The Providence Rider (17 page)

Then he went right off the gangplank, splashing headlong into the drink between the wharf and the
Nightflyer
’s hull.

The water was far warmer than Manhattan’s winter harbor yet still cool enough to make swimming uncomfortable about the family jewels. He reckoned he might have shouted underwater, for an explosion of bubbles hit him in the face and following that was a rush of saltwater into his mouth.
There goes the hair pomade
, he thought either grimly or crazily. Then he realized he had better kick to the surface and get out of here, for it was a shame for his fine suit to be so soaked.

His next thought was:
Damn, I’ve made a mess of this already!

He came up to the noise of hooting and cat-calling, and someone yelling with unbridled mirth,
“Man overboard!”
He pushed the hair out of his face and saw Aria making her way unsteadily down the gangplank, but she had prepared for this moment by taking small steps. She speared him with her eyes as one might spear a fat-bellied bottom feeder. A sailor appeared holding a long wooden pole with a leather-wrapped hook on one end, which he offered to Matthew. The hook having been taken, Matthew was pulled up until he could get a grip on the edge of the wharf, and so struggling and scrabbling like a dumb, doomed crab for a moment he at last hauled himself up onto the hardwood.

Oh, the laughter! The hilarity! The horror of it all! Even Captain Falco had his hand strategically to his face, and was examining some point of interest up on the mainmast.

He got himself up on his feet and stood dripping. He heard the harsh, rasping laughter of the two orange-haired gents coiling toward him like whips. The young blonde woman—bless her—watched in silence.

Matthew felt a box closing around him. It might be a coffin. He decided he would not let it close. It was time—oh,
yes
—for Nathan Spade to speak out.

He looked up at the grinning crew of the
Nightflyer
. He looked up into the laughter, and he brought a wide grin of his own up from somewhere, and he puffed his chest out again like a banty rooster and he hollered at the top of his salty lungs, “Fuck all! I’ve wet my fuckin’ britches, haven’t I?”

The words did not taste very good, but the sentiment was delicious.

The laughter changed; it was difficult to tell exactly how, but it did. For Matthew began to laugh too, and now the joke was not just about one strutting man who’d taken a dive into the drink, but about all men who cast their fate upon a treacherous path and find themselves quite unexpectedly falling from grace.

They grinned and nodded and nearly cheered him, and then Matthew turned away with a sweeping flourish of his arm that said
I am the same as you, only better dressed
. In his squishy boots he strode past Aria Chillany, who moved to give him way, and on his purposeful yet still dizzied walk up the wharf he saw that the two orange-haired men were no longer laughing but watching him with narrowed eyes from fox-like faces, and that the blonde woman had climbed into her berline and could no longer be seen.

He continued onward, leaving puddles of the Atlantic in his footsteps. Madam Chillany caught up with him and said in a guarded voice, “Careful of those two. Jack and Mack Thacker. You don’t want to turn your back on them.”

The Thacker brothers. Matthew recalled hearing mention of them from Hudson. And here they were, in the ugly flesh. They sprawled atop the coach, each wearing an identical gray suit, white shirt, white stockings and black boots. In fact, they were identical twins, or nearly much so. They looked like lazy animals taking the morning sun. One spoke to the other and the other spoke back, but the eyes in their granite-jawed and sharp-nosed faces never left the person of Nathan Spade. They looked to be in their early forties, short and compact like rowdy tavern brawlers ready to bet a coin on a mouth of broken teeth. Someone else’s broken teeth, of course, because the Thackers had thick forearms and shoulders, legs like squat treetrunks and necks that could burst a hangman’s noose. Their faces were flushed with the blood that pulsed just beneath the skin’s surface, or perhaps they didn’t take the sun very well. As Matthew approached the berlines, he saw that one of the twins had a streak of gray at the front of the orange hair, which was brushed back from the forehead and shiny with pomade; the other twin did not share this mark, and so it was the only thing Matthew could see different about them. They had small deepset eyes that looked to be pale green, like sharp splinters of glass.

They did not speak or move from their languid positions as Matthew approached.

“Nathan!” said the woman behind him. “We’ll take the other coach.”

Matthew changed his direction. He heard the brothers snicker at almost the same time.

