“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.
Eleven
STEADY,” Lillehorne said, but his weak voice was of no comfort to Matthew, who watched from the coach’s barred window as the entrance arch of Newgate drew nearer.
The dark castle of Newgate Prison, made even more gloomy by the chill, rainy weather and the overhanging clouds, stood as the next building to the Old Bailey’s Court Of Session House. It was connected to that structure by a flagstone walk between two stone walls. Matthew knew from his reading of the Gazette that many thousands had taken the journey along that path, which was referred to as the “dead man’s walk” since a high percentage of those who undertook it were destined for the undertaker. It was also called “the Birdcage”, for the walkway itself was covered over by a grating of iron bars. Lillehorne had arranged for the coach to drive Matthew and the two attendant guards the short distance into the prison, possibly making a statement that Matthew was not yet convicted and should be treated as such. Matthew thought Lillehorne was not all bad, just as certainly as William Atherton Archer was not all good.
Lillehorne leaned forward toward his charge. The two guards were sitting on either side of Matthew, pinning him in, but their show of strength was not necessary since under the burden of his chains the young man was virtually helpless.
“Listen to me well,” Lillehorne said, both quietly and pointedly, as the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves drew the coach ever nearer to that grim monument to despair. “I am going to speak to the warden on your behalf. That may do some good with him, but you’ll be on your own with the other inmates. Needless to say…within Newgate lies another world…and not one that will be kind to you.”
“This one has been no Father Christmas.”
“The time for witticisms is over and the time for wits beginning. If ever you used your good sense and careful tread, prepare to use them now.” Lillehorne’s eyes had become small black holes. “I cannot stress to you strongly enough the animal nature of—”
The coach slowed. The coachman hollered “More fuel for the furnace!” There came the sound of an iron portcullis being drawn upward in the medieval fashion, the wooden gears making the noise of a battery of bludgeons hammering flesh.
“The animal nature of this place,” Lillehorne continued. “As I say…I’ll do what I can for you…but…as I am a fairly new member of the legal establishment here…I hope you realize that my powers of influence are limited.”
A whip snapped. The horses picked up their pace. The portcullis was cranked down behind them.
“I’m sorry,” said Lillehorne, and he leaned back against the seat of cracked leather, for he had come to his finish.
Matthew nodded. His heart was beating hard, but he knew he had a long haul ahead of himself and it would not pay to lose his senses at this early point. How easy it would be to cry out for mercy, to rail against a seemingly-distant God, against the cold marble of the law and the distressing ignorance of mighty men. How easy…yet such would do him not a candle’s wink of good, and it would simply open his soul up to further torment.
The coach began to slow again. They were near stopping, their destination reached.
What swirled in Matthew’s mind was a memory. Back in Fount Royal in the Carolina colony in 1699, during the problem of Rachel Howarth’s supposed witchcraft, the true villain in that piece had spent time in Newgate Prison, and now Matthew recalled part of that man’s hideous recitation of survival against the unholy predators within those walls.
The days were sufficiently horrible, he’d said, but then came the nights! Oh, the joyous bliss of darkness! I can feel it even now! Listen! Hear them? Starting to stir? Starting to crawl from their mattresses and stalk the night fantastic? Hear them? The creak of a bedframe here—and one over there, as well! Oh, listen…someone weeps! Someone calls out for God…but it is always the Devil who answers.
Even if it was so terrible a place, Matthew remembered saying to that near-demonic killer, you still survived it.
And his answer: Did I?
The coach’s wheel creaked to a stop. One of the horses snorted. Someone else out there gave a muffled shout, a guttural sound.
More fuel for the furnace.
The coach’s door on the right hand side was opened from without. Two men wearing dark coats and leather tricorns stood ready to receive the prisoner; both were carrying billyclubs, one of the implements glinting with a coating of pitch spiked with bits of broken glass. Without a word the two guards on either side of Matthew ne
arly lifted him off his seat and out of the coach onto bare earth that was pebbled with cinders. He stood in a courtyard with high walls of dark, soot-stained stone on all sides. Faces peered from barred windows up to the very top, which must have been four floors. Turrets with conical roofs stood at the corners of the walls. Up in the sky black banners of coalsmoke drifted from massive chimneys that were not part of the prison but were industries of London, yet as Matthew stood getting his bearings he was aware that burning bits of coal flared high above like dying comets, and by the hundreds the cinders of these little deaths rained down upon Newgate.
