“My information to you,” she said, still smiling, “is that you are now the property of my employer, Professor Fell.”
Her name burst upon both the brains of Hudson and Berry at the same time. She was just as Matthew had described her.
“Ah,” said Hudson. “Mother Deare.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Matthew wondered if you’d survived the earthquake.”
“You can see I did. So too did my friend Augustus Pons. And so too did the professor, who I’m sure would like to see the both of you.”
“He’s somewhere near?”
“Somewhere,” she allowed.
“I suppose our wandering around Whitechapel asking about Matthew brought us to the attention of your…shall we describe them as your people?”
“Yes, my people.” Her smile broadened. The froggish eyes seemed to bulge a bit more. “I like that, Hudson. May I call you by name?” She didn’t wait for his approval. “Hudson, I like being civilized…being intelligent.”
“I imagine you’ve come a long way in both areas.”
“Oh, yes. I was born a quarter-mile from here in the most dreadful hovel. Now I have a very fine house in the central city, I own several taverns, and I do like to make the rounds.”
“Whitechapel’s in your blood, I suppose.”
“Well expressed,” she said, with a little bow of her head. When she looked into his eyes again her gaze was all iron and no nonsense. “Let me tell you what’s going to happen. You are both going to walk down those stairs to where my people are waiting. You can be sure all three have pistols in their hands by now. None of the patrons down there will give a flying flip. In fact, they will have likely already cleared out at the first sight of the weapons. Then, being on your best behavior, you will sit at a table of your choice and enjoy a cup of that fine mulled wine as we wait for a coach that has already been summoned.”
“And the coach will take us where?”
“To my home. You’ll be treated well there this evening. My people will continue to search for Matthew. If he’s found—as I expect he shall be—all the better. In any case I’m sure the professor would like to get hold of you sooner than later.”
Hudson said, “Nice plan, but you forgot one thing.”
“Oh? Please enlighten me.”
With a short drawback of his right fist he hit her as hard as he could on the forehead just above the left eye. She staggered back but made no sound, and he expected her to fall like a chopped tree as he said, “This ox can—” punch, he was about to continue, which would have made no sense to anyone but himself. But he held the word in amazement, for not only did Mother Deare not topple from a blow that would have sent a regular-sized man into dreamland, but she shook her head and touched the reddened place of impact on her forehead as if she’d only been bothered by a mosquito.
“Oh my,” she croaked. “That smarted a bit.” Then, her eyes fierce, she thundered:
“Frost!”
Immediately boots clunked on the stairs. Hudson picked up a chair and threw it, catching Frost in the chest as the man came up. Frost fell backward, the pistol in his hand went off with a loud crack and burst of white smoke, the lead ball went up somewhere amid the colored lanterns, Frost collided with the other two men behind him and they fell down the stairs in a tangle.
And then, as Berry cried out a warning, Mother Deare was upon Hudson.
Sixtyish or not, the woman still carried the brutality of her birthplace. The lantern she’d picked up from the nearest table was smashed into the left side of Hudson’s head, pieces of glass slicing into his cheek and jaw and putting him on the path to being a bloody mess. He swung at her and missed as she dodged aside, and then she kicked for his balls. Before the kick could connect Hudson grabbed her booted foot and heaved upward, crashing her to the floor with a violence that likely puffed dust from every fiber of the Gordian Knot. Blood burned and blinded his left eye. As he retreated from Mother Deare and tried to clear his vision with the back of a hand, the woman squirmed toward him like a serpent, took hold of both his ankles and with sheer brute strength upended him. The back of his head bashed a table and he fell, stunned and very near to having his neck broken.
As Mother Deare was standing up from the floor, Berry grabbed hold of the woman’s white hair with one hand and with the other fist struck her full in the nose. There was the sound of fabric or some kind of fastener tearing, and the blow separated Mother Deare’s head from her hair.
Berry stood dumbly looking at the golden-pinned wig in her hand.
