Reverend Burton stood looking at the dead girl. He pulled in a long draught of air and shook his head back and forth, as if to clear his own mind and vision. Or perhaps, Lark thought, he had sprained his neck killing her sister. She tried to speak, to shout or scream or curse, but found her voice had left her and all that emerged was a hoarse rattling of enraged air.
“Hush,” he said to Faith. And louder, when she did not: “Hush!”
When she still did not—or could not—Reverend Burton returned to the table, took up a handful of cornbread and pressed it into her mouth until she gagged and choked. Her bright blue eyes, wide to the point of explosion, stared at him without blinking as her chest slowly rose and fell.
“There. Better,” he said. His head swivelled. His gaze found Lark, whose voice was reborn in a shuddering moan. With both hands she gripped hold of the chair beside her, as if its oak legs made up the walls of a mighty fortress.
He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his right hand. “Don’t think ill of me,” he said, and then he went to Aaron’s body and, pressing down with a boot against the chest, pulled the knife out. He wiped it on one of the good napkins. Then he righted his chair, sat down at his place at the head of the table, sliced himself a piece of ham, spooned out a baked apple and a helping of beans, and began to eat.
Faith was silent, still staring but now simply at the far wall. Lark still gripped hold of the chair, her knuckles white. She did not move; she was thinking, crazily, that if she didn’t move he wouldn’t see her, and soon he would forget that she was even there.
He chewed down the ham and licked his fingers. “Have you ever been irritated by a fly?” he asked, as he carved the baked apple. His voice made Lark jump; she thought she had spoiled her invisibility, and she thought she was stupid and weak and she couldn’t help but begin to cry, though silently. “One of those big green flies, that buzz around and around your head until you can’t stand for it to live another minute. Another second,” he amended, between bites. “So you think, I am going to kill this fly. Yes, I am. And if it doesn’t go easily, I shall pull off its wings before I crush it, because I don’t like to be flouted. Then…you watch the fly, and it may be slow or fast or very fast indeed, but soon you make out its pattern. Everything alive has a pattern. You see its pattern, you think one step—one little fly’s buzz—ahead of its pattern, and there you have it.” He emphasized his point by rapping his spoon against the table. “A dead fly. Not so different with people.”
He reached for the cornbread, paused to take note of Lark’s crying, and then continued his solitary feast. “I hate flies. They’ll be in here in a while. Nothing you can do to keep them out.”
“You’re not…” Lark didn’t know if she’d meant to speak, but there it was. Still, the words were sluggish, and her throat strangled. “You’re not…you’re not…”
“Not really a reverend, no,” he admitted, with a small shrug. “But if I’d come to your door and said, Good morning, I’m a killer, where would it have gotten me?”
“You didn’t…have…” Could she ever make a whole sentence again? Something in her mind was screaming, but she could barely whisper. “You didn’t…have to do that.”
“I wanted to. Lark. That’s a pretty name. There used to be a nest of larks in a tree outside my house, when I was a boy.”
“Did you…did you…kill them?”
“Absolutely not. They woke me up in the mornings, so I could get to work.”
And now came the question that she had to ask, but that she dreaded. “Are…you going to kill us now?”
He finished the apple before he spoke again. “Lark, let me tell you about power. Most men will say that power is the ability to do as you please. But I say…power is the ability to do as you please, and no one is able to stop you. Oh!” He watched as Faith threw up her breakfast and in so doing blew the cornbread out of her mouth. “I think she’s coming around.”
Faith was trying to stand. Her face was pallid and somehow misshapen, her mouth twisted to one side and her eyes sunken inward as if a pair of vicious thumbs had forced them back into the skull. The tracks of tears glistened on her cheeks. Her mouth moved, but she made no sound.
Then Lark thought her mother’s tortured eyes must have seen the bodies again, and the whole event must have whirled once more through her mind like the gunsmoke that still roiled at the ceiling. Faith slid back to the floor and began to cry like a broken-hearted child.
