“Wanted to get your name in the Pin, is what I’m thinkin’,” said the heavy-set guard. “Pack of lies, all of it.”
Matthew remained silent. There was nothing more to say to these two. Neither did he care to listen to their foolish jabbering. He looked out the window again, at the moving shapes and the blurs of flame in the fog, and allowed himself the luxury of thinking what he would do when this was settled and he returned to New York. Approach Berry and try to make amends, if that was possible? Try to tell her what he’d been thinking that day he was so callously cruel to her? He wished he could bring her back to him but there was the problem of Professor Fell, who certainly would never forget the fact that Matthew had blown up his gunpowder supply and basically destroyed his home island. So…bring Berry back to him, with Professor Fell certainly set on revenge?
No. He could not.
The coach rolled on, the ride getting rougher over rougher streets. The blocks of buildings seemed to grow tighter together, and the streets more narrow. Darkness ruled in this part of London, though it was interrupted by the occasional glow from the windows of what must be taverns. The fog had thickened and the tavern signage was impossible to make out. The denizens of this area must be rougher as well, for a stone thwacked against the coach’s side and following it was a shouted snarl of curses, indicating no love for the law. In the distance could be heard a man’s ragged hollering, the words indistinct but the tone one of pure rage, the words rising and falling on volcanic tides. From another direction came the high thin scream of a woman that abruptly ended. Out in the fog, very close to the coach, a man laughed quietly and Matthew saw the flare of a flame as a pipe was lighted. It occurred to him that Houndsditch might not be so bad as Newgate, but the Whitechapel area itself was no walk of saints.
He’d no sooner thought that than two hands gripped the bars of the window next to Matthew. A bedraggled young girl with sharp features and one eye blackened and swollen shut cried out into the coach, “Shillin’ for a blow! Shillin’ apiece, all a’ ya!” She tried to create a smile but the clay of her battered face would not cooperate, and all she could present was a desperate, gap-toothed grimace. “Free for a sip of the velvet!” she cried out again, as if her life depended upon it.
“Off with you!” said the larger guard, and he leaned over to slam his hand against her fingers, breaking her grip on the bars and causing her to fall away. She let loose a string of oaths that would have made the inmates of Newgate blanch bloodless, and then the coach had gone on deeper into what Matthew began to suspect was a London tarpit the likes never seen in the New World.
“Holy Hell, Johnny,” said Petey with an expression of dismay. “I could’a spared a shillin’!” Then, dejected, he slunk down in his seat.
In a few minutes, Johnny peered out one of the windows to get his bearings. Though all Matthew could see were vague shapes in the yellow fog, the guard must’ve spied a landmark of sorts—a tavern sign, a familiar window or some such—because he said with satisfaction, “We’re near the gate. Won’t be long now.”
About ten seconds after he said that, something bumped against the side of the coach. Then against the top. There came a muffled cry. The horses seemed to lose stride and the entire coach shuddered.
“What the damned hell…!” Johnny said.
The coach rolled on a few more feet and then stopped.
The brake came down with a hard thud.
“Nelson!” Johnny slammed a fist against the coach’s ceiling. “What’re you stoppin’—”
For, he was going to say, but it was forever left unsaid.
The door on the left swung open. A swordblade entered first, gleaming in the lantern light. Its tip pricked Johnny’s brick of a chin.
“Sit easy,” came a low whisper.
Johnny may have soiled his breeches. Or Petey may have. One of them certainly did, for Matthew smelled it. He, himself, was shocked but he was able to keep his already-filthy trousers at least clean of that.
The figure behind the saber wore a dark cloak and hood. Within the hood was the golden mask with the ornamental beard. The color of the eyes were impossible to make out. A black glove held the sword, which shifted smoothly to the tip of Petey’s narrow nose.
Albion whispered, “You. Give him your cloak and hat.”
“What?” Petey blinked, his eyes watery.
