“You take a tumble?” Keen asked, as he put his lantern down on the table.
“Never you mind.” Frost took a moment to hawk and spit on the floor. Keen quickly noted that the spit had a red shine to it. “Everybody here?”
“Looks so. Carr not with you? Or Mother Deare?”
“Not an accountin’ visit. We’re lookin’ for—” Frost had to stop, because his breathing did sound impaired. “Tell ’em, Willow.”
The other man, lean and long-chinned with a blonde goatee and deep-set dark eyes that regarded the Broodies with more than a smudge of arrogance, said, “Mother Deare’s sent us out lookin’ for a young man. Mark’s name is Matthew Corbett. Last seen wanderin’ in Whitechapel, as we hear it. We’re makin’ the rounds. Gent’s in his young twenties, stands about six, wiry build, black hair, gray eyes. Handsome, Mother says he is. Might have a beard. Seen him?”
Keen was about to say no when Jane spoke up.
“What does she want with him?”
Keen darted a savage glance at her but he had to quickly lower his head; he did not have that much freedom of the mask.
“Does it matter?” Willow asked. “Seen him, or not?”
No one spoke. Keen felt Pie’s arm pressing against his side. He knew she was likely thinking the same thing he was, that anyone who now wanted to step into being leader of the Broodies had a golden opportunity to chop off the head of a fella named Rory Keen. That would probably include Will Satterwaite, Jesse Lott and John Bellsen.
Keen put his mask of toughness back on and looked into Willow’s face. “We ain’t seen such a person.”
A guinea coin hit the table, drawn from Frost’s pocket. “For whoever sights him,” Frost said, still speaking with an effort.
“You don’t sound too good,” Keen remarked. “Lung trouble?”
“Chair trouble,” came the answer. Frost reached out, retrieved the coin and put it back into his pocket. “We got places to go. You see this mark, you—tell ’em, Willow.”
“You see this mark, you bust ’im up so he can’t walk. Then go tell the keep at the Lion’s Den and give him your name. He’ll get the word to us.”
Keen nodded. “Sure will.”
Frost’s gaze wandered toward Jane once more. Keen felt his heartbeat quicken. Did the bastard sense it? Did he have an inkling that Jane knew something she wasn’t spilling? For a few seconds Keen wondered how he might kill Frost and Willow, if it came to that.
“Accountin’ visit next week,” Frost said. “Have your numbers ready.” He took in a hitching breath, pressed his hand to his chest once more as if to help his lungs perform, and then he and Willow left through the narrow door that to the passersby also looked boarded-over.
“That gent’s got a serious problem,” said Keen after they’d gone.
“It’s us got the serious problem!” Will said. “What’re we doin’, lyin’ to those men? Hell, Rory! What’s the jig here?”
“The jig is that Matthew is a Black-Eyed Broodie, and though he ain’t proved hisself in combat yet he still bears the sign and by God that makes him my brother. Yours too. Long as I’m wearin’ the crown here, ain’t no Broodie turnin’ another Broodie over to no-fuckin’-body.”
“What’re they wantin’ him for?” Paulie asked. “Seems like they’re real bent on findin’ him. How come?”
“If he’s done an offense against Mother Deare,” Jesse Lott added, “then we’re all in for some heavy shit.”
That caused a few of the others to bubble up and spew their mouths off, but Keen held up both hands for quiet and got it. “Ever’body just calm down, now. Believe me when I tell you, I got all this under control.”
“Don’t seem it!” said Will, his eyes narrowing. “That fella down there, when he ought to be in the gaolhouse but Albion turned him loose, and Albion killin’ Ben right in front of me, and now them men comin’ here and—”
“And and and!” Keen snapped. “Shut up your andin’! Hell’s bells!” He cast a fiery look upon the group, pausing for a particular throw of flame at Jane Howard for opening her yap, and then he said, “Will, you, John and Billy go collect somethin’ from somebody. Hit up the Piper’s Folly and the Brass Bell.”
“We done that last week.”
“Do it again! Tell ’em they ain’t paid enough, I need a new Sabbath suit. Jesse, you take Micah and Paulie and go to…I don’t care…somewhere. That old bastard at the Golden Slipper’s in need of a shakeup. Go lean on him.” Keen clapped his hands together with a noise like a pistol shot. “I ain’t just jawin’! Move! The rest of you…go get drunk or fetch your supper or bag a whore or I don’t care what the hell you do. Pie, come with me.”
