“Yes, we certainly are.” Chapel stood up. “Tell them, and tell Edgar and Hastings to get everything ready. Oh…wait. After you’ve done that, I want you and Mr. Bromfield to take your horses and ride back to town. Go to the stable there and secure a third horse. Then proceed to…” He checked the census book. “Number Thirty-Nine Nassau Street. Wait until dark if you have to, but bring back a man named Dippen Nack. Be careful, as he may be very dangerous and quite mad, but do not-I repeat-do not injure him in such a way that any further injury would be redundant and ineffective. All right?” He glanced at Evans. “Who’s on the gate today?”
“Enoch Speck, sir.”
“On the way out, tell Mr. Speck he may join in the game after he locks up tight. Go, the both of you!”
When the two hunters had gone, one in obvious distress from a bruised shin, Chapel made a motion to Jeremy, who cut the cords binding Berry to the chair. Miss LeClaire released Berry’s hair, but Matthew noted she had many red strands stuck between her fingers.
“Up, the both of you.” Chapel extended his hands and motioned them to their feet with a waggling of his fingers. “Get that out of her mouth, please.”
Berry turned toward the elegant bitch to have the glove extracted. Matthew saw it before Miss LeClaire did: a crimson glare in Berry’s eyes, like the distant watchfire on a rocky coast proclaiming Danger, many ships have perished here.
Before the glove was halfway out, Berry suddenly leaned her head back and then swiftly crashed her forehead into the slim bridge of Miss LeClaire’s nose. There was a noise Matthew equated to what a melon might sound like if it fell from a one-hundred-storey building, if indeed such an edifice was possible. Even as Chapel reached to restrain Berry and the pale torturer-in-training Mr. Ripley gave not a cry but an emotionless hiss of alarm, Miss LeClaire fell back with eyes already turned inward toward a world of long sleep and painful recovery. The bridge of her nose was flattened, as if smacked by a skillet. Her head crunched into the wall behind her, her hair seemed to explode into a mass of writhing blond Medusa snakes, and as she sank down to the floor the blood shot in two fine arcs from the small holes of her nostrils onto her lacy dress and a black bruise spread across her twitching face as quickly and hideously as the plague.
Berry spat out the rest of the glove. It landed square atop Miss LeClaire’s head, like a new style of Parisian hat.
It occurred to Matthew that Grandda Grigsby was not the only one in his family who could crack walnuts on an iron forehead.
Chapel spun her around, but kept an arm up in case Berry tried for a double score. A red blotch of anger had surfaced on each cheek, but because he was a man of firm self-control and perhaps also fatalism they cleared just as rapidly. He even managed a guarded smile of approval as he regarded the collapsed dolly. “Nicely done,” he said.
“You bastards!” Berry seethed to the room at large. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Language, please,” Chapel cautioned. “We can always find another glove.” His arm was still up, protecting his brainpan.
Matthew didn’t like this talk about a game. In fact, it made his knees weak and his bladder throb even more than having his hands nearly dead from the pressure of the cords. “They’re going to send us to a nice little village in Wales,” he said, by several shades too brightly. “Aren’t you, Mr. Chapel? The village the professor keeps?”
The emotion drained from Chapel’s face. It was now a wax replica. “Hold this vixen, Lawrence.” When Evans had cautiously taken the position, Chapel entertained himself with two more sniffs of snuff. At length he said, “For all his worth in keeping the affairs in order, Mr. Pollard has demonstrated a very large and disorderly mouth. Our benefactor’s business is not any of yours, sir. In fact, it is up to my discretion whether you should be passed on further into the system or if you should not. Be,” he added, for clarification. “I have decided on the latter course.” A bell began ringing in the distance. Ringing and ringing. He gazed at Matthew and behind the square-rimmed spectacles his hard eyes softened. He seemed to wear a little gray cast of regret. “You have the mind, Matthew. You have the resources. You might have been very useful to our benefactor, in time. But I fear-and the professor would agree-that you’re too far gone.”