The saber twitched. Blood spooled from the sliced nostril. Petey cried out but did not move.
“Cloak and hat,” Albion whispered.
The items were rapidly removed and set in Matthew’s lap.
“Your money,” came the next demand.
The two guards gave it up, putting two small leather drawstring pouches on the seat beside Matthew as if they had become as noxious as what freighted an unfortunate pair of breeches.
The golden mask angled toward Matthew. “Take them,” said the swordsman, and the order was delivered so fiercely that Matthew’s arms gathered up everything as if they were on poppet strings to Albion’s control.
Then, a command also directed to Matthew: “Out.”
Here Matthew was suddenly frozen, for terror hit him hard. Did this creature mean to roust him from the coach and murder him in the street?
“Now,” said Albion.
Matthew found his voice. “If you mean to kill me, you’ll have to do it here.” He was preparing a kick to the center of Albion’s chest, and if he could get in another one before that saber kissed him it would be a miracle…but worth the chance.
“Fool,” came Albion’s raspy whisper. “I’m helping you. Out!”
“I don’t care to be helped by you.”
Albion might have laughed behind that mask. Or groaned…it was difficult to tell.
“Mr. Corbett,” said the voice, “you are also going to help me. Out, or…” He paused, thinking. Then: “Out, or I kill the thin one.” The saber went to Petey’s throat.
“I understood you only killed criminals who had managed to escape justice.”
“True until now.” The sword’s point pressed into Petey’s flesh. The guard had gone deathly pale, and he trembled and moaned but otherwise was paralyzed with fear. “Your decision,” said Albion.
Matthew nearly said Go ahead and kill him, but he wasn’t far enough gone for that. He was desperately thinking what he should do when he stepped out of the coach. Throw these items in Albion’s masked face? Then run for it? But what did the creature mean by saying you are also going to help me?
“Please,” Petey croaked.
Matthew moved toward the door. Albion lowered the sword and stepped back. When Matthew’s shoes had crunched down on the street’s cinders, Albion plunged the saber forward into the coach…not to pierce Petey, but to pick up one of the lanterns by its nailhook. He withdrew it, said to the two guards, “Stay,” as if they were nothing more than dogs, and then shut the coach’s door with his free hand. He turned toward Matthew. “Put on the cloak and hat,” he ordered, still speaking in a whisper. “Take the money. Take the lantern.” He offered it on the saber. Matthew donned the cloak and tricorn. He pushed the pouches into a pocket in the cloak. When he took the lantern, he found Albion’s golden mask pressed forward into his own face.
“Midnight,” said the voice, up close where it could not possibly carry into the coach. “Tavern of the Three Sisters. Flint Alley. Hear me?”
Matthew was fully and completely poleaxed. But he heard himself say, “Yes.”
A black-gloved hand went into Albion’s cloak and emerged with an ivory-handled dagger in a cowhide sheath. “Guard yourself,” said Albion. “Dangerous here.”
Matthew took the weapon, as he could not disagree.
Then, abruptly, Albion turned away and strode quickly off along the street, and within a few seconds the fog had swallowed him whole.
Matthew swayed on his feet. The world seemed to spin around him. He realized it wouldn’t be too much longer before one of the guards found the courage to look out the window and see that Al
bion had left the scene, and what then? He had no idea where Flint Alley was, or where he stood in this vast city. Time was moving, and so he must make a decision. In truth it flitted across his mind to return to the coach and deliver himself to Houndsditch, for surely with Lillehorne’s influence he could soon get out of this predicament.
You are also going to help me.
Spoken by a golden-masked avenger, most likely the prisoner who’d escaped Newgate.
Spoken to what purpose, and what meaning?
His curiosity was roused to a feverish pitch. How could he go forth to Houndsditch and vegetate there for many days—if not weeks—with this problem to be solved?
