The River of Souls

by Robert McCammon

  The pallid problem-solver pondered this. He looked up once more at the Sword of Damocles that dangled above his skull. Then he stared into the eyes of Magnus Muldoon and saw there something he had not seen before. Something, perhaps, he had not expected to see. He decided, then, what was his choice. But before he spoke it, Matthew thought of how he had come to this place and this moment, and how when he got home he was going to give Hudson Greathouse such a kick in the pants that the squabbling ghosts of Number Seven Stone Street would stop their eternal fight to applaud his determined application of the boot.

  Two

  "I say, go!”

  “And I say, no.”

  “Well my God, Matthew! It’s an easy fifty pounds! And I think, according to this gent’s taste in stationery and his oh-so-precious seal, I can ask another twenty pounds and get it. Easy money for an easy task.”

  “Too easy,” said Matthew, as he turned from the pair of windows that—now opened to the warm air of early June—afforded a view to the northwest of New York, to the wide sun-sparkled river and the mossy cliffs and vivid green hills of New Jersey. Fishermen in their small skiffs were at work upon the river, and a sailing boat carrying crated cargo of some sort on deck had come drifting down toward the docks of town, its sails bloomed before the breeze. The ferry was making its long, slow but usually reliable crossing from Manhattan to New Jersey, with a coach and four horses aboard. Matthew had noted with interest that the frameworks of two houses were being built up on the Jersey cliffs where no dwelling had stood before he’d been kidnapped by Professor Fell’s cohorts and taken to Pendulum Island. The pristine nature of the cliffs was no more; such was progress, and ever would be. Directly below the windows were the streets, houses and businesses of New York, a jumble of nautical warehouses, stables, blacksmith shops, rope makers, timberyards, tallow chandlers, carpentry shops, soap makers, poulterers, coopers, peltry sellers, bakeries, japanners, horners, creditors and a dozen and one other areas of occupation. It seemed to Matthew that more people had come since he’d been gone, and on some mornings the bustling traffic of horses, wagons, carts and carriages along the Broad Way reminded him of an anthill scraped open by an errant boot.

  “Too easy,” he repeated to Hudson Greathouse’s bearded face. “And it’s not a suitable task for me. Or for any problem-solver worth a pinch of salt, for that matter.”

  “I saved this letter,” said the Great One, holding it aloft at his desk, “because I thought you might detect a little pepper in it. And I assumed it would stir your juices and make you wish to get to the meat of it.”

  “Is it a letter or a beef stew? Keep on like this and I’ll ask you to pledge yourself to buying my noonday meal at Sally Almond’s.”

  “Pah!” said Hudson, and let the missive drop like a dead leaf upon his desk. He had grown his silver-touched beard out ever since Matthew had arrived bearded from his time at sea upon Captain Jerrell Falco’s Nightflyer, and the widow Donovan had remarked upon her attraction to a hairy face. Which presently had set Hudson to lay aside his razor and reap the rewards, of which Matthew wished to know nothing. Of Captain Falco and the Nightflyer, the good captain’s ship was now many hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic on the mission of returning the ex-slave Zed to his tribal homeland. Matthew had seen the ship off on that morning, as had Zed’s ex-owner, the town’s eccentric coroner Ashton McCaggers. And…on that morning also, stood with McCaggers Berry Grigsby in a dress the color of the April meadows and wearing a floppy-brimmed straw hat banded with wildflowers. Matthew had sneaked several glances at Berry but had received nary a one in return. But what had he expected? He recalled his speech to her not so long ago…recalled it, in fact, as one might recall a stab to the gut.

  I was wrong to have confided in you on the ship that night. It was weak, and I regret it. Because the fact is, I have never needed you. I didn’t yesterday, I don’t today and I will not tomorrow. He had seen the little death in her eyes. And it had killed him, most of all. Fine, she had answered. Good day to you, then. She’d begun walking quickly away, and six strides in her departure she had turned again toward him and there were tears on her face and she’d said in a voice near collapse, We are done.

  Three words. All of them small. All of them terrible.

  So…what had he expected?

