The Providence Rider (19 page)

In any event, he could feel her watching him. Taking him apart, as it were.

And suddenly he thought he was becoming more Nathan Spadish by the moment, for he reckoned he wouldn’t be averse to being taken apart by a woman like her.

No, not in the least.

“Giddup!” said the coachman, almost apologetically, and the injured berline rolled on up the road like a Saturday-night drunk determined to get home before cock’s crow.

In a few moments Matthew gave up his pretense of rest to mark their progress. The road turned away from the cliffs. It went inland through a thick forest where moss hung from trees like banners of emerald-colored lace and flowers of intense purples, reds and yellows burned the eyes. The smells of strange fruit both sweetened and soured the air. Occasionally a black person or two in bright clothing and straw hats could be seen picking such fruit and putting them in a basket. Matthew noted that the citizens of color here were not the true deep ebony of Zed, but rather the shade of milk in strong tea. It was obvious that, at least from these few examples, interbreeding between the races had gone on here for many years. He wondered if such might be the result of long-forgotten shipwrecks that had thrown slaves and Englishmen together on what probably was an unhospitable chunk of rock. The questions were, then: how old was the settlement on Pendulum Island and of course how long had Professor Fell been its…what would be the correct term?
Benefactor?

Just two questions of many in Matthew’s mind, and here came another one as the road emerged from the forest onto a plain of wild grasses swept by the seabreeze: how much money had
that
thing cost?

That thing
being the castle of white stone that came into view on the right-hand side, perched on the cliff overlooking a turbulent cauldron of Atlantic foam. It was a massive monument to the power of a wallet…and also, possibly, to the power of power itself. In any case, Matthew suddenly felt very small indeed. Turrets roofed with red slate stood like cobra heads. Arched windows and doorways called attention to the art of a highly-talented architect. The road continued on, but a gravel driveway curved from the road to the castle’s entrance, and passed between stands of wind-sculpted pines, thatches of palmettos and ornamental flower gardens. Outbuildings stood to either side of the main structure, possibly stables or servants’ quarters. The whole picture was one of serenity and removal from the world beyond. This truly was Professor Fell’s kingdom, and one would have to be very stupid not to be awed by it. Not being by any means stupid, Matthew was sufficiently awed; yet he did not let anyone see this register on his face, for the masquerade was underway and much depended on the power of his mask.

The berline turned on the driveway. The team followed the orderly path until they reached a porte-cochere supported by thick white columns, and there stood the offending coach driven by the Thacker brothers. A pair of native servants wearing sea-blue uniforms and elaborate white wigs were removing Gentry’s luggage from the baggage compartment while two more in the same colored clothing and ridiculous wigs waited to transfer it beyond a massive oak door. The Thackers were waiting beside the coach, one having removed his shirt and using it to wrap around a bleeding hand. His blood-spattered coat was draped over his shoulders. Jack Thacker’s chest looked like a squat wall of reddened brick. Both brothers eyed the approaching berline with barely-concealed loathing.

As Matthew’s coach pulled up under the porte-cochere, Jonathan Gentry half-stumbled and half-fell from the passenger compartment of his own. He went down on his knees nearly under the hooves of the approaching horses, which had to be pulled up short and sharply by the beleaguered driver. “Hell’s bells!” Madam Chillany snarled, and she was out of the coach like, indeed, a belle from Hell.

The chilly madam had become a redhot fire spitting a plentitude of profanities in the faces of the Thackers as Matthew disembarked the berline and strolled up beside her. The brothers looked highly disinterested, and the wounded Jack produced a yawn for her troubles. Their eyes then went to Matthew and their gazes sharpened like daggers.

“Soggy Ass,” said Jack.

“In the flesh,” said Mack.

“Listen to
me
!” the woman nearly screeched. Augustus Pons waddled past, his fat and florid face stricken by the need to distance himself from any impending ugliness. Aria reached out and seized Jack’s chin, as he was the brother standing closer to her. “I could have you fucking killed for that! Do you hear me? I could have your fucking heads on fucking platters, you fucking assholes!”

