He paused outside the room to pick up the lantern that was burning with a low wick on a nearby table and that was when he saw the open door to Julian’s room. Peering in and holding the lamp up, he saw that Julian’s bed was empty.
A noise alerted him. He walked into the parlor, where Julian stood with a blanket wrapped around himself, using a poker to stir embers in the hearth.
“I woke up cold,” Julian said, with a quick glance at Matthew. “Drafty in that damned room. Did I miss Christmas Day?”
“By a few hours,” Matthew answered.
“I always enjoyed Christmas Day.” Julian continued to poke at the embers. At the back of the hearth a few small tongues of flame began to lick at a piece of charred wood. “One can enjoy the day without belief in God, you know.”
“I imagine so.”
Julian ceased his work with the poker, put it aside and held his palms out toward the warmth. “Are we still at the same inn?” he asked. His voice was yet somewhat slurred.
“The same.”
“Because of me, I’m supposing.” One hand went down to gingerly touch the wrapping that hopefully secured his ribs from moving around too much. “That doctor…had quite the strength. I remember that.” He shot a severe glare at Matthew. “Why the hell didn’t you go on? I would have.”
“According to Fell’s calculations,” Matthew replied, “we are returning in the proper time. And Firebaugh has consented to give us no more trouble. In fact, I’ve talked him into looking forward to meeting the professor.”
“Huh. You missed your calling. You should’ve been a politician. Or a priest.”
“Unlikely,” said Matthew.
“I need to sit down,” Julian said, and he very slowly settled himself into a chair, his face still gray and pinched with pain.
“You were running a fever.”
Julian put a hand up to touch his shaven scalp. “Well, now I’ve got the chills, so obviously I am no longer feverish. But I’m damned hungry. My stomach is an empty hole. Can you get me something?”
“I’ll see.” Matthew didn’t wish to waken the Varneys, who slept in a back room off the kitchen, but he quietly followed the lamp’s light into the kitchen and found on a platter two corncakes that had not been consumed at the previous meal. He took the platter to Julian, who finished them off in a matter of seconds and then asked for a drink. Back to the kitchen Matthew went, finding a clay flagon of the apple cider in the pantry. He measured out a mugful and in the parlor Julian poured the cider down his throat as if it were the golden liquid of life.
“Better,” Julian said. “Not perfect,” he amended. “But better. We should get back on the road at first light.”
“I don’t think you’re able yet.”
Julian didn’t reply for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe not. I couldn’t control the team.”
“I’m driving the rest of the way. I think we’ll probably have two more stops before we get back.”
“Right.” Julian closed his eyes and was silent. Matthew thought he’d gone to sleep sitting up, but at last Julian said with his eyes still closed, “I have killed many men. Many. I have lost count. Isn’t that terrible?”
“Honestly? Yes.”
“Some deserved to die. Others did not.” His eyes opened. “Should I feel guilty?”
Matthew suspected that all of Julian’s guilt was concentrated upon the boy he had crushed beneath a runaway horse on a London street. He couldn’t find an answer.
“I don’t,” said the bad man. “In my profession—my calling—guilt leads to introspection, and introspection leads to hesitation, and hesitation leads to death. I don’t fear it, but I don’t wish it just yet. Does that make sense to you?”
“You didn’t finish Lash off,” Matthew said. “You had the chance. Why not?”
“Lash was already finished. I didn’t choose to waste the shot. Oh…you’re thinking I should’ve been merciful, and not allowed him to lie in that snow and linger for an hour? That’s all the time he had left. I didn’t choose to waste the shot,” he repeated. He watched the small fire burn. Then he drew a short but painful breath and slowly released it. “The truth…is that…in some way…I think I admired him. I think…for all he was…Lash believed in something. A vision…a plan…a hope. I have never had any of those. One day to me is the same as another. One job…the same. One killing…the same. Oh, of course I am good at what I do.”