He did not remember starting off but suddenly he was walking in the direction Albion had gone, with the sheathed dagger beneath his cloak. In another moment a figure came staggering out of the fog. The man was holding his left shoulder and his face was bloodied. Nelson had obviously been thrown from his perch atop the coach when Albion had climbed up to rein the horses in. The coachman glanced only quickly at Matthew and then averted his eyes, for this was indeed a dangerous place. He staggered on past in search of his charge.
Matthew kept going for awhile, his mind still mostly stunned. He stopped in a darkened doorway to check by lantern light the contents of the money pouches and discovered enough money to buy a good meal and a bottle or two of ale, if he could find such. He heard fiddle music adrift in the fog and the sound of male and female laughter. Then, a free man wearing a warm cloak and with money in his pocket, a lantern to light his way and a dagger close at hand, Matthew set off to follow the noise of humanity to its source.
Fifteen
MATTHEW sat at a corner table in the Horse Head Tavern on a street called Gower’s Walk, with his back to a wall of brown bricks. Before him was a wooden platter of boiled pig’s feet, some kind of mushy greens, a mashup of figs and apples sour enough to curdle the tongue, and corncakes baked to break the teeth. The ale in his tankard was bitter and smelled of long age in a musty cellar.
He ate and drank and thought himself for the moment a king in a delectable dream, for food and drink that would have seemed indigestible at the beginning of Matthew’s ordeal now equalled any delight put before him at Sally Almond’s in New York. He hadn’t realized how starved he was, and so down the hatch went everything, the sour with the bitter and the mush with the tooth-crackers.
This was not the first tavern he’d entered on his exploration of Whitechapel, but at the Goat’s Breath a fight had broken out before he’d taken a chair, and finding the chair he was about to take smashed across the shoulders of one gin-raged blowzabella by another, and men throwing their coins down and clearing the floor for this violent entertainment to continue, Matthew eased himself away from the maddened crowd and back into the foggy street.
Therefore he used caution in studying the tavern signs before committing himself to life-threatening error. The Scarlet Hag, the Leper’s Kiss, the Four Wild Dogs, the Broken Cherry…heavens, no. And as he walked along these narrow, dirty lanes in the weak circle of his lanternlight, with an occasional other lamp or torch sliding past him in the gloom, he was aware that many other figures were on the move with him, all going somewhere or another, some calling out with voices impossible to decipher as if they were speaking haughtily not to anyone on earth but rather to gods unknown, in the manner of daring lightning to strike. Most, however, moved in ominous silence, either singly, doubly or in packs of three, four or more. Matthew kept his lantern uplifted and his other hand on the dagger’s hilt, and he stopped every so often to press his back against a rough wall and make certain he was not about to be jumped from behind.
He had had at least one close call of which he knew. Several times he’d passed bodies sprawled on the ground, one with a head so bashed it was impossible for that broken cup to hold a drop of life. But in one instance Matthew had been called—“Gentle sir! Gentle sir, I beg you!”—from a doorway next to an alley, and found by the lanternlight a not unattractive young girl in dirty rags huddled there holding a baby. The infant was not moving. Matthew had thought its pallor a shade too blue. The girl had asked for coin to feed her child, and asked in so poignant and tearful a way that Matthew almost did not sense a slow uncoiling of something from the alley to his left. He did not wait to see what it was, because the sensation of evil that emanated from it was too horrible to contemplate, and so he quickly retreated as the girl called out with practiced sorrow Gentle sir, gentle sir, please help us.
He did not turn his back on that alley until he had put a little distance between it and himself. The last he heard from the girl was a seething release of breath that had all the damnation of the world in it.
Then Matthew had gone on, thinking that anyplace where there was a market for dead infants was a place he did not be needing to wander, yet here he was. His appointment was at the Tavern of the Three Sisters at midnight, and he could not be late for that.
Now, as Matthew finished his meal at the Horse Head, he considered the subject of Albion. Surely there was some connection between the person who wore that mask and the historic meaning of the name. What Defoe had said: It also refers to the elemental force—the strength of a giant—that is fabled to be England’s protection again harm.
