Matthew started across the gangplank, taking long strides as if he owned the world and everyone else was just a passing visitor. Suddenly his world tipped over on its side. He realized his sealegs were still measuring the roll of a ship after three weeks on the Atlantic. He staggered left and staggered right, drunk with solidity. On the third stagger he reached for the handrail but there was no handrail to be gripped, and he gave a curse to both Nathan Spade’s vanity and the fact that God was a more mischievous trickster than ever any preacher imagined in a sonorous Sabbath’s speech.
Then he went right off the gangplank, splashing headlong into the drink between the wharf and the Nightflyer’s hull.
The water was far warmer than Manhattan’s winter harbor yet still cool enough to make swimming uncomfortable about the family jewels. He reckoned he might have shouted underwater, for an explosion of bubbles hit him in the face and following that was a rush of saltwater into his mouth. There goes the hair pomade, he thought either grimly or crazily. Then he realized he had better kick to the surface and get out of here, for it was a shame for his fine suit to be so soaked.
His next thought was: Damn, I’ve made a mess of this already!
He came up to the noise of hooting and cat-calling, and someone yelling with unbridled mirth, “Man overboard!” He pushed the hair out of his face and saw Aria making her way unsteadily down the gangplank, but she had prepared for this moment by taking small steps. She speared him with her eyes as one might spear a fat-bellied bottom feeder. A sailor appeared holding a long wooden pole with a leather-wrapped hook on one end, which he offered to Matthew. The hook having been taken, Matthew was pulled up until he could get a grip on the edge of the wharf, and so struggling and scrabbling like a dumb, doomed crab for a moment he at last hauled himself up onto the hardwood.
Oh, the laughter! The hilarity! The horror of it all! Even Captain Falco had his hand strategically to his face, and was examining some point of interest up on the mainmast.
He got himself up on his feet and stood dripping. He heard the harsh, rasping laughter of the two orange-haired gents coiling toward him like whips. The young blonde woman—bless her—watched in silence.
Matthew felt a box closing around him. It might be a coffin. He decided he would not let it close. It was time—oh, yes—for Nathan Spade to speak out.
He looked up at the grinning crew of the Nightflyer. He looked up into the laughter, and he brought a wide grin of his own up from somewhere, and he puffed his chest out again like a banty rooster and he hollered at the top of his salty lungs, “Fuck all! I’ve wet my fuckin’ britches, haven’t I?”
The words did not taste very good, but the sentiment was delicious.
The laughter changed; it was difficult to tell exactly how, but it did. For Matthew began to laugh too, and now the joke was not just about one strutting man who’d taken a dive into the drink, but about all men who cast their fate upon a treacherous path and find themselves quite unexpectedly falling from grace.
They grinned and nodded and nearly cheered him, and then Matthew turned away with a sweeping flourish of his arm that said I am the same as you, only better dressed. In his squishy boots he strode past Aria Chillany, who moved to give him way, and on his purposeful yet still dizzied walk up the wharf he saw that the two orange-haired men were no longer laughing but watching him with narrowed eyes from fox-like faces, and that the blonde woman had climbed into her berline and could no longer be seen.
He continued onward, leaving puddles of the Atlantic in his footsteps. Madam Chillany caught up with him and said in a guarded voice, “Careful of those two. Jack and Mack Thacker. You don’t want to turn your back on them.”
The Thacker brothers. Matthew recalled hearing mention of them from Hudson. And here they were, in the ugly flesh. They sprawled atop the coach, each wearing an identical gray suit, white shirt, white stockings and black boots. In fact, they were identical twins, or nearly much so. They looked like lazy animals taking the morning sun. One spoke to the other and the other spoke back, but the eyes in their granite-jawed and sharp-nosed faces never left the person of Nathan Spade. They looked to be in their early forties, short and compact like rowdy tavern brawlers ready to bet a coin on a mouth of broken teeth. Someone else’s broken teeth, of course, because the Thackers had thick forearms and shoulders, legs like squat treetrunks and necks that could burst a hangman’s noose. Their faces were flushed with the blood that pulsed just beneath the skin’s surface, or perhaps they didn’t take the sun very well. As Matthew approached the berlines, he saw that one of the twins had a streak of gray at the front of the orange hair, which was brushed back from the forehead and shiny with pomade; the other twin did not share this mark, and so it was the only thing Matthew could see different about them. They had small deepset eyes that looked to be pale green, like sharp splinters of glass.
They did not speak or move from their languid positions as Matthew approached.
“Nathan!” said the woman behind him. “We’ll take the other coach.”
Matthew changed his direction. He heard the brothers snicker at almost the same time.
The one with the gray streak said in a heavy Irish brogue, “Go on with ya! Listen to your—”
“Mama!” said the second, and they both snickered again.
Matthew shot them a dark look, but he also offered a thin smile. He stopped in his wet tracks. Now was as good a time as any to display his mettle, though it be fashioned from the cheapest tin. “Should I know you gentlemen?”
“I don’t know,” said one, and the other added, “Should ya?”
Interesting, Matthew thought. They finished each others’ sentences. They wore identical smirks. The coachman of their berline kept his head down and his attention forward, as if fearful of imminent violence. Matthew could feel it in the air. These two liked to bloody up a victim, and maybe they were sizing him up as fodder for their fists.
“My name is Nathan Spade,” said Matthew. “Do you have names?”
One of them answered with an outthrust chin, “I think your name is—”
“Soggy Ass,” said the one with the gray streak, and both of them grinned tightly, with no humor on their faces.
“Nathan?” Aria’s voice had also tightened. “Come along. Yes?”
“Hold her petticoat, Nathan!” said the gray-streaker.
“Go on with ya!” said the second, who perhaps had larger ears than his brother.
But Matthew stood his ground. “Oh,” he said easily, though his heart was pounding, “I’ve heard of you two. The Thackers. Which is Jack and which is Mack? Or have you forgotten?”
Their grins began to slowly fade.
A movement within their coach caught Matthew’s attention.
He saw someone lean forward to peer through the door’s open window. It was a woman. He met her eyes, and he felt turned inside-out.
She stared at him only briefly, possibly five seconds before she leaned back into the seat once more. But Matthew was left with the stunned impression of one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. She had tawny flesh that seemed almost radiant. Her long ebony hair, topped by a gray hat tilted to one side with a spill of black lace across her forehead, flowed down about her shoulders in rich waves. She had an oval face with high cheekbones, a straight and narrow-bridged nose, and a full-lipped mouth that seemed to Matthew to be crimped tightly on many secrets. Her eyes were very dark, perhaps as ebony as her hair, and they had regarded Matthew in passing, without life or fire or spirit.
Whoever she was, she was not altogether there. In just the instant of seeing her, Matthew thought this lovely creature was terribly, heartbreakingly lonely. And he thought it was a shame, that such a pretty girl should sit alone.