Forty-Three

Dawn was a red slash to the east when the two men who’d talked were tied to the mouths of cannons, the barrels elevated over the parapet, and ten-pound cannonballs blasted through the men’s bodies out to sea.

The other three deaths had not been so clean, because the execution by cannon was Professor Fell’s brand of mercy.

After leaving the professor Matthew had banged on the locked door of Nash’s house and been admitted by the bandaged and bloodied man who by candlelight was getting drunk on a bottle of rum in the front room. He’d found Berry asleep and unharmed in a bed beside the sleeping Mrs. Nash. Matthew had caught the man up by the collar and told him that if either he or his wife forgot that Berry Grigsby was under both his and Fell’s protection he would kill them without hesitation. As he left the house, he realized that not only was he in partnership with the professor but he was taking on some of the ruthlessness required, because he had meant the threat.

He’d contemplated getting some sleep of his own, but it really would’ve taken drugs to get him calmed down enough to rest. Anyway, he had such a headache from his fight with Mother Deare that it would be impossible. He would rest when he collapsed and not before.

The festivity in the square was a merry scene, if one enjoyed seeing the limbs of screaming men being sawed off.

By the crimson light of a fire at the center of the square, Matthew had stood to one side and watched the five men be stripped and tied to chairs. A small number of people had gathered. The two fiddle-players, the accordionist and the tambourine girl had been brought out to add the bizarre touch of lively tunes to the proceedings. Austere and solemn in his black suit, Professor Fell had stood speaking to one of his men who held a handsaw. Another man had thought to bring an axe. A brazier and bellows had been set up and a iron put into the coals.

Fell asked no questions of any of the men. He simply gave a command and the arms and legs were sawed off one of the horsemen and one of the turncoat guards, the wounds cauterized with the iron after each limb was severed. In time with the music, the man with the axe chopped the arms and legs into pieces and they were shovelled into a leather bag. Fell announced to his new guests that the pieces would be thrown over the cliffs to attract the sharks, and then the torsos of those unfortunate men with the blood-drained faces and the eyes rolling in their sockets would be tossed over to join the feast. Those who refused to talk would become part of the meal, but if any man offered to at least partially blot this stain on his character he would be given a merciful death.

“Now,” Fell said, his arms crossed over his chest, “does anyone have anything at all to say?”

The first man who spoke up babbled that he had been a prisoner in the gaolhouse in Cardiff and had been freed with six others in a raid there two weeks ago, he knew nothing but the name of Cardinal Black and all he was doing, sir—kind sir—was taking orders in exchange for food and drink.

“Prepare that man,” Fell had said, and the sawblade had instantly gone to work. “I want some real information,” he told the remaining two, over the screams and the music. “Give me something of value or follow the others.”

It was amazing, what a saw, a cauterizing iron and the image of a torso being torn into by sharks’ teeth could do.

As the sun came up, Matthew stood in Berry’s cottage. He had no idea how long she would sleep in the bed at Nash’s house. He couldn’t bear to see her again in there, and it was pointless. He knew what he had to do and that at the very most he had thirty-four days to get it done.

But he lingered in Berry’s house awhile. He sat in a chair and watched the sun’s rays strengthen, as she might. He had a little time, as the professor had directed that a pair of horses be saddled and supplies be put into the saddlebags, and it would take about twenty minutes for everything to be readied.

One of the horsemen had revealed that Cardinal Black and his men—eighteen in number, subtracting their own casualties—had taken over the village of Adderlane. The harbor wasn’t deep enough for the mortar vessel to be kept at wharf, so it was anchored in the bay. There were lookouts all around the town, and they would be expecting retaliation but they were soon to be moving out by coach, horse and ship. When they were moving and where to, the man didn’t know. He had also been among the number of prisoners freed from the Cardiff gaol, and admitted that he’d been imprisoned there for the murder of a watchman during a robbery. He said that one gave allegiance to Cardinal Black by having a vein opened in the arm and blood dripped into a sacred jar during a ceremony, you got a burn on the underside of that arm in the shape of an inverted Cross—which had already been shown to all eyes in the man’s condition of stark nudity—you repeated some gibberish and thus you belonged not only to him but to the will of the Devil. If you failed to do that, you were gutted on the spot. The man claimed he had no use for things Satanic, but it was said that Cardinal Black had discussions with his own Master in the darkest hours of the night, and it was best to go along to stay alive.

About Cardinal Black’s origin and history he had no clue. Why this raid on the fortress village had taken place, the man was not told, but he understood from some of the others that there was something here that Black had spent much money, time and effort to get hold of.