“No doubt,” said Matthew.
“Proficient at what I do,” Julian corrected. “The professional, hard at work building…what? A future? My future consists of the time I have left before someone more proficient finishes me off. A younger gun, so to speak. Though I am not old. I am not. Not yet. But…I wish I had something to believe in, Matthew. I wish I had what Lash possessed…and what I took from him, because I recognized my own lack of hope…and I burned his away. Was he a bad man, Matthew?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call his methods pristine.”
“But his motivations…was he bad?” Julian asked, and it seemed he wanted to hear an answer more than anything else in the world. “Really…truly…was he bad?”
Matthew had no certain reply. Samson Lash had wished to conduct the building of his airship with the auction of the book, yet the building of the airship though important to his self-worth was equally important to him to insure the military strength of England against future enemies. Of course such a thing was a mad idea, but who could say what the passage of time might bring? And Lash had given Elizabeth a chance to grow beyond the confines of the Highcliff asylum, and it was out of a strange—one might say warped—love for her that he provided an outlet for RakeHell Lizzie safe from the streets of London.
His figurehead, Matthew mused. Lash had never touched her, nor seemed to want to.
And why not?
Because Lash was still faithful in his own way to the wife who had lost her mind.
Bad or good?
Matthew thought that it was all a mix. As, perhaps, it was in every human being who walked upon the earth.
Except maybe one.
Who went by the title of Cardinal Black. Matthew could see nothing in that one but an avarice for power…demonic power, at that…and Matthew doubted very seriously that Black had any humanitarian motivations for his association with his ‘master’. What Black might do if he had gotten hold of that mirror…well, the whole thing was insane, anyway. A mirror created by a sorcerer to summon up a demon from Hell?
Insane.
“Black,” Matthew said. “Do you think he’s still out there?”
Julian considered it. He said, “If he’s not, someone like him will always be.”
With Matthew’s help, because Julian’s strength was at a low ebb, Julian returned to his room and slept until midday, when he came hobbling out of his chamber and announced to Ann Varney that he craved something substantial to eat, and preferred beef if she had it. A bowl of beef stew served the purpose. Matthew went out walking on another sunny afternoon with Firebaugh, who maintained the act of keeping the cord around his wrists to soothe the Varneys’ fears that he might attempt an escape.
On the following morning, Doctor Clark arrived to take an inspection of his patient, who at the moment was dressed in a robe and seated in the parlor involved in a game of whist with the Varneys and Matthew. Clark pronounced Julian still in precarious condition, but apparently on the road to recovery. About three hours after the doctor left, a coach pulled up out front and out of it came a well-dressed man and woman, their daughter of about fourteen years of age, and two businessmen all on their way to London from Plymouth. It was determined that this new group of travellers would need to stay the night, and therefore the time had come for goodbyes to be said to the Varneys, and for Matthew and Julian in their newly-clean clothes and that foul murderer Firebaugh in his not-very-clean and obviously ill-sized clothing
to be on their way.
Matthew was able to purchase a spare coat and cap from Varney, since the innkeeper could easily buy their replacements in Whistler Green. Added to the purchase were two good woolen blankets to ease the comfort of the passengers in the semi-open-aired landship.
Thus, with bellies full, as much sleep as they had required, and the parchment of passage and the book of potions within the coach, they set out under a blue sky with Matthew at the reins. As he urged the rested team into a brisk canter away from the Flying Dragon he hoped the carnage on the road to the southeast had already been discovered by a coach travelling to the northwest, and that the lovely and charming fourteen-year-old daughter would never have to lay eyes upon such evidence of violence.
five.
revelation
thirty-three.
The spyglass was mounted on a tripod. The glass itself was turned toward the northwest, aimed at the road taken by Matthew and Julian Devane. Behind the glass was the eye of Hudson Greathouse, and before both the glass and the eye the road remained empty across the flat plain of snow-covered Welsh landscape. Though the afternoon sky was blue and streaked only with high clouds, cold wind blew hard over the roofs of Y Beautiful Bedd from the sea beyond.
