He decided to go ahead, but with a watchful eye at his back in case a piece of darkness separated itself from the night and rushed upon him. And he had gone perhaps ten paces farther when a piece of darkness shifted not at his back, but directly in front of him.
He stopped and stood stone-still. He was a dried husk, all the blood and breath gone from him on a summer night suddenly turned winter’s eve.
A spark leaped, setting fire to cotton in a little tinderbox, and from it a match was lighted.
“Corbett,” said the man as he touched flame to pipe bowl, “if you’re so intent on following me I ought to give you an audience. Don’t you think?” Matthew didn’t reply. Actually his tongue was still petrified.
Eben Ausley took a moment lighting his pipe to satisfaction. Behind him was a fire-blacked brick wall. His corpulent face seethed red. “What a wonder you are, boy,” he said in his crackly high-pitched voice. “Laboring at papers and pots all day long and following me about the town at night. When do you sleep?”
“I manage,” Matthew answered.
“I think you ought to get more sleep than you do. I think you are in need of a long rest. Don’t you agree with that, Mr. Carver?”
Too late, Matthew heard the movement behind him. Too late, he realized the other two men had been hiding in the burned rubble on either side of—
A lumberboard whacked him square in the back of the head, stopping all further speculations. It sounded so loud to him that surely the militia would think a cannon had fired, but then the force of the blow knocked him off his feet and the pain roared up and everything was shooting stars and flaming pinwheels. He was on his knees and made an effort of sheer willpower not to go down flat on the street. His teeth were gritted, his senses blowsy. It came to him through the haze that Ausley had led him a merry traipse to this sheep-trap. “Oh, that’s enough, I think,” Ausley was saying. “We don’t want to kill him now, do we? How does that feel, Corbett? Clear your noggin out for you?”
Matthew heard the voice as if an echo from a great distance, which he wished were the truth. Something pressed down hard upon the center of his back. A boot, he realized. About to slam him to the ground.
“He’s all right where he is,” Ausley said, in a flat tone of nonchalance. The boot left Matthew’s back. “I don’t think he’s going anywhere. Are you, Corbett?” He didn’t wait for a reply, which wouldn’t have arrived anyway. “Do you know who this young man is, my friends? Do you know he’s been trailing me hither and yon, ’round and about for…how long has it been, Corbett? Two years?”
Two years haphazardly, Matthew thought. Only the last six months with any sense of purpose.
“This young man was one of my dearest students,” Ausley went on, smirking now. “One of my boys, yes. Raised up right there at the orphanage. Now I didn’t take him off the street myself, my predecessor Staunton did that, you see. That poor old fool saw him as a worthwhile project. Wretched urchin into educated gentleman, if you please. Gave him books to read, and taught him…what was it he taught you, Corbett? How to be a damned fool, like he was?” He continued merrily along his crooked road. “Now this young man has gone a far travel from his beginnings. Oh yes, he has. Went into the employ of Magistrate Isaac Woodward, who chose him as a clerk-in-training and took him out into the world. Gave him a chance to continue his education, to learn to live a gentleman’s life and to be someone of value.” There was a pause as Ausley relit his pipe. “And then, my friends,” Ausley said between puffs, “and then, he betrayed his benefactor by falling in with a woman accused of witchcraft in a little hole of a town down in the Carolina colony. A murderess, I understood her to be. A common tramp and a conniver, who pulled the wool over this young man’s eyes and caused the death of that noble Magistrate Woodward, God rest his soul.”
“Lie,” Matthew was able to say. Or rather, to whisper. He tried again: “That’s…a lie.”
“Did he speak? Did he say something?” Ausley asked.
“He mumbled,” said the man standing behind Matthew.
“Well might he mumble,” Ausley said. “He mumbled and grumbled quite a lot at the orphanage. Didn’t you, Corbett? If I had killed my benefactor by first exposing him to a wet tempest that half robbed his life and then breaking his heart by treachery, I’d be reduced to a mumbling wretch too. Tell me, how does Magistrate Powers trust you enough to turn his back on you? Or have you learned a bewitching spell from your ladyfriend?”