Mother Deare got fully to her feet. Both her nostrils were bleeding. The bulbous eyes leaked tears of pain. She was completely bald, her scalp a tortured battlefield of thick and ghastly dark red and brown burn scars, the tightening of seared flesh being the cause of her eyeballs to bulge from their sockets.
The sight of that blood-smeared face beneath such a horror petrified Berry. Mother Deare approached her with a blank expression, reached out to grasp the wig and headbutted Berry into instant unconsciousness. As Berry fell like a bag of laundry, Mother Deare pressed the wig back upon her head and, though it was on backwards, turned her attention to the dazed and bloody man—formerly an ox, now more of a poor lamb—who was struggling to his knees.
Frost, Willow and Carr had made it up the stairs, though Hudson would’ve been pleased to see that Carr was holding a broken wrist. The men approached their victim. Mother Deare said, “Wait,” and they halted in their tracks.
She removed from her bodice a pink lace handkerchief, which she used to blot her bloody nose. Hudson was attempting to stand. She put a hand atop his head and exerted force to keep him where he was.
“Look what happens,” she said to him, “when people forget their manners.”
Then she grasped his hair and drove a cruel knee into his face, and his last thought as he was crushed under a red wave of pain was that this mother was a bitch.
Twenty-One
I SUPPOSE this is the place,” said Keen.
“It would appear so,” Matthew answered. On the signboard of the shop before them was the designation 1229 Fleet Street and below that, Sm. Luther, Printer. It simply looked to be, in spite of Lord Puffery’s probable wealth, a perfectly ordinary printshop and actually the door and windowsills were in need of painting.
Light rain was falling, forming puddles on the walks and in the street. Keen said, “Never thought I’d have any need to go into such a shop. I’m feelin’ kinda funny about it.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know…meetin’ Lord Puffery face-to-face. He’s like…you know…somebody important.”
“He’ll be just a man. A man with quite an imagination and very few scruples, but he pulls on his breeches the same as any other. And…he holds the key to Albion’s identity. Come on, buy you an ale when we’re done.”
“What, with my money?”
“My money, that you took from my cloak and still have not returned.”
“You didn’t have enough money on you to buy a rotten apple! Ahhhh, damn it all!” Keen said, bridling at a sore spot. He looked around uncomfortably at the traffic of pedestrians, wagons, coaches and carriages. He was dressed in a mud-colored suit with gray patches at elbows and knees. The cravat he’d wrapped around his neck was dark with grime. His shirt had been white at one time in the distant past but currently was a sick shade of yellow. He had done himself up like this at Matthew’s urging, to present a gentlemanly front to the printers’ shop they would be visiting.
But Keen knew he was out of place here in this central part of the city, where even in the rain the gentlemen and their ladies strode about showing off the height of fashion. He had noted the passage of roofed carriages and teams of exactly-matched horses that cost fabulous amounts of money, and within the plush interiors beautiful women with high-topped hairdos and their handsome escorts who appeared to have been born in a world where everyone had a bathtub and used them quite frequently. He knew that he could not—should not—go with
Matthew to visit Lord Puffery looking as he usually did, and he readily admitted to himself that this would be offensive to the Fleet Street toffs and their toffettes, so it was this suit last worn by a dead man and purchased from an undertaker that had to do.
“All right,” said Keen, his steely grip on courage returning. “Let’s get to it.”
About twenty-four hours ago, after Matthew had taken the Black-Eyed Broodie oath and been tattooed, he had sought out Keen in the Whitechapel warehouse and presented his premise: that it was more important to learn on the morrow who Albion might be than it was to attack the Mohocks that night. After all, was Keen absolutely certain he knew where the Mohocks were headquartered?
Two buildin’s, Keen had said. We figure we know which one Fire Wind lives in. We get him, that’s a good night’s work.
Matthew had pointed out that the Mohocks were going to have lookouts up on the rooftops all night, just as the Broodies did, so it was imperative that if an attack be made it was to the correct building and not a chancy affair. Any attack on the Mohocks was sure to cause Mohock deaths, of course, but Keen should bear in mind that some of the Broodies would not be returning from this jaunt, so was he prepared to go in helter-skelter?
