Cardinal Black

by Robert McCammon

  “Yes…well, sir…you see…Lord and Lady Turlentort are two of our best customers. I mean to say—”

  “Say what?” Julian took hold of the sword’s grip.

  “I don’t…think they would appreciate sharing a coach. In fact I know they would not.”

  “Are they already in the coach?”

  “No, sir.” He nodded toward the office’s grandfather clock but Matthew noted he kept one nervous eye on the sword. “They’ll be arriving within the hour, and due to leave as soon as they board.”

  “I think,” said Julian to Matthew, “that we’re talking to the wrong man.” He retrieved the guinea and removed a second coin from the belt before the belt went back into the scabbard. Then he sheathed the sword and was going out the door so fast he seemed to Matthew to be naught but a blur.

  “You the driver?” Julian asked one of the men, who was busy lacing up the canvas.

  “Shooter,” was the reply, meaning he was the armed guard. “Benson’s the driver.” He gave Julian a long hard look. “You ain’t Lord Turlentort, so who the hell are—”

  “Your new passengers,” said Julian, holding the gold up under the man’s hooked nose. “My friend and I want to go to London today, in this coach. I don’t give a fuck about any lord and lady, they can come along if they want to, but we’re riding in this coach today to London. Got that?” Before the man could answer, Julian called out, “Benson! Come over here!”

  The shooter didn’t have to think very long. He said, “Fuck if I care either, I don’t run this damn shop.” He snatched the coin from Julian’s hand, while Matthew stood watching this endeavor with more than a little bemusement.

  When Benson—an older gray-bearded and mustached gent who appeared to have quite the number of road miles on his stoop-shouldered shape—took the offered guinea it was explained to him that for both men to receive a second helping of gold coins they would not be stopping overnight at a coach inn, but just long enough to change horses, get something to eat and drink, piss and drop a fig or two if it was necessary, and then hell’s blaze on toward London.

  “Got that?” Julian asked, his face right up in the driver’s.

  The old man sucked his upper lip down and chewed on his mustache while he regarded the guinea, which seemed to shine even more brightly on this cold, grim and blustery morning. At last he gave a guttural grunt and rasped with dusty lungs, “Can be done.” Then he stuck a black clay pipe in the wrinkle of his mouth, and when he went around to see to the horses he sauntered like the king of Siam.

  Matthew and Julian climbed in and took one of the red-leather-covered bench seats that faced the other. The windows were protected from the elements by wooden shutters, and overhead in a rack was a dark blue horse blanket. On both sides of the interior, mounted on the wood in gimbals that kept them steady, were oil lamps with little red shades.

  They didn’t have long to wait. Within ten minutes there came the sound of clopping hooves and turning wheels. Julian opened the window shutters on his side and Matthew caught sight of an elaborately decorated carriage with a uniformed driver and being pulled by a team of white horses.

  Julian removed his pistol and put it in his lap.

  They could hear some inane pleasantries being exchanged between the male new arrival and Benson, who didn’t let on about the present occupants. Then the door on the street side came open and a middle-aged woman in a white coat, a dress like a frosted cake and a high white wig was being helped into the coach by the shooter. Her heavily rouged and eyelined face took on the distortion of distress as she saw the two men within, but she was given a shove that was a little more than rude and she came tumbling in like a sack of the queen’s laundry. Then the man in his white coat and attempt at the beribboned military uniform of some unknown force and country entered much the same way, and his heavily rouged and eyelined face under his high white wig took on the same expression. “What the devil!” he sputtered.

  “Yes,” said Julian. He put his hand upon the pistol and smiled. “Good morning to you both.”

  “This is a private coach!” said Lord Turlentort, the nostrils of his huge nose flared and his painted eyebrows lifted nearly to his false hairline. “Driver! Driver, come here!” he shouted.

  Benson came, said, “On our way in a moment, sir,” and shut the door with a flourish.

  “I won’t stand for this!” The lord reached for the door’s handle but his hand stopped in midair when Julian lifted the pistol.

