Two days of soup for every meal had left Matthew in a less-than-cheerful mood. Add to that the plaster-covered gash that had taken eight horse-gut stitches under his left eye, sundry other cuts and scrapes on forehead and chin, a nose that had nearly been broken but was so sore now even the flutter of a nostril was pure agony, and enough bruises on face, arms, legs, chest and back to make him appear a spotted beast from the heart of Zed’s homeland, and he was a bedful of joy. But he was greatly thankful for a certain trapdoor and cellar, which had held at its dirt-floored bottom some items of broken furniture and a few shelves holding bottles of murky liquid probably used by the doctor in his treatments.
“Tell McCaggers he won’t find the heads,” said Matthew, in a voice that still sounded smoke-choked.
“I’ll tell him,” Greathouse said after a short pause.
“The Mallorys,” Matthew went on, “wanted to appear to be dead. They got the corpses from somewhere. God only knows.”
“I believe you,” Greathouse said after a longer pause.
Matthew nodded, but gingerly because any movement yet pained his multitude of strained muscles. He knew exactly what his friend meant. He could still see Gardner Lillehorne standing over his bed, yesterday morning here at the Publick Hospital on King Street. The high constable in his cardinal-red suit and red tricorn, with the same crimson glare at the center of his small ebony eyes and his teeth on edge.
“You have secured your place in infamy now, Mr. Corbett,” said the offended redbird. “Staggering out of that burning ruin? With your name painted on the alley wall across the street? And here you’re telling me there were two naked and headless corpses in the bed of Dr. Jason Mallory? My Christ, boy! I thought I was talking nonsense when I said you were addle-brained after that misadventure in Pennsylvania, but I’m thinking now you must be half-crazy.” He let that linger for a few seconds before he darted in again with, “And the other half insane. Do you wish to tell me how you were to be in that house, or shall we hear that in Cornbury’s office?”
Matthew had not answered. It seemed to be too much effort, and anyway even the muscles of his jaws were hurting.
“You are in a situation.” Lillehorne had leaned over the bed like a threatening bonfire, ready to catch sheets and bedclothes burning. “You are going to have to explain yourself, sir. If not to me and to Lord Cornbury, then before a court of law.”
“I’m being arrested?” Matthew had managed to ask.
“Consider yourself so. I’ll think up some appropriate charges. Breaking and entering would be the first.”
“The back door was open,” Matthew reminded him.
“Unlawful entrance, then. Mark it. Criminal mischief. Unwillingness to aid an official investigation. Mark those as well. Do I make myself clear?”
“In a muddy way,” Matthew said, his tone as dry as October’s leaves. His face, too, was a study in mottled stone. He left it at that, and after another moment the high constable made a low noise in his throat, gave a pinched expression that conveyed volumes of both frustration and disgust, and strode out of the hospital’s wardroom with the lion’s-head ornament of his cane slapping against his red-gloved palm.
And good riddance, you bastard, Matthew had thought.
“McCaggers,” said Hudson Greathouse, as he stretched his legs out before him, “believes the corpses to be those of a man and a woman. Just as you’ve said. Only he’s of the belief that they’re the Mallorys, caught in the blast and fire.”
“What they wished him to believe,” was Matthew’s terse reply.
“McCaggers has found fragments of women’s clothing and the heel of a shoe. His question is: if the Mallorys were leaving for good—sneaking away in the middle of the night, as you’ve put it—why wouldn’t Rebecca have taken her gowns?”
“What they wished him to question,” said Matthew.
Greathouse tapped a finger against the musketball-sized cleft in his chin. “Yes,” he said. “All right, then. But…” And here Greathouse’s brow knit, and Matthew knew his friend was struggling to make sense of what could not possibly make sense. “But why, Matthew?” came the most urgent question. “Tell me. Why?”
“I can tell you why the corpses have no heads,” Matthew ventured. “Because if the heads were found, McCaggers might determine the bodies were not those of the doctor and the damsel. By some remnant of hair or the facial bones, I would think. Possibly one or both of the murder victims had rotten teeth. They wanted to be careful, lest McCaggers find something that would throw their plot off its course.”
Greathouse did not speak for a time. He seemed to be watching the crawl of sunlight across a green-painted wall. “Murder victims,” he repeated, tonelessly. “Their plot.”
“Correct. Two people were murdered and decapitated to serve as stand-ins.” Matthew thought better of that last term. “Lie-ins,” he amended, with a small, tight and painful smile. “I imagine the victims were plucked off the street in some nearby town. Probably a beggar and a prostitute, who would not be easily missed.”
“A beggar and a prostitute.” Greathouse sounded as if he were standing in a church reciting a particularly uncomfortable Bible passage.
“Look at me,” Matthew directed.
Greathouse did.
But in his eyes Matthew saw the blankness of the green-painted wall, and with that came the realization that even such a friend as Greathouse had his limits of belief. Or perhaps it was just that, to save the situation, Greathouse had simply ceased thinking.
“They put the corpses in the house,” Matthew said, a little unsteadily, “to make it appear that they are dead.”
“They were, you said.”
“What?”
“The corpses. They were already dead. I would think so, if they were headless.”
“The Mallorys,” said Matthew. “Or whoever they are.”
“A beggar and a prostitute, you said.”
“No! The Mallorys. They put the corpses in the bed knowing they would be blown to pieces and burned to crisps. Then they could make it look as if I had something to do with it, by painting my name on the alley wall.”
“And why would you have something to do with it?” The eyes narrowed, just a dangerous fraction. “You didn’t, did you? I mean…I believe you.”
“It’s a plot,” said Matthew, who felt himself spinning away from the world, “to draw me in.”
“Draw you into what?”
“The plan. The…summons. I can’t…” Matthew leaned his head against the pillow. He had to close his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them again, nothing had changed. Or had Greathouse quietly moved his chair back a few inches from the bedside?
“I’ll go fetch the doctor,” Greathouse offered, in as sympathetic a voice as Matthew had ever heard.
“No,” Matthew said, and the power of his declaration stopped Greathouse from leaving his chair.
Then the great one—the man of action, the lover of wild widows, the swordsman scarred by battles and life—looked at Matthew with something like pity in eyes gone sad.
He reached out to grasp his friend’s shoulder, and he said quietly, “I know you went through tribulations in that Slaughter incident. I know…they must have been terrible. And even about those, you won’t tell me. But I know, Matthew. Because I see how you’ve been…” Here he paused to agonizingly search for the proper word, neither too hard nor too soft. “Affected,” he went on. “By what happened. So who could blame you, for…suffering. For—”