratulations."

"Thank you." He brought up a frown. "The problem is my grandfather. He's quite aged. Seventy-two years. Come December," he chose to add, just for the sake of texture. He felt he was drawing a picture, as much as Berry ever did. "My grandmother has been dead these last few years, my father passed away on the voyage over, and my mother well, my mother met a new gentleman in New York, they married and returned to England."

"This world," she said, with no expression.

"Yes, a trying place. But the situation is that my grand-father-"

"What's his name?"

"Walker," Matthew replied.

"An active name for an active man?"

"Exactly." Matthew offered a fleeting smile. He decided then was the time to touch the plaster under his eye. "Unfortunately of late he has been too active."

"I was wondering. My pardon if you caught me looking." Now there was a quick show of teeth, then gone. The clear green eyes did not smile, Matthew noted. Ever.

He was getting nothing from her. Feeling nothing. But what had he expected? He swept his gaze around the room, as if trying to gather his next confession of the trials of this world, especially those of a young lawyer who needs to get rid of an uncomfortable cyst that pains his progress. The house, on the outside painted white with a light blue trim the exact color of the Paradise lettering, was simply a nice two-story dwelling that any lady of means might have owned. The furnishings were tasteful, the colors restrained, the windowpanes spotless and the throw rugs unsullied by a dirty boot. He wondered if Tyranthus Slaughter was lying upstairs in a bedroom right this moment, nursing his injuries. For Matthew had come to the conclusion that Lovejoys of a feather might well lie down together.

"Not long ago he struck me," Matthew continued. "Several times, in fact, as you can see. He's angry about his situation, I know, but things are as they are. He's not companionable with people, he's surly, he can't work, and I have to say, I don't like my wife and son being with him, much less the idea of a new baby coming."

"And who's with him now? Your wife and son alone?"

"No. He's in the custody excuse me, the possession of friends in New York."

Mrs. Lovejoy looked him directly in the eyes, again revealing nothing with her own. "He sounds like a difficult case."

Matthew didn't know whether her cool, polished demeanor made him go faster than he'd intended, or if he wanted to shake her up. He said, "Honestly, I'm afraid he might take a knife some night and slaughter us in our beds."

There was no reaction whatsoever. The lacquered surface between them held more expression than the woman's leonine face.

"In a manner of speaking," Matthew went on, a little flustered.

She lifted a hand. "Oh, I understand. Absolutely. I see many situations like this. An elderly person who is not used to being dependent, now finds the choices limited due to illness, waning strength or changing circumstances, and very often anger results. You and your wife have the demands of family and profession, and therein lies the problem. You say Walker will be seventy-two in December?" She waited for Matthew to nod. "Is he a strong man? In good physical health?"

"I'd say, for the most part, yes." He was still looking for some reaction, for something. Now, though, he wasn't sure he would know what it was if he saw it.

Mrs. Lovejoy picked up her letterblade and toyed with it. "I have found, Mr. Shayne, in my five years at this occupation-this calling - that the more physically aggressive guests are the ones who unfortunately tend to " She cast about for the proper word. "Dissolve, when placed in a situation of being controlled. In time, they all dissolve, yes, but those like your grandfather do tend to go to pieces first. Am I making sense to you?"

"Perfect sense." He was beginning to wonder what the further point of this was.

Maybe it showed in his own eyes and came across as boredom, for Mrs. Lovejoy leaned toward him and said, "Men like your grandfather rarely last more than two years here, if that. Now: we would wish to make him comfortable, and as happy as possible. We would wish to feed him well, to keep up his strength, and give him some kind of challenge. We do have gardening activities, a greenhouse, a library and a barn they can putter around. We have women who come from town to read to them, and to tell stories. Your wife will wish to inquire about the Bluebirds once you're settled, I'm sure. They do all sorts of charitable deeds."

She reached out and patted his hand, very professionally. "Everything is taken care of here. Once you sign the agreement, it's all done. Your life is your own again, so that you may give it to your family and your future. And as for worrying about your grandfather's future let me say that we hope, as I'm sure you do, that he lives many more happy years, but but when the day of God's blessing occurs, with your approval your grandfather will be laid to rest in Paradise's own private cemetery. He can be out of your mind and cares, Mr. Shayne, and you will know that for the remainder of his days he has received the very best treatment any guest of Paradise can be given. For that is my solemn promise."

"Ah," said Matthew, nodding. "That sounds hopeful, then."

"Come!" She stood up with a rustle of fabric. "Before we venture into the area of money, let me show you exactly what your coin would buy."

Matthew got his cloak and hat, and in a few minutes was walking beside Mrs. Lovejoy along the gravel drive that went past her house into the property. It was an aptly-named place, because it was certainly beautiful. There were stands of elm and oak trees brilliant in the sunshine, a meadow where sheep grazed, and a green pond where ducks drifted back and forth.

Mrs. Lovejoy continued to talk as they walked. Presently there were twelve male and sixteen female guests, she said. The men and women were housed in separate facilities, because-she said-snow on the roof did not necessarily mean the fireplace had gone cold. Their ages were from the late-sixties to the eighties, the eldest being eighty-four. The guests had been brought from Boston, New York, of course Philadelphia, Charles Town and many smaller towns between. Word-of-mouth was building her business, she said. As life moved faster and responsibilities increased, many people were-as she said-stuck between a rock and a hard place regarding aged parents. Sometimes the guests resented being here, but gradually they accepted their situation and understood it was for the greater good of their loved ones. Oh, there were the rowdy guests and the guests who cursed and fought, but usually they calmed down or they didn't last very long.

A doctor was within a thirty-minute ride, she assured him. Also, the doctor made several visits each week to check ailments and general health. A minister came on Sunday afternoons to lead worship in Paradise's church. Seven workers, all female, did the cooking, the washing, kept everything scrubbed and fresh and all the rest of it. Very upright girls, every one. "Here's our laundry house," Mrs. Lovejoy announced, as they came around a bend.

There stood a tidy-looking white brick building with two chimneys spouting smoke and a pile of wood stacked up alongside it ready to be burned under the wash kettles. The door was wide open, and three young women wearing the gray gowns and mob caps stood beside it chattering and laughing; they also, Matthew quickly saw, were taking snuff up their noses from a snuffbox. When they saw Mrs. Lovejoy they went stiff-backed and the laughter died. Two of the girls turned away and rushed inside, where the heat was probably stifling, to continue stirring the laundry with kettle poles. The third seemed to realize too late that her friends had abandoned her. She had been left holding the snuffbox.

Before the girl could retreat into the laundry house, Mrs. Lovejoy said sharply, "Opal! Bring that to me." And then, under her breath to Matthew: "I have told them such nasty habits will not be tolerated. Pardon me while I apply the whip."

Opal held the snuffbox behind her as she approached, as if that would do any good. In her eyes there was a mixture of trepidation and what? Matthew wondered. Barely-repressed hilarity? Opal's mouth was twisted tight; was she about to laugh in mum's face?

It was never to be known. At that moment came the crunch of hooves on gravel. Two horses pulling a wagon came trotting along the drive from the direction of Mrs. Lovejoy's house. Matthew and the woman stepped aside as the wagon approached. Guiding the reins was a heavy-set, bulky-shouldered young man maybe Matthew's age or just a little older. He was wearing a gray monmouth cap, a russet-colored shirt, brown breeches and stockings and wore a brown cloak over his shoulders. His hair looked to be skinned to the scalp, from what Matthew could see. He had a broad, pallid face with fleshy lips and his scraggly black eyebrows met in the middle.

"May I help you?" Mrs. Lovejoy asked.

"Need talk," the young bulk said; something was wrong with his mouth or tongue, for even that simple sentence was garbled.

"I am with someone," she said crisply.

He balled up a formidable fist and rapped three times on the wagon's side.

Mrs. Lovejoy cleared her throat. "Opal? Would you continue Mr. Shayne's tour of our Paradise? And please do something with that snuffbox. Mr. Shayne, I'm needed for the moment. I'll meet you back at my house in oh fifteen or twenty minutes?" She was already going around to climb up on the seat. Matthew followed her to do the gentlemanly thing.

"Not necessary," she said, but she let him help her.

As Mrs. Lovejoy took his hand and stepped up, Matthew glanced into the rear of the wagon. Back there, among dead leaves and general untidiness, was a scatter of workman's odds-and-ends: some lumberboards of various lengths, a pickaxe and shovel, a couple of lanterns, a pair of leather gloves, a wooden mallet, and underneath the mallet a dirty burlap bag that-

"Mr. Shayne?" came the woman's voice.

He brought himself back. "Yes!" "You can let go of my hand now."

"Surely." He released it and stepped back, but before doing so he glanced one more time at what he'd thought he'd seen, in case the problem with his vision fading in and out had become a problem of seeing what was not there.

But it was there.

"Later then," said Mrs. Lovejoy. "Take care of Mr. Shayne, Opal."

"Yes, mum, I shall."

The wagon moved off, heading deeper into the property. An interesting wagon, Matthew thought as he watched it follow the drive and disappear beyond a stand of trees. Interesting because of the dirty burlap bag that was lying underneath the mallet.

The bag that had 'Sutch A' across it in red paint. If he could have picked the bag up and shaken out the folds, wrinkles and dead leaves he would have read its full declaration: Mrs. Sutch's Sausages and, below that, the legend 'Sutch A Pleasure'.

Twenty-Eight

"Want a sniff?"

The snuffbox, open to its mound of yellow powder, was suddenly up below Matthew's nose. He stepped back a pace, still with Mrs. Sutch's pleasure on his mind. "No, thank you."

"Don't laugh, you bitches!" Opal called to her friends as the girls emerged grinning from the steaming innards of the laundry house. She took two sniffs up the snoot and sneezed with hurricanious violence. Then she hooked an arm around Matthew's, her eyes watering, and crowed, "I've got me a man!" She pulled him along as if he were made out of spit and straw.

Matthew let himself be pulled.

"Well!" she said, striding with a jaunty step. "What do you want to see?"

"What's worth seeing?"

She gave him a deep-dimpled smile. "Now that's an answer!" She glanced back to gauge if her companions in crime were still watching, and when she saw they'd returned to their labors she released his arm. "Not much worth seein', 'round here at least," she confided. She looked him over from boots to tricorn. "Here, now! You ain't old enough to be puttin' a mater or pater in this velvet prison!"

"I'm bringing my grandfather. And I don't think Mrs. Lovejoy would care to hear your description of Paradise."

