and the City Hall office of Magistrate Powers. Before he reached that destination, he passed again by the pillory where Ebenezer Grooder was so justly confined, since he himself had heard the facts of this particular case as the magistrate’s clerk.
Grooder, he noted, had company. Standing next to the basket of ammunition was a slim dandy in a beige- colored suit and a tricorn of the same color. He had pale blond hair, almost white, that was tied back in a queue and fixed with a beige ribbon. Grooder’s visitor wore tan boots of expensive make and rested a riding-crop against his left shoulder. The tilt of his head said he was examining the pickpocket’s predicament with interest. As Matthew watched, the man plucked an apple from the basket and without hesitation fired it into Grooder’s face at a distance of more than twenty feet. The apple smacked into Grooder’s forehead and exploded upon contact.
“Ah, you miserable bastard!” Grooder shouted, his fists clenched through the pillory’s catch-holes. “You damned wretch!”
The man silently and methodically chose another fouled apple and threw it smack into Grooder’s mouth.
He’d chosen an apple with some firmness to it, for this time Grooder didn’t holler insults as he was too busy spitting blood from his split upper lip.
The man-who ought to be a grenadier with aim that true, Matthew thought-now took a third apple, cocked his arm to throw as Grooder found his ragged profane voice again, and suddenly froze in mid-motion. His head swiveled around and found Matthew watching him, and Matthew looked into a face that was both handsome for its regal gentility and fearsome for its utter lack of expression. Though there was no overt animosity from the other, Matthew had the feeling of looking at a coiled reptile that had been mildly disturbed by a cricket lighting on a nearby stone.
The man’s piercing green eyes continued to hold him for several seconds, and then suddenly-as if some decision had been made about Matthew’s threat or more precisely the lack of threat from a passing cricket-he turned away and delivered the third apple again with cold ferocity into the pickpocket’s bloody mouth.
Grooder gave an anguished noise, perhaps a cry for help muted by broken teeth.
It was not for Matthew to intercede. It was, after all, Magistrate Powers’ sentence on Grooder, that he stand at the pillory by daylight hours and that the pleasure of the citizens be to punish the man in such a fashion. Matthew strode past, quickly now because he had much work to do. Still…it was terribly cruel, wasn’t it?
He glanced back and saw that the man in the beige suit was swiftly crossing the street, heading in the opposite direction. Grooder was quiet, his head bowed and blood dripping down into a little gory puddle below him. His hands kept clenching and unclenching, as if grappling the air. The flies would be all over his mouth in a few minutes.
Matthew kept walking. He’d never seen that man before. Possibly, like many others, he’d recently come to New York by ship or coach. So what of him?
Yet…it had occurred to Matthew that the man had taken great pleasure in his target practice. And never be it said that Grooder didn’t merit such attention, but…it was unpalatable, to his taste.
He continued on, to the yellow stone edifice of the triple-storied City Hall, in through the high wooden doors meant to signify the power of government and up the broad staircase to the second floor. The place still smelled of raw timbers and sawdust. He went to the third door on the right. It was locked, as the magistrate had not yet arrived, so Matthew used his key. Now he had to harness his power of will, and force all thoughts of injustice, disappointments, and bitterness from his mind, for his working day had begun and the business of the law was indeed a demanding mistress.
Three
By the pendulum clock it was sixteen minutes after eight when Magistrate Nathaniel Powers entered the office, which was a large single room with a lead-paned glass window viewing upon the northward expanse of the Broad Way and the forested hills beyond.
“Morning, Matthew,” he said, as he instantly and by constant habit shed his rather dimpled dove’s-gray tricorn and the gray-striped coat of a suit that had known more needle-and-thread than a petticoat army. These he placed carefully, as always, upon two pegs next to the door.
“Good morning, sir,” answered Matthew, as always. Truth be told, he’d been day-dreaming out the window, turned around at his desk upon which lay two ledger books, his bottle of good black India ink, and two goose- feather quills. He’d been quick enough, with the noise of boots on the corridor’s boards and the click of the doorhandle, to dip his quill and return to his transcription of the most recent case of Duffey Boggs, found guilty of hog thievery and sentenced to twenty-five lashes at the whipping-post and the branding of a “T” on the right hand.
“Ah, the letters are ready?” Powers walked to his own desk, which befitting his status was central in the room and perhaps twice as large as Matthew’s. He picked up the packet of more than a dozen envelopes, which were stamped with red wax seals of the magistrate’s office and were bound for such destinations as varied as a city official down the stairs and a law colleague across the Atlantic. “Good work, very neatly done.”
“Thank you,” Matthew replied, as he always did when this compliment was offered him, and then he returned his attention to the thief of hogs.
Magistrate Powers sat down at his desk, which faced Matthew. “And what is on the docket for today, then?”
“Nothing at court. At one o’clock you have an appointment with Magistrate Dawes. Of course you’re expected to attend Lord Cornbury’s address at three o’clock.”
“Yes, that.” He nodded, his face amiable though deeply lined and care-worn. He was fifty-four years old, was married, and had three children: a married girl with her own family and two sons who wished nothing to do with books or judgments of law and so occupied themselves as workmen on the docks, though one had risen to the rank of foreman. The thing was, the two boys were likely paid quite a sum more than their father, the salaries of civil servants being as low as a mudcat’s whiskers. Powers had dark brown hair gone gray with fatigue at the temples, his nose as straight as his principles and his brown, once hawk-like eyes in need of spectacles from time to time. He had been a tennis champion in his youth, at the University of Cambridge, and he spoke often of greatly missing the cheers and tumult of the galleries. Sometimes Matthew thought he could see the magistrate as a young, supple, and handsome athlete drinking in the approval of the crowd, and times as well he wondered if the man’s silent reveries replayed those days before his knees creaked and his back was bent under the weight of a pressing judgment.
“Edward Hyde is his given name,” Powers said, interpreting Matthew’s silence as an interest in the new governor. “Third Earl of Clarendon. Attended Oxford, was a member of the Royal Regiment of Dragoons and a Tory in Parliament. My ear-to-the-ground also says he’ll have some interesting observations about our fair town.”
“You’ve met him, then?”
“Me? No, I’ve not been so favored. But it seems those who have-including High Constable Lillehorne-wish to keep the particulars to themselves and the rest of us in suspense.” He began to go through the tidy stack of papers that had been arranged on the desk for his appraisal courtesy of his clerk, who had also prepared his quills and gathered some legal books from the shelves in anticipation of impending cases. “So tomorrow morning is our interview with the widow Muckleroy?”
“Yes sir.”
“Casting a claim for stolen bedsheets on Barnaby Shears?”
“She contends he sold the bedsheets and bought his mule.”
“Well, his entire house isn’t worth an ass,” Powers said. “One wonders how these folk get together.”
“Not without some effort, I’m sure.” The widow Muckleroy weighed near three-hundred pounds and Shears was a rascal so thin he could almost slide between the iron bars of his gaol cell, where he was now being held until this matter was cleared up.
“Friday, then?” the magistrate inquired, looking through his notes.
“Friday morning, nine o’clock, is the final hearing before sentence on George Knox.”
Powers found some writing he’d done on the subject and spent a moment studying the pages. It was a matter of violence between rival owners of two flour mills. George Knox, when raging drunk, had hit Clement Sandford over the head with a bottle of ale in the Red Bull Tavern, causing much bloodshed and subsequent
