“It makes no sense,” said Matthew.
“No sense, agreed,” said Lillehorne, “yet there it is. What’s the message here, I wonder?”
“I don’t know.” Yet Matthew was beginning to get an idea of it. Come to us or we will turn this town to ashes.
He looked around for the doctor and his wife, but they had slunk away. Probably in triumph, Matthew thought. He was aware of others coming forward to see what was to be seen: Effrem did, and left without a word; Marmaduke Grigsby did, and made a sound that reminded Matthew of an inkstamp hitting paper; Berry did, and she bit her lower lip for a moment and gazed at him with sorrowful eyes before she withdrew; and then others came and went, until it seemed to Matthew that the whole town had peered under the roof of this well, and at last Gilliam Vincent thrust his bewigged head forward to take a gander and then regarded Matthew as one would look smelling a piece of spoiled cheese. Matthew came very near playing out the role of Hudson Greathouse and knocking Vincent wig over tailbone, but he restrained himself.
“I didn’t do anything!” Matthew said; he was speaking to Lillehorne, yet pleading his innocence to the whole of New York.
“Of course you didn’t!” said Greathouse. And then to the high constable: “Damned if you believe he did! What do you think, he’s causing these fires and signing his work?”
“I think,” replied Lillehorne, in a weary tone, “that I will soon be summoned before Lord Cornbury again. Dear me.” He aimed his lantern at Matthew’s face. “All right, then. I know you didn’t do this. Why would you, unless…your recent adventures with a madman scrambled your brains?” He let that hang in the air for a few seconds before he continued. “Tell me: do you know any reason this is being done? Do you know any person who might be doing this? Speak up, Corbett! Obviously these buildings are being destroyed in your name. Do you have anything to say?”
“He’s not on trial!” Greathouse fired back, with rising heat.
“Hold,” said Lillehorne, “your temper and your fists. Please.” His small black eyes found Matthew once more. “I asked you three questions. Do you have at least one answer?”
Matthew thought, Not one answer, but two suspects. He frowned in the candlelight. There was no way to link the Mallorys with this. Not yet, at least. And to reveal what he felt true about the connection between Jason and Rebecca Mallory and Professor Fell…no, he wasn’t ready for that yet either. Therefore he looked the high constable square in the goateed and sharp-nosed face and said calmly, “I do not.”
“No opinion? Nothing?”
“Nothing,” said Matthew, and he made it sound very believeable.
Lillehorne pulled the lantern’s light away. “Damn me,” he said. “Corbett, you must be ill. Perhaps you really did scramble your brains out there in the wilderness? Well, you can wager that if Cornbury summons me again, I’m summoning you again. I shall not look upon that countenance alone. Do you hear me?”
“We hear you,” Greathouse answered, in a gravelly voice.
“That’s all I have with you, then.” Lillehorne gave the name one more appraisal. “Someone find me some whitewash!” he shouted toward the commonfolk. “I’ll paint this out myself, if I must!”
Matthew and Greathouse took the moment to get away. They slid through the crowd. On the other side they walked east the rest of the way along Crown to the waterfront, where they turned south on Queen Street with the cold salt breeze in their faces.
“You’re keeping something back,” said Greathouse after they’d gotten clear of all listening ears. “You might throw a frog into Lillehorne’s pocket, but you can’t frog me. Let’s have what you know.”
Matthew was close to telling. He thought that with the next stride he would tell his friend everything, but…he did not. To pull Hudson into this, when there was no proof? To rouse the man up to action against…what? Shadows? Or against a perceived smirk on the faces of Jason and Rebecca Mallory? No, he couldn’t do it. This was a personal duel, himself versus them, and he would have to fight this particular battle quietly and alone.
“I don’t know anything,” he replied.
Greathouse stopped. In the faint light from the lanterns of New York, his expression was impassive and yet the intelligent coal-black eyes knew. “You’re lying,” he said. “I don’t take kindly to lies.”
Matthew said nothing. How could he? There was no use flinging another lie at the truth.
“I’m going home,” Greathouse announced after another moment. Home being the boarding-house on Nassau Street operated by the kindly but rather nosy Madam Belovaire. Matthew had already wondered if Greathouse was sneaking the widow Donovan into his abode, or if she was sneaking him into hers. Whichever, there was likely a lot of sneaking going on. “Home,” Greathouse repeated for emphasis. He drew the collar of his coat up around his neck. “When you decide to stop lying, let me know. Will you?” He took a stride in the direction of Nassau Street before he turned toward Matthew again, and Matthew was amazed to see on the great one’s face a mixture of anger and hurt. “Remember,” Greathouse said, “I’m always on your side.” And then he walked away with stiff-backed dignity, following the stick that tapped lightly on the earth.
Matthew stood as a solitary figure against the wind.
His thoughts were jumbled. They were as confused as he felt his life to be in the present. He began walking home, north on Queen Street. He passed by the masted ships and the slave market. The wind, stronger and colder, came at him from different angles as if to upset his balance on the world. Passing the last of the docked ships, his shoulders hunched forward and his chin tucked in, he cast his gaze toward the darkness of the sea. So much darkness, he thought. It was an immense dark, and he felt it pulling at his soul. He felt it grasping at him, taunting him, making a mockery of his name and a falsehood of his desire for truth.
And that darkness also had a name, he mused.
That name was: Professor Fell.
He stopped abruptly, and peered out into the black.
What had that been? Just that quick flash of red? Far, far out, it had been. If it had really been, at all. Was he seeing red signal lamps in his mind? Was he going the path of Hooper Gillespie, and the next step would be muttering to himself in the aloneness of his mind? He waited, watching, but the red lamp—whatever it had been, if so—did not reappear.
He recalled what Hudson Greathouse had told him about Professor Fell. It may be that by now Fell is on the cusp of creating what we think he desires: a criminal empire that spans the continents. All the smaller sharks—deadly enough in their own oceans—have gathered around the big shark, and so they have swum even here…
This big shark, Matthew thought, had big teeth and big eyes. It saw everything, and it wanted to eat everything. Even—perhaps most especially—the heart of a young man who had begun life born to a Massachusetts plowman and his wife, both dead early, and then sent to the pig farm of an aunt and uncle on Manhattan island. Escaping that prison of pigshit and drunken abuse on a haywagon, he had fallen in with a group of urchins on the waterfront, later to be caught literally in the net of the law and bound over to the town’s orphanage. There he had been educated by an intelligent and kindly headmaster, yet there was more misery to come. Of course, more misery…such was the essence of life. It either built or broke a character. And then finding himself clerk for two magistrates, and at last being offered the position of problem-solver for the Herrald Agency by none other than Katherine Herrald herself. At last? No, Matthew was certain the story of his life was far from being finished, yet at the moment he felt himself lost in a kind of limbo, a gray kingdom that demanded the right choice and proper action for his release yet he knew not what that was to be.