when you’re able?”
There was no answer. Kirby remained pressed against the wall, his face hidden.
“Please,” Matthew added. “For the both of us.” Then he retrieved his tricorn and put it on, held the notebook close and firm at his side, and turned away to climb the stairs. He flinched as he heard Kirby move, but no attack ensued. Matthew went through the door at the top of the steps, then out the front door into the same bright light where the ferry sailed, the birds sang, and children played their joyful games.
He started walking north along Broad Street toward City Hall, his pace neither brisk nor particularly slow. He was simply giving a good but misguided son the chance to make up his mind. The air smelled of salt sea and the occasional puff of tobacco as pipe-smoking gentlemen walked past him. He kept his focus on the building ahead, putting together in his mind what his first words would be to Gardner Lillehorne. How was he to explain this, if Kirby failed to appear? It would be so much chaff to the wind. Constable Lillehorne, will you listen while I tell you about an insidious plot to mold orphans into professional criminals in service to-
The hard grip of a hand against his right shoulder jarred him out of his thoughts. Startled, he looked to that side and into the sunken-eyed, vulpine face of Bromfield, who wore the same wide-brimmed leather hat and similar rustic clothes as he’d been wearing that day on Chapel’s estate.
“Look here!” A second hand snatched the notebook from Matthew’s grip. “An added reward, I’d say!”
Bromfield put his arm around Matthew’s neck like an old friend bending in to tell a secret and pushed him off the sidewalk into the shaded alcove of a doorway.
“Careful, careful,” said the second man, who held the notebook. “All geniality and lightness, please. Mr. Corbett?”
Matthew blinked, stunned, and looked into the smiling face of Joplin Pollard.
The boyish lawyer leaned close; his mouth retained the smile, but his large brown eyes were sparkling not with grand good humor but with the razor-sharp glints of cruelty. “I want you to be very quiet now, all right? No trouble. Show it to him, Mr. Bromfield.”
The hunter brought up his other hand and displayed a terribly familiar straw hat. He couldn’t help himself; he took Matthew’s tricorn off and pushed Berry’s straw topper down around the younger man’s ears.
“Your lovely friend has been taken on ahead.” Pollard kept a hand pressed against the center of Matthew’s chest. “Sadly, she gave Mr. Carver a kick to the shin that rattled even my teeth. So when you see her again she may be a bit bruised, but you should know that her life depends on what you do and say-or rather, not say-in the next few minutes.”
“What’s this…what’s…” But Matthew knew, in spite of his mental fumbling. It hit him in the face like freezing water. Charles Land, the attorney whose practice Pollard had taken over, had supposedly inherited a large sum of money and returned to England to become an art patron and a dabbler in politics. That had been Professor Fell’s method of clearing the way for a new investment.
Pollard is the one with ambition, the widow Sherwyn had said.
“You.” The word came bitterly from Matthew’s mouth. “You’re in charge of everything, aren’t you?”
“Everything? A large blanket, I think. No, not everything. Just making sure people do what they’re paid to do, and all goes smoothly. That’s my job, really.” He showed his teeth. “To smooth the rough roads and make sure they all connect. Thank you for the notebook, Mr. Corbett. I didn’t expect to get hold of this today.”
“Can I tweak his nose, sir?” Bromfield asked hopefully.
“Certainly not. Let’s keep our decorum on the public street. Mr. Corbett, you’re going to come with us and do it without protest or drawing attention. If you’re not delivered to Mr. Chapel’s estate within a reasonable number of hours, the very lovely Miss Grigsby will die a death I can’t begin to explain to you without losing my breakfast. Therefore, I’d suggest you follow my instructions: keep your head down, move quickly, do not speak to anyone else even if you’re spoken to. Ready? Let’s go, then.”
Whether he was ready or not was beside the point. Matthew, with Berry’s hat obscuring most of his face, was pushed along between the two men, who steered him left onto Barrack Street and past the place where he’d found Ausley’s body.
