The Queen of Bedlam Read Online Free PDF

eventual emulation of the sprawl, debasement, and utter calamity of London. The tales he’d heard of that pandemetro chilled his blood-everything from the twelve-year-old prostitutes to the freak-show circuses and the joy of the mob at the hangman’s theater. Possibly, with that latter revulsion, he was remembering how near Rachel Howarth had come to being burned alive in Fount Royal, and how the merry crowd would have howled as the ashes flew up. He wondered what would be the future of New York, in a hundred years. He wondered if fate and human nature decreed that every Bethlehem become in time a Bedlam.
    As he crossed Wall Street before Trinity Church and the black iron fence around the church cemetery, he gave a glance at the trough in which he’d cleaned himself of his night’s misfortune. The Dutch fortress wall that had stood here, made of logs twelve feet tall, had been constructed to guard that avenue of attack from the British before the settlement changed hands some thirty-eight years ago. It occurred to Matthew that New York no longer faced an adversary from without, as barring severe epidemic or some unforeseen catastrophe the place was securely fixed. He thought that the next threat to the survival of this town might well come from within, and bear from the consequences of forgetting the perils of human greed.
    On his left, also on Wall Street, was the yellow stone City Hall and the town gaol, before which a notorious pickpocket named Ebenezer Grooder was on public view, confined to the pillory. A basket of rotten apples lay within reach of any citizen who wished to apply further justice. Matthew continued south, entering the smoke-hazed realm of stables, warehouses, and blacksmitheries.
    It was one of those establishments, whose affixed sign read simply Ross, Smith, that was the aim of his arrow. He went into the open barn door of the place, into the dim light where hammers rang on iron and orange flames seethed in the black-bricked forge. A thick-set young man with curly blond hair was at work on the bellows cord, making the fire flare and spit. Beyond him, the elder master Marco Ross and the second apprentice were hammering out the vital commodity of horseshoes on their respective anvils. The noise was a kind of rough music, as one hammerblow was pitched higher than the other. All the smiths wore leather aprons to protect their clothes from flying shards of red-hot metal, and the heat and strenuous activity already at this early hour made the men sweat through the backs of their shirts. Cart-wheels, plows, and other bits of farm implements were arranged in wait for inspection, showing that Master Ross was at no sorrow for work.
    Matthew crossed over the bricked floor to stand near the young man at his bellows labor. He waited until finally John Five sensed him there and turned to look over his shoulder. Matthew nodded; John returned the nod, his cherubic face ruddy in the heat and his eyes pale blue beneath thick blond brows, and then he returned to what he was doing without a word, since speaking was useless so long as the hammers did the talking.
    At last John knew Matthew would not be denied; Matthew saw it, in the slump of the younger man’s shoulders. That alone gave him an indication of how their meeting must go, but he had to pursue it. John Five ceased the bellows work, waved his arm in the air to get Master Ross to see, and then held up five fingers to ask for that much time. Master Ross gave a curt nod, with a stern glance at Matthew that said Some of us have work to do and laid in again on the hammer-and-tongs.
    Outside, in the smoky sunlight, John Five wiped his sparkling forehead with a cloth and said, “How are you, Matthew?”
    “Well, thank you. And you?”
    “Well also.” John was not as tall as Matthew, but had the wide shoulders and thick forearms of a man born to command iron. He was four years Matthew’s junior, yet far from being a youth. In the King Street almshouse-then known