"This ain't my idea of Paradise!" she scoffed, her nose wrinkled up so hard Matthew thought the metal ring might go flying out. "Hell, no!" She suddenly seemed to catch her own imprudence. Her cheeks reddened and she widened the distance between them by several feet. "Listen, you ain't gonna go blab about my tongue, are you? I mean, my tongue gets me in awful trouble. I'm already hangin' on to my job by the curl of an ass-hair."

"I won't blab," said Matthew, who was finding the girl to be a sparkling conversationalist. Just what he needed, in fact.

"Might have to go pack my bag anyways, cause of this here whuffie-dust." Opal held up the snuffbox, which was fashioned of cheap birch bark and looked like an item from the shelves of Jaco Dovehart's trading post. "Mizz Lovejoy's already been on me twice this week about it. If Noggin hadn't come along, she was sure to toss me out right then and there."

"Noggin?"

"That's who was drivin' the wagon. What she calls him, I mean. Let's go this way." She pointed out a path leading off the main drive into the woods. Matthew had had his fill of forest travel, but he went in the direction she indicated. He waited a moment until he asked his next question, which was disguised as a statement. "I thought Mrs. Lovejoy told me all the workers here were female."

"They are. Well, all the ones who live on the premises. Noggin lives somewhere else. He comes in to do fix-up work. You know, patchin' roofs and paintin' walls and such. And diggin' the graves, he does that too."

"Oh," Matthew said.

"Matter of fact," Opal said, "here's the graveyard."

They came out of the woods to face a cemetery surrounded by a white-painted wrought-iron fence. Everything was neat and orderly, the weeds kept at bay and the small wooden crosses lined up in rows. Matthew counted forty-nine of them. He didn't know if that was high or not for five years of business, considering the ages and conditions of her guests. He doubted if any of them were too very robust when they arrived, and they went down from there.

"Be another one in here after dark," Opal said. "The widow Ford passed late last night. She was a pretty good old lady, never caused much trouble. Had a merry kind of laugh."

"After dark?" Matthew paused to lean against the fence. His sense of curiosity, still tingling from his sighting of the burlap bag, received a further pinch. "Why do you put it that way?"

She shrugged. "Ain't no other way to put it. You come here tomorrow, you'll see a fresh grave dug in the night. That's how it's done here."

"Isn't there a funeral?"

"There's a service, if that's what you mean. After the doctor looks 'em over and pronounces 'em dead, the preacher says some words. It's done in the church, right over yonder." She motioned toward a small white building that Matthew could see through the trees. "Everybody who's able and wants to come can pay their finals. The coffin lies in the church all day. Then, after dark, Noggin takes the listen, why are you wantin' to know about this so much?"

"I'd like to know what to expect," Matthew said evenly, "when my grandfather's time comes."

"Oh. 'Course. As I was sayin', then " She stopped and shook her head. "Maybe Mizz Lovejoy ought to be the one tellin' you. I'm already up to my buttbone in trouble."

"All right." Matthew decided to pull back, so as not to scare all the conversation out of her. "Where to next?"

They walked along the path past the cemetery and the church itself. A road went by the church that Matthew thought must connect to the main drive. Further on there was a bench positioned among some trees, and beyond that vantage point the land sloped slightly downward toward a meadow. A number of other white-washed buildings were in view.

"Those are where they live. The guests, I mean," Opal explained. "The one on the right is for the men, the one on the left for the women. Between 'em is the vegetable garden. Then way over there the smaller one is where we live. It's not much, but we've all got our own rooms. Barn's back behind there. She's got some cows and pigs over that way. I'll milk a cow, all right, but I ain't prancin' in pigshit, and I told her just the same."

"Good for you," Matthew said. "What's that?" He pointed toward a low-slung structure beyond the workers' house that looked to be all panes of glass, shining in the sun. "A greenhouse?" He recalled Mrs. Lovejoy mentioning it.

"That's right," Opal said. "Grows her hot plants in there." "Her hot plants?"

"Her peppers. Mizz Lovejoy's got a craze for 'em. You can't go in there without your eyes start leakin' and your skin get all itchy. At least I can't."

"She has a second business?" Matthew asked.

"What second business?"

"Well she must sell her peppers at market, is what I'm thinking. A little of that goes a long way."

"You'd be wrong," Opal told him. "Mizz Lovejoy feeds 'em to her guests. Grinds 'em up in every damn thing, excuse my French. Even gives 'em pepper juice to drink, mornin', noon and night."

Matthew frowned. "For what earthly reason?"

"Makes the blood flow, is what she says. Keeps everything workin'. I don't know, ask her. All I know is, you ought to see some of them oldies-guests-eatin' their suppers and moanin' with the tears runnin' down their faces. It's just awful." And then she put her hand up to her mouth but she couldn't catch the laugh before it came spilling out.

"I think you're a very cruel girl, Opal," Matthew said, but he was fighting to keep a straight face too because he could envision the scene she had described. That must make him cruel too, he thought. He was just about to laugh, and he also brought his hand up to cover his mouth.

Before the hand could get there, Opal turned and kissed him.

Actually, she flung herself upon him. She pressed her lips upon his with desperate need, and Matthew thought peppers were cool compared to Opal's fire. He staggered back, but she had hold of him and wouldn't let him go. Her mouth worked at his, her tongue explored, one of her hands gripped his buttocks and Matthew thought he was going to be thrown down and ravished under the trees. But after all, this was Paradise.

"Come on, come on," she breathed in his ear, cleaving to him like a second skin. "We can go in the woods, don't matter. I know a good place. Come on, you ever done it behind a church?" He feared she was going to peel his breeches right off. "You don't know," she said as she pulled at him, her voice near sobbing. "Old people everywhere, and sick, and dyin' right there in front of you, come on, darlin', come on just let me-"

"Opal," he said.

"-have a little bit, a little bit of warm, that's all I'm-"

"Stop," he told her, and he caught her chin and looked into her dazed blue eyes and saw it was not about him at all, no it was not; it was about the place, with its white paint and blue trim and lovely buildings that hid the dark side of Paradise. It was about the wrinkled flesh and the spottings of age and the old women who talked about old dead loves and the old men whose adventures had dwindled down to the size of a chamberpot. It was about the silence of midnight and the frost on the windowpane, and the way a day could be so slow and yet so quick, and how the merry laughter of that good old widow Ford had ended in a strengthless gasp. Matthew knew the truth of this place, and Opal knew it as well; it was where you were put to be forgotten.

"-askin'," she finished, and suddenly the tears bloomed up and blurred the blue and she looked at him as if she'd been struck.

She backed away. Matthew thought she was going to turn and run, but she stopped at a distance and stood staring at the ground as if searching for something she'd lost.

"I " she started, and then went silent again. She rubbed her mouth with the back of her sleeve. He thought she was going to rub her mouth until it bled. "I'm " Once more she was quiet, and Matthew saw her considering her position. When she lifted her gaze to his again, she was full of flame and spite. "I'm going to have to say you advanced on me, if it comes to that." Her eyes were blazing. "If it comes to that," she repeated.

"It won't," he answered, gently.

"I ain't a bad person," she went on. "I mean, I've had my share of scrapes, but I ain't bad. Exactly." "I need your help," he told her.

She was silent. An expression of incomprehension flickered across her face. Now she did look as if she might turn and run.

"Don't go," Matthew said. "Just listen."

So close to running so close

"Mrs. Lovejoy may be in some trouble." Matthew kept his voice low, but he was also very aware of their surroundings, that no one-especially the mistress of Paradise or her Noggin-would come along the path unheard.

Opal regarded him as he had regarded the rattlesnake beneath his tricorn. "Who are you?"

"I'm going to ask the questions. Has there been a male visitor here lately for Mrs. Lovejoy? Say in the past five days?"

"A visitor? Who?"

"Listen to me, Opal. In the past five days. Has a man come to visit her? A big man, with broad shoulders." Only true when he swelled himself up, Matthew thought. "Reddish-blond hair, parted down the middle. Going gray on the sides. He would have a bandage probably on the left side of his head, just above the ear. Very pale blue eyes. Like ice. Have you seen anyone like that?"

"Here?" she asked.

"Yes, here. Please, Opal, it's important." "Why is it important?" Oh Christ! he thought.

"If this is about Kitt, I don't know anything," Opal said.

"Kitt? Who's Kitt?" Matthew felt as if he were back in the night wilderness and unable to see his hand in front of his face.

"I don't know anything."

"All right, then." Matthew held out a hand to steady her, even though she was more than ten feet away. "Tell me about Noggin. He lives somewhere else?" When she nodded, he asked, "Where?"

She shook her head.

He tried for a flintlock shot in the dark, thinking that there might possibly be some connection between the fact that Slaughter's safebox-bought by Mrs. Lovejoy-had been wrapped up in a Mrs. Sutch sausage bag, and now a Mrs. Sutch sausage bag appears in the back of her handyman's wagon. "Do you know the name Sutch?"

"Who?"

The sausages were likely too expensive for her purse, he thought. And too expensive for Noggin's, as well? "Back to Noggin. And use yours, please." He waved away whatever she was going to say before she could open her mouth. "Has Noggin brought a man here to see Mrs. Lovejoy? In the past five days? Or after dark?" But how would she know? he wondered. Where the girls lived was a good distance away from Mrs. Lovejoy's house.

Opal just stared at him, her eyes wide. Matthew thought she was trying to make a decision. Whatever it was, it wasn't easy.

"I am investigating Mrs. Lovejoy," Matthew said. "It's better that you don't know my name. But I believe that a man I'm looking for may have-"

"Kitt found out Noggin didn't bury Mr. White," she blurted out. "She told me. Everythin' she saw that night."

Matthew had stopped speaking at this bizarre assertion; he had no idea what she was talking about, but it seemed very important-urgent-to her. He said, "Go on."

"Mr. White was laid out in his coffin, in the church," Opal said. "For the service. Kitt said for me to look, that Ginger had dressed him up in that fine lace cravat he always wore, and it was a shame such a nice piece of lace was gonna get buried. She had a mind to come back before Noggin put him under and get it, but I said if Mizz Lovejoy caught her she was out on her ear." She paused, making sure Matthew was following.

"Ginger being another servant?" Matthew asked.

"Yeah, she's gone now. But Kitt said she wanted that lace, and she wanted me to go get it with her after we'd fed 'em their suppers. I wasn't havin' no part of it. So Kitt said she was gonna hurry to the church, sneak in and get the lace before Noggin wheeled the coffin out."

"Wheeled it out?"