Chapel shook his head. His decision had been painfully made. “You should at least have let us take one eye before you ratted out Mr. Nack,” he said. In Matthew’s stunned and apprehensive silence, Chapel returned to his desk, picked up the notebook, and put it into the top drawer. The bell was still ringing. A merry sound for a funeral, Matthew thought. Berry was looking at him for some kind of reassurance, but he had none to give her.
“Let her sleep,” Chapel instructed when Jeremy bent down to tend to his source of that which starts with p and ends in y. “God knows we all could use the rest. You first down the stairs, Jeremy. Don’t step in blood and get it on my carpet, for the sake of Christ! All right, move along. You next, Mr. Ripley.” Matthew noted that even Chapel drew back from the young creeper. “After you, miss,” he told Berry, who started to plant her feet obstinately but was pushed forward by Lawrence Evans with a hand gripped to her neck. “Mr. Corbett and Count Dahlgren, please proceed.”
In the dining-room, the group waited for Chapel to descend the stairs. He came down as a whistling, convivial spirit. All was right with Simon Chapel’s little world. Matthew watched as he closed the office door behind him, took a key from a coat pocket, locked the door, and returned the key to its home. Miss LeClaire probably wouldn’t wake up until September.
Matthew threw a glance at Berry, who caught it and returned one of her own that said, in quite explicit language: What the hell are we going to do?
He didn’t know. What he did know, he didn’t intend sharing with Berry. The cords around their wrists, at once lighter and more strongly woven than regular barn or household rope, were the same as had bound the wrists of Billy Hodges.
“We’re off,” beamed Chapel, as the bell kept ringing.
“Sir,” Matthew said before Count Dahlgren could shove him along again, “don’t you think we ought to wait? I mean, just to be sure I’ve told you the truth about Dippen Nack?”
“Why?” Chapel’s face loomed, moonlike, into Matthew’s. “Was it not the truth?” To Matthew’s contemplation of how to respond to this knitting-needle of a question, Chapel laughed explosively and clapped his prisoner’s shoulder. “Your problem,” he said with damnable good humor, “is that you’re much too honest. Come along, now.”
Forty-Six
It was a long walk to a bad end, with the bell pealing a spritely dirge.
Matthew and Berry were side-by-side as they progressed along the road toward the vineyard. Ahead of them strode Chapel, deep in conversation with Evans. Arrayed around the hapless prisoners in a dangerous triangle were Jeremy, Ripley, and Count Dahlgren. And keeping pace were the boys, hooting and laughing with joyful glee, jostling one another for closer looks at Berry, darting in and plucking at Matthew’s coat or Berry’s dress and then being chased back by an almost playful feint from Jeremy’s knife or a backhanded threat and Prussian yell from the count. No one bothered Ripley and Ripley reacted to no one; he’d put on dark-tinted spectacles to shield his eyes from the sun and walked with a solemn but inexorable forward motion.
“What are they going to do to us?” Berry pressed up close beside Matthew, flinching as a yellow-haired boy of about fourteen ran in and pulled at her dress. She started to turn and shout at him, as she’d done to several others, but as that had just brought about a storm of laughter she decided it was wasted breath.
Matthew wanted to say I don’t know but the time for that lie was well and truly done. After all, he was so damned honest. “They’re going to kill us,” he said.
Berry stopped. She stood gaping at him, her blue eyes scorching holes through his head, until Dahlgren gave her a shove that almost propelled her into Matthew. Oh, how the boys did convulse themselves! One-a little brown-haired imp not over twelve-started massaging the front of his breeches and grinningly pranced a jig, his boots kicking up dustpuffs.
“Kill us?” she gasped when she could speak. “Kill us? What have you got me into?”
“An adventure,” he replied. “I thought you liked those.”
“I like adventures I can live through!” Her mouth was so close to his right ear Matthew thought she was going to bite it off. Her hair was wild and tangled and whitened by dust. She looked desperately around and saw
