“I’ll stand for what Matthew says,” Magnus added. “More questions to be answered.”
“Sarah’s killer is yet unproven,” Matthew said. “But…that will be remedied, when we get back to the Green Sea.”
“Abram killed Sarah!” Royce almost spat it. “It’s proven! Damn buck must’ve gone crazy! You think somethin’ like that’s never happened on any other plantation?”
Matthew smiled faintly. “Ah! Did it happen on another plantation where you and Joel worked?”
“Hold on, now!” Stamper frowned. “Boy, you’re sayin’ it was somebody else killed the girl? But Joel saw that buck with the bloody knife, standin’ over the body!” He looked to Gunn. “Ain’t that right?”
“A good question,” Matthew said when Gunn’s reply didn’t come. “Did you see him with the knife, or not?”
“He did!” Royce spoke up. “If he says he did, he did…and he’s already said it!”
“I’d like to hear it from Gunn again,” said Magnus. “Go ahead, everybody’s listenin’.”
Gunn’s mouth opened and then closed. He stared at the ground as if the stones and weeds might guide him in his speech. Matthew knew what he must be thinking: he could swing for helping conceal a murder, if he was found out…and he had no way of knowing what Matthew had discovered on Sarah’s body, or what Mrs. Kincannon’s questions were. Gunn was a man in a very precarious position, and he knew Griffin Royce had put him there.
Still, Gunn did not—could not—speak.
“Hey!” Bovie suddenly said, and he sniffed the air. “I’m smellin’ smoke!”
Indeed, a breath of dry wind brought the odor to all. Stamper narrowed his eyes and looked ahead. Matthew followed his gaze; there was no sight of a fire through the trees, yet the smell was certainly wood burning.
“Campfire?” Royce asked.
“Strong smell,” said Stamper. “Could be lightnin’s hit a tree, set it afire. Whatever it is, it’s not far away.”
“We should be movin’,” Royce prodded. “Leave Corbett here, if he can’t go on. Muldoon, you and the girl want to stay with him, that’s fine by me. I think we’re gettin’ close to the skins, and I won’t be slowed down.”
“Mr. Stamper,” said Matthew, “I would remind you…that the reward is for the runaways…dead or alive. Mrs. Kincannon wants them returned alive, as I do…for Abram to answer some questions. Is that too much to ask?”
Stamper thought about it. He ran a hand across his grizzled chin. “No,” he said at last. “Not too much. All right then, we’ll take ’em alive. No ears cut off, no harm done ’em.”
“Ha!” was Royce’s response. “Those animals won’t go back so easy! You’ll see!”
“Go with them, Magnus,” Matthew urged. “I’m used up for awhile. You have to go.”
“Leave you and her with that thing out here? No, I’m stayin’.”
“You have to go,” Matthew repeated, with some force behind it. “To make sure, Magnus. You have to.” He lifted his sword. “I’ve got this.”
“Little of nothin’.”
“Better than nothing.”
“Losin’ time,” said Barrows. “Let’s move.”
Bovie turned away and started off. Royce followed. Gunn hesitated only briefly before he went, and then Barrows and Foxworth. Stamper gave a long weary sigh, and he said, “Sorry to leave you, but we’ve got to go on. We’ll come back this way, soon as we get ’em. Muldoon, you comin’ or not?”
Magnus nodded. “I’m comin’. Matthew,” he said, “you two stay right here. Don’t move, and keep a sharp eye out. All right?”
“We will,” Quinn answered. “You be careful.”
“Always,” said the bearded mountain, and he followed Stamper into the dark woods.
“I’ll just rest a little while,” Matthew said. His voice was becoming slurred. “I’ll be all right…soon as I rest.”
“Put your head in my lap,” Quinn offered, and Matthew accepted. He stretched out upon the ground and his eyes closed. He felt Quinn’s hand running back and forth through his hair. I am not Daniel, he thought as he sank into the silence. Then he felt her lean forward and very tenderly kiss his forehead, and he let go of this world and fell away.
Sixteen
He was standing in a room in which there were five doors. They were all ordinary doors, with ordinary handles, yet Matthew sensed that behind each was something extraordinary…and perhaps terrifying.
For better or for worse, he was compelled to open the first on his left, which opened onto a scene he remembered welclass="underline" Rachel Howarth in the dirty cell in Fount Royal, throwing off her gray cloak and hood to reveal her naked body, and saying defiantly to the world Here is the witch.
Suddenly Matthew’s hand was on the next door, and opening it displayed the Prussian swordsman Count Anton Mannerheim Dahlgren, he of the blond hair, gray teeth and deadly command of the rapier. He whom Matthew had bested, broken his left wrist and sent him reeling into a fishpond. He who had seemingly vanished from the world, and was yet out there somewhere in the shadows. In this instance, however, Dahlgren had the use of both arms and was coming at him, teeth bared, with a rapier. Matthew slammed the door in his face.
The third door showed a wagon travelling under a sky threatening rain, and a man with a patchwork beard sitting in the back with his eyes closed, his arms and legs confined by irons. A fly landed at the corner of the man’s mouth. The man did not move, nor did his eyes open. The fly began to crawl across the lower lip, unhurriedly, and when it reached the center the man’s mouth moved in a blur. There was a quick sucking sound, and then Matthew heard the faintest crunch. The eyes of the killer Tyranthus Slaughter opened and fixed upon Matthew, and when the man grinned there was a bit of crushed fly on one of his front teeth.
Matthew also slammed that door.
The fourth door opened upon a dining hall, and sitting in a chair before the assembled guests was a man who was not a man, but appeared to be an automaton, a wiry-looking construction of a man dressed in a white suit with gold trim and whorls of gold upon the suit jacket and trouser legs. It wore a white tricorn, also trimmed in gold, white stockings and black shoes with gold buckles. The hands were concealed in flesh-colored fabric gloves, and a flesh-colored fabric cowl covered the face and head yet showed the faintest impression of nose-tip, cheekbones and eye-sockets. With a sound of meshing gears and the rattling of a chain the figure began to move, the head turning…slowly…left to right and back again, the right hand rising up to press against the chin as if measuring a thought, and then from the bizarre figure issued a tinny voice with a hint of a rasp and whine, One of you has been brought here to die.
Matthew closed that door firmly, but with an unfirm hand.
He stood staring at the fifth door.
Behind that one…what? He feared that one, perhaps more than any other. Behind it was…something he had never known before, something that perhaps he could not survive. Something that perhaps would remove Matthew Corbett from life itself, and distance him from everything and everyone he had ever known and loved.
That door…the fifth one…he could not bear to open, yet it must be opened because he realized it was his destiny.
He reached for it and took the handle. He had no choice but to open it, and see what was ahead for him…if he could indeed take the sight of his future and not lose who and what he was in the present.