four inches. He also cracked the knuckles of one huge hand like the walls of Jericho.
Matthew decided that one more word was not worth the loss of many good teeth. He gave Primm a brief smile and bow, turned around, and got out before his own lamp was extinguished. Farther down the street he saw the sign of another tavern, this one titled The Harp and Hat. He approached its door, but before he went in he stopped to open his valise. He removed from it another rolled-up piece of paper, which was the second portrait of the Queen of Bedlam that Matthew had asked Berry to draw, just in case Primm’s fingers didn’t like the first one.
Matthew entered the tavern, carrying the lady’s picture and in hopes that someone here might recognize it.
Soon he emerged with hopes dashed, for no one in the place had any idea who she might be. Just across Chestnut Street was the Squire’s Inn, which Haverstraw had mentioned. Matthew went in there with the picture ready, and was accosted by a drunken wag who said the lady in question was his mother and he’d not seen her since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. Since the man was over sixty, that was quite impossible. The tavern’s owner, a friendly enough gent in his late twenties, said he thought the woman looked familiar but he couldn’t put a name to her. Matthew thanked one and all for their trouble and continued on his way.
By the time he reached a third tavern, this one called The Old Bucket on Walnut Street, it was nearing lunch and a dozen persons were celebrating the noon hour. A young man with a brown mustache and goatee and wearing a russet-colored suit took the drawing and examined it pensively while he stood at the bar drinking a glass of port and eating a plate of sausages and fried potatoes. He called to a friend rather more rustic than himself to come look, and together they regarded the picture as other customers ringed around to see. “I think I saw this woman on Front Street this morning,” the young man finally decided. “Was she collecting coins while a girl was playing the tambourine?”
“No!” his friend scoffed, and pulled the paper away so fast Matthew feared it was going to be ripped asunder just as the first had been. “You know who this is! It’s the widow Blake! She was sittin’ up in her window watchin’ me when I went past her house today!”
“I know that’s not the widow Blake!” said the heavy-set tavern-keeper as he put an empty pitcher under the spigot of the wine cask behind the bar and filled it. “The widow Blake’s got a fat face. That one’s thin.”
“It is her, I say! Looks just like her!” The rustic with the rough manner had angled a suspicious gaze at Matthew. “Hey, now. What is it you’re doin’, carryin’ around a picture of the widow Blake?”
“Not her,” said the tavern-keeper.
“She’s not in any trouble, is she?” came the question from the young man with the goatee. “Does she owe money?”
“I’m sayin’, it’s not the widow Blake. Lemme see that.” The tavern-keeper nearly tore a corner off it when one of his big hands yanked it away. “No, she’s too thin to be her. Anybody else thinks this looks like the widow Blake?” He held the picture up for the assembly to judge. “And if you do, you’re already way too drunk!”
Matthew counted himself fortunate to get out of the place with the drawing intact and no one chasing him with a cudgel for being a bill collector. He’d told the group he was trying to locate a missing person, and was informed by the grinning rustic that everyone knew where the widow Blake lived, so why should she be missing?
Matthew took to stopping a few passersby on the street to show them the picture, but none recognized the face. Farther on along Walnut Street, past an area where farmers had pulled their wagons up to offer fruit and vegetables for sale, he came to two taverns almost across the street from each other. The one on the right was the Crooked Horse Shoe and the one on the left the Seven Stars Inn. He didn’t care for the luck of a crooked horse shoe, so he chose to cast his fate to the stars.
Again the lunchtime crowd-mostly a dozen or so men in business suits, but also a few well-dressed women- had come in for drinks and what Matthew saw to be a menu of baked chicken, some kind of meat pie, and vegetables probably fresh from the farm wagons. The place was clean, the light through the windows bright, and the conversations lively. On the wall behind the bar was a painted depiction of seven white stars. It was the same kind of welcoming tavern as the Trot, with its immediate feeling of belonging. Matthew made his way toward the bar, pausing to let a serving-girl with a tray of platters pass, and almost at once the tall gray-haired man who was pouring wine for a customer came down the bar to him. “Help you, sir?”
“Yes, please. I know you’re very busy, but would you look at this for me?” Matthew put the Queen’s portrait down before the man.
“Why, may I ask, am I looking at this?”
“I’ve come from New York. I represent a legal agency there.” A white lie? It was all in the interpretation. “Our client is trying to identify this woman. We think she at least has roots in Philadelphia. Would you tell me if you recognize the face?”
The man picked the portrait up. “Just a moment,” he said, while he fished spectacles from a pocket. Then he angled the drawing into sunlight that reflected off the bar’s polished oak.
Matthew saw the man frown, and his gray eyebrows draw together.
“From New York, you say?” the man asked.
“Yes, that’s right. I arrived this morning.”
“You’re a lawyer?”
“Not exactly a lawyer, no.”
“What, then? Exactly.”
“I’m…” What would be the right word? he wondered. Deducer? No, that wasn’t it. Deductive? No, also wrong and hideous to boot. His role was to solve problems. Solvant? No. He might be considered, he thought, as a sifter of clues. A weigher of evidence. A detector of truth and lies.
That would do. “I’m a detector,” he said.
The man’s frown deepened. “A what?”
Not good, Matthew thought. One should at least sound professional, if one was to be taken professionally.
He made up a word on the spot and spoke it with forceful assurance: “I mean to say, sir, that I am a detective.”
“As I said before…a what?” The man’s attention was mercifully diverted by a handsome gray-haired woman about the same age as himself who had just come behind the bar through another doorway. “Lizbeth!” he said. “Look at this and tell me who you think it is.”
She put aside the wine-pitcher she’d come to refill and examined the portrait. Matthew saw her also respond with a frown, and his heart jumped because he thought she must know something. She looked at him with searching brown eyes, and then at the man. “It’s Emily Swanscott.”
“That’s who I thought. This young man says he’s come from New York. Says he’s a…a…well, a legal person. Says his client is trying to identify the woman in the picture.”
“Emily Swanscott,” Lizbeth repeated, speaking to Matthew. “May I ask who your client is, and from where you got this drawing?”
“I fear I have to plead confidentiality,” Matthew replied, trying to keep his voice as light as possible. “You know. It’s a legal condition.”
“Be that as it may, where is Mrs. Swanscott?”
“One moment. Are you absolutely certain you can identify this woman as being Emily Swanscott?”
“As certain as I’m seeing you. Mrs. Swanscott didn’t get out very much, but I met her in the Christ Church cemetery one afternoon. I was there to see to my sister’s grave, and Mrs. Swanscott was putting flowers on the graves of her sons.”
“Flowers?” He’d really meant to say graves but the word had stuck in his throat.
“That’s right. She was very kind. She was telling me what sort of flowers attract butterflies. It seems her eldest boy, the one who drowned, liked to catch them.”
“Ah,” Matthew said, half-dazed. “Her eldest boy.”
“A terrible accident,” the man spoke up. “Eleven years old when he died, as I understand.”
“How many sons did she have?”
“Just the two,” Lizbeth said. “The younger one died of fever when he was…oh…”
“Not even six,” the man supplied. Matthew thought he was probably Lizbeth’s husband, and that they
