The Queen of Bedlam (7 page)

The magistrate had not gotten to be a magistrate by sitting on his opinions. “Do you really think you’re informing the citizens? By making up this…this damned Masker business?”

“I saw Dr. Godwin’s body, sir. And I was not the only one who remarked upon that bit of cutting. Ashton McCaggers also speculated the same. In fact, it was he who mentioned it first.”

“McCaggers is nearly a fool, the way he carries on!”

“That may be so,” Grigsby said, “but as coroner he does have the authority to examine the dead for the benefit of High Constable Lillehorne. I trust you believe he’s fit for that task?”

“Is all this bound for your next broadsheet? If so, I think you’d best direct your questions to the high constable.” Powers frowned at his own remarks, for he was not a man suited to show a foul temper. “Marmy,” he said, in a more conciliatory tone, “it’s not the broadsheet that bothers me. Of course we’ll have a proper newspaper here sooner or later, and perhaps you’re the man to publish it, but I don’t approve of this appeal to the low senses. Most of us thought we were leaving that behind in London with the Gazette. I can’t tell you the harm an ill-reported or speculative story might do to the industry of this town.”

It never hurt London, Matthew almost said, but he did think silence was the wisest course. He read the Gazette religiously when copies arrived by ship.

“I reported only the facts of Dr. Godwin’s murder, sir,” Grigsby parried. “As far as we know, I mean.”

“No, you made up this ‘Masker’ thing. And perhaps it did come from McCaggers, but the young man didn’t set it in type, you did. That kind of presumption and fear-mongering belongs in the realm of fantasy. And I might add that if you wish in the future to improve your list of subjects as to whom you will check facts, you should at the present time constrain your imagination.”

Grigsby started to reply, but he hesitated whether by force of the magistrate’s argument or his own desire not to disrupt a friendship. “I see your point, sir,” he said, and that was all.

“Well, it’s a damnable thing,” Solomon Tully said. “Julius was a fine man and an excellent physician, when he wasn’t in his cups. You know, he’s the one who recommended my dental work. When I heard he’d been murdered, I couldn’t believe my ears.”

“Everyone had kind words to say about Dr. Godwin,” the printmaster offered. “If he had any enemies, they weren’t apparent.”

“It was the work of a maniac,” said Powers. “Some wretch who crawled off a boat and passed through town. It’s been almost two weeks now, and he’s well gone. That’s both my opinion and that of the high constable.”

“But it is odd, don’t you think?” Grigsby lifted his eyebrows, which seemed a Herculean task.

“What?”

“Odd,” said the printmaster, “in many ways, not least the fact that Dr. Godwin had so much money in his wallet. And the fact that his wallet was right there inside his coat. Untouched. Do you see what I mean?”

“Emphasizing the fact that a maniac killed him,” Powers said. “Or possibly someone frightened the man off before he got the wallet, if indeed robbery was a motive.”

“A maniacal robber, then?” Grigsby asked, and Matthew could see his mental quill poised to scribe.

“I’m speculating, that’s all. And I’m telling you before witnesses I don’t wish to see my name in the Bedbug…or Earwig or whatever you’re calling it next. Now find a place to prop yourself, here come the aldermen.”

The official door at the opposite end of the room had opened and the five aldermen-representing the five wards of the town-filed in to take their seats at the long, dark oak table that usually served to give them a surface to pound their fists on as they argued. They were joined by twice their number of scribes and clerks, who also took their chairs. Like the waiting crowd, the aldermen and lesser lights were dressed in their finest costumes, some of which had probably not seen sunshine from out a trunk since the Wall had come down. Matthew noted that the old Mr. Conradt, who oversaw the North Ward, looked gray and ill; but then again, he always appeared thus. So too, the Dock Ward alderman Mr. Whitakker was hollow-eyed and pale, as if all the blood had left his face, and one of the scribes spilled his papers onto the floor with a nervous twitch of his arm. As Marmaduke Grigsby retired from the aisle, Matthew began to wonder what was up.

At last the crier came to the speaker’s podium that stood before the council table, drew in a mighty draught of air, and bellowed, “Hear ye, hear ye, all-” Then his voice cracked, he cleared his throat like a bassoon being blown, and he tried it again: “Hear ye, hear ye, all stand for the honorable Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, Governor of the Queen’s colony of New York!”

The crier stepped back from the podium and the assemblage stood up, and from the door came with a rustle of lace and a swoop of feathers not Lord Cornbury but-shockingly, scandalously-one of Polly Blossom’s bawds seeking to make a laughingstock of the sober occasion.

