The sound of the calling bell had receded.
Dinner was ready. And so was Matthew Corbett.
He pulled in one long breath, let it slowly out, and then he left his room.
In the hallway, a woman glided up beside him and took his right arm. Aria Chillany pressed close against him, her fragrance like the last embers of a smoky fire. She was wearing a black gown trimmed with red lace. Her ebony hair flowed down in brushed waves and her sapphire eyes sparkled, yet her beautiful face was tight and her mouth a hard line. “Nathan,” she said quietly as they walked, “do you know your part?”
“I do,” he answered, just as quietly. These doors they were passing might have ears.
“Let us hope,” she said, and added: “Dear boy.”
They descended the stairs like criminal royalty. Matthew allowed the woman to guide him, as he was certainly a stranger here. They walked through a hallway that held alcoves displaying what appeared to be the skeletons of various types of fish mounted on stands. Then the hallway ended at a short staircase descending to a large banquet room with blue-painted walls and ceiling and, upon that ceiling, painted clouds with painted cherubs gazing down upon the denizens of earth.
The assembled group of six sat before silver placesettings at a polished table that seemed to Matthew as long as a New York block. Above it was a brass chandelier ablaze with candles, as the night had fallen over Fell’s festival, and also spaced along the table were brass candelabras that gave off a lovely light upon the unlovely throng.
Where to begin? It was Matthew’s question to himself, as he and Madam Chillany came down the stairs and their presence brought to a halt the banquet room’s already-restrained conversation. He was wondering where to begin gathering impressions, and was aided in this regard when Aria announced to the group, “Let me introduce our new arrival, Nathan Spade.”
No one sat at the foot of the table, nor at the head. The first person seated on the left was a dashing-looking gentleman in a shimmery gray suit and a vivid scarlet neckscarf, his age probably in the late forties, his hair black and gleaming except for streaks of gray along the temples, his chin sharp, nose narrow and his deep-set eyes dark brown beneath arched black brows. He stood up, smiled showing good white teeth, gave a crisp bow and extended a hand. “Cesar Sabroso,” he said, in a voice that made Matthew think of warm oil at the bottom of a lamp. The better to lubricate a monarch’s imagination so as to get at the Spanish treasury beyond it, Matthew thought. He shook the man’s hand and then gave his attention to the person seated on the right.
“Adam Wilson,” spoke this slight, pale and nearly invisible creature, who wore small square-lensed spectacles and had a long, somber and horse-like face. His voice was like the echo of another voice spoken in another room. He wore a baggy suit the shade of bleached-out hay, and his tight cap of hair pulled back into a painful-looking queue was nearly the same color. His pallid blue eyes refused to meet Matthew’s, but rather angled off a few inches to the side even as he offered a hand the size of a child’s. Matthew’s impression was that this man could sit in a corner without moving for a time and be forgotten by everyone else in the room, and therefore he carried around with him his own disguise.
“Edgar Smythe,” announced the next gent on the left, in a voice like a bucket of gravel being pounded by an iron mallet. It made Matthew’s eardrums throb. Smythe, the selfsame gray-bearded and gray-haired man who had climbed the stairs past Matthew this morning, looked supremely bored. He was again in his black suit, with a ruffled blue shirt. He neither rose from his chair nor offered a hand, but immediately returned his attention to a glass of red wine he was nursing like a beloved child.
Matthew noted gold-lettered placecards on the table. The one across from Smythe read Dr. Jonathan Gentry, but the seat was empty. The physician, Matthew mused, was yet upstairs healing himself. Then next to Smythe was another empty chair and the placecard for Minx Cutter, who likewise had not yet arrived. Across from Minx’s chair, the card read Nathan Spade, and next to that place Aria Chillany. Next to Minx were three empty chairs, the closest to her being for Mack Thacker, the next for Miss Fancy, and the third for Jack Thacker. This will be a lovely scene, Matthew thought grimly.
“Our daring savior!” said Augustus Pons, who sat one chair down from Aria’s place. The triple-chinned face grinned, as candlelight played on the lenses of his spectacles and gleamed upon his bald pate. “You and Miss Cutter taught those bad boys a lesson, eh?” He opened his mouth and the twig-thin young man with curly brown hair who sat between him and Madam Chillany’s chair tipped a glass of the red wine over lips that glistened like garden slugs. The young man wore a powder-blue suit and had ruddy cheeks like those of the painted cherubs gamboling above. His eyes were bright blue, and they sparkled merrily for his master.
“Thank you, Toy,” said the fat man, when the glass had been lowered and the young man had blotted Pons’s third chin with a napkin. “Mr. Spade, do sit down and tell us all about your escapades in London!”
“Keep your business to yourself, Mr. Spade,” said the white-haired woman who sat on the other side of Pons. “His mouth has been known to get people into trouble.”
“It is other people’s mouths that get me into trouble,” Pons protested, without much vehemence. “Isn’t that right, Toy?”
Toy giggled, a nasty sound.
“Come speak to me, Mr. Spade,” said Mother Deare. “Let me take your measure.” She was a broad-shouldered, thickly-set woman in a copper-colored gown with frills of red and blue lace at the neck and cuffs. Matthew thought the gown fit her as much as two pairs of silk slippers fit a drayhorse. He went to her side, as she pushed her chair back from the table and turned it to regard him with froggish brown eyes in a wide, square-chinned face. Matthew reasoned she was likely sixty years old or thereabouts, with deep lines across her forehead and radiating from the corners of her eyes. She appeared to have known a life of hard work, probably performed outside under a hot sun. She wore red lace gloves, perhaps to hide hands that had been worked to the point of broken knuckles. The cloud of her cottony hair was done up with golden pins. She smiled at him, in a motherly way. Matthew had the desire to step back a pace or two at the sight of this peg-toothed smile, but he held himself in check as he thought rudeness here would be an unforgiven sin.
“A handsome young lad,” Mother Deare decided. She had a quiet voice, yet there was some element of the bludgeon in it. “I suspect you are no stranger to the wiles of women.”
The moment of real truth had arrived. Everyone was listening. Matthew’s heart was pounding, for he thought surely this bulgeous-eyed woman was able to see through his mask. He kept his face composed and reached deep for a reply. “The wiles of women,” he said, “are my business. And in my business, the stranger the better.”