“Hm,” said Muldoon. “Mebbe you ain’t a pure dandy after all, to be carryin’ such a token. But no matter. You have got to die for darin’ to bring my angel to this gatherin’.”
“I won’t allow it!” spoke the violet-eyed angel, with some devilish heat. “Magnus Muldoon, you don’t own me! You can’t be trying to win a woman’s heart with bloodshed! It’s not…not…” She hesitated, struggling for words.
“Natural. Nor is it Christian,” Matthew supplied.
“Oh, you’re wrong there!” came the answer from the growly-throated voice within the busky beard. The eyes above that black forest glittered with feverish intent. “It is natural for a man to use bloodshed when he has seen the woman he loves more than the stars love the night. More than the river loves the sea. More than a bird loves the free wind. It is natural, if that’s the only way to win her…by killin’ every damn pretender to her heart who dares to take her arm and sport her about like a silver button on his cuff. And it is Christian, you low-assed heathen, for even Jesus shed blood in the name of love…”
“His own blood,” Matthew said, to no avail.
“…and I’m riddin’ this world of those men who can’t carry a candle to the torch of her beauty, and they dress ’emselves up like jouncy crows and hop hither and yonder tryin’ to prove they’re made of some mettle, when right before her stands a man of pure iron!”
“A little rusty, I think,” said Matthew. He regarded the circling flies and wrinkled his nose at what they swooned upon. “And musty, also.”
“He won’t be the last,” Pandora said to her hulking suitor. This did not go over very well with Matthew, who nevertheless remained silent. “I would never marry a beast like you! I want a civilized man of refinement…a man to be proud of, not a…not a…”
“Man not to be proud of,” Matthew supplied.
“That,” said the most beautiful woman in the world.
The grim-faced head nodded. “I’ll kill every man livin’ who stands in my way, Pandora Prisskitt! Sooner or later…I’ll be the last man standin’.”
“You can stand on your head or stand on a pile of gold! I can’t bear to look at you, much less smell you!” She put a hand to her throat and reached out for a handkerchief. “Father!” she cried, and staggered toward him. “I’m going to be ill!”
“Your time has come,” said the bearded beast to Matthew Corbett. “I challenged you to a duel, and if you’re any kind of man you’ll accept that challenge. If not, turn tail like the yellow-belly I figure you to be and light out of here this minute. Many others have, and everybody at this social loves a good laugh. So I’m askin’ you…what weapon do you choose? Sword? Pistol? Axe? What are you wantin’ to fight me with, you little pale piece ’a parchment?”
The pallid problem-solver pondered this. He looked up once more at the Sword of Damocles that dangled above his skull. Then he stared into the eyes of Magnus Muldoon and saw there something he had not seen before. Something, perhaps, he had not expected to see. He decided, then, what was his choice. But before he spoke it, Matthew thought of how he had come to this place and this moment, and how when he got home he was going to give Hudson Greathouse such a kick in the pants that the squabbling ghosts of Number Seven Stone Street would stop their eternal fight to applaud his determined application of the boot.
Two
"I say, go!”
“And I say, no.”
“Well my God, Matthew! It’s an easy fifty pounds! And I think, according to this gent’s taste in stationery and his oh-so-precious seal, I can ask another twenty pounds and get it. Easy money for an easy task.”
“Too easy,” said Matthew, as he turned from the pair of windows that—now opened to the warm air of early June—afforded a view to the northwest of New York, to the wide sun-sparkled river and the mossy cliffs and vivid green hills of New Jersey. Fishermen in their small skiffs were at work upon the river, and a sailing boat carrying crated cargo of some sort on deck had come drifting down toward the docks of town, its sails bloomed before the breeze. The ferry was making its long, slow but usually reliable crossing from Manhattan to New Jersey, with a coach and four horses aboard. Matthew had noted with interest that the frameworks of two houses were being built up on the Jersey cliffs where no dwelling had stood before he’d been kidnapped by Professor Fell’s cohorts and taken to Pendulum Island. The pristine nature of the cliffs was no more; such was progress, and ever would be. Directly below the windows were the streets, houses and businesses of New York, a jumble of nautical warehouses, stables, blacksmith shops, rope makers, timberyards, tallow chandlers, carpentry shops, soap makers, poulterers, coopers, peltry sellers, bakeries, japanners, horners, creditors and a dozen and one other areas of occupation. It seemed to Matthew that more people had come since he’d been gone, and on some mornings the bustling traffic of horses, wagons, carts and carriages along the Broad Way reminded him of an anthill scraped open by an errant boot.
“Too easy,” he repeated to Hudson Greathouse’s bearded face. “And it’s not a suitable task for me. Or for any problem-solver worth a pinch of salt, for that matter.”
“I saved this letter,” said the Great One, holding it aloft at his desk, “because I thought you might detect a little pepper in it. And I assumed it would stir your juices and make you wish to get to the meat of it.”
“Is it a letter or a beef stew? Keep on like this and I’ll ask you to pledge yourself to buying my noonday meal at Sally Almond’s.”
“Pah!” said Hudson, and let the missive drop like a dead leaf upon his desk. He had grown his silver-touched beard out ever since Matthew had arrived bearded from his time at sea upon Captain Jerrell Falco’s Nightflyer, and the widow Donovan had remarked upon her attraction to a hairy face. Which presently had set Hudson to lay aside his razor and reap the rewards, of which Matthew wished to know nothing. Of Captain Falco and the Nightflyer, the good captain’s ship was now many hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic on the mission of returning the ex-slave Zed to his tribal homeland. Matthew had seen the ship off on that morning, as had Zed’s ex-owner, the town’s eccentric coroner Ashton McCaggers. And…on that morning also, stood with McCaggers Berry Grigsby in a dress the color of the April meadows and wearing a floppy-brimmed straw hat banded with wildflowers. Matthew had sneaked several glances at Berry but had received nary a one in return. But what had he expected? He recalled his speech to her not so long ago…recalled it, in fact, as one might recall a stab to the gut.
I was wrong to have confided in you on the ship that night. It was weak, and I regret it. Because the fact is, I have never needed you. I didn’t yesterday, I don’t today and I will not tomorrow. He had seen the little death in her eyes. And it had killed him, most of all. Fine, she had answered. Good day to you, then. She’d begun walking quickly away, and six strides in her departure she had turned again toward him and there were tears on her face and she’d said in a voice near collapse, We are done.
Three words. All of them small. All of them terrible.
So…what had he expected?
He had played and replayed this scene, in the silence of his diminutive abode behind the Grigsby house. In the shaving of his face before his mirror he had replayed it, and in his reading by candlelight it interrupted the pages. In his walks to and from this very office it followed him like a silent shade, and as he sat alone at Sally Almond’s or in some other establishment it mocked him like a cuff upon the ear.