The Not-Reverend continued to eat. He cut another piece of ham and whittled it down between his teeth.
“We didn’t…we didn’t…do…” Lark feared she too was going to vomit, for the smell of blood and burnt hair had touched her nostrils. “We didn’t…do anything to you.”
“And that matters exactly how?” he asked, with a spoonful of beans at his mouth. When no reply was made, he ate them and dug in for another bite.
Lark wiped her eyes. She was trembling, the tears still running down her face. She was afraid to try to stand up, for she was sure that would bring him upon her with either the knife or some other implement. She listened to her mother crying, and thought that something in the sound reminded her of how Robin had wept when the spotted puppy—Dottie, they’d named it—had died of worms last summer.
Lark felt her lips curl. She felt the rage seize her heart and embolden her soul, and even though she knew that what she was about to say would mean her death she spoke it anyway: “God will fix you.”
He finished the piece of ham he was working on, took a last drink of the cider, and then he put his elbows on the table and laced his murderous hands together. “Really? Well, I’d like to see that. I want you to listen. Listen beyond your mother’s crying. What do you hear? Listen now, listen very carefully. Go on…what do you hear?”
Lark didn’t answer.
“Nothing but my voice,” he said. “No one but me.” He lifted his arms toward the smoky ceiling. “Where is the bolt of lightning? Where is the angel with the flaming sword? Bring them on, I’m waiting.” He paused a moment, smiling thinly, and then he lowered his arms. “No, Lark. It won’t be today.” He regarded the nails of his right hand and with them scratched his chin. “You’ll stand up now, and take off your clothes.”
Lark didn’t move. Deep inside her head, the words repeated over and over again.
He picked up the knife. It reflected a streak of light across his face and across the walls. “Let me ask you this, then: which ear could your mother do without?” When no sound came from between the girl’s tightly-compressed lips, he continued, “Actually, she could do without either one. All you need is a hole. But fingers…now that’s another kettle of cod.”
He waited. She waited also, her face downcast.
“I’ll demonstrate,” he said, and with the knife gripped in his hand he stood up.
Lark said, “Wait. Please.” But she knew he would not wait; no man who had just slaughtered three people was going to wait, and so she got unsteadily to her feet and when she began to remove her clothing she tried to find a place in her mind to hide. A small place, just enough to squeeze into.
“Show me where you sleep.” He was standing right beside her, the knife glinting. One ragged fingernail played across her freckled shoulders, down her throat and between her breasts.
In the room she had shared with her sister, Lark stared at the ceiling as the man moved atop her. He made no noise, and did not try to kiss her. Everything about him—his hands, his flesh, that part of him battering itself within her—was rough. The knife was on a round table beside her bed. She knew that if she reached for it he would kill her, and perhaps he was so adept at murder that if she even thought about reaching for it he would kill her, so she stayed in that safe place in her mind, that far and distant place, which was a memory of her mother holding her hand and by candlelight reciting the nightly ritual before going to bed.
Do you believe in God?
Yes, Momma.
Do you believe that we need fear n
o darkness, for He lights our way?
Yes, Momma.
Do you believe in the promise of Heaven?
Yes, Momma.
So do I. Now go to sleep.
The man was still. He had finished in silence, with a hard deep thrust that had almost conquered her refusal to break before the pain. The tears had coursed over her cheeks and she had bitten her lower lip, but she had not sung for him.
“Momma?”
It was the voice of a child. But not Robin’s voice.
The man’s hand went to the knife. He slid off her. Lark lifted her head, the muscles taut in her neck, and looked at her mother standing in the doorway.
Faith was holding both hands to her private area, her face half-masked by shadow and the other half sweat-shiny. “Momma?” she said in the childlike, horrifying voice. “I have to water the daisies.”
It was what Robin always said. And what Lark knew her mother had said to Grand Ma Ma when she was a little girl.
“Hurry, Momma,” the child in the doorway pleaded.
