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Back Cardinal Black Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Title Page
  2. One: Into the Storm
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Two: London Calling
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Three: The Malignant Seven
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Four: Squirrels and Cats
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-One
  37. Thirty-Two
  38. Five: Revelation
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. About the Author

On the walk along Conger Street to the square, Matthew wondered why it was that he could feel a twinge of pity for an old man who had committed so many murders and evils, but who was in essence trapped in the creature of his own construction and had to play the part out to its bitter end.

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Five

It was as cruel and heartbreaking a sight as Hudson had warned it was going to be.

Frederick Nash, the appointed mayor of Fell’s village, sat in a chair in the front room, watching the procedure in stony silence. His wife Pamela would not deign to enter the room, but stayed in her bed in the back. Matthew sat watching Lazarus Firebaugh as he perched on a stool before the shell of Berry Grigsby, she seated upon the flower-printed sofa splashed with morning sunlight that streamed through a window, and conducted his examination.

Matthew felt tears burning at his eyes. He had had a good sleep, had enjoyed a hot bath, had shaved and dressed in clean clothes and a frayed but serviceable gray jacket—likely also from one of the guards killed in Black’s raid—and met Firebaugh at the Nashes’ door precisely at nine o’clock. Matthew’s knock at the door had had to be delivered thrice and with increasing strength, for when Nash had peered out the window and retreated Matthew figured that Pamela in her own depths of madness had begged him not to give up their daughter Mary Lynn to the possibility that she would be—as their real daughter had been—taken away from them.

But the door had been opened, Nash had allowed them in without a word, and Matthew had said in a voice that trembled more than he would’ve liked, “Bring her out.”

The young woman who sat on the sofa amid the printed flowers was a long way from the one who had walked amid the vibrant gardens of New York. Her face was pale white and reddened with garish rouge, all the freckles and natural beauty of her skin powdered over, her copper-colored hair with its healthy hints of red covered with a brown wig of curly ringlets and childish ribbons that this morning was slightly askew and all the more false in its tilted inclination, her eyes dead … dead … deader than dead … sunken down into purple hollows, her body squeezed into a violet-hued gown with an explosion along her throat of once-pink and white ruffles that were themselves tainted with the gray of age, all wrong … all so terribly wrong.

And there was an odor from her. A scent of what Matthew could only describe as rot. Not overtly so, but more like an apple that has been cut open and left to shrivel in an unbearable sun.