Ten

Matthew Corbett had never been afraid of a door before, but this one terrified him.

It was glossy ebony and had a shining brass handle that made him think of the grip and trigger of a pistol. The small brass nameplate across it read W. A. Archer. The door was situated next to the high bulwark of the judge’s bench, which itself was a testament to the power of English law; sitting tall up there one might have a bird’s-eye view of the entire kingdom, or at least the view of a hawk upon the tattered crows that came hopping in their chains upon the polished planks below.

Any second now Judge Archer would come through that door. Matthew could not stop his heart from pounding. His breathing was ragged; he wondered if he hadn’t been poisoned by the moldy air at St. Peter’s Place. All the air of London was moldy, it seemed to him. Today London smelled like bread that had been left to ferment in pickle juice, or perhaps that was just himself. In any case, he felt light-headed and near passing out as he stood before the bench, with Lillehorne positioned a few paces to his right. The guards had remained in the vestibule. Not another soul occupied this great columned courtroom with its vaulted ceiling, its upper balcony and its row upon row of spectator seats. Behind the bench there was a white wall sculpture of a heroic male figure at the reins of a six-horse chariot, the horses bounding forward and the muscles of the driver tensed as he held the steeds in check. Matthew noted that the driver wore a breastplate, his teeth were clenched and he’d been given a grin that said he was equal to the challenge of controlling this vehicle. Matthew had to wonder if the driver was modelled after the judge who sat beneath it.

There came the sound of the door’s handle being turned. Matthew’s heart stutter-stepped. Then … nothing. Perhaps the judge had forgotten something and gone back for it, or for some reason he’d paused in his entry. A few seconds passed, as Matthew watched the door that did not open.

Quite abruptly the handle turned, the door was nearly thrown open, and a slim man of medium height, his blonde hair bound in a queue with a black ribbon, came through. He was wearing a pearl-gray suit and waistcoat and he held a brown leather valise. He looked neither right nor left nor did he cast a glance at either of the two supplicants awaiting him, and he climbed up to his chair with the quick movements of a man who had energy to burn.

He situated himself, opened the valise and drew out some papers. He began to silently page through them. His mouth did not move as he read. Matthew had expected an older man but Judge Archer looked probably to be only in his early forties, or perhaps he was just well-maintained. He appeared a man who enjoyed a healthy breakfast. He had a high forehead, now furrowed as he digested the documents, and a long, narrow aristocratic nose. His eyes looked to be either dark blue or gray, it was difficult to tell at this distance. All in all, Judge Archer was a handsome man who certainly appeared to be cut from the upper crust, and Matthew figured he was from a long line of good breeding, exquisite manners, family money and mansions and of course the Oxford or Cambridge education. A doting wife, two delightful children with great prospects—if one was male certainly a future as a lawyer and judge himself—and all the English world spread out before him like a gigantic banquet on the best table money and old family connections could buy. Matthew felt very, very small—and very poor—indeed.

“Damn,” said the judge without looking up. Though he had the appearance of an Oxford gentleman, he owned the voice of a dockside brawler. “When’s the last time you had a bath?”

“Your Honor,” said Lillehorne, “Mr. Corbett was imprisoned in Plymouth, directly he disembarked from the—”

“Was I asking you?” The lean face with its sharp cheekbones came up. The equally-sharp gray eyes under thick blonde brows pierced Gardner Lillehorne as an archer’s arrow might pierce a soft, ripe apple. “Can this man speak, or is he as dumb as he looks?”

Matthew cleared his throat. God help him, he gave a little squeak in doing so. “I can speak, sir. My last bath was—”

“Forever ago, I’m sure. If I’d known your condition I would have met you in the alley and been done with this.” He slapped the papers down with a force that made Matthew jump and caused Lillehorne to nearly lose his grip on his cane. The gray eyes shifted toward the sheet in Lillehorne’s possession. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Your Honor, it’s the latest—”

“Oh, that’s what I’m smelling! The offensive odor of a beggar’s rag, printed with ink strained from the bowels of diseased lepers! Dare you bring that into my court? Here, approach the bench and deposit it, I’ll have my clerk come in and take it to be burned after we’re done.”