“If he knows witchcraft,” another voice said, “it hasn’t done him any good tonight.”
“No,” Ausley answered, “he doesn’t know witchcraft. If he did, he’d at least make himself into an invisible pest instead of a pest I have to look at every time I venture out into the street. Corbett!!”
It had been a demand for Matthew’s full attention, which he was able to give only by lifting his throbbing brainpan on its weakened stalk. He blinked, trying to focus on Ausley’s repugnant visage.
The headmaster of King Street’s orphanage for boys, he of the jaunty cockatoo and the swollen belly, said with quiet contempt, “I know what you’re about. I’ve always known. When you came back here, I knew it would start. And I warned you, did I not? Your last night at the orphanage? Have you forgotten? Answer me!”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Matthew said.
“Never plot a war you cannot win. Isn’t that right?”
Matthew didn’t respond. He tensed, expecting the boot to come down on his back again, but he was spared.
“This young man…boy…fool,” Ausley corrected himself, speaking now to his two companions, “decided he didn’t approve of my correctional methods. All those boys, all those grievous attitudes. Some of them like animals wild from the woods, even a barn was too good for them. They’d bite your arm off and piss on your leg. The churches and the public hospital daily bringing them to my door. Family perished on the voyage over, no one to take responsibility, so what was I to do with them? Indians massacred this one’s family, or that one was stubborn and would not work, or this one was a young drunkard living in the street. What was I to do with them, except give them some discipline? And yes, I did take many of them in hand. Many of them I had to discipline in the most strict of manners, because they would abide no—”
“Not discipline,” Matthew interrupted, gathering strength into his voice. His face had reddened, his eyes glistening with anger in their swollen sockets. “Your methods…might make the church elders and the hospital council think twice…about the charity they give you. And the money the town pays you. Do they know you’re confusing discipline with sodomy?”
Ausley was quiet. In this silence, the world and time seemed to hang suspended.
“I’ve heard them scream, late at night,” Matthew went on. “Many nights. I’ve seen them, afterward. Some of them…didn’t want to live. All of them were changed. And you only went after the youngest ones. The ones who couldn’t fight back.” He felt the burn of tears, and even after eight years the impact of this emotion stunned him. He pulled in a breath and the next words tumbled out of him: “I’m fighting back for them, you jackal sonofabitch.”
Ausley’s laugh cracked the dark. “Oh ho! Oh ho, my friends! View the avenging angel! Down on the ground and fighting the air!” He came forward a few steps. In the next pull of the pipe and the red wash of cinder-light, Matthew saw a face upon the man that would have scared even the winged Michael. “You make me sick, Corbett! With your stupidity and your fucking honor. With your following me, trying to get under my feet and trip me up. Because that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Trying to find out things? To spy on me? Which tells me one very important thing: you have nothing. If you had something—anything—beyond your ridiculous suppositions and made-up memories, you would have first fetched your dear dead magistrate Woodward upon me, or now your new dog Powers. Am I not correct in this?” His voice suddenly changed; when he spoke again he sounded like a nettled old woman: “Look what you’ve made me step in!”
r /> Then, after a meditative pause: “Mr. Bromfield, drag Corbett over here, won’t you?”
A hand grabbed Matthew’s collar and another took hold of his shirt low on his back. He was dragged fast and sure by a man who knew how to move a body. Matthew tensed and tried to convulse himself, but a knuckled fist—Carver’s, he presumed—jammed into his ribs just enough to tell him that pride led to breakage.
“You have a filthy mind,” Ausley said, standing closer with his odors of cloves and smoke. “I think we should scrub it a bit, beginning with your face. Mr. Bromfield, clean him up for me, please.”
“My pleasure,” said the man who’d seized Matthew, and with diabolical relish he took hold of the back of Matthew’s head and thrust his face down into the fly-blown mass of horse manure that Ausley’s boot had found.
