Shorts? It dawned on him that the meaning must be short fuses.
The men were lighting fuses with their candle flames, and whatever they were preparing was about to blow the house to pieces.
He swallowed hard and stood up. As he came off the floor, he cocked the pistol and opened his lantern. Light streamed out, catching one of the jackadaws lighting the last of four fuses that went into the same number of black cylindrical objects about a foot in length.
“Stop that,” Matthew said. The men fairly leapt from the floor. One gave his own explosion in the form of a fart. Matthew aimed his flintlock between them. The four fuses hissed and smoked, throwing blue sparks in their progress. “Stomp those out!” Matthew commanded.
“Who the hell are you?” the farter asked.
“Stomp those out!” Matthew repeated. The fuses were burning dangerously near their entrance holes into the cylinders, which appeared to be wrapped in oily black leather. “Now!”
“Sure, sure,” said one man, lifting his hand to show Matthew his palm. Then, as if they’d practiced this cue for just such a predicament, the second man threw his lantern at Matthew’s head. It hit Matthew’s shoulder as he twisted aside, and the flintlock pistol went off from a convulsive twitch of the trigger finger. Smoke bloomed, the bullet smacked into the opposite wall, and the concussion made the ribs of Oliver Quisenhunt’s device snap shut, cutting off Matthew’s light. It occurred to him, as the men rushed from the room and smoke whirled around him, that the apparatus needed more testing.
It then occurred to him, quite sharply, that the fuses were burning into their bombs, and though he was able to crush out two with his boot the other two snaked away and flared brightly as they entered the cylinders.
Matthew ran.
Through the door into the hallway, and just as he got out the Devil shouted in his ears and a fierce hot wave of Hell picked him up off his feet and flung him like a ragdoll through the doorway into the doctor’s treatment room.
Nine
SOMETIME in the next few seconds, as Matthew lay crumpled on the brick floor and the whirlwinds of flame gnawed at his coat, he realized that if he was going to live he would have to get out of this house.
He thought the roof might have blown off already, or at least a goodly portion of it. Pieces of fiery wood were falling about him. His ears made a roaring sound, but hollow as if he were in an underwater cavern. Everything hurt: shoulders, knees, backbone, neck, jaw, teeth. He felt as if his muscles and sinews had been stretched long and then jammed tight. There was a red haze before his eyes; he thought they might be swollen with blood. He swallowed blood and felt it streaming from his nose, which might have been broken in his collision with the bricks. Already the fire was surrounding him. It was a hydra-headed beast, growing bright orange horns, talons and teeth and tearing through the house. A piece of flaming timber crashed down on the floor about three feet from his right thigh. Cinders stung his face. He was at the center of a world full of red-hot hornets. Then he was aware that his fearnaught was on fire, and his own coat was going to eat him alive.
He gritted his teeth and with the effort of the damned began to roll to get the fire out. Whether he was successful or not, he didn’t know, but for the moment he was alive. Was his cap aflame too? He snatched it off. It glowed with a dozen red cinders but it was not yet burning.
He began to crawl. To where?
To anywhere but here.
And now the real Matthew Corbett emerged. It took hold of the young man who had found himself in a gray kingdom of indecision and regret, whose mind had become a sluggish set of gears that did not mesh, whose spirit had been pummelled and thrashed by the memory of murder in the wilderness. The real Matthew Corbett peered out from desperate red eyes in a bloodied face. The real Matthew Corbett, who had survived so much pain and hardship and dangers that might have put any other man on his knees or in his grave, recognized that he was in the burning wreckage of Doctor Jason’s treatment room. He saw the ceiling, riddled with tentacles of fire like Professor Fell’s octopus, beginning to collapse. He saw the open trapdoor on the floor.
He saw a way out.
Mindless of all sensation but the need to survive, he began to pull himself toward the open square in the bricks.
Once there, he did not hesitate. He turned himself to descend the ladder into the pool of darkness below, and reaching up he got hold of the trapdoor’s inner ring and slammed it shut over his head just as a new rain of cinders fell from above.