“Such language!” said Jack.

“Tut, tut!” said Mack.

“I’ll report this to
him
, you can believe it!” she threatened. “We’ll see what
he
decides to do to punish you fuckers!”

“What he might decide to do,” said Mack in an easy voice, his eyes on Matthew, “is punish Spadey, ’cause we’ve been waitin’ on this fuckin’ island for more than one solid
month
. And you know what he tells everybody?”

“The meetin’ can’t start without Spadey,” said Jack, smoothly picking up the tale, “so we all have to wait. We all have to twiddle our fuckin’ thumbs and play with our cocks ’til—”

“Spadey gets here,” said Mack, “which was supposed to be weeks ago, as I take it. What I want to know is…what was so important, that Spadey had to make everybody wait for him—”

“And us with our business to get back to, ’cause it ain’t gonna run itself!” Jack finished, with a puffing out of the brickwall chest and a defiant glare at the
faux
Nathan Spade.

This prideful puff visibly stole some of the wind from Madam Chillany, who sought to make a comeback and found nothing in her slim treasury of wit. “We’ll see about that!” she managed to say. And then, back to more familiar territory: “You
assholes
!”

Matthew was suddenly aware of an additional presence.

The young Indian woman had emerged from her coach. She stepped slowly and carefully around Jonathan Gentry, who still sat on his knees blinking stupidly at the sunlit garden. She passed Matthew at a distance of three or four feet. It was near enough for Matthew to feel he was crowding her, and so he moved further aside; he also seemingly felt the hairs stir on his arms and on the back of his neck, yet he knew this must only be his imagination or some effect of gaining his landlegs.

She was a painting come to life, he thought. She was a piece of art that could never be confined by frame or glass. To his tastes she was stunningly beautiful. Her face, her hair, her body…all the creation of a master’s hand. She was nearly as tall as he, and she was lithe and long-stemmed and moved with a grace that perhaps was born of silent walking in lush green forests. She wore a slate-gray gown trimmed with red, and a pale blue blouse with a boil of black lace at the throat to compliment the lace on her hat. She looked neither to right nor left as she approached the brothers. Matthew noted that she did not look directly at them either but rather seemed to be staring as if in a dreamstate through them at some scene beyond their reckoning.

Mack spoke sharply. “What’re your eyes findin’ so interestin’…”

“…boyo?” said Jack, just as sharply.

“A very attractive woman,” Matthew answered, with a little of his own defiance in his voice. The girl obviously heard, but gave no reaction to this compliment whatsoever. Her face was slightly downcast, her attention removed from the moment. Matthew had the impression she was hearing a different voice in her head, and possibly it spoke the Iroquois language. “Where she did come from?” he asked, to whichever brother would reply first.

“She’s a fuckin’
squaw
,” said Jack.

“Where d’ya
think
she came from?” Mack’s eyes held a dangerous glitter. “You ain’t too smart, are ya?”

And so saying, Mack Thacker reached out and grasped the girl’s arm, and he pulled her roughly toward him so she was between himself and his brother. Then, his dangerous eyes still focused on Matthew, he began to lick along the girl’s face with a brown-coated tongue, and on the other side Jack took her free arm in a hard grip and he too began to lick the girl’s face with his own ghastly tongue, his eyes also on Nathan Spade the jayhawk-turned-political pimp and purveyor of valuable state secrets.

And between these two nasty and brutish tongues, the Indian girl looked at Matthew with her sad ebony eyes. There was something crushed and defeated in her yet-beautiful face that nearly wrenched his heart out, but he had to keep his mask on and so by the most difficult effort his visage maintained its stone. The two brothers began to laugh as they marked her cheeks with their saliva, and then the girl lowered her gaze from Matthew’s and she was again gone, walking silently through a forest unknown.

Minx Cutter took Matthew by the elbow and guided him toward the formidable oak door, which was being held open for the guests by a black servant in the sea-blue uniform and a powdered wig that must have been three feet tall.

“Come along,” Minx told Matthew, as she linked her arm with his and held it in an unbreakable grip. “You’re with me.”