  He had played and replayed this scene, in the silence of his diminutive abode behind the Grigsby house. In the shaving of his face before his mirror he had replayed it, and in his reading by candlelight it interrupted the pages. In his walks to and from this very office it followed him like a silent shade, and as he sat alone at Sally Almond’s or in some other establishment it mocked him like a cuff upon the ear.

  Gone too far, he thought. Too far by many steps.

  But he had no choice now, only to keep walking the path. What he would have liked to say to Berry was lost to him. He would have liked to tell her that as long as Professor Fell was alive or at the least uncaged, he must fear the unsleeping eye and the stealthy hand that held a dagger aimed for the heart. And not only fear a sudden death for himself, but for others who dared to befriend him. He didn’t worry much about Hudson Greathouse, who knew what he was getting into when he signed on with the Herrald Agency. No, it was those like Berry—and especially Berry—whom Matthew thought the professor would target, as a method of revenge. Matthew had already led her along dark passages and into dangerous situations that he regretted; to lead her into more intrigues and dangers would mean he did not care for her nearly as much as he really did. Therefore…the silence.

  Silence, however, was not Hudson’s forte.

  “Here you are,” said the Great One, “with an opportunity to refresh yourself with a minor task to carry out—something I’d surely do if I was up to the dance, my lady was more understanding and I was as young as you—and you spurn it as if you were given a horse-shit pudding. There’s nothing so vital on your schedule! Go to Charles Town and relax! Get that episode of Pendulum Island out of your sails! And bring us back a nice chunk of money, for nothing more dangerous than escorting a rich man’s daughter to—” He checked the letter again. “The Sword of Damocles Ball.” A little chuckle rolled from the corner of his mouth. “Some imaginations, these Carolinians have. And, it appears, a little too much money. Why Mister Sedgeworth Prisskitt can’t find a local escort for his daughter is a mystery.” He stared at Matthew with a more serious intent. “Don’t you wish to find the answer?”

  “I wish to enjoy the summer in my own way. I have several books to read.” The truth was, Matthew might be interested in the why of this situation, but his inclination for travel had been dulled by that sea voyage to the Bermudas imposed upon him. At this late date, he would have to take the packet boat from here to Charles Town. He and Berry had worked as crew on the Nightflyer during the passage home, and during his own night flying Matthew was still awakened by the ringing of phantom ship’s bells, the hum and thrum of wind through rigging and the creaking of sea-strained timbers. It seemed at times his little residence was pitching back and forth as if in a white-capped sea.

  “I think the answer,” Matthew ventured, “is that Pandora Prisskitt is so homely no man will be seen in public with her. Far be it from me to upset that equilibrium.” He returned to his own desk and sat down, ignoring his friend’s snort of derision. He had nothing on the docket that shook his earth. Three letters…two requests for a rider to safeguard property papers between New York and smaller towns, and one missive from a farmer in Albany asking for help in unmasking the fiend who had stolen his scarecrow. None of those inflamed Matthew’s imagination, enticed him to act as a champion for justice or caused him to want to travel any of the hard roads out of town. Still…he did wish to be active in some way, to get his mind back onto the business of problem-solving. And of course because his abode—which used to be a dairy-house belonging to New York’s prickly printmaster Marmaduke Grigsby—was just steps away from Berry’s door, the house she shared with her grandfather, Matthew was
painfully aware of how long a short distance could be. On the matter of distance, the best news of the season was that the spindly-framed High Constable Gardner Lillehorne had announced he was leaving for London with his shrewish wife ‘the Princess’ at the end of the month to accept a position as Assistant to the High Constable in that teeming city. The surprise to this was that the little red-faced bully Dippen Nack was going with Lillehorne to become his assistant. Matthew thought London must certainly be desperate for assistants these days.

  He shuffled some papers while Hudson busied himself answering a letter from a woman in the town of Huntington inquiring as to help in finding a missing horse, the animal having been taken from her barn in the middle of the night. Perhaps, Matthew thought as his mind wandered, its current rider was a scarecrow.

