The Queen of Bedlam by Robert R. McCammon Page B

well-ordered. He could cross from wall to wall with six steps, yet this was a favorite part of his world because of the bookcase.
    The bookcase. There it stood, beside the clothes chest. Three shelves, made of lustrous dark brown wood with diamond-shaped mother-of-pearl insets. Underneath the bottom shelf was burned a name and date: Rodrigo de Pallares, Octubre 1690. It had arrived in New York last May, on a privateer’s vessel, and was offered at waterfront auction along with many other items taken from Spanish ships. Matthew had bid on it, as a birthday gift to himself, but was outbid by half again as much by the shipbuilder Cornelius Rambouts. Suffice it to say, it was an amazement when Magistrate Powers, who’d been present at the auction, announced to Matthew that Corny had decided to sell that “old worm-eaten piece he’d picked up at the dock” for Matthew’s original bid just to be rid of a Spanish captain’s tobacco-pipe smell.
    The books that were jammed into these three shelves had also come off ships. Some were water-damaged, others missing front or back covers or large sections of pages, some yet almost perfect for their tribulations of sea travel, and all to Matthew were wonderful miracles of the human intellect. It helped that he was fluent in Latin and French, and his Spanish was coming along. He had his favorites, among them John Cotton’s A Discourse About Civil Government, Thomas Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City of London, Cyrano de Bergerac’s A Comic History of the Society of the Moon, and the short stories of The Heptameron compiled by Margaret, Queen of Navarre. In truth, though, all these volumes spoke to him. Some in voices soothing, some angry, some that had confused madness with religion, some that sought to build barriers and others that sought to break them; all the books spoke, in their own way. It was left to him to listen, or not.
    He contemplated taking the chair and rereading something heavy, like Increase Mather’s Kometographia, Or a Discourse Concerning Comets, to get these demons of murder out of his mind, yet it was not the dream that weighed on him so much. He found himself dwelling more on the memory of Nathan Spencer’s funeral. It had been a bright and sunny June morning when Nathan had gone into the ground; a day when the birds sang, and that night the fiddles had played in the taverns and the laughter had gone on just as every night, but Matthew had sat in this room, in his chair, in the dark. He had wondered then, as he wondered now-as he wondered many nights, long before John Five had said it-if he’d killed Nathan. If his adamance and thirst for justice-no, call it what it was: his unflagging ambition to bring Eben Ausley to the noose-had led Nathan to uncoil the rope. He’d thought Nathan would crack, under his unrelenting pressure. And surely Nathan would do the right thing, the courageous thing. Surely Nathan would bear witness before Magistrate Powers and Chief Prosecutor Bynes to those terrible things done to him, and later be willing to repeat those same atrocities before a court of the town of New York.
    Who wouldn’t do such, if they were truly in need of justice?
    Matthew looked into the flame of the nearest candle.
    Nathan had needed only one thing: to be left alone.
    I did kill him, he thought.
    I finished what Ausley began.
    He drew a long breath and let it out. The flame flickered, and strange shadows crawled upon the walls.
    The funny thing, he thought. No…the tragic thing, was that the same all-consuming fire for justice in himself that had saved the life of Rachel Howarth in Fount Royal had…probably…most likely…almost certainly?…caused Nathan Spencer to take his own life.
    He felt constricted within these walls; his shoulders felt pinched. He had the most uncommon need for a strong drink to calm his mind. He needed to hear the fiddle play across the room, and to be welcomed in a place where everyone knew his name.
    The Gallop