The Providence Rider

Twelve

AS the days passed, as the ship sailed across an ocean that might be both calm and turbulent in the same day, as the rain showered down from dark clouds and then the sun burst forth from the midst of darkness, as the pallid moonlight glittered upon the luminous waves and the bright blue ribbons of sea creatures moved on their errands of life and death, Matthew felt himself healing.

He was aided in this regard by the doctor, Jonathan Gentry by name. Gentry came by his cabin to see him in the mornings after breakfast and in the evenings before supper was served. Sometimes medicinal tea was brought, sometimes Gentry unpeeled the plaster under Matthew’s left eye to check the stitches, and then he applied a green salve and put the plaster back as it was. The doctor gave him a cake of grassy-smelling soap and told him to keep everything clean, for this Atlantic travel was a nasty business and all sorts of mold grew from the grime a ship carried. Not to mention the rats that crawled about so freely they were given pet names by the sailors.

Matthew always posed the same three questions to Dr. Gentry. One being, “Are Berry and Zed well-treated?”

And the answer to that, always the same: “Certainly they are.”

The next question following: “May I see them?”

“Not quite yet.”

The third question: “When am I to hear what Fell’s problem is?”

And its answer: “In time, Matthew.” Then: “Make sure you get out on the deck for your walk. Yes?”

Matthew always nodded. In fact, he greatly looked forward to his walks on the deck. No matter if it was raining or the sun shone, Matthew walked ’round and ’round the ship, taking in the tasks being performed and the occasional glimpse of Captain Jerrell Falco, an austere figure in black suit, black cloak and black tricorn to match the blue-black sheen of his ebony flesh. The captain had a white goatee, and he carried a twisted cane that he had no qualms about using across the back of a slow seaman. Matthew had noted there were several Africans or black Caribees among the crew, as well as a few yellow skins from the Far East. If anything, the ship was worldly. Matthew found himself with books to read. They were delivered in a basket to his cabin, and they carried the faint hint of a woman’s perfume. It seemed to him that either Aria Chillany liked the idea of bruised flesh under her hands, or she was toying with him. The books were Shakespeare’s The Tempest, King Lear and Julius Caesar, a philosophical tome concerning the earth’s place at the center of the universe, and a fearsomely blasphemous book explaining how God was a creation of the mind of Man. Matthew figured just opening that book in some communities might earn a backburn of whiplashes if not a noose around the neck. Still, he thought he might read it. After all, the books aboard this ship had to have earned the approval of Professor Fell, therefore some view of Fell’s mental state might be gleaned from the reading.

To be sure, Matthew found no fault with his cabin or with the way he was being pampered. And pampered was indeed the correct word. Though no human element could correct the roll of the ship, the drumming of waves against the hull or the constant creaking and crying of timbers, every human element aboard the Nightflyer seemed intent on treating Matthew as a valued guest. A glass of wine—drugged or non-drugged, as he wished—was only the ringing of a silver bell away. His food was not only palatable, it was damned good. Yet he might tire of fish, the daily catch was spiced to his liking. His clothing had been washed and pressed by a hot iron. His boots wore a shine. As much as was possible aboard an ocean-going vessel, his cabin was spacious and clean. His bed was a four-poster, the legs pegged down to prevent movement with the ship. The person who came in to change the candles did so on a daily basis and was not stingy with the wax. And, most tellingly, the door to Matthew’s cabin was never locked from the outside. If he required privacy and latched it himself, that was fine, yet he was never forced to feel like a prisoner. One afternoon a knock at his door introduced him to an elderly man who came in with a measuring stick and piece of chalk and proceeded to take his measurements of arm, leg, chest and so forth and then left without a word.

Of course there were some places Matthew could not go. He was cautioned by Gentry not to wander around belowdecks, as he might pick up some unfortunate fungus or infection that would not do his condition any good. Also, there were several locked doors he came to that were obviously not going to be opened for him, and he presumed one of those led down to the brig. But as long as he stayed out of the way he was encouraged to be up on the deck, and several times Gentry had shared dinner with him in the doctor’s own cabin, which was perhaps one half the size of Matthew’s and not nearly so well-fashioned. Gentry was an interesting conversationalist, focusing mostly on his travels through South America, the Caribbean, Italy, Prussia, China, Japan and elsewhere, but not a word would come from him regarding either the professor or the reason behind this endeavor.

And so it was with real interest that after the passage of six days, and after Matthew had made his morning rounds of the deck under a blue sunlit sky that projected an amazing warmth for this time of year, he returned to his cabin to continue his reading of The Tempest and was roused from his comfortable chair by a rap at the door.

“Yes?” he asked mildly, for he had learned there was no sense or need to be rude in this situation.

“Dear Matthew,” said the raven-tressed woman on the other side, “I’ve brought you something.”

It had been several days since he’d laid eyes upon Aria Chillany. He had to admit she was an intensely beautiful woman and his eyes had missed such beauty in the midst of all these ragged and hard-bitten sailors. Therefore he put the folio aside, got to his feet and—marking the fact that this cabin made at least two of his dairyhouse home—he crossed to the door and opened it.

“Good morning,” she said with an honest smile, yet the sapphire-colored eyes were always wary. “May I come in?”

He stepped back and motioned her to enter, and she closed the door at her back.

She was wearing a lilac-hued gown and a dark blue jacket trimmed with black leather. Her hair copiously cascaded along her shoulders and down her back. She smelled of an exotic incense, with an undertone rather like a sugared, hot and slightly burned coffee. She took him in with her direct stare. “You’re mending nicely.”

Was some witticism called for here? He decided to say only, “Thank you.” He also had realized that the shaving mirror was becoming kinder to him. The worst of the bruises only showed faint blue, the cuts were scabbed over and this woman’s ex-false-husband was coming in the afternoon to remove the plaster and the stitches. Matthew was free of pain and everything seemed to have settled back where it needed to be. This was, he’d decided, more of the effects of deep and healing sleep brought on by the drugged wine than any other of Gentry’s ministrations.

“Here,” she said, and gave him a rolled-up parchment secured with a black cord.

“What is this?”

“Your future,” she told him. Her gaze wandered over to the dresser and atop it the brown clay bowl holding two apples, an orange and a lemon that were brought to him on a daily basis. Without asking, she moved to the bowl with a crisp rustle of underclothes, selected an apple and bit into it. She chewed and watched him as he opened the parchment.

Matthew saw it was someone’s life history, scribed in black ink by a steady and very disciplined hand. The title was The Life And Times Of Nathan Spade.

“And exactly who is Nathan Spade?” Matthew asked.

“That would be you,” said Madam Chillany, as she crunched another bite of apple.

He scanned the document. It proclaimed a false birthday, and a birth year that made Nathan two years the elder. It described a hardscrabble childhood on a farm in Surrey. A younger brother, Peter, died as an infant. Mother—Rose by name—perished from consumption. Father Edward was ambushed by a highwayman and his throat slashed for a palm’s weight of measly coins. Therefore Nathan went into the world as a bitter twelve-year-old with many miles to walk and many scores to settle against the whole of humankind. His first occupation: rolling the drunks at a London dockside bordello and cleaning up the mess they left—whether vomit, blood or other.

“Charming,” said Matthew. He stared into the woman’s eyes, forcing his expression to remain stony and unflinching. “What is this about?”

“Obviously,” she answered, “your new identity.”

“And why would I need one?”

She continued to eat her apple with leisurely bites. She smiled faintly, the smile of a predator. She came around behind him, and he allowed it. She leaned forward and said quietly into his right ear, “Because being Matthew Corbett, problem-solver for the Herrald Agency, would hasten your death where we are going. You would not last a day, darling Matthew.” Her forefinger, wet with juice, played with his hair. “Some of the personages you are going to meet knew Lyra Sutch. They would not like to know the part you played in her tragedy. Your name is already being bandied about. Therefore the professor wishes to protect you…from them, and from yourself.” The last word was concluded with a nip to Matthew’s ear. Playful or not, she had sharp teeth.

He decided it was best, after all, not to let her get behind him, and therefore he turned to face her and backed away a pace.

“Oh,” Aria said, her face placid and self-composed but her eyes on him as if he were the most luscious apple to be plucked, “you shouldn’t be afraid of me, darling. It’s those others you should fear. The ones you’re going to meet.”

“Who are they, exactly?”

“Associates. And friends of associates.” She came toward him a step, and again he retreated. “You have been invited to a gathering, Matthew. A…festivity, if you will. That’s why you need the new identity. So you will…shall we say…fit in.”

He read a few more lines of the document. “Hm,” he said. “Spade murdered his first victim at the age of fourteen? He was involved with one of the prostitutes and he killed a jayhawk?” A jayhawk, in this instance, being a man who attempts to remove a prostitute from one ill abode to another, using either flattery or force.

“Yes,” said Aria. “The jayhawk beat her terribly one night. Broke her beautiful nose and vowed to cut her open and watch her guts slide out upon the floor. And do you know what, dear Matthew? Her name might have been Rebecca.”

That took a few seconds to sink in. He held up the parchment. “I thought this was a work of fiction.”

“Fiction is often the echo of truth,” she answered, her focus steady upon him. “Don’t you think?”

Matthew studied her face. Her nose was indeed a little crooked, yet still beautiful. He wondered what those eyes had seen. Or perhaps he really did not wish to know.

But one bit of information he did desire. He decided now was the moment to reach for it. “I’m presuming you were the woman with the blue parasol that day at Chapel’s estate? When he put his birds on us?” He was speaking here of an incident that had occurred during the summer, in his investigation concerning the so-called Queen of Bedlam.

“I was. And happy we all are now that you did not succumb to that fate.”

“I’m presuming also you got out through the hidden tunnel? The one that wound down to the river?” He waited for her to nod. “Tell me this, then. What happened to the swordsman? The Prussian,” Matthew emphasized. “He called himself Count Dahlgren.” Matthew and the count had been locked in deadly combat, and but for a silver fruit tray one young problem-solver would have found himself run through by a wicked dagger. Though Dahlgren had been wrapped in a pair of curtains and clouted into a goldfish pond, his left arm broken at the wrist, still the enigmatic Prussian had escaped capture that day, and had disappeared.

“I have no idea,” Aria answered. “That’s the truth.”

Matthew believed her. He hated loose ends. Dahlgren was definitely a loose end. Moreover, Dahlgren was a loose end who could still manage a sword and surely bore a Prussia-sized grudge against the adversary who’d bested him. The question was still unanswered: where had Dahlgren gone, and where was he now?

Surely the count was not waiting for him at the end of this voyage, Matthew mused. But he felt sure that somewhere, at sometime, he would meet Dahlgren again.

Matthew decided to try another angle to one of his three questions, now that he had this parchment and some idea that he was being required to playact the part of a rather nasty young killer. Obviously, a great deal of thought and preparation had been put into the professor’s plan…whatever it was. “I want to see Berry and Zed.”

“That’s not possible. I believe that Gentry has assured you—”

“You’re speaking when you should be listening,” Matthew interrupted. “You must not have heard. I’m not asking, I’m telling.” He rolled up the parchment and wrapped it with the black cord. “I want to see Berry and Zed. Now.”

“No,” she said.

“And why not? Because if I see what condition they’re being kept in, I may refuse to go along with this…nonsense?” He flung the parchment across the room to land in the far corner. “All right, then. You go tell Sirki I refuse to leave the ship when we dock wherever we’re going. Tell him they’ll have to carry me out on a stretcher, after all. Tell him—”

“I’ll tell him,” Aria agreed, “to kill them. Starting with the girl.”

Matthew forced a harsh laugh. He and the woman might not have swords, but they were fencing all the same, and damned if she wasn’t as good at using her own weapon as Dahlgren had been with his. “You will not,” said Matthew, and now he approached her. She stood her ground and lifted her chin. “Sirki vowed Berry would be returned safely to New York, and myself as well. His anger toward Zed will have passed by now. I have the feeling he might be an honorable man, in his own way.” And you a dishonorable woman in all ways, he might have added. He continued right up to her, as if he owned the very air she breathed. He had already decided he had very little to lose in this situation, and he must show himself to be a powerful force. As much force as he could masquerade under, to be honest. A look of uncertainty passed only briefly across Aria’s face before she righted her ship. She stood firm and defiant before him, and she started to take another bite of the dwindling apple.

“If I’m going to be Nathan Spade,” said Matthew, “I’m starting now. Rebecca,” he added with a faint sneer. “And who gave you permission to steal my apples?” He took it from her before it reached her mouth, and then he took a bite from it. A bit green and sour, but there it was. “I said I want to see Berry and Zed today,” he told her as he chewed. “This moment. Is that clear enough for you?”

She didn’t answer. She stood expressionless, like a cipher, perhaps revealing her lack of soul. Or, possibly, she was simply struggling to control a scene that had gotten away from its playwright.

“All right, then. I’ll find them on my own.” Matthew picked up the bowl to prevent further thievery, and also to take the fruit to Berry and Zed for he fully intended to either find someone to unlock the necessary door or he was going to kick it down.

She let him get a grip on the door’s handle before he spoke. “You can only spend a few minutes with them. If I take you.”

He turned upon her as if determining where to thrust the sword, now that her defenses had been cracked. “You’ll take me,” he said. “And I’ll spend as much time with them as I please.”

She hesitated. Then, with a small cat-like smile, “I’m not sure I approve of this Nathan Spade so very much. He does seem to like to give commands, when he’s in no position to—”

“Be silent,” Matthew said flatly. “I didn’t ask to be here. Neither did my friends. So take me or step aside or do whatever you need to do, madam. But I’m done listening to you prattle.”

A hint of red crept across Aria Chillany’s cheeks. She blinked as if she’d been struck. But the damnedest thing, Matthew thought, was that the look in her eyes was not so much temper as tempest, and she began to chew on her lower lip as if it might spring forth a wine of rare vintage.

“I’ll take you,” she said quietly.

Good enough, Matthew thought, and if the woman had not been as near he would have heaved a sigh of relief so gusty the sails might have blown from their masts.

He followed her along the corridor. She took a key from an inner pocket of her jacket and started to unlock a narrow door about thirty feet from Matthew’s cabin, but she found the door already unlocked; its grip turned smoothly beneath her hand. She returned the key to its place. “It seems your friends already have a visitor this morning,” she told him.

The door opened on stairs that descended between two oil lamps hanging from ceiling hooks. At the bottom was a second door. Down here, nearer to the sea and the mollusks that likely clung by the hundreds to the hull, the aromas of tar, fish and old wet timbers were nearly overpowering. The constant low thunder of the waves was bad enough, but the creaking of the Nightflyer made it sound as if the vessel was coming apart at pegs, nails and seams. At this level the ship also rolled like a little bitch. Matthew was certain he would face Berry’s wrath about this, at some point to come. Yet it was he who should feel wrath, for who had asked her to stick her nose into this? Who had asked her to creep along and appear there on the dock, apparently in an effort to save him? Who had asked her?

Not I, Matthew thought, and didn’t realize he’d said it aloud until Aria Chillany looked over her shoulder and inquired, “What was that?”

He shook his head. She took him through the second door, and into the brig.

He had a moment of feeling he was back in time, entering the dingy gaol in the town of Fount Royal to hear a witchcraft case as a magistrate’s clerk. This might be a shipborne brig, yet the four cells were familiar and the iron bars as forbidding as any landlocked cages for human beings. Several dirty lanterns hung from hooks, illuminating the scene with a murky yellow light. A rat skittered across the floor at Matthew’s feet. It was chasing a cockroach as big as a crab. The smells of foulness commingled with the odors of musty wet wood and the fishy bowels of the ship were nothing short of an apocalyptic assault. Matthew felt rage rising in him, as he saw Zed confined in one cell to the left and Berry—a poor moldy ragamuffin with a tangled mass of red hair, she appeared to be—confined in the furtherest one to the right. They had straw mattresses and buckets, and that was the extent of the hospitality offered here.

“God blast it!” Matthew nearly shouted. His throat had almost seized shut. “Get them out of there!”

A man stepped from a pool of shadows in front of Zed’s cell. “Sir, please restrain yourself.”

“Restrain myself? Good Christ!” Red-faced and steaming, Matthew was on a tear. As a matter of truth, he felt he could tear the head from the neck of any sonofabitch who defied him. Even if it was the white-goateed and austere Captain Jerrell Falco who stood before him, armed with his twisted cane, and staring at him with steady and rather frightening amber-colored eyes. “These are my friends!” Matthew said into Falco’s face. “They’re not animals, and they’ve done nothing wrong!”

“Oh my,” said Madam Chillany, who wore a thin smirk that very nearly was her last, “I knew this was a bad idea.”

“Matthew!” Berry was calling for him. She sounded weak and sick. And who wouldn’t be, Matthew thought, in this undersea tomb that smelled of tar and dead fish, with the ship rolling enough to tear a person’s internals loose.

“Get them out!” Matthew roared, at both the woman and the captain. The smirk melted from her face and Falco’s goatee may have smoked a bit as well.

The twisted cane was laid softly but firmly upon Matthew’s right shoulder.

“Calmness,” said the captain, “in a situation of pressure is a virtue, young man. I suggest you become more virtuous in speaking with me, beginning with your next word.” He had a deep, resonant voice that Matthew thought any church pastor would sell his soul to possess. And then Falco’s head turned and he said something in a rough dialect to Zed. Matthew, to his everlasting amazement, heard Zed give a throaty chuckle.

“You can…speak to him?” Matthew asked, feeling the sweat of rage start to evaporate from his brow. “He understands you?”

“I speak the Ga language,” Falco answered. “Also five other languages. I read and write ten languages in all. I was educated in Paris, and I have lived on three continents. Why would I not have taken benefit of my travels?”

“He understands you,” Matthew repeated, this time as a statement.

“I believe that fact has been demonstrated.” Falco frowned. His eyebrows were graying, but had not yet turned as snowy as his chin-hair. Gray also was the hair that could be seen beneath his brown leather tricorn. “What are you doing down here?” The amber eyes shifted to Madam Chillany. “Why did you allow this?”

“He insisted.”

“If I insist you jump to the sharks wearing a necklace of fish guts, would you do so?” He gave her a stare that would have buckled the knees of any ordinary woman, but Aria Chillany was nearly a witch herself, it seemed, so it had little effect.

Matthew strode past them and went to Berry’s cell. To say she was a sad-looking mess was to say that the sun did not shine at night. And truly her sunny disposition had been darkened by this perpetual gloom, enough that Matthew felt tears of new anger squeezing past his eyeballs. “Damn this!” he said. He put one hand around the bars, the other still gripping the bowl of apple, orange and lime. They built these brigs to keep mutineers and madmen at bay, and surely the iron that would not surrender to a Ga warrior would not be moved by a problem-solver. Berry came up close to him, her hair in her face and her eyes as murky as the light. “Can you get me some fresh water?” she asked him. “I’m very thirsty.”

“Yes,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ll get you some fresh water. First, take this.” He pushed the orange between the bars, and she took it and bit into it peel and all as if this were her first food since leaving New York. He turned toward Falco and Madam Chillany with something near murder glowering in his eyes. “I want my friends out of here. Captain, I implore you. They’ve done no crime to fit this punishment. I want them freed from this place and given decent cabins.”

“Impossible,” said the woman. “Everything is taken.”

“It seems to me that one uses what can be used,” Matthew said. “For instance, your cabin might be freed if you were to take habitation with your husband. I mean to say, the man who posed as your husband. A few more nights of sleeping with him and you might fall in loving bliss all over again.”

“I’d rather die!” shrieked the harpy.

Matthew ignored her. “Captain, could you find a bunk for a Ga? Perhaps give him some work to do, after he’s been decently fed and allowed to breathe healthy air?”

“He stays here!” said Madam Chillany. “It’s safer for all!”