Hudson stood upon a parapet of Fell’s fortress, just above and beside the wagon that still blocked the front entrance between the walls of ancient gray stones. The oaken door that had been destroyed by a gunpowder bomb in the attack nearly two weeks ago was yet in the process of being rebuilt at the carpentry shop. On either side of Hudson two guards with muskets walked the ramparts, and as Hudson peered through the spyglass one of them ambled toward him.
“Anythin’?” the man Hudson had come to recognize as Dan Gravelling asked.
“No,” said Hudson. He straightened up from the glass and pulled the collar of his brown corduroy coat up higher. The fit of his black wool cap was disturbed by the width of his ears. “He’ll be along, though.”
“You mean the both of ’em will be along.”
Hudson smiled grimly. This was a little game of words the two had begun playing in the last week. “That’s what I meant, Dan.”
Gravelling leaned on his musket. “I’ve been wonderin’ for a time, and I’ve got to ask. A big fella like y’self,” he said. “How the hell did they drag you here?”
“It was a woman’s knee to the face, and three thugs with pistols to back it up,” Hudson answered, referring to the hefty knee of Mother Deare that had sent him into dreamland and brought both himself and Berry Grigsby in a guarded coach to Fell’s little village—a little prison for its unfortunate inhabitants—on the windswept and sea-crashed coast of Wales.
“Was she a looker?”
“Oh yes, a real beauty. Caught me sleeping.” Hudson knew the man would recognize the name—and froggish face—of the hideous Mother Deare, but he hated to blight anyone’s fantasy.
“Figured as such,” said Gravelling, who Hudson had found was one of those salt-of-the-earth workmen who were here not because of any evil affiliation but because the accommodations were free and the protection assured. Gravelling was on the run from the law in Newport for physically assaulting a judge. He was an able watchman but honestly he didn’t possess more than a thimbleful of brains.
Gravelling took a pinch of snuff from a small pouch brought out of his coat, inhaled it and offered the pouch to Hudson, who shook his head and returned his eye to the glass. “Day in and day out. Seen you up here in the night as well,” Gravelling said. “Standin’ out here in the cold and the snow fallin’ so thick it whitewashed the world. That fella Corbett must owe you a grand sum of money.”
“Thousands of pounds,” said Hudson, moving the glass to scan the far distant woods.
“Really?”
“God’s truth.”
“Well, no wonder you’re up here so often wishin’ him back. I mean, them back. I ain’t had a whole lot of…what would be the word?…assayin’ with Mr. Devane, but he don’t seem a bad sort. Keeps to himself, though. But he’ll speak back if you speak to him first.”
“A real prince, from what I know.”
“A prince? Nah, he ain’t royalty. Just an ordinary bloke.”
Hudson gave a noncommittal grunt and continued his surveillance of the empty road.
“You ain’t the only one so interested,” said Gravelling, and when Hudson looked at him with an inquiring expression Gravelling motioned with a lift of his grizzled chin toward the far realm of Y Beautiful Bedd.
Over the blackened ruins of several structures and those that were being laboriously rebuilt by the village’s workforce, Hudson saw him standing on the upper floor of his castle-like lair, his eye to his own tripod-mounted spyglass aimed to the lonely road.
“I hear tell—just a whisper of it, really—that you and him has become pals,” said Gravelling.
“Hardly.” Hudson leaned against the rampart’s wall and wished he’d thought to bring a flagon of something hot and very strong in terms of alcohol.
“I hear you supped with him.”
“That was a while back.”
“Well, maybe so, but still and all…I ain’t never seen him up close. I mean, I seen him that night in the square when we put paid to them raiders, but not up close.” Gravelling’s eyes narrowed. “There he goes inside again. Man as slight as he is, hard to bear this cold. But he’ll be out at that glass before an hour’s up, and you can mark it. Maybe one of them two owes him money?”