The tower he thought Black had mentioned was a crumbling structure about a half-mile in the forest on this side of Adderlane, a medieval watchtower that was the last thing remaining of what must’ve been a sprawling castle. The man said he’d never been there, but he’d heard that the ‘tower’ was where Black went to commune with his Master. The Devil’s church, as it were.

The other man, one of the turncoats, said that Martin had approached him over a period of more than a month, had worked into his confidence and told him Miriam Deare was planning an organization of her own, that the professor was old and tired and he’d become too weak to manage the various operations.

“Pardon sir, pardon please, I’m just repeatin’ what I was told,” the poor terrified wretch had said.

“Go on,” Fell had answered, his face showing no reaction to this blasphemy.

The turncoat continued, haltingly, to relate his passage from Fell loyalist to fallen soul. What it came down to was something that Matthew knew the professor could readily understand: the lure of money and power. Those who helped Miriam Deare in what was expressed as a righteous cause in saving the empire Fell had built from breaking down like last century’s wagon were to be rewarded with more gold and higher positions of authority.

Matthew thought it was a tried-and-true story, and had made sense to those who’d participated. Thus the two cannons had fired and the two bodies torn apart, their stories ended but a new tale yet to begin.

It was time to get moving. Matthew had told the professor what Fell already knew, that Black had gotten only one of the books he’d desired. By now Black was well aware that since Mother Deare had not, presumably, taken a horse from the stable and met him at the tower he was not getting The Lesser Key. Black might find a copy at a bookseller, but it would likely not be in London. The professor had informed Matthew that the book was rare and made more so since Fell had bought up every copy in London at exorbitant prices. There was a possibility Black and his men might attack the Beautiful Grave again tonight or tomorrow night to get hold of it, or he might play a waiting game.

It made sense to Matthew that Cardinal Black would want a book detailing the demons of Hell and the incantations used to raise them, but why was it so important to the professor? On that subject, Fell would give no answer.

Concerning the book of potions, Matthew thought that if a band of Fell’s men—as paltry as they were—tried to attack Adderlane they would probably be cut to pieces. Worse than that, even if they succeeded in getting through the defenses Black might well destroy the book before it could be retrieved.

Matthew could not risk that, and the professor had agreed. In this case it was best to send only two men who might slip into Adderlane unseen. Still, two against eighteen?

There was no way around it.

Matthew made one last visit to Berry’s bedroom, to look at the rumpled bed where she slept. He sat down and smoothed his hand across her pillow as if smoothing the hair away from her cheek—and he felt something hard beneath the goosefeathers.

Lifting the pillow, he found a slim white box about the size of a sheet of paper. He opened the box and saw that, though the Berry he knew was in dire straits of disappearing, some part of her was fighting to remain.

The box held three worn charcoal pencils and several drawings. He examined the pictures one by one.

They were childlike scrawlings of different scenes. The first was the representation of a sailing ship at sea, people aboard the vessel shown as stick figures and the stick figures of fish leaping up from the water. The second depicted the scene of a town. The buildings and stick figure people were out of proportion, stick figure animals and wagons on the streets, a few black squiggles of what might have been ships in the harbor, everything done as if by an eight-year-old. Matthew didn’t think Berry had been trying to draw London, for there was a familiarity to the streets and also the long straight street in the middle.

It was the Broad Way, he realized.

And central in the drawing was a building taller than the rest with a small stick figure standing atop it. Berry had drawn little tears falling from the oval of the face.

Ashton McCaggers? he wondered. Sad because she’d left New York to come find him?

The third drawing made him catch his breath and hold it for a few long seconds.

It showed what might have been a pier with holes where some of the planks were missing. Standing at the end of the pier and facing the viewer were two stick figure people, one with a scribble of long curly hair. Both figures were smiling, and they were holding each others’ three-fingered hands. Up in the sky shone a childish rendition of the sun with a few curved lines representing birds.

At the bottom of the drawing, beneath the pier on which the happy couple stood, was laboriously written I LOV YOU.

Matthew stared at it for awhile. His eyes teared up. What was to be said about this, other than what he’d already said to the professor?

I’ll find the book and a chemist. If not, I’ll die trying.

He carefully returned the drawings to the box, closed it and put it back beneath the pillow, just so. He donned his cloak, his tricorn and a pair of black leather gloves the professor had given him earlier when a present was also made of a pistol, which now resided along with a leather powderflask in a holster at his waist, and the dagger with the ivory handle.

