Speaks the Nightbird

the residents blamed for these fires. If not her hand directly, then the hands—or claws, as the case might be—of the infernal beasts and imps she invoked. Fire was their language, and they were making their statements very clear.

His dream was dying. She was killing it. Though the bars of her cell and the thick walls of the gaol confined her body, her spirit—her phantasm—escaped to dance and cavort with her unholy lover, to plot more wreckage and woe to Bidwell's dream. To banish such a hydra into the judgment of the wilderness was not enough; she had plainly said she would not go, that no power on earth could make her leave her home. If Bidwell hadn't been a lawful man, he might have had her hanged at the beginning and been done with it. Now it was a matter for the court, and God help the judge who must sit in attendance.

No, he thought grimly. God help Fount Royal.

'Edward,' BidweU said, 'what is our present population?'

'The exact figure? Or an estimate?'

'An estimate will do.'

'One hundred or thereabouts,' Winston offered. 'But that will change before the week is done. Dorcas Chester is ill onto death.'

'Yes, I know. This damp will fill up our cemetery ere long.'

'Speaking of the cemetery . . . Alice Barrow has taken to bed as well.'

'Alice Barrow?' Bidwell turned from the window to face the other man. 'Is she ailing?'

'I had cause to visit John Swaine this morning,' Winston said. 'According to Cass Swaine, Alice Barrow has told several persons that she's been suffering dreams of the Dark Man. The dreams have so terrified her that she will not leave her bed.'

Bidwell gave an exasperated snort. 'And so she's spreading them about like rancid butter on scones, is that it?'

'It seems to be. Madam Swaine tells me the dreams have to do with the cemetery. More than that, she was too fearful herself to say.'

'Good Christ!' Bidwell said, the color rising in his jowls. 'Mason Barrow is a sensible man! Can't he control his wife's tongue?' He took two strides to the desk and slapped a hand down upon its surface. 'This is the kind of stupidity that's destroying my town, Edward! Our town, I mean! But by God, it'll be ruins in six months if these tongues don't cease wagging!'

'I didn't mean to upset you, sir,' Winston said. 'I'm only recounting what I thought you should know.'

'Look out there!' Bidwell waved toward the window, where the rain-swollen clouds were beginning to seal off the sunlight once again. 'Empty houses and empty fields! Last May we had more than three hundred people! Three hundred! And now you say we're down to one hundred?'

'Or thereabouts,' Winston corrected.

'Yes, and how many will Alice Barrow's tongue send running? Damn it, I cannot stand by waiting for a judge to arrive from Charles Town! What can I do about this, Edward?'

Winston's face was damp with perspiration, due to the room's humid nature. He pushed his spectacles up on his nose. 'You have no choice but to wait, sir. The legal system must be obeyed.'

'And what legal system does the Dark Man obey?' Bidwell planted both hands on the desk and leaned toward Winston, his own face sweating and florid. 'What rules and regulations constrain his mistress? Damn my eyes, I can't watch my investment in this land be destroyed by some spectral bastard who shits doom in people's dreams! I did not build a shipping business by sitting on my bum quaking like a milksop maid.' This last had been said through gritted teeth. 'Come along or not as you please, Edward! I'm off to silence Alice Barrow's prattling!' He stalked toward the door without waiting for his town manager, who hurriedly closed his ledger and stood up to follow, like a pug after a barrel-chested bulldog.

They descended what to the ordinary citizens of Fount Royal was a wonder to behold: a staircase. It was without a railing, however, as the master carpenter who had overseen the construction of the stairs had died of the bloody flux before its completion. The walls of Bidwell's mansion were decorated with English pastoral paintings and tapestries, which upon close inspection would reveal the treacheries of mildew. Water stains marred many of the whitewashed ceilings, and rat droppings lay in darkened niches. As Bidwell and Winston came down the stairs, their boots loudly clomping, they became the focus of Bidwell's housekeeper, who was always alert to her master's movements. Emma Nettles was a broad-shouldered, heavyset woman in her mid-thirties whose hatchet-nosed and square-chinned face might've scared a redskin warrior into the arms of Jesus. She stood at the foot of the stairs, her ample body clad in her customary black cassock, a stiff white cap enforcing the regimented lie of her oiled and severely combed brown hair.