Lark heard the man begin to laugh. It was the slow sound of a hammer nailing a coffin shut, or the hollow cough of a puppy choking on worms. She almost turned upon him and struck at him then. Almost. But she let the rage go, and instead decided she would try to keep herself and her mother alive as long as she could.
“Never seen that before,” said the man. “By all means, get her to a chamberpot.”
Faith allowed herself to be guided. To be directed and squatted and wiped. Lark realized that her mother’s dull blue, sunken eyes no longer saw anything but what she wished to see, and if those were scenes from nearly thirty years ago on an English farm, then so be it. Faith gave no reaction to the man’s presence, not even after Lark had put on her clothes again and the man instructed Lark to heat a pot of water and fetch a pair of scissors because he wished to shave. Not even, when the man had drawn the last stroke of his razor and the devil’s beard was gone, he put on a pair of her father’s stockings, a pair of his brown breeches, a gray shirt and a beige coat with patched elbows. When the boots came off the corpse and went onto the man’s feet, Faith asked Lark if they were going to town today to see someone named Mrs. Janepenny.
“You remember, Momma!” Faith said, as she walked across the kitchen avoiding the blood and the bodies like a child making her way through a blighted garden. “About the lace!”
The man had his tricorn hat on and his haversack with the pistol in it around his shoulder. He waved away the flies, which had arrived as he’d predicted. “We’re going to the barn, and you are going to help me harness the team.”
The afternoon sun was bright and warm, the air cool. There were only threads of clouds in the sky. In the barn, as Lark got the harness down from its hooks beside the wagon, Faith sat on the ground outside and played with some sticks. The man brought one of the horses from its stall and was getting the harness on when Faith said excitedly, “Momma! Somebody’s coming!”
Instantly the man said, “Bring her in. Quickly.”
“Mother!” Lark said, but the woman just stared blankly at her. “Faith,” she corrected, her mouth tasting of ashes. “Come in here! Hurry!” Her mother, an obedient child, got up and entered the barn.
The man rushed to a knothole facing the road and peered out; within seconds he turned to his haversack and took from it a spyglass, which he opened to its fullest extent and put to the knothole. Lark reasoned that the approaching visitor was still distant. There followed a silence, as Faith stood beside Lark, grasped her hand and kicked idly at the straw.
The man grunted. “I am impressed,” he said. “Found himself an Indian guide, as well.” He lowered the spyglass, closed it and returned it to the haversack. He stood rubbing his bare chin, his cold eyes moving back and forth between the woman, the girl and the wagon. Then he walked to an axe leaning against the wall, and when he picked it up Lark caught her breath.
He chopped out two of the spokes from one of the wagon’s wheels. Then, with quick and powerful blows, he began to destroy the wheel, until the wood splintered and broke and the wagon sagged. He threw the axe aside, reached again into the haversack and brought out two items that he offered to Lark.
“Here,” he said. “Go on, take them!” There was impatience in his voice. Lark accepted the gold coins, and once they were in her hand they were visible to Faith, who made a cooing noise and wanted to hold them.
“The young man’s name is Matthew Corbett,” said the man, and Lark noted that small beads of sweat had bloomed on his clean upper lip. “I want you to give those to him. Tell him we’re square, as far as I’m concerned. Tell him to go home.” He strode to the rear of the barn, where he kicked enough boards loose to crouch down and get through into the orchard beyond. “But tell him,” he said when his way of escape had been made, “that if he wishes to find death, I will be glad to give that to him, also.” He took his tricorn in his hand and knelt down.
“You aren’t…going to kill us?” Lark asked, as her mother rolled the gold coins between her palms.
The man paused. He gave her a slight smile that contained in equal measures both disdain and mockery, but not a whisker’s weight of pity.
“Dear Lark,” he said, “I have already killed you.”
And with that, the man pushed his shoulders through, and was gone.
Twenty-One
AFTERR Lark had told her story, Matthew walked for the second time into the blood-stained kitchen, not to further test his stomach but to reaffirm that this hideous, unbelievable sight was inconvertibly true.