Hudson realized Gravelling was asking him what was going on, since the hired help—and the guards here had their own pecking order, which Gravelling was low on the peck—didn’t receive the benefit of much information. “Maybe so,” Hudson said.
“I seen ’em ride out. That Corbett fella and Mr. Devane. A mismatched pair if there ever was, if you ask me.”
“Agreed,” said Hudson, “but I’m hoping the strengths of one will help the other survive.” More like hoping Julian Devane could keep Matthew from being killed…unless Devane had already killed him, and climbing up to this parapet to sweep the canvas covering off the tripod and glass and keep watch every day for hour upon hour was a useless—
“Coach comin’!” shouted the second guard, McBray, a small slim man who had murdered his mother-in-law.
Hudson instinctively looked to the northwest, but the road to Adderlane remained empty. He turned his face toward the southeast…
…and there it was…still in the distance, over two miles away…
Hudson redirected the glass and put his eye to it.
“Coach comin’!” McBray shouted again, in case the men who manned other sections of the ramparts had failed to hear his booming bawl as it swept across the village.
Hudson made out that it was a strange-looking vehicle…huge…resembling more of a ship than a coach…pulled by four giant horses…and who was that up at the reins? Coat and cap, the face a smear, still indistinct…
“He’s come to looksee again,” Gravelling said, and Hudson knew he must mean Professor Fell.
Hudson kept his eye to the glass. The team was walking; obviously they had already travelled a distance today and the driver was not pushing them. A little closer, and closer still…and then Hudson could make out the driver’s face.
He hadn’t realized how strained he was, waiting for this moment. He hadn’t realized, in his sleepless nights of reaching for a bottle in the little cottage Fell had given him, that he had thought Matthew would never return from this suicidal mission, that the boy was dead either by Devane’s hand or some other equally as foul, that Berry was lost, that all was lost. He’d thought it impossible that Matthew should come back, and many times he’d entertained the idea of stealing a horse and taking out on the road to Adderlane, but the idea of leaving Berry in the clutches of Frederick and Pamela Nash prevented it.
Therefore he was unprepared
for the rush of emotion that hit him like a moving brick wall.
Hudson Greathouse staggered. No blow from a human fist had ever stunned him as did the sight of Matthew Corbett driving that huge coach in toward Y Beautiful Bedd, nor had any drink of knee-dropping liquor ever burst the brilliance of a sun more brightly in his soul.
“God’s truth!” Gravelling marvelled. “Is that them?”
“Damn right it is!” With his next shout to the men below, Hudson nearly blew Gravelling off the rampart. “Move that wagon! Now!” He didn’t wait for the command to be obeyed; he went down the first four stone steps and vaulted the rest of the stairs to the ground. Hudson put his shoulder against the wagon and along with three other men shoved the thing out of the way.
The big horses came through, pulling the ship-shaped coach, and in the village’s square Matthew reined the team in. “Whoa, whoa!” he called out, and had to fight the reins as the headstrong horses still didn’t care much for their new driver even after all those miles.
The wheels stopped turning. With a final creak, the coach was still.
Matthew looked about himself, at the houses of Y Beautiful Bedd and the faces of the people gathering around. Who would ever have believed he would be overjoyed—a weak word to describe his feeling—to have returned to this place?
“You took your damned time, didn’t you?” Hudson called up, standing with his hands on his hips. “Nearly two weeks?”
“Better late,” Matthew said, “than never.” He heard his voice crack. He was exhausted from this final leg of the trip, but it seemed now that the last thing in the world he wanted to do was sleep. The possible cure for Berry’s condition was too close at hand. Also he was overjoyed to see that Hudson had recovered from being the cowering, terrified and drugged shell of a man he’d been when Matthew and Julian had left.
Cardinal Black Page 38