ladder.
After John Five was gone, Matthew pondered the startling statement he’d just heard. Losing his mind? And how was this condition revealing itself? he wondered.
We have to leave him, Wade had said to Vanderbrocken, over the dead man in the street.
Had they been travelling separately, or together? And if together, to what destination?
One step at the time, Matthew thought. First, to listen to what John Five had to say, and then to determine what it might mean.
He carefully folded his razor and put it away, thinking that the most dangerous edges often lay close at hand.
Fourteen
John Five was waiting for Matthew outside the Thorn Bush when he got there just before seven. It was the beginning of a fine night in New York. The stars were showing, the breeze was warm, candles burned in the street-corner lamps, and a man with a bloody nose sat in front of the tavern throwing curses at everyone who passed by.
“Damn you!” hollered the man at Matthew. “Think you’ve got me whipped, do you?” Obviously he was drunk as well as battered. He struggled to get to his feet, but John Five placed a boot at his shoulder and nonchalantly shoved him back down on his ass.
Beyond the door with its five triangular glass panes-three of them cracked-and a depiction of thorns and leaves carved into the wood, the place was lit by dirty lanterns hanging from the ceiling beams. The smoke from a thousand pipes had turned the beams as black as printer’s ink. A current haze thickened the air. The front room, where the bar was prominent, held tables where sat a dozen or so men all in various degrees of intoxication while feathered and buckled women swooped and cawed around them. Matthew had seen this picture before, during his nights of tracking Eben Ausley. He understood that the more attractive of these ladies-the better dressed and better mannered, if manners counted for anything-came from Polly Blossom’s rose-colored house on Petticoat Lane, while some of the others who seemed unkempt and desperate had come over on the ferry from New Jersey.
At once four women aged probably from seventeen to forty-seven converged upon John Five and Matthew with lip-licking expressions of seduction on their painted faces so ridiculous that Matthew might have laughed had he not been a gentleman. Anyway, business was business and the competition was fierce. Still these ladies knew who was buying and who was not; when John Five shook his head and Matthew said, “No, thank you,” they turned away almost as one, shrugged their bared shoulders, and life went on.
Now the noise of men yelling came from a second room. Matthew knew the gambling fiends were in their element. A drowsy-looking barmaid carrying a pitcher of wine approached, and John Five said, “We’re going all the way back. My friend wants some supper.”
“Mutton pie with turnips and beef brains with boiled potatoes,” she answered, reciting the evening’s fare.
“May I have mutton pie with boiled potatoes?” Matthew asked, and she speared him a look that told him he might get what he wanted and then again he might not.
“Two glasses of wine,” John added. “The port.”
She went off to the kitchen and Matthew followed John into the gambling room, where the smoke of Virginia’s finest was truly dense. The men in here at first appeared to be more shadows than flesh, either sitting at tables where cards were being slapped down or hovering over boards where dice clattered as they were thrown toward a series of painted numbers. Then another uproar went off like an explosion and someone slammed a fist against wood and yelled, “Fuck it all, Hallock! Everything on the black!”
Matthew wondered if some madhouses-bedlams, as they were called-weren’t more sane than this. Certainly more peaceful. The yelling died down, the cards were turned or the bones were tossed and then again the throat of Hell seemed to open to allow out a quick hot breath of chaos. Matthew thought that for some of these men winning or losing was not really the attraction; it was that chaotic instant of joy or terror, both made so pure in their intensity that all else of life paled in their shadows.
“Look here!” someone said to Matthew’s left as he was going through a group of men in the gambling room. “It’s Corbett, isn’t it?”
Matthew looked in the direction of the voice and found himself standing alongside a dice table in the presence of the two young lawyers Joplin Pollard and Andrew Kippering. Both had ale tankards in their hands and appeared a bit woozy. Of special notice was the dark-haired and not unattractive prostitute of about twenty years of age hanging on to Kippering’s left arm, her ebony eyes deep-sunken and vacant as the burned-out houses on Sloat Lane.
“See, Andrew?” Pollard said, with a wide grin. “It is him. He. Whatever. The one and only, eh?”
“I am who I am, I suppose,” Matthew replied.
“Good man!” Pollard hit his sore shoulder with the tankard. Worse than that, he slopped some ale on the light-blue shirt Matthew wore, which was the last clean shirt in his possession. “Always be who you are. Eh, Andrew?”
“Always,” Kippering said, with a lift of his tankard and then a long drink. The prostitute pressed forward and Kippering obliged her by pouring some of the stuff down her throat as well.
“And who’s this, then?” When Pollard motioned toward John Five, Matthew was able to step back and avoid another spillage. “Hold a minute!” Pollard turned toward the dice table and the men who were wagering there. “I’m in on this one too, damn it! Three shillings on anchor!”
Matthew saw they were playing the popular game of Ship, Captain, and Crew, in which the shooter had five throws with a pair of dice to come up with a six, five, and four in that order, which stood for the ship, captain, and crew. Others could bet on any variation of success or failure. Pollard had just wagered on “anchor,” which was a three to show up in the first throw.
“My friend John Five,” Matthew said when Pollard had returned his attention. “John, Misters Joplin Pollard and Andrew Kippering, both of whom are attorneys.”
“First throw! Crew without a ship and an ace!” came the call from the table, with its resulting moment of chaos. Four and one. Then the wagering began once more at the pitch of frenzy as silver coins were tossed into an iron pot.
Pollard just shrugged. “To hell with it. John Five, did you say?”
“Yes sir.” John was a bit distracted, as the prostitute had begun chewing on Kippering’s left ear. “I’ve seen you both around town.”
“You’re Constance Wade’s beau,” Kippering said, trying carefully to get his ear free.
“Yes sir, I am. May I ask how you know about that?”
“I don’t think it’s a secret. I was speaking to the reverend just lately and he mentioned your name, in passing.”
“Are you a friend of the family?”
“Double anchors!” cried the caller. Once more the gamblers hollered or cursed and the entire room with its whirling smoke, brays of laughter, and shouts for liquid courage made Matthew feel he was on the pitching deck of a rudderless ship. He had noted that the prostitute’s left hand was crawling down toward Kippering’s crotch.
In the tumult of noise before Kippering’s response to John’s question, Matthew had the chance to sum up what he knew about the two attorneys. Joplin Pollard-boyish and clean-shaven, his reddish-blond hair close-cropped and his brown eyes large and sparkling with good humor-was in his early thirties and had come to the colony in 1698 to join the older and established lawyer Charles Land. Hardly a year later Land had inherited a large sum of money from a family estate in England and returned to the home country with his wife to become, as Matthew understood from Magistrate Powers, a rich art patron and dabbler in politics.
Thus Pollard-a “green gent,” Powers had called him-had been forced to sink or swim in his own firm, and had hired Bryan Fitzgerald from a Boston partnership soon afterward. He was obviously doing well enough now, though, as attested by his taste in his fine light-gray linen suit, his ruffled royal-blue cravat and expensive black boots polished to a gloss.
Completing the trio of blazing youth was Kippering, who’d come from England two years ago with an