Captain Falco had been staring fixedly at Matthew. Now his amber gaze settled upon the woman. “Do I hear,” he said quietly, “you making decisions concerning my ship and my crew, madam? Because if I do, I will remind you that I am indeed the master of this vessel—”

“I’m just saying it’s better he stays locked—”

“I hear what you’re saying,” the captain continued, “and I appreciate your opinion.” He looked again at Zed and fired off some statement that made Zed shrug. “I don’t think he’s a danger,” Falco said, addressing Matthew. “The girl is certainly no danger.”

“They should be freed from this place,” Matthew said. “The sooner, the better.”

“I disagree.” Madam Chillany stepped between Matthew and Falco to disrupt their burgeoning accord. “Captain, I will remind you that you are being paid very well by your employer to—”

“Madam, you are not my employer,” he said, with a hint of a curled lip. “Yes, I am being paid very well. I am loyal to my employer, as long as he pays well. I always do my job to the best of my ability…but my job, madam, is to make the best decisions possible under the shadow of the sails above our heads. Now, I’ve been coming down here for several days to speak to the Ga. And to the girl as well. I was simply told when they were brought aboard that for the sake of security and simplicity they should be caged here, and I agreed with your position. At that time I agreed,” he added. “But now, having spoken to both of them and gained a bit more…shall we say…understanding of the issues involved, I see no point in having them remain in these cells.” He reached for the wall, where a ring of keys hung from a hook. “After all, where are they going to go? And I believe the swords and pistols aboard this ship can handle a Ga if he loses his temper.” He spoke again to Zed, who answered with a chest-deep grunt and a shake of his bald head. “Madam,” Falco translated, “he vows not to lose his temper.”

“The professor won’t care for this,” she warned as Falco slid a key into the lock on Zed’s cell, and instantly Matthew knew she’d gone a threat too far.

Falco unlocked the cell and opened the door with a creak of sea-rusted hinges. He motioned Zed out. “I believe our young guest has a good idea,” said Falco. “Concerning the arrangement of quarters. I think our Ga here can be given tasks to perform and therefore rate at least a blanket on the deck, if not a hammock.” He strolled past Matthew to slide a second key into the lock on Berry’s cell door. “As for her, I believe she should rest in some comfort, to make amends for this affront to her dignity. Madam, I expect you to move into the doctor’s cabin within the hour. If he has any problem with this, he’ll know where to find me.”

“No!” The woman had a voice on her. It nearly shook the oaken beams at the ceiling. Her eyes blazed. She was one mad madam. “I refuse! He snores to high heaven and his feet stink like the devil’s ass!”

The key turned. The lock was sprung. Falco opened the door and Matthew was there to catch Berry when she staggered out.

“I’ll be glad to provide you with wads of cotton,” Falco told Aria Chillany. “Two for the ears and two for the nose. Shall we all go up now and enjoy a little sunshine?”

Thirteen

MATTHEW was not himself today. On this thirteenth morn of sailing aboard the Nightflyer, he was restless and irritable and felt he would soon jump from his skin if harbor was not presently reached. Of course, reaching harbor would offer its own set of pressures. He pitied the crews and passengers of ships bound from England to the colonies. But he did have an escape from this constant roll of ship upon sea and vista of sun’s glare off dark blue water. He was becoming Nathan Spade.

Madam Chillany had told him, very coldly, the same afternoon of the day that Berry and Zed had been released from their cages: I assume you’re proud of yourself, that you won the little skirmish? But there are real battles ahead of you, Matthew, and I hope you are up to fighting them so valiantly for you might be fighting for your life. I would suggest you pick up that parchment you so carelessly tossed aside and read the entire document. It was prepared for you by Professor Fell, so it’s not to be taken lightly. Consign the life and times of Nathan Spade to your memory, dear one. Become him, if you value your neck…and, by reason of association, the necks of your lady friend and the black crow. We will be making harbor toward the end of another week. By that time, you should be Nathan Spade. Mark this advice well, won’t you?

I shall, Matthew had replied. I do hope you enjoy your new quarters, and thank you for your hospitality to Miss Grigsby.

There had been a definite chill in the air when that woman left his door.

Why he had to become Nathan Spade, he had no idea. But it seemed the right thing to do, since Aria Chillany was so insistent upon his no longer being Matthew Corbett when they docked. And as for her statement that Some of the personages you are going to meet knew Lyra Sutch…well, long live Nathan Spade.

Whether Nathan Spade had ever really lived or not was a question Matthew considered, and then decided upon not asking Madam Chillany, as such a creature in this world further darkened his view of God’s control over Evil on this side of Heaven. As Matthew walked the deck on this thirteenth morn, with the sun out in full force and Berry walking at his side refreshed and well-fed and free of shipboard mold, he speculated with an uneasy mind upon the life and times of Master Spade.

From one murder to the next, Nathan Spade travelled as if on a mission of discovery to reach the wretched bottom of the human soul. It seemed that Spade had become very proficient at murder, having hired himself out to a gang of London thugs called the Last Chancers, and having killed—and pray to God this was Professor Fell’s attempt at fiction—eight men by the age of twenty. And an additional two on his twentieth birthday, seemingly for the sport of it. He was called ‘The Pepper Kid’ for his method of throwing a handful of ground pepper into the eyes of his victims before he either slashed open their stomachs or their throats with a hooked blade, depending on how fast or how slowly he wished them to die. Then he became a jayhawk of the most sterling quality, and secured for the Last Chancers the gin-sodden wenches they desired to fill the rooms of their house of ill-repute on Blue Anchor Road in Southwark. He fulfilled this role to the best of any bastard’s dark ambitions, having impressed upon the Last Chancers the fact that little girls and virgins always sold well in any economic climate, and that there were always little girls lost or thrown out upon the London streets, and there were always doctors ready for an amount of cash to restore with needle and stitches the pride of a wholesome virgin.

“I wish you wouldn’t tell me these things,” Berry said, as they walked the deck and Matthew recited this particular element of Nathan Spade’s charm. Then she corrected herself: “But I do want to know. Why do they need you to pretend to be him? And what does this Professor Fell want with you?”

Matthew had had no choice but to tell her everything, as he knew it to be. He saw her daily, during these outings, but had seen Zed only a few times as Zed was usually working belowdecks. Matthew had decided that keeping Berry in the dark was no longer a noble endeavor, but was in fact an act of cruelty. “As I said,” he told her, “he wants me to work for him. To solve some unknown problem. But I do trust his word to return us to New York after we’re done.”

“And why should you trust his word?”

Matthew looked at her. He noted she was getting sun on her face. Her freckles were emphasized by her freshened coloring. In the last few days the sun had made the weather as warm as April in New York. They were nearing the Bermuda islands and Matthew reasoned they couldn’t be more than a few days out. “I have to,” he replied. “Though I’ve…shall we say…disturbed his plans on more than one occasion, I believe he considers me to be…” He hesitated, pondering the end of that thought. “Of worth to him,” he finished.

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell someone, Matthew! About the Mallorys! I mean…Doctor Gentry and that woman.” She spoke the word with supreme disdain. “You could have told Hudson! Why didn’t you?”

“For the same reason I didn’t tell you,” he reminded her. “I want no one dead on my behalf. If Hudson had interfered with this, they might have killed him. Because it wasn’t he they wanted. The same with you. And, of course…here you are, and look what’s happened. Now not only do they have me, they have Zed to be held as a sword over your head and you to be held as a sword over mine.”

“As you’ve said,” she answered with a quick flash of blue-eyed anger, “many times before.”

“And I’ll say it many times hence before I’m done.” His anger was not so flashy, but mayhaps burned deeper. Still, there was no use in hitting her over the head with her own obstinacy, for he shared that same particular quality and it had certainly hit him over the head a few times.

They walked a distance further, completing one circuit of the deck and watching their step for coiled ropes and the numerous seamen scrubbing the wetted planks with holystones, before Matthew said, “All right, then. Continuing on about Master Spade, if you wish to hear anymore.”

Berry hesitated only briefly. Her gentle sensibilities were no match for the power of her curiosity. “Go on.”

Matthew did. Nathan Spade—if this indeed had been a living person—had evidently done a robust job as a jayhawk and thus at the age of twenty-two he had graduated to running the Blue Anchor bordello for the Last Chancers. Clock forward six months, and the Pepper Kid was put in charge also of a second Southwark whorehouse on Long Lane. And then at the age of twenty-four, his reputation both for discovering new talent and putting knives in the bellies of competitors was such that he was contacted by a certain Doctor Jonathan Gentry on behalf of a certain professor who wished to know if the aforementioned Master Spade might wish to come up in the world? Namely by managing a new house nearly in the shadow of Parliament, where men of good breeding and excellent funds mixed and mingled with the women of bad breeding who were determined to remove some of those funds from the overstuffed pockets? And suffice it to say, the women should be beautiful and rather ruthless in gaining information from their sex-stunned or love-struck lotharios, the better to share that information with Nathan Spade on its progress to Doctor Gentry and the professor’s ear.

So be it.

The Pepper Kid had arrived in his own personal land of Milk and Honey. Now he no longer needed the pepper nor the knives, for he had the professor’s killers to do that work if needed, and these days he wore expensive Italian suits and strolled the halls of diplomacy as an equal among the other moneyed and well-placed scoundrels.

“Disgusting,” was Berry’s comment when the tale was done.

“I agree,” Matthew said, and yet he was becoming Nathan Spade and so he felt compelled to add, “But one must admire ambition.” Spoken, he realized, from a knowledge of what it took for a farmer’s son to rise above a mountain of pigshit.

A commotion among a group of sailors snagged the attention of Matthew and Berry as they came around the starboard side, and following the pointed fingers and eager grins of these men brought their view up into the Nightflyer’s intricate rigging. Up there two figures were climbing and leaping amid the jungle of ropes and netting, even as the sails blew wide and tight with captured wind and strained against their masts. Matthew saw, at the deck level, some of the crew coming forward to drop coins into a black box held by a surly-looking seaman and beside him one of studious demeanor marking in a ledger book. Up above, the two figures grasped ropes and swung from mast to mast, and on the deck some of the sailors hollered with glee and some catcalled with derision. Matthew realized he was witnessing not only a race between men in the rigging but also a bet in progress as to who would win, yet it wasn’t clear what finish line one had to cross first in order to claim the prize. He wondered, from the shouts and rather crude encouragements of the gamblers, if several circuits of the masts had to be made, and so it was not only a contest of speed and dexterity but also of endurance.

He was struck with a sudden remembrance.

It had to do with the Iroquois tracker Walker In Two Worlds, who had been so vital in helping him in his hunt for Tyranthus Slaughter. Walker was telling Matthew about an arrangement that had been made, for a group of wealthy Englishmen to—

Pick three children, Walker had said, and see them off on one of the flying canoe clouds that rested on the waters of Philadelphia. Nimble Climber was chosen, Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone was another, and I was the third. We three children, and the tribe, were told we would see the world of England and the city of London for ourselves and when we were returned—within two years—we would be able to explain to our people what we had witnessed. In hopes, the men said, of forming closer ties as brothers.

But Matthew recalled that had only been part of the story.

My soul withers at the memory of that trip, Walker had said.

Watching the men race through the rigging high above his and Berry’s heads, Matthew realized what had lit the fuse on this line of thought.

Nimble Climber did not survive, Walker had told him. The sailors began a wagering game, betting how fast he could get up the rigging to fetch a gull feather fixed to the mast with a leather strap. And they kept putting it higher and higher. They were paying him with peppermint candies. He had one in his mouth when he fell.

The sailors hollered. One of the racers had slipped but had caught himself in the safety netting. He clambered up again to the nearest rope, undaunted by his brush with death.

When we reached England, Matthew remembered Walker saying, Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone was taken away by two men. I held onto her hand as long as I could, but they pulled us apart. They put her in a horse box. A coach. She was carried off, somewhere. I never found out. Some men put me into another coach, and I was not to see my people again for almost ten years.

Matthew recalled the rest of Walker’s story, that the Indian had been put into several plays as the ‘Noble Young Savage,’ and then—as his fortunes had dwindled and the novelty of an American redskin on a London stage had faded—he had found himself as the Demon Indian in a broken-down travelling fair and later returned to his tribe sadder, wiser, and—as he put it—insane.

The racers went around and around. A foot slipped on a mast. A rope was grabbed. The two men, having landed face-to-face on the same beam, wrestled with each other for a moment with no lack of effort. One fell, causing a mighty uproar. He toppled into a safety net ten feet above the deck and so no blood was spilled nor bones broken in this display of rough skill amid the ropes. It seemed also that throwing one’s opponent off the mast was part of the game, as another uproar ascended for the victor and a crowd of men began to gather to claim their payouts from the black box.

“Skylarking,” said a voice behind Matthew and Berry. There was only one voice like that aboard the Nightflyer. “That’s what it’s called,” Captain Falco said when they looked to him for explanation. “A time-honored tradition. We’re close enough to harbor now that I thought they should have a little reward.”

“How close to harbor?” Matthew asked.

“Two days distant.” The amber eyes scanned the sky. “The weather will hold. The wind favors us. Yes, two days.”

“Thank God,” said Berry, with a sigh of relief albeit premature. “I can’t wait to walk on land again!” Though this trip had been nothing like the agony of her journey from England to New York on the ill-fated Sarah Embry last summer.

“Soon enough, miss.” Falco regarded Matthew for a silent moment. Matthew thought he was trying to come to a decision. “Mr. Corbett,” the captain said at last, “would you do me the courtesy of having a drink with me this evening? Say eight bells, in my cabin? I have something to discuss with you.”

“Concerning what, if I might ask?”

“Concerning your presence here. And I would appreciate your not mentioning this visit with any of your other friends.”

“Oh. I see.”

“No, you don’t see,” Falco corrected, in a tone that was becoming a shade harsh. He looked up, as he did more than a hundred times a day, to measure the progress of wind in the sails. “Two days distant,” he repeated. And then, to Matthew: “Eight bells, sharp.” He turned away, and went about his business of managing a sailing ship under the charter of the emperor of crime.

Fourteen

ENTER,” said Captain Falco when eight bells had been struck on the deck above. Matthew had just knocked at the door decorated with the carved face of a lion. He turned the door’s handle and half expected the lion to let out a roar. Then he stepped into the captain’s cabin, where Falco was sitting at a table lighting a clay pipe with a candle’s flame.

“Sit,” came the next invitation, which sounded like a command. Falco blew out a gust of smoke and motioned toward the chair on the other side of the table.

Matthew obeyed. He saw that fish bones littered Falco’s dinner plate, along with the remnants of biscuits and brown gravy. A smaller plate held slices of lime. Also on the table were two wooden cups and a squat “onion”-style bottle of black glass. Matthew had a quick look around at the ship master’s quarters. Situated at the Nightflyer’s stern, it had six shuttered windows that, now opened, gave a view of the sea and star-spangled sky. The cabin, however, was not so very much larger than Matthew’s. There was an oak chest of drawers with a mirror and water basin sitting atop it. A writing desk held a gray blotter and a quill pen and inkpot at the ready. A bed—more of a thin-mattressed cot, really—was made up so tautly its brown fabric covering looked to be in agony. Several lanterns hung from hooks in the overhead beams to give light to the captain’s world. Falco smoked his pipe and Matthew smelled the rich, fragrant tang of Virginia tobacco.

“Pour yourself a drink.”

Matthew again obeyed. What flowed from the black bottle and into his cup was a clear, golden liquor.

“Brandy,” said the captain. “I decided to uncork something decent.”

“Thank you.” Matthew took a taste and found it considerably better than decent, but not so strong as to cause the eye-watering reaction he’d been expecting.

“It’s a civilized drink.” Falco poured himself a cupful. “For civilized men. Eh?”

“Yes,” Matthew answered, for Falco seemed to expect a comment.

The captain offered Matthew the plate of lime slices, but Matthew shook his head. Falco chewed one of the slices, rind and all. He had a high, heavily-creased forehead and a widow’s-peak of iron-gray hair. The upper portion of his left ear was missing. Matthew wondered if he’d ever met a swordsman named Dahlgren. In this light Falco’s flesh appeared the hue of the deepest blue-black ink, which made the amber eyes both lighter and more powerful in their unwavering appraisal of his guest.

Falco finished the lime before he spoke again. “What in God’s name have you gotten yourself into?”

The question was so direct it stunned Matthew for a few seconds. “Sir?”

“I don’t repeat myself.” Smoke roiled through the air.

A silence stretched, as one waited and one considered.

At last Matthew said, “I really don’t know yet.”

“You’d best find out in a hurry. Day after tomorrow, we reach Pendulum.”

Matthew wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. He frowned. “Pendulum?”

“Pendulum Island. One of the Bermudas. It belongs to…but you know who it belongs to. Don’t you?”

“I do.”

Falco nodded, the pipe’s stem clenched between his teeth. The eyes had an expression in them both sinister and jovial. Mocking, it might be, Matthew thought. Or carefully curious. “Are you afraid?” Falco asked.

There was no sense in lying to the lion. “Yes.”

“And you should be. My employer, I understand, is to be feared.”

“You understand? You’ve never met him?”

“Never met him. Never seen him. I take my orders from him through Sirki.” The eyes had become heavy-lidded, and smoke swirled between the captain and Matthew. Falco poured himself a drink and removed the pipe from his mouth to take a sip. “I know he…commands many people, and directs many things. Some I’ve heard about, but I have ears that can remain closed when I choose. Also, my mouth can remain closed when need be. Which is most of the time.” Another drink of copious strength went down the hatch, and then the pipe’s stem was returned between the teeth.

“You’re not one of his criminals, then?” It was a daring question, but Matthew felt it was the right thing to ask.

“I am the captain of my ship,” came the measured reply. “How long I wished to be a captain, I cannot tell you. How long I labored for this position, again…a long time. He has given me the Nightflyer. He has placed me in the position I desired,” Falco amended. “And pays me what I am worth.”

“To do what, exactly? Sail from where to where?”

“From here to there and everywhere. To ferry passengers and carry cargo and pouches of letters. You see, I’m not like those others.”

“What others?”

Falco spewed smoke in a long stream toward the ceiling. He took another drink. “His other captains. The ones who—” He paused, with his head slightly cocked to one side and his gaze sharp once again. “The ones who do more than ferry passengers,” he finished.

“What more would there be?” Matthew asked, hungry for as much information concerning Professor Fell as he could consume. He reasoned that the more he knew, the stronger his armor.

“More,” said Falco, with a faint and passing smile his eyes did not share. “But I asked you here because I wished to know what your purpose is on Pendulum Island. I wasn’t told. My orders were to expect a passenger. One passenger, not three. Then there was some business with the signal lamp, and I saw fires burning in your town. Evidently the gunpowder bombs Sirki brought along in a wooden crate were put to use. I chose not to know anything further.”

“But you’re curious about my reason for being here?” Matthew prodded. “Why is that?”

Falco drew in more smoke and released it. He drank again before he answered. “You are out of place here. You are not…” He hesitated, hunting the rest of what he was trying to express. “The type I usually see,” he said. “Far from it. And the young girl and the Ga warrior? They shouldn’t be here. I can’t understand this picture I’m seeing. You stood up to that woman in the brig. And you stood up to her for the right reason. My friends, you said. You see, this is what puzzles me: the kind of person I ferry for my employer has no friends, young man. To risk anything for anyone else…well, I’ve never seen that happen before on this ship. So I have to wonder…what in God’s name have you gotten yourself into?”

Matthew pondered the question. His reply was, “I’m a problem-solver. I’ve been summoned by Professor Fell to solve a problem for him. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

“No. And why would I? I keep out of his business.” Falco nodded at some inner comment he’d made to himself. “There. You see? I knew you were different. You’re not of his world, if you get my meaning. But take care that his world doesn’t get into you, because there’s a lot of money in it.”

