Carver’s, he presumed-jammed into his ribs just enough to tell him that pride led to breakage.
“You have a filthy mind,” Ausley said, standing closer with his odors of cloves and smoke. “I think we should scrub it a bit, beginning with your face. Mr. Bromfield, clean him up for me, please.”
“My pleasure,” said the man who’d seized Matthew, and with diabolical relish he took hold of the back of Matthew’s head and thrust his face down into the fly-blown mass of horse manure that Ausley’s boot had found.
Matthew had seen what was coming. There was no way to avoid it. He was able to seal his mouth shut and close his eyes, and then his face went into the pile. It was, by reason of the analytical part of Matthew’s brain that took the cool measure of all things, distressingly fresh. Almost velvety, really. Like putting one’s face into a velvet bag. Warm, still. The stuff was up his nostrils, but the breath was stuck hard in his lungs. He didn’t fight, even when he felt the sole of a boot press upon the back of his head and his face was jammed through the wretched excess near down to the cobblestones. They wanted him to fight, so they could break him. So he would not fight, even as the air stuttered in his lungs and his face remained pressed down into the filth under a whoreson’s boot. He would not fight, so he might fight the better on his feet some other day.
Ausley said, “Pull him up.”
Bromfield obeyed.
“Get some air in his lungs, Carver,” Ausley commanded.
The flat of a hand slapped Matthew in the center of his chest. The air whooshed out of his mouth and nostrils, spraying manure.
“Shit!” Carver hollered. “He’s got it on my shirt!”
“Step back then, step back. Give him room to smell himself.”
Matthew did. The stuff was still jammed up his nose. It caked his face like swamp mud and had the vomitous odor of sour grass, decayed feed, and…well, and stinking manure straight from the rump. He retched and tried to clear his eyes but Bromfield had hold of his arms as strong as a picaroon’s rope.
Ausley gave a short, high, and giddy laugh. “Oh, look at him now! The avenger has turned scarecrow! You might even scare the carrion birds away with that face, Corbett!”
Matthew spat and shook his head violently back and forth; unfortunately some of this unpalatable meal had gotten past his lips.
“You can let him go now,” Ausley said. Bromfield released Matthew and at the same time gave him a solid shove that put him on the ground again. Then, as Matthew struggled up to his knees and rubbed the mess out of his eyes, Ausley stood over him and said quietly, the menace in his voice commingled with boredom, “You are not to follow me again. Understand? Mind me well, or the next time we meet shall not go so kindly for you.” To the others: “Shall we leave the young man to his contemplations?”
There was the sound of phlegm being hawked up. Matthew felt the gob of spit hit his shirt at the left shoulder. Carver or Bromfield, showing their good breeding. After that, the noise of boots striding away. Ausley said something and one of the others laughed. Then they were gone.
Matthew sat in the street, cleaning his face with his sleeves. Sickness bubbled and lurched in his stomach. The heat of anger and the burn of shame made him feel as if he were sitting aboil under the noonday sun. His head was still killing him, his eyes streaming. Then his stomach turned over and out of him flooded the Old Admiral’s ale and most of the salmagundi he’d put down for his supper. It came to him that he was going to be laboring over a washpot tonight.
Finally, after what seemed a terrible hour, he was able to get up off the ground and think about how to get home. His roost on the Broad Way, up over Hiram Stokely’s pottery shop, was going to be a good twenty-minute walk. Probably a long, malodorous twenty minutes, at that. But there was nothing to be done but to get to doing it; and so he started off, seething and weaving and stinking and being altogether miserable in his wretched skin. He searched for a horse trough. He would get himself a bath in it, and so cleanse his face and clear his mind.
And tomorrow? To be so impetuous as to once more haunt the dark outside the King Street orphanage, waiting for Ausley to appear on his jaunt to the gambling dens and so spy on him in hopes of…what, exactly? Or to stay home in his small room and embrace cold fact, that Ausley was right: he had absolutely nothing, and was unlikely to get anything at this pace. But to give up…to give up…was abandoning them all. Abandoning the reason for his solemn rage, abandoning the quest that he felt set him apart from every other citizen of this town. It gave him a purpose. Without it, who would he be?
He would be a magistrate’s clerk and a pottery sweeper, he thought as he went along the silent Broad Way. Only a young man who held sway over a quill and a broom, and whose mind was tormented by the vision of injustice to the innocent. It was what had made him stand up against Magistrate Woodward-his mentor and almost father, truth be told-to proclaim Rachel Howarth innocent of witchcraft in the town of Fount Royal three years ago. Had that decision helped to carry the ailing magistrate to his death? Possibly so. It was another torment, like the hot strike of a bullwhip ever endlessly repeating, that lay upon Matthew’s soul in every hour lit by sun or candle.
He came upon a horse trough at Trinity Church, where Wall Street met the Broad Way. Here the sturdy Dutch cobblestones ended and the streets were plain hard-packed English earth. As Matthew leaned down into the trough and began to wash his face with dirty water, he almost felt like weeping. Yet to weep took too much energy, and he had none of that to spare.
But tomorrow was tomorrow, was it not? A new beginning, as they said? What a day might change, who could ever know? Yet some things would never change in himself, and of this he was certain: he must bring Eben Ausley to justice somehow, for those crimes of wanton evil and brutality against the innocent. Somehow, he must; or he feared that if he did not, he would be consumed by this quest, by its futility, and he would wither into slack- jawed acceptance of what could never in his mind be acceptable.
At last he was suitable to proceed home, yet still a ragamuffin’s nightmare. He still had his cap, that was a good thing. He still had his life, that was another. And so he straightened his shoulders and counted his blessings and went on his way through the midnight town, one young man alone.
Two
On this bright morning, neither of Matthew’s breakfast hosts knew of his tribulations of the night before; therefore they merrily jaylarked about the day with no regard to his headache and sour stomach. He kept these injuries to himself, as Hiram Stokely and his wife, Patience, went about the sunny kitchen in their small white house behind the pottery shop.
Matthew’s plate was filled with corncakes and a slice of salted ham that on any other day he would have considered a delight but today was a little too discomfited to properly appreciate. They were good and kind people, and he’d been fortunate to find a room over the shop. His responsibility to them was to clean the place and help with the throwing and kiln, as much as his limited talents allowed. They had two sons, one a merchant sea captain and the other an accountant in London, and it seemed to Matthew that they liked having the company at mealtimes.
The third member present of the Stokely family, however, definitely found something peculiar with Matthew this morn. At first Matthew had thought it was the salted ham that made Cecily, the pet pig, nose about him to the point of aggravation. Considering he was putting knife and fork to one of her relations, he could well fathom her displeasure, yet she was surely by now used to these cannibals who’d taken her in. Surely she knew that after two years of this coddled life she wasn’t destined for the plate, for she was a smart piece of pork. But the way she snorted and pushed and carried on this day made Matthew wonder if he’d gotten all the horse manure out of his hair. He’d almost scrubbed his skin off with sandalwood soap in the washbasin last night, but perhaps Cecily’s talented snout could find some lingering stink.
“Cecily!” said Hiram, after a particularly hard push from the rotund lass to Matthew’s right kneecap. “What’s the matter with you today?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know,” was Matthew’s response, though he presumed Cecily was reminded of rolling in the sty by some aroma he was emitting, even though he wore freshly cleaned trousers, shirt, and stockings.
“She’s nervous, is what.” Patience, a large stocky woman with gray hair pinned up under a blue cotton mob cap, looked up from her hearth, where she was using a bellows to fan the biscuit-pan fire. “Something’s got her
