“Killed them? Why?”

“Chose three at gunpoint the night they got here: Brennan Owain, John Lyles the school teacher and Kendall Griffin, a goodly woman and mother to four children. Shot ’em down by the wharf and rolled their bodies on over. Rolled ’em over so we’d have to drag up what was left to have a Christian burial. That ‘cardinal’ said it was to show they would kill everybody here if we tried to fight ’em, or if any one of their men was hurt.” Eurig at last lowered his musket. “Some couldn’t watch it, but I did. Me and Gregor.” He glanced at the bearded man. “Tell ’em what they done to the bodies ’fore they rolled ’em.”

“I already know,” said Matthew. “Cardinal Black cut a Devil’s Cross in their foreheads and likely spoke some kind of a ritual over them. Is that correct?”

“My boy!” a woman suddenly screamed beyond the knot of onlookers. “My boy! Lord God, my boy!”

Through the group pushed a woman maybe in her late thirties, but gaunt and hardened by her way of life and circumstances, her hair already streaked with gray and her eyes swollen by tears. “My boy!” she cried out. “Where’s my Gavin?”

Another man, about her age and just as time-worn, had been right at her heels and now he grasped at her arm but she shook free and cast a look of horrible imploring at Matthew and Devane. “They took my little one! My Gavin! Where’s my boy? Please … can you find him for me?”

“Ariana, come on,” the man said, trying to be of comfort, but she was having none of it.

“My boy!” she shrieked, and this time the fresh tears streamed down through the gullies of her face. “Oh Lord my boy!”

“SHUT HER UP!”

The voice behind Matthew was not Devane’s … or, at least, it was not the Julian Devane he had known to this moment. His shout had been one of an unnerved man calling out for something Matthew could not yet understand … whatever it was, it was much more than demanding a desperate woman cease screaming for her son.

“My Gavin, my boy!” she went on, a keening cry. “Please help me—”

Suddenly Devane shoved past Matthew. He had the four-barrelled pistol in his hand. “Shut her up or I will!” he shouted, his voice ragged and a look of sheer panic on his pallid face. She instantly went silent. “Put down that musket!” he told Gregor. “Do it now!”

Gregor hesitated. Matthew saw Devane’s finger start to curl around one of the sets of triggers. Two balls at this range would be sheer murder.

Devane had put his sword back into the scabbard at his side. Matthew grasped the handle, drew it out and had no choice but to step between Devane and Gregor and, striding forward with absolute foolish bravado, place the point of the sword under Gregor’s chin.

“You heard him,” said Matthew.