Two

As a crab scuttled amid rocks in the liquid dark, so Matthew Corbett danced across the plank floor of Sally Almond’s tavern by golden candlelight. Perhaps he was not as ungainly as the crab, and perhaps he did comport a certain amount of grace and style, yet there was definitely room for improvement in his technique. In its largest room the tavern’s tables and chairs had been pushed back and space arranged for a right fair gathering. A fire crackled in the brick hearth to warm the air, though the heat of energy filled the place. Two fiddlers played, a squeezeboxer squeezed, and a drummer rattled his bones at a merry pace. The stately gray-haired figure of Sally Almond herself had joined the festivity, clapping her hands to the bounding beat.

Round and round went the swirl of dancers, among them the blacksmithing apprentice and Matthew’s friend John Five and his bride Constance, the potter Hiram Stokely and his wife Patience, the Munthunk brothers Darwin and Davy and their corpulent but surprisingly light-footed Mother Munthunk, Dr. Artemis Vanderbrocken who at seventy-six was content to mostly sip the spiced punch and enjoy the music, Felix Sudbury the owner of the Trot Then Gallop tavern, the printmaster Marmaduke Grigsby, Madam Kenneday the baker, another of Matthew’s good friends Effrem Owles the tailor’s son, and Jonathan Paradine the undertaker who was thin and pale and seemed to slink from place to place on the floor rather than actually dance. His ladyfriend, a newly-arrived widow by the name of Dorcas Rochester, was equally thin and pale and slinked just the same as her beau, so the couple seemed to all to be well-matched.

Matthew Corbett had been in some demanding predicaments in his twenty-three years on earth. He had weathered the attack of a bear whose claw had left a crescent scar from just above the right eyebrow into the hairline. He had outrun a triad of hawks determined to remove his eyeballs in the most ungracious fashion. And he had literally managed to keep his face situated on his skull in a millhouse fight with the brutal killer Tyranthus Slaughter, among many other moments of dramatic danger. But at this moment, in the golden candlelight of Sally Almond’s tavern with the music playing and the dancers stepping through their paces, Matthew thought his own feet were perhaps the most dangerous enemies he’d yet faced, for the crossover mirror reels were treacherous in their complexity and the elaborately bewigged dance master Gilliam Vincent—who also served as the prissy proprietor of the Dock House Inn—wielded a leather glove on the end of a hickory stick to slap the heads of imperfect offenders.

And, as Matthew made a slight stumble, here came the stick and glove. Smack upon the back of his skull. When Matthew turned his head to give Gilliam Vincent a glowering stare, the dance master had lightly moved away and so was Matthew moving away as well, caught up in the procession. Yet Mr. Vincent bore a smirk beneath his bony snoot that said he enjoyed the correcting perhaps a bit more than he ought to.

“Pay no mind to him!” said Berry Grigsby as she came up alongside Matthew on their right-shoulder pass. “You’re doing fine!”

“A relative term,” he answered.

“Better than fine,” she corrected as she moved past. “Wonderful.”

Now that, he thought as he continued along the path this particular reel required, was skinning the onion and calling it a potato. Then he turned to find himself face-to-face with the two-hundred-and-forty pound shock of woman called Mother Munthunk, and she gave him a black-toothed grin under her hatchet nose and a whiff of breath a goat could not suffer.

What a joy this evening was, Matthew thought when his eyes had ceased their watering. He regretted accepting this invitation from Berry, though he had twice before declined her note. Matthew, she’d said at his door last week, I’m only going to ask you once more, and if you say no I’ll never—never—ask again.

And what could he do then but accept? Not only was Berry breaking what seemed like the law of God by inviting a male to a social gathering, but also implicit in the tone of her request and the low fire in her dark blue eyes was the suggestion that not only would she never ask him again, she would never speak to him again. Which would be a problem for him, since he lived in a converted dairyhouse just behind the Grigsbys’ abode and he took supper there on occasion with Berry and her moon-faced and usually ink-stained grandfather Marmaduke. So in respect with keeping the peace and the more selfish ambition of keeping his place at a very hospitable supper table, what else could he do but accept?

“Half reels of three!” Gilliam Vincent announced, with an expression that verged on a sneer. “Then we shall turn to the left, give both hands, make a complete clockwise circle and assume our places for the Mad Robin!”

This was supposed to be enjoyable, Matthew thought grimly. Berry had taught him the positions and steps last week, but with the fiddling and the drumming and Gilliam Vincent’s stick poised to strike a blow for artful perfection it was torment for a young problem-solver who would much rather be studying the pieces on a chessboard or, for that matter, be out on a task somewhere for his employer, the London-based Herrald Agency.