Matthew had seen what was coming. There was no way to avoid it. He was able to seal his mouth shut and close his eyes, and then his face went into the pile. It was, by reason of the analytical part of Matthew’s brain that took the cool measure of all things, distressingly fresh. Almost velvety, really. Like putting one’s face into a velvet bag. Warm, still. The stuff was up his nostrils, but the breath was stuck hard in his lungs. He didn’t fight, even when he felt the sole of a boot press upon the back of his head and his face was jammed through the wretched excess near down to the cobblestones. They wanted him to fight, so they could break him. So he would not fight, even as the air stuttered in his lungs and his face remained pressed down into the filth under a whoreson’s boot. He would not fight, so he might fight the better on his feet some other day.
Ausley said, “Pull him up.”
Bromfield obeyed.
“Get some air in his lungs, Carver,” Ausley commanded.
The flat of a hand slapped Matthew in the center of his chest. The air whooshed out of his mouth and nostrils, spraying manure.
“Shit!” Carver hollered. “He’s got it on my shirt!”
“Step back then, step back. Give him room to smell himself.”
Matthew did. The stuff was still jammed up his nose. It caked his face like swamp mud and had the vomitous odor of sour grass, decayed feed, and…well, and stinking manure straight from the rump. He retched and tried to clear his eyes but Bromfield had hold of his arms as strong as a picaroon’s rope.
Ausley gave a short, high, and giddy laugh. “Oh, look at him now! The avenger has turned scarecrow! You might even scare the carrion birds away with that face, Corbett!”
Matthew spat and shook his head violently back and forth; unfortunately some of this unpalatable meal had gotten past his lips.
“You can let him go now,” Ausley said. Bromfield released Matthew and at the same time gave him a solid shove that put him on the ground again. Then, as Matthew struggled up to his knees and rubbed the mess out of his eyes, Ausley stood over him and said quietly, the menace in his voice commingled with boredom, “You are not to follow me again. Understand? Mind me well, or the next time we meet shall not go so kindly for you.” To the others: “Shall we leave the young man to his contemplations?”
There was the sound of phlegm being hawked up. Matthew felt the gob of spit hit his shirt at the left shoulder. Carver or Bromfield, showing their good breeding. After that, the noise of boots striding away. Ausley said something and one of the others laughed. Then they were gone.
Matthew sat in the street, cleaning his face with his sleeves. Sickness bubbled and lurched in his stomach. The heat of anger and the burn of shame made him feel as if he were sitting aboil under the noonday sun. His head was still killing him, his eyes streaming. Then his stomach turned over and out of him flooded the Old Admiral’s ale and most of the salmagundi he’d put down for his supper. It came to him that he was going to be laboring over a washpot tonight.
Finally, after what seemed a terrible hour, he was able to get up off the ground and think about how to get home. His roost on the Broad Way, up over Hiram Stokely’s pottery shop, was going to be a good twenty-minute walk. Probably a long, malodorous twenty minutes, at that. But there was nothing to be done but to get to doing it; and so he started off, seething and weaving and stinking and being altogether miserable in his wretched skin. He searched for a horse trough. He would get himself a bath in it, and so cleanse his face and clear his mind.
And tomorrow? To be so impetuous as to once more haunt the dark outside the King Street orphanage, waiting for Ausley to appear on his jaunt to the gambling dens and so spy on him in hopes of…what, exactly? Or to stay home in his small room and embrace cold fact, that Ausley was right: he had absolutely nothing, and was unlikely to get anything at this pace. But to give up…to give up…was abandoning them all. Abandoning the reason for his solemn rage, abandoning the quest that he felt set him apart from every other citizen of this town. It gave him a purpose. Without it, who would he be?
He would be a magistrate’s clerk and a pottery sweeper, he thought as he went along the silent Broad Way. Only a young man who held sway over a quill and a broom, and whose mind was tormented by the vision of injustice to the innocent. It was what had made him stand up against Magistrate Woodward—his mentor and almost father, truth be told—to proclaim Rachel Howarth innocent of witchcraft in the town of Fount Royal three years ago. Had that decision helped to carry the ailing magistrate to his death? Possibly so. It was another torment, like the hot strike of a bullwhip ever endlessly repeating, that lay upon Matthew’s soul in every hour lit by sun or candle.