“Dirty money, to be sure.”

“Clean or dirty, it buys what you please when you please. It’ll buy me a ship of my own one day. I’ll start my own cargo business. That’s what I’m in it for.”

“A reasonable plan,” said Matthew. He decided to try again at a question he wanted answered: “What do the other captains do? Besides ferrying passengers?”

For a time Falco did not answer, instead relighting his pipe from the candleflame. Matthew thought the question was going to go unheeded, and then Falco said, “There are four others. A very nice fleet, the professor has. The other ships carry cannons, which I have said I will not do. I want a clean and fast ship, unburdened by that heavy iron. But the others are also in the business of taking prizes on the high seas.”

“Pirates?”

“They fly no flag,” Falco corrected. “They are in the professor’s employ.”

This scheme was becoming clearer to Matthew, and the picture fascinated him. “So the professor gets a major portion of the prize for affording these…um…other captains a safe harbor?”

“As I said, he pays well. And lately the prizes have been something he obviously finds of great value.”

“What? Treasure boxes of gold coins?”

“Not at all.” Falco drew on his pipe and the blue-tinged Virginia fumes rolled from a corner of his mouth. “In the past few months the professor has been interested in ships carrying loads of sugar from the Caribbean.”

“Sugar?” Matthew had to sit back in his chair on that one, for he’d had the image of Solomon Tully having a temper fit on the Great Dock, and asking the question of Matthew and Hudson Greathouse: What kind of pirate is it that steals a cargo of sugar but leaves everything else untouched?

The third shipment in as many months, Tully had moaned in his disconsolate agony of lost commerce. And I’m not the only one affected by this either! It’s happened to Micah Bergman in Philadelphia and the brothers Pallister in Charles Town!

Professor Fell at work, Matthew thought. Sending his captains out to the trade routes to intercept the sugar boats.

“Why?” Matthew asked, through the smoke that hung in layers between himself and Captain Falco.

“I have no idea. I only know the sugar is brought into that harbor on the northernmost point and taken away in wagons.” He offered Matthew a thin smile that looked like a razor cut. “Possibly this is also of interest to a problem-solver?”

Matthew remembered something else Solomon Tully had said, that cold day there on the Great Dock: There’s something wicked afoot with this constant stealing of sugar! I don’t know where it’s going, or why, and it troubles me no end! Haven’t you two ever faced something you had to know, and it was just grinding your guts to find out?

Looking across the table at Jerrell Falco, Matthew realized the Nightflyer’s captain was also troubled by this unanswered question. Perhaps Falco had sensed a change in the wind, or a shift in the direction of his life toward darker and deeper currents.

And, perhaps, he had decided…far down in his soul, where every man lived…that he didn’t wish to go there.

He was asking Matthew to find out what was happening to the sugar. Because he too, like Solomon Tully, was confronted with something he felt had to be tinged with evil, and if Professor Fell desired shipload after shipload of it…was there any doubt?

“I may look into it,” said Matthew.

“As you please,” said the captain. “With one eye forward and one eye behind, I trust?”

“Always,” Matthew answered.

“Finish your drink,” Falco advised. “Take a slice of lime if you like.”

Matthew drank the rest of the very good brandy. He chose a slice of lime and, like the captain, chewed it down rind and all. Then, realizing he was being dismissed, he stood up from his chair and said goodnight.

“Goodnight, Mr. Corbett,” Falco answered, behind his swirling screen of smoke. “I do hope you solve the problems facing you.”

Matthew nodded. It was a sincere wish, and certainly Matthew shared it. He left the cabin and walked back along the corridor to his own little room on the sea.

Upon opening the door, he found three people waiting for him by the light of the hanging lanterns. Sirki and Jonathan Gentry occupied chairs in his chamber, while Aria Chillany lounged on the edge of the bed. They were sitting as if waiting for a concert or theater program to begin, and the show being a bit late Doctor Gentry was playing a solitaire version of cat’s-cradle with string between his fingers. The giant Sirki stood up, tall and dignified in his white turban and robes, as Matthew entered the room, and the madam pursed her lips and seemed to stretch her legs out a little as if to trip Matthew as he passed.

Matthew only needed a few seconds to compose himself, though seeing these three in his room had given him a severe jolt. “Good evening,” he said, his face expressionless. No need to let them see any hint of nerves. Nathan Spade surely wouldn’t have broken a sweat. “Making yourselves comfortable?” He closed the door at his back, a further sign of confidence he did not entirely embrace.

“Yes,” Sirki said to the question. “Very. So good to see you. I presume you’ve been walking the deck?”

“I fear there’s not much else to do for amusement aboard this ship. I’ve finished the books.”

“Ah.” Sirki nodded. Matthew felt the eyes of the other two on him. “Amusement,” Sirki repeated, in a dry voice. “We are here just in time, it seems, to amuse you. Also to instruct. We shall be reaching our…will you stop that?” Sirki had shot a glare at Gentry, who was still playing with his cat’s-cradle. The hands went down into Gentry’s lap, while the doctor’s mouth crimped with sullen indignation. To further the indignity, Madam Chillany gave a hard little laugh that sounded like clippers snipping off a pair of balls.

Matthew thought that the sea voyage was wearing on his hosts just as it wore on himself. He crossed to his dresser and poured himself a cup of fresh water from the pitcher there. Would Nathan Spade offer his guests a drink? No.

Sirki softly cleared his throat before he spoke again. “Have you been smoking?”

Matthew waited until he’d finished his water, taking leisurely sips in order to prepare his mind. He didn’t really want these three to know he’d been talking to Captain Falco, in case they decided to find out exactly why Falco had summoned him. Falco’s sudden discovery of curiosity and, perhaps, a desire to know the depth of his employer’s evil would not go well for him with this triad of terror-makers. Matthew asked, “Excuse me?”

“Smoking.” Sirki came upon him, nostrils flared. “I smell tobacco smoke on you.”

“Hm,” said Matthew, with raised brows. “I suppose I walked through a cloud or two.”

“On deck? It seems a windy night for smoke clouds.”

“It seems,” Matthew said, meeting Sirki’s dark stare with as much willpower and steadiness as he could find in an otherwise trembly soul, “windy in here. What’s this about?”

“For fuck’s sake!” squalled the woman, reduced to her true sensibilities due to either the buzz of snoring in her ears or the noxious aromas of her cabin companion. “Tell him!”

Sirki paid her no attention, but kept his focus solely on Matthew. “In the morning,” he said after a pause, “the tailor will bring you two suits. Both will fit you very finely. You will wear one of them—your choice—when we dock at Pendulum and leave this ship. From that moment on, you will be Nathan Spade. There will be no more Matthew Corbett until you reboard this ship to be taken back to New York. Is that understood?”

“Somewhat,” Matthew said, with a disinterested shrug to hide his seething curiosity.

Sirki took a stride forward and closed his hand upon Matthew’s collar. “Listen to me, young sir,” said the quiet and deathly voice. “There will be no mistakes made. No slips.” The eyes bored into Matthew’s. “Too much money has been spent to secure you to allow for a mistake. And bear this in mind: you will be a small fish in a pool of predators when you leave this ship. They can smell weakness. Just as I smell tobacco smoke in your clothes, and wonder who you’ve been spending time with tonight and why. They can smell…how shall I put this?…blood in the water. They will eagerly eat you alive, if you show any part of yourself that is not Nathan Spade. Now: is that understood?” Sirki released his grip on Matthew’s collar, and though Matthew’s first impulse was to put his back against a wall he instead set his chin and stood his ground.

“No,” said Matthew. “I don’t understand any of it. So tell me right now. What am I getting into?”

It was Madam Chillany’s cool, rather taunting voice that replied: “Dearest boy, you are entering the professor’s world as one of his own. You are going to attend a gathering. A business meeting, I suppose you’d call it. The professor’s associates from England and Europe are coming to Pendulum Island for a…a…” Here she lost her power of description.

“Conference,” Sirki supplied. “Some have already been there several weeks, waiting for the others to arrive. This has been planned for many months. Your inability to follow directions has made us late to the party, but it can’t begin without you.”

Matthew was still trying to get past the sentence about the professor’s associates from England and Europe coming to Pendulum Island. He felt as if he’d taken a blow to the basket. A convergence of Fell’s criminals, with Matthew Corbett—no, make that Nathan Spade—among the dishonorable guests.

My God, Matthew thought. I’ve stepped into deep—

“Water,” said the woman languidly. “Matthew, would you pour me a cup?”

He did so, as he was not so far gone as to be heedless to good manners. And as Matthew offered the cup to Madam Chillany, Sirki swept it disdainfully from his hand and the cup broke to pieces against strong oak planking that bore the heelmarks of many passengers before himself.

“It’s time,” said Sirki, his glare like embers about to burst into dangerous flames, “that you learned to answer only to the name Nathan.”

Matthew regarded the bits of broken clay. He said easily, “That was a damned fine cup. I presume you’ll bring me yours to correct this unfortunate situation?” He turned his own hot gaze upon Sirki, and let it burn. “In fact, I insist on it.”

“You’re a cocky little bastard!” sneered Doctor Gentry, but there was some humorous admiration in it.

“Oh, now that’s my Nathan!” came Aria’s voice. Her admiration seemed a bit lower. “Give him room, Sirki. I think he’s big enough for the part.”

Matthew had no comment on that remark, but he wondered if his parts were big enough to make a whole.

Sirki smiled faintly, enough to display a glimmer of diamonds. “I think you’re right, Aria.” The smile vanished, like a busker’s conjuring trick. “But so much remains to be seen.” He pulled toward himself the chair he’d vacated, turned it around and sat astride it. “I’ll tell you,” he said, addressing Matthew, “that when we dock, your beauty and her beast will be kept aboard this ship after you have left it. When darkness falls, so as not to draw any undue attention, they will be put into a carriage and taken to a place of confinement. It would not do for any of the other associates to see them, and wonder who they might be. The type of person we’re dealing with here has a high degree of suspicion and a higher degree of cunning. We want no questions left in the air.”

“A place of confinement?” Matthew frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Whether you do or not is of no concern to me, but I’ll tell you also that they will be in comfort and well looked-after.”

“Behind bars, I take it?”

“No bars. But locks and a guard or two, yes. I’ll see to that arrangement. They’ll be near the main house and out of the way, but they’ll also be out of danger.”

“What kind of danger?”

“The same that faces you if anyone discovers you are an imposter. Some of these people make Nathan Spade appear a saint. They kill for sport. And trust me, I can think of two or three who will be doing their best to unravel your rope.”

“This sounds less like a conference as it sounds to be a gathering of…” Sharks, Matthew was about to say. All the smaller sharks—deadly enough in their own oceans—have gathered around the big shark, and so they have swum even here…

Well said, Hudson, he thought. Well said.

“Do not push anyone,” Aria offered, standing up from the bed. She came to Matthew’s side. He thought she smelled of fire and brimstone. Smiling—if that could be called so—she pushed a finger into his right cheek. “But do not let yourself be pushed, either.” Her finger moved to gently trace the outline of the wound underneath his left eye, where the traces of stitchery could still be seen. “This will do you splendidly. They like evidences of violence. It makes them feel all warm inside.”

How does it make you feel? he nearly asked. But he reckoned that she was waiting for him to ask that question, and he was not that much Nathan Spade. Yet. God forbid.

“If these associates are so cunning,” Matthew said, looking at the woman but speaking to the East Indian giant, “then they’ll soon find out I’m not the blackhearted whoremonger I’m supposed to be. A few questions regarding my relations with the Last Chancers and the…um…ins and outs of my particular business, and—”

“No one will ask those questions,” Sirki interrupted. “They know not to know too much. Consider the professor’s organization like a ship. Everyone is on board, yet all have their cabins.”

“Not a good example,” sniffed the woman.

“All have their cabins,” Sirki repeated, “and their responsibilities. Yes, I’m certain some of them will have heard of Nathan Spade, but none will have ever met him or had any business with him. That’s not how it’s done.”

Matthew grunted softly and moved his attention from Aria to Sirki. Gentry, in his own defiance of being told what to do, was playing again with the cat’s-cradle, keeping his hands low and his movements tightly controlled. “I see,” said Matthew. “It’s a security measure, yes? Also to keep any one person from knowing how everything works?”

“I know how everything works,” Sirki reminded him. “Then next would be the madam, and after her would be the good doctor, who has the bad habit of losing his power of concentration due to the many exotic elixirs he has inhaled or imbibed. Isn’t that right, Jonathan?”

“As rain at a funeral,” said Gentry. A crooked half-smile stole across the devilishly-handsome face. “But oh what colors I have seen.”

“I wish you would see less colors and more soap,” Aria said. “You stink.”

“Ha,” Gentry replied, a humorless laugh, as he applied all his brain to the pattern of strings between his fingers. Matthew wondered if a particularly strong and exotic elixir, possibly one made from the jungle mushrooms of South America, had been the doctor’s companion this evening.

“No one will want to know too much about Nathan Spade,” Sirki continued. “It would be bad behavior and a violation of rules. But you can be sure the professor has made your name and reputation known to one and all.”

“Grand,” said Matthew, with a bitter edge. “May I ask if there really is—or was—a Nathan Spade? And if he is, where he is, and if he was, what was his fate?”

“Oh, Nathan was very real.” Aria’s fingers stroked Matthew’s cheek. She stared deeply into his eyes. “But Nathan became weak, with his position and his money. He let himself falter. He became too comfortable.” The fingers went back and forth across Matthew’s flesh. “He forgot who made him, as made all of us.”

“God?” Matthew asked.

“Oh,” she said with a quick smile though the sapphire-colored eyes remained dead, “you are so cute.”

“For a dead man? I’m assuming he’s no longer on this side of Hades?”

Sirki rose to his feet, an ominous sign. The chair creaked with relief. “Madam Chillany shot Nathan Spade in the head last year.”

“Almost a year ago exactly,” she added. The fingers moved, stroking from chin to ear and back again.

“Nathan Spade became a liability,” Sirki went on. “He went into the business of selling information to foreign interests. That conflicted with the professor’s aims. No one you’re going to meet will know that, nor that Master Spade is deceased. The body was cut to pieces, burned, and the remnants—”

“Dumped from a basket into the Thames,” said the woman, nearly whispering it. Whether she was choked with emotion or pride, Matthew couldn’t tell. “He deserved what he got,” she murmured. The fingers abruptly stopped moving. The nails pressed against Matthew’s flesh. Harder, and harder still. She smiled, her eyes glassy. “Such is life,” she said.

Her hand left his face.

She turned away.

Matthew watched her back stiffen as she walked past Sirki and Doctor Gentry. She resumed her casual position on the bed. Perhaps it was the position she was most comfortable with. There was something remote and even desperate about her blank expression, and Matthew didn’t care to look too long upon it because he had left the desolation of winter in New York.

He regarded Sirki once more. “I still don’t understand my purpose. What does the professor expect me to do?”

“Professor Fell,” said the giant, “wants the pleasure of informing you in person.”

Matthew had no response to this. He wished he had put down a second cup of brandy in Falco’s cabin. He wished he had a bottle of rum to keep him company tonight. He wished he could see Berry, who was down the corridor in a locked cabin. He wished he was still a magistrate’s clerk, whose responsibilities began and ended with a quill.

But no, he was somebody now. Someone special in this world.

And for that, he must pay the price.

“Those suits,” he managed to say, “better fit me perfectly. If I’m to play the part, I will look the part.”

“Naturally,” Sirki agreed. “And well spoken, sir.” He spoke then to his companions in crime: “We should leave Mr. Spade to his deliberations, and his rest.”

Aria Chillany left the cabin first, seemingly still in a trance of her own making, followed by the cat’s-cradle devotee. Sirki paused at the door.

“It occurs to me that Captain Falco smokes,” he said.

“Does he?” Matthew offered not a hint of reaction. “I’d say there are at least twenty others aboard who also smoke.”

“True, but the fragrant Virginia weed is more expensive than most, and I think beyond the means of ordinary swabbies. Be careful whose smoke you collect, young sir. It can get in the eyes and make one blind as to their purpose here.” He let that linger in the air, like its own stinging fumes. Then: “Goodnight.” Matthew didn’t return the comment. Sirki left the cabin, and instantly Matthew threw the latch on the door. The horses had already left the barn, yes, but he didn’t want any more manure on his floor. As he readied himself for what he presumed would be a troubled night’s sleep, he could almost sense the Nightflyer approaching Pendulum Island. The brigantine with full sails stretched wide, a few lamps burning on deck, the wake bluish-white under the silver moon and lacy clouds moving slowly across the dark. And the lair of Professor Fell, becoming closer with each wave crossed and each slow roll of the ship. He wondered if Sirki knew Captain Falco was starting to question his lot in life. If maybe Falco had expressed some misgiving to someone who told someone else, who told an ear that led to a voice cautioning the East Indian giant: Falco knows too much, and he thinks too much.

It occurred to Matthew that the captain’s days might be numbered. This might be Falco’s final voyage. Payment in full, when they made landfall.

What would Nathan Spade do?

Laugh and say Good riddance?

Yes. But what was Matthew Corbett to do?

He had a head full of problems, but—sadly—no solutions.

Yet, he thought.

And then he extinguished his lanterns except for one candle left burning, and he took to bed in the Nightflyer’s creaking belly.

Fifteen

MATTHEW had expected to hear a shouted “Land ho,” but instead the note of a trumpet signalled the sighting of Pendulum Island.

There was a rushing forward of sailors eager to set foot onto solid earth. Matthew stood among them in the bright warm morning sun and watched the island take shape.

Possibly by the eye of a gull it had the shape of a pendulum, but from this vantage point it was a mass of jagged black rocks and broken gray cliffs with a sparse covering of moss and brown lichens. Inland there looked to be a verdant wilderness, which did not soothe Matthew’s soul. He yet saw no sign of manmade structures, and had to wonder if Professor Fell’s domain lay somewhere within the very rock itself.

He was dressed for Nathan Spade’s success. His charcoal-gray suit with thin stripes in a hue of lighter gray fit him like a prison cell. His pale blue shirt was adorned with ruffles at collar and cuffs, which seemed to Matthew to be a little precious for an ex-jayhawk, but then again it was likely perfect for a genteel whoremaster-around-town. His stockings were chalky-white and his black boots buffed to an admirable shine; they gleamed with every step. He was clean-shaven and ruddy-cheeked, his hair was brushed back and—by Aria Chillany’s insistence this morning—put under strict control with two fingers of pomade that smelled of sandalwood and another sweetly pungent scent that made him think of the incense curling from a Turkish lamp in Polly Blossom’s parlor. Call it, he decided, the smell of ‘vice.’

It made sense to him that such an aroma would be leaking from Nathan Spade’s pores.

“It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t.” Matthew was aware that Berry—freed from the confines of her cabin during the daylight hours—had come up beside him. The sailors gathered around were also aware of her presence, and seemed to bend toward her like saplings in a strong wind to get the womanly perfume of her hair and flesh. But one glance from the false Nathan Spade and they straightened their backs and went about their business, for they knew the young man had favor of the master of Pendulum.

Matthew saw Captain Falco at the wheel, turning the Nightflyer a few degrees to port. He took stock of the sun and reasoned they were making a course to the southeast. “Not much,” he said to Berry, continuing her statement, “but obviously it’s an important destination.” He examined Berry’s face, and found her eager-eyed and nearly as sun-ruddy as himself. Her freckles had emerged by the dozens across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, and her curly hair flowed free in the breeze and seemed the color of some kind of tawny-red candy sold by the handful to sweet-toothed children. She is on a grand adventure, he thought. She is all kite and no string.