Onward! he told himself. His feet were more or less where they needed to be. He mused upon cocking a fist at Gilliam Vincent if that stick came near his skull again, but he had had enough of violence lately to last him a lifetime.

He still had nightmares of Mister Slaughter. In some of them, he was being chased across a black bog by the killer, his feet and legs were sinking into the muck, he couldn’t get himself free to move fast enough, and when he looked back through the red-tinged nightmare gloom he saw the approaching figure and the glint of a knife gripped in the right hand. And then from the opposite side another figure was coming toward him: a leonine woman with an axe in one hand and under her other arm a burlap bag marked in crimson paint Mrs. Sutch’s Sausages, Sutch A Pleasure.

“Places for the Mad Robin!” Gilliam Vincent called out. “Find your places!” You idiot children, he might have added.

Matthew moved, but he sometimes felt dazed and unsure of his direction. Sometimes he felt as if he belonged to another world that the people in this room knew nothing about. Sometimes he felt that even though both Mister Slaughter and Mrs. Sutch were dead, part of them kept clawing at him deep inside as if he were the entrance to their crypt and they desperately wished to open him up so they might rejoin the living. For in a way he was their brother now.

He was a killer.

Of course Tyranthus Slaughter had died due to the combined efforts of Matthew, the vengeful boy Tom Bond and the Iroquois tracker Walker In Two Worlds, but Matthew had cleaved an important portion of Lyra Sutch’s head from her shoulders with an axe, and he would never forget the expression of hatred on her bloodied face and the way the scarlet rivers had flowed. That hideous cellar was a memory bad enough to drive any man to madness. Since it had happened Matthew could never again sleep in the dark. A candle—or better, two—had to be burning all through the night beside his bed.

“Step lively!” commanded Vincent. The curls of his wig were as big as cotton balls. “Corbett, wake up!”

He was awake, yet was he? When he got this horrible business on his mind reality became fogged, like a dirty glass. He recalled speaking to Sally Almond about how the great fans of Mrs. Sutch’s sausages were reacting now that there were be no more of the spicy things laid out on the dark red—Indian blood, they were called—platters Hiram Stokely supplied to Madam Almond. Most are faring well, the lady had told him. But a few who seemed to crave those sausages beyond all reason tell me they sweat at night and do not sleep very soundly.

“They’ll get themselves in order,” Matthew had answered, but he was thinking he should get the names of those particular sausage-lovers so he might studiously avoid them in the streets and alleyways of New York.

A pity that Mrs. Sutch left the country so suddenly, said Sally Almond.

“Yes, and most likely it was a one-way destination,” Matthew had replied, leaving Madam Almond to frown with puzzlement for a few seconds before she gave a shrug of finality and returned to her kitchen.

“Step! Step! Step! Pause!” shouted the bewigged tyrant, who was doing his best to make a pleasant pastime into an onerous odyssey.

Matthew Corbett wore tonight a plain dark blue suit with a white shirt and white stockings, his shoes buffed to a polite shine. He was no longer interested in presenting himself as a cock-of-the-walk, as had been the case back in the flush of autumn. He was absolutely fine with his current position in life, which was as a problem-solver tasked to do many various things for the Herrald Agency, some as mundane as carrying land deed papers to a particular personage and others as interesting as had been the incident of the Four Lamplighters just this past December. Problems such as Lord Mortimer, the wealthy man who’d hired Matthew to help him cheat death, and the tricky—yet sadly comic—situation faced by Lady Pink Manjoy had helped Matthew put some distance between himself and the Slaughter tribulation, yet he still felt he had many miles to go.

He moved within the flow of dancers yet felt himself drifting apart. Even when Berry passed him once more and gave him a lingering appraisal, he saw only the fact that he had taken a human life. And perhaps it had been his life or the wretched life of Mrs. Sutch in the balance, but still … he remembered asking his friend Walker In Two Worlds the question How are you insane?

And the Indian’s answer, which seemed more appropriate now to Matthew’s state of mind: I know too much.

Matthew was tall and slim, yet with the toughness of a river reed about him. Surely, he knew by now the virtues of bending with the flow of events. He had a lean, long-jawed face and a thatch of fine black hair that was now brushed and tamed for the civilities of the evening. His pale candlelit countenance attested to his interest in books and nighttime games of chess at the Trot Then Gallop. His cool gray eyes with their hints of twilight blue were on this night thoughtful upon matters more of flesh-and-blood than music and dance. Yet he was here, in a way, on a mission.