The scene of carnage had not changed. He put his hand to his mouth once again, but it was only a reflex action; he had not yet lost his breakfast of cattail roots nor the midday meal of dried meat and a handful of berries, which meant that he was either toughening up or that the food was too precious to expel. He thought the latter was more likely, for he never wished to be tough enough to take a sight like this without feeling sick.
He walked around the kitchen, avoiding the blood and in the case of Peter Lindsay, the brains that had been blown out the back of the head. He was looking for details, as the sunlight through the window shimmered in the gore and the flies buzzed back and forth on their industrious journeys.
No boots on the man’s corpse. Slaughter’s old boots, taken of course from Reverend Burton, were lying on the floor. Couldn’t Slaughter just ask for a damned pair of boots? Matthew wondered. Or at the very least take them without stealing someone’s life? God damn the man! Steady, steady, he told himself. There was no use in losing control. He was shaking a little bit, and he had to get a grip. Slaughter would not be Slaughter, if he asked for things he desired. No, Slaughter’s way was to take, and to kill, and however senseless it seemed to Matthew it must make some kind of sense to the killer. Or not. Matthew thought that Slaughter was a breed apart; a human being who detested the very air that other humans breathed, who hated people right down to their shadows. But to kill children…
Matthew picked up a green marble from the table. No, it was not altogether green. It had within it a swirl of blue. It was a beautiful thing, polished and smooth. He had it in mind that he should put two or three of these marbles in his pocket, to rub between his fingers, to remind himself that beyond the ugliness and evil of what had happened here there still remained beauty in the world. But he had no wish to rob the dead and, besides, marbles were for boys. He was far from boyhood now. Getting older, he thought, by the minute.
He put the marble back where it was, looked at all the food on the table and knew that Greathouse might be able to cast the corpses out of his mind and feast on the leftovers, but Matthew would rather have eaten cattail roots and dried meat for a week rather than touch any of this tainted groaning board. Or perhaps, he suspected, he wasn’t hungry enough.
The pot of soapy water on the table drew his attention. In it he saw floating hair of many colors. Slaughter had gotten his shave; one more step toward his presentation as an earl, a duke, o
r a marquis, the better to cut the throat of some wealthy widow and throw her in a pauper’s grave.
God damn the man.
Walker In Two Worlds came into the room. This was also his second visit here; his face was impassive, his eyes fixed only on Matthew. But he looked tired and drawn, and even his feathers seemed to have wilted like the petals of a dying flower.
“Slaughter went up the hillside,” he reported. “I caught sight of him, moving among some boulders. He got into the woods before I could draw my bow.”
Matthew nodded, knowing Walker had chosen the better part of valor—and shown good sense—not to continue the pursuit without having the little bullpup pistol covering his back.
“It’s very thick up in there,” Walker said. “Many places to set a trap.”
“He’ll keep going.” Matthew opened his left hand and looked at the two gold coins Lark had given him. They were both five-guinea pieces, the same type as he’d taken from the lockbox in Chapel’s house. Some well-to-do traveller or merchant had come to grief on the Philadelphia Pike, and coughed these up for Slaughter and Rattison. “I wonder if he really thinks I’ll give up.”
Now Walker did turn his gaze away from Matthew and with hooded eyes regarded the dead man and the two children. “Will you?”
Matthew saw a small blood-splattered pillow on the floor, next to one of the chairs. It displayed an embroided picture of a robin sitting on a tree branch.
“I don’t understand your god,” said Walker, in a toneless voice. “Our spirits created the world and the heavens and all that we are, but they never promised to keep their eye upon every little bird. I thought your god showed more…” He searched his memory for the word. “Compassion.”
Matthew couldn’t reply. Rain fell equally on the just and unjust, he thought. The Bible surely contained more verses and lessons about misery and untimely death. But how could God turn a blind eye to something like this? The question begged for an answer. More than that; it screamed for an answer. But there was no answer, and Matthew put the two gold coins into his waistcoat pocket along with the other items of jewelry and got out of the kitchen before his sense of dark despair crushed him to his knees.