“Good man,” said Greathouse. And he added, as they started off side-by-side toward Crown Street: “You’re buying.”
Five
AT what was figured to be nearly half-past one in the morning of the twenty-third of February, four days after Hooper Gillespie had hooked a grouper, a well-known building on the corner of Crown and Smith streets was ripped apart by an explosion.
Its power was fierce enough to blast the roof into flaming pieces and crash them down again in the middle of the street. Shutters and door blew out. The glass of the display window was later found imbedded across the way in the wooden walls of the Red Barrel Inn, which itself took a buckling that made the last drunks within think that God’s fist had come knocking for their sins. The building on the corner of Crown Street did not so much burn as it ignited with a flash, like a torch wrapped with rinds of hog’s fat. The noise of the explosion threw everyone out of their beds from Golden Hill to Wall Street, and even the late-night entertainment at Polly Blossom’s on Petticoat Lane was interrupted by the echoing boom that chased itself across the town.
“What now!” shouted Gardner Lillehorne, sitting up in bed beside his Princess, whose face was smeared with green cream known to restore beauty to the ugliest woman in Paris.
“Damn what a noise!” shouted Hudson Greathouse, sitting up in bed beside a certain big-boned blonde widow who had long ago forgotten what the word no meant.
“Dear Lord, what was that?” asked Madam Cornbury, sitting up in bed beside the bulk of her husband, who was curled beneath the quilt with cork plugs in his ears for his own snoring sometimes woke him up.
And Matthew Corbett sat up in silence in his small but neatly-kept dairyhouse, and he lit a third candle to go along with the two that he kept burning at night to ward off the demons of Slaughter and Sutch. Emboldened by the light, he got out of bed and dressed himself and prepared for the worst, for he had the sure sensation that this blast had claimed something more vital than a warehouse full of ropes.
The flames burned with tremendous heat. The night was filled with sparks and smoke, and lit as orange as an August morn. The bucket brigades worked feverishly. They did their best, but then they had to turn their attention to the surrounding structures to keep the fire from travelling.
And so died the tailor shop run by Benjamin Owles and his son, Effrem.
In its last moments it coughed fire and gasped ash, and standing alongside Effrem in the crowd Matthew watched one black-scorched brick wall collapse and then another, until the rubble covered everything that had meant success in the lives of the Owles family.
“It’s over,” Matthew heard his friend say, in a very quiet voice. Matthew put his hand on Effrem’s shoulder, but it was a small gesture for such a huge tragedy. Nearby, Benjamin Owles stared into the flaring embers; he had been stoic until now, but the end had come and so the tears began to trickle down his face.
A ripple suddenly passed through the gathered throng. Matthew felt it like the passage of a knife’s blade down his spine. Someone shouted something, across Crown Street, but it was unintelligible. A murmur seemed to surround Matthew, like the whispering of a secret with himself at the center. “What is it?” he asked the silversmith Israel Brandier, standing to his right, but Brandier just stared at him through his horn-rimmed spectacles and said nothing. Beside Brandier, the laundress Jane Neville also aimed at him an expression of what could only be called uneasy doubt. Matthew had the sensation of being in a dream painted in shades of gray smoke and red embers. The figures around him were less human and more blurred. Someone spoke his name: “Corbett?” but he couldn’t see who it was through the murk. Then a man in a purple suit and purple tricorn bearing a white feather came through the gathering and caught his arm, and Matthew recognized Gardner Lillehorne.
“Come with me,” said the black-goateed high constable, who held a lantern in his other hand and clasped his lion’s-head cane beneath his arm.
Matthew allowed himself to be guided. At his heels nipped Dippen Nack, who made smacking sounds as if feasting on the meat and bones of an earnest young man. “What’s this about?” asked Hudson Greathouse, coming forth from the crowd. Lillehorne did not bother to answer. “Stop!” Greathouse commanded, but the high constable was in charge and he listened to no one.
Matthew was aware of others following him; he was creating a small wake, like a ship crossing the icy harbor. He caught sight of Berry and her grandfather, whose nose for news for the Earwig must be twitching aplenty. He saw Hudson, of course, close beside him and still mouthing questions at Lillehorne that were not going to be answered. He saw Effrem Owles, who moved like a smoke-stained sleepwalker. He saw the rotund and gray-bearded Felix Sudbury, owner of the Trot Then Gallop. He saw the constable Uriah Blount and the stable owner Tobias Winekoop. And there on his right, keeping pace with this strange procession, were the Mallorys: Doctor Jason and the beautiful Rebecca. They had linked their arms together, Matthew noted. They stared straight ahead, looking to all the world as if they were out on the most relaxed stroll of a midsummer eve. Yet the air was biting and cruel, and so too Matthew saw cruelty in their faces.
The high constable led Matthew to the nearest well, which stood about forty paces east on Crown Street. He released Matthew’s arm, leaned forward under the wooden roof that shielded the well from the elements, and he shone his lantern upward.
“Mr. Problem-Solver?” said Lillehorne, in a voice tight enough to squeeze sap from a stone. “Would you care to solve this problem?”
Matthew got beside Lillehorne and, with an inward shudder of what might have been precognition, he looked up along the candlelight.
And there.
There.
Painted in white on the underside of the roof.
Matthew Corbett, for all to see.
“It wasn’t noticed at first.” Lillehorne’s voice was not so tight now as it was simply matter-of-fact. “Not noticed until the fire was almost done. I think, Mr. Problem-Solver, that you most certainly have a problem.”
“What the hell is this?” Hudson Greathouse had thrust himself under the roof to peer upward, and Matthew had to wonder if the man’s guts didn’t clench just a bit, being so close to what had almost killed him in October. Greathouse at once answered his own question. “This is a bagful of shit, is what it is!”
“I seen it first!” said a man who stepped forward from the onlookers. Matthew recognized the twisted-lip face of Ebenezer Grooder, a notorious pickpocket. Grooder’s mouth was full of broken teeth, and he sprayed spittle when he spoke. “Does I earn meself a reward?”
“You surely do,” said Greathouse, who then hit the man so hard in the mouth that the remaining stubs of Grooder’s teeth flew from his head and he went out of one of his stolen boots on his way to an unconscious landing.
“Hold! Hold!” Lillehorne shrieked, like the high register of a little pipe-organ. He had no hope of holding Hudson Greathouse and neither did any other man present. But several men did take the opportunity of picking up Grooder’s limp carcass and tossing him aside, but not before one of them got a few coins and an engraved silver ring out of the unfortunate’s pocket. “Greathouse, mind you don’t end up behind bars tonight!” Lillehorne warned, because his position demanded it. He then quickly returned his attention to the roof’s underside. Matthew was still staring up at his own name, trying to figure out why the Mallorys had done it. Because Matthew had refused—and still refused—their invitation to dinner?