When he and his problem-solving associate Hudson Greathouse had been assaulted by Tyranthus Slaughter and had wound up at the bottom of a well in the ruins of a Dutch fort, Matthew in his efforts to escape death and save his friend’s life had been fortified by the image of the lovely, intelligent, artistic and quite willful young woman who had just passed by his right shoulder. In fact, he had fixed upon her as he had attempted time and again a precarious spider-like climb to the top of the well, which had seemed at the moment as far away as Philadelphia. During that struggle to survive he had made the vow to invite her to a dance if indeed he lived through the episode. And he had vowed to dance the floor to woodshavings in appreciation of a life returned to him. Mayhaps it had been Berry doing the inviting, and the dancing was more regimented than he would have liked, but nevertheless he felt he was alive because of her, and so he was here—dancing with her, every few turns of the reel—and he was in his own way ecstatic to still be a citizen of this earth.

So when Berry passed next to him the following round—she of the curly coppery-red tresses, blue-eyed and fresh-faced and all of nineteen years old with a scattering of freckles across her nose and a gap between her front teeth that Matthew found not only endearing but exciting—he raised his face to her and smiled, and she smiled back at him, and he thought she looked radiant in her sea-green gown adorned with purple ribbons on the front, and perhaps an errant thought of what her lips would taste like when they were kissed crept in and surprised him, and caused him to lose the pace, for he stumbled against Effrem Owles and suddenly Gilliam Vincent was there glowering his disapproval and the stick was coming down to swat Matthew’s noggin with the leather glove.

But before the glove could smack home, the length of hard hickory met with resistance in the form of a gnarled black walking-stick that got in its way. There was a little crack of wood against wood, more like the horns of two rams clashing.

“Mr. Vincent?” Hudson Greathouse had stepped forth from the throng of perhaps twenty or so onlookers to this slow death called a ‘dance.’ He spoke quietly, so that only Matthew and the dancemaster could hear. “Have you ever had a glove up your ass?”

Vincent sputtered. His cheeks reddened. Maybe the answer was yes. It was hard to tell.

In any case, the hickory stick went down.

“Time, everyone!” Vincent announced. “Time, please!” And then, to no one in particular, “I’m going out to get some air!”

“Don’t rush back on our accounts,” Greathouse said as Vincent departed with a wobble in his wig.

The little commotion caused a hiccup in the music and, the pacing lost, the company of reelers banged and bumped into each other like a caravan of carriages that had thrown their wheels. Instead of the kind of indignation that Vincent might have shown at this lack of dancely decorum, the collisions brought forth laughter both brassy and silvery and thus revealed was the true metal of friendship among the Mad Robins of New York.

The musicians decided to rest their fiddles, drums and squeezebox. The dancers dispersed to get their share of apple cider and sugar cakes from the table in the other room. Berry came up alongside Greathouse and Matthew and said with appreciable generosity to the young man, “You’re doing very well. Better than you did at the house.”

“Thank you. My feet don’t believe you, but thank you anyway.”

She gave a quick glance at Greathouse and then focused her attention again on her object. “Cider?” she asked.

“In a minute.” Matthew was aware he was not the most genial of company this night; perhaps it was the fact that he’d just seen the Mallorys—the devilishly-handsome, gentlemanly Doctor Jason and his beautiful black-haired wife Rebecca—standing across the room pretending to be talking but actually keeping their eyes on him. Those two had been haunting him seemingly wherever he went ever since he’d returned from the Slaughter incident.

We have a mutual acquaintance, Rebecca Mallory had said to Matthew one day on a quiet waterfront street while her husband silently stood watch. We believe he’d like to meet you.

When you’re ready, the woman had said, in a week or two, we’d like you to come visit us. Will you do that?

And what if I don’t? Matthew had asked, because he knew full well to what acquaintance Rebecca Mallory must be referring.

Oh, let’s don’t be unfriendly, Matthew. In a week or two. We’ll set a table, and we’ll be expecting you.

“I’ll certainly be glad to have cider with you, Berry!” said Effrem Owles, pushing past Matthew in his eagerness to inhale the girl’s essence. His eyes were large and round behind his spectacles. The tailor’s son was dressed simply but elegantly in a black suit, white shirt and white stockings. His teeth gleamed at the center of his giddy smile. Though Effrem was only twenty years old, premature gray streaked his brown hair. He was tall and thin. Gangly would be the proper word. An excellent chess player, but the only game he was playing tonight had to do with Cupid. Tonight he was obviously hanging onto the hope that Berry would grace him with the opportunity to watch her drink cider and eat sugar cakes. Effrem was in love. No, more than love, Matthew thought. Effrem was obsessed with Berry. He talked about her incessantly and wanted to know everything of her comings and goings, and did Matthew ever put in a good word for him and say how much money an able tailor could command and all such nonsense. Between Effrem and the town’s eccentric but highly-efficent coroner Ashton McCaggers, Berry had her choice of ardent pursuers.

