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I have always been proud of you. Always. I knew from the first. When I saw you at the almshouse. The way you carried yourself. Something different and indefinable. But special. You will make your mark. Somewhere. You will make a profound difference to someone…just by being alive.
    “Matthew?”
    I have always been proud of you.
    “Matthew?”
    He realized John Five had said something he’d not caught. He came back to the moment like a swimmer gliding up through dark and dirty water. “What?”
    “I asked if you would be goin’ to the social on Friday night.”
    “Social?” He thought he’d seen an announcement about it, plastered up on a wall here and there. “What social?”
    “At the church. Friday night. You know, Elizabeth Martin has got quite the eye for you.”
    Matthew nodded vacantly. “The shoemaker’s daughter. Didn’t she just turn fourteen?”
    “Well, what of it? She’s a fine-lookin’ girl, Matthew. I wouldn’t turn up my nose at such a prize, if I were you.”
    “I’m not turning up my nose. I just…don’t feel in the spirit of companionship these days.”
    “Who’s talkin’ about companionship, man? I’m talkin’ marriage!”
    “If that’s so, your kettle’s got a crack in it.”
    “Suit yourself, then. I’d best get back to work.” John made a motion toward the doorway and then hesitated. He stood in a shard of sunlight. “You can beat your head ’gainst a wall ’til it kills you,” he said. “It won’t ever knock the wall down, and then where’ll you be?”
    “I don’t know,” came the answer, in a weary and soul-sick breath.
    “I hope you’ll figure it out. Good day, Matthew.”
    “Good day, John.”
    John Five returned to the blacksmith shop, and Matthew-still hazy in the head, whether from his disappointment or the knock he’d taken last night-walked away to New Street and thence northward to Wall Street and the City Hall office of Magistrate Powers. Before he reached that destination, he passed again by the pillory where Ebenezer Grooder was so justly confined, since he himself had heard the facts of this particular case as the magistrate’s clerk.
    Grooder, he noted, had company. Standing next to the basket of ammunition was a slim dandy in a beige-colored suit and a tricorn of the same color. He had pale blond hair, almost white, that was tied back in a queue and fixed with a beige ribbon. Grooder’s visitor wore tan boots of expensive make and rested a riding-crop against his left shoulder. The tilt of his head said he was examining the pickpocket’s predicament with interest. As Matthew watched, the man plucked an apple from the basket and without hesitation fired it into Grooder’s face at a distance of more than twenty feet. The apple smacked into Grooder’s forehead and exploded upon contact.
    “Ah, you miserable bastard!” Grooder shouted, his fists clenched through the pillory’s catch-holes. “You damned wretch!”
    The man silently and methodically chose another fouled apple and threw it smack into Grooder’s mouth.
    He’d chosen an apple with some firmness to it, for this time Grooder didn’t holler insults as he was too busy spitting blood from his split upper lip.
    The man-who ought to be a grenadier with aim that true, Matthew thought-now took a third apple, cocked his arm to throw as Grooder found his ragged profane voice again, and suddenly froze in mid-motion. His head swiveled around and found Matthew watching him, and Matthew looked into a face that was both handsome for its regal gentility and fearsome for its utter lack of expression. Though there was no overt animosity from the other, Matthew had the feeling of looking at a coiled reptile that had been mildly disturbed by a cricket lighting on a nearby stone.
    The man’s piercing green eyes continued to hold him for several seconds, and then suddenly-as if some decision had been made about Matthew’s threat or more precisely the lack of threat from a passing cricket-he