“Yes sir.” Lillehorne flashed a helpless glance at Matthew that said We are all up here, good luck and God’s mercy on your neck. He approached the bench, stood on tiptoes and reached up so high his back cracked, but he did deliver the Pin as instructed. Then he backpedalled, his head lowered and his eyes firmly fixed upon the floor.

“Mr. Matthew Corbett,” said Judge Archer, and then he simply sat staring at the prisoner as if getting ready to test the reins of this particular chariot, as broken-down and filthy as it was.

The silence stretched.

“Your tale interests me,” he went on. “An associate of the Herrald Agency? Well, I wouldn’t brag on that, as they cause the legal system here more trouble than they’re worth. Dealings with Professor Fell? A myth, as far as I’m concerned, and no one can make me believe he’s a single man. If indeed there is a ‘Professor Fell’, he is a stewpot of various other criminals who have forged some kind of alliance with each other, the better to do their harm to England.”

“Your Honor,” said Matthew, “I can tell you that—”

“Don’t interrupt me.” The fierce expression would have caused a lion’s balls to shrivel. “To continue: loss of memory? An abduction by a Prussian count who you say meant to kill you? And this business aboard the ship … what was its name?” He found the item in his papers. “Wanderer. Mr. Corbett, from what I have read you have committed murder. Now … your plea upon the magistrate at Plymouth that there is no proof of this man’s death, for there is no body, carries some truth, but to allow you to walk away from this incident with no penalty whatsoever would be an affront to my colleagues here and to my entire career. You know you meant to commit murder. The witnesses know it, and I know it. Even Lillehorne there, who has very inably come to your defense, must know it. It’s all here.” Archer lifted the papers in a sinewy hand and then let them fall, one after the other, while maintaining his nearly mocking gaze upon the prisoner. “You try trickery upon this court, Mr. Corbett, and we shall not abide it.”

Matthew saw his future tumbling away in the fall of those papers and this man’s callous—even sadistic—attitude. The panic that leaped up within him was tinged with the first embers of anger. “Please listen to me,” he said. “When I regained my memory and was going to tell the law about the murder of Quinn Tate, I was no longer of use to—”

“Ah, the murder of a poor madwoman in a wretched hovel! How is the court to know that is true, and not a lie or a delusion in keeping with this nonsense about Professor Fell?”

“You’re not hearing me!” This was delivered more loudly than Matthew had intended, and he felt his cheeks reddening not with shame but with indignation. “I was in the presence of Professor Fell! I have spoken with him and I know part of his history! He’s real, I can assure you! Didn’t Lillehorne tell you about Pendulum Island and the gunpowder—”

“That is Mister Lillehorne to you, sir!” Archer snapped. “And refrain from raising your voice to me in my courtroom! No, he has told me nothing of that, and he knows what I think of that whole mythology! I sincerely doubt your tale, sir, and so should the Honorable Mr. Lillehorne, for one central and inescapable reason … you are still alive, which should not be if indeed you did what you purport to have done! Now facts are facts, and the overwhelming fact is that you cut a lifeline in a storm at sea that doomed a man to certain death, and please don’t go jabbering on and taunting this court with melodies of whether the man is actually dead or not! My father was—and remains—a sea captain and I was born at sea. I know what a raging ocean does to a man in peril, and in this case it aided the murderous use of an axe to—”

“You need to see a physician immediately!” Matthew shouted, and at once there was silence.

“Matthew!” Lillehorne grasped his arm. “Don’t! Please remember your—”

“Hush,” Matthew said, and pulled his arm away. He kept his own hot gaze fixed on Judge Archer’s; where they met the air should have sizzled. He knew he ought to shut his mouth, he knew he ought to cower like a whipped dog … but he had to speak, and by God he was no whipped dog, even in these chains. “You need to see a physician immediately,” Matthew repeated, in spite of all the gongs and chimes of alarm ringing in his head, “to have him clean the tonnage of wax from your ears that prevent you from hearing anything you don’t wish to hear.” He let that simmer for a few seconds. Lillehorne gave a soft groan, but Archer sat without speaking or moving. “Everything I have stated is the truth,” Matthew vowed. “Count Dahlgren would have surely killed me before we reached port. I was never his servant, I was his unwitting captive. Should I have chopped that rope? No, I should not have. But at the moment … in that storm … after the fight and with my memory back … I lost my balance. And I’m telling you also that Professor Fell is no myth. If you think so, woe to you and woe to England because you’re playing directly into his hands. If I were sitting on that bench I would at least have the sense to interview my constables, to verify—”

“That,” said Judge Archer, in a very quiet voice, “will do.”