“Well …” Berry made it sound like not only a deep subject but also one that greatly perplexed her. “Matthew, I thought—”

“Go ahead,” Matthew told her, if only because he feared getting saliva on his sleeve from Effrem’s tongue. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Grand!” said Effrem as he positioned himself beside Berry for the stroll into the other room. She went along, because she did like Effrem. Not in that way he wished to be liked, but because Matthew counted him a good friend and she saw in Effrem the loyalty of friendship she considered among the highest blessings in the world.

In the departure of Berry and Effrem, Hudson Greathouse leaned lightly on his stick, cocked his head to one side and gave Matthew a grin that was also half-cocked. “Brighten your candle,” he advised. “What’s wrong with you?”

Matthew shrugged. “I suppose I’m not in a festive mood.”

“Well, get in one. My God, boy! I’m the one who can’t dance anymore! And I’ll tell you, I could shake my shillelagh in my younger days. So use it while you have it!”

Matthew stared at the floor between them. Sometimes it was hard for him to look Hudson in the face. Because of greed and a bad decision, Matthew had allowed Slaughter to get the drop on them. Greathouse got along fine on his walking-stick, for sure, and sometimes he could get along just fine without it if he was feeling more like a stallion than a gelding, but being stabbed four times in the back and then three-quarters drowned had a way of aging a man, of slowing him down, of thrusting the bitter truth of mortality in his face. Greathouse of course had always been a man of action, and thus knew the pitfalls of putting himself in harm’s way, but Matthew still blamed his mendacity for the darkness that sometimes passed across Greathouse’s face like a shadow, and made the man’s deep-set black eyes seem yet more ebony and the lines around them more numerous. To be certain, a diminished Hudson Greathouse was still a force to be reckoned with, if anyone dared try. Not many would. He had a ruggedly handsome, craggy face and wore his thick iron-gray hair in a queue tied with a black ribbon. He stood three inches over six feet, broad of shoulders and chest and also broad of expression; he knew how to conquer a room, and at age forty-eight—having turned so on the eighth of January—he possessed the canny experience of a survivor. And well to be so, for the wounds and the stick had neither made him put quit to his work with the Herrald Agency nor made him any less desirable to any number of New York females. His tastes were simple, as attested to by his gray suit, white shirt and white stockings above unpolished black boots that knew how to kick a tail or two, if need be. Matthew mused that Mr. Vincent should consider himself lucky to have gotten out of the room with just an insult, because since Matthew had saved his life Greathouse was the finest of friends and the fiercest of protectors.

Yet, still, there was the nit to be picked.

“Are you that much of an idiot?” Greathouse asked.

“Pardon?”

“Don’t play dumb. I’m talking about the girl.”

“The girl,” Matthew repeated, dumbly. He glanced to see if he was still the center of attention from Doctor Jason and the beautiful Rebecca, but the Mallorys had moved to a different position and were conversing with the ruddy-faced sugar merchant Solomon Tully, he of the Swiss-geared false choppers.

“The girl,” said Greathouse with some force behind it. “Can’t you tell she’s got it set for you?”

“What’s set for me?”

“It!” Greathouse’s scowl was a frightening thing. “Now I know you’ve been working too much! I’ve told you, haven’t I? Make time for life.”

“My work is my life.”

“Hm,” said the great one. “I can see that carved on your gravestone. Honestly, Matthew! You’re young! Don’t you realize how young you are?”

“I haven’t thought.” Ah, yes! There was the quick glance from Rebecca Mallory again. Whatever she was thinking, Matthew knew he was never far from it. Of course, owing to events revealed to Matthew after the deaths of Slaughter and Sutch, it was clear to him that the Mallorys were somehow involved with the personage who seemed to be becoming a dark star on the horizon of Matthew’s world. That personage being Professor Fell, emperor of crime both in Europe, England and now desirous of a place of control in the New World, the better to spread his clutching tentacles like his symbol the octopus.

We have a mutual acquaintance, Rebecca Mallory had said.