  “Nice day for a trip to London,” Julian said, and still smiling he scratched his unshaven chin with the four barrels.

  “Heavens!” cried the lady. “They’re ruffians bound to rob us!”

  “Not at all, fair one,” Julian answered. “We’re simply in need of transportation to London. You’re going there, so are we, and all is right with the world.”

  “The company shall hear of this, and mark it well!” Lord Turlentort threatened, but Matthew was sure that like so many others had been in Julian’s career, the man’s fearful eyes were fixed on that damned pistol.

  “I’ll mark it in my book of sins.” Julian set the gun down again; Matthew thought that if that thing went off in here all that would be left of the Turlentorts would be wig curls and false eyelashes.

  “Pullin’ out!” Benson shouted, and then, the traditional coachman’s cry for luck from the gods of safe travel: “Tally ho!”

  With a jarring lurch the coach started off and quickly gained speed. Matthew mused that Benson might be a Jarvey—a regular, speed-conscious coachman—but the gold guinea and the promise of another had turned him into a Jehu, a coachman who drove the team with reckless abandon.

  “Good Christ, we’re moving fast!” said the lord as the wheels really started turning. There came the sound of the whip cracking the air. The coach itself began rocking back and forth, the weathered wood without and the varnished wood within making whines and pops of protest.

  “Faster we move, faster we get there,” said Julian. “Settle back and enjoy the ride.” He touched his saddlebag. “I have some dried beef and fish I would share, if you’d like.”

  “We certainly would not!” said the lady. She looked near tears. “Travelling with two…two unkempt criminals is not my idea of a wonderful journey! You both smell vile!”

  Matthew decided to try to ease the woman’s fears. “I apologize for the aroma, but baths have not been on our recent agenda. May I ask why you’re going to London?”

  Neither one replied for a few seconds, and then the lady sniffed and said, “Shopping, of course! Everyone who is anyone does their shopping in London!”

  “Little you’d know of that!” sneered the lord.

  “True,” said Julian. “I do prefer to rob for what I want. Also, killing is high on my list of pleasures. I’ve already sent a man to his grave this morning. It’s what I do, just after breakfast.” He glanced at Matthew. “Isn’t that right, Scar?”

  Matthew was taken aback, but he thought it best to go along. “Correct. I mean…right.”

  “Are they joking, Edgar?” the lady asked, newly stricken. “Tell me they’re joking!”

  “We never joke about murder,” said Julian, grim-faced, and with a voice that would’ve made a professional assassin blanch.

  The coach went on, rumbling and grumbling along the rutted road. Rain pelted the roof and Matthew envisioned the driver and shooter up there both curled up in their coats, under their hats with water dripping from the brims. In spite of the weather, Benson did not spare the speed, and Matthew figured the horses were being pushed to their limits, but Benson must have enough experience not to exhaust them entirely before they reached the next coaching inn.

  Lady Turlentort had taken to opening a little white clamshell of a purse and dabbing her flabby throat from a bottle of perfume that smelled of roses, faintly rotten.

  “Unshaven, unwashe
d beasts!” Edgar muttered. “I shall ruin this company!”

  “Oh we’re not so bad,” said Julian. “You should have seen the men we’ve had to kill.”

  “Killing! Killing! Killing!” Edgar’s nostrils flared wide again. “Is that all you live for?”

  “No. I do like the occasional slice of chocolate cake.”

  “Madness! You two belong behind the bars of Newgate Prison!”

  “I’ve been there,” Matthew said, and realized at once that such a statement simply painted him a darker villain. The expression of renewed horror on the faces of the lord and lady spurred him on. “I broke out, of course.” And then: “No prison can hold me.”

  Lady Turlentort stared at him as if he were a creature never seen before in the world…at least, not in her world. “You don’t appear to have the face of a killer. I mean to say…I see that scar, but—”

  “Tell them how you got that scar,” Julian suggested.