It seemed that, in a way, Albion would still be with him.

Outside it was cold though the sun was bright. It would get colder. An iron plating of gray clouds was approaching from the northwest. December was closing in, the winter yet ahead. On his walk to the stable Matthew considered the life and death of Judge William Atherton Archer. Perhaps sometime soon the Pin would cease its tales about Albion, and the golden-masked phantom of the night would fade into folklore. There would always be another darktime creature ripping into the headlines, and the Pin would never be wanting for tales of heroes and villains … and sometimes, those who were a little of both.

Perhaps also the more staid and respectable Gazette would have already run an article on the disappearance of the famous and rightly-feared Justice Archer, and have reported that the constables of London were searching for him high and low after some mystery of why Sir Archer was forcibly kidnapped from Whitechapel’s Cable Street Publick Hospital. And there was a mystery yet unexplained of why Sir Archer was a patient at said hospital, but—according to the young clerk Steven Jessley, who attended to Sir Archer among others at the Old Bailey—there was no trace of him nor any idea where he might have been taken or by whom.

And perhaps the Gazette, which probably cast an interested eye in the direction of the Pin’s readership, might comment that the editorial staff sincerely hoped Albion would look into this matter, since it seemed that the phantom, like Sir Archer, was the only one who gave a fig about the release of hardened criminals back upon the streets of fair London.

Matthew had seen Di Petri this morning after the cannon blasts, when he’d forced himself to go to the tavern and get something to eat. It had turned out to be a plate of cold beans and two corn cakes washed down with yesterday’s coffee, but Matthew put it all down knowing none of it would be drugged since anyone who put a pistol up on the bar and spun it while they were ordering their food obviously had graduated into the professor’s elite. Also, Matthew had told the keep that if anything was in his meal to hinder his mind Professor Fell would be loading up a third cannon. That brought him to a whole new level of respect.

Di Petri, his nose bandaged from his injury of last night, had sat at the table with Matthew and had refrained to eat after seeing all the mess being cleaned up in the square but wished to thank Matthew for his help in getting Madam Candoleri out of the theater. She had had a bad night but was resting, her wound being looked after by a man who had some medical knowledge, having related with a drug-loosened tongue that he’d been a student before he failed his courses and then entered the business of procuring cadavers for more earnest medical students in London. In any case, he had some knowledge of stitchery and a limited but adequate grasp of anti-infectant medicines, and he’d been promoted to be the village’s general physician.

“Rosabella told me you were asking about her cousin and her uncle,” Di Petri said. “Can you tell me what the professor’s after?”

“No, I can’t,” Matthew answered. “Rosabella can tell you about something her uncle created that’s attracted Fell’s attention, but she doesn’t know what it is and he refuses to tell me. She and I did have a nice talk, though.”

“Interesting. You say it’s something her uncle created?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose Rosabella told you, then, about her collection?”

“Her collection?” Matthew had put down his cup of absolutely wretched coffee. “Of what?”

“The mirrors,” said Di Petri. “She didn’t tell you? Every year on her birthday, since she was six years old, her uncle sent her a hand mirror that he’d created. She has two of them with her right now that she uses when she’s doing the madam’s makeup. I think in some way the mirrors caused her to become interested in the human face, and … being a woman … an interest in the application of theatrical makeup followed.”

Matthew paused while that information sank in. Then he asked, “Would you think of a hand mirror as furniture?”

“Not really. Why?”

“Just wondering. I wouldn’t, either.”

Di Petri had appeared puzzled over that question, but he’d brushed it aside to delve into what was to him a more vital subject. “Will the professor ever let us go?” When Matthew was silent, attending to drinking down the bitter brew, Di Petri said, “I don’t see how he can. He wouldn’t want the law to learn about this place, would he? I think he’d rather have us all killed.”

“I don’t know,” Matthew replied, because he honestly didn’t.

“We’ll lose our minds here, won’t we?” Di Petri asked. “Rosabella told me what you said about the drugs. Of course we’ve all noticed what most of the others are like. How could we not? Even last night, with all that going on, some of them were wandering around like sleepwalkers. And that woman who screamed in the audience. Alicia said when she looked out there she saw so many empty faces her voice was stolen. I assume we haven’t been given anything yet, because of the performance. I would think our food and water would soon begin to be tainted?”

There was no use in denying the truth any longer. “Yes,” Matthew said.

“What about you? Aren’t you in the same boat?”

