Matthew was quick to pull out his handkerchief.
But he was not quick enough.
“Here, miss! Let me see!”
And Matthew witnessed something he had no idea would ever take place. When the blue eyes of Opal Delilah Blackerby and the brown eyes of Effrem Owles met, you could almost hear a distinct pop, as if a pinecone had burst in the overheated hearth. Matthew was certain Effrem was only being his gentlemanly self, and perhaps thinking he was to blame for this girl cutting herself, but in that instant there was something more. In that instant there was an exchange of something, maybe a recognition, something…a powerful instant, and Matthew saw the girl who knew only how to clean up messes and had been searching so long for a little bit of warmth flutter her eyelashes, and the shy young tailor’s son who liked to play chess and wished desperately to mean something to someone’s heart reddened a little on the cheeks and had to look away from her, but she had offered her hand and he took it, and as he pressed his own handkerchief against the injury he brought his eyes back upon hers and Matthew saw him smile—just a small, shy smile—and Effrem said, “We’ll get this fixed.”
“Ain’t nothin’,” Opal replied, but she didn’t pull her hand away.
Matthew glanced at Berry, who also had taken note of this exchange. She nodded almost imperceptibly, as if to say, Yes, but it may yet be something after all.
And in that instant Matthew felt the world tremble.
Or, to be more precise, it was the floor that trembled. He was not the only one who felt it, for conversations halted and Berry blinked in surprise because she’d also felt it. In its aftermath the floor’s planks growled like old brown lions stirred from sleep. Then the front door crashed open and from the bundle of his black coat and beneath the tilt of his yellowed wig the white face of Gilliam Vincent painfully shouted, “The Dock House Inn has blown up!”
Decorum was lost and dancing forgotten in the rush upon Nassau Street. Matthew was out the door amid the throng, finding himself behind John Five and John’s bride Constance. Berry bumped into Matthew’s side as they all looked toward the dockfront at smokeclouds and bursts of flame roiling up into the night.
“Oh my Jesus!” Gilliam Vincent cried out. He began to run southward along Nassau Street toward the point of conflagration perhaps nine blocks distant. Matthew saw Vincent’s wig fall off, exposing a pallid scalp where a few sprigs of gray hair stood upright like shocked soldiers on a barren battlefield. For all his vanity, Vincent cared not for the wig so much as he cared for the fate of his beloved Dock House Inn, where he was the narrow-eyed and supremely arrogant king of his domain, and so he put wings to his heels and was off hollering “Fire! Fire! Fire!” all the way.
Cries of alarm were quickly echoing across the town. From Manhattan’s previous experience, flame was a disastrous enemy. Matthew surmised that if indeed it was the Dock House Inn that had somehow ‘blown up,’ as Vincent had put it, there might not be very much left of the guests who’d been sleeping there. The fire shot yellow and orange tendrils a hundred feet into the air. If clouds had not already slid in to mask the moon, the dark plumes rising from New York would have blackened Selene’s lunar face. “Come on, men!” someone shouted, a call to fetch buckets and get to the wells that stood here and there on the cobbled streets. Some went back into Sally Almond’s tavern to get their coats, scarves, gloves, caps, tricorn hats before they started off. Matthew took his black fearnaught from a hook on the wall, donned his gray gloves and woolen cap and with a quick glance at Berry that said I think dancing must wait he was away among the men fast striding or outright running for the scene of fiery destruction.
The houses were emptying their people onto the streets. Many folk wore their flannel robes and were bare-legged against the cold. Lanterns swung back and forth, a midwinter congregation of summer’s fireflies. Night watchmen scurried around rather helplessly, showing their green lamps of authority for whatever they were worth. At the corner of Broad and Princes Streets Matthew nearly collided with elderly Benedict Hamrick, an ex-soldier of the realm with a white beard that hung to his spit-polished belt-buckle. Hamrick marched around blowing into an ear-piercing tin whistle and shouting incomprehensible orders to anyone who would listen, which meant he had utterly no troops to command in his fantasy of the Coldstream Guards.
For all its everyday chaos, nattering of merchants, horse manure in the streets and slaves in the attics, New York at a moment of crisis became a purposeful juggernaut. Much as ants will boil over from a heel-kicked nest and begin feverish defenses, so were the Manhattanites. Buckets materialized from houses and barns. A horse wagon hauling buckets came clattering down Broad Street. Teams of men gathered, took hold of buckets and set off at a run to station themselves at wells. Somehow, the chains of the bucket brigades solidified within minutes of Gilliam Vincent’s first cry. Water began moving, faster and faster along the line. Then the line split into two and three and thus multiple dowsings of water were thrown upon the fire, which turned out not to be consuming the Dock House Inn but to be eating a Dock Street warehouse where nautical ropes were made and stored.
And it was surely a hot fire. A fire with a white center, and a power to scorch the eyebrows and puff the faces of those at its edge. Even Matthew, working with the other feverish ants a block north of the scene, could feel the waves of heat rolling past him in dusty swells. The labor continued on, the buckets moving as fast as muscle would allow, but very soon it was apparent that the warehouse was a goner, and all liquid must be used to wet the surrounding structures thus to prevent a disaster of the worst kind. At one point old Hooper Gillespie appeared, ranting about an attack by the Dutch, but no one paid him any attention and so he slinked away scowling and spitting toward the harbor.
Hollers and shouts went up when the last wall of the warehouse collapsed. The sparks that flew up were stomped under boots when they landed. More water was thrown upon the soggy, steaming wood walls of the buildings to left and right, and finally as the hours passed and the muscles weakened, the southernmost portion of the town was saved but the rope merchant Johannis Feeg wept bitter tears over his pile of smouldering ashes.
The work was at last finished. The tavern owners brought out kegs of ale and opened them in the street; one never knew when one might need a bucket brigade, and it was safer to be on the good side of the citizenry rather than pinch ale pennies at a time like this. Matthew scooped up a drink in a wooden cup he’d been given, and along with other bedraggled fire fighters he walked toward the smoking remains.
There was very little left but smoke. Matthew saw other men walking through the ashes, kicking embers between the eyes and then crushing them for good measure. The smell of acrid smoke, dust and heat was like coarse flannel in the lungs. Men who had been closest to the fire staggered around blackened and nearly cooked, and they nodded wearily as others put cups of ale into their hands.
“Now this was a merry moment, wasn’t it?”
Matthew turned to see who’d spoken, but he’d already recognized the voice of Gardner Lillehorne, which tonight was the hum of a wasp seeking a place to sting.
The spindly-framed high constable was in less than his usual perfection, for ashes marred his overcoat of bright holly green, trimmed at the collar and cuffs with bands of scarlet. Alas, the cuffs were filthy and his white shirt the color of dirty teeth. His holly green tricorn was dark with ash and its small red feather burned to a wisp. Ashes streaked his long, pallid face with its narrow black eyes, small and pointed nose, precisely-trimmed black-goatee and black mustache. Even the silver lion’s head that topped his ebony cane seemed to be scorched and dirty. Lillehorne’s eyes left Matthew’s and scanned the wandering crowd. “A merry moment,” he repeated. “For Mr. Feeg’s competitors, that is.”