Then he lost both grip and balance, and he tumbled downward into what might have been a hundred-foot hole.
But more like ten feet. He recalled the breath whooshing from his lungs, though by this point any more pain was simply a proof of life. He was on his back in the dark. No, not quite dark; he could see the glow of flames through small cracks in the trapdoor. Would the fire eat through it? He didn’t know. Would it steal his air? He didn’t know. Was he burned and smoking? Didn’t know that, either. He was in, as Hudson Greathouse might have said, one shit of a pickle.
He faded in and out. Fire sounds, burning away. The smell of smoke, scorched cloth and blood. He began to laugh at something, though he wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe he was weeping; again, he didn’t know. But at the center of his mind the real Matthew Corbett held rule, and that calm personage said Hold on.
Definitely he was laughing, he decided. Chuckling, really. The way those two bastards had jumped off the floor. And then he thought of Berry and his cold voice saying I was confused and the bitter tears watered his face.
No, he realized. Not bitter tears.
It was actually water, and it was streaming down through the cracks in the trapdoor.
The bucket brigade at work, he realized. Fighting to save the Mallorys’ house. And perhaps they could save what was left of it, for this time not all the firebombs had ignited. Did he call out Help me? Or was it just Me? For he was himself, found once more in fire and blood, and he thought My name is Matthew Corbett, and by God I am going to live.
He thought the worst of the explosion had gone upward or been absorbed by the walls of Doctor Jason’s bedroom. The thing was, he had not resisted the blast. He had not had time to resist, and though he was in pain he didn’t think he had suffered any broken bones.
There was a lesson to be had there, he decided. He vowed to decipher its meaning later, if he survived to do so. At the moment he had more important and more strenuous work to do. And it was going to hurt, but it had to be done.
He turned himself over on the cellar’s dirt, found his way to the bottom of the ladder, and began to pull himself up.
At last—somehow, with a will to live that rivalled his episode in the well at Fort Laurens—Matthew reached the top. He placed a hand against the trapdoor. It was not hot, but it was going to be an effort. He was stewing in sweat, he had very little strength and what remained was departing on a fast horse. He pushed. And pushed. And pushed some more. “Help me!” he shouted, but could he be heard? He had to keep pushing.
The trapdoor opened a crack. Matthew got the fingers of his left hand into it and kept the pressure—a dubious term, in this instance—up with his right hand. He put the back of his head against the trapdoor and shoved upward with everything he had, and suddenly the trapdoor came open with a crisp crackle and slam.
Climb up, he told himself. And stand up.
He entered a smoking, still-burning ruin where a house had been. The flames were low, however, having been for the most part bested by the bucket brigade. Matthew climbed out and sat on his knees, his head lowered; he was trying to make sense of what he should do next. Ah, yes! he recalled. Stand up!
He got to his feet by the shakiest of efforts. Instantly he threw up what tasted like a sick man’s portion of smoke. Then he began to stumble through the wreckage, his fearnaught hanging in burned tatters from his shoulders and his face freighted with blood. He became aware of shadows in the smoke, moving hither and yon with their lanterns through thi
s new world of burned and broken timbers, smoking piles of rubble and things that had melted and reformed into objects unrecognizable as being of the earth and possessions of man. Matthew staggered toward one of the shadows and said—or thought he said, because of the shrill ringing in his ears—“Do you have some water?” He had no idea why he said that, other than he was terribly thirsty.
The shadow came forward and became a shape that became a man that became Marco Ross, the blacksmith. Ash-blackened and filthy, he was…but then again Marco Ross was usually ash-blackened and filthy, so it was all the same.
The blacksmith, a big enough man for his job, stopped in his tracks and gave a gasp like a weakling woman who is in need of air lest she faint dead away.
“Corbett?” he whispered.
It is I, Matthew thought, before his knees collapsed and he went down like a brain-hammered bull.