He came upon a horse trough at Trinity Church, where Wall Street met the Broad Way. Here the sturdy Dutch cobblestones ended and the streets were plain hard-packed English earth. As Matthew leaned down into the trough and began to wash his face with dirty water, he almost felt like weeping. Yet to weep took too much energy, and he had none of that to spare.
But tomorrow was tomorrow, was it not? A new beginning, as they said? What a day might change, who could ever know? Yet some things would never change in himself, and of this he was certain: he must bring Eben Ausley to justice somehow, for those crimes of wanton evil and brutality against the innocent. Somehow, he must; or he feared that if he did not, he would be consumed by this quest, by its futility, and he would wither into slack-jawed acceptance of what could never in his mind be acceptable.
At last he was suitable to proceed home, yet still a ragamuffin’s nightmare. He still had his cap, that was a good thing. He still had his life, that was another. And so he straightened his shoulders and counted his blessings and went on his way through the midnight town, one young man alone.
two
ON THIS BRIGHT MORNING, neither of Matthew’s breakfast hosts knew of his tribulations of the night before; therefore they merrily jaylarked about the day with no regard to his headache and sour stomach. He kept these injuries to himself, as Hiram Stokely and his wife, Patience, went about the sunny kitchen in their small white house behind the pottery shop.
Matthew’s plate was filled with corncakes and a slice of salted ham that on any other day he would have considered a delight but today was a little too discomfited to properly appreciate. They were good and kind people, and he’d been fortunate to find a room over the shop. His responsibility to them was to clean the place and help with the throwing and kiln, as much as his limited talents allowed. They had two sons, one a merchant sea captain and the other an accountant in London, and it seemed to Matthew that they liked having the company at mealtimes.
The third member present of the Stokely family, however, definitely found something peculiar with Matthew this morn. At first Matthew had thought it was the salted ham that made Cecily, the pet pig, nose about him to the point of aggravation. Considering he was putting knife and fork to one of her relations, he could well fathom her displeasure, yet she was surely by now used to these cannibals who’d taken her in. Surely she knew that after two years of this coddled life she wasn’t destined for the plate, for she was a smart piece of pork. But the way she snorted and pushed and carried on this day made Matth
ew wonder if he’d gotten all the horse manure out of his hair. He’d almost scrubbed his skin off with sandalwood soap in the washbasin last night, but perhaps Cecily’s talented snout could find some lingering stink.
“Cecily!” said Hiram, after a particularly hard push from the rotund lass to Matthew’s right kneecap. “What’s the matter with you today?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know,” was Matthew’s response, though he presumed Cecily was reminded of rolling in the sty by some aroma he was emitting, even though he wore freshly cleaned trousers, shirt, and stockings.
“She’s nervous, is what.” Patience, a large stocky woman with gray hair pinned up under a blue cotton mob cap, looked up from her hearth, where she was using a bellows to fan the biscuit-pan fire. “Something’s got her gristle.”
Hiram, who was just as physically sturdy as his wife, with white hair and beard and pale brown eyes the color of the clay he worked so diligently, took a drink from his mug of tea. He watched Cecily make a circle in the kitchen before she went back under the table to give out a snort and push Matthew’s knee again. “She was like this a morning or two before the fire, you remember? She can tell when there’s trouble about to happen, is what I believe.”
“I didn’t realize she was such the fortune-teller.” Matthew scooted his chair back from the table to make room for Cecily. Unfortunately, the lady continued to shove her snout at him.
“Well, she likes you.” Hiram gave him a quick, joshing smile. “Maybe she’s trying to tell you something, eh?”
A day late, Matthew thought.
“I recall,” Patience said quietly, as she went back to her work, “when Dr. Godwin came to visit us last. To get his plates. Do you remember, Hiram?”