  He recalled quite vividly the day that Zed departed New York aboard Captain Falco’s ship. His recollection was keened by the fact that after the ship had parted ways with the harbor, Berry had left the scene arm-in-arm with Ashton McCaggers. This time, though Matthew might have fervently wished it, neither of McCaggers’ shoe heels snapped, and neither did the coroner step into a hole or a mud puddle or suffer any disaster of Berry’s supposed “bad luck”. Which perplexed and bothered Matthew no end, though he wasn’t sure exactly why.

  “You are not here,” said Hudson, looking up from his letter and frowning. His frown made a thundercloud appear jolly. “You are not there, either. So the question is…where are you?”

  Matthew replied after a moment of reflection, “Neither here nor there, it seems.”

  “Exactly. Which is why you should find a destination. I’d think you would want to—” He was interrupted by the sound of the door at the bottom of the narrow stairs opening and then closing. Came the noise of someone ascending, and in another moment the inner door opened and there stood the grand dame of the Herrald Agency, Katherine Herrald herself.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said, with an uptilt of her solid chin. She was wearing a pale blue gown nearly the same shade as her eyes, which with a single sweep took survey of the office and her two associates. She wore white gloves. Her right hand held a red clay vase that brimmed with yellow flowers. Though she was about fifty years of age, Katherine Herrald was trim-figured, straight-backed and elegant. She wore tipped at a jaunty angle a pale blue hat with red piping, her dark gray hair streaked with pure white at the temples and at a pronounced widow’s peak. She was, lamentably, a true widow; her husband Richard had originated the agency and been brutally murdered in his pursuit of the enigmatic and viperous Professor Fell.

  “Good morning, madam,” replied Hudson, who pushed back his chair and rose to his feet at the same time as did Matthew. Hudson, a broad-shouldered and some might say supremely over-confident bull of a man, stood three inches over six feet and wore a plain white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, tan-colored trousers and white stockings. His thick iron-gray hair was pulled back in a queue and tied with a black ribbon. He was forty-eight years old and had a ruggedly handsome, craggy face that had quickened the hearts of many women before the widow Donovan. The scars he wore attested to his dealings in the world of men armed with swords, daggers and muskets, but actually the scar that cut across his left eyebrow had been caused by the treachery of a broken teacup thrown by his third wife. Hearing the tales of Greathouse’s exploits, Matthew had often wondered how the man had stayed alive so long. Indeed, in one case involving the killer Tyranthus Slaughter, Matthew had almost been the cause of the Great One’s demise. For a time Hudson had counted on the support of a cane to get around; a knife plunged repeatedly into the back followed by near-drowning at the bottom of a well did tend to make the legs unsteady. Happily now in these warmer days, however, Hudson showed his mettle by no longer depending on the cane as much, and he was getting more nimble at taking the stairs up from Stone Street.

  “I have seen Lady Cutter off,” said Madam Herrald, with a quick glance at Matthew. “And I’ve brought something to brighten your day.” She walked to the small hearth of rough gray and tan stones, unused now these last two weeks. She leaned down to place within it the red vase of flowers. “There!” she announced. “An improvement over cold ashes, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would,” Hudson agreed. “As a matter of fact, I was about to suggest that Matthew clean the fireplace out today. It seems he’s so free with his time at the present.” He followed this with so slick a smile Matthew wanted to rip his beard off and throw it out the window so someone might use it as a horse-brush.

  “Indeed?” The woman’s penetrating blue eyes fixed upon the younger problem-solver. It was apparent she was not simply appraising Matthew’s light gray suit and spotless white shirt. “Time on your hands, you say?”

  “A bit sullen this morning,” Hudson spoke up, rather too cheerfully for Matthew’s liking. The letter from Charles Town rose again from the dead in the Great One’s grasp. “We have here a request from a Mister Sedgeworth Prisskitt concerning the employ of an escort for his daughter Pandora to an occasion called the Sword of Damocles Ball, held the last week of June.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” said Mrs. Herrald. “An annual occasion for the elite of the town, to see and be seen. Sounds more than a little pretentious to me.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Matthew supplied, bellowing the sail while this tide was turning to his favor.

