“She’ll be here, don’t fret,” said Hudson. “I’m going to order another bottle. That suit everyone?”
“It suits me fine,” said Lady Cutter, with an intimation in her voice that she could drink the great one under the table ten times and again.
As they had walked along the Broad Way that morning in April, Berry had been silent for a few moments, contemplating this interest in Minx Cutter. Then had come the question that Matthew had been expecting: “Do you care for her?”
“Who?”
“You know who. Minx Cutter. Do you care for her?”
“I care about her.”
Berry had stopped suddenly, positioning herself in front of him. Her eyes were keen. Her chin was slightly uplifted. She wore her universe of freckles proudly. “You delight in playing with me, don’t you? Your word games and your…your mismeanings. I am asking you this question, Matthew. Do you care—in a romantic way—for Minx Cutter?”
He thought about this. He looked at the ground. He looked at the sky. He looked at his own hands, and polished with a sleeve the buttons on his coat. Then he looked into the face that he considered so very beautiful, and he knew the mind behind it was beautiful and so was the heart, and he said as coldly as he could on such a warm day, “Maybe I do. What of it?”
She wore a stricken expression. But only for a few seconds. If she had come to pieces in that short span of time, so she reassembled herself just as quickly.
“I see,” she said.
But Matthew knew she did not see. Matthew knew that very easily Berry’s head could have been parted from her body at the neck by Sirki’s blade, and that her beauty might have curdled in the guts of an octopus. Or that she might indeed have walked off a cliff in the dark and fallen to her death. Or been found by the searchers and wound up…what?…beaten and ravished in a cell? He couldn’t bear to think of any of those possibilities, and how close some of them might have been to coming true. So last night he had made up his mind what to do, and now—this moment—was his opportunity.
He had decided to make her hate him.
“Minx Cutter is…fascinating to me,” he said. “So different.”
“I’ll say different, too. She wears a man’s clothes.”
“She is unique,” Matthew plowed on. “A woman, not a girl.”
“Hardly a woman,” was the retort.
“All woman,” said Matthew. “And very exciting to me in that way. You know, one gets tired of the ordinary.” He thought that might be the shot that knocked her down.
But Berry was still on her feet, and still on his side. “I think you’ll find out for yourself that some ordinary people, as you say, are extraordinary. If you cared to look closely enough.”
“I live an exciting life,” said Matthew, and he nearly cringed at his own self. “Why would I want less in my romantic life?”
“Why are you so cold today? This isn’t like you!”
“It’s the new me,” he told her. And possibly there was some truth in that, for he wasn’t exactly sure he’d left all of Nathan Spade behind.
“I don’t like the new you very much, Matthew,” she said. “In fact, I don’t like the new you at all.”
“I am who I am. And who I will ever be.” He frowned, impatient at his own heartless lies. “I have to get along to see Minx now. Would you excuse me? I’d rather walk alone than be entangled in a ridiculous discussion like this.”
“Oh, would you?” She nodded. Her cheeks were very red and the freckles looked like bits of pepper. But deep in her eyes—and this wounded his soul to see—was a hurt that he thought he would rather tear his own orbs out than have to gaze upon. “All right then, Matthew. All right. I thought we were friends. I thought…we were something, I don’t know what.”
“I don’t know what either,” he answered, like the bastard of the world.
“I can’t…I don’t understand…why…”
“Oh,” he said, “stop your prattling.”
“I came to help you, if you needed me. That’s all I ever wanted, Matthew! To help you! Can’t you see that?”
“That’s the point I’m trying to make.” He drew a breath, for this next thing might be the killer. “I was wrong to have confided in you on the ship that night. It was weak, and I regret it. Because the fact is, I have never needed you. I didn’t yesterday, I don’t today and I will not tomorrow.”
And this time, he saw the little death in her eyes. It killed him, most of all.
“Fine,” Berry said. And again, as the ice closed in: “Fine. Good day to you, then.” She sounded a bit choked, and she quickly cleared her throat. Then she turned and began walking quickly away, and six strides in her departure she turned again toward him and there were tears on her face and she said in a voice near collapse, “We are done.”
It was good that she got quickly away, for Matthew got himself going in the opposite direction, not toward Garden Street at all, and he staggered like a drunk though he had only put down the water, and everything seemed blurred and terribly wrong, and his heart ached and his eyes felt as if they were bleeding. A few steps and he broke the heel off his right boot, which made him limp even more drunkenly. And also like a drunk he found himself sitting under a tree in the Trinity cemetery, surrounded by those who had already known their share of life, love and loss, and he sat there for a time wishing some ghost would whisper to him about strength and fortitude and the will to keep going and similar such bullshit but no ghost spoke and so therefore he wiped his eyes, roused himself and went on his way and he thought that somewhere in Heaven or Hell one spirit applauded him and that spirit’s name had been Nathan. Who now was long deceased, for all the good love had done him.
Before he left that village of the dead he had the overwhelming urge to call out for her, as if she could hear him. To call out and say he was sorry, that he was a liar and hadn’t meant any of it but that he was frightened for her and frightened of Professor Fell for her. So it all came down to fear. But he didn’t call out, for it would have been for nothing and anyway the dice had been thrown. We are done. Three words he would take with him when they rolled him over into his own bed in this very same village of silent sleepers.
“Yes,” said Matthew, as he watched the door of Sally Almond’s tavern at seven-twenty-nine by the clock. “By all means, another bottle.”
“You’ve been drinking a lot lately, I notice.” Greathouse poured the last of the red wine into Matthew’s glass and held up the empty soldier for the waitress. “Why is that?”
“Thirsty,” Matthew answered.
There was a small tick of metal from the clock as the minute hand moved. And just that soon, the door opened and in walked Katherine Herrald.
She was now, as she had been in October, a trim figure who drew attention and admiration. She was about fifty years old, with sharp features and penetrating blue eyes. She was straight-backed and elegant and there was nothing aged or infirm about her. Her dark gray hair, under a fashionable cocked riding-hat a rich brown hue, was streaked with pure white at the temples and at a pronounced widow’s peak. She wore a dark brown dress ornamented with leather buttons and cinched with a wide leather belt. Around her throat was a scarf nearly the same color as the Stokelys’ Indian-blood-colored pottery. She wore brown leather gloves. She came across the tavern directly to their table, as Matthew and Hudson stood up to greet her. She was their employer, her dead husband the originator of the Herrald Agency and himself murdered by Tyranthus Slaughter on orders of Professor Fell. Back in October she’d told Matthew she was going to England and then would be returning in May. So here she was, and when she’d arrived yesterday morning she’d sent a letter to them from the Dock House Inn, announcing her presence. Matthew had written back: I have someone you need to meet. Her name is Minx Cutter, and she was once an associate of Professor Fell.