“I have a task to perform that’s going to take me out of here. When I get back I’ll—” What? he asked himself. How could he possibly help Di Petri, Madam Candoleri and Rosabella? How could he help anyone escape this place but Berry and Hudson?

“You’ll actually come back on your own, without being forced? Why?”

“I have a responsibility. That’s all I can say.”

“Dio del cielo!” said Di Petri. “Surely while you’re out there you’ll help us! Find the law! Find someone who can get us out of here! Won’t you please? Not just for myself, but … Alicia is not nearly as strong as she pretends to be. She has had a very unstable life. Yes, of course with drugs making everything happy in our heads, we will all live here as if we would rather be nowhere else. But it’s a travesty, Matthew! It’s an evil! Please … if you can help us, and you won’t … then you become part of the evil, don’t you?”

Matthew was shaken by this, because there was no way he could avoid the truth of it. Still, all he could think about at the moment was getting that book of formulas back from what he knew would be an extremely dangerous opponent.

“I have to go,” he told Di Petri, and stood up from his chair.

“Please, Matthew! Please!” Di Petri had called, as Matthew headed for the door. “Don’t turn your back on the rest of us!”

With the image of Berry’s drawings burned into his brain, Matthew reached the stable. He found his horse, a chestnut steed, already saddled and being held for him by the stablemaster. The saddlebags, containing such items as a tinderbox, ammunition, extra flints for the pistol and pieces of dried and salted fish and beef, were also ready. Julian Devane, wearing a black cloak and with his dark green tricorn tilted at a slight angle upon his blonde-haired head, was standing beside his own roan horse. He wore a sword in a sheath at his side. Devane nimbly swung himself up into the saddle, spurs glinting at the heels of his boots. Matthew mounted his horse, set his boots in the stirrups, and without a word the two riders set off toward the front gate.

On the way, Matthew glanced toward Fell’s house and saw the figure of the professor standing upon his balcony watching them depart. Matthew thought of Hudson in the dungeon cell, but at least he’d been assured that no more of the ‘fear drug’ would be applied, and in a few days time Hudson would be getting a lantern down there, and a cot and chair. They passed on, and neither Matthew nor Devane looked back again.

A wagon had been situated in front of the entrance, the oaken gate itself having been destroyed by last night’s gunpowder bomb. It was pushed aside to allow the riders to go out, and Matthew followed Devane beyond the walls of the beautiful grave.

In the distance, many miles away, stood a line of blue-hazed mountains. For several hundred yards around Fell’s village the land was an unsightly morass of dark gray bogs streaked with brown and yellow, patches of knee-high grass likely hiding quicksand pits, and a few scraggly wind-sculpted trees reaching up as if for mercy from the brutal earth. The road that stretched from southeast to northwest was no more than a hardly-recognizable track across the ground. Ahead, in the direction the two riders must travel, the track curved into forest.

They had gone only a short distance when Devane reined his horse in and turned the animal to block Matthew’s progress.

The purple knot above Devane’s right eye had receded somewhat but the mottling of bruises had merged together to form a dark patch across his left cheekbone. His mouth curled when he said, “You’re well aware that this is a suicide mission, are you not?”

“I’m aware it’s a mission,” Matthew replied. “I don’t consider it suicidal.”

“Then you’re a bigger idiot than I suspected. And here you’ve dragged me into it!” He reached into his cloak with a black-gloved hand and brought out a pistol that had four short barrels, two atop two, and double triggers. “Should I kill you now or later, and tell the professor this was a fool’s errand?”

“It should be later,” Matthew said calmly. “The guards up on the parapets could likely hear the shot from this distance.”

Devane urged his horse forward until he was side-by-side with Matthew. The sun faded; the ironwork of clouds had arrived.

“Hear me well, Corbett,” Devane said. “I don’t like you, I don’t like this damned circumstance you’ve gotten me into, and if I somehow survive it I will make you pay. But I will do this to the best of my ability, because I’ve given my word and I abide by that rule. I have killed many and most of those deaths I enjoyed dealing out. If I have to kill you, I will … and you have my word on that. Understand?”

“Without question,” said Matthew.

“I am the bad man,” Devane said. “Just so you know.”

Again without question, Matthew thought, but he remained silent.

Then Devane put his gun away and wheeled his horse toward the northwest. Matthew gave his mount a flick of the reins and followed behind, his resolve ready for both saving the woman he loved and meting out justice to the killer behind the deaths of his brother and sister Broodies, as he’d vowed to a lost friend.

They went on along the road, the good and the bad across the ugly landscape.