  “Pretentious or not, we’re being offered fifty pounds for what appears to be one night of work. If you want to call this work.” Hudson waved the letter like a battleflag. “A few days aboard a packet boat for Matthew, he attends the ball and escorts the dear daughter, he gets back aboard another packet boat the next day or so…and there you have it. Anyway, I’m of the opinion that Matthew could use a trip to refresh himself. His last trip was…how shall I say this…? Eventful, for all the wrong reasons. Matthew’s been dragging himself around these past couple of weeks. Look at him, he’s a ghost in his own skin.”

  Matthew thought he could well be a ghost by now, and stumbling through the invisible world inhabited by the spirits of Number Seven Stone Street’s fighting coffee-bean dealers if not for the courage and faith of three women: the princess of blades Minx Cutter, the lonely Iroquois wanderer Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone, and the indefatigable but unreasonable Berry Grigsby.

  He did have another bitter seed from his apple of fortune to chew upon. The fact that Minx Cutter’s first assignment since agreeing to become an associate with the Herrald Agency was taking her to Boston. She was on the case of a stolen piece of jewelry said to be in the shape of a scorpion, and supposedly endowing mystical “gifts” of some kind upon its wearer. Matthew would have wished for such a problem to solve, but that honor and opportunity went to Minx. He thought this totally unfair, since Minx had not yet proven her worth. Or…for that matter…proven she wouldn’t abscond with the scorpion herself at the first chance she got. He could only surmise that Mrs. Herrald had given Minx the enviable job because of information Lady Cutter had offered concerning Professor Fell’s organization. After all, Minx had been involved in the forgeries realm of that operation and also knew more than a passing bit about other areas of the professor’s criminal world. Which made Minx a source of valuable wealth, if she could be trusted. Perhaps giving Minx the task of finding the jewelled scorpion was Mrs. Herrald’s way of verifying if indeed Lady Cutter was trustworthy. Minx had just left for Boston aboard a north-bound packet boat this morning, so the issue of trustworthiness—and the recovery of the mystical scorpion—was yet to be asserted.

  Matthew had bitten his tongue when he’d learned Minx was given the assignment. But it was he who had talked Minx into meeting Mrs. Herrald barely two weeks ago and considering a position in the agency of problem-solvers. Still, it was a damnable affront to his own abilities. And here he sat, with Hudson Greathouse waving that blasted letter around! He had to voice his opinion to Mrs. Herrald, now or never.

  “I believe,” he said calmly, his attention focused on Katherine
Herrald, “that this Pandora Prisskitt must be one of the most…shall we say…unlovely creatures upon the face of the earth. I recall that we received a letter sometime back from this same gentleman requesting an escort for his daughter to the…if my memory is not faulty…Cicero Society Ball at the end of March. Why else would her father want to hire someone? And pay what is really a ridiculous amount? I mean…think of it! Hiring an escort to come to Charles Town all the way from New York? Why doesn’t Mr. Prisskitt just find a local escort and pay him the same? Surely there are young men in Charles Town who can be paid to squint through their spectacles at a female of an unfortunate proportion, a wayward eye or a dark-haired lip. So…how does it make sense that this gentleman proposes to secure an escort from a place some seven hundred miles away?”

  “Oh, you’ve tracked the distance, have you?” Hudson’s scar-cut left eyebrow went up.

  “I know the distance. I lived in Charles Town long ere I met you, and certainly had a trying experience in its vicinity.”

  “Yes, the Nightbird thing,” Hudson recalled. “Well, you were but a lad then.”

  “Old enough,” was Matthew’s reply. The Nightbird thing was an improper way to put it, but understandable coming from the Great One’s unruly tongue. It was a reference to his association in the spring of 1699 with Rachel Howarth in the fledgling town of Fount Royal. The magistrate Matthew had clerked for, the late and lamented Isaac Woodward, had called Rachel his “nightbird”, due to the fact that she’d beguiled him just as the singing of a nightbird might beguile any ordinary man from his daytime duties. Matthew had told Greathouse the whole story of that, and now was rewarded with this jab to the groin biscuits.