Until now, Matthew Corbett had thought he understood the balance of the world. Good was its own reward. Evil deeds were punished. God was in His Heaven, and the Devil was evermore forbidden to walk the streets of gold. Yet here, in the realm of Professor Fell, all such platitudes and pieties for the Sabbath pulpit were revealed to Matthew as being echoes of the hollow voices of long-dead saints.

No rich man on New York’s Golden Hill had ever lived thus. He wondered what rich man in London might have earned such a monument. He was standing in what he presumed would be the Grand Entrance, and grand it was. The high arched ceiling might have been a sanctuary for angels, who could hide amid the polished oak beams with their feathered wings kissing the snow-white stones. The flags of many nations hung on poles that protruded from walls on either side, among them the white banner of France, the crowned eagle of Prussia, the tricolor of the Netherlands, and the Spanish arms of Bourbon-Anjou. Matthew noted that none of them were afforded a central location or a height that would emphasize one above the other, not even the English Union Jack. Matthew reasoned that to Professor Fell all countries were meant to be equally plundered.

A marbled floor of black and white squares made Matthew wonder if the professor was a chess player. But of course he was, Matthew decided. Who else would he be if he did not recognize the value of helpless pawns, black knights, crooked bishops, and an errant queen or two in his malignant view of life?

The Grand Entrance opened onto a Great Hallway and Glorious Staircase. White trimmed in gold seemed to be the color of the professor’s love. Well, Matthew mused as he followed Minx Cutter toward the stairs, the professor was his own God, so why not create for himself his own Heaven on earth?

“I’ll show you to your room,” Minx said, her voice echoing amid the ceiling’s beams.

“
I’ll
show him to his room.” This was spoken by Aria Chillany, who had come up behind the pair and now caught Matthew by the arm that Minx did not hold.

Minx levelled a calm but icy stare at the interloper. “I should think,” she said, “that you are very tired from your journey, and that a woman of your age needs her rest. So, as we have a dinner tonight and much to prepare for, I suggest you go to your own room and get your…shall I say…
beauty
sleep?” Her hand tightened on Matthew’s limb, and he thought if it got much tighter he would lose the circulation in his arm. She flashed a quick and totally insincere smile into Aria’s stony and—one might say—stunned face. “I’ll show you to your room, Nathan,” she said, a statement of power as well as of fact, and without a second’s more of hesitation she led him up the staircase with a stride that left a woman of a certain age at her bootheels.

Matthew had just time enough to glance back at Aria, who had recovered her composure to offer him a look that might have said
Careful with this one, and guard your throat
. He did not have to be so warned, but he was truly on his own now and whatever this game was, he was in deep.

They passed a stained-glass window overlooking the staircase that caught the morning sun and burst it into jewels of yellow, gold, blue and scarlet. It depicted what Matthew had first thought was the image of a suffering saint, but then he saw that it was the portrait of a young boy possibly ten or twelve years of age, his hands folded against the side of his face and tears of blood dripping from his haunted eyes. It was a strange decoration to be a centerpiece of Professor Fell’s paradise, and Matthew wanted to ask who that person might be but then they were past it and climbing up and he let the question go.

Though the stairway continued up to a third floor, Minx guided Matthew into the second floor’s hallway, lined with doors and hung with various tapestries that showed intricately-woven hunting scenes. Matthew thought they must date from medieval times or else be very convincing reproductions. Minx stopped at a white door about midway along the hall. “This is yours,” she told him, and opened the door for his entrance. The room had a canopied bed done up in black. Again, the floor was made up of the black-and-white chessboard squares. An iron chandelier and eight candles awaited his tinderbox flame, and on a white dresser stood another three-wicked candelabra. There was a small writing desk and a chair before it. On the desk was a key, presumably to his door, and a candle clock. Next to the bed was a white high-backed chair with black stitches woven through it in an abstract design. A white ceramic washbasin stood on iron legs with a supply of folded towels as well as a pearl-handled razor and a small round mirror. Matthew picked up the cake of soap next to the mirror and smelled limes. He noted that his baggage had been brought in and placed at the foot of the bed. He wondered if there might be a solid gold chamberpot under the bed, for surely here even the nuggets were worth something. “You might enjoy this,” said Minx, as she opened a pair of louvered doors. The warm seabreeze rushed in, bringing the salt tang of the Atlantic. A small balcony with a black iron railing overlooked the sea that thrashed itself into foam sixty feet below. Matthew had a view to the horizon, which was all empty blue ocean and sparkling waves.