"He's got a cart with wheels on it, that's how he moves the coffin about. See, he makes the coffins, too. So Kitt went back just as dark was fallin', but she told me she was too late because she saw Noggin's lanterns burnin'. And the thing is the thing is she saw Noggin right there pushin' the coffin into the back of the wagon, and she didn't know what to make of this so she slipped into the woods to watch."

"He'd already dug the grave?"

"That's not what I'm gettin' at," Opal said. "Kitt told me she saw him open the coffin and look in it for a time. Then he reached in, lifted up Mr. White's head-she said she could see his hair in the lamplight-and all of a sudden, whisk! He pulled that lace cravat off Mr. White and wrapped it around his own neck. Then he closed the lid, and he walked back to the graveyard as nervy as you please."

"Then he hadn't yet dug the grave?"

"No, just listen!" She came closer, until she was right in front of him a hand's reach away. "Kitt couldn't make tits nor teeth out of this, so she followed him. And there was Noggin in the graveyard, tampin' the last of the dirt down on Mr. White's pile. He'd finished it. But Mr. White was still in his coffin, sittin' in the wagon!"

"Noggin didn't bury him," Matthew said.

"That's right! He didn't bury him! But he'd made it look so! Well, Kitt figures she ought not to be where she is, and she starts off along the path away from there. Then all of a sudden somebody comes out of the woods right in front of her, right smack dab, a lantern's pushed in her face, and she said she hollered so loud she was surprised I didn't hear it way down where I was. She said she just turned tail and ran. And she said, 'Opal, don't you breathe a word of this, and I'm forgettin' I saw anything either.' And I said, 'Well, what is it you saw?' And she said, 'I don't know what I saw, but I didn't see it.'"

"Saving money on their coffins, I suppose," Matthew ventured. "Using the same one over and over in the funeral service."

"Yeah, I thought that." She leaned in to him, her eyes wide again. "But what became of Mr. White?"

Her question begged another. Matthew wondered if any of those forty-nine graves were really occupied. Were the bodies actually buried somewhere else? Or just dumped into the woods beyond Paradise? If so, what the hell was this about?

"The next day," Opal said, "I went and looked for myself. Sure enough, the grave was dug and filled and there was a new marker planted. And I started wonderin' right then is anybody to home in there?"

"Interesting," Matthew agreed, but this was totally off the subject of Tyranthus Slaughter. Except for the fact that if Mrs. Lovejoy knew about this fraud, it indicated a larcenous frame of mind. Still, what did she stand to gain from something like that? A few shillings saved on the wood for a coffin? "Have you or Kitt told anyone else?"

"Not me, for sure. I can't say for Kitt. 'Specially since she up and ran away about three days after it happened. So says Mizz Lovejoy to the staff. Says Kitt must've gotten sick of the work and bolted in the middle of the night. She wouldn't have been the first, just took out for the road. Well, I looked and all her clothes were gone out of her room, and her travelin' bag gone too." Opal held up a finger. "But,"she said, "Kitt never would've left without sayi n' good-bye to me. Never. I just know it in my bones. So right after that Mizz Lovejoy says she wants to see the staff one-by-one, to find out what might have made Kitt bolt like she did, without even drawin' her week's coin. Find out what might have been so heavy a weight on Kitt, she says. Me, I sat in there across from Mizz Lovejoy and all I thought about was who it might have been come up on Kitt and shone a lamp in her face. And I kept my mouth sealed tight. There you have it." Opal looked in all directions to make sure no one had crept close enough to overhear.

It was an odd story, Matthew thought. He really didn't know what to make of it. A grave dug and filled, but no coffin or body in it? The coffin and body then put onto a wagon, and taken where? Obviously Noggin knew. Matthew was surmising that Mrs. Lovejoy also knew. And Kitt's fate? Had she actually run away, or had she

There was a very large mallet in the back of Noggin's wagon, Matthew remembered.

But was what Kitt had seen damning enough to kill her for?

Matthew figured that had to do with the i importance of the secret.

If, for instance, a servant-girl decided to ask for a little extra shine in her pay in order to keep the secret, a mallet might have to fall. Or the decision might be to go ahead and use the mallet early, because if that same servant-girl got in contact with one of the families of a deceased person and talked them into coming back and having a grave dug up

"Tonight," Opal said. "He'll be doin' it again, with the widow Ford."

Whatever Noggin was doing, Matthew knew it had to be nasty.

And Nasty seemed to be Tyranthus Slaughter's middle name.

Was there a connection? He had no idea. But he thought one slime trail might lead to another.

"I'd best get you back," Opal offered, suddenly sounding wan and older than her years. "Oh the man you're talkin' about? I ain't seen nobody like that."

Matthew didn't follow when she started back toward the cemetery, and she paused to wait for him. He asked, "What's your full name?"

"Opal Delilah Blackerby."

"All right, Opal Delilah Blackerby. I want you to have this." He reached into the pocket of his dark green waistcoat, felt for what he knew to be there, and brought it out. "Here. Come take it."

She came forward, slowly, and when she took what he was holding she blinked first at it, then at him, then at it again. "Is this is this real?"

"It is." The ring was real gold, of course. Was the red stone a ruby? He would leave it for her to find out. Never let it be said that Slaughter's treasure hadn't offered a chance for escape to someone. "I wouldn't show that to anyone else. And I wouldn't care to stay around here very much longer either."

"Why are you givin' me this?"

"Because I like you," he answered, in all truth. "I think you'd make a good detective." "A what?"

"Never mind. If you ever get to New York, come to Number Seven Stone Street. Can you remember that?"

"Remember it? Hell's bleedin' bells, I'll never forget it!"

"I can find my way back," he said. "Just be careful, do you hear me?"

"I will," she promised. He started to go back along the path, leaving her staring at the gold ring with its small red-ruby?-stone, and then suddenly she caught at his sleeve and she asked, "Can I kiss you?"

Matthew said yes, it would be fine, and Opal gave him a sedate but heartfelt kiss on the cheek. A far cry from doing it behind the church, he thought, but maybe at its essence a little bit of warm.

He returned to Mrs. Lovejoy's house. Another servant-girl answered his knock at the door. No, sir, Mrs. Lovejoy has gone out, she said. Mrs. Lovejoy has asked me to tell you that urgent personal business has called her away, but she will be glad to finish the arrangements if you would come back tomorrow or the following day.

"Thank you," Matthew replied. "Tell her "

Tell her I'll be back tonight, he thoug ht.

"Tell Mrs. Lovejoy I shall look forward to her charming company," he said, and then he walked to his horse at the hitching-post.

Twenty-Nine

Crouched in the woods that faced Paradise's cemetery, Matthew didn't have long to wait before Noggin came calling.

It was a hazy blue twilight. Matthew had left his horse hitched among the trees at the edge of a meadow about two hundred yards away, back toward the Paradise sign. He had been waiting little more than ten minutes, and here came Noggin's wagon along the road to the church.

Noggin pulled his team up in front of the church, set the brake and climbed down. He lit the two lanterns and set them in back of the wagon. He put on his gloves, took his pickaxe and shovel to the cemetery, came back for the lanterns, stripped off his cloak and then set to work digging a grave with what appeared to be formidable strength.

Matthew settled back. From where he was positioned, he could see Noggin working if not speedily, at least steadily. The digging was not what particularly interested him; it was what happened to the coffin and the corpse afterward.

He'd spent some time this afternoon visiting the village of Red Oak, which was about two miles away from Paradise and the nearest community. It was ringed by farms and lush pastures where cattle grazed in the golden light. Red Oak itself had a busy farmers' market, a main street of craft shops, three taverns, two stables, and between thirty and forty houses separated by gardens, picket fences and fieldstone walls. Matthew had received a few curious looks as he walked from place to place, being a stranger, but for the most part he was taken as having business there and left alone. His business was to stroll into some of the shops and inquire about a handyman from the area called Noggin. The closest he got to an affirmative answer was from the blacksmith, who said he thought he knew a young man named Noggin who lived in Chester, but then again now that he remembered it the man's name was Knocker. Matthew had thanked him kindly and moved on.

The patrons of the taverns had been equally unhelpful. Matthew had gotten back on his horse and ridden another few miles to Chester, where a further unprofitable hour was spent. Then, as the afternoon was growing late, he'd returned along the road toward Paradise, and had decided to stop for a meal and drink at the Speed The Plow.

"Noggin?" The beak-nosed tavernkeeper had shaken his own bald nog. "Never heard the name, sorry."

Matthew had eaten a humble pie and nursed a mug of ale, waiting for the twilight to gather. Several people came and went, a rather raucous drunk had to be swept out with a broom to the backside, and Matthew must have looked a little forlorn at his table because the tavernkeeper called out, "Hey, Jackson! You know a fella by the name of Noggin?"

Jackson, a black-garbed stout who wore a powdered wig and resembled for all the world either a hellfire preacher or a hanging judge, looked up from his second mug of ale and said in a gravel-scrape voice, "Not recallin'," which put paid to that particular bill.

"I know the name," said a younger but equally stout gent sitting at a table just beyond Jackson. "Fella named Noggin did some work for me last summer. Who's askin'?"

Matthew watched Noggin dig, as the darkness began to come on. According to the farmer who lived just outside a village called Nicholsburg, the handyman called Noggin could patch a barn roof like nobody's business. Could chop wood like there was no tomorrow. Could slap on paint as sure as the day was long. And had told the farmer in his garbled voice that he was just trying to make some extra money because his regular employer was a tightfisted

"Bitch, was the word he used," the farmer had related, over the mug of ale that Matthew had bought him.

"I'm sorry to hear him speak of the lady in that way," Matthew had said.

"Oh?" The farmer's thick brown eyebrows had gone up. "Do you know Mrs. Sutch?"

It had taken Matthew a moment to digest that. "Mrs. Sutch?"

"That's who he said he worked for. Owns a hog farm up north of Nicholsburg. She makes sausages." "Ah," Matthew had said, brushing some invisible dust from the front of his waistcoat. "Sausages." "Big taste for 'em in Philadelphia, I hear. Too damn expensive for the home folk, though." Matthew listened to the wind moving through the trees. He heard Noggin's shovel stop scraping dirt. In another moment he heard the dirt start going back into the grave.

The farmer couldn't describe Mrs. Sutch. He'd never seen her. A private type of lady, he thought. Had heard tell of Mrs. Lovejoy, but had never seen her either. She was probably private, too.

Nicholsburg was about seven miles up the road, the farmer said. He didn't get down this way often, but this morning he'd gone nearly to Philadelphia to a cattle sale. "What was it you were wantin' Noggin about?"