The alternative: postpone this attack until it was certain without a doubt in which building Fire Wind lived, and how best to wage the battle without throwing Broodie lives away. Tomorrow, Matthew had said, put on a suit and go with me to find Lord Puffery.
Keen had delayed his response until after nightfall. Then he’d sent Pie to Matthew with a one-word message: Agreed.
A matter of concern had developed in the morning. “What do you mean, we hire a coach?” Keen had asked. “I’ve never ridden in a fuckin’ coach in my life! Anyway, the treasury don’t have coin to throw away! And you don’t know these people lookin’ over my shoulder about the money…they want to know where every penny of every shillin’ is spent!”
Matthew had decided to let the matter rest of who these people might be, but he’d answered, “First of all, is the address of 1229 Fleet Street within walking distance?”
“I don’t know exactly where that lies, but I figure I could get there in a few hours.”
“I don’t want to look like a drowned rat when I speak to the man and neither do I want you to appear the same. Travelling by coach makes the most sense. If you have a problem with the accounting, pay with the money you took from me. And I don’t want to get there and have to walk back, either.”
Of the return trip by coach, Keen didn’t argue because he knew, as Pie had pointed out, how many gangs were out there just hungering to catch a Broodie in their territory after dark.
“There wasn’t enough money left in them little bags of yours to pay for a drayhorse, much less a coach! Put my neck on the choppin’ block, spendin’ this kind of loot,” Keen had fretted. “How am I gonna square it with the old woman?”
“Old woman?”
“Yeah…the old fancy-dressed woman who comes to collect. Her and her three hard cases. They come by once a month to check the book and get their cut.”
“The book? You keep a financial ledger?”
“Have to. Well…Tom keeps it, he’s got the head for numbers.”
Matthew was bursting with questions, but he thought it wise not to push Keen just yet. There would be time for that in the coach ride to Fleet Street, and indeed he had starting throwing them when they were settled—one gentleman in a mud-colored and patched suit and the other in a purple and green-piped horror—and on their way.
“This ledger book you keep,” Matthew had begun as the team clopped along westward in the direction of the central city. “You scribe a record of the money paid to you by the local merchants for protection?”
Keen had given him the evil eye.
“I’m a Broodie now,” Matthew had reminded him. “You see?” He held up his tattooed hand, which today was a bit swollen. “Aren’t I to be trusted yet?”
“The oath and the tat don’t mean but half of it ’til I see you in action, which you talked y’self out of last night.”
“Fighting war-painted idiots is not how I plan to leave this earth.”
Keen gave a fierce grin. “Rowdy idiots, don’t you mean? Ain’t that how you put it to Pie? Meanin’ the Mohocks, the Broodies and all the others fightin’ for territory?”
“Yes,” Matthew said. “It’s my opinion the Broodies are being used for purposes far beyond a battle for territory. The Mohocks may be as well, and every other gang.” He let that simmer for a bit before he stirred the pot again. “You may be in charge of the Broodies,” he said, “just as Fire Wind—Lord, I can barely speak that with a straight face—is in charge of the Mohocks. But you likely both have something in common: someone else is in charge of you. Just look at your ledger book, at the restrictions put upon you, and think about the old woman and the hard cases. What does she call herself?”
“The boss,” he answered, a bit grimly. He had sunken down in his seat.
“You know what I’m saying is true. These people take a monthly cut of what you get, correct? And they expect you to, as you put it, run ‘errands’ on their behalf? Putting you at risk with the law, but not them.”
“Mousie sprang Ben from the coop. They paid for it and worked an angle,” Keen said. “Mousie’s our—”
“Lawyer, yes. Paulie told me. He’s another individual I’d like to have a talk with. I wonder how many of those other five men Albion murdered were represented at court by Mousie.”
“Huh?”
“I wonder if Mousie—or some lawyer paid by the same individuals who are running this show—worked angles for those other five men, got them ‘sprung’ and in so doing put them at the point of Albion’s sword. That’s what I’d like to know.”