“Very nice,” he agreed, uncomfortably aware that this young woman who was so good with knives had retreated a few paces to stand at his back. He turned to face her. When he did, he was startled to find that she had come up upon him as silently as a cat and was standing only inches away.

Minx peered into his eyes as if studying items for sale beyond a window. She said, “Have you ever seen me before?”

Matthew felt a small tremor. Was this a trick question? Was he
supposed
to have seen her before? He decided to play this safely. “No,” he answered, “I think not.”

“And I’ve never seen you before, either,” she said, with an arched eyebrow. “You’re a handsome man, I should have remembered you.”

“Oh.” Did he blush a bit? Possibly. “Well, then…thank you.”

“Soft hands, though,” she said, and took his right hand in hers. “You’re not much for handling horses, are you?”

“I haven’t much need to handle them.”

“Hm,” she replied. Her gold-touched eyes had taken on a certain ferocity. “Are you and Madam Chillany together?”

“Together?”

“An
item
,” she clarified.

“Oh. No…we’re not.”

“You may not think so,” she answered. Then she let his hand go. “If you’d like some lessons, I’d be glad to offer them.”

“Lessons?”

“In handling horses. The professor keeps a very fine stable. I might show you the island, if you’d like.”

“Yes,” he agreed, and gave her a wisp of a smile. “I would like.” Immediately he thought he had just taken a plunge into the deepest water yet, but still…such a sea should be explored.

“Meet me downstairs in one hour.” She was already moving toward the door. Yet she paused on the threshold. “That is,” she said, “if you can manage a tour. After your voyage, I mean.”

“I can always sleep tonight.” As soon as he voiced this, he noted an expression on her face that said he might be wrong about this as well as wrong about Aria Chillany’s interest in him.

“All right.” Minx gave him back his wispy smile. “One hour then.” And she added his name after the briefest of pauses: “Nathan.”

When the girl had gone and the door closed behind her, Matthew let out a long exhalation of breath and had to sit down on the bed, damp breeches be damned. The room seemed to be rocking on the Atlantic waves. He had his doubts about staying aboard a horse very long, but the offer of a guided tour of Pendulum Island was too good to reject. If he toppled from horseback, at least his excuse would pass Minx Cutter’s judgment. He stood up, went to the washbasin, poured water into it from a pitcher and splashed some into his face. Then he wet a portion of a towel and used it to cool the hot whipsting on his neck. It wasn’t so bad, but he could do with a little poultice of honeysuckle to calm the fever. He needed to get out of these clothes and…what?…send them downstairs to be cleaned? He imagined it would be that simple.

He thought of how many things could go wrong on his excursion with the girl. But then again…he had to have faith in himself. He had played parts before, notably as Michael Shayne with Lyra Sutch or, more corrrectly, in her own guise as Gemini Lovejoy. It occurred to him that Professor Fell had faith in him. Then he thought he must be going mad to be affirming the professor’s questionable attributes, or possibly it was the island’s sultry air clouding his mind.

He dressed in his other suit, this one of a velvety forest green, with a white shirt and white stockings. When he’d finished fastening the last shirt button he was aware of a shrill calling of seagulls from outside, and therefore he strolled out upon the balcony to have a look at what was stirring the birds up.

She was sitting cross-legged atop a large rock in the sea, her perch some twenty feet above the waves. Over her shining black hair the gulls spun around and around, perhaps disturbed at their roost being claimed by a human. She was entirely nude, her brown skin wet and glistening in the sunlight. Matthew grasped the balcony’s railing with both hands. She was sitting about forty feet below him, her chin resting on her folded hands, her face aimed seaward, her attitude remote and absolutely solitudinous in her nudity. Matthew could only stare at this display of removal from the world. Where had she disrobed and left her clothes? Obviously she was unconcerned about being an object of attention from any of the other guests…or, Matthew thought after another moment, she simply had ceased to care.