"Oh," Matthew had said, "I'd heard he was a good worker. Just trying to find him."

"I don't think he's the kind of fella you find," came the reply. "He finds you."

It was almost full dark. Matthew watched as Noggin used his shovel to tamp down the dirt. Noggin did a good job of it, not rushing at all. Then Noggin came back to his wagon, took a wooden cross from it, and planted the marker with two firm whacks of the mallet. After his tools were squared away, Noggin carried one of his lanterns into the church, and Matthew sat wondering if the lowest point of human evil could ever be reached.

Noggin returned wheeling his cart with the coffin on it, and the lantern on the coffin. He pushed the coffin into the back of the wagon with ease. He took the cart back into the church for the next occasion, and when he came back out again he opened the lid and looked into the widow Ford's face as if determining whether she had anything worth stealing. Matthew saw by the lamplight that Noggin's flat, bovine features were totally devoid of expression. Not even a shred of curiosity. Noggin was obviously an old hand at this; he even had the ill manners to yawn in the widow's face before he eased the lid shut. For the sake of decorum he'd brought along a ratty old gray blanket, which he spread over the coffin. Then he took off his gloves and threw them in the back. He put on his cloak and hung the two lanterns up on hooks on either side of the driver's seat. The horses rumbled and shifted, ready for a trip.

Matthew watched Noggin get the wagon turned around. When the wagon pulled away, heading back in the direction of the main road, Matthew emerged from his hiding-place and made his way as quickly and safely as possible across the meadow to his horse. As he mounted up, he looked toward Mrs. Lovejoy's house through the trees on the other side of the meadow. Not a light showed in the windows.

He turned his horse, caught sight of Noggin's wagon by the glint of the lanterns, and set forth in a leisurely pursuit, for Noggin was going somewhere but in no hurry.

Matthew also had plenty of time. He kept watch of the lanterns, and followed Noggin under the same sky of stars that had looked down upon Lark, Faith and Walker that night in the forest. He still felt he was Walker's arrow, shot here through the dark. It might take him a while to reach his destination, but reach it he would. He still felt he was trying, for Lark.

The horror of both the Burton house and the Lindsay house had come to him in nightmares every night since he'd arrived in Philadelphia. He thought they would be waking him in a cold sweat for many nights to come. That was how it should be; he should not easily forget those scenes. They were part of his penance. But one thing kept coming back to him, over and over again, in broad daylight as well as deepest dark.

The marbles that had belonged to Lark's brother. On the table and the floor in that murder room. Then rolling across the floor in the watermill. Thrown through the window by whom?

Matthew didn't believe in ghosts. Well, yes, he did, actually; he believed Number Seven Stone Street was haunted by the unquiet spirits of the two coffee merchants who had killed each other there. He might tell himself those bumps and thumps were Dutch stones settling into English earth, but often he felt he was being watched, or heard a faint chuckle or saw a shadow pass across the corner of his eye where there should be no shadow. He did believe in those ghosts, but what unquiet spirit had tossed a handful of marbles through the watermill's window?

It was something he'd thought about, but which he didn't wish to think about for there was no answer. He'd told himself quite sternly that it had not really been the dead boy's marbles thrown through the window, but instead pebbles that his heated and pain-wracked brain had incorrectly seen. Some passing farmboy had heard the fight, peered through the window and thrown pebbles in to distract one man from killing another. Then the boy had hidden while Slaughter raged and raved.

But why hadn't this boy come forward? Why hadn't he gone to fetch the constable? Why had no boy appeared in Hoornbeck to tell his tale, during the duration of Matthew's stay there?

A ghost? The marbles hadn't been ghostly. They'd clattered loud enough when they'd hit, and one had given him a substantial sting to the neck. Or had they been only pebbles, after all?

When this was over and the local constable informed that Mrs. Lovejoy's dead guests did not stay in their graves, Matthew had decided he would go back to that watermill and find out if either marbles or pebbles lay on the floor. But first there was this and Mrs. Lovejoy was going to have to explain how her thief trap had ended up holding Slaughter's buried treasure. Mrs. Lovejoy? Mrs. Sutch?

What did the mistress of Paradise have to do with the queen of spicy sausages?

He thought of something Opal had said, about the pepper plants: Mizz Lovejoy feeds 'em to her guests. Grinds 'em up in every damn thing, excuse my French. Even gives 'em pepper juice to drink, mornin', noon and night.

Matthew watched the lanterns far ahead. He saw them sway with the wagon. Is anybody to home in there? had been Opal's question about the cemetery.

He had the mental image of Hudson Greathouse sitting in Sally Almond's, eating some of Mrs. Sutch's sausages for breakfast. Whew, this is hot! he'd said, as he'd blotted sweat from his forehead with his napkin.

And Evelyn Shelton, saying, Only have 'em a fewdays a month as is, so if you want 'em you'd best get your order in!

Matthew whispered, "Easy, easy," to his horse, though it was he who had given a start, as if a cold hand had suddenly been laid across the back of his neck.

He refused to consider what had just gone through his mind. Refused it. Shut the book on it. Closed the coffin. Mrs. Sutch owned a hog farm up north of Nicholsburg. A hog farm. Pork. Hear me?

Opal's voice came to him, asking, But what became of Mr. White?

And, the real question: What may have become of all forty-nine people supposedly buried over a period of five years in Paradise?

Mrs. Lovejoy? Mrs. Sutch?

Sisters in crime? Or one and the same?

Matthew had no idea. He banished these wild, unsettling, and downright sickening suppositions from his mind, as best he could, and concentrated on the glint of Noggin's lamps. The wagon moved on, the horse and rider following at a distance behind and cloaked by the night.

Two hours passed, during which Matthew drew no closer nor fell back no further. In a shift of the chill breeze he caught the rank scent of hog filth, and by that he knew Noggin was near his destination.

The wagon turned to the left. Its lanterns suddenly disappeared. Matthew picked up his horse's pace, and in a few minutes came to the forest track that Noggin had followed. Through the trees Matthew could see no lights, but the smell of the hogs was overpowering. He urged his mount forward, though even the steadfast horse grumbled and didn't seem to want to proceed. About fifty or sixty yards along the track, with dense woods on either side, Matthew caught sight of lanterns. He instantly dismounted, led his horse among the trees and tied the animal up. When he had sufficiently bolstered his courage, he left his tricorn and cloak with the horse and crept through the forest into what appeared to be yellow layers of smoke hanging in the sullied air, the stomach-turning miasma of hog stench.

It was developing into a delightful evening.

Through the trees and low underbrush, Matthew saw that Noggin's wagon had pulled up alongside a one-story house painted dull gray. The house had a front porch with a rope handhold up the woodblock steps, and window shutters painted the same gray as the walls. Light showed in the windows and a lantern hung on a hook next to the door, which was shut. Matthew wondered if Noggin had crafted the house, for though it seemed at first glance to be of good construction it began to dawn on him that the structure was somewhat malformed, that the walls were crooked, and none of the windows were the same size. A stone chimney spat smoke from the yellow roof, which sat like a crumpled hat on the head of a blowsy drunk. Matthew thought Noggin might be an able handyman, but house building was not his talent.

A black horse with a white star on its forehead stood tied to a hitching-post on the far side of the house. Matthew saw the dark shapes of other structures beyond the house, back where a few fitful lanterns burned and the haze was thick enough to choke a mule. From what he could tell there looked to be a barn, a long shedlike structure that probably was part of the hog pens, another utility building of some kind-the slaughterhouse?-and finally a scabby-looking rectangular building that might be a smokehouse. The noise of hogs gobbling and grunting came from the pens.

The domain of Mrs. Sutch. Matthew thought it was very far indeed from Paradise.

Noggin was nowhere in sight. The coffin's lid was open. Matthew shifted his position a few feet and saw an open cellar door. A faint glow of dirty light washed out upon the boards.

He knelt down, mulling his situation. It would be a simple matter now to ride back to the village of Nicholsburg and knock on doors until he roused someone who had something to do with the law. He could get there in about twenty minutes. Go from door to door and raise hell, if he had to. Sorry to wake you up, sir, but Mrs. Sutch's handyman Noggin is stealing dead guests from Mrs. Lovejoy's Paradise and carting them up here to the hog farm, where he's taking them into the cellar, and would you please lower that musket from my face, sir?

Noggin suddenly came up through the cellar door, which caused Matthew to duck even though he was already on the ground. Matthew had a glimpse of Noggin's dark-stained leather apron before the handyman trudged on toward the buildings out back. The haze swallowed him up.

Something moved behind Matthew. He sensed it first before he heard it. The back of his neck rippled, and then came the quiet sound of brush being stirred by a body. Matthew whirled around, his eyes wide, for he thought surely someone he hadn't counted on being there was going to jump him, and he would have to fight for his life.

But no there was no one there.

Matthew's heart was racing. He had to struggle to regain his breath. An animal of some kind had just skittered past, he thought. Damn if it hadn't turned his temples gray.

He saw Noggin returning to the house, carrying a bucket in each hand. Noggin went back unhurriedly into the cellar, like any workman doing a job he's done many times before.

This would be number fifty, Matthew thought.

He no longer felt safe out here. His skin was still crawling. In another moment Noggin was going to come back and shut the cellar door. Matthew stood up. In back of the wagon would be the shovel, the pickaxe and the mallet, if Noggin hadn't already taken them inside. Matthew figured those items stayed in the wagon. He had to make a quick decision that might end his life right here and now. The longer he delayed, the worse. He pushed out through the brush, crept up to the wagon, debated for about three seconds which of the items he could use, decided against his first choice, the pickaxe, because he didn't want to burst Noggin's skull, and picked up the mallet. He stood at the cellar door, the mallet upraised, waiting for Noggin to appear.

He waited.

No Noggin.

From within, at a distance, he heard what sounded like an axe at work. On what, he dreaded to think, but it didn't sound like wood.

Matthew took a deep breath and peered inside. A few lanterns hung from beams overhead. The cellar had dirt walls, and looked to be a warren of small rooms and passages. Like the diggings of a rat's nest, Matthew thought. Or the tunnels of a coal mine. In the larger chamber before him stood a number of barrels, coils of rope and chains, a cupboard in the corner and on the floor a stack of burlap bags with Mrs. Sutch's legend already painted on them in red.

The chopping noise was coming from the right. He eased down the cellar's steps and saw along the passageway a shadow thrown by lamplight from one of the rooms. It had a shadow axe, and was cleaving a shadow something that appeared to be hanging from the ceiling. Matthew heard liquid running into a bucket. He decided this was not where he wished to be.