  “Well,” Matthew began, “I was—”

  “—about to be hanged by the neck for the murder of three men and a woman,” Julian interrupted, his voice again as one nearly speaking from beyond the tomb. “Right there under the hangman’s noose, he stood. About to go kick the very Devil in his ass. And then…his gang stormed the town square…swarmed over the gallows with their swords and pistols, cutting down every man of the law in sight.” He nodded, looking back and forth from the two wide-eyed faces. “Yes. But…the executioner himself had a hook for a hand. Just as a pistol ball parted the rope that would send Scar to his maker…the executioner swung on him. Carved him, just as you see. And with the blood streaming from his face, Scar threw himself at the executioner and down they fell from the gallows to the gore-soaked ground below. They fought as animals do, down on that bloody battlefield, and—”

  “But…” Edgar Turlentort’s voice was a wisp. “Scar’s hands were tied behind him, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, of course they were! I was about to say, they fought as animals do, though Scar’s hands were tied behind him. And this executioner…well, he was viciously strong, and had been known to use his hook on unsuspecting victims late at night as they staggered drunk with rum from their taverns, though such could never be proven. That is to say, the executioner’s soul was far from being lily-white.”

  “Quite far!” said the lady.

  “Indeed,” Julian replied. “As I was relating, Scar fought for his life. Kicking at his tormentor, you see, with his hands bound behind him. And just as the executioner was about to slash his hook across Scar’s throat…I shot him in the back of the head with this very pistol you see before you.”

  No one spoke, at first, as the coach creaked and squeaked, the wheels made a low thunder and the horses’ hooves thudded on the earth, and then Lord Turlentort let go the breath he’d been holding.

  “Zounds!” he said, so quietly it seemed he feared the wrath of a dead executioner.

  The lady cleared her throat, fanned herself with a gloved hand, shifted her position on the seat and cleared her throat a second time. “Let me ask…a simple question, really…but out of curiosity…young man, did the four you murdered…how shall I put this?…did they in any way deserve such an end?”

  “No doubt!” said Julian. “They were a ring of black-hearted villains brutalizing orphans.”

  Matthew lowered his head a fraction and stared down at the floorboards. Julian had no way of knowing that the pursuit of such a black-hearted villain who actually did brutalize orphans had brought him to New York from the Carolina colony in 1699, and had led to his recruitment into the Herrald Agency and in essence a new life and calling.

  “I don’t approve of taking justice into one’s own hands,” said the lord. “Yet…I imagine this ring of villains might have been operating beneath the attention of the law?”

  “Absolutely so,” said Matthew, who spoke the truth. “I had no choice but to try to trap him myself. I mean…trap them.”

  Julian was looking at him oddly, as if this tale had taken wings and flown away from him. He righted himself in an instant. “But, alas, simple trapping did not do the job nor save a single orphan. So…I won’t go into the bloody details, but suffice to say the villains went to their rewards and Scar here was seized and a rope put about his neck.”

  “Hm,” Lord Turlentort said after a moment’s consideration, “the executioner might have been part of the ring. Do you think?”

  “I have often thought as much,” Julian answered. “You know…lord and lady…that if one is a villain, sometimes it is because villainy is the only open avenue when all others have closed. Then—by chance—one must wear his villain’s cloak with a measure of pride, to best fight the darkest of evils. Thus Fate steps in and directs the course. What you see before you…myself and Scar…well, we are here to tell that tale.”

  “Oh, agreed!” the lady said. “I understand completely!”

  “Somehow,” said Julian with his most charming smile, “I knew you would.”

  Rain was still beating down, yet Benson still drove the horses hard. Lord Turlentort opened the window shutters to peer into the storm, then he snapped them tight again. Winter’s light had turned gloomy. The lord reached into his coat, brought out a gold tinderbox, went about striking a flint and sparking the cotton and then he touched flame to the two oil lamps, which spread what Matthew considered a nice, comfortable and warming glow.

  They had not gone much further when Lord Turlentort put his hand over his wife’s and she seemed to settle against him. Cautiously, he said to the villain, “I must ask…since we are fellow travellers and are here in these confines…with time on our hands…do you have any further…um…episodes you might relate?”

