And swimming out there in the dark sea, the big shark. Circling and circling, getting ever closer.
A hand touched his shoulder. He almost shot out of his boots.
“I’m sorry!” said Berry, drawing back. She was wearing a black coat with a hood, and nearly was one with the night. “Were you thinking?”
“I was,” he managed to answer, when he was certain he could speak intelligibly. His heart was still a snare drum being whacked by a madman’s fist. “Don’t you know better than to sneak up on a person?”
“Sorry,” she said, and added with a touch of hot pepper, “again.”
Matthew nodded. It was best to retreat a bit rather than risk the wrath of a redhead. “All right, then. It’s done.” He shrugged; his heartbeat was settling down, more of a trot now than a gallop, which made him think he could use a good drink of ale from that so-named tavern on Crown Street if Felix Sudbury had opened up for business from the bucket brigaders and fire-watchers. New York was truly becoming a town that seemingly never slept. Very soundly, at least.
“Matthew?”
“Yes?” He’d been looking at the ground, and now he raised his eyes to hers.
“Do you have any ideas? I mean…really. Do you?”
“None,” he answered, a little too quickly.
She came a step closer. Her gaze was intense and no-nonsense and she would not take none for an answer. “That’s not like you,” she told him. “You always have ideas. Some perhaps better than others…” She paused. He knew she was thinking of a certain trick involving horse manure they’d used to avoid having their faces ripped off by hawks in a rather frightening experience last summer. “Some much better than others,” she went on. “But you always have ideas. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be…” She paused again, thinking. “Who you are,” she decided to say. “So if you do. Have any ideas, I mean. I would care to hear them, if you would care to tell.”
He stared at her, from a distance that seemed both terribly long and at the moment uncomfortably close. She was asking him to trust her, he realized. Because she could look into his eyes and see that he had something hidden there, in that brain of his, and she was wanting to be part of it.
For a few seconds many things went through Matthew’s mind. What he might say. The right choice of words, the proper tone of voice. A complicated sentence that skirted the truth, to hold her curiosity at bay and certainly keep her out of danger. But what he came up with was as simple as two words.
“I can’t.”
Then he turned away from her and walked toward Crown Street and the Trot in search of a late-night drink.
Berry remained where she was. The wind seemed colder; she drew her coat tighter around herself. Oh Matthew, she thought. Where are you going?
It seemed he was always going somewhere. Always on the move. Always away from where she stood, it seemed. She would never tell him that sometimes in the morning she watched through the kitchen window to see him come out his door. That she marked always how fresh-scrubbed he was, and clean-shaven, and ready for the world. Except since coming back from the wilderness, he did not seem so ready for the world. He was different, and he would not talk about it but she could tell his step was slowed and his back always slightly hunched as if expecting a blow. Perhaps not talking about it was killing him, very slowly, inside. Perhaps, she thought, if he could trust her enough to tell her…then he could truly come back from the wilderness, for some sweet and innocent part of him had been left there, and she greatly missed it.
She wished very much that she might tell him her theory of her bad luck. She’d had several suitors, of course, who’d fallen under the spell of her bad luck. And poor Effrem, always stepping into a gopher hole or a mud puddle when walking beside her. Poor Ashton, trying to be so collected and worldly when he first came calling for her, and then breaking the heel of his shoe within the next few minutes. It had become a little joke between them, how many heels he’d broken at her side.
But Berry remembered a day in the summer when she’d been sketching at the end of a long pier. The pier she’d chosen had been a horror of worm-eaten boards and gaps and damage caused by the progress of the elements and boats with unproficient captains. She’d chosen that place because she’d wished not to be bothered.
Then he’d come along.
May I come out? he’d asked.
And she’d said, As you wish, and thought he was asking for a certain swim in the drink.
She’d kept drawing on her sketchpad and waiting to hear him holler as he fell. Because surely her bad luck would be the bedlam queen of this rotten wharf, and he wouldn’t make it halfway to her before he went down.
Waiting…waiting…
And then, quite suddenly, he was standing at her side. She’d heard him breathe a sigh of relief, and she might have released her own sigh of relief from under her straw hat, and she’d said with a mischievous smile, Nice morning for a walk, isn’t it, Mr. Corbett?
His answer, somewhat shaky, had been: Invigorating.
And turning back to her work, which was to capture the colorful essence of a Breuckelen pasture, she’d thought Any other man would have fallen. Why didn’t he?
That was still her question.
Because her theory of her so-called bad luck, at least as regards young men, was that it steered her in the right direction as much as a compass steered any adventurous ship. Yet Matthew’s destination was unknown to her. Surely it seemed he often looked right through her, as if she existed only as a mist he might brush away like silken cobwebs.
I want to mean something to you, she said silently to him, wherever he was on his journey into the dark. Please…will you let me?
But on this night there was no answer. There was the just the winter wind, touching with cold fingers the face of a hopeful young girl.
He was not coming back this way anytime soon, she decided. Therefore she left her position of watchful waiting, and she went back home to go to bed.
Six
WHEN a knock came at his door Matthew was in the midst of shaving. He looked away from his mirror, which displayed the rather pale visage of a tired young man, and called to the door, “Who is it?” The door being only six feet away from where he presently stood.
No one answered. Except here came another knock, strong and insistent.
“Yes?” Matthew asked heatedly; he was in no mood for games this early in the morning. Was it Berry, making merry? No, she’d not been in such a mood last night and wouldn’t be this morning, either. It was just after seven by the candle clock on the wall, which was a candle in a metal holder marked with bars to indicate the hours. “Can I help you?” Matthew inquired, his razor ready for another stroke along his chin.
“I am here,” said the voice of a man beyond the door, “to speak to Mr. Matthew Corbett.”
It was not a voice Matthew recognized. Muffled by the door, yes, but still…it was an odd accent. He put his razor down on the tabletop, next to the dish of soapcream and the bowl of water. “Who are you?”