" can't go back and pick up like it was only yesterday "

The muffled voice was coming from above Matthew's head. A woman's voice.

Thunk thunk thunk went the axe.

" if you would help me, that particular door might not be "

A man's voice, responding.

That voice was very familiar. Sickeningly familiar, in fact.

"Ty, listen to me!" said the woman sharply. "He won't take you back. Not now, not ever."

Ty's voice pitched lower, became silken in its cajoling. Whatever Ty wanted help with, he meant to get it. Matthew had lifted the mallet, as if to strike at the speaker though separated by a floor of uneven boards. His heart was pounding, and a sheen of cold sweat glistened on his forehead. He knew the voice of Tyranthus Slaughter, all right. And the woman calling him "Ty" sounded like Gemini Lovejoy, but less genteel now and more hard-edged.

In the room along the passage, Noggin kept chopping. Further in the cellar, Matthew saw a set of steps going up to a door. When he took the second one, it let out a squeal that made his blood curdle; he froze in place, expecting either the door to open or Noggin to come rushing along the passage, but the voices kept muttering and wrangling. The two Lovejoys were having a dispute, it seemed. He intended to find out what issue stood between the loving harmony of a killer and a whatever she was. He eased up the steps and peered through a crack where door and wall should have met. He could see nothing but yellow lamplight in a room with dark brown wallpaper, so he put his ear to the crack instead and listened to the Lovejoys fuss.

" shouldn't have come here," she said. "Of all places."

"I told you, I'd worn out my welcome in that boarding house. Chester is not my idea of a fascinating destination."

"Be damned with that!" she snapped. Matthew heard a chair scrape. Were they both sitting down? At a table? "I told you, long ago, that I was done with you! I couldn't help you anymore!"

"Ah, Lyra!" Slaughter's voice was like warm honey. "Couldn't, or wouldn't?"

"Both. Now we've been going over this all afternoon. How much longer are you going to stir the pot?" "Oh," he said, and Matthew could imagine him shrugging and giving a cold smile, "until the stew is ready." She was silent. Then: "Your head's leaking again."

"Yes, that happens when I become disturbed. The stitches were put in by a country idiot, what do you expect? Would you get me a fresh cloth?"

Matthew's nerves jangled. The chopping noise had stopped. But now it began again, and Matthew could relax a little because at least he knew where Noggin was. He heard Mrs. Gemini Lovejoy-also her own twin, Mrs. Sutch-walk across the floor and return. The chair scraped once more, and Matthew presumed she had seated herself. He thought they might be sitting at a kitchen table, because there was also the clink of a plate or a glass.

"Thank you," said Slaughter. "You should have seen me, Lyra! All the old fire and ability came back. Makes a man delight in living, to know he hasn't lost a step."

"I still don't believe you. About the three constables and the Indian."

"Three of the hardest constables you ever set eyes on," he insisted. "Militia soldiers, every one. Took me out of that madhouse and treated me like a common criminal. The Indian came later, as I said. But I killed them all, I did. Outsmarted them, and put them down. The Indian got me, yes, but I polished him off, too, when push came to shove. That's when I'm at my best, Lyra. When my back's against the wall. As it is now, dear one. As it is now."

"I'm not your 'dear one'. And stop crowing. I know your abilities. That's not the problem."

"The problem," Slaughter said, "is that you're telling me he has no need for my abilities. When we both know I was his favored one. We both know he relied on me to settle his accounts, more than any other." Mrs. Sutch was quiet, and Slaughter added, "Look how neatly I polished off Richard Herrald. That still counts for something, doesn't it?"

Matthew's knees almost buckled. Polished off Richard Herrald? What madness was this?

"Professor Fell will take me back," Slaughter said, in the room beyond. "He's not going to let a talent like mine go to waste."

Truly, Matthew nearly had to sit down. He put his eye to the crack, but still saw nothing of the two villains. He thought they were sitting just to the right of his position. He was aware that Noggin had ceased chopping; now there came a scraping noise, blade against bone.

Matthew's brain crackled as he took it all in: Tyranthus Slaughter had been an assassin working for Professor Fell in England. Settling the professor's accounts, which included murdering Fell's enemies who received the blood cards. Richard Herrald, Katherine's husband and founder of the Herrald Agency, had been on Fell's murder list, and had met a hideous fate in London about ten years ago.

Greathouse, Slaughter had said at Reverend Burton's cabin. I don't knowthat name, but I swear you're familiar.

Probably because Greathouse looked enough like his elder half-brother for Slaughter to have his memory jogged, though he couldn't connect one man to the other.

Slaughter had murdered Richard Herrald, on behalf of his employer Professor Fell. His very strict employer, who had the habit of having associates killed once they landed in gaol, to ensure the secrecy of his operations. Thus Slaughter had preferred a stay at the Westerwicke public hospital, and a pretense of being mad, rather than spending any time whatsoever in a gaol.

As Greathouse himself had said, No one makes Professor Fell angry and lives very long.

Not even, evidently, the professor's own assassins.

"You did that job a long time ago," Mrs. Sutch countered. Matthew heard the clink of glass against glass; was she pouring from a bottle of wine? "And that was before he found out you were working for yourself. Masquerading as a nobleman and killing those girls! Really, Ty! Without his permission, and without paying him a percentage! You knew you were dead if you stayed there, and you know you can't ever go back again."

Slaughter didn't speak for a time. When his voice came, it was raspy and hesitant, as if some measure of strength had left him. "Tell me, then," he said, sounding small and even a little frightened, "where is my place?"

"Not here. I want you gone. Tonight. If he knew I was still in touch with you, it'd be my throat cut." Spoken like a true woman of business who looks at the balance sheet and sees liability. Matthew wondered if this was the female partner with whom Slaughter had jumped through hoops of fire as a circus acrobat in his youth. He could imagine it printed in festive letters on the broadsheet: Presenting the Daring Ty and Ly!

"You owe me." Slaughter had regained his dignity; his voice was stone-cold. "I gave you the idea for this. Told you how you might do it, and look how Mrs. Sutch's sausages are so well-loved, with that little bit of extra spice in 'em! People crave 'em, don't they? Damn right they do, just like I said they would!" There was a loud slap: the noise of his palm hitting the table. "Don't you scowl at me, woman! I know where your bodies aren't buried!"

Matthew felt feverish. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

It is like pork, Slaughter had said. But sweeter. In the human meat can be tasted the essence of food and drink consumed by that body in happier times. There are some, I hear, who if left to their own devices would become enslaved to the taste of human, and want nothing else.

A popular dish at Sally Almond's, indeed. Sausages likely made most with pork, but with the extra spice of human meat saturated with hot peppers. Matthew recalled seeing them oily and glistening on Greathouse's breakfast platter. This would really slay him.

My God! Matthew thought. How he could use Quisenhunt's rotator pistol right now!

"Lyra," Slaughter said softly. "I don't mean to fight with you. After all we've been through together? All the times I've come to your aid?"

"We're paid up," she answered. "I bought that damned box for you, so you'd know one when you saw it. You were too stupid to quit while you were ahead."

"I shall bare my back to your lash. You may whip me for my stupidity-for my ambition-a thousand times, if it pleases you. But this thing I'm asking this one thing would mean my salvation. I'm begging you, as I have never begged another human being and shall never again beg please give me someone to kill."

"I can't."

"You can. You have the power to bring me back into his grace, Lyra. Just one name, is all I'm asking. Someone he wants dead. It doesn't have to be a hard one. Or make it the most difficult on the list, I don't care. Please. Now look closely you'll never see Ty Slaughter grovel like this again, so mark the momentous occasion."

Matthew heard her sigh.

"You're an insane fool," she told him, but her hard edge had softened. "True," the killer replied, "but I am forever and dependably your insane fool."

Lyra Sutch muttered an oath that Matthew had never heard come from a woman's mouth, and indeed had thought it was beyond a woman to imagine such a mindboggling crudity.

There came the sound of a chair scraping back.

"Come downstairs," she said.

Thirty

The door opened. The two killers descended the stairs, lady first.

In the darkness beneath them, Matthew was already on his knees on the dirt floor. He dared to peer out from his hiding-place, but not far enough that the lantern's light might catch him. Mrs. Sutch, wearing an austere gray gown and with a black netting over her leonine hair, went to the cupboard, drew a latch and opened the doors. Slaughter's boots clomped down the steps, the gentleman dressed in a black suit. Obviously he'd either found a tailor to do a quick job, as Matthew had, or more likely some victim had died for his clothes. It pleased Matthew no end that Slaughter's face was less ruddy and more the shade of Mrs. Sutch's gown, and that he held a mottled blue rag pressed to his scalp stitches.

"Now thafs what I'm talking about!" Slaughter said, in admiration for what was contained within the cupboard.

Light glinted and gleamed off a variety of weapons held on hooks. Matthew saw three pistols, four knives of various lengths and shapes, two pairs of brass knuckles, one of which was studded with small blades, and two black cords used for the strangler's art. An empty space above the cords indicated that some implement of murder had recently been removed.

Tools of the trade, Matthew thought.

Mrs. Sutch reached deeper into the cupboard and slid out a shelf. On it was the fifth thief trap Quisenhunt had made. She opened it so quickly Matthew couldn't see if she'd turned the latches horizontally or vertically. She lifted the lid, as Slaughter plucked one of the knives from its hook and examined the blade with the air of an artist considering a new brush.

Papers crackled within the box. Mrs. Sutch brought out a small brown ledger book and opened it, positioning herself beneath the nearest lantern in order to better read what was written there. "As of the last posting, there are two in Boston," she said. "One in Albany. That would be an easy job for you. A retired judge, fifty-eight years of age. Crippled in a riding accident last year. Received his card in London, March of 1697. Oh here. This one would please the professor." She tapped the page. "Are you up to a trip?"

"I can travel."

"This would be to the Carolina colony. Twelve days or so, depending on how hard you want to ride. But he's not going anywhere. In the summer he left New York, where he was a magistrate. Settled now as manager on Lord Peter Kent's tobacco plantation, just west of the town of Kingswood. His name is-"

Matthew almost spoke it, if speaking wouldn't have gotten him killed.

"-Nathaniel Powers," she continued. "A friend of Herrald's, by the way. Received his card in London, July of 1694. Sailed from Portsmouth to New York with his family in September of 1694. Obviously he has a healthy respect for the professor's determination. It's time his card was called to count."

"Absolutely time," Slaughter agreed, and seemed to be admiring his reflection in the knife's shine.

"Take what you please."