  “Oh, yes,” Julian said. He again offered up the smooth smile. “Prepare to be amazed.”

  two.

  london calling

  eight.

  It was a dark and stormy night. Truly it was. But with a difference, for the late-night lanterns of London taverns cut the dark, sending yellow beams out into the streets like lifelines to guide their patrons in from the storm, which had arrived over the city not as a howling horror but as a softer sigh of falling snow. Matthew mused that the snowfall—heavier within the last hour, and now blowing up flurries that swept through and nearly obscured those same tavern lights—was soon to completely cover the broken bricks and rude cobbles of the low city as well as the grand mansions and manicured parks of the high. All would be joined in white, in this town of many tones of gray.

  Matthew and Julian trudged through the swirl, the former following the latter by several strides for it was clear Julian had another destination in mind in addition to the four taverns they’d already visited. The cold bit at Matthew’s cheeks and nose, the snow beginning to dash him in the face with flakes that felt edged with ice. When a wagon or a coach passed, the sounds of the wheels and the horses’ hooves were so muffled as to be nearly inaudible, and even the cries of a madman on a corner ahead were simply echoes within echoes, the snow imposing a quiet upon the most raucous of furies.

  What part of the city they were in, Matthew had no clue. After Benson had let the exhausted couple of Lord and Lady Turlentort stagger from the coach in front of the majestic Mayfair Arms Inn and unloaded their baggage for the handlers to carry, he had agreed to take Matthew and Julian a mile or so further to the southeast, under Julian’s direction to a locale called Pepperpot Alley. There Julian paid Benson and his shooter, Hedges, the other gold guineas and the coach—its driver and shooter ready for two days of solid sleep—trundled off, leaving its previous passengers staring through the flurries at what Matthew saw was indeed a narrow alley with red lanterns showing in the windows of several questionable establishments and a sign that announced this was the entrance to Howe’s Cavern.

  But the Cavern did not suit Julian. After one quick look around he was off again without a word, h
is cloak pulled up around his neck and his saddlebag across his shoulder. The next tavern they entered, further along the snow-dusted alley and named The Boggy Bottom, likewise held not a long interest from Julian, but here Matthew stood his ground and demanded to at least get a plate of the spinach pie that was advertised on the chalkboard, as well as a cup of hot chicken broth since the last meal he’d eaten—and quickly at that—was a bowl of stewed tomatoes and a slice of cornbread from the coaching inn they’d paused at six hours ago. Julian relented and they sat down in the corner with Julian’s hand always on his pistol and his eyes ready for trouble from the surly-looking patrons. Matthew ordered his food and hoped for the best, Julian ordered a bowl of beef-and-rice soup that he said would likely be horsemeat, and they took a few moments of ease.

  Then…off again.

  The Black Grin Of Wisdom…one minute and out. “Who are we searching for?” Matthew asked as they left the odious place, which was the wisest thing to do.

  “Someone important,” was the answer. “He’ll be out and about tonight, he always is.”

  Cat And Mouse…no once more, and then off to the east several streets to another bounty of bedlam, starting with a decrepit-looking hole that bore a sign identifying it as The Octopus Garden, a title which Matthew thought would meet with great interest from Professor Fell himself.

  Before Julian pushed through the door he said, “I have hopes for this one.”

  “I have hopes to get next to a fireplace,” Matthew muttered through lips as cold and stiff as metal.

  They went in.

  The trip from Bristol had taken thirty-eight hours, with several stops at various coaching inns along the route but only long enough for the necessities. Benson had crawled into the coach to get a few hours’ sleep while Hedges drove the team, and then they switched up. Lord and Lady Turlentort would have been driven mad by the frenzied pace if Julian hadn’t put on a performance that Matthew thought was masterful. In the pitching and swaying coach, Julian Devane took the Turlentorts away from their misery by the tales he spun, and whether they were true or not—and Matthew doubted any of them were true—the Turlentorts ate them up like sugar candies.