For all his masquerade of courage and fortitude in the faces of Madam Chillany and the giant Sirki, he had not been able to bring himself to tell Berry that she and Zed were destined for lock-and-key upon landfall. He trusted Sirki, that they would be well-cared for. He really had no choice but to trust Sirki. But as he stood beside Berry her hand suddenly came out and searched for his. He took it firmly, and she looked him in the face and asked, “Are we going to be all right?”

“Yes, we are,” he answered without hesitation.

The island grew nearer. Waves crashed against the rocks and white foam spewed up. A whirring of gulls thrashed the air.

“Are you afraid?” Berry asked, in a quiet voice.

“Yes,” Matthew said, “I am.” But he recovered from this spillage of truth long enough to give her a sturdy smile with no lack of false bravado at its center, and he added, “But before this is done, they’re going to fear me.”

And though he only half-believed it, he fully meant it.

The Nightflyer was going to pass this northernmost point of Pendulum Island on its starboard side. Matthew and Berry still held hands as the first sign of human life came into view, and mayhaps they clasped hands harder at the sight. Two masted ships of dark design were moored to a wharf. Dark design, due to the gunports along the hulls. Matthew thought that here were two of Fell’s plunderers used to raid the sugar merchants. One look at the snouts of cannons protruding from those ports, and any issue of resistance was ended. Just beyond the wharf was a low-slung wooden building that likely was a warehouse for nautical goods storage. A dirt road curved away from the wharf and entered the forest, where it disappeared among green fronds and the thick walls of trees. And up above, perched atop a gray cliff but partly hidden by vegetation, was the stone wall of a fort also guarded by cannons on its parapets. The professor’s estate? Matthew wondered.

Onward the Nightflyer sailed, sliding over blue sea and white swirling foam. Captain Falco had a sure touch on the wheel. At his urging the ship moved between fangs of black rock. To starboard Matthew and Berry saw another pier come into view, this one tucked into a small cove where the waves were more gracious and the rocks less fangly. More cliffs of some thirty or forty feet faced the sea, and along them was a road that followed their ascent. Before the road disappeared around a bend, Matthew figured it was nearly a hundred feet above the water. A pair of coaches, each with four horses, waited alongside the pier. Evidently someone had come to witness the arrival of that notable black-hearted scoundrel Nathan Spade.

“Miss Grigsby, I would ask that you return to your cabin.”

The voice, so close to their ears, startled them both. Sirki was watching the pier. “A spyglass might be in use,” he said. “We wish no one to inquire about the red-haired girl.” He took Berry’s elbow. “Come below, please.”

“What?” She resisted his pull, showing remarkable strength. In truth, her heart had leaped to her throat and she could hardly speak. She looked to Matthew for aid, and when she spoke again she forced the words out one by one: “Why do I have to go to my cabin?”

“A moment,” Matthew said to Sirki, and the East Indian giant withdrew his hand and also his presence by a few paces. Matthew stared intensely into Berry’s eyes. “Listen to me,” he said quietly, even as the gulls croaked and called above. “You can’t be seen by anyone on the island. Nor can Zed. Sirki’s going to take you somewhere for…safekeeping,” he decided to say. “It won’t be a cell. Will it?” He darted a glance at Sirki, long enough for the giant to shake his turbanned head. Then back to Berry’s eyes again. He saw fear in them, and the wet beginnings of tears. “Listen.” He took both her hands. “In this case, I agree with Sirki. I don’t want you or Zed to be seen by any of the…the creatures I’m going to meet. I want you out of the way.” She started to protest, but a finger went to her lips. “No,” he said. “Don’t speak. When this is done, we’ll go home. All of us, safe and sound. But for that to happen, you’re going to have to trust me to do my job.”

“I can help you,” she said, with a note of pleading.

“No you cannot. Not in the way you wish. You can really help me by going with Sirki to your cabin, and waiting there until he summons you to leave the ship. Also by controlling Zed, if you can. Let him know that he needs to lie low for a time. Both of you do. Sirki!” Matthew’s voice was harsher than he’d intended, but it caused the giant to step forward with something like obedience. “Where will they be taken? Tell me now, and tell me the truth.”

“Of course. They will be taken to the village of Templeton on the east side of the island. Many people live there, but none who will be a danger to your friends. Miss Grigsby and the Ga will be afforded quarters at the Templeton Inn, run by a very efficient Scotsman who knows to ask no questions. The inn is used primarily for the professor’s guests, when not invited to the castle. And I can tell you that the innkeeper’s wife is a very excellent cook.” He paused for a few seconds before continuing. “I will say also that two guards will always be present, and if Miss Grigsby and the Ga desire to walk about the village they will never walk alone. Is that truth enough for you?”

“Sufficient,” came the curt answer. Matthew was in no mood for niceties; this subject was disagreeable to him to an extreme, yet he knew how necessary—and unavoidable—was the outcome. “You have to go,” he told Berry.

“Now,” Sirki added, with a glance at the oncoming wharf. Captain Falco had given the order to drop sails, and weighted ropes had been thrown over the sides to reduce their speed into the cove.

Berry realized she had no choice. Ordinarily this would have made her temper flare, but she knew that to let herself be angry here was pointless. Matthew was doing what he needed to do, and indeed she had to trust him. She nodded. “All right.” She was still holding one of Matthew’s hands, and this she released. She turned away from him without another word, and Sirki followed her across the deck to the stairway down.

Matthew started to call It won’t be for long after her, but he didn’t wish to lie so he kept his mouth closed. He had no idea how long it might be. Several days? Weeks? A month or more? He dreaded to think, therefore he shut away all thoughts to that regard.

The Nightflyer’s speed had slowed dramatically, and the brigantine was now mostly drifting. The ship’s course was met by four longboats that had set off from the wharf. Ropes were thrown from ship to boats, and now the crews on the smaller craft had the work of rowing the Nightflyer in the rest of the way and securing Captain Falco’s vessel to her mooring bollards. Falco strode forward to the bow and nearly rode the sprit in his intense watch over the task at hand. He gave a few commands which were relayed to the seaman at the wheel, but otherwise he was silent.

So it was done within another twenty minutes, the ship being moored to the wharf and the longboats withdrawing. Matthew noted Jonathan Gentry and Aria Chillany on deck, dressed in their finest for the landing. A couple of unfortunate and weary-looking sailors had been impressed to carry their luggage. Matthew also saw Croydon and Squibbs wandering about, but they cared not to cast a glance in Matthew’s direction and that likewise was fine with him.

The gangplank was lowered. “All ashore!” came a sea-fevered cry, yet there was no rush for the crew to leave the ship for there was still work to be done before the Nightflyer could be considered well-and-truly arrived. Falco stood on the poop deck, casting a long shadow. Matthew saw that the two black coaches waiting at the head of the wharf was manned by two drivers, and looked to be a type he knew to be called a berline, enclosed with room for four passengers, the driver sitting on a forward perch. But atop one of the coaches sat a pair of men in gray suits. They both had bright shocks of orange hair, and were sunning themselves as they presumably waited for the Nightflyer’s passengers to disembark. The lithe figure of a young woman with short-trimmed blonde hair stood in a casual attitude beside the second coach. She was a sight to behold and would have caused jaws to drop in New York, for she was wearing a man’s brown breeches, high-topped brown boots, and a deep purple waistcoat over a cream-colored blouse.

Whoever they were, Matthew reasoned they had come to see Nathan Spade set foot on Pendulum Island. Either that, or the amusements on Pendulum were so lacking they had little else to do.

“Are you ready?”

Matthew looked to his left, into the sapphire-blue eyes of Aria Chillany. Gentry stood a few feet behind her. His eyes were bloodshot. He wore a stupid smile directed at no one. Though the Nightflyer had docked, the doctor was still flying. Matthew wondered if Gentry’s proclivity for his potions had to do with the fact that he would soon be hearing his master’s voice, and this paragon of handsome charm was unnerved by that oncoming certainty. In any event, Gentry was skunked.

“I’m ready,” Matthew managed to answer.

“You know your subject, then?” Her mouth was very close to his.

“I said I’m ready.” Spoken with fortitude, but little surety.

“Your luggage is here.” She motioned toward a seaman who stood nearby shouldering a brown canvas bag. Matthew had been given it this morning, and had dutifully packed away his belongings. “You should be first off the ship. I’ll follow along.”

He nodded. It was time for the grand entrance, and this particular—and peculiar—play to commence. He crossed the deck to the gangplank, gave a glance at the two men and the woman who watched the wharf, and then he puffed out his chest and determined to put a little strut in his stride, as befitting a big cock-of-the-walk.

Matthew started across the gangplank, taking long strides as if he owned the world and everyone else was just a passing visitor. Suddenly his world tipped over on its side. He realized his sealegs were still measuring the roll of a ship after three weeks on the Atlantic. He staggered left and staggered right, drunk with solidity. On the third stagger he reached for the handrail but there was no handrail to be gripped, and he gave a curse to both Nathan Spade’s vanity and the fact that God was a more mischievous trickster than ever any preacher imagined in a sonorous Sabbath’s speech.

Then he went right off the gangplank, splashing headlong into the drink between the wharf and the Nightflyer’s hull.

The water was far warmer than Manhattan’s winter harbor yet still cool enough to make swimming uncomfortable about the family jewels. He reckoned he might have shouted underwater, for an explosion of bubbles hit him in the face and following that was a rush of saltwater into his mouth. There goes the hair pomade, he thought either grimly or crazily. Then he realized he had better kick to the surface and get out of here, for it was a shame for his fine suit to be so soaked.

His next thought was: Damn, I’ve made a mess of this already!

He came up to the noise of hooting and cat-calling, and someone yelling with unbridled mirth, “Man overboard!” He pushed the hair out of his face and saw Aria making her way unsteadily down the gangplank, but she had prepared for this moment by taking small steps. She speared him with her eyes as one might spear a fat-bellied bottom feeder. A sailor appeared holding a long wooden pole with a leather-wrapped hook on one end, which he offered to Matthew. The hook having been taken, Matthew was pulled up until he could get a grip on the edge of the wharf, and so struggling and scrabbling like a dumb, doomed crab for a moment he at last hauled himself up onto the hardwood.

Oh, the laughter! The hilarity! The horror of it all! Even Captain Falco had his hand strategically to his face, and was examining some point of interest up on the mainmast.

He got himself up on his feet and stood dripping. He heard the harsh, rasping laughter of the two orange-haired gents coiling toward him like whips. The young blonde woman—bless her—watched in silence.

Matthew felt a box closing around him. It might be a coffin. He decided he would not let it close. It was time—oh, yes—for Nathan Spade to speak out.

He looked up at the grinning crew of the Nightflyer. He looked up into the laughter, and he brought a wide grin of his own up from somewhere, and he puffed his chest out again like a banty rooster and he hollered at the top of his salty lungs, “Fuck all! I’ve wet my fuckin’ britches, haven’t I?”

The words did not taste very good, but the sentiment was delicious.

The laughter changed; it was difficult to tell exactly how, but it did. For Matthew began to laugh too, and now the joke was not just about one strutting man who’d taken a dive into the drink, but about all men who cast their fate upon a treacherous path and find themselves quite unexpectedly falling from grace.

They grinned and nodded and nearly cheered him, and then Matthew turned away with a sweeping flourish of his arm that said I am the same as you, only better dressed. In his squishy boots he strode past Aria Chillany, who moved to give him way, and on his purposeful yet still dizzied walk up the wharf he saw that the two orange-haired men were no longer laughing but watching him with narrowed eyes from fox-like faces, and that the blonde woman had climbed into her berline and could no longer be seen.

He continued onward, leaving puddles of the Atlantic in his footsteps. Madam Chillany caught up with him and said in a guarded voice, “Careful of those two. Jack and Mack Thacker. You don’t want to turn your back on them.”

The Thacker brothers. Matthew recalled hearing mention of them from Hudson. And here they were, in the ugly flesh. They sprawled atop the coach, each wearing an identical gray suit, white shirt, white stockings and black boots. In fact, they were identical twins, or nearly much so. They looked like lazy animals taking the morning sun. One spoke to the other and the other spoke back, but the eyes in their granite-jawed and sharp-nosed faces never left the person of Nathan Spade. They looked to be in their early forties, short and compact like rowdy tavern brawlers ready to bet a coin on a mouth of broken teeth. Someone else’s broken teeth, of course, because the Thackers had thick forearms and shoulders, legs like squat treetrunks and necks that could burst a hangman’s noose. Their faces were flushed with the blood that pulsed just beneath the skin’s surface, or perhaps they didn’t take the sun very well. As Matthew approached the berlines, he saw that one of the twins had a streak of gray at the front of the orange hair, which was brushed back from the forehead and shiny with pomade; the other twin did not share this mark, and so it was the only thing Matthew could see different about them. They had small deepset eyes that looked to be pale green, like sharp splinters of glass.

They did not speak or move from their languid positions as Matthew approached.

“Nathan!” said the woman behind him. “We’ll take the other coach.”

Matthew changed his direction. He heard the brothers snicker at almost the same time.

The one with the gray streak said in a heavy Irish brogue, “Go on with ya! Listen to your—”

“Mama!” said the second, and they both snickered again.

Matthew shot them a dark look, but he also offered a thin smile. He stopped in his wet tracks. Now was as good a time as any to display his mettle, though it be fashioned from the cheapest tin. “Should I know you gentlemen?”

“I don’t know,” said one, and the other added, “Should ya?”

Interesting, Matthew thought. They finished each others’ sentences. They wore identical smirks. The coachman of their berline kept his head down and his attention forward, as if fearful of imminent violence. Matthew could feel it in the air. These two liked to bloody up a victim, and maybe they were sizing him up as fodder for their fists.

“My name is Nathan Spade,” said Matthew. “Do you have names?”

One of them answered with an outthrust chin, “I think your name is—”

“Soggy Ass,” said the one with the gray streak, and both of them grinned tightly, with no humor on their faces.

“Nathan?” Aria’s voice had also tightened. “Come along. Yes?”

“Hold her petticoat, Nathan!” said the gray-streaker.

“Go on with ya!” said the second, who perhaps had larger ears than his brother.

But Matthew stood his ground. “Oh,” he said easily, though his heart was pounding, “I’ve heard of you two. The Thackers. Which is Jack and which is Mack? Or have you forgotten?”

Their grins began to slowly fade.

A movement within their coach caught Matthew’s attention.

He saw someone lean forward to peer through the door’s open window. It was a woman. He met her eyes, and he felt turned inside-out.

She stared at him only briefly, possibly five seconds before she leaned back into the seat once more. But Matthew was left with the stunned impression of one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. She had tawny flesh that seemed almost radiant. Her long ebony hair, topped by a gray hat tilted to one side with a spill of black lace across her forehead, flowed down about her shoulders in rich waves. She had an oval face with high cheekbones, a straight and narrow-bridged nose, and a full-lipped mouth that seemed to Matthew to be crimped tightly on many secrets. Her eyes were very dark, perhaps as ebony as her hair, and they had regarded Matthew in passing, without life or fire or spirit.

Whoever she was, she was not altogether there. In just the instant of seeing her, Matthew thought this lovely creature was terribly, heartbreakingly lonely. And he thought it was a shame, that such a pretty girl should sit alone.

“What’re ya lookin’ at…”

“…boyo?”

The two brothers slid off the coach. They stood a few feet distant from each other, one to Matthew’s left and one to the right. They had lost their grins. Their faces were impassive, and brutal in their lack of expression.

“The woman in the coach—” Matthew began.

“Never ya mind her,” said the gray-streaker.

“Go ’bout your business,” said the other. It was no doubt a warning.

“Nathan?” Aria’s voice held a hard edge. “To our coach, please.” Gentry was staggering toward them, whether by nature or by naturalist potion difficult to tell. Behind him came the sailors bearing their luggage.

The two brothers were silent. They were waiting, it seemed, for Nathan Spade’s next move in this small but potentially deadly game. Matthew realized the stocky pair were about as tall as the point of his nose. He said, “Good to meet you gentlemen,” and turned toward Aria. He had taken two strides when one of the Thackers let out the sound of a wet and nasty fart and the other gave a quick grating laugh that made the flesh on the back of Matthew’s neck crawl.

“Let’s keep moving,” said Aria in a hushed voice, her face frozen in a smile but her dark blue eyes glittering with either repressed rage or something akin to fear, if she knew what that was. It was clear that the Thacker twins were no devotees of good manners, and Matthew figured his masquerade—and usefulness—might have ended here at the head of this wharf if those two had been incited to explosive riot. And it seemed the Indian girl might be their powderkeg.

There it was, Matthew thought as he opened the berline’s door. The beautiful woman in the other coach was most decidedly an Indian…not of Sirki’s nationality, but of the tribe of Walker In Two Worlds.

He slid along the leather bench seat and found himself sitting across from the blonde-haired woman dressed in the male finery.

She aimed at him a pair of eyes the color of golden ale. “You’re dripping on my boots,” she said, her voice low and controlled and not lacking in menace.

“Pardon me.” Instantly he shifted his position, which he figured was not what Nathan Spade would have done, but he was still Matthew Corbett at heart and in manners. Something to work on, he decided. He looked at the third occupant of their berline, a rotund bald-headed man with three chins. This individual, dressed in a beige suit and a dark green blouse with lavender ruffles, was taking a pinch of snuff from a gold box. He wore round spectacles that magnified his watery blue eyes and made the small red veins in them jump out. Adorning the edge of his right ear were seven small gold ornaments of varying geometric shapes. His lips were as thin as a pauper’s wallet, his bulbous nose as large as Lord Cornbury’s ambitions. Matthew guessed his age at around fifty. “Good morning,” the man said when the two huge nostrils had taken their drink of whuffie-dust. “I am Augustus Pons. You are Nathan Spade.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I am.” No hand was offered from either man.

“Ah,” said Pons, with a slight nod. The eyelids blinked drowsily. When he spoke, his jowls danced. “We have been awaiting your arrival. I have been on this island for nearly one month. Why is it, may I ask, that it took so long for you to join us?”

“Complications,” said Aria as she entered the coach and sat beside Matthew. She offered nothing else, but stared at Augustus Pons in a way that told him to ask no more questions. Pons smiled wanly, showing small nuggets of brown teeth, and visibly retreated as if going down a hole and pulling it in after himself.

Evidently the luggage had been loaded in the berline’s cargo compartment at the rear and Jonathan Gentry had found a seat in the other coach, as there was only room for four here. Aria rapped on the wall behind her as a signal to the driver. A whip cracked and the team set off.

“Nathan Spade,” said the blonde woman. She was staring intently at him, her head cocked slightly to one side as if trying to make up her mind about something. “Where did you sail from?”

“New York,” Matthew said before Aria could speak. He’d decided it was time for him to chart his own course. “I had business there.”

“Don’t we all?” she asked, with a half-smile and a lift of a thick blonde brow. Then she said, “I’m Minx Cutter. Pleased to meet you.” She offered a hand, which Matthew took. “Welcome to Pendulum,” she offered, with a squeeze before releasing him.

“Thank you. I believe those other two don’t welcome me quite as graciously.”

“Jack and Mack Thacker,” she said. “They go everywhere together. I understand Jack is the elder by a few minutes. He has the streak of gray.”

“Ah.” Matthew paused for a few seconds before asking the question that followed: “And who is the young Indian woman?” Minx Cutter shrugged. “They call her Fancy.” The coach was climbing the cliffside road. Matthew glanced to the right, out the window past Aria, and saw their height increasing over the sunlit blue cove. His drenched clothes were a nuisance, but he’d suffered worse. He made a show of examining his fingernails, which were perfectly clean, while he gathered impressions of Minx Cutter.