"I've come upon a bounty of blades just recently. I have a sufficient pistol, as well." He put the knife back upon its hook. "But tell me, what's missing right there?" He touched the empty space above the cords.

"A new item, brought from South America. A blowpipe. It uses a dart tipped with frog venom that causes "

"Instant death?" The way Slaughter said that, it was religious.

"The muscles to stiffen and the throat to constrict," she corrected. "Within seconds, the victim cannot move. It's being experimented with."

"Who has that job?"

"We have new blood among the brethren, since you've been gone."

"It's gratifying to know our profession shall not die for want of youth," Slaughter said, and then he, the lady and Matthew all looked across the cellar as Noggin came out of the passageway lugging a damp and dripping Mrs. Sutch burlap bag that appeared to be heavy with contents. Noggin carried it out the cellar door, bound for some destination Matthew didn't wish to think about.

"Can you trust him?" Slaughter asked, as Mrs. Sutch closed the box and slid the shelf back.

"He does what I tell him, when I tell him. He's dull, but smart enough to ask no questions." She shut the cupboard and pushed the latch home. "From time to time, I let him have one of the girls at Paradise."

The fate of Kitt, Matthew thought. And of how many others?

"You amaze me." Slaughter had turned toward Mrs. Sutch. He lowered the cloth from his head, and Matthew could see that the hair had been shaved away from the vivid red gash and its ugly stitches. "Always the spirit of industry. You can work any ten people into the ground."

"You know where I came from. What I went through, and what I saw. Poverty and misery have always been the greatest of incentives. Besides," she said with a faint smile, "I'm making a fortune for both myself and the professor."

"As if he needs more."

"He always needs more. And so do I."

They stared at each other for a moment. Then Slaughter reached out to touch Mrs. Sutch's cheek. She pulled away, her face grim. Slaughter let his arm drop.

"When you do the job," she told him, "come back here. Send Noggin for me. At that point, we'll consider what the next step ought to be. I'm not promising anything."

"I understand." Slaughter was all business now as well; the sparkle had gone out of his eyes.

"Do you have money?"

"Enough, yes."

"Then I want you out of here now," she said, and she went up the stairs. Slaughter followed her without a word, his face lowered and shrouded with shadows.

The door closed.

Matthew heard footsteps creak the boards. They were moving toward the front of the house. He was lightheaded, because he'd been breathing so shallowly. He drew a long breath and kept watching the cellar doorway, expecting Noggin to return at any minute. He didn't think any of the pistols in the cupboard would be loaded or he would have been up and at them already, if he could coax his legs into moving. Slaughter was on his way to kill Nathaniel Powers in the Carolina colony. Mrs. Sutch was in charge of the blood cards, and of arranging the murders on behalf of Professor Fell. His own name was on that list, of course, and he wondered what Slaughter's reaction would have been to hear it. How did Mrs. Sutch manage the job? Did she get some kind of message from Professor Fell, or from one of his associates, directing whose name should be added to the list? Did she then make the blood card here? Using blood from either the hogs or-more of a macabre touch­ the gutted guests of Paradise? He wondered if his own card had been daubed from the blood of Mr. White. A bizarre riddle occurred to him: what color was White on white?

Did Noggin deliver the cards? Maybe by packet boat from Philadelphia? Or did someone else carry the cards out? So many unanswered questions, and so little time.

But Matthew kept staring at the cupboard. In there was Quisenhunt's fifth thief trap, and within it was a book with the names of Fell's murder list. What else might be in that book, and what other papers in the box?

"Noggin! Noggin!" Mrs. Sutch was outside, calling for her handyman. Slaughter must have already ridden away. It sounded as if Mrs. Sutch was moving toward the rear of the place, back toward the pens or the utility building.

There indeed wasn't much time. Matthew stood up, went to the cupboard and found the latch. He put aside his mallet, opened the cupboard, slid out the shelf and looked at the thief trap.

"Noggin!" Mrs. Sutch shouted, still at the back of the house.

Matthew now faced a question regarding the box. Was it an armed thief trap, or simply a locked keyless safe? He ran his fingers over the latches. One was nearly horizontal, the other just to the right of vertical. If he turned the latches the wrong way, would smoke and sparks explode from the keyhole? What if the powder charge was not set, but the hammer mechanism was armed? Either way, the noise would bring Mrs. Sutch running. He could take the whole box, he decided. That would be the safest thing. Just take the whole box and get out of here. But he needed the lamplight to see what he was doing. In the dark, it would be impossible to line the latches up either perfectly vertically or horizontally. And which version of the two might this be?

He could take the box and a lantern. He reached up, lifted a lamp from its hook and then set the lamp atop the box. He picked the box up with both arms. It was heavy, but not unmanageable.

He turned toward the cellar door, took a single step and stopped as if he'd been slapped in the face.

He was no longer alone.

Standing in his way was Mrs. Sutch.

She smiled tightly; in the lamplight her eyes seemed to possess glowing centers of red. "Good evening, Mr. Shayne," she said in a quiet, strained voice. With an effort, Matthew answered, "Hello, Mrs. Sutch." They stared at each other, the lioness and her prey.

The moment hung, both Matthew and Mrs. Sutch standing motionless as paintings.

Mrs. Sutch suddenly lifted her arm, not without a certain feminine grace. The axe she'd picked up at the back of the house emerged from behind her gray gown. She had come prepared to do her share of the night's work. Her smile crumpled. She showed her teeth.

"Noggin!" she screamed, her face contorting into a picture from Hell, and Matthew thought she might well be announcing her target because she gripped the axe's handle in both hands and, rushing forward, brought it down for his head.

He lifted the box. The axeblade crashed into it and knocked it and the lantern from his hands to the floor. He spun around to get at the weapons in the cupboard, but he heard the whisper of the axe coming at him again. As he threw himself to the left the blade whacked into the cupboard. The guns, knives, and all the rest of the deadly collection jumped off their hooks.

The woman was on him before he had time to right himself. The axe was flying at his face, and as Matthew tumbled backward the blade hissed past, nearly rendering him noseless. Before she could bring the axe back for another blow, Matthew reached for the stack of burlap bags, picked one up and whipped it into her eyes. A second whip of the bag sent her reeling, and then Matthew leaped forward and hit her, female or not, smack in the forehead with his fist.

Mrs. Sutch fell across a coil of rope, but she did not relinquish her hold on the axe. All Matthew wanted to do was get out, devil take the box and everything in it; he found this intent denied, however, as Mrs. Sutch heaved herself up from the ground and stood between him and the cellar door, her teeth gritted and the axe upraised.

"Noggin!" she shouted, loud enough to wake the widow Ford. "Come here!"

Matthew knew he was finished when Noggin came. He bent to pick up a length of chain, but the woman charged him once more. The axe flashed with lamplight. Matthew jerked his head back, and the blade thunked into the wall. Then Matthew grabbed hold of the axe and they fought for it, spinning each other around and around, banging into barrels and staggering back and forth across the cellar. Everything was blurred and chaotic, a mad nightmare, Mrs. Sutch kicking at his legs, spitting in his eyes and biting at his hands, he trying to pull the axe out of her iron grip.

Suddenly she shoved him hard against a wall. A knee came up and caught him square in the groin. Pain stole his breath and nearly crippled him. His legs sagged and he slid down. She stepped back to give herself room to bash his brains out, but before she could steady her legs to deliver the blow Matthew had scrambled away from her, almost on hands and knees. He found himself in the passageway that Noggin had come out of, and desperate to buy some time and find a weapon he half-ran, half-stumbled toward the lamplit room that had thrown such hideous shadows.

"Noggin!" she screamed, her throat shredding.

Matthew knew she'd be after him, Noggin or not. He flung himself into the chamber, fell onto his knees, and there through his pain-hazed vision saw the depth of Mrs. Sutch's pleasure.

Hanging from the ceiling beams in this dirt-walled room, along with a few blood-spattered lanterns, were a half-dozen chains each ending in a sharp iron hook about five feet off the floor. Items impaled on some of these hooks looked at first to be nothing more than marine creatures from the deep brought up in a fisherman's net: here twisted blue coils like an aquatic worm, there a gleaming mass like a crimson skate, here a grayish-purple fist-sized lump with cords dangling down like the tendrils of a jellyfish. Two buckets full of blood stood beneath a wooden trough, within which lay a ferrago of gore and matter that was best not too closely examined. The chamber's smell was also nautical, of sea brine and low tide. On the floor very near Matthew were, oddly enough, a pair of bare feet chopped off at the ankles, a pair of wrinkled hands and beside them the white-haired decapitated head of an elderly mermaid, her eyes half-open as if groggily awakening from sleep and her gray lips pressed tight to keep a secret.

The widow Ford had come to pieces in here. An extra bit of spice, to be added to the next batch of sausage.

Matthew stared at the hanging internals, which were swinging ever so slightly. He thought it was very economical that Mrs. Sutch used all the body as she did. All the organs, as well as the meat. Bone marrow too, most likely. Didn't want to get the nails into the mix, though. Or the teeth. The head was probably due to be cracked last, for the brains. Then everything into the pot along with the pork, and after the sausages were shaped and cased they went into the smokehouse. Very economical of her, very efficient.

He thought he could lose his mind, kneeling here before this altar of evil.

With a shriek of rage Mrs. Sutch hurtled into the room. She lifted her axe, and when it fell it cleaved deep into

Matthew's head.

Or, rather, the head he'd picked up from the floor, which had belonged to the widow Ford and which Matthew had thrust up in front of his own to take the blow.

Mrs. Sutch saw she'd chopped the wrong head and began to try to fling it off the axeblade, but it was stuck tight. She beat the head against the floor, to no avail. Then she gave a scream of frustration, put her foot upon it and pushed, adding indignity to the sorry fate of the widow Ford. As Mrs. Sutch was so occupied, Matthew crawled to one of the buckets of blood and took hold of it. He struggled to his feet against the ache of his bruised stones and threw the gore full into her face.

Spitting blood that was not her own, her face, hair and the front of her gown streaming crimson, Mrs. Sutch dropped the axe and the head it was buried in. She staggered back into the passageway, her hands up to clear her eyes. For good measure Matthew flung the bucket at her, but she was already moving and the bucket only crashed into the wall where she'd been.

Matthew knew she wasn't done. He knew also that she'd gone to find something else to kill him with. He looked around and saw a second axe leaning against the trough, this one with a bloody blade. The handyman's tool. But where the hell was Noggin? Matthew heard Mrs. Sutch shout for him again, her ragged voice carrying the high note of desperation. She knew, as well as Matthew did, that if Noggin wasn't here by now he wasn't coming.

