Matthew Corbett 03 - Mister Slaughter

paisleys, and the pistol fell from his fingers.

He looked with both amazement and incomprehension into a face he didn't seem to recognize. 'Who are you?' The boy was gaunt. His hair had grown out some. His clothes were dirty, his eyes were steely gray and the point of the knife he held was blood-red.

Matthew remembered what Walker had said, when he'd seen a figure behind them on the trail and Matthew had dismissed it as delirium:

Following. I saw him twice. Very fast.

Saw who? Matthew had asked.

And Walker's answer had been: Death.

Tom answered the question with a statement, his voice cold and matter-of-fact: 'You hurt my dog.'

Slaughter reached into his waistcoat. He brought out a knife of his own. He lunged at Tom, but the boy had already retreated. Then Slaughter began to flail with the knife, left and right, his teeth gritted and eyes hideous with dying rage. Matthew figured it was likely the knife with which he'd planned to cut Nathaniel Powers' throat, and then make a quick escape.

Tom had lifted his blade to stab Slaughter again, but now he stopped as the bleeding wretch before him slashed wildly at the air. Slowly, Tom lowered the knife to his side. He backed away.

Slaughter was still fighting. He fell against the bundles and stabbed them in a frenzy as if striking flesh, sending brown ribbons of tobacco flying. Matthew wondered what he was trying to kill. He wondered what he had always been trying to kill, in one way or another.

Tom walked a distance and bent to the ground.

Slaughter was running down; his watch was about to stop. He dropped the knife, his head lolling.

'Matthew?' It was the voice of Nathaniel Powers, the stubborn man who didn't need a bodyguard. 'Matthew?' The barn door was pulled open wider. There looked to be six or seven men at the entrance, drawn there by the sound of the shots.

Slaughter straightened himself up. He ran a hand down the front of his paisley-patterned coat, as a lord might do to smooth it before meeting his public. Even as the life's blood streamed from his neck and bloomed around the hole in his side, he looked at Matthew with eyes that yet in their gathering dark held a red glint of ferocity.

'My compliments,' he allowed. 'I said you were worthy. But Matthew you never could have bested me. Not alone.'

Matthew nodded. As Slaughter had told him in the watermill, It would take two of you to polish me off.

But he'd been wrong. It had taken three.

Now, though, it appeared he was well and truly polished.

'You have aided my ambition,' Slaughter said. 'My title. Where I'm going they'll make me royalty.'

Lifting his chin, he took an unsteady step toward the door. Then another, dragging his injured leg. Matthew followed behind him, as he staggered onward. At the threshold, Slaughter fell to the ground on his knees. The knot of men backed up to give him room to die. Powers had a musket, Doyle had his pistol, the groom also brandished a gun, and the others all carried either wooden clubs or other implements of violence. At the back of the group, Mrs. Allen held a large rolling-pin.

Tyranthus Slaughter gasped and forced himself up. He lurched forward again, his fists clenched. Suddenly he lifted his right fist and cocked it back, as if about to hurl a thunderbolt of evil into their midst. Before him the crowd shrank away, their faces taut with fear that even their guns and clubs and rolling-pin could not overcome.

Slaughter took two more steps toward them, his fist upraised and trembling, and the crowd retreated two.

And then Slaughter began to laugh, that deep slow sound of a funeral bell.

Matthew watched as Slaughter opened his fist, and the handful of dust he was holding streamed away between his fingers.

When his hand was empty, the funeral bell ceased its tolling.

Slaughter pitched forward, and lay stretched out upon the earth.

PART SIX: A Meeting of Night

Owls

Thirty-Two

On a bright, breezy afternoon in the middle of November, a flat-bottomed ferry barge from Weehawken tied ropes at Van Dam's shipyard, and discharged its passengers onto the wharf after an hour's trip across the Hudson.

A wagon pulled by a team of horses rumbled off the boat and onto the boards. Its driver then steered the horses into the town's traffic along King Street and turned to the right on the busy Broad Way, while the boy sitting next to him took in the sights, smells and sounds of New York.

The wagon was passing the intersection of Beaver Street and the Broad Way, heading south toward the Great Dock. Three men engaged in conversation in front of a tallow chandler's shop fronting the Way paused in their snide remarks concerning the bilious green of Lord Cornbury's new hat and took view of the wagon. One of them, a little barrel-chested gent standing at the center, caught his breath. He said, with a smudge of disgust, 'Choke a duck! Corbett's back!'

With that, Dippen Nack took to his heels in the direction of City Hall.

Matthew heard several people shout to him from the sidewalks, but he paid them no mind. As much as he was glad to be back-as much as he'd thought he would never be back-the place seemed foreign, in a way. Different. As alien as Walker's village had seemed, at first. Had there been this many houses and buildings when he and Greathouse had left, more than a month ago? This many people, carts and wagons? This much clatter and bustle? He wondered if part of Walker had not returned with him, and he was seeing New York through an altered vision; he wondered if he would ever see it the same way again, or feel he truly belonged here among citizens who had not witnessed such vicious murder, violence and evil, or who had not killed a woman with an axe and fired a bullet into a man's body.

He had returned home, but not as he'd left. For better or for worse, he had blood on his hands. As did the boy beside him, but if Tom suffered any qualms about his part in the death of Tyranthus Slaughter, he kept them locked up in the ironclad vault of his soul. The most he'd professed about it to Matthew was that he viewed it as an execution, and lawful or not it was done so it wasn't worth speaking of any more.

But Matthew was sure Lillehorne was going to have a lot to say about it.

'Matthew! Hey, there!' Running up alongside the wagon was his friend, the blacksmith's apprentice John Five, newlywed in September to Constance Wade, now the happy Mrs. Five.

'Hello, John,' Matthew answered, but he kept the team moving.

'Where've you been?'

'Working.'

'You all right?'

'I'll be all right,' Matthew said.

'Folks were wonderin'. When your partner came back last week, and you didn't. I've heard what he's been tellin', about the redskins. Some were sayin' you'd had it.'

'Almost did,' Matthew said. 'But I gave it back.'

'You up to comin' to supper one night?'

'I am. Give me a few days.'

'Okay.' John reached up and slapped Matthew's leg. 'Welcome home.'

Not much further along, a well-dressed middle-aged woman with an exuberant, sharp-nosed face waved at him with her handkerchief and stepped forward. 'Oh, Mr. Corbett!' she called. 'So good to see you! Will we be reading any more of your adventures in the next Earwig?'

'No madam,' he told Mrs. Iris Garrow, wife of Stephen Garrow the Duke Street horn merchant. 'Definitely not.'