“In with ya,” said the man with the glass-spined billyclub; his voice also was spiny and rough, and Matthew knew at once that a second’s disobedience would here be a bloody mistake. He was pushed toward the yawning mouth of what appeared to be a tunnel entrance where a few torches burned against the walls. He obeyed without hesitation. Over the clanking of his chains he heard a harsh bestial rumbling, a sound that seemed to be issuing from both the bowels of the earth and the vaults of the clouds; it was, he realized as he entered the tunnel, the sound of the prison itself, or more specifically the noise of the prisoners as they crowded at barred windows, pushing and shoving or thrashing and fighting to get a look at the arrival of more fuel for the furnace.
“I’ll go ahead to speak with the warden,” Lillehorne told Matthew as they continued along the tunnel. He raised his voice so all could hear the next statement, which was delivered without addressing any particular person. “I trust your keepers will bear in mind that you are here for safe-keeping and not for punishment, as you have yet to be officially heard in the crown’s court.” Lillehorne’s gaze returned to Matthew, and it was no comfort to the young man that Lillehorne appeared terrified and ready to flee this monstrous place at the drop of a cinder. “Good luck to you,” he said to Matthew, and then with lowered head he strode away at a rapid pace, turned to the right and was gone from the flickering illumination of the torches.
One of Matthew’s four guards gave a short, hard laugh. The man with the mean billyclub said, “Gots to be in this damn place for a reason, no matter what that fancy cockadoodle crows!” And then, “Move on, baitfish! I ain’t gots all day to be nursin’ ya!”
A dozen more hobbling steps and Matthew was guided to the right by the prod of a billyclub, thankfully not the one primed with stickers. A massive, ugly slab of a door with, perversely, the faces of two smiling cherubs carved upon it was opened for him and he shuffled into a cold chamber with pale yellow walls and a floor that looked as if all the stains of London had been gathered in one place. A beak-nosed man in a topcoat, a brown cravat and wearing a wig that was more or less the same color as the walls sat at a desk with a ledger, a double-wicked candle, a supply of quills and an inkpot before him. A small pair of spectacles was balanced on the beak.
“You are Matthew Corbett, so sayeth Mr. Lillehorne?” the man asked without looking up, quill poised over stained paper. “Two ‘t’s, both?”
“Correct.” Obviously Lillehorne had passed this way on his errand to see the warden.
“Age?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Place of birth?”
“The Massachusetts colony.”
That earned only a brief rise of the arched eyebrows. “You are consigned here for holding purposes until your trial date, so sayeth Mr. Lillehorne?”
“Yes.” God, it was cold in here! A grimy, wet cold; the cold of the grave.
The man scribbled, and scribbled, and scribbled some more. His writing, what Matthew could see of it, was illegible. “Calculate these figures,” the man said abruptly. “Twenty-one plus ten minus four.”
“Twenty-seven,” Matthew answered almost at once.
“Sound of mind and memory, it appears.” The man made a mark next to the scrawl that was the new prisoner’s name.
“I try my best.”
A billyclub bumped the base of Matthew’s spine hard enough to bring from him a gasp of pain.
“You were not being asked a question,” said the bewigged master of admittance, with no emotion whatsoever in his voice. “Refrain from speaking unless an answer is required. This prisoner is assigned to…” He paused while he checked some bit of information or another. “Cairo. Mr. Lillehorne has vowed to pay your entrance fee, as well as one month’s worth of lodging, food and water.”
“An entrance fee? You’re joking!” Matthew dared to say, and this time the billyclub meant business. Matthew’s knees nearly buckled and he had a few seconds in which he feared he couldn’t regain his breath.
“Fees are required for all processes.” A quick scan was made of Matthew’s person. “No value to be had from your clothing. Your shoes, such as they are, have a value in their leather. Remember that if you desire anything extra. You gentlemen are dismissed,” he said to the two courthouse guards. And to the others, “Take him away.”
Three ordinary words. Combined in this situation, horrific.