“News,” said Hudson Greathouse, pulling the visitor’s chair closer to Matthew’s bedside. He went on without waiting for an invitation from the grape-colored lips in a face mottled with black bruises. “McCaggers has found the corpses. At least…some of what could be found. He’s got two blankets over there with the…uh…remains laid out. It’s not pretty.”
Matthew thought it must be terribly ugly. And horrible for Ashton McCaggers, whose gorge rose at the sight of a bloodied finger. Piecing together two charred bodies would be a scene plucked from McCaggers’ worst nightmares. For the eccentric and soft-stomached coroner, it would be at least a four bucket day. And without Zed to help him, the more the worse!
“I’ll say it again.” Greathouse stared out the window at the late-afternoon sunlight. “Everyone has a time. This wasn’t yours…but it was a damned close call.” His deepset black eyes left the window and found Matthew’s red-shot swollen eyes. “When are you going to tell me what you were doing in there?”
Two days of soup for every meal had left Matthew in a less-than-cheerful mood. Add to that the plaster-covered gash that had taken eight horse-gut stitches under his left eye, sundry other cuts and scrapes on forehead and chin, a nose that had nearly been broken but was so sore now even the flutter of a nostril was pure agony, and enough bruises on face, arms, legs, chest and back to make him appear a spotted beast from the heart of Zed’s homeland, and he was a bedful of joy. But he was greatly thankful for a certain trapdoor and cellar, which had held at its dirt-floored bottom some items of broken furniture and a few shelves holding bottles of murky liquid probably used by the doctor in his treatments.
“Tell McCaggers he won’t find the heads,” said Matthew, in a voice that still sounded smoke-choked.
“I’ll tell him,” Greathouse said after a short pause.
“The Mallorys,” Matthew went on, “wanted to appear to be dead. They got the corpses from somewhere. God only knows.”
“I believe you,” Greathouse said after a longer pause.
Matthew nodded, but gingerly because any movement yet pained his multitude of strained muscles. He knew exactly what his friend meant. He could still see Gardner Lillehorne standing over his bed, yesterday morning here at the Publick Hospital on King Street. The high constable in his cardinal-red suit and red tricorn, with the same crimson glare at the center of his small ebony eyes and his teeth on edge.
“You have secured your place in infamy now, Mr. Corbett,” said the offended redbird. “Staggering out of that burning ruin? With your name painted on the alley wall across the street? And here you’re telling me there were two naked and headless corpses in the bed of Dr. Jason Mallory? My Christ, boy! I thought I was talking nonsense when I said you were addle-brained after that misadventure in Pennsylvania, but I’m thinking now you must be half-crazy.” He let that linger for a few seconds before he darted in again with, “And the other half insane. Do you wish to tell me how you were to be in that house, or shall we hear that in Cornbury’s office?”
Matthew had not answered. It seemed to be too much effort, and anyway even the muscles of his jaws were hurting.
“You are in a situation.” Lillehorne had leaned over the bed like a threatening bonfire, ready to catch sheets and bedclothes burning. “You are going to have to explain yourself, sir. If not to me and to Lord Cornbury, then before a court of law.”
“I’m being arrested?” Matthew had managed to ask.
“Consider yourself so. I’ll think up some appropriate charges. Breaking and entering would be the first.”
“The back door was open,” Matthew reminded him.
“Unlawful entrance, then. Mark it. Criminal mischief. Unwillingness to aid an official investigation. Mark those as well. Do I make myself clear?”
“In a muddy way,” Matthew said, his tone as dry as October’s leaves. His face, too, was a study in mottled stone. He left it at that, and after another moment the high constable made a low noise in his throat, gave a pinched expression that conveyed volumes of both frustration and disgust, and strode out of the hospital’s wardroom with the lion’s-head ornament of his cane slapping against his red-gloved palm.
And good riddance, you bastard, Matthew had thought.
“McCaggers,” said Hudson Greathouse, as he stretched his legs out before him, “believes the corpses to be those of a man and a woman. Just as you’ve said. Only he’s of the belief that they’re the Mallorys, caught in the blast and fire.”