They call her Fancy
, Minx had said.

Of course that was a made-up name, Matthew reasoned. A nearly-sarcastic name imposed upon her if not by the Thacker brothers then by whoever else had lured her over the Atlantic from her tribal home. He wondered how she’d fallen into their hands, and wound up between their dirty tongues.

She was such a beautiful girl, he thought. And there she sat, still alone.

He very suddenly had the sensation that the balcony had given way beneath his feet and he was falling, and yet he gripped the railing harder and he was not falling at all but still…he thought that in the space of a few startling seconds he had indeed travelled from one risky position to another equally as dangerous.

“Oh my God,” he said quietly, to himself and to whomever might be listening, even here in this place of Professor Fell’s self-worship.

He had already voiced the thought in his head, when he’d first seen the Indian girl in the coach.

It was a shame, that such a pretty girl should sit alone
.

He recalled the tale of his Indian friend, Walker In Two Worlds, who had departed from this life and gone to walk the Sky Road. Walker had told him about the Indian girl called Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone. The girl who had been taken from her tribe and accompanied him and the doomed Nimble Climber in their journey across the Atlantic to England, where she had been seized by two men and put into a coach while he went on to portray a parody of the savage redskin on the lamplit English stage.

“Oh my God,” Matthew repeated, in case that entreaty to hear him had been missed the first time.

He had no idea how old the girl was who sat upon the rock below him, under her moving crown of seagulls. Walker had not told him exactly how old the girl was when they left the tribe together.
We three children
, Walker had said. Matthew had judged Walker’s age at around twenty-six or twenty-seven. Therefore…if this indeed
might
be the same Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone, then she could be the same age or younger by a few years. Or, perhaps, she was the same age as Matthew, twenty-three. In any case, it was possible…just possible…that before him was the very same Indian girl who had made that daunting voyage with Walker, and who had been removed by rough hands into a rough life that led her here, between two orange-haired ruffians who thought themselves the owners of a beautiful…yes, the word that Mack Thacker had used…
squaw
.

But still…certainly other Indian maidens had been brought over from the New World in all the many years since Walker’s journey. Of course. Many of them, brought over to be curiosities or servants or…whatever.

That this young woman could be the same one…

It boggled the mind.

Suddenly she must have caught a prickling sense of Matthew’s mental thornpatch, for she turned her head toward him as surely as if she had heard her name spoken, and they stared at each other seemingly not only across space, but also across time.

Fancy stood up. She rose to her full height. Brown and gleaming she took one step forward and flung herself into the air like one of Walker’s arrows leaving his bow, and as she came down into the sea she tightened her body and narrowed it and entered the churning foam with the bravery and ease of a creature born to be part of nature and perhaps desirous of a return to the childhood dream.

She did not surface. Though Matthew stood for several minutes scanning the boisterous waves there was no sign of her reemergence to the realm of air-breathers. He wondered if she was part fish, and once in the security of the blue world her fins and gills had grown, her tail had taken shape, and she had gone down with vigorous strokes to the silent bottom of the bay, where a pretty girl might once again sit alone. He had a moment of panic, thinking he should call someone to help her. But it occurred to him that no one without Indian courage would dare a dive into that deep, and if she would rather dream in the peaceful solitude of an ocean grave than be called Fancy and be tossed about like a ragdoll between two scums of the earth, then so be it.

Matthew left the balcony and closed the louvered doors. He took the key, went out of his room and locked it, then he walked along the corridor back to the stairs. A tall, slim and hollow-cheeked man with a trimmed gray beard and a smooth sheen of gray hair tied back in a queue was coming up. He was dressed in a black suit and smoking a clay pipe. The man’s eyes, equally gray in a heavily-lined and craggy face, barely registered Matthew’s presence. But Matthew registered the distinct odor of unwashed flesh.