Matthew picked up the axe. He turned to face the doorway, the pain at his groin forcing him into a crouch.

When Mrs. Sutch returned, her face a dripping bloodmask, she was gripping in each hand a knife from her collection.

"I don't want to kill you," Matthew said. He held the axe up.

If she feared the blade, she gave no sign of it. She feinted once, trying to get him to commit, but he stood his ground. "You're in your grave," she whispered, as her knives carved the air between them. "In your grave. Oh yes, in your grave." Her eyes were fixed upon his, both daring and taunting him. She shifted two steps to the left and then came back to the right. "In your grave," she repeated. "Yes, you are. In your-"

She leaped at him, the knives flashing.

Matthew had no time to think, only to react. Neither did he have time to aim. He just struck out with the axe, as Mrs. Sutch slashed at his face with one knife and at his throat with the other.

Before she could get to him, there was a crunching sound. Mrs. Sutch gave an animalish grunt and was flung away. She fell down in the wet red dirt. She blinked, her eyes wide with shock and perhaps more than a touch of madness. Then she began to try to get up once more, but her left arm was no longer a working part of her body.

"Stay down," he told her.

She was on her knees. She stared at the knife in her right hand, as if drawing strength from it. Then, shaking with either rage or pain, she got up on her feet.

"Don't," Matthew said, the axe ready again.

But he knew she was coming. She had passed beyond the human state, into a creature that must kill to survive. At that moment Matthew thought of the monster's tooth in McCaggers' attic. A supreme carnivore, McCaggers had said. Formed for the function of both destruction and survival.

Both she and Slaughter were of the same breed, Matthew thought. Formed for the same function. Kill or be killed.

He watched as she came toward him, but slowly now, with a terrible silence. The blade was thrust forward; the monster's tooth was seeking flesh. He retreated, brushing past the chains with their hanging pieces of meat.

She was now the full creation not of God, but of Professor Fell. Whatever the professor was, he had the power to take the raw clay of humanity and mold it into something monstrous.

The monster's tooth. Evidence of what God had told Job, about the behemoth and the leviathan.

God spoke to Job from the whirlwind, McCaggers had said. He told Job to gird up his loins like a man, and face what was to come.

I will demand of thee, He said.

Mrs. Sutch attacked with a sudden burst of speed and ferocity, her teeth gritted, her eyes wild in the bloody face, the knife seeking Matthew's heart.

Matthew swung the axe. Even as the blade tore into flesh and broke bone, Matthew was aware that the knife had pierced his waistcoat and shirt because he felt the point of the monster's tooth pressed against his skin, felt it poised to bite into his guts but quite suddenly its power was gone.

Mrs. Sutch had lost the knife, and she was falling backward. All of her head was no longer there. She fell into the chains and staggered against the trough and then slid down to the floor, where her body quivered and her legs shook in a hideous palsied dance.

Incredibly, she put her remaining good hand to the floor and looked to be trying to get up again, and she lifted her misshapen head toward him and gripped her fingers into the dirt in an attempt to crawl. The expression of pure, cold hatred on her face riveted Matthew.

It said, Don't think you've won, little man. Oh no for I am the least of what is ahead for you

She drew a terrible, shuddering breath, and then he saw her eyes cloud over and her face freeze. Her head pitched forward but her fingers dug deeper into the dirt-once, twice, and a third time-before they stilled. Her hand stayed twisted into a claw.

For a long time, Matthew could not move. Then, at last, the full impact that he had killed another person hit him, and he hobbled out of the cellar next to Noggin's wagon and threw up until he was just heaving and gasping, but never in all this distress did he let go of the axe.

Matthew unbuttoned his waistcoat and opened his shirt. The blade had given him a shallow bite across his ribs about two inches long, but it wasn't so bad. Not as bad as Mrs. Sutch had intended. His groin, though, was a more painful subject. He would think himself lucky if he could walk tomorrow.

But Slaughter was on his way to kill Nathaniel Powers. To settle an account for Professor Fell. Matthew thought he might have trouble walking tomorrow or the next day, but somehow he was going to have to gird up his loins enough to climb on his horse and ride to Nicholsburg, to find some help. It would be an unlucky farmer who answered his door tonight. First, though, there was a box in the cellar that needed to be opened.

After this mess was sorted out, he was going to have to ride south, to the Carolina colony, and get to Nathaniel Powers before Slaughter did.

Matthew leaned against the wagon, waiting for his head to clear and his nerves to settle. That might take a while. He looked at the empty coffin, and at the shovel lying there in the back.

Something was missing, he realized.

It was the damnedest thing. Where was the pickaxe?

Thirty-One

A solitary rider came along the road, under the gray November sky. The road went straight between young trees. At its end stood a red brick two-story plantation house with white trim, white shutters and four chimneys. On either side of the road, beyond the trees, were the tobacco fields, brown and barren now until April. The solitary rider reined his black horse in for just a moment, while his gaze swept across the landscape, and then he continued on his chosen path.

He was a well-dressed gent, on this cold and somber morning. He wore tan-colored breeches, white stockings, polished black boots, a dark blue waistcoat and a dark blue jacket overlaid with a design of paisley in lighter blue. On his head was a tasteful white wig, not too ostentatiously curly, and atop that a black tricorn. Black gloves, a black cloak and a white cravat completed his carefully-crafted attire.

He had just come from the Gentleman's Rest Tavern and Inn in Kingswood, where he'd spent the past two nights. They knew him there as Sir Fonteroy Makepeace, aide to Lord Henry Wickerby of the Wickerby estate near Charles Town. This title had also appeared in the very formal letter sent from Sir Makepeace by way of a young courier from Kingswood to the door of the plantation house now drawing nearer. Such was the communications of one gentleman to another, and the privileges of breeding.

As Sir Makepeace rode his horse along the drive, a groom who'd been notified to expect the visitor saw him coming and emerged from his small brick watchhouse that stood alongside the main entrance. He went up the front steps to alert the other servants by usi ng the brass door knocker cast i n the shape of a tobacco leaf, and then he hurried to bring over a footstool and hold it steady as Sir Makepeace dismounted. The groom offered to take the gentleman's horse around to the barn, but Sir Makepeace said it wouldn't be necessary, that his business would only take a short while and it was fine to just keep the animal here.

The groom gave a respectful bow and said As you wish, Sir Makepeace.

"Good morning, Sir Makepeace," said the rather stocky, balding servant who came down the steps to meet him. Climbing the steps to the front door appeared to be a bit hard on Sir Makepeace, if anyone was watching. He brought a cloth from his waistcoat pocket and blotted some beads of sweat that had risen on his face. Then he put the cloth away, looked back to make sure the groom was standing firm with his horse, and allowed the servant to usher him inside.

A servant-girl came forward to take Sir Makepeace's cloak, hat and gloves, but he said, "I'll keep these for the while, miss. I'm rather cold-natured." She gave him a polite smile and a quick curtsy.

"Mr. Powers' office is this way, please," said the male servant, motioning up the staircase.

Sir Makepeace looked up the stairs. His face showed just the slightest ripple of unease.

"Men usually keep their offices on the lower floor," said Sir Makepeace.

"Yes sir, that may be true," the servant answered, "but Lord Kent has given Mr. Powers an office on the upper level, so that he might always have a view of the fields."

"Ah." Sir Makepeace nodded, though his smile did not completely take hold. "My business is with Mr. Powers, but is Lord Kent in residence?"

"No sir, Lord Kent is currently in England and shall not be back before summer. This way, if you please."

Sir Makepeace followed the servant up the stairs and to a closed door on the right side of the house. The servant knocked, there was a muffled, "Come in," and the servant opened the door for Sir Makepeace's entry. He closed it as soon as the visitor had crossed the threshold.

Sir Makepeace gave the office a quick once-over. It was richly appointed, with cowhide chairs, a brown leather sofa, and in the corner to his right a gold-and-black lacquered Chinese screen. A chandelier holding six lanterns hung from the ceiling. The desk was on the far side of the room, where a man in his mid-fifties, with dark brown hair gone gray at the temples, had removed his reading spectacles and risen from his chair. "Mr. Powers? " said Sir Makepeace, as he walked across a red carpet toward the desk.

"Yes," Nathaniel Powers replied. Since leaving his position as magistrate in New York he'd grown a gray goatee that his wife, Judith, actually thought was quite handsome. Behind him a pair of windows looked out upon the fields, and to his right a second set of windows offered another view of the fields that included several of the plantation's workbuildings.

"A pleasure to meet you," Sir Makepeace said. He removed his gloves as he approached. "I much appreciate your taking the time to see me, as I have business to conduct."

"I assumed so. I must say, though, I'm not familiar with Lord Wickerby or the Wickerby estate."

"No matter. I have here an item concerning an old account of yours that needs to be settled. To be polished off, you might say." With a frozen smile, Sir Makepeace reached into his waistcoat.

"Mister Slaughter," came a voice from behind him that caused the rest of him to freeze. "Please keep your hands at your sides."

The nobleman turned slowly toward the source of his irritation. Matthew had emerged from his concealment behind the Chinese screen, and he stood halfway between it and Tyranthus Slaughter.

"Pardon me," said the nobleman, with an air of bewilderment. "Do I know you?"

Matthew kept his own hands behind him. He was relaxed, but not lax in his assessment of his foe. Slaughter was carrying a knife or pistol-possibly both-within his waistcoat. Either one of his boots could be hiding a blade. He might even have a knife under that damned wig. But it was clear that Slaughter was somewhat diminished from their last meeting. Slaughter's face was gray and puffy, with dark hollows beneath his eyes. Sweat sparkled at his temples. Matthew wondered if Walker's arrows had not done the job on him, after all, and Slaughter's blood was poisoned. Still the most dangerous beast was one that was both wounded and trapped.

"Lyra Sutch is dead," Matthew told him. "I have the ledger book of Professor Fell's accounts to be settled." He saw Slaughter flinch on that one. "Your career has ended, sir. The man who is standing outside that door has a pistol, and so does the groom who took your horse. Of course we weren't sure who Sir Fonteroy Makepeace actually was, so we had to let you come up." He did not say that Powers' office was usually downstairs, and that this was Lord Kent's bedroom, redecorated. The point had been to get Slaughter further away from an exit, if only to underscore the difficulty of escape.

"Mr. Powers?" Slaughter lifted his hands, as if to beg a question. "Is this young gentleman mad?"

Powers looked from Slaughter to Matthew and back again. "I have complete faith in his judgment. He intends to take you to New York, but from what he's told me about you over the last few days, I would have shot you as soon as you walked through the door."