She had a hard quality of beauty. There was nothing soft about her except possibly the curly ringlets of her hair. Even those might have been thorny to the touch. She had a firm jawline and a square chin, a tight-lipped mouth and a nose that appeared to have been broken and improperly repaired, for it bore a small bump in the middle and crooked slightly to the left. She was slimly-built, but far from being frail. Matthew thought she was built for speed and agility. She held herself with calm composure and obvious high regard. Her intelligent eyes, light brown with a golden element in their hue, feigned disinterest, but Matthew had the sense that she was also sizing him up. She might have been anywhere from twenty to twenty-five, as her peach-toned flesh was unlined; she appeared to Matthew to not have much practice in smiling. So young to be so deeply in the professor’s pocket, he thought. Therefore he had to wonder exactly what Minx Cutter did for the emperor of crime and the owner of Pendulum Island.

He was mulling over the possibilities when he heard a man’s scream. Looking out his own window to the left, he was uncomfortably aware that the four horses of the second berline were thundering up nearly wheel-to-wheel of their own coach and that this precarious path was suited only for one set of wheels at a time. He saw that the coachman had been removed by force, and sitting with reins in hand was Mack Thacker, while Jack swung the whip with mad abandon over the rumps of their team.

“Oh my!” croaked Augustus Pons. His eyes were gigantic. “I fear those two are up to—”

The whip cracked against the side of their coach, causing Pons to jump and spill most of the snuff from his open box. As the brown dust swirled around, Matthew saw Jack Thacker grit his teeth and swing the whip to connect with their own driver, who must have been stung by the blow because there was a strident cry of pain. The next whipstrike did something particularly nasty, for both brothers grinned and jostled each other with their elbows.

Matthew sensed uneasily that their speed was becoming dangerous on this already-dangerous road. There were no walls nor railings; if two wheels on the cliffside went off, so would follow the berline.

And then Jack Thacker in a red-cheeked frenzy began to whip the team of Matthew’s coach to more reckless speed. Matthew realized with a start of fear that their whipstruck driver must have abandoned his seat and reins. They were sitting in a runaway coach only a few inches from disaster. Minx Cutter realized it at nearly the same time because she cried out a most unladylike “Shit!” and Matthew reckoned that under the circumstances it could be a command.

Sixteen

AN enraged cry flew from Aria Chillany’s mouth toward the boisterous brothers: “Stop it!”

But that, Matthew reasoned in his cool center at this moment of heat, was like asking the breeze to cease blowing and the ocean to quit waving, for the Irish twins were now both red-faced and crazed in this drama of their own making and there was no stopping them until…what? Nathan Spade’s coach went over the cliff?

As if to emphasize this thought, the whip struck out again and hit the edge of Matthew’s window, knocking loose a chip of black paint.

The runaway horses surged forward at an even more frantic gallop, and now the wheels of the Thackers’ speeding coach hit those of Matthew’s berline, rim to rim, and a shudder passed through the framework that made the joints moan.

“Those bastards!” Aria seethed. She thrust herself across Matthew’s lap and halfway out the window. “Stop it!” she screamed at the brothers. “Stop it or you’re dead, do you hear?”

It occurred to Matthew that threatening the Thackers with death was not quite the way to resolve this problem, particularly from the way they laughed and snorted at this pronouncement and also due to the fact that they were not in the coach on the cliff’s edge. Now the road was curving. The coach began to swing to the right and the precipice just beyond. Aria pulled herself back in and looked into Matthew’s face, her eyes wild and black hair windblown. “Do something!” she shrieked.

“For the sake of Christ do something!” Pons implored with a similar shriek, the lines of his face brown with whuffie-dust and his eyes wet with terror behind the magnifiers.

There was a crash up underneath the coach on the right rear side. Matthew was sure one of the wheels had left the road. The berline shook so hard Pons’ spectacles vibrated off his face and hung by his ornamented ear. His jowls nearly slapped him silly. Matthew’s heart was a constant drummer. He felt the coach leaning toward the gates of heaven…or wherever this bunch would end up. Jack Thacker swung his whip back and forth between the two teams, absorbed in a race that seemed to Matthew to be wholly and terribly one-sided, and as a flame of anger burst into barely-controlled rage he realized that if he went over the side in this shuddering berline he would never set eyes upon Professor Fell and never know why he’d been brought here, and both Berry and Zed would likely be murdered and buried somewhere on this island, and everything—his entire life and all his struggles—had been for naught.

“The hell you say,” he spoke to himself, in a voice that seemed torn from the throat of Nathan Spade.

He was going to have to get up there, find the reins and take control of the team. And he had to go now.

He couldn’t get the berline’s left-side door open, for the wheels of the other coach were already scraping the paint away. As if reading his mind and intent, Jack cracked the whip nearly through Matthew’s window into his face; the smell of burned air rushed past his nose. Matthew countered by angling his body to the right and kicking the opposite door open. Then he pushed himself past the two women and grabbed hold of the open door in an effort to climb atop the berline. The sea glistened sixty feet below his boots. The right rear wheel was balanced on the precipice. He started climbing up the coach’s side and saw the driver clinging to dear life on top, arms and legs spread out and fingers grasping anything that afforded a grip. How fast the horses were going now, Matthew didn’t dare guess but the wind of progress up here was terrific. The road was curving again. There was a high thin skreeling sound of contact as the wheels of the Thackers’ coach once more gouged paint and wood splinters. Matthew’s coach lurched further to the right and he heard Augustus Pons give his own high thin skreel of terror from within.

Matthew crawled over the trembling driver, who bore a bright scarlet welt across the side of his face. Then the whip came at Matthew, striking left and right, as Jack Thacker aimed to knock Nathan Spade off his perch. “Stop it, you damned fool!” Aria shouted through the left-side window, but the stridency of her voice only added more cotton to Jack’s tinderbox. He began whipping the runaways as Mack gave a shrill laugh and popped the traces on their own team. Matthew kept his head down and inched toward the driver’s seat; he figured it was all a ghastly joke to those two, but the way the berline was rocking back and forth, the joke might be on himself, Aria, Pons and Minx Cutter. He could imagine the Indian girl frozen in her seat in an attitude of silent acceptance, while Jonathan Gentry might be curled up on the floorboard singing a song of sixpence.

Well, Matthew thought grimly, it was time to show what a Soggy Ass could do.

He reached the driver’s seat and got up on his knees. But where the hell were the reins? Dragging somewhere beneath the horses? The team was throwing up dust and gravel from under their hooves. Matthew saw the road ahead continuing to curve, and now once more the coach was sliding toward the bitter edge.

He heard the crack of Jack Thacker’s whip almost in his ear. At the same time, a searing pain striped across the left side of his neck. It was enough for him to lose his senses and his position on the seat, and suddenly he was falling to the right in a wild flailing of arms and legs.

Even in his pain and panic Matthew realized the only thing between him and the sea below was the berline’s open door, and it was swinging erratically. He reached out for it as if trying to grasp God’s own hand. He caught the windowframe and clung desperately to it as his boots dangled over the edge. He heard what sounded like pistol shots: the spokes of the right rear wheel breaking loose.

“Here!” came a woman’s shout. “Grab hold!”

He looked up at Minx Cutter, who stood crouched over and braced in the coach’s doorway. Her right arm was outstretched toward him, her fingers clawing at the air in an effort to reach his.

He hooked one arm through the window and with the other hand grasped Minx’s. She pulled him toward her but he decided he was not going back into the coach, but rather back into the fray, and the bully boys be damned. He let go of her fingers when he could get his boots on the doorframe’s edge. Then he climbed back up the berline’s side and hauled himself to the top where the coachman still sprawled in abject terror. It occurred to Matthew, as he fought off the pain of his whipstung neck, that working for Professor Fell in any capacity was an exercise in throwing caution to the wind.

Jack’s whip searched for his skin as Matthew crawled once more toward the driver’s seat. What these two were trying to prove was beyond reckoning, or perhaps they simply delighted in deadly games. Call it life-or-death chess, Matthew thought. Fair enough.

The coach suddenly tilted to the right, and both Matthew and the driver had to grab hold of anything their fingers could latch onto. There was a grinding, shrieking noise under the berline. Matthew thought that both right-side wheels had gone off the edge. The horses were fighting to keep from being pulled over by the berline’s weight. For a few horrific seconds it seemed the horses were going to lose, but then they righted the coach and the terrible enterprise kept on shuddering at breakneck speed along the hellish road with the demonic Thackers grinning from crimson faces.

Matthew continued his crawl for the driver’s seat as the whip cracked over his head. Again he searched for the reins, and determined that indeed they were down amid the horses somewhere. His mind deserted him; he had no idea what to do. Without the reins, the horses were beyond control. He thought he must do something to slow the berline, but what it was he could do was another matter. The whip came at him once more, and he ducked to avoid having an eye extinguished.

“Get out of the way!”

Matthew looked over his shoulder. Minx Cutter was on her feet atop the coach, daring Jack Thacker to strike at her. “Get out of the way!” she repeated in a shout, her curly hair flying in the wind and her face a firm-jawed, rather frightening visage of raw determination.

He drew himself aside so she could get past him. A glance at Jack Thacker showed the elder brother with his teeth clenched, and rearing his arm back to swing the lash again upon either Matthew or the young woman.

But Minx Cutter was faster.

In a blur, her hand went into her waistcoat. It reappeared with an extra finger of sharp silver. She turned the knife in her hand to seize the grip. She hardly seemed to take aim. Her throw of the knife across the distance between the coaches, taking into account the speed, the whirling dust and the shuddering of the damaged berline, was nothing short of awesome. The blade flashed with sunlight on its arrow-straight path to the hand that held the whip, and when it pierced the flesh between forefinger and thumb Jack Thacker’s fingers opened and he howled like a dog.

Then Minx Cutter leaped past Matthew and landed upon the back of the first horse on the right. She grabbed hold of the flying mane and leaned down so far Matthew thought surely her legs would lose their grip and she would be lost beneath hooves and wheels. But then she came up with dust on her face and the reins in her hand. She put her shoulders and back into slowing the team, all the time shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” in a voice that made Matthew think her lungs must be made of leather.

Within ten seconds of her handling the reins and shouting for order in this scene of chaos, Minx Cutter was obeyed. The horses began to slow. The offending coach sped on past with a final scraping of wheels, as Mack slapped the reins and Jack held his bleeding hand to his chest like a wounded dove.

Minx stayed aboard her horse until the berline had rolled to a creaking and clattering stop. It sounded to Matthew as if the entire framework was about to fall to pieces, yet miraculously it held together. The horses nickered and jostled each other, still nervous from their run, but Minx held them with a steady hand. When she was satisfied, she slid off her mount to the ground and walked around to look at the battered right-side wheels, her own boots about three inches from the precipice.

“My God!” Matthew had to say. He was nearly sputtering with admiration. “How did you do that?”

She gave him a narrow-eyed glance that said she didn’t suffer fools, and that she ranked him highly on that low list.

“Get out! Get out!” Aria Chillany shouted. In response, Augustus Pons made it out of the coach before tossing his breakfast in long streams over the cliff. His face had taken on a green cast to match his blouse. Minx Cutter aimed her most reproachful gaze at him, hard enough to slap his jowls without lifting a finger, and then she called for the coachman, who peered over the berline’s side like a terrified child.

“Come down here and look at these wheels!” she commanded. “Can we keep going or not?”

The coachman, a sweating bundle of raw nerves, obeyed in spite of his obvious desire to cling to safety as long as possible. Matthew eased himself off the driver’s seat to the ground, where his knees begged to give way. Yet he thought that one stumble and fall today was already one too many, and to show weakness before the formidable presence of Minx Cutter would not do honor to the dirty reputation of Nathan Spade.

“I’ll have them killed!” seethed Madam Chillany as she staggered from the coach. She stared along the dusty road in the direction the Thackers had gone. “No matter who they think they are, they are dead!”

“I believe…we can go on,” said the coachman, which might have been the most difficult six words he had ever spoken. He followed this statement with a more cautious, “If we go slow.”

“Just get us to the castle as quick as you can!” Aria blotted her face with a frilly handkerchief. Her eyes were ablaze. “Pons, stop that! Wipe your mouth and get back inside!”

The fat man, whose legs were almost freakishly short, crawled into the berline as if he were closing about himself the spiky confines of an Iron Maiden. He sat with his head tilted back, his eyes squeezed shut and both hands clasped to his mouth.

“Nathan!” Aria snapped, to coax Matthew from his reverie. “Get in!”

Matthew’s knees were still trembly. “When I’m ready!” he snapped back, only half-acting. He had a hand on the whip’s sting to his neck; the pain had eased a little, but the welt was going to be worthy of some soothing ointment. He planted himself in front of Minx, aware that one step to his left would send him to find out how his old employer, Magistrate Isaac Woodward, fared in the Great Courthouse Beyond. “I asked you how you did that,” he said.

“I jumped,” she replied cooly. “How else?”

“Not that. Anyone could’ve done that,” he lied. “I was about to do the same thing.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he answered, feeling his oats. “I mean with the knife. How did you throw the knife like that?”

She got up close to him and stared him in the eyes. Her golden-hued gaze was both solemn and yet touched with a shade of humor, though the expression on her face remained absolutely impassive. She let a few seconds expire, during which Matthew began to feel extremely uncomfortable. Then she said, nearly in a whisper, “It’s all in the wrist.” She strode past him and swung herself up into the coach.

Matthew had the thought he was still in the water, and maybe in far too great a depth for either comfort or safety. He had the feeling of being a small fish at the mercy of any number of predators. But where was there to go from here, except deeper still? He waited until the coachman had secured the reins, positioned himself back in his seat and the horses were ready, as much as they could be after that wild frenzy of whipping and the pounding of hooves. Then Matthew got into the coach and after a bemused and careful glance at Minx Cutter closed his eyes to think more clearly. But just before his eyes shut he saw her turn her head to take him in, and he had the distinct feeling that she would be examining him as he sat drowsing, and—a dangerous feeling—she might be thinking she knew him from somewhere yet could not decide where the meeting had taken place.

In any event, he could feel her watching him. Taking him apart, as it were.

And suddenly he thought he was becoming more Nathan Spadish by the moment, for he reckoned he wouldn’t be averse to being taken apart by a woman like her.

No, not in the least.

“Giddup!” said the coachman, almost apologetically, and the injured berline rolled on up the road like a Saturday-night drunk determined to get home before cock’s crow.

In a few moments Matthew gave up his pretense of rest to mark their progress. The road turned away from the cliffs. It went inland through a thick forest where moss hung from trees like banners of emerald-colored lace and flowers of intense purples, reds and yellows burned the eyes. The smells of strange fruit both sweetened and soured the air. Occasionally a black person or two in bright clothing and straw hats could be seen picking such fruit and putting them in a basket. Matthew noted that the citizens of color here were not the true deep ebony of Zed, but rather the shade of milk in strong tea. It was obvious that, at least from these few examples, interbreeding between the races had gone on here for many years. He wondered if such might be the result of long-forgotten shipwrecks that had thrown slaves and Englishmen together on what probably was an unhospitable chunk of rock. The questions were, then: how old was the settlement on Pendulum Island and of course how long had Professor Fell been its…what would be the correct term? Benefactor?

Just two questions of many in Matthew’s mind, and here came another one as the road emerged from the forest onto a plain of wild grasses swept by the seabreeze: how much money had that thing cost?

That thing being the castle of white stone that came into view on the right-hand side, perched on the cliff overlooking a turbulent cauldron of Atlantic foam. It was a massive monument to the power of a wallet…and also, possibly, to the power of power itself. In any case, Matthew suddenly felt very small indeed. Turrets roofed with red slate stood like cobra heads. Arched windows and doorways called attention to the art of a highly-talented architect. The road continued on, but a gravel driveway curved from the road to the castle’s entrance, and passed between stands of wind-sculpted pines, thatches of palmettos and ornamental flower gardens. Outbuildings stood to either side of the main structure, possibly stables or servants’ quarters. The whole picture was one of serenity and removal from the world beyond. This truly was Professor Fell’s kingdom, and one would have to be very stupid not to be awed by it. Not being by any means stupid, Matthew was sufficiently awed; yet he did not let anyone see this register on his face, for the masquerade was underway and much depended on the power of his mask.

The berline turned on the driveway. The team followed the orderly path until they reached a porte-cochere supported by thick white columns, and there stood the offending coach driven by the Thacker brothers. A pair of native servants wearing sea-blue uniforms and elaborate white wigs were removing Gentry’s luggage from the baggage compartment while two more in the same colored clothing and ridiculous wigs waited to transfer it beyond a massive oak door. The Thackers were waiting beside the coach, one having removed his shirt and using it to wrap around a bleeding hand. His blood-spattered coat was draped over his shoulders. Jack Thacker’s chest looked like a squat wall of reddened brick. Both brothers eyed the approaching berline with barely-concealed loathing.

As Matthew’s coach pulled up under the porte-cochere, Jonathan Gentry half-stumbled and half-fell from the passenger compartment of his own. He went down on his knees nearly under the hooves of the approaching horses, which had to be pulled up short and sharply by the beleaguered driver. “Hell’s bells!” Madam Chillany snarled, and she was out of the coach like, indeed, a belle from Hell.

The chilly madam had become a redhot fire spitting a plentitude of profanities in the faces of the Thackers as Matthew disembarked the berline and strolled up beside her. The brothers looked highly disinterested, and the wounded Jack produced a yawn for her troubles. Their eyes then went to Matthew and their gazes sharpened like daggers.

“Soggy Ass,” said Jack.

“In the flesh,” said Mack.

“Listen to me!” the woman nearly screeched. Augustus Pons waddled past, his fat and florid face stricken by the need to distance himself from any impending ugliness. Aria reached out and seized Jack’s chin, as he was the brother standing closer to her. “I could have you fucking killed for that! Do you hear me? I could have your fucking heads on fucking platters, you fucking assholes!”

“Such language!” said Jack.

“Tut, tut!” said Mack.

“I’ll report this to him, you can believe it!” she threatened. “We’ll see what he decides to do to punish you fuckers!”

“What he might decide to do,” said Mack in an easy voice, his eyes on Matthew, “is punish Spadey, ’cause we’ve been waitin’ on this fuckin’ island for more than one solid month. And you know what he tells everybody?”

“The meetin’ can’t start without Spadey,” said Jack, smoothly picking up the tale, “so we all have to wait. We all have to twiddle our fuckin’ thumbs and play with our cocks ’til—”

“Spadey gets here,” said Mack, “which was supposed to be weeks ago, as I take it. What I want to know is…what was so important, that Spadey had to make everybody wait for him—”

“And us with our business to get back to, ’cause it ain’t gonna run itself!” Jack finished, with a puffing out of the brickwall chest and a defiant glare at the faux Nathan Spade.

This prideful puff visibly stole some of the wind from Madam Chillany, who sought to make a comeback and found nothing in her slim treasury of wit. “We’ll see about that!” she managed to say. And then, back to more familiar territory: “You assholes!”

Matthew was suddenly aware of an additional presence.

The young Indian woman had emerged from her coach. She stepped slowly and carefully around Jonathan Gentry, who still sat on his knees blinking stupidly at the sunlit garden. She passed Matthew at a distance of three or four feet. It was near enough for Matthew to feel he was crowding her, and so he moved further aside; he also seemingly felt the hairs stir on his arms and on the back of his neck, yet he knew this must only be his imagination or some effect of gaining his landlegs.

She was a painting come to life, he thought. She was a piece of art that could never be confined by frame or glass. To his tastes she was stunningly beautiful. Her face, her hair, her body…all the creation of a master’s hand. She was nearly as tall as he, and she was lithe and long-stemmed and moved with a grace that perhaps was born of silent walking in lush green forests. She wore a slate-gray gown trimmed with red, and a pale blue blouse with a boil of black lace at the throat to compliment the lace on her hat. She looked neither to right nor left as she approached the brothers. Matthew noted that she did not look directly at them either but rather seemed to be staring as if in a dreamstate through them at some scene beyond their reckoning.