“We’ve been searching all over for you this morning,” said Pollard as they kept a steady clip. “I met Bryan on the street a little while ago. He told me you were in to see Andrew. Would you mind telling me what that was about?”
Matthew did, so he didn’t.
“No matter,” the lawyer answered to Matthew’s silence. “I’ll have a little talk with Andrew and we’ll get to the bottom of it. Am I right to feel a little uneasy around Andrew these days? What say you?”
“I say, you can put your head up your-” That gallant but foolish statement was censored by a pair of rustic knuckles that drove into his ribs through coat, waistcoat, and sweat-damp shirt.
“Easy, Mr. Bromfield. No need for that yet. Ah, here we are.”
Ahead at the corner of Barrack and the Broad Way sat a coach with four horses. It was very different from the vehicle that had carried Charity LeClaire and him to the estate. This one was dusty and ugly, meant to look more like the regular, road-weary landboats that travelled the hard track between New York and Boston, and so would not gather as much notice amid the movement of pedestrians, cargo wagons, farmers’ carts, and higglers’ wheelbarrows.
A driver and whipman, both boys about fifteen or sixteen years old, sat up top. “Get in,” said Pollard, guiding him forward. Quickly Bromfield tossed the tricorn through the window into the coach and unlatched the door. As Matthew was about to enter, he glanced to the right and saw his friend and chessmate Effrem Owles approaching along the sidewalk not twenty feet away. Effrem’s head was lowered, his eyes lost in thought behind the spectacles. It came to Matthew to cry out for help, but just that fast the thought perished for not only might these men take Effrem as well, but Berry’s life hung by a slender thread. Effrem passed by, so close Matthew could have touched him.
Then Matthew felt Bromfield’s hand balled up in the small of his back, and he let himself be pushed into the coach. Already within sat the wiry, long-haired youth whose job had been to pour the wine at Chapel’s feast. Jeremy, Chapel had called him. Pomade glistened in his hair. He had drawn a knife as soon as the door had opened, and greeted Matthew with its blade.
Matthew sat on the bench seat facing him. Bromfield sat beside Matthew, reached over, and pulled the canvas sunshade down over the opposite window.
Pollard leaned in through the door and gave the notebook to Bromfield, who instantly tucked it down in his leather waistcoat. “Good man,” Pollard said to Matthew. “No need for unpleasantries. Mr. Chapel just wants to speak to you.”
“To speak to me? You mean, to kill me, don’t you?”
“Relax, Mr. Corbett. We don’t waste talent, even if it is misguided. Our benefactor keeps a nice village in Wales where people can be educated as to the proper meaning of life. I would like to know, though: how did you come upon the notebook?”
Matthew had to think fast. “McCaggers was wrong about it not being with Ausley’s belongings. His slave, Zed, had moved some of the stuff to another drawer. I went back to McCaggers and he’d found it.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“Hm.” Pollard’s eyes, much more alert than Matthew had ever seen them, examined Matthew’s face. “I’ll have to ask Mr. McCaggers about that. You trouble me, sir, just as you trouble Mr. Chapel. It’s time something is done.”
“The girl’s not part of this.”
“Part of what, sir?” Pollard kept the thin smile. “Oh, you mean your intrigues with Mr. Greathouse, is that correct? We know all about your going to dig up a certain grave on a certain farm. Mr. Ormond was glad to talk to a young representative from the coroner’s office who wished to tie up some loose ends.”
“I have no idea what-”
“Spare me. Good, dependable, and stupid Bryan has a little game he plays with his laundress. He tells her a secret, she tells him a secret. I think that’s his only vice, God pity him. On Tuesday Bryan tells me his laundress has heard that there have been four murders instead of only three. A corpse was found washed up out of the river onto a farm about ten miles out of town. A young man, still unidentified. The body pierced by multiple stab wounds. And this mysterious informant has actually seen it. Well, Mr. Ormond saw our young representative yesterday and