"Really?" The gentlemanly veneer of Sir Fonteroy Makepeace cracked, and peering out with narrow, red-rimmed eyes and a half-snarl was a monster who had perhaps been born long before the small sound of a rat biting a bone in a Swansea coal mine. "But I don't see that he has a gun, sir, or anything else with which to take me anywhere I don't wish to go."

"Well, actually," Matthew said, and brought from behind his back the three-barreled black rotator pistol that Oliver Quisenhunt had been kind enough to loan him when he'd returned to Philadelphia to ask for it, "I do."

Slaughter moved.

He lowered his shoulder and like a charging bull smashed through the wood frame and glass squares of the window to his left. Matthew pulled the trigger, aiming at Slaughter's legs. A ragged-edged hole exploded in the wall, but through the billowing smoke Matthew saw the killer leap into space.

"My God! My God!" Powers was shouting. The door burst open and the servant, Doyle by name, came rushing in with his pistol drawn. Matthew got to the aperture where the window had been in time to see Slaughter below him, sliding down the sloped roof of the outbuilding on which he'd landed. His tricorn and white-curled wig were tumbling down behind him. Then Slaughter dropped to the ground, staggered and nearly fell, but gained his footing and started running with a pronounced limp toward the cluster of worksheds and barns. Beyond them was three hundred acres of open tobacco field, and beyond that the Carolina woods.

Matthew saw Slaughter run past a few startled workmen in a blacksmith's shed and then disappear into the darkness of another workbuilding. Damn, what a jump! He'd never imagined Slaughter would've risked a broken neck to make an exit, but that was the nature of the beast: death before surrender.

"Sir!" Doyle said to him. "What shall we do?"

Matthew had no idea what other weapons Slaughter might have. He couldn't ask anyone else to fight his battle for him. He opened the compartment in the rotator's handle and brought out the second paper gunpowder cartridge.

"I've got a musket!" Powers' face was ruddy with excitement. "I'll blow the shit out of him!"

"No sir, you'll stay right here." Matthew tore the cartridge and primed the second barrel. "Doyle, I want you to stay with the magistrate. I mean " He waved off his confusion as to his ex-employer's current position. "Just be his bodyguard," he said.

"I don't need a bodyguard!" Powers shouted, further incensed.

Matthew asked himself where he'd heard those words before. He said, "Your family would think otherwise." Thank God their own home was at another location. He heard people coming up the stairs. It was Corinna, the servant-girl, and Mrs. Allen, the cook. Matthew got past them as they came forward to press themselves on Powers' nerves, and he ran down the steps, through the house and out the back door that led into the work area.

Though the labors of the tobacco plantation were never-ceasing, there was not so much activity here this time of year, and the workmen fewer in number. Matthew set his course for the shed that Slaughter had entered.

Matthew couldn't help wondering where he was. Not Slaughter, but the other one. The one who had taken the pickaxe from the back of Noggin's wagon and hit Noggin in the head with it while the handyman was crouched down in the woods relieving himself. A man with a broken skull could not answer a shout, no matter how desperate.

When the constable from Nicholsburg had found Noggin dead the next morning in the woods, with that pickaxe planted in his head, Matthew had known who it must be. Incredibly, who it must be. The same person who had thrown a handful of marbles against the gearwheel in the watermill. The same person Matthew had seen on a horse, following him at a distance day after day on the road south. Matthew had no doubt who it must be. A resourceful person who could take care of himself. Who could take a fierce beating and keep going, mile after mile. Who could read the ground and the sky. Who could build a fire, who knew how to hunt, and how to lay a snare. Who could push himself nearly beyond the limits of human endurance, and who had an iron will to survive. Who also knew how to steal a horse, which he'd done in the village of Hoornbeck the morning Slaughter had left with the knife peddler.

In these last few days Matthew had started leaving a jug of water and some food out for him, just before dark at the edge of the woods. The food was always gone the next morning and the jug emptied, but then again it was hardly needed because there was a stream nearby and he'd seen plenty of rabbits. One could say an animal might have taken the food, but one would be wrong. But also right, in a way. Matthew had looked for the glow of a fire, but on those many nights of travel when he couldn't find an inn and had to sleep outside, he'd never seen any fire but his own, so why should he see one now? But he was out there, all right. Waiting. The question was, where was he now ?

Matthew reached the building that Slaughter had entered and eased into it with his pistol ready and all his senses alert. He passed slowly and carefully through a storehouse of wagon parts, extra harnesses, yokes and the like. On the opposite wall was an open door. He passed through it, and outside again.

Before him, about forty yards distant, was a large red barn. It was where the tobacco leaves were stored to age, pressed into bundles or put into hogshead barrels pending shipment. Matthew could see across the field from his position; there was no sign of Slaughter. The barn's door was partly open.

He approached the barn, briefly hesitated to solidify his resolve, and then with his finger on the pistol's trigger he went inside.

The light that streamed in was dim and dusty. Matthew saw around him stacks of barrels as tall as a man and thick bundles of tobacco leaves wrapped up with rope. Handcarts stood waiting for use, and ahead was a wagon half-loaded with barrels. He moved cautiously, taking one step and then stopping, listening for any movement.

The back of his neck was tingling.

He had nearly reached the wagon when he heard a quick sliding sound. Like the dragging of an injured leg. There and then gone. It had come from his right. He changed course for that direction, his heart slamming in his chest.

Three more steps forward, and he heard the click of a striker being cocked almost directly ahead of him. Slaughter had a pistol.

Matthew thrust his own gun out at arm's length, and so was ready when suddenly Slaughter rose up from behind a wall of tobacco bundles less than six feet away and thrust his own pistol forward. Matthew's finger tightened on the trigger, but he didn't squeeze it. He saw Slaughter's gun barrel drift to the right. Slaughter blinked heavily, as if trying to focus on his target. Matthew thought he might have taken such a jolt in the fall that he was seeing double.

Or maybe he was nearly used up. Slaughter's face was pinched with pain and damp with sweat. The flesh around the ugly wound on his scalp was so swollen the stitches had torn open, the gash wet and glistening. Tendrils of gray liquid were trickling down the side of his face, and Matthew caught the odor of corruption.

"Shall we die together?" Slaughter asked, bringing the barrel to bear on Matthew. "I don't fear it."

"Lower your gun."

"No, I think I will not. I think I will pull my trigger, you will pull yours, and that will be the end of it." He managed a lopsided grin. "Does that suit you?"

"I'd rather live a little longer," Matthew answered, watching Slaughter's trigger finger. "You can choose life too, if you wish. It's not the end of the world."

"Oh, but it is. The end of my world. What else-" There came the sound of something moving, very fast.

A body hurtled through the air from Matthew's right. A knife's blade flashed in a blur and went into the side of Slaughter's neck, and as Slaughter's face contorted and he turned to shoot his attacker Matthew had no choice but to pull the trigger. He shot Slaughter in the side, about halfway down the ribcage.

Slaughter's pistol fired downward, in a burst of sparks and smoke. Pieces of tobacco leaves flew into the air. He staggered back, clutching the wound in his neck that now poured blood over his cloak, his cravat and his paisleys, and the pistol fell from his fingers.

He looked with both amazement and incomprehension into a face he didn't seem to recognize. "Who are you?" The boy was gaunt. His hair had grown out some. His clothes were dirty, his eyes were steely gray and the point of the knife he held was blood-red.

Matthew remembered what Walker had said, when he'd seen a figure behind them on the trail and Matthew had dismissed it as delirium:

Following. I saw him twice. Very fast.

Saw who? Matthew had asked.

And Walker's answer had been: Death.

Tom answered the question with a statement, his voice cold and matter-of-fact: "You hurt my dog."

Slaughter reached into his waistcoat. He brought out a knife of his own. He lunged at Tom, but the boy had already retreated. Then Slaughter began to flail with the knife, left and right, his teeth gritted and eyes hideous with dying rage. Matthew figured it was likely the knife with which he'd planned to cut Nathaniel Powers' throat, and then make a quick escape.

Tom had lifted his blade to stab Slaughter again, but now he stopped as the bleeding wretch before him slashed wildly at the air. Slowly, Tom lowered the knife to his side. He backed away.

Slaughter was still fighting. He fell against the bundles and stabbed them in a frenzy as if striking flesh, sending brown ribbons of tobacco flying. Matthew wondered what he was trying to kill. He wondered what he had always been trying to kill, in one way or another.

Tom walked a distance and bent to the ground.

Slaughter was running down; his watch was about to stop. He dropped the knife, his head lolling.

"Matthew?" It was the voice of Nathaniel Powers, the stubborn man who didn't need a bodyguard. "Matthew/?" The barn door was pulled open wider. There looked to be six or seven men at the entrance, drawn there by the sound of the shots.

Slaughter straightened himself up. He ran a hand down the front of his paisley-patterned coat, as a lord might do to smooth it before meeting his public. Even as the life's blood streamed from his neck and bloomed around the hole in his side, he looked at Matthew with eyes that yet in their gathering dark held a red glint of ferocity.

"My compliments," he allowed. "I said you were worthy. But Matthew you never could have bested me. Not alone."

Matthew nodded. As Slaughter had told him in the watermill, It would take two of you to polish me off.

But he'd been wrong. It had taken three.

Now, though, it appeared he was well and truly polished.

"You have aided my ambition," Slaughter said. "My title. Where I'm going they'll make me royalty."

Lifting his chin, he took an unsteady step toward the door. Then another, dragging his injured leg. Matthew followed behind him, as he staggered onward. At the threshold, Slaughter fell to the ground on his knees. The knot of men backed up to give him room to die. Powers had a musket, Doyle had his pistol, the groom also brandished a gun, and the others all carried either wooden clubs or other implements of violence. At the back of the group, Mrs. Allen held a large rolling-pin.

Tyranthus Slaughter gasped and forced himself up. He lurched forward again, his fists clenched. Suddenly he lifted his right fist and cocked it back, as if about to hurl a thunderbolt of evil into their midst. Before him the crowd shrank away, their faces taut with fear that even their guns and clubs and rolling-pin could not overcome.

Slaughter took two more steps toward them, his fist upraised and trembling, and the crowd retreated two.

And then Slaughter began to laugh, that deep slow sound of a funeral bell.

Matthew watched as Slaughter opened his fist, and the handful of dust he was holding streamed away between his fingers.

When his hand was empty, the funeral bell ceased its tolling.

Slaughter pitched forward, and lay stretched out upon the earth.