Mack spoke sharply. “What’re your eyes findin’ so interestin’…”

“…boyo?” said Jack, just as sharply.

“A very attractive woman,” Matthew answered, with a little of his own defiance in his voice. The girl obviously heard, but gave no reaction to this compliment whatsoever. Her face was slightly downcast, her attention removed from the moment. Matthew had the impression she was hearing a different voice in her head, and possibly it spoke the Iroquois language. “Where she did come from?” he asked, to whichever brother would reply first.

“She’s a fuckin’ squaw,” said Jack.

“Where d’ya think she came from?” Mack’s eyes held a dangerous glitter. “You ain’t too smart, are ya?”

And so saying, Mack Thacker reached out and grasped the girl’s arm, and he pulled her roughly toward him so she was between himself and his brother. Then, his dangerous eyes still focused on Matthew, he began to lick along the girl’s face with a brown-coated tongue, and on the other side Jack took her free arm in a hard grip and he too began to lick the girl’s face with his own ghastly tongue, his eyes also on Nathan Spade the jayhawk-turned-political pimp and purveyor of valuable state secrets.

And between these two nasty and brutish tongues, the Indian girl looked at Matthew with her sad ebony eyes. There was something crushed and defeated in her yet-beautiful face that nearly wrenched his heart out, but he had to keep his mask on and so by the most difficult effort his visage maintained its stone. The two brothers began to laugh as they marked her cheeks with their saliva, and then the girl lowered her gaze from Matthew’s and she was again gone, walking silently through a forest unknown.

Minx Cutter took Matthew by the elbow and guided him toward the formidable oak door, which was being held open for the guests by a black servant in the sea-blue uniform and a powdered wig that must have been three feet tall.

“Come along,” Minx told Matthew, as she linked her arm with his and held it in an unbreakable grip. “You’re with me.”

Seventeen

UNTIL now, Matthew Corbett had thought he understood the balance of the world. Good was its own reward. Evil deeds were punished. God was in His Heaven, and the Devil was evermore forbidden to walk the streets of gold. Yet here, in the realm of Professor Fell, all such platitudes and pieties for the Sabbath pulpit were revealed to Matthew as being echoes of the hollow voices of long-dead saints.

No rich man on New York’s Golden Hill had ever lived thus. He wondered what rich man in London might have earned such a monument. He was standing in what he presumed would be the Grand Entrance, and grand it was. The high arched ceiling might have been a sanctuary for angels, who could hide amid the polished oak beams with their feathered wings kissing the snow-white stones. The flags of many nations hung on poles that protruded from walls on either side, among them the white banner of France, the crowned eagle of Prussia, the tricolor of the Netherlands, and the Spanish arms of Bourbon-Anjou. Matthew noted that none of them were afforded a central location or a height that would emphasize one above the other, not even the English Union Jack. Matthew reasoned that to Professor Fell all countries were meant to be equally plundered.

A marbled floor of black and white squares made Matthew wonder if the professor was a chess player. But of course he was, Matthew decided. Who else would he be if he did not recognize the value of helpless pawns, black knights, crooked bishops, and an errant queen or two in his malignant view of life?

The Grand Entrance opened onto a Great Hallway and Glorious Staircase. White trimmed in gold seemed to be the color of the professor’s love. Well, Matthew mused as he followed Minx Cutter toward the stairs, the professor was his own God, so why not create for himself his own Heaven on earth?

“I’ll show you to your room,” Minx said, her voice echoing amid the ceiling’s beams.

“I’ll show him to his room.” This was spoken by Aria Chillany, who had come up behind the pair and now caught Matthew by the arm that Minx did not hold.

Minx levelled a calm but icy stare at the interloper. “I should think,” she said, “that you are very tired from your journey, and that a woman of your age needs her rest. So, as we have a dinner tonight and much to prepare for, I suggest you go to your own room and get your…shall I say…beauty sleep?” Her hand tightened on Matthew’s limb, and he thought if it got much tighter he would lose the circulation in his arm. She flashed a quick and totally insincere smile into Aria’s stony and—one might say—stunned face. “I’ll show you to your room, Nathan,” she said, a statement of power as well as of fact, and without a second’s more of hesitation she led him up the staircase with a stride that left a woman of a certain age at her bootheels.

Matthew had just time enough to glance back at Aria, who had recovered her composure to offer him a look that might have said Careful with this one, and guard your throat. He did not have to be so warned, but he was truly on his own now and whatever this game was, he was in deep.

They passed a stained-glass window overlooking the staircase that caught the morning sun and burst it into jewels of yellow, gold, blue and scarlet. It depicted what Matthew had first thought was the image of a suffering saint, but then he saw that it was the portrait of a young boy possibly ten or twelve years of age, his hands folded against the side of his face and tears of blood dripping from his haunted eyes. It was a strange decoration to be a centerpiece of Professor Fell’s paradise, and Matthew wanted to ask who that person might be but then they were past it and climbing up and he let the question go.

Though the stairway continued up to a third floor, Minx guided Matthew into the second floor’s hallway, lined with doors and hung with various tapestries that showed intricately-woven hunting scenes. Matthew thought they must date from medieval times or else be very convincing reproductions. Minx stopped at a white door about midway along the hall. “This is yours,” she told him, and opened the door for his entrance. The room had a canopied bed done up in black. Again, the floor was made up of the black-and-white chessboard squares. An iron chandelier and eight candles awaited his tinderbox flame, and on a white dresser stood another three-wicked candelabra. There was a small writing desk and a chair before it. On the desk was a key, presumably to his door, and a candle clock. Next to the bed was a white high-backed chair with black stitches woven through it in an abstract design. A white ceramic washbasin stood on iron legs with a supply of folded towels as well as a pearl-handled razor and a small round mirror. Matthew picked up the cake of soap next to the mirror and smelled limes. He noted that his baggage had been brought in and placed at the foot of the bed. He wondered if there might be a solid gold chamberpot under the bed, for surely here even the nuggets were worth something. “You might enjoy this,” said Minx, as she opened a pair of louvered doors. The warm seabreeze rushed in, bringing the salt tang of the Atlantic. A small balcony with a black iron railing overlooked the sea that thrashed itself into foam sixty feet below. Matthew had a view to the horizon, which was all empty blue ocean and sparkling waves.

“Very nice,” he agreed, uncomfortably aware that this young woman who was so good with knives had retreated a few paces to stand at his back. He turned to face her. When he did, he was startled to find that she had come up upon him as silently as a cat and was standing only inches away.

Minx peered into his eyes as if studying items for sale beyond a window. She said, “Have you ever seen me before?”

Matthew felt a small tremor. Was this a trick question? Was he supposed to have seen her before? He decided to play this safely. “No,” he answered, “I think not.”

“And I’ve never seen you before, either,” she said, with an arched eyebrow. “You’re a handsome man, I should have remembered you.”

“Oh.” Did he blush a bit? Possibly. “Well, then…thank you.”

“Soft hands, though,” she said, and took his right hand in hers. “You’re not much for handling horses, are you?”

“I haven’t much need to handle them.”

“Hm,” she replied. Her gold-touched eyes had taken on a certain ferocity. “Are you and Madam Chillany together?”

“Together?”

“An item,” she clarified.

“Oh. No…we’re not.”

“You may not think so,” she answered. Then she let his hand go. “If you’d like some lessons, I’d be glad to offer them.”

“Lessons?”

“In handling horses. The professor keeps a very fine stable. I might show you the island, if you’d like.”

“Yes,” he agreed, and gave her a wisp of a smile. “I would like.” Immediately he thought he had just taken a plunge into the deepest water yet, but still…such a sea should be explored.

“Meet me downstairs in one hour.” She was already moving toward the door. Yet she paused on the threshold. “That is,” she said, “if you can manage a tour. After your voyage, I mean.”

“I can always sleep tonight.” As soon as he voiced this, he noted an expression on her face that said he might be wrong about this as well as wrong about Aria Chillany’s interest in him.

“All right.” Minx gave him back his wispy smile. “One hour then.” And she added his name after the briefest of pauses: “Nathan.”

When the girl had gone and the door closed behind her, Matthew let out a long exhalation of breath and had to sit down on the bed, damp breeches be damned. The room seemed to be rocking on the Atlantic waves. He had his doubts about staying aboard a horse very long, but the offer of a guided tour of Pendulum Island was too good to reject. If he toppled from horseback, at least his excuse would pass Minx Cutter’s judgment. He stood up, went to the washbasin, poured water into it from a pitcher and splashed some into his face. Then he wet a portion of a towel and used it to cool the hot whipsting on his neck. It wasn’t so bad, but he could do with a little poultice of honeysuckle to calm the fever. He needed to get out of these clothes and…what?…send them downstairs to be cleaned? He imagined it would be that simple.

He thought of how many things could go wrong on his excursion with the girl. But then again…he had to have faith in himself. He had played parts before, notably as Michael Shayne with Lyra Sutch or, more correctly, in her own guise as Gemini Lovejoy. It occurred to him that Professor Fell had faith in him. Then he thought he must be going mad to be affirming the professor’s questionable attributes, or possibly it was the island’s sultry air clouding his mind.

He dressed in his other suit, this one of a velvety forest green, with a white shirt and white stockings. When he’d finished fastening the last shirt button he was aware of a shrill calling of seagulls from outside, and therefore he strolled out upon the balcony to have a look at what was stirring the birds up.

She was sitting cross-legged atop a large rock in the sea, her perch some twenty feet above the waves. Over her shining black hair the gulls spun around and around, perhaps disturbed at their roost being claimed by a human. She was entirely nude, her brown skin wet and glistening in the sunlight. Matthew grasped the balcony’s railing with both hands. She was sitting about forty feet below him, her chin resting on her folded hands, her face aimed seaward, her attitude remote and absolutely solitudinous in her nudity. Matthew could only stare at this display of removal from the world. Where had she disrobed and left her clothes? Obviously she was unconcerned about being an object of attention from any of the other guests…or, Matthew thought after another moment, she simply had ceased to care.

They call her Fancy, Minx had said.

Of course that was a made-up name, Matthew reasoned. A nearly-sarcastic name imposed upon her if not by the Thacker brothers then by whoever else had lured her over the Atlantic from her tribal home. He wondered how she’d fallen into their hands, and wound up between their dirty tongues.

She was such a beautiful girl, he thought. And there she sat, still alone.

He very suddenly had the sensation that the balcony had given way beneath his feet and he was falling, and yet he gripped the railing harder and he was not falling at all but still…he thought that in the space of a few startling seconds he had indeed travelled from one risky position to another equally as dangerous.

“Oh my God,” he said quietly, to himself and to whomever might be listening, even here in this place of Professor Fell’s self-worship.

He had already voiced the thought in his head, when he’d first seen the Indian girl in the coach.

It was a shame, that such a pretty girl should sit alone.

He recalled the tale of his Indian friend, Walker In Two Worlds, who had departed from this life and gone to walk the Sky Road. Walker had told him about the Indian girl called Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone. The girl who had been taken from her tribe and accompanied him and the doomed Nimble Climber in their journey across the Atlantic to England, where she had been seized by two men and put into a coach while he went on to portray a parody of the savage redskin on the lamplit English stage.

“Oh my God,” Matthew repeated, in case that entreaty to hear him had been missed the first time.

He had no idea how old the girl was who sat upon the rock below him, under her moving crown of seagulls. Walker had not told him exactly how old the girl was when they left the tribe together. We three children, Walker had said. Matthew had judged Walker’s age at around twenty-six or twenty-seven. Therefore…if this indeed might be the same Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone, then she could be the same age or younger by a few years. Or, perhaps, she was the same age as Matthew, twenty-three. In any case, it was possible…just possible…that before him was the very same Indian girl who had made that daunting voyage with Walker, and who had been removed by rough hands into a rough life that led her here, between two orange-haired ruffians who thought themselves the owners of a beautiful…yes, the word that Mack Thacker had used…squaw.

But still…certainly other Indian maidens had been brought over from the New World in all the many years since Walker’s journey. Of course. Many of them, brought over to be curiosities or servants or…whatever.

That this young woman could be the same one…

It boggled the mind.

Suddenly she must have caught a prickling sense of Matthew’s mental thornpatch, for she turned her head toward him as surely as if she had heard her name spoken, and they stared at each other seemingly not only across space, but also across time.

Fancy stood up. She rose to her full height. Brown and gleaming she took one step forward and flung herself into the air like one of Walker’s arrows leaving his bow, and as she came down into the sea she tightened her body and narrowed it and entered the churning foam with the bravery and ease of a creature born to be part of nature and perhaps desirous of a return to the childhood dream.

She did not surface. Though Matthew stood for several minutes scanning the boisterous waves there was no sign of her reemergence to the realm of air-breathers. He wondered if she was part fish, and once in the security of the blue world her fins and gills had grown, her tail had taken shape, and she had gone down with vigorous strokes to the silent bottom of the bay, where a pretty girl might once again sit alone. He had a moment of panic, thinking he should call someone to help her. But it occurred to him that no one without Indian courage would dare a dive into that deep, and if she would rather dream in the peaceful solitude of an ocean grave than be called Fancy and be tossed about like a ragdoll between two scums of the earth, then so be it.

Matthew left the balcony and closed the louvered doors. He took the key, went out of his room and locked it, then he walked along the corridor back to the stairs. A tall, slim and hollow-cheeked man with a trimmed gray beard and a smooth sheen of gray hair tied back in a queue was coming up. He was dressed in a black suit and smoking a clay pipe. The man’s eyes, equally gray in a heavily-lined and craggy face, barely registered Matthew’s presence. But Matthew registered the distinct odor of unwashed flesh.

Another bad ingredient in this odious stewpot, Matthew thought as he descended the stairs. Who might that be, and what was his role for Professor Fell?

Or…had it been Professor Fell?

Keep going, he told himself. Whatever you do, don’t look back. We don’t wish to become a pillar of salt today.

Minx was waiting for him under the flags of many plundered nations. She still wore the man’s brown breeches, the cream-colored blouse and the high-topped brown boots, but had put on a tan waistcoat decorated with small gold-colored paisleys. Matthew wondered how many knives were concealed underneath there. Her first expression upon seeing him was a frown, followed by the question, “Don’t you have any riding clothes?”

“This will have to do,” he answered, and decided to add: “Unless you’d like to loan me some of yours?”

“Hm,” she said, with a darting glance at his crotch. “No, I think you’d be too small for my breeches. Shall we go?”

It was a brief walk to a very well-appointed stable, where a black attendant saddled their horses and wished them pleasantries for a good ride. Then they were off, Minx on a sleek black mare the attendant had called Esmerelda and Matthew on a broader-chested sorrel mare called Athena. Minx took the lead and obviously knew where she was going, guiding her horse onto a trail that crossed the estate in the direction of the road. Matthew dutifully followed, finding Athena not too hard to handle in spite of her namesake being a Greek goddess of war. The trail led them across the road and onto the plain of windswept seagrass. But a verdant green wilderness awaited a hundred yards beyond, and they entered it and rode for a while without speaking as the sunlight streamed down through the treelimbs overhead and strange birds called in the ferns.

At last, as they plodded along, Matthew decided it was time to voice a question. He urged Athena up alongside Minx’s horse. “May I ask,” he said, “what you do for the professor?”

She stared straight ahead. “You know better than to pose a question like that.”

“Ah, yes.” He nodded. “No one should know anyone else’s business, of course. Pardon my curiosity.” His curiosity, he thought, had been cursed before but never pardoned.

They went on a distance further, past a small lake where white egrets searched for fish in the shallows. Here and there treacherous brown thornplants reached out from the softer green growth on either side of the trail to snare the clothes of unaware riders, and they made Matthew think of the dangerous predicament that Berry and Zed had constructed for themselves. I can help you, she’d told him. Yes, he thought; help them all into unmarked graves. And that night she’d shown up in the alley opposite the house on Nassau Street and nearly scared his tenor into a permanent falsetto. My God, the cheek of that girl! he thought. She had lovely cheeks, it was true, but her curiosity was likewise to be cursed and not pardoned. Who did she think she was? A female version of himself?

And now he had not only to watch his own step in this beautiful morass, but to keep Berry and Zed from plunging into quicksand…and at a distance, no less.

“I will overlook your lack of propriety,” Minx suddenly announced, as the horses walked along side by side. “Because this is your first conference. And I suspect you’re curious about the other guests.”

“I am.” He paused for a few seconds before he went on. “Is it true that the professor has told the others a little about me?”

“A little. A small amount.” She held up two fingers pressed nearly together to show how small.

“But enough to let them know who I am and what I do for him?” He was amazed how easily this flowed, even as he thought how easily the quicksand pit might suck him under.

“Yes,” she answered, still staring straight ahead as the trail led them through a grove of spidery trees with leaves like miniature green fans.

“I am at a disadvantage then. I don’t like to be disadvantaged.” He smiled to himself. Well said, Nathan!

They went on perhaps forty more yards before Minx shifted in her saddle and spoke again.

“I’m an expert on handwriting. Forgeries, in four different languages,” she emphasized, as if he didn’t understand: “I oversee three apprentices to the craft. You’ve seen Augustus Pons. He’s a blackmail specialist. You may have seen Edgar Smythe on the stairs. He has something to do with weapons, I’m not quite sure what. Then there’s Adam Wilson, who does something with finances. Cesar Sabroso is a Spaniard who has influence with King Philip the Fifth. You’ll also meet Miriam Deare at dinner tonight. She prefers to be called ‘Mother Deare.’ What she does, I don’t know, but she is one of the professor’s oldest associates. You might already know that Jonathan Gentry is an expert on poisons, and that Aria Chillany has a position of responsibility concerning murders-for-hire. Lastly but not leastly, we come to the Thacker brothers, who hold themselves in high regard for their persuasive abilities in the area of extortion. Then there’s you…the whoremaster who steals state secrets.”

“Yes,” Matthew agreed. “Whenever I get the opportunity, that is.”

“You sound proud of that.”

“I am.” Lies came so fluidly they frightened him. “As I’m sure you’re proud of the work you do?”

“I’m proud of my abilities. They are hard-earned.”

“Your talent with a knife speaks for itself. Is that ability also hard-earned?”

Minx gave him a little sidelong smile, as they passed beneath the branches of trees draped with curtains of green moss. “I was born into a circus family,” she said. “I had to do something to earn my keep. For some reason, I was drawn to the knives. You know. Throwing them at moving targets. Including my own mother and father. I was quite the attraction, at twelve years of age taking aim with a knife in each hand, and outlining with the blades my mother’s body as she whirled around on a spinning wheel. Or splitting an apple on my father’s head while I wore a blindfold.”

“The art of dexterity,” Matthew said. “And a solid measure of self-confidence, I’m sure. Did you ever miss?”

“My mother and father are still circus performers. They may have a few more white hairs than they should. But no, I never missed.”

“For that, I’m grateful.” He fired a quick glance at her. “As should be everyone in our coach. But don’t you think Jack Thacker might hold a grudge? After all, you gave him something more than a quill’s prick.”

“He might hold a grudge,” Minx agreed, “but it is just because of the quill’s prick that he knows to leave me alone. My dexterity as a forger is more important to the professor than my ability with the throwing knife.”

Matthew made no comment. He was thinking, and being drawn along a wilderness path as surely as the horses followed their own. I oversee three apprentices to the craft, Minx had said.

It stood to reason that the others—Pons, Smythe, Wilson, Sabroso, Mother Deare and of course the handsome Thackers—were also the heads of their respective departments, rather than being lone wolves. Each one might oversee several—or dozens—of other lowlier lowlifes. Just as he, Nathan Spade, had a network of prostitutes and well-groomed grabbers of Parliament’s finest whispers. So when he looked at one of these so-called associates, he was looking at a single cog of what might be a truly vast criminal machine.

