Matthew felt someone coming up behind him. He turned his head and saw Berry, her hair wild in the smoky breeze and ashes on her freckled cheeks. She was bundled in a brown coat. She stopped when he saw her, as if understanding a statement not to get too close.
At nearly the same time, Matthew noted the presence of the nasty little watchman and general troublemaker Dippen Nack coming up like a small creeping predator beside the high constable, who seemed to be his idol in all things either arrogant or assinine. Matthew considered the barrel-chested, red-faced Nack a brutal bully and, worse, a coward who used his black billyclub to wallop only those who could not return the blow.
“What’s the tale?” Lillehorne asked Nack, indicating that the high constable had recently sent his devilish devotee out on a mission.
“Number a’ people heard it, sir,” Nack answered, in the manner of slump-shouldered subjugation, be it ever so false. “Yessir! A cannon blast is what they all said it was!” And he added, just to polish the worm-holed apple: “Sir!”
“A cannon blast?” Instantly Matthew’s curiosity had spun toward this information like an arrow on a weather vane. “From where?”
“I don’t have that information yet, thank you for asking.” Lillehorne’s nostrils wrinkled, and he gently patted them with a green handkerchief. Over the reek of smoke Matthew caught the reek of a too-sweet perfume water.
“Some folk say they thought it come from out thataway.” Nack motioned with his club toward the south. “Then this thing blew up.”
“‘Blew up’?” Matthew asked. Nearly the same choice of words that Gilliam Vincent had made. “Why do you put it that way?”
“Just look at it,” Nack answered, the anger never far from his curdled surface. “Ain’t no regular fire! Pieces layin’ all up and down the street!” He gave a mocking grin for Lillehorne’s benefit. “I thought you was supposed to be such a brain!”
Matthew kept his attention directed to Lillehorne, even though the gypsies had arrived at the scene and stood nearby scratching their squalling fiddles while their dark-haired girls danced for coins amid the ale-drinkers. “You’re saying a cannonball did this?”
“I am saying that a cannon was heard to be fired. Corbett, restrain your interest. I’ve already sent some men to watch the harbor, if indeed it was the signal from Oyster Island. The town is not paying for your abilities tonight. Keep that noise down!” Lillehorne shouted at the gypsy fiddlers, but the volume altered not an ear-spike.
Matthew gazed out over the ashen plain. There were cannons on the walls at what had been Fort William Henry, now called Fort Anne, at New York’s southernmost point; they were manned day and night and aimed at the sea. The single cannon on Oyster Island was used as an early signal of invasion by the Dutch fleet, even though commerce and profits had made steady companions of London and Amsterdam. No one ever truly expected a Dutch armada to try to retake their once-possession, but…why had the cannon fired?
“I have no earthly idea,” said Lillehorne, and only then did Matthew realize he’d asked the question aloud. “But I’ll get to the bottom of this without your so-called professional assistance, sir.”
Matthew then saw another element of interest in this cold night’s play. Off beyond Lillehorne, lit by the lamps they carried, were the handsome Doctor Jason Mallory and the beautiful Rebecca. They were talking quietly and surveying the ruins, but did both of them now glance in his direction? Did they speak again, and then glance again before they turned their backs and moved away?
A whistle blew, loud enough to be heard over the caterwauling of gypsy fiddles.
Then blew once more, stronger, with a demanding note. And a third time, equally demanding.
“What the devil?” Lillehorne’s gaze was searching for the annoying source, as well as did Matthew, Nack and Berry. A group of onlookers was coming around, intrigued by the noise. Matthew saw Marmaduke Grigsby, the old inkslinger and editor of the Earwig broadsheet, step up beside his granddaughter, his eyes large and questioning behind his spectacles in the moon-round face. The whistle continued to blow, stridently now.
“Over there, sir!” It was Nack who pointed toward the other side of Dock Street and just east of the destroyed warehouse.
Matthew saw Benedict Hamrick standing next to a wall of brown bricks, which was part of a storehouse for tarbarrels, anchors, chains and other nautical goods. Hamrick’s beard and crusty coat blew in the rising wind. He was manning his whistle as if commanding an attack of grenadiers. And furthermore, he was pointing to something written on the bricks.
At once Matthew was following Lillehorne toward the whistle-blower, with Nack almost stepping on his heels. “Matthew!” Berry called out, but he didn’t stop though he thought that, oddly, she was telling him not to go.
A group of people congregated around Hamrick, who abruptly ceased his tin-whistling and pointed with a thin, gnarled finger at the two words written about head-high on the wall. The white paint had trickled down, making the words look like crawling spiders.
The first word was Matthew.
The second was Corbett.
Matthew felt his heart stutter as Hamrick’s hand moved, and the finger pointed at him.
Lillehorne took a lantern from the nearest citizen and lifted it to shine a direct light upon Matthew’s face. He stepped forward, his eyes further narrowed, as if to examine something he’d never seen before.
Matthew could do nothing, nor could he speak.
“Yes,” said the high constable. He nodded. “You can be sure I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Four
I WOULD sincerely love to hear an explanation,” said the man in the lilac-colored gown with blue lace trimming the neckline. To the silence that followed, his painted lips smiled faintly. Under his elaborately-curled and coiffed wig, his blue-shaded eyes ticked from person to person in the room. “Please,” he said, with a lift of his white silk gloves, “everyone should not speak at once.”
Gardner Lillehorne cleared his throat, perhaps a bit too explosively. He held his pumpkin-colored tricorn in his hands, that color being his hue of the day. “Lord Cornbury,” he said, “the facts are as I’ve told.” Matthew thought he sounded a bit nervous, and in truth when one looked into the face of Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, Governor of the colony of New York and cousin to Queen Anne herself, one did feel one’s breakfast tumble in the gut.
“Told,” said the well-dressed man behind his desk, “but not made sense of.” The white silk fingers steepled together. The horsey face might have broken any mirror in town. “That mumble-mouthed fool made no sense, either. What’s all this about red lamps and a Dutch invasion and fish being stolen from a boat?”
Hooper Gillespie had just given his statement a few moments ago, before his nervous agitation had caused him to stagger and fall upon the floor. He’d had to be taken out of Lord Cornbury’s office on a canvas stretcher. And his statement? That too seemed to Matthew to be in need of a stretcher, or perhaps it was already stretched.