Matthew had no doubt the Mallorys knew Professor Fell much better than he. All he knew of the man was that he had a slew of nefarious plans—some of which Matthew had already upset—and that at one time Professor Fell had laid a ‘blood card’ down upon the young problem-solver’s life: a bloody fingerprint on a white card that meant Matthew was marked for certain death. Whether that threat still held true or not, he didn’t know. Perhaps he should stroll across the room and ask the Mallorys?

“You’re wandering off from what I’m saying.” Greathouse shifted his position so that he stood between Matthew and the handsome couple who hid their secrets. Matthew had said nothing of any of this to his friend; there was no need, as yet, to pull him into this intrigue. Particularly now that the great one was somewhat less great and much more human in his vulnerable flesh. “And if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, stop thinking it.”

Matthew looked Greathouse in the eyes. “What might that be?”

“You know. That you still carry a burden, and you blame yourself and all that. It happened, it’s done and it’s over. I told you before, I might have done the same thing in your shoes. Hell,” he growled, “I’m sure I would’ve. I’m all right, believe me. Now let that go and come back to life. I don’t mean just halfway. I mean all the way. Hear me?”

Matthew did. Greathouse was right; it was time to let those things of the past go, because they were corrupting both his present and future. Maybe it would still be awhile before he could come back all the way, but he forced himself to say, “Yes.”

“Good boy. Good man, I mean.” Greathouse leaned in a little closer. His eyes caught candlelight and glinted with devilish humor. “Listen,” he said quietly, “that girl favors you. You know she does. She’s a mighty comely girl, and she could make a man excitable if you know what I mean. And I’ll tell you, she hides more than she shows in that area.”

“What area?” In spite of himself, Matthew felt a smile pushing at the corners of his mouth.

“Love.” It had been nearly a whisper. “You know what they say: Gap between the teeth, hot between the sheets.”

“Oh, they say that, do they?”

“Yes. Definitely yes.”

“Hudson? There you are!” The person who’d just spoken was a woman, and she came forward with a rustle of lemon-colored skirts and an expression of bemusement. She was tall and willowy and had a lush garden of blonde hair that in defiance of the proper ladylike fashion fell unconfined about her bare shoulders, which of itself spoke volumes of both her nature and the future of modern women. Upon seeing a small heart-shaped birthmark in the hollow of her throat Matthew thought they would have seized on this rather brazen female as a witch in the since-departed town of Fount Royal. He doubted she would’ve gone nicely to the gaol. She got up alongside Greathouse and actually put her arm around his shoulders. Then she stared at Matthew with her warm and inviting brown eyes and said, “This is the young man.” No question, just statement.

“Matthew Corbett, meet the widow Donovan,” said Greathouse.

She offered an ungloved hand. “Abby Donovan,” she told him. “I arrived last week from London. Hudson has been so helpful.”

“He’s a helpful sort,” Matthew said. His hand would remember the woman’s remarkably firm squeeze.

“Yes, but he does get away from you. Particularly when he says for you to get cider and that he’ll return in a moment. I don’t think ‘a moment’ is the same for Hudson as it is for other men.” All this was said with the slyest hint of a smile and the brown eyes fixed on the man of the moment.

“Never was,” he admitted. “Never will be.”

“I admit, he’s one of a kind,” said Matthew.

“Don’t I know it!” answered the lady, who when her smile broadened into nearly a laugh displayed a gap between her front teeth that made Berry’s appear a crevice compared to a canyon. It shocked Matthew that his first thought was wondering what might fit in there, and then he got redfaced and had to swab his temples with his handkerchief.

“It is warm, this close to the fire,” observed the widow Donovan, who Matthew figured might have burned her dearly departed to cinders under the sheets. But anyway, it was up to Greathouse now to brave the flames, for the woman stood close against him and stared desirously at the side of his face, so much so that Matthew wondered how a week might pass so intensely heated for some and yet so frozen with blue ice for others.

“Excuse us,” Greathouse said at length. He shifted his balance, perhaps because he had to reposition his stick. “We’ll be going now.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Matthew said.

“Oh,” said the woman with a lift of her blonde brows, “when Hudson gets going, there’s no stopping him.”

One week! Matthew thought. And here he was, brooding over the great one’s disabilities! Perhaps it was true, Greathouse could no longer dance. Standing up, that is. But otherwise …

“Goodnight,” said Greathouse, and he and his new kitten—cat, really, for she was likely in her late thirties but very well assembled for her age—went out of the room as close-stepped as two people could be who were not in a military parade. Then Matthew got upon his mind the matter of salutes of a certain kind, and so he was redfaced again when a female voice beside him quietly said, “Matthew?” and he turned to set eyes upon a person whose presence he would not have predicted from now until the impossibly distant twenty-first century.