“What are you thinking?”

He brought himself back. On either side the forest was dense and dark, and birds called out in harsh voices from the tangled limbs. “Only about the conference,” he said, and just that quickly he decided to venture out on his own dangerous limb. “The why of it.”

“This being your first, I should suspect so. I attended the conference two years ago, which was my first. We are all used to being summoned by now. Some more than others.”

“And it is for the purpose of…?” He let the rest of it hang.

“It is for the purpose,” Minx said firmly, “of obeying the professor. Also he enjoys hearing in person reports of progress from his associates. It is a business, you know.”

“Of course it is. Otherwise, what would be the point of any of it?”

Minx suddenly kicked Esmerelda forward and then sharply reined the horse in, turning the animal so Matthew’s path was blocked. Matthew also reined in Athena, and he and Minx stared at each other as motes of dust drifted through the sun’s streamers and dark-colored butterflies flew back and forth between them.

“What is it?” Matthew asked, his heart pounding, when Minx remained silent a bit too long for his comfort. Her eyes were likewise too sharp for his skin.

“You intrigue me,” she answered. “And puzzle me.”

He forced a smile. “An intriguing puzzle. I am flattered to be so.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I mean to say that I can’t quite get the sense of you. Your manner of speaking…the way you present yourself…” She frowned and shook her head. “It isn’t what one would expect, after hearing about you.”

Matthew said with a shrug, “Possibly if I heard about your exploits in forgery, I’d never expect you to have been a child of the circus. Meaning that there are many sides to a person. Yes?”

“Yes,” she agreed, in a careful voice, “but even so…I think you are a puzzle with many pieces, and not all of them seem to fit.”

With that, Matthew felt the best course of action was silence lest he reveal another piece of his puzzle not meant for Minx’s sharp eyes and senses. She turned her horse to follow the trail again, and now she gave Esmerelda’s sides a kick and the animal took off at a brisk trot. Matthew likewise urged Athena forward and in another moment caught up behind the black mare’s flowing tail.

Presently they emerged from the forest trail onto another road. A horse-drawn wagon was trundling past, carrying a load of various brightly-colored fruits. Minx turned her mount in the direction the wagon was travelling, and left the fruit-vendor in her dust. Matthew urged Athena to speed but this time was unable to catch Lady Cutter. Soon, however, their progress was slowed by a sign on the roadside whose green-painted letters read: Welcome To Templeton.

Stood the village as quaint as a Quaker’s bonnet and as tidy as a Presbyterian’s soul. The small houses were all painted white with green trim. There were white picket fences and shade trees aplenty. The street led past a number of shops: a bakery, a wigmaker, an apothecary, a shoemaker, a general goods store and the like. People were out and about on this sunny morning. Most of them were the cream-colored locals in their vivid hues and straw hats, yet there were a few whites in their more restrained English or European clothing. On the right, behind a dark green iron gate and fence, stood a two-story yellow-bricked structure that Matthew took note of: The Templeton Inn, read a small sign above the front door. There appeared to be a tiled courtyard with a small circular pond at its center. Curtained windows looked down upon the street, and doors opened onto green wrought-iron balconies. Matthew wondered if Berry and Zed had been taken yet from the ship. This would be their final destination for a while. It seemed to be a pleasant enough prison. He figured the guards would not be too very obtrusive, but then again this was Fell’s kingdom so who was going to complain?

The street continued past a farmers’ market that was doing a brisk business in the sale of fruits and vegetables. On the left, further along, was a stable and on the right a series of corrals holding cattle and hogs. Here the air glistened with dust and smelled like New York in midsummer. Then after a few more unremarkable houses the village of Templeton passed away and the forest again took hold on either side. Minx and Esmerelda kept going, and Matthew and Athena kept following.

“Shouldn’t we turn around?” Matthew asked presently, as the sun was warming toward noon and the sweat had begun to prickle his neck.

“I want to show you something,” Minx answered. “It’s not far.”

Indeed it wasn’t. Minx guided Matthew to the edge of a cliff with the glittering expanse of the sea spread out below. “Wait,” Minx told him, as he scanned the rolling waves. “Ah!” she said suddenly, and pointed. “There they are!”

A geyser of water marked the surfacing of a number of whales. They rolled about each other like children at play. They flapped their tails and created their own foamy surf. They dove down and rose up again, breaking the sea into shards of rainbow glass. Matthew looked at Minx and saw she was smiling as she watched the cavorting of the leviathans, and he thought that the circus might be very far from the girl but the girl was never very far from the circus.

Something else caught his eye. It was the fort situated up on the northern point of Pendulum Island. There were several buildings within the cannon-guarded walls, and a pall of gray smoke hung over the area. A little fluttering of smoke rose from a chimney on a squat building to the far right.

“What’s that?” Matthew asked. He nodded toward it.

Minx’s smile went away. “The professor’s property.”

“I know that. But…a fort, yes?”

“His concern, not ours,” she replied. The air had become frosty on this sunny noon. She urged Esmerelda away from the cliffside, and the moment of watching whales at play had passed. Matthew followed back to the main road, feeling he had stepped on something that stuck to his bootsole. The fort was lost to sight by another dense thicket, but presently the two riders crossed in front of a secondary road that cut through the forest toward what Matthew presumed was the very place he’d just seen. He noted the ruts of wagon wheels in the dirt. The road to the fort had seen many comings and goings. And there on either side of the road was to him an interesting element to this new puzzle of Pendulum Island: hanging from leather cords on two poles were two human skulls painted with vivid stripes of color.

There was no need to ask Minx what that meant. Matthew knew. It was a warning of death, made cheerful by the stripings but no less serious. In fact, Matthew thought, there was a twisted sense of humor on display here. The entire message seemed to be: No Entry Without Permission, Or You Will Wear Your Bright Colors To Your Grave. He wondered if there were any guards nearby, watching the road, to enforce that particular threat. He decided that there probably were, hidden in the foliage somewhere. He didn’t care to test his question.

Not today, at least.

For it seemed to Matthew that a cannon-guarded, walled fort on the island owned by Professor Fell must hold something the emperor of crime did not care to be viewed by the inhabitants of his drowsy dreamworld.

Well, Matthew thought, there was always tomorrow. By now he was used to kicking over ordinary rocks and finding extraordinary horrors scuttling from underneath them in a desperate search for the protective dark. He reined Athena in and sat for a moment staring down the road that sat between two poles and two skulls. He marked that this place was about four miles from the professor’s castle, by the route they’d taken. Within him his sense of curiosity and desire for discovery began to vibrate; he was attuned to a question that needed to be answered.

Minx said firmly, “Come along. We shouldn’t linger here.”

Indeed not, Matthew thought as he got Athena moving again. For he had the sure sensation that they were being watched from somewhere in the trees, and even the guests at this strange conference of criminals could find their skulls separated from their necks by following that particular road into the unknown.

But, of course, following the unknown road was part of his business. His nature, also.

Another time, he promised himself.

And he knew that, whatever dangers and intrigues he might face at this bizarre dinner planned for tonight, his promises were for keeping.

Eighteen

CAUTION doubled. And redoubled. A bell was being rung by a servant who walked along the hallway. It was time for dinner. Time for Matthew to slip into the skin of Nathan Spade and button himself up in it, just as now he buttoned his shirt. When he was done, he slipped into the coat of his forest-green suit and also buttoned that up. It seemed he could not have enough security, nor buttons enough. One popped off as he was wrestling it. The bell called him to hurry. He appraised his look in the mirror. His face had become darkened by the sun, which made the bear-claw scar on his forehead stand out as a pinker line. Also more on the pinkish side was the newer and smaller mark under his left eye, put there by his adventure in the exploding house on Nassau Street. His hair was brushed, his teeth were cleaned, he was freshly-shaved and he was ready for the moment. Yet…there was something about himself that was a recent arrival, he thought. It was a steely glint in his eyes that had not been there before…what? The last gasp of Tyranthus Slaughter? It was the glint of a sword ready to parry another, or quickly strike if need be. It was the steel of survival, forged from his experiences to the point of standing here before this mirror.

The sound of the calling bell had receded.

Dinner was ready. And so was Matthew Corbett.

He pulled in one long breath, let it slowly out, and then he left his room.

In the hallway, a woman glided up beside him and took his right arm. Aria Chillany pressed close against him, her fragrance like the last embers of a smoky fire. She was wearing a black gown trimmed with red lace. Her ebony hair flowed down in brushed waves and her sapphire eyes sparkled, yet her beautiful face was tight and her mouth a hard line. “Nathan,” she said quietly as they walked, “do you know your part?”

“I do,” he answered, just as quietly. These doors they were passing might have ears.

“Let us hope,” she said, and added: “Dear boy.”

They descended the stairs like criminal royalty. Matthew allowed the woman to guide him, as he was certainly a stranger here. They walked through a hallway that held alcoves displaying what appeared to be the skeletons of various types of fish mounted on stands. Then the hallway ended at a short staircase descending to a large banquet room with blue-painted walls and ceiling and, upon that ceiling, painted clouds with painted cherubs gazing down upon the denizens of earth.

The assembled group of six sat before silver placesettings at a polished table that seemed to Matthew as long as a New York block. Above it was a brass chandelier ablaze with candles, as the night had fallen over Fell’s festival, and also spaced along the table were brass candelabras that gave off a lovely light upon the unlovely throng.

Where to begin? It was Matthew’s question to himself, as he and Madam Chillany came down the stairs and their presence brought to a halt the banquet room’s already-restrained conversation. He was wondering where to begin gathering impressions, and was aided in this regard when Aria announced to the group, “Let me introduce our new arrival, Nathan Spade.”

No one sat at the foot of the table, nor at the head. The first person seated on the left was a dashing-looking gentleman in a shimmery gray suit and a vivid scarlet neckscarf, his age probably in the late forties, his hair black and gleaming except for streaks of gray along the temples, his chin sharp, nose narrow and his deep-set eyes dark brown beneath arched black brows. He stood up, smiled showing good white teeth, gave a crisp bow and extended a hand. “Cesar Sabroso,” he said, in a voice that made Matthew think of warm oil at the bottom of a lamp. The better to lubricate a monarch’s imagination so as to get at the Spanish treasury beyond it, Matthew thought. He shook the man’s hand and then gave his attention to the person seated on the right.

“Adam Wilson,” spoke this slight, pale and nearly invisible creature, who wore small square-lensed spectacles and had a long, somber and horse-like face. His voice was like the echo of another voice spoken in another room. He wore a baggy suit the shade of bleached-out hay, and his tight cap of hair pulled back into a painful-looking queue was nearly the same color. His pallid blue eyes refused to meet Matthew’s, but rather angled off a few inches to the side even as he offered a hand the size of a child’s. Matthew’s impression was that this man could sit in a corner without moving for a time and be forgotten by everyone else in the room, and therefore he carried around with him his own disguise.

“Edgar Smythe,” announced the next gent on the left, in a voice like a bucket of gravel being pounded by an iron mallet. It made Matthew’s eardrums throb. Smythe, the selfsame gray-bearded and gray-haired man who had climbed the stairs past Matthew this morning, looked supremely bored. He was again in his black suit, with a ruffled blue shirt. He neither rose from his chair nor offered a hand, but immediately returned his attention to a glass of red wine he was nursing like a beloved child.

Matthew noted gold-lettered placecards on the table. The one across from Smythe read Dr. Jonathan Gentry, but the seat was empty. The physician, Matthew mused, was yet upstairs healing himself. Then next to Smythe was another empty chair and the placecard for Minx Cutter, who likewise had not yet arrived. Across from Minx’s chair, the card read Nathan Spade, and next to that place Aria Chillany. Next to Minx were three empty chairs, the closest to her being for Mack Thacker, the next for Miss Fancy, and the third for Jack Thacker. This will be a lovely scene, Matthew thought grimly.

“Our daring savior!” said Augustus Pons, who sat one chair down from Aria’s place. The triple-chinned face grinned, as candlelight played on the lenses of his spectacles and gleamed upon his bald pate. “You and Miss Cutter taught those bad boys a lesson, eh?” He opened his mouth and the twig-thin young man with curly brown hair who sat between him and Madam Chillany’s chair tipped a glass of the red wine over lips that glistened like garden slugs. The young man wore a powder-blue suit and had ruddy cheeks like those of the painted cherubs gamboling above. His eyes were bright blue, and they sparkled merrily for his master.

“Thank you, Toy,” said the fat man, when the glass had been lowered and the young man had blotted Pons’s third chin with a napkin. “Mr. Spade, do sit down and tell us all about your escapades in London!”

“Keep your business to yourself, Mr. Spade,” said the white-haired woman who sat on the other side of Pons. “His mouth has been known to get people into trouble.”

“It is other people’s mouths that get me into trouble,” Pons protested, without much vehemence. “Isn’t that right, Toy?”

Toy giggled, a nasty sound.

“Come speak to me, Mr. Spade,” said Mother Deare. “Let me take your measure.” She was a broad-shouldered, thickly-set woman in a copper-colored gown with frills of red and blue lace at the neck and cuffs. Matthew thought the gown fit her as much as two pairs of silk slippers fit a drayhorse. He went to her side, as she pushed her chair back from the table and turned it to regard him with froggish brown eyes in a wide, square-chinned face. Matthew reasoned she was likely sixty years old or thereabouts, with deep lines across her forehead and radiating from the corners of her eyes. She appeared to have known a life of hard work, probably performed outside under a hot sun. She wore red lace gloves, perhaps to hide hands that had been worked to the point of broken knuckles. The cloud of her cottony hair was done up with golden pins. She smiled at him, in a motherly way. Matthew had the desire to step back a pace or two at the sight of this peg-toothed smile, but he held himself in check as he thought rudeness here would be an unforgiven sin.

“A handsome young lad,” Mother Deare decided. She had a quiet voice, yet there was some element of the bludgeon in it. “I suspect you are no stranger to the wiles of women.”

The moment of real truth had arrived. Everyone was listening. Matthew’s heart was pounding, for he thought surely this bulgeous-eyed woman was able to see through his mask. He kept his face composed and reached deep for a reply. “The wiles of women,” he said, “are my business. And in my business, the stranger the better.”

Pons gave an amused little laugh. Aria Chillany followed that one with her own. Mother Deare’s smile was unbroken, but she nodded ever so slightly. “Well said,” she told him. She motioned toward his chair. “Join us.”

Matthew took his place.

Aria sat to his right. A black servant in the sea-blue uniform and high wig emerged from a door artfully concealed in a wall at the far end of the room, bringing a basket full of various kinds of freshly-baked bread cut into slices. After he had served these to whomever desired them, he went around the table refilling wine glasses from bottles of red and white already on display. Matthew chose a glass of red, as that seemed to be the drink of choice among this bunch. When he took his first sip a thrill of terror shot through him…not at the sense that he might be taking a sip of poison, but at the fact that suddenly he was so damned comfortable in this masquerade. It astounded him, how far he had come from being a lowly law clerk, to being…what? It seemed to him that he wasn’t quite sure what he was on his way to being. And that too caused a kink of unease down where the red wine drifted.

Descending the stairs to the banquet room came Minx Cutter, wearing tan trousers, a dark blue waistcoat and a white blouse. She took her time about it, and then she seated herself directly across from Matthew as per her placecard. She nodded at Mother Deare and Pons but directed her attention to her choice of wine from the servant instead of to any of the other guests, and to his surprise Matthew felt a pang of envy toward the bottled grape.

A minute or so after Minx’s arrival, came a bellow of noise and the slamming of bootheels on the stairs and thus the Thackers arrived with Fancy held fast by either arm and pressed between them. The brothers wore identical red suits—a shock to any civilized eyeball—with black waistcoats and gray shirts. Fancy was draped in a dark green gown with a black bodice, and she wore elbow-length gloves of black cloth. She was manhandled along until she was shoved down in the chair between the Thackers, and they were laughing like hyenas and snorting like bulls all the way. Matthew noted with a certain satisfaction that Jack’s right hand was bound up with a cloth bandage. The two brothers took their places and sprawled in their chairs, and Fancy wore a blank stare on her lovely face and kept her head lowered.

Mack and Jack went after the bread and spilled as much wine as they poured. When Minx reached for the bread basket the servant had left on the table, Jack suddenly reached into his coat with his left hand, brought out a knife crusted with blood and, standing up and leaning forward, plunged it into the basket’s contents.

“There ya go,” he said sweetly to Minx. “Wanted to return what ya gave to me—”

“—so kindly,” Mack finished, and then he swigged a glass of red.

Minx’s expression remained placid. She pulled the basket toward her, removed the knife and chose a slice of bread marred by Jack’s crusty lifejuice. She ate it while staring at Matthew, after which she calmly slid the blade into her waistcoat.

The eyes of the Thackers settled on Nathan Spade.

“Hey, boyo!” Jack called. “Enjoy your coach ride?”

“Thrilling,” Matthew replied. “Thank you.”

“We wasn’t tryin’ to thrill ya,” said Mack, as he dipped bread into a bowl of brown sauce the servant had left. “We was tryin’ to—”

“—kill ya!” Jack finished, and he gave a harsh chortle. “Naw, just jokin’ there, boyo! We knew you wasn’t gonna go off the edge!”

“And how did you know that, please?” Madam Chillany had regained the fire in her eyes and the ice in her voice.

Mack answered, “Somebody as smart as he’s supposed to be, playin’ with the whores and all, he ain’t gonna go so easy as that! Naw, ma’am! ’Course, it helped him to have—”

“—a knife-thrower at his side,” said Jack, with a quick and disdainful glance at Minx. “Problem is, maybe she ain’t always gonna be at his side!”

“Maybe not.” Matthew took another drink of his wine before he spoke again. “What do you two gents have against me? You’re simply angry because I made you wait a few weeks?”

“They don’t like anyone with three attributes they don’t have,” said Mother Deare. “Good manners, good looks, and good sense. Pay them no further attention. You are feeding a fire that should be left untamped.”

“Listen to her, Spadey,” said Mack, with brown sauce on his chin.

“Yeah, she’s big enough to fight your battles for ya, ain’t she?” Jack grinned in the most sarcastic way. Then his eyes flared like flaming tinderboxes, he grabbed Fancy by the hair and kissed her mouth, Augustus Pons said, “Oh my God,” Toy squirmed in his chair, and Mack then grasped Fancy’s chin and smashed her lips with his own. After the bully-boys’ statement of ownership was done, they went back to their drinking and Fancy again lowered her head and stared at the surface of the table as if it were a new world she was fixated on either exploring or escaping to.

“Well, I don’t enjoy having to wait for anyone!” It was spoken by the hammer-crushing-gravel voice of Edgar Smythe. His face was a wrinkled mass of barely-confined anger. “Here nearly a month! After that damnable voyage from Plymouth! The seas so high I was swimming in my fucking bed! And then I get here and am told I have to wait for him before we can start our business?” A finger stabbed toward Matthew. “A damned boy?”

“Watch your words, please,” Mother Deare advised. “We are all equals here.”

“The money I bring in has no equal,” Smythe fired back, his bearded chin lifted in defiance. “You know that’s true, and so does he!”

He meaning the professor, Matthew surmised.

“Settle yourself,” Mother Deare said quietly, but the bludgeon was ready. “Have another glass of wine, breathe deeply of this exalted air, and remark to yourself how fortunate you are—as we all are—to be at this table.

“One month of waiting bothers you, Mr. Smythe? Here on this warm island? Really it does? My, my!” She touched her throat. “Such ingratitude, I would be ashamed.”

“Ingratitude my ass,” Smythe growled. He reached to refill his glass, which evidently had already been refilled several times. “I know my place here, and it’s far better than his!”