The one with the gray streak said in a heavy Irish brogue, “Go on with ya! Listen to your—”

“Mama!” said the second, and they both snickered again.

Matthew shot them a dark look, but he also offered a thin smile. He stopped in his wet tracks. Now was as good a time as any to display his mettle, though it be fashioned from the cheapest tin. “Should I know you gentlemen?”

“I don’t know,” said one, and the other added, “Should ya?”

Interesting, Matthew thought. They finished each others’ sentences. They wore identical smirks. The coachman of their berline kept his head down and his attention forward, as if fearful of imminent violence. Matthew could feel it in the air. These two liked to bloody up a victim, and maybe they were sizing him up as fodder for their fists.

“My name is Nathan Spade,” said Matthew. “Do you have names?”

One of them answered with an outthrust chin, “I think your name is—”

“Soggy Ass,” said the one with the gray streak, and both of them grinned tightly, with no humor on their faces.

“Nathan?” Aria’s voice had also tightened. “Come along. Yes?”

“Hold her petticoat, Nathan!” said the gray-streaker.

“Go on with ya!” said the second, who perhaps had larger ears than his brother.

But Matthew stood his ground. “Oh,” he said easily, though his heart was pounding, “I’ve heard of you two. The Thackers. Which is Jack and which is Mack? Or have you forgotten?”

Their grins began to slowly fade.

A movement within their coach caught Matthew’s attention.

He saw someone lean forward to peer through the door’s open window. It was a woman. He met her eyes, and he felt turned inside-out.

She stared at him only briefly, possibly five seconds before she leaned back into the seat once more. But Matthew was left with the stunned impression of one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. She had tawny flesh that seemed almost radiant. Her long ebony hair, topped by a gray hat tilted to one side with a spill of black lace across her forehead, flowed down about her shoulders in rich waves. She had an oval face with high cheekbones, a straight and narrow-bridged nose, and a full-lipped mouth that seemed to Matthew to be crimped tightly on many secrets. Her eyes were very dark, perhaps as ebony as her hair, and they had regarded Matthew in passing, without life or fire or spirit.

Whoever she was, she was not altogether there. In just the instant of seeing her, Matthew thought this lovely creature was terribly, heartbreakingly lonely. And he thought it was a shame, that such a pretty girl should sit alone.

“What’re ya lookin’ at…”

“…boyo?”

The two brothers slid off the coach. They stood a few feet distant from each other, one to Matthew’s left and one to the right. They had lost their grins. Their faces were impassive, and brutal in their lack of expression.

“The woman in the coach—” Matthew began.

“Never ya mind her,” said the gray-streaker.

“Go ’bout your business,” said the other. It was no doubt a warning.

“Nathan?” Aria’s voice held a hard edge. “To our coach, please.” Gentry was staggering toward them, whether by nature or by naturalist potion difficult to tell. Behind him came the sailors bearing their luggage.

The two brothers were silent. They were waiting, it seemed, for Nathan Spade’s next move in this small but potentially deadly game. Matthew realized the stocky pair were about as tall as the point of his nose. He said, “Good to meet you gentlemen,” and turned toward Aria. He had taken two strides when one of the Thackers let out the sound of a wet and nasty fart and the other gave a quick grating laugh that made the flesh on the back of Matthew’s neck crawl.

“Let’s keep moving,” said Aria in a hushed voice, her face frozen in a smile but her dark blue eyes glittering with either repressed rage or something akin to fear, if she knew what that was. It was clear that the Thacker twins were no devotees of good manners, and Matthew figured his masquerade—and usefulness—might have ended here at the head of this wharf if those two had been incited to explosive riot. And it seemed the Indian girl might be their powderkeg.

There it was, Matthew thought as he opened the berline’s door. The beautiful woman in the other coach was most decidedly an Indian…not of Sirki’s nationality, but of the tribe of Walker In Two Worlds.

He slid along the leather bench seat and found himself sitting across from the blonde-haired woman dressed in the male finery.

She aimed at him a pair of eyes the color of golden ale. “You’re dripping on my boots,” she said, her voice low and controlled and not lacking in menace.

