“You don’t need to speak for my daughter!” said the father, getting more enraged by the minute. “How dare you! Speak for yourself! Or…let the world look at you and smell you, and that tells the story well enough!”
Magnus Muldoon opened his mouth perhaps to fire an angry volley at Father Prisskitt, but suddenly it appeared to Matthew that all the salt went out of him and all that was left was sad clay. “I reckon you’re right,” said the man. He nodded. “Reckon you are.” His eyes found the loveliest vision, who stared at him with the warmth of a blizzard. “Pandora,” he said, and the sound was like a heart breaking. “I know I done wrong…but I thought…maybe…with you at my side…I could be better than I was. Am,” he corrected. “I would’ve given you love,” he told her. “I would’ve held you like the finest cup in the world, and poured myself into you. Is wishin’ that so wrong?”
“It is hideous,” Father Prisskitt answered, and in it Matthew heard the hiss of the snake. “And if it did not make me so sick I would laugh myself to the floor.”
“Get out of our sight!” the daughter nearly shouted, her face contorted and eyes glittering and not nearly so lovely as Matthew had thought at the evening’s beginning. “Get out of this world, you black-bearded monster!”
With that, Muldoon straightened his boulder-like shoulders. He cast his gaze around the ballroom, at the grinning faces in the guttering light. He let his gaze fall upon Matthew Corbett, who felt the weight of the moment.
“You bested me,” said Muldoon. “I ought to hate your guts…but I don’t. I’m just gonna leave you here with ’em, all these fine ladies and gentlemen, and I’m gonna say…enjoy what you’ve earned.” He gave Matthew a slight bow, and then turning around he walked across the boards and exited the event by the way he’d come, through the filmy curtain and into the garden where no weed dared grow.
In another few seconds Matthew found himself the hero of the moment. So many hands whacked him on the back—and some as hard as enmity—he feared he’d be bruised all the way to his lungs. Sedgeworth Prisskitt came up and clapped him on the back and said something unintelligible, because Matthew had ceased to listen to him. Fine ladies drifted up like pastel smoke to rub against his shadow. Highwigs puffing powder marched up and the chunky faces beneath them said how steadfast he was, and how cunning. And then Pandora Prisskitt came forward, radiant even in her darkness, and took his arm with the pride of ownership.
“You are so smart,” she gushed, “and so brave too!”
The musicians were starting to take their places again, and allow a few notes to issue forth as invitations to more dancing. “Thank you for your compliments and your company,” said Matthew, to Pandora’s puzzled expression as he dislodged her hand from his arm. “I shall have to take my leave now, as I’m feeling a little ill.”
“Oh?” Sedgeworth had heard this, and came forward. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing very much,” Matthew replied. “Just a bit close in here for me. The air…seems oppressive.”
“I’m sure a walk around the garden will help! Pandora, go with him!”
But Pandora was very intelligent, and she knew and pulled back. Matthew gave both father and daughter the smile of a gentleman who has done his duty. “I shall indeed walk around the garden on my way to the inn. It seems to me that there are several fellows here who might like a dance with your very gracious and understanding daughter. Oh…would you take this, please?” And so saying, he placed the comb matted with Muldoon’s bloody hair into Sedgeworth’s palm. Then he offered a bow to the lady and glanced up one more time at the sword of Damocles to count himself lucky. He left the room by the garden exit to walk beneath the star-strewn sky over Front Street, ruminate on how quickly life could turn comedy into tragedy and vice versa, and consider that he might appear to be one of the chosen elites who occupied the ballroom yet he in truth he had been there on a task and in depth he was more an outsider than ever before. And tonight, after having escaped either death or humiliation and seeing the reality of things, Matthew was very much more than content with his position.
Four
It was a fine morning to walk along Front Street in the warm sunshine, which if Matthew knew anything about Charles Town in the summer—and he certainly did from past experience as clerk to Magistrate Woodward here in his younger days—the warmth of the sun would turn to wretched heat as the day wore on and the shadows grew small. By noon the smell of the swamp would ooze over the town’s stone walls and permeate the little shops selling coffees and teas and bon-bons for the genteel, and the odor of decaying fish afloat and abloat against the wharf would violate even the most sweetly-scented fragrance of a garden’s roses or the perfumes sold to dab behind a lady’s ear or upon a gentleman’s cravat. In other words, at high noon it was time to get out the silk fans and employ the nosegays, so Matthew walked the street early and wisely before such aromas could embellish the air.
Besides, last night he’d gotten a strong enough whiff of this place. He had slept on a goosedown mattress in a comfortable bed in an inn owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Carrington, both agreeable people who were curious about New York and asked many questions concerning the life and manners there, and he had supped this morning on orange muffins with cinnamon butter followed by spiced ginger tea, and he appeared to be composed and content…and yet this was an illusion. For as he strolled along Front Street in his neat gray suit, his pale blue shirt and his gray tricorn with a dark blue band, even as he peaceably passed the shops and seemed to be at peace with all under God’s eye, he was at war with himself.
He had come to this situation of internal combat sometime before dawn, just when the town’s roosters began to crow. One part of himself wished to directly return to New York upon the next packet boat leaving port, and the other part…
…perhaps not so quickly.
He strolled on, from tree-shade to tree-shade. The scene—or rather, the sense—of last night’s festivity would not leave him. Several well-dressed gentlemen and ladies who passed him nodded in greeting. He wondered if they had been present at the ball, and if they still thought him such the hero for besting Magnus Muldoon with a comb. But the part of it that particularly galled Matthew was the truth of something the bearded mountain had said: I kinda see you now. I kinda see how you brung this fella all the way from New York, for me to kill just ’cause you have to go to these fancy dances. That ain’t right, Pandora. Ain’t right, to use a person that way.
And Pandora’s less-than-musical reply: Get out of this world, you black-bearded monster!
It was an ugly picture, Matthew thought as he walked. Made more ugly by the superficial beauty of the queenly Lady Prisskitt, which had beguiled him so completely and might nearly have crowned him as the king of his own coffin.
He walked a distance further, mindful of other people strolling on the street and the passage of carriages, the horses clip-clopping along. In a moment he stopped to gaze into the window of a tailor’s shop that displayed some shirts and suits in light summer hues. He was thinking…thinking…thinking that thinking was often his undoing…but it seemed to him that Pandora Prisskitt should not get away completely free from causing the deaths of three men—however those deaths had been delivered by the hand of a man who loved her valiantly and in vain. Also, Matthew disliked the fact of being used, intended to be either the fourth corpse or another frightened fool running for his life. And there was also the issue of Magnus Muldoon, a sad and heavy-hearted soul who seemed to think himself more Lancelot than Luckless Lout.