Matthew was struck senseless, as was everyone else. The woman, who made her madam look like a pauper’s princess in her yellow-ribboned gown and her high lemon-hued sunhat topped with an outrageous sprouting of peacock feathers, marched right past the aldermen as if she-as Solomon Tully might have said-owned the damned place. She wore white kidskin gloves with gaudy sparkling rings displayed on the outside of the glove-fingers. From underneath her skirt of flouncing ribbons came, in the silence, the sharp clack-clack of high French heels on the English wood. The sunhat and feathers tilted at a precarious angle above a snow-white, elaborately curled wig decorated with glitter-stones and piled high to the moon, and the result of this was that she appeared to be a giantess of a woman, well over six feet tall.

Matthew expected someone to holler or storm the podium, or one of the aldermen to leap to his feet in outrage, or Lord Cornbury himself to burst through the door red-faced and raging at having a prostitute upstage his entrance in such a way. But none of these things happened.

Instead, the wanton spectacle-who Matthew suddenly noted did not glide, as might be expected by a woman of leisure, but had a decidedly ungraceful gait-went right past the crier, who seemed to shrink into himself until he was just eyes and a nose at the collar of a shirt. Still no one rose or protested to stop her progress. She reached the podium, grasped it with gloved hands, regarded the citizens with her long, rather horsey pale-powdered face, and from her pink-rouged lips came the voice of a man: “Good afternoon. You may be seated.”

Five

No one sat down. No one moved.

From far back of the room Matthew thought he heard the sound of a bass Chinese gong, muffled. He caught a movement beside him and looked over at Solomon Tully, whose mouth was stretched wide open and whose new choppers, wet with spit, were sliding out of the gaping aperture. Without a thought, Matthew reached out and pushed them back in until something clicked. Tully continued to stare open-mouthed at the colony’s new governor.

“I said, you may be seated,” Lord Cornbury urged, but the way his peacock feathers swayed had some already mesmerized.

“God above,” whispered Magistrate Powers, whose eyes were about to pop, “the lord’s a lady!”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” a voice boomed from the back. There came the tap of a cane’s tip, followed by the noise of boots clumping on the pineboards. High Constable Gardner Lillehorne, a study in purple from his stockings to the top of his tricorn, strode up to the front and stood at ease, one hand resting on the silver lion’s head that adorned his black-lacquered cane. “Ladies also,” he amended, with a glance toward Polly Blossom. “Lord Cornbury has asked you to be seated.” He heard, as did the whole assemblage, the noise of giggling and scurrilous chatterings back where the crowd became a mob. Lillehorne’s nostrils flared. He lifted his black-goateed chin like an axeblade about to fall. “I,” he said, in a louder voice, “would also ask you not to show discourtesy, and to remember the manners for which you are so justly famous.”

“Since when?” the magistrate whispered to Matthew.

“If we are not seated,” Lillehorne went on against what was mostly still shock instead of resistance, “we will not witness Lord Cornbury’s address this day…I mean, his remarks this day.” He stopped to pat his glistening lips with a handkerchief that bore the new fashion, an embroidered monogram. “Sit, sit,” he said with some annoyance, as if to wayward children.

“I’ll be damned if my eyes haven’t gone,” Tully told Matthew as they sat down and the others got themselves settled again, as much as was possible. Tully rubbed his mouth, vaguely noting that the corners of his lips felt near split. “Do you see a man up there, or a woman?”

“I see…the new governor,” Matthew answered.

“Pray continue, sir!” Lillehorne had turned around to face Lord Cornbury, and perhaps only Matthew saw that he squeezed his lion’s head so hard his knuckles were bleached. “The audience is yours.” With a gesture of his arm that would have made competent actors challenge Lillehorne to a duel for the honor of the theater, the high constable retreated to his place at the back of the room where, Matthew considered, he could watch the reactions of the crowd to see how the popular wind ruffled Cornbury’s feathers.

“Thank you, Mr. Lillehorne,” said the governor. He gazed out upon his people with his purpled eyes. “I wish to thank all of you as well for being here, and for showing me such hospitality as I and my wife have enjoyed these last few days. After a long sea voyage, one needs time to rest and recuperate before appearing properly in public.”

“Maybe you need more time, sir!” some wag shouted back in the gallery, taking advantage of all the swirling smoke to hide his face. A little laughter swelled up but it froze on Lillehorne’s wintry appraisal.