“I want to know,” spoke the soft and echoey voice of the nearly-invisible Adam Wilson, “when Matthew Corbett is going to be killed.”

Matthew had been lifting the glass to his mouth. The jolt that went through him almost caused a regrettable spillage.

“That Chapel disaster lost us all some fine young recruits,” Wilson went on. “He had a hand in that, and he caused the loss of one of my best men. I want to know when revenge will be delivered.”

Matthew was thinking furiously. Ah yes! He remembered! One of the older men captured at the Chapel estate during the Queen of Bedlam affair had been an expert on finances, and had been serving as an instructor.

Mother Deare’s voice was as steady and direct as her fierce stare: “The professor decides that, Mr. Wilson. Not you.”

“I’m only voicing my wishes, Mother Deare,” spoke the slender man, who even as he shrugged his shoulders seemed again to be vanishing away.

A clattering on the stairs announced the arrival of Jonathan Gentry, clad in a dark blue suit with a white shirt and stockings. Unfortunately he appeared to be under the influence of his own making, for his face was flushed and sparkling with sweat and the tail of his shirt was hanging out beneath his waistcoat. He came staggering down the staircase, gripping hard to the oak bannister, and at the bottom he hesitated and felt forward with one shoe as if he feared the floor was made of ice and might crack under his weight.

“Oh Christ,” Madam Chillany breathed beside Matthew. “He’s in one of his states.”

Assured that the floor would hold him, Gentry released his death-grip on the bannister and approached the table, in a circuitous sort of way. He walked as if he were dancing to an unheard tune. Matthew thought Gentry’s steps would be appreciated by Gilliam Vincent.

Mack said, “Come on and sit your arse down—”

“Ya stumblin’ arsehole!” Jack supplied, and the two brothers laughed as if they were the very kings of wit.

The devilishly-handsome though nearly-incapacitated Gentry just gave a feeble smile, a comma of dark brown hair sweat-stuck to his forehead. His remarkable green eyes were not so luminous; tonight they were darkened and bloodshot. Matthew watched as Gentry searched for his place at the table, and no one helped him. Matthew thought that whatever freight the doctor was carrying, the castle of Professor Fell must weigh most heavily upon him for he had surely drunk or inhaled something potent to deaden his nerves.

“You’re next to me,” Matthew spoke up, and Gentry narrowed his eyes to focus and came staggering around the table to claim his place.

“Thank you, M—” Gentry caught himself and smiled dazedly. “My friend,” he said, as he lowered himself into the chair.

Sirki emerged from the door at the far end of the room, presumably to make sure everyone had arrived, and then he went away again without a word to the guests. Matthew noted the East Indian giant was wearing black robes and a black turban tonight, and for some reason that fact sent a disturbance rippling slowly through him like a wave about to shatter itself against a rock.

In a few minutes the feast began to arrive, brought in by a squadron of servants. The theme—no surprise here to Matthew—was nautical. Seafood stew was served in clay bowls shaped like boats. Platters of clams wafted steam up through the candlelight. A glass bowl contained bits of raw fish mingled with onions and small red peppers that nearly seared Matthew’s tongue off at first taste. Puff pastries filled with crabmeat and a white wine cream sauce came piled on a blue plate and were quickly gobbled down by the Thackers before anyone else could get their fair share. Then came whole fish grilled, baked and steamed. A swordfish laid out on a wooden slab still had its beak and eyeballs. The pink tentacles of an octopus dripped puddles of butter. The wine flowed and the guests consumed. Matthew watched Mother Deare watching everyone else. From time to time someone gave a grunt as they ate something particularly pleasing to them, but otherwise there was no conversation.

Then Jonathan Gentry, his face and suit jacket smeared with oil and butter, withdrew from a pocket a small bottle of green liquid and poured it into his wine. He drank it down with relish, after which he began trying to carve a piece of mackerel with the edge of a spoon.

“What are you drinking?” Aria asked him, with notes of both wariness and disgust in her voice. “Something of your own making, I presume?”

“My own making,” he said, and nodded. “Yes, my own.” He smiled at nothing, his eyes heavy-lidded. “I am a doctor, you know. I am a physician. And a very able one, in fact.” He turned the heavy lids toward Matthew. “You tell her.”

“Leave Mr. Spade alone,” came Aria’s quiet command, emphasizing the name.

“What’s he saying?” Mother Deare asked, interrupting her consumption of tentacles.

“He’s sayin’ he’s a fuckin’ asshole,” said Jack Thacker, and he grinned drunkenly at Fancy, who had eaten half of a boatbowl of seafood stew before she had again left the room on her silent voyage.

“I’m saying I am a doctor. A healer,” Gentry replied, with as much dignity as a grease-smeared drug fiend could muster. “That is who I am. And this,” here he held up the bottle, which still contained a few drops of green, “is the medicine I have given myself tonight. I call it…” He paused, seemingly searching for what he called it. “Ah, yes. Juice of Absence.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Mack muttered in his wine, and then he took hold of Fancy’s hair and began to gnaw on her throat. Not to be outdone, Jack attacked the other side of her neck.

“Oh dear me,” said Pons, who had been fed his entire meal and had his mouth and chin wiped by his special Toy.

“Juice of Absence,” Gentry repeated, his face slack. His eyes appeared to be sliding inward. “It removes one. Takes him away. It eases the mind and deadens the nerves. It causes one to leave this realm of unhappy discord, and enter another more pleasant. Yes, it is of my own making.” He stared blankly at Aria. “Somewhat like my life, isn’t it?”

“A disgusting mess, you mean?” she asked, her brows uplifted.

Gentry nodded. Suddenly there was nothing handsome about him at all. He just looked to Matthew like a pitiful man trying to hold onto something that had perhaps slipped his grip many years before. Down the table, Pons was being fed by Toy, Mother Deare was carefully watching Gentry, the Thackers were feasting on Fancy’s throat, and Minx was sipping her wine in stiff-backed silence. Up the table, Smythe was tearing into a piece of swordfish, Wilson ate small bites of the raw fish concoction and kept pushing his glasses up because the peppers were making his face glisten with sweat, and Sabroso leaned back in his chair and drank not from a glass but from a fresh bottle of red wine that he had uncorked with his teeth.

But Gentry in a way sat alone, and Matthew found he could no longer look at the man.

Instead Matthew stared across at the Thackers, and seeing the suffering expression on Fancy’s beautiful and tortured face as the two brutes ravished her he felt the words come up from his soul to his throat and he was powerless to secure them from leaving his mouth.

He said, “Stop that.”

They continued on, unhearing.

“You two!” Matthew said, louder, with the flush of righteous anger and redhot peppers in his cheeks. “I said…” And again, louder still: “Stop that!”

This time they heard. Their mouths left the Indian girl’s throat, leaving red suction marks and grease trails. Their glittering eyes in the foxlike faces found him, and yet they grinned stupidly as if they had never in their lives heard anyone give them a command and really mean it.

“Nathan?” Aria’s voice was very small and very tight. “I think—”

“Hush,” he told her, and she hushed. He focused his attention on the girl, who just that quickly had begun to leave the room once more. There was something he had to find out, and it had to be now. “I saw you sitting on the rock today. I thought…that’s a pretty girl, who sits alone.”

There was no response whatsoever. Her face was downcast, her disarrayed hair hanging in her eyes.

“A pretty girl shouldn’t sit alone,” Matthew continued. He felt sweat gathering at his temples. It was hard to avoid the deadly stares of the Thacker brothers; their silence seemed equally as deadly. “You know,” Matthew said with an air of desperation, “coming from New York’s winter to this island, I feel like a walker in two worlds.”

Again…nothing.

Mack’s mouth opened: “What shit are ya goin’ on about—”

“—boyo?” Jack finished, and he started to rise threateningly from his chair.

It was wrong, Matthew thought. Something was wrong. What was it? Think! he told himself. She didn’t respond to the name Walker In Two Worlds. Why not? If she was the same girl who’d crossed the Atlantic on the ship with he and Nimble Climber, then…why not?

“I think your head needs fixin’,” said Mack Thacker, who likewise started to slide from his chair.

“Straightenin’ out,” said the brother with the gray wisp in his hair, his teeth clenched and his fists the same. “Gentlemen! Please restrain yourselves!” Mother Deare’s voice was a shade shrill.

“Let them fight!” said Smythe, with a satisfied grunt. “Give us some entertainment while we wait!”

Matthew was the only one who saw Minx Cutter slide the knife out from under her waistcoat. He was feverishly fixated on something he was trying his damnedest to recall. It was Walker’s name. Something…something…

He caught it. Walker In Two Worlds had not been called that when the Indian crossed the Atlantic. As a child, he’d been known as—

“He Runs Fast, Too,” said Matthew, staring at the girl. And then, realizing he sounded like a complete fool but not caring very much: “Speaking of Indians.”

Fancy lifted her head, and she looked not only across the table at him but across a divide of space and time. For a brief few seconds their eyes met and held, and he thought he saw something within hers awaken like a brief flicker of flame or the dance of a spark. Then she gazed down upon the table once more, and whatever there had been—might have been, Matthew thought—was gone.

The Thackers appeared about to climb over the plates and glasses to get at their victim of the evening. They glared at him like dumb beasts, their faces reddened and eyes glinting green. They were done with fish, and now they wanted meat.

Matthew lifted his chin and awaited what was to come. He was ready to do whatever was needed to survive, which meant using a knife, a broken bottle, a chair, a candelabra. But he thought that indeed Fancy had shown a reaction to that name, and if this was the same girl who had crossed the ocean with Walker he reasoned that he owed his departed friend a final favor.

He decided that if it was the last thing on earth he did, he would free Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone from these two animals.

The room shook.

Just a fraction, perhaps. Overhead the chandelier swayed an inch or so, back and forth. Matthew saw the wine in his glass tremble. It was over and done within a couple of seconds, but Matthew was left with a sick feeling of motion in his gut.

“Damn it!” growled Smythe. “There’s another one!”

The concealed door in the wall at the far end of the room opened. Sirki emerged, pushing before him something covered up with a brown tarpaulin. There was the noise of rollers on the chessboard floor.

“Gentlemen!” Mother Deare was addressing the unruly Thackers. Her voice was hard, the voice of a woman who has known plenty of hardship and has dealt it out aplenty herself. “Be seated before Professor Fell!” she commanded.

Nineteen

SIRKI pushed the covered object to the head of the table. By the time he’d reached it, the Thackers had grumbled curses at Matthew and resumed their seats. Matthew saw Minx return the knife to its safe place beneath her waistcoat. Jonathan Gentry poured the last few drops of Juice of Absence into his wine and drank the concoction down, thirsty perhaps for a sense of removal from the scene before him. Cesar Sabroso quietly cleared his throat. Adam Wilson seemed to be there even less than before. Fancy darted a quick glance across the table at Matthew. Toy blotted Augustus Pons’s lips and whispered something into one of the blackmailer’s ears, which surely had heard their share of secrets.

Matthew waited, his eyes slightly narrowed and his jaw set.

Sirki whipped the brown tarpaulin off. Revealed underneath was a man in a chair, set upon a polished wooden platform with rollers on the bottom.

But yet not a man, Matthew realized.

It was the image of a man. A portrayal of a man. A facsimile, and that was all.

The chair was made of red leather, with gold-colored nailheads decorating the armrests. The man was made of…who could say? Certainly not flesh and blood, for the stillness of the figure. It was a dummy, Matthew thought. A life-sized poppet. Likely stuffed with hay and sawdust?

This figure of Professor Fell sat stiffly upright with its arms upon the rests and its feet spaced equidistantly upon the platform. It was a thin and wiry-looking construction, dressed in a white suit with gold trim and whorls of gold upon the suit jacket and breeches legs. It wore also a white tricorn, likewise trimmed in gold, white stockings and shiny black shoes with gold buckles. It wore flesh-colored fabric gloves and—most remarkably and startling—a flesh-colored fabric cowl that covered the face and head, yet showed the faintest impression of nosetip, cheekbones and eyesockets.

Matthew’s thought was: What the hell is this about?

He was answered in another few seconds, when Sirki removed a rather large key from a pocket of his robe. He inserted it into some opening at the back of the chair and turned it a dozen times. He threw a lever. With a sound of meshing gears and the rattling of a greased chain, the figure in the chair began to move.

It was a smooth motion, for a machine. For Matthew realized it was a majestic and almost-unbelievable creation he’d read about in his newspapers from London but had never seen or thought he would ever see. It was something called an automaton.

The right hand came up to press an index finger against the chin, as if measuring a thought before speaking. The right hand came down again, upon the armrest. Was there a twitch of the head, as a few ragged gearteeth moved through their circles? Yes, now the head was turning…slowly…left to right and back again, taking view of everyone at the table.

“Welcome,” spoke the automaton, in a tinny voice with a hint of a rasp and a whine, “to my home.”

No one responded. Did the machine have human ears? No.

Matthew realized he was gripping his wine glass so hard he was either about to break the glass or his knuckles. Everyone else was taking this in stride; they had been here before and obviously seen this machine in action.

The left hand rose, fluttered up into the air with a racheting of gears and then settled back once more. “There are important things to discuss,” the machine said, with a slight tilting of the masked face.

Did the mouth move behind that opaque cowl? It was hard to tell in the flicker of the candlelight. The voice was high and metallic and otherworldly, and Matthew felt a chill skitter up along his spine.

“I shall hear your reports at the proper time,” spoke the automaton, as Sirki stood several feet behind it and to one side. “For now, with you all together, I have a request.”

A silence stretched. Had the gears run their course? Then the chain rattled and the head moved again and the right hand came up to press the index finger a second time against the chin, as if in studious contemplation.

“I am searching for a man,” said the image of Professor Fell. “His name is Brazio Valeriani. He was last seen one year ago in Florence, and has since vanished. I seek this man. That for the present is all you need to know.” The finger left the chin and the head moved slowly from left to right. “I shall pay five thousand pounds to the person who locates Brazio Valeriani,” said the voice of the machine. “I shall pay ten thousand pounds to the person who brings him to me. Force may be necessary. You are my eyes and my hands. Seek,” it spoke, “and ye shall find.”

“Pardon, sir,” said Mack Thacker, suddenly a docile child, “but who is he?”

“All you need to know I have told you.” Once more the faceless head tilted to one side. “That concludes my request.”

Matthew was amazed. It appeared the construction had human ears after all. And the figures the machine had just offered were incredible. At once new questions burned his brain. Who was this Brazio Valeriani, and why was he so immensely valuable to Professor Fell?

The automaton was still. The silence was heavy. Suddenly it was broken by the clatter of a glass overturning on the table, which made Matthew almost jump out of his chair. Jonathan Gentry’s hand must have gone nerveless due to the Juice of Absence, and now the good and drug-addled doctor held the offending hand before his face and examined the fingers as if they belonged to someone he did not know.

The gearteeth moved again. So did the head, tilting backward a few degrees.

“One of you,” said the voice of the machine, “has been brought here to die.”

Matthew was near wetting his pants. If his heart was running any faster it was going to tear from his chest and roll across the room.

“To be punished for your sin,” the automaton continued. “You know what you have done.” The right hand lifted, the index finger beckoned, and Sirki withdrew from his black robes the wicked curved dagger with the sawtoothed edge. Then the East Indian giant strode forward, walking slowly and leisurely behind those guests sitting on the side opposite Matthew. “You have betrayed me,” spoke the tinny tongue of metal. “For this you shall not leave the room alive.”

Sirki continued his stroll, candlelight gleaming from the knife’s inset jewels and edge of horror.

“I offer you a chance to speak. To confess your sin before me. In so doing, you will receive a quick and merciful end.”

No one spoke. No one moved but Sirki, who now rounded the foot of the table and crossed behind Adam Wilson.

“Speak,” said the machine. “I will not abide a traitor. Speak, while you have life in your veins.”

There was no speaking, though Aria Chillany drew in her breath as Sirki passed behind her, and already Matthew’s nuts had seemingly pulled themselves up into his groin.

Sirki continued onward. Behind Mother Deare he stopped, turned and began to retrace his steps. The knife was held low, at the ready.

“This involves the Cymbeline,” came the hideous voice, which now held a note of taunting. “You know nothing can be kept from me. Confess it now.”

No tongue moved, though perhaps even in this rough company hearts pounded and pee puddled.

“Alas,” spoke the machine, “your moment of redemption has passed.” And then it added: “Doctor Gentry.”

“What?” Gentry asked, his eyes bleary and saliva breaking over his lower lip.

Sirki’s progress stopped. Standing behind the good, drug-addled and doomed doctor, the giant swung his arm back and with tremendous force smacked the sawtoothed blade into the right side of Gentry’s neck.

He gripped Gentry’s hair with his free hand. And then he began to saw the blade, back and forth.

Matthew flinched as the blood jumped upon him. In truth, in any other arena he might have let out a bleat of terror but in this room it might be another kiss of death. But horror came quickly upon horror, as Gentry turned his head toward Matthew even as it was being sawed from his neck, and there was more puzzlement upon Gentry’s face than pain as the crimson blood flowed from the deepening wound. Matthew realized that the Juice of Absence was at work, and perhaps too well it had deadened the nerves and taken the doctor to a distant room.

But this room, unfortunately, was where his head was being methodically—and somewhat joyfully, it must be said from the grim smile on Sirki’s face—cut off.

Augustus Pons gave a strangled gasp, though it was not his throat being opened. Toy was pressed up against his master like a second skin, or at least a second suit. The blood leaped and sprayed from the wound in Gentry’s neck, and though the body began to tremble and the hands to grasp and claw at the table yet the doctor’s face was placid and composed as if he were hearing the voice of a patient sitting at his knee.

And indeed, in the next moment Gentry asked Matthew with the gore dripping from his lips, “Tell me. What ails you?”

Across the table, Jack Thacker had recovered his nerve enough for a hollow laugh that Mack Thacker finished, with a ghastly chuckle. Between them, Fancy’s hair was in her face but her gaze was riveted to the tides of blood that flowed between the glasses and platters.

The right side of Gentry’s neck and his shoulder were both masses of red connected by darker threads and clumps, like a hideous suit coming apart at a crucial seam. The wound had the appearance of a gaping, toothless mouth. Matthew, to his absolute terror, could not look away.

Gentry’s eyes had seemingly sunken into a once devilishly-handsome face, now gone suddenly gaunt and sallow. When he spoke again, his voice was a hollow rasp. “Papa?” he said, addressing Matthew. “I’ve finished my lessons.”

The blade sawed back and forth, and forth and back. A sheen of sweat had risen upon the giant’s cheeks.

Aria gave the first burst of a scream but she choked it down. Her eyes were wide. The sapphires had turned to onyx. Toward the foot of the table, Adam Wilson leaned forward toward the carnage, his eyes alight behind his spectacles and his nostrils twitching as if entranced by the smell of so much blood. Cesar Sabroso, his mouth slack and eyes deadened, had hold of a wine bottle in each hand, gripping them like life itself.

Suddenly Gentry seemed to realize what was happening to him and he gave a shuddering cry and tried to rise but the giant’s hand was firm in his hair and just that quickly all of the doctor’s ebbing strength had run its course. The Juice of Absence was obviously a very potent formula. Gentry collapsed back into the chair, his head hanging to the left, and his hands twitched and jerked on the armrests as his legs kicked underneath the table and tried to run. Yet there was nowhere to run to.

“Oh,” moaned the mangled voice of a dead man, as the body whipped and spasmed, “Papa…I kissed…kissed Sarah today.”

A gush of nearly black blood met the next tearing of sawteeth. What came from the center of the thick red flood issuing out of Gentry’s straining mouth might have been a voice, and it might have been a pitiful cry for a life lost or a small handsome boy’s last boast: “I think she likes me.”