“You’d like to know a whole hell of a lot you probably shouldn’t ought to know. What do you do for a livin’, anyway? Educated fella like y’self, a high talker and all…what’s your game?”
“I was a law clerk at one time. Lately, in New York, I’ve been what is called a ‘problem-solver’.”
“Law clerk,” Keen repeated. He nodded. “That’s the smell of the Old Bailey I’ve been gettin’. The other thing…solvin’ what kind of problems?”
Matthew felt that a moment was upon him. He steadied his gaze upon Rory Keen and said, “I have one very large problem I’m trying to solve, other than the current one involving Albion. Do you know the name of Professor Fell?”
Keen was silent. He studied the Broodie tattoo upon his own hand. “Used to be,” he said in a guarded voice, “the name would put terror in me, and the others too. You never knew what that bastard was up to, and where his people might show up. ’Course we keep low to the ground, we never did fly ’round his belfry. But of late, word’s gotten out…he ain’t what he used to be.”
“Go on,” Matthew prompted.
“Word is he’s been fucked in a couple a’ deals. Ain’t been able to get a grip on the colonies like he was intendin’. Somethin’ about runnin’ gunpowder to the Spanish…that was fucked too. Word is he’s left London, holed up somewhere to lick his wounds. Still dangerous, for sure, but…see, here’s the rub of it.”
Matthew waited, as the strident noise of London’s streets buffeted the coach and rain tapped upon the top.
“Some of his people have…like…gone over to his competition,” Keen continued. “Left him, ’cause they think he’s had too many teeth knocked out. Think he’s gotten weak. That’s what I hear, at least.”
“His competition? Who would that be?”
“New blood,” said Keen. “A younger gent. Already done some murders that’s made talk. Killed a judge a couple of months ago, is what I heard. Man by the name of Fallonsby. Beat him to death and strung the body up from a flagpole outside the house. Offed the wife, the daughter, the butler, the maid and the family dog too. It was in the Pin for awhile, but I think Lord Puffery dropped it ’cause even he got scared.”
“Do you k
now this new man’s name?”
“Nobody does. Oh, he left his mark carved into Fallonsby’s forehead…leastwise that’s what the Pin thought it to be. A Devil’s Cross. One carved upside-down,” he explained.
“Hm,” said Matthew, looking out the window at the passing carnival. He heard the deep tone of a tolling bell from a nearby church, and he wondered if it was for someone’s funeral.
“What I’m gettin’ at,” Keen offered, “is that when the cat goes soddy, the rat gets cheese. Fell’s been the big cat ’round here for a long time. Now the rat’s eatin’ cheese, and gettin’ mighty…” He hesitated, searching his brain for an apt description. “Mighty,” he finished.
Due partly—mostly?—to myself, Matthew thought. Exit the black-hearted villain, enter the blacker-hearted? He had one more subject to broach with Keen.
“Where does the White Velvet come from?” he asked.
Keen stared squarely at him. The eyes were, again, dead.
“No,” said Keen, and that had been the end of that.
Now, as Matthew and Keen entered the printshop of one Sm. Luther, a little bell tinkled merrily above the door. The place smelled of bitter ink. Barrels and crates stood about, along with stacks of various qualities of paper. Behind a long counter, standing beside his press in the light of several oil lamps and the dim illumination from a nearby window, was a slim white-haired man occupied in the arrangement of rows of wood-carved letters in their print trays. He wore an ink-stained leather apron over his clothing and he was smoking a stubby black pipe. At the music of the bell he looked toward his visitors with gray eyes behind thick-lensed spectacles, the seams of his face deepened by the presence of ink that likely had collected there, dot by dash, over a period of many years and now had become part of the man.
“Help you?” he asked, his fingers still poised over the trays of letters, which by necessity he had to arrange in the mirror image of what the finished product would be.
“We hope so,” said Matthew. “Samuel Luther?”
Freedom of the Mask Page 27