“I’m sure I do,” agreed Lord Cornbury good-naturedly, and then he gave a ghastly smile. “But rest will do for some other day. On this afternoon I wish to state some facts about your town-our town now, of course-and offer some suggestions as to a future avenue toward greater success.”

“Oh, mercy,” quietly groaned Magistrate Powers.

“I have been in consultation with your aldermen, your high constable, and many business leaders,” Cornbury went on. “I have listened and, I hope, learned. Suffice it to say I have not accepted this position lightly from my cousin, the Queen.”

Lillehorne thumped his cane tip against the floor, daring anyone to chortle for fear of a night in the gaol.

“My cousin, the Queen,” Cornbury repeated, as if chewing on a sweet. Matthew thought he had very heavy eyebrows for such a lady. “Now,” the governor said, “let me outline where we are.”

For the next half-hour, the audience was held not in rapture but rather by the droning on of Cornbury’s less-than-majestic vocal skills. The man might be able to carry a dress, Matthew mused, but he couldn’t manage a decent speech. Cornbury meandered through the success of the milling and shipbuilding businesses, the fact that there were nearly five thousand residents and that now in England people saw New York as not a struggling frontier town but a steady venture able to return sterling investment on the pound. He gave his lengthy opinion on how someday New York might surpass both Boston and Philadelphia as the central hub of the new British Empire, but added that first a shipment of iron nails that had accidentally gone to the Quaker town from the old British Empire must be retrieved so as to rebuild the structures unfortunately burned in the recent fire, as he did not trust treepegs. He waxed upon the potential of New York as a center for farming, for apple orchards and pumpkin fields. And then, going on forty minutes in his dry dissertation, he hit upon a subject that made the citizens sit up.

“All this potential for industry and profit must not be wasted,” Cornbury said, “by late-night carousings and the resulting problem of slugabeds. I understand the taverns are not closed here until the last…um…gentleman staggers out.” He paused a moment, surveying the audience, before he clumsily plowed ahead. “Forthwith, I shall decree that all taverns close at half past ten.” A murmur began and quickly grew. “Also, I shall decree that no slave is to set foot in a tavern, and no red Indian shall be served-”

“Just a moment, sir! Just a moment!”

Matthew and the others up front looked around. Pennford Deverick had stood up and was casting an eagle-eye at the governor, his brow deeply furrowed as a sign of his own discontent. “What’s this about the taverns closing early, sir?”

“Not early, Mr. Deverick, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Mr. Deverick it is.”

“Well. Not early, sir.” Again the hideous smile emerged. “I wouldn’t call ten-thirty at night early, by any stretch. Would you?”

“New York is not a town constrained by a bedtime, sir.”

“Well, then, it ought to be. I’ve done a study on this. Long before I set out from England, many wise men afforded me their opinions on the wastage of available manpower due to-”

“The blazes with their opinions!” Deverick said sharply, and when he spoke sharply it was like a very loud knife to the ears, if a knife might be loud. Matthew saw the people around him flinch, and beside him Robert Deverick looked as if he wished to crawl under the nearest stone. “Do you know how many people here depend on the taverns?”

“Depend, sir? On the ability to consume strong drink and in the morning be unable to go about their duties to themselves, their families, and our town?”

Deverick was already waving him off with the governor’s ninth word. “The taverns, Lord Cornblow…”

“…bury,” said the governor, whose quiet voice could also be cutting. “Lord Cornbury, if you please.”

“The taverns are meeting places for businessmen,” Deverick continued, swirls of red beginning to come up on his cheeks not unlike the governor’s rouge. “Ask any tavern owner here.” He pointed toward various personages. “Joel Kuyther over there. Or Burton Lake, or Thaddeus O’Brien, or-”

“Yes, I’m sure the assembly is well-stocked,” Cornbury interrupted. “I presume you are also a tavern owner?”

“Lord Governor, if I may?” Again the smooth and rather oily High Constable Lillehorne slid forward, the lion’s head on his cane nodding for attention. “If you haven’t been properly introduced to Mr. Deverick other than by name, you should know that he represents, in a way, all the taverns and their owners. Mr. Deverick is a goods broker, and it is by his untiring enterprises that the establishments are properly stocked with ale, wine, foodstuffs, and the like.”

“Not only that,” Deverick added, still staring squarely at the governor. “I supply most of the glasses and platters, and a majority of the candles.”

“And to also mention a majority of the candles used by the town,” said Lillehorne, who Matthew thought was up to getting free wine for a year at his own favorite haunt.

“And, not least,” Deverick pressed on, “the majority of lanterns that hold those candles, supplied to the town’s constables for a reasonable allowance.”