“What they wished him to believe,” was Matthew’s terse reply.
“McCaggers has found fragments of women’s clothing and the heel of a shoe. His question is: if the Mallorys were leaving for good—sneaking away in the middle of the night, as you’ve put it—why wouldn’t Rebecca have taken her gowns?”
“What they wished him to question,” said Matthew.
Greathouse tapped a finger against the musketball-sized cleft in his chin. “Yes,” he said. “All right, then. But…” And here Greathouse’s brow knit, and Matthew knew his friend was struggling to make sense of what could not possibly make sense. “But why, Matthew?” came the most urgent question. “Tell me. Why?”
“I can tell you why the corpses have no heads,” Matthew ventured. “Because if the heads were found, McCaggers might determine the bodies were not those of the doctor and the damsel. By some remnant of hair or the facial bones, I would think. Possibly one or both of the murder victims had rotten teeth. They wanted to be careful, lest McCaggers find something that would throw their plot off its course.”
Greathouse did not speak for a time. He seemed to be watching the crawl of sunlight across a green-painted wall. “Murder victims,” he repeated, tonelessly. “Their plot.”
“Correct. Two people were murdered and decapitated to serve as stand-ins.” Matthew thought better of that last term. “Lie-ins,” he amended, with a small, tight and painful smile. “I imagine the victims were plucked off the street in some nearby town. Probably a beggar and a prostitute, who would not be easily missed.”
“A beggar and a prostitute.” Greathouse sounded as if he were standing in a church reciting a particularly uncomfortable Bible passage.
“Look at me,” Matthew directed.
Greathouse did.
But in his eyes Matthew saw the blankness of the green-painted wall, and with that came the realization that even such a friend as Greathouse had his limits of belief. Or perhaps it was just that, to save the situation, Greathouse had simply ceased thinking.
“They put the corpses in the house,” Matthew said, a little unsteadily, “to make it appear that they are dead.”
“They were, you said.”
“What?”
“The corpses. They were already dead. I would think so, if they were headless.”
“The Mallorys,” said Matthew. “Or whoever they are.”
“A beggar and a prostitute, you said.”
“No! The Mallorys. They put the corpses in the bed knowing they would be blown to pieces and burned to crisps. Then they could make it look as if I had something to do with it, by painting my name on the alley wall.”
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“And why would you have something to do with it?” The eyes narrowed, just a dangerous fraction. “You didn’t, did you? I mean…I believe you.”
“It’s a plot,” said Matthew, who felt himself spinning away from the world, “to draw me in.”
“Draw you into what?”
“The plan. The…summons. I can’t…” Matthew leaned his head against the pillow. He had to close his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them again, nothing had changed. Or had Greathouse quietly moved his chair back a few inches from the bedside?
“I’ll go fetch the doctor,” Greathouse offered, in as sympathetic a voice as Matthew had ever heard.
“No,” Matthew said, and the power of his declaration stopped Greathouse from leaving his chair.
Then the great one—the man of action, the lover of wild widows, the swordsman scarred by battles and life—looked at Matthew with something like pity in eyes gone sad.
He reached out to grasp his friend’s shoulder, and he said quietly, “I know you went through tribulations in that Slaughter incident. I know…they must have been terrible. And even about those, you won’t tell me. But I know, Matthew. Because I see how you’ve been…” Here he paused to agonizingly search for the proper word, neither too hard nor too soft. “Affected,” he went on. “By what happened. So who could blame you, for…suffering. For—”
“Imagining murders and plots?” Matthew interrupted, in a tone descrescendo.
“I don’t understand any of this,” Greathouse continued, as if the question had never been spoken, “but I do believe someone is trying to…further affect you. For whatever reason, I don’t know. I believe you know, but you’re not going to tell me, are you?”
Matthew said nothing; he, too, had begun to watch sunlight crawl across the wall, and with it the waning afternoon.