“Oh no it won’t! I’m not done!”

“Yes,” still said quietly, “you are done. Constable, if the prisoner makes one more offensive and belligerent noise in my courtroom I wish you to strike him across the face.” To Lillehorne’s expression of dismay, Archer added, “Or you too will find punishment for disobedience.”

“You can’t stop me from speaking!” Matthew objected.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Lillehorne under his breath, and he struck Matthew across the cheek with the flat of his hand.

“You call that a strike?” Archer asked. “That was a weak-willed tap.”

Matthew stared daggers at the judge. “A court can’t stop a man—”

He was hit again, harder.

“—from speaking!” Matthew shouted. “You refuse to even con—”

The next blow was much harder still, though delivered with a child-sized fist. “I’m sorry,” Lillehorne repeated. “Please … don’t—”

“—consider my circumstances!” Matthew continued, his voice ringing from the balcony, from the vaulted ceiling, from the sculpture of the heroic figure commanding the chariot, though now through a haze of pain Matthew thought the figure was not so heroic, it was not grinning so much as it was grinding its teeth trying to hold in check a team of runaways determined to run to freedom or die trying.

“You’re a danger, sir!” Matthew exploded. “A small-minded man in a great man’s—”

His eyes wide with fear for his own skin, Lillehorne hit Matthew with all the strength he could summon, a fist to the side of the bearded jaw.

Matthew staggered but did not fall. Damned if he would fall in this travesty of a court. His eyes watered a bit but he kept their focus on Archer, who was actually giving this scene a thin smile of approval. “Position,” Matthew said, finishing his previous statement. He spat blood upon the polished planks. “There,” he said. “Is that what you want?”

Lillehorne had cocked his arm back for another punch.

“That will do, Constable,” said the judge, and immediately Lillehorne’s arm dropped. He turned his back on the bench and walked away a few feet, where he leaned heavily on a railing. He was trembling, and he convulsed as if he were about to spew. “Restrain yourself,” Archer told him, in a voice that demanded obedience. “I wish you to hear your instructions.” He waited for Lillehorne to compose himself and turn around again. Matthew wiped blood from his lips and thought of a hundred other things he could—and should—hurl at this effigy of a judge, but the time had passed.

Archer folded his hands before him and looked down upon the prisoner. His smile had gone. His face was vacant of all emotion.

“You raise intriguing questions of life and death, of happenstance and responsibility,” he said. “I commend you for assembling these observations. That is all I commend you for. The court cannot and will not let you walk away from your actions without penalty, Mr. Corbett, yet research must be done to determine if this crime truly falls under the jurisdiction of the Old Bailey. Does it merit hanging if you’re found guilty? Well, that’s to be determined at an official hearing, which this is not. In the meantime …”

He tapped his fingers together, and Matthew had the sense that the man was enjoying this way too much.

“In the meantime,” Archer said, “the constable will with the necessary caution and the number of guards he deems appropriate … escort you to Newgate Prison, where—”

Lillehorne gave an audible gasp.

“Where,” Archer went on, “you will be held in confinement until your case appears officially on the docket, which could be … oh … six months?”

“Your Honor,” Lillehorne dared to venture, “may I ask that—”

“You may remain quiet,” came the reply, “and do your duty as ordered by a justice of the realm, unofficially speaking or not. The proper documents will be drawn up by day’s end. This is what I wish and it shall be done.”

“Yes sir,” was all that Lillehorne could say.

Matthew was stunned, to say the least. His brain reeled. Newgate Prison. The worst of the worst. Six months in that hole of Hell. Probably longer, if Archer could manage it and well he could; he had all the power now, and a bearded and bloody problem-solver from New York had none.

“You may prove yourself useful, Lillehorne,” Archer said. “Instead of standing on muddy ground with common criminals, use your means to pressure your office in two worthy areas: finding Madam Candoleri and putting an end to this madman who calls himself Albion. Don’t waste the court’s time and yours otherwise. That is all.”

Without a further word or glance at either of them the arrogant eminence got up from his chair, descended from the bench, and removed himself through the terrifying ebony door.

Even in the depths of his distress, Matthew could not help to note that Archer had taken the Pin.