Free The Queen of Bedlam by Robert R. McCammon

said the printmaster, “in many ways, not least the fact that Dr. Godwin had so much money in his wallet. And the fact that his wallet was right there inside his coat. Untouched. Do you see what I mean?”
    “Emphasizing the fact that a maniac killed him,” Powers said. “Or possibly someone frightened the man off before he got the wallet, if indeed robbery was a motive.”
    “A maniacal robber, then?” Grigsby asked, and Matthew could see his mental quill poised to scribe.
    “I’m speculating, that’s all. And I’m telling you before witnesses I don’t wish to see my name in the Bedbug…or Earwig or whatever you’re calling it next. Now find a place to prop yourself, here come the aldermen.”
    The official door at the opposite end of the room had opened and the five aldermen-representing the five wards of the town-filed in to take their seats at the long, dark oak table that usually served to give them a surface to pound their fists on as they argued. They were joined by twice their number of scribes and clerks, who also took their chairs. Like the waiting crowd, the aldermen and lesser lights were dressed in their finest costumes, some of which had probably not seen sunshine from out a trunk since the Wall had come down. Matthew noted that the old Mr. Conradt, who oversaw the North Ward, looked gray and ill; but then again, he always appeared thus. So too, the Dock Ward alderman Mr. Whitakker was hollow-eyed and pale, as if all the blood had left his face, and one of the scribes spilled his papers onto the floor with a nervous twitch of his arm. As Marmaduke Grigsby retired from the aisle, Matthew began to wonder what was up.
    At last the crier came to the speaker’s podium that stood before the council table, drew in a mighty draught of air, and bellowed, “Hear ye, hear ye, all-” Then his voice cracked, he cleared his throat like a bassoon being blown, and he tried it again: “Hear ye, hear ye, all stand for the honorable Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, Governor of the Queen’s colony of New York!”
    The crier stepped back from the podium and the assemblage stood up, and from the door came with a rustle of lace and a swoop of feathers not Lord Cornbury but-shockingly, scandalously-one of Polly Blossom’s bawds seeking to make a laughingstock of the sober occasion.
    Matthew was struck senseless, as was everyone else. The woman, who made her madam look like a pauper’s princess in her yellow-ribboned gown and her high lemon-hued sunhat topped with an outrageous sprouting of peacock feathers, marched right past the aldermen as if she-as Solomon Tully might have said-owned the damned place. She wore white kidskin gloves with gaudy sparkling rings displayed on the outside of the glove-fingers. From underneath her skirt of flouncing ribbons came, in the silence, the sharp clack-clack of high French heels on the English wood. The sunhat and feathers tilted at a precarious angle above a snow-white, elaborately curled wig decorated with glitter-stones and piled high to the moon, and the result of this was that she appeared to be a giantess of a woman, well over six feet tall.
    Matthew expected someone to holler or storm the podium, or one of the aldermen to leap to his feet in outrage, or Lord Cornbury himself to burst through the door red-faced and raging at having a prostitute upstage his entrance in such a way. But none of these things happened.
    Instead, the wanton spectacle-who Matthew suddenly noted did not glide, as might be expected by a woman of leisure, but had a decidedly ungraceful gait-went right past the crier, who seemed to shrink into himself until he was just eyes and a nose at the collar of a shirt. Still no one rose or protested to stop her progress. She reached the podium, grasped it with gloved hands, regarded the citizens with her long, rather horsey pale-powdered face, and from her pink-rouged lips came the voice of a man: “Good afternoon. You may be seated.”

Five
    No one sat down. No