“Well,” Lord Cornbury said after a short rumination, “it seems you run the town then, sir, is that not so? For all your good works procure both the peace and-you would have me believe-prosperity of New York.” He lifted his gloved hands to show the palms, in an attitude of surrender. “Shall I sign over my governing charter to you, sir?”

Don’t ask that of Lillehorne, Matthew thought. The high constable would use his own blood for want of ink.

Deverick stood very straight and stiff and tall, his face with its craggy boxer’s nose and high creased forehead taking on an expression of composed nobility that perhaps Lord Cornbury could do well to emulate. Of course Deverick was a rich man. Possibly one of the wealthiest in the colony. Matthew didn’t know much about him-who did? for he was certainly a lone wolf-but he’d heard from Grigsby that Deverick had fought his way out of the London rubbish piles to stand here, grandly clothed and as cold as midwinter’s pond ice, staring down an official popinjay.

“I have my own fields of governance,” replied Deverick, with a slight lift of his chin. “I should stay within their boundaries lest I trip over another man’s fence. But before I release this subject, let me please ask you to meet with myself and a committee of the tavern owners to discuss the matter at your convenience ere you decide upon a fixed course of action.”

“Oh, he’s good,” Powers whispered. “I didn’t know there was so much lawyer in old Pennford.”

Lord Cornbury again hesitated, and Matthew thought the man was not so schooled in diplomacy as he ought to be. Surely his feminine nature would seize upon a truce, if not so much to appease a very influential man but to get through his first public display without a riot.

“Very well,” the governor said flatly, with no trace of interest in hearing any other opinion. “I shall delay my decree for one week, sir, and thank you for your remarks.” With that gesture, Pennford Deverick returned to his seat.

Some of the discordant hubbub that had been brewing back in the mob pot began to simmer down now, but there were occasional hoots and hollers out on the street that proclaimed the verdict of the common man. Matthew wondered if a live governor such as the one standing before them could be worse than a dead mayor; well, time would tell.

Cornbury now launched upon another speech in which he praised every gentleman-and gentle lady, of course-for their support and recognition of the need for strong leadership in this growing and all-important town. Then, his smug horse half whipped to death, he said, “Before I ask that this meeting be adjourned, are there any comments from you? Any suggestions? I want you to know I am an open-minded man, and I shall do my best to solve whatever problems may arise, small or large, to aid this town in its orderly and profitable progress. Anyone?”

Matthew had in mind something to ask, but he warned himself against it because it was sure to anger Lillehorne and in his position that wasn’t wise. He’d already in the past month left two letters with the high constable’s clerk outlining his thoughts and had heard nothing back, so what was the point of further expressing an opinion?

Suddenly old wild-haired Hooper Gillespie stood up and said in his raspy wind-weathered voice, “See here, sir! I’ve got a problem needs fixin’!” He sailed on, as was his way, without waiting for a response. “I run the ferry between here and Breuckelen and I’m sick and tired of seein’ them bullywhelp boys a-roamin’ the river. You know they set fires out on Oyster Island to run them boats on the rocks, enough to make ye weep to see a good ship wrecked thataway. They got a cove they’s hidin’ in, I can point it out to ye quick enough. Holed up there in a shipwreck hulk, they got ’emselves a right nice hidin’ place there all covered with weeds and sticks and such, ’nuff to make a beaver throw a jealousy. Well, it’s gonna come to killin’ if them boys ain’t brought to justice, and I see ’em all the time a’-workin’ their mischiefs and bad intents. And you know they come up alongside me a night back first a’ June and robbed me, robbed all my passengers right there pretty as you please. Next time I’m feared if we don’t have no coin or drink to scold ’em off with they’re gonna run somebody clean through, ’cause their leader, that young fella thinks he’s the like of Kidd his-self, well he carries a rapier sword and I tell you I don’t like havin’ a blade so near my throat on a night the Devil wouldn’t be out there on that damn river. What do ye say?”

Lord Cornbury said nothing, for the longest spell. His eyes had gotten very large, which did nothing for his beauty. Finally, he asked of the audience, “Can anyone here translate that into proper English?”

“Oh, Mr. Gillespie’s prattling on, sir,” said Cornbury’s new favorite middleman, the high constable. “He’s mentioning a problem with some river trash that I am planning to clean up very soon indeed. It’s nothing you need think about.”

“What’d he say?” Gillespie asked the man sitting next to him.

“Sit down, Hooper!” commanded Lillehorne, with an imperial wave of that cane. “The governor doesn’t have time for your little situations.”