In nearly a shocked state of mind Matthew was removed from the admissions area, was taken along a corridor past other various offices and to a narrow iron door that only one human body could pass through at a time. This seemed to Matthew to be the boundary between worlds. The noise of the prison, the slow animalish rumble, was more pronounced here, and absolutely terrifying. As one guard put a billyclub at the back of Matthew’s head, the other unlocked the iron door from a ring of ancient-looking keys. Matthew noted there were only four keys on the ring, which likely meant that they were skeleton keys or that the locks in here were not much varied one from the other. He knew from his reading that the first incarnation of this prison had been built in the year 1188, and perhaps the structure had been altered over the centuries but the atmosphere of dread, violence and horror remained constant.
The iron door was pulled open. The hinges shrieked like a chorus of banshees. Through the opening came an incredibly vile odor of dampness, rot, unwashed bodies and something else even more debilitating in its heavy, putrid essence. Matthew thought it might very well be the smell of despair.
“Go through,” he was told, and the rest of that sentence could have been And welcome to Hell. At his first step he was shoved through, then followed by the guards. More walls of mortared stone stood on either side of the cramped corridor, these walls wet, dripping and blotched with clumps of black and green fungus. Dim gray light entered from a single barred window at least twelve feet above the floor. At the far end of the corridor was a doorway formed of an iron grating, the entrance to a cage, and beyond it Matthew could make out figures watching his progress as he drew nearer. A few weak candles burned in the dankness over there, and voices of all manner whispered and grunted and shouted, laughed with mad merriment or evil intent, rasped like sawblades and gurgled with disease.
“More fuel for the furnace!” someone hollered over there. The cry was taken up by another voice, and another and another, and echoed hollowly along the walled corridor as a macabre greeting to the fresh meat that approached the cage. Only his chains rattled in response.
“Stop! Don’t move until I say so,” the guard with the wicked billyclub hissed in Matthew’s ear. Bodies in rags pressed against the grating. Grime-blackened faces stared at Matthew and the guards with watery eyes.
“Give ’em a knock, Baudrey!” said the other man.
The guard referred to slammed his club against the door with furious force and gave an unintelligible yell that yet had the promise of bloodshed in it. The prisoners scattered back like frightened mice. Matthew saw that the metal had been scarred and actually bent inward at several places, indicating that billyclubs found this a suitable knocking place.
“Stay back, ya dogs!” Baudrey shouted. He slid a key into the door’s lock, turned it and pulled the door open. No prisoner dared to rush him, though there seemed to be dozens all jammed up together within ten feet of the grate. “Ira Richards!” he hollered, ever louder. “Get yer ass up here!”
“Yes sir, yes s
ir, yes sir,” came a weak-lunged voice, and following it was a bent-backed, thin figure that seemed more crab than human being. This individual held a punched-tin lantern with a candle stub burning in it. His flesh appeared the same dingy gray color as his clothes, and he wore no shoes; his hair was shaved to the scalp and his scalp mottled with the red bites of vermin.
“New prisoner,” said Baudrey. “Name of Matty Cubitt. He’s to go in Cairo.”
“Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir.”
“Well don’t stand there breathin’ on me, ya stinkin’ mongrel! Take him on!”
Matthew, who felt delirious from the sights, sounds, smells and reality of this nightmare, said, “My name is—”
Baudrey clutched Matthew’s throat with a hairy hand and put the billyclub up to the prisoner’s lips, threatening to slash flesh at the least provocation. “Yer name,” he growled, his sunken eyes devoid of life, “is Sir Shitface, Lord Lay Me, Lady Cockplay or anything I damn say it is. Don’t matter to me what ya done or what ya ain’t done…in here yer allllllll the same fuckin’ garbage. Garbage!” he shouted at the mass of prisoners, and the crablike Richards scrabbled back as if desperately searching for his hidey-hole. Baudrey pushed Matthew forward, into the guts of Newgate. “Good day to ya, baitfish,” he said, and then he slammed the mesh door shut, relocked it, and he and the other guard walked away. The second man slapped Baudrey on the shoulder and gave a noise one might present as appreciation to the most noble champion of law and order.
“This way, Matty,” said the crabman, and motioned with his lantern.
“It’s Matthew,” the prisoner answered, but no one seemed to be listening. Most of the others had begun to drift away from what was perhaps an eating-chamber for there were a number of chairs and long wooden tables in it, but not a speck of food. Unclean hay was scattered about on a floor of damp stones. A few of the prisoners converged around Matthew, plucking at his clothes, his hair and his beard; they spooked Matthew because they were grinning and whispering to him as an ardent suitor might whisper to an object of affection.
Freedom of the Mask Page 14