'May I he'p you, sir?' she asked, her voice carrying a distinct Scottish burr. In her formidable shadow stood one of the servant girls.

'I'm away to business,' Bidwell replied curtly, plucking from a rack on the wall a navy blue tricorn hat, one of several in a variety of colors to match his costumes. He pushed the hat down on his head, which was no simplicity due to the height of his wig. 'I shall have toss 'em boys and jonakin for my supper,' he told her. 'Mind the house.' He strode past her and the servant girl toward the front door, with Winston in pursuit.

'As I always do, sir,' the madam Nettles said quietly an instant after the door had closed behind the two men, her flesh-hooded eyes as dark as her demeanor.

Bidwell paused only long enough to unlatch the ornate white-painted iron gate—six feet tall and shipped at great expense from Boston—that separated his mansion from the rest of Fount Royal, then continued along Peace Street at a pace that tested Winston's younger and slimmer legs. The two men passed the spring, where Cecilia Semmes was filling a bucket full of water; she started to offer a greeting to Bidwell, but she saw his expression of angry resolve and thought it best to keep her tongue sheltered.

The last of the miserly sunlight was obscured by clouds even as Bidwell and Winston strode past the community's brass sundial, set atop a wooden pedestal at the conjunction of Peace, Harmony, Industry, and Truth streets. Tom Bridges, guiding his oxcart to his farmhouse and pasture on Industry, called a good afternoon to Bidwell, but the creator of Fount Royal did not break stride nor acknowledge the courtesy. 'Afternoon to you, Tom!' Winston replied, after which he had to conserve his wind for keeping up with his employer as Bidwell took a turn onto the easterly path of Truth.

Two pigs occupied a large mud puddle in the midst of the street, one of them snorting with glee as he rooted deeper into the mire while a mongrel dog blotched with mange stood nearby barking his indignation. David Cutter, Hiram Abercrombie, and Arthur Dawson stood not far from the pigs and puddle, smoking their clay pipes and engrossed in what appeared to be stern conversation. 'Good day, gentlemen!' Bidwell said as he passed them, and Cutter removed his pipe from his mouth and called out, 'Bidwell! When's that judge gettin' here?'

'In due time, sir, in due time!' Winston answered, still walking.

'I'm talkin' to the string puller, not the puppet!' Cutter fired back. 'We're gettin' tired a' waitin' for this thing to be resolved! You ask me, they ain't gonna never send us a judge!'

'We have the assurances of their councilmen, sir!' Winston said; his cheeks were stinging from the insult.

'Damn their assurances!' Dawson spoke up. He was a spindly red-haired man who served as Fount Royal's shoemaker. 'They might assure us the rain will cease, too, but what of it?'

'Keep walking, Edward,' Bidwell urged sotto voce.

'We've had a gutful of this dawdlin'!' Cutter said. 'She needs to be hanged and done with it!'

Abercrombie, a farmer who'd been one of the first settlers to respond to Bidwell's broadsheets advertising the creation of Fount Royal, threw in his two shillings: 'The sooner she hangs, the safer we'll all sleep! God save us from bein' burnt up in our beds!'

'Yes, yes,' Bidwell muttered, lifting a hand into the air as a gesture of dismissal. His stride had quickened, sweat gleaming on his face and darkening the cloth at his armpits. Behind him, Winston was breathing hard; the air's sullen dampness had misted his spectacles. With his next step, his right foot sank into a pile of moldering horse apples that Bidwell had just deftly avoided.

'If they send us anybody,' Cutter shouted as a last riposte, 'it'll be a lunatic they plucked from the asylum up there!'

'That man speaks knowingly of asylums,' Bidwell said, to no one in particular. They passed the schoolhouse