“Pardon me.” Instantly he shifted his position, which he figured was not what Nathan Spade would have done, but he was still Matthew Corbett at heart and in manners. Something to work on, he decided. He looked at the third occupant of their berline, a rotund bald-headed man with three chins. This individual, dressed in a beige suit and a dark green blouse with lavender ruffles, was taking a pinch of snuff from a gold box. He wore round spectacles that magnified his watery blue eyes and made the small red veins in them jump out. Adorning the edge of his right ear were seven small gold ornaments of varying geometric shapes. His lips were as thin as a pauper’s wallet, his bulbous nose as large as Lord Cornbury’s ambitions. Matthew guessed his age at around fifty. “Good morning,” the man said when the two huge nostrils had taken their drink of whuffie-dust. “I am Augustus Pons. You are Nathan Spade.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I am.” No hand was offered from either man.

“Ah,” said Pons, with a slight nod. The eyelids blinked drowsily. When he spoke, his jowls danced. “We have been awaiting your arrival. I have been on this island for nearly one month. Why is it, may I ask, that it took so long for you to join us?”

“Complications,” said Aria as she entered the coach and sat beside Matthew. She offered nothing else, but stared at Augustus Pons in a way that told him to ask no more questions. Pons smiled wanly, showing small nuggets of brown teeth, and visibly retreated as if going down a hole and pulling it in after himself.

Evidently the luggage had been loaded in the berline’s cargo compartment at the rear and Jonathan Gentry had found a seat in the other coach, as there was only room for four here. Aria rapped on the wall behind her as a signal to the driver. A whip cracked and the team set off.

“Nathan Spade,” said the blonde woman. She was staring intently at him, her head cocked slightly to one side as if trying to make up her mind about something. “Where did you sail from?”

“New York,” Matthew said before Aria could speak. He’d decided it was time for him to chart his own course. “I had business there.”

“Don’t we all?” she asked, with a half-smile and a lift of a thick blonde brow. Then she said, “I’m Minx Cutter. Pleased to meet you.” She offered a hand, which Matthew took. “Welcome to Pendulum,” she offered, with a squeeze before releasing him.

“Thank you. I believe those other two don’t welcome me quite as graciously.”

“Jack and Mack Thacker,” she said. “They go everywhere together. I understand Jack is the elder by a few minutes. He has the streak of gray.”

“Ah.” Matthew paused for a few seconds before asking the question that followed: “And who is the young Indian woman?” Minx Cutter shrugged. “They call her Fancy.” The coach was climbing the cliffside road. Matthew glanced to the right, out the window past Aria, and saw their height increasing over the sunlit blue cove. His drenched clothes were a nuisance, but he’d suffered worse. He made a show of examining his fingernails, which were perfectly clean, while he gathered impressions of Minx Cutter.

She had a hard quality of beauty. There was nothing soft about her except possibly the curly ringlets of her hair. Even those might have been thorny to the touch. She had a firm jawline and a square chin, a tight-lipped mouth and a nose that appeared to have been broken and improperly repaired, for it bore a small bump in the middle and crooked slightly to the left. She was slimly-built, but far from being frail. Matthew thought she was built for speed and agility. She held herself with calm composure and obvious high regard. Her intelligent eyes, light brown with a golden element in their hue, feigned disinterest, but Matthew had the sense that she was also sizing him up. She might have been anywhere from twenty to twenty-five, as her peach-toned flesh was unlined; she appeared to Matthew to not have much practice in smiling. So young to be so deeply in the professor’s pocket, he thought. Therefore he had to wonder exactly what Minx Cutter did for the emperor of crime and the owner of Pendulum Island.

He was mulling over the possiblities when he heard a man’s scream. Looking out his own window to the left, he was uncomfortably aware that the four horses of the second berline were thundering up nearly wheel-to-wheel of their own coach and that this precarious path was suited only for one set of wheels at a time. He saw that the coachman had been removed by force, and sitting with reins in hand was Mack Thacker, while Jack swung the whip with mad abandon over the rumps of their team.

“Oh my!” croaked Augustus Pons. His eyes were gigantic. “I fear those two are up to—”

The whip cracked against the side of their coach, causing Pons to jump and spill most of the snuff from his open box. As the brown dust swirled around, Matthew saw Jack Thacker grit his teeth and swing the whip to connect with their own driver, who must have been stung by the blow because there was a strident cry of pain. The next whipstrike did something particularly nasty, for both brothers grinned and jostled each other with their elbows.