Judging from what he’d seen so far, Matthew thought that the elemental force of the fabled Albion had given up the cause and left the country.
But…was it possible that a human being had taken up the sword?
What…one man was going to puncture this evil bladder and release all the devil’s piss? Then London would be a shining example of order and purity, and so bring England back to some golden condition it had never really known?
It was madness.
What had been his impressions of Albion? It was worth summing up. The figure had been slim of build and not quite as tall as Matthew. Male, of course, though age was hard to tell because the whisper had been an effective disguise for the voice. A swordsman, for sure, and not just using the saber as a prop. And, obviously, Albion had to know that Matthew was being transferred to Houndsditch, what time he had left Newgate and what the route would likely be. Matthew recalled that Johnny had said they were near the gate. Albion had been most certainly lurking there, hidden by darkness and fog, awaiting the coach’s arrival. Then he’d taken a leap, climbed up the coach’s side, thrown the driver off and brought the coach to a sudden halt.
But why?
The serving-girl, a dark-haired wench with bruised eyes, came over to ask if he required anything else. He had noted her misshapen nose, obviously broken by more than one fist, and her downcast countenance. It seemed to him this was a city of beasts bound to battle each other because the larger circumstances of their poverty and plight could not be fought by human hands.
He checked the candle clock on the bar and saw that it was burning down toward ten. “Tell me,” he said to the girl, “do you know the Tavern of the Three Sisters in Flint Alley?”
“Heard of it.”
She needed prompting to continue. “Well, is it near?”
She had to ask the barkeep, who replied, “South toward the river. Maybe…oh…half a mile, I’d reckon. But sir…if you’re thinkin’ of goin’ down in there I’d take another think. Awful mean down that way. Wilders left and right, ain’t nobody safe.”
“Cut yer throat for a sniff a’ snuff,” one of the patrons added, and the drunken blonde doxy astride his lap slurred out, “Ain’t got no fuckin’ morals down there.”
“I was afraid of that,” Matthew said resignedly. “Thank you, all.” He asked for another tankard of ale and gave the serving-girl his best effort at a smile, but if she knew what a smile was she had forgotten, for she turned away with the same lifeworn expression she might have had if he’d spat in her face.
A choice lay before him, and here in the warmth of the tavern with a few candles flickering and a low fire burning red in a small hearth, he had the luxury of time and space to consider it. If he ventu
red forth to reach the Tavern of the Three Sisters at midnight he would undoubtedly learn who Albion was and what in the blazes this was all about. Of course, before he reached there he might suffer a little thing called murder, which would cancel the rest of his evening.
The other half of his choice involved throwing all this to the wind and finding his way back to Houndsditch, where he would humbly turn himself in. He would ask to speak to Gardner Lillehorne on the morrow to both thank him for getting him out of Newgate and explaining that this Albion business was none of his doing, and all he intended to do was be nice, quiet and timid until he could go before Archer in an official court function and state his case.
He drank and considered. Either way, sooner or later he would have to brave the streets of Whitechapel. It appeared from the number of people staggering into the Horse Head that this area was only beginning to come to life as the candle burned toward midnight. He might have one more tankard of ale for courage, but his money would be gone and so would his senses; best to face the rest of this night with a clear head.
He gave it another hour, nursing his ale and watching the denizens of Whitechapel come and go. A dice game was begun, the barkeep’s billyclub slammed the drinkers’ deck to stop several arguments before they became violent, a few garishly-made up dollies sauntered in and out, various mutterings and whispers indicated nefarious plots being planned by shadowy figures that stayed their distance from the light, and then it was time for Matthew to turn his attention to the task at hand.
He had decided. He would go to the Tavern of the Three Sisters, find out what all this was about, and then he would report himself to Houndsditch. The life of an escaped criminal was not for him.
Freedom of the Mask Page 19