He decided to turn a deaf ear to the muttering, but in truth he knew he was out on a mighty thin limb. He and Pie returned to the cellar with their lanterns.
“It’s us, Matthew!” Keen said into the dark. “They’re gone.”
Matthew raised himself up from the floor behind the barrels, and not a moment too soon because a couple of rats had been scurrying around him and getting braver. “She wasn’t with them?”
“Naw. Two of her men, Frost and Willow. They described you good. Nobody quailed. But she’s lookin’ for you, and those two are gonna turn Whitechapel upside down. I’d figure she’s got others on the hunt too. Damn it,” he said quietly. “Maybe you were right, back on Fleet Street. Go on about your business and hope you don’t get killed doin’ it. I sent some men out to press extra coin, I figure we can cook the ledger that way. Mother Deare knows how much we take in ever’ month. Maybe we can scare up enough to cover that fuckin’ coach.”
“Thank you,” Matthew said, for he knew what it would mean if Mother Deare’s people learned the Broodies were harboring him and had lied to their faces. “Sorry I’ve gotten you into this.”
“Matthew?” Pie asked, coming closer and shining her light on him. “If those men took you…would they kill you right off?”
“I doubt it. I think they would take me to Professor Fell, wherever he is. Then…well, the professor is a bit angry at me for destroying his island in the Bahamas.”
“Oh Jesus! I don’t want to hear it!” Keen would have put both hands to his ears if he hadn’t been holding the lamp. “Christ, you’re a rounder!”
“I knew that,” Pie said with a gamin-like smile, “when he walked in that alley to save my skin.”
“I believe we done paid that debt. Matthew, in the mornin’ you’re off. We can’t have you here with them bloodhounds sniffin’ your trail, it’s way too risky and there’s some here I think would like to turn you over. We don’t have much to give you, but you can keep the suit and the boots.”
“Thanks again.” The purple horror was due for a burning, but for now that and the boots were very much appreciated. “Let me ask…do you know the time?”
“Ten or so, I reckon. Why?”
“At midnight,” said Matthew, “I plan on being at the Tavern of the Three Sisters.”
“What? With them neckbreakers out there huntin’ you? I thought you had some sense!”
“Unfortunately, sometimes my sense and my curiosity go to war. Often my curiosity wins. I’m thinking that Albion might have been haunting the Three Sisters since that night he told me to meet him there. This near to midnight, and so close to the Sisters…I have to go.”
Keen was about to protest again, but he sighed and simply said, “It’s your funeral.” He added, “Just be a good ol’ oak and if them fellas get you, keep clammed about ever knowin’ any of us.” Keen’s light fell upon the barrels. “Oak,” he repeated, his eyes hazed over, and both Matthew and Pie knew who he was thinking about. “You’re right,” he said after a space of time. “The Velvet killed Josh, no doubt about that. It’s killed a whole hell of a lot of other people, too. Either put ’em in their graves or made ’em into the livin’ dead. What I hear the Velvet does…it’s a bad thing, all right.” He moved his light to take in both Pie and Matthew.
“You know
what I think about sometimes?” he asked, in a faraway voice that sounded as if it were coming from a different man. “It comes on me awful sudden, and I can’t shake it. You remember, Pie…when Josh went crazy and jumped out that window…you remember…he landed smack on a woman gettin’ out of a carriage down on Cable Street. I recall hearin’ her give a cry. Just real quick, and then she went down. She was dressed like a lady. I can still see her, all splayed out like a broke doll on the stones. Even when that horse bashed Josh’s head in…I was lookin’ at that lady, and wonderin’ what she was doin’ all dressed up gettin’ out of a fancy carriage on Cable Street. And wherever she’d come from and whatever she was there to do…she sure hadn’t gone to bed the night before thinkin’ that a skeleton-weight piece of Whitechapel insanity was gonna fall from the sky and strike her down.”
“Did she live?” Matthew asked.
“I don’t know. We cleared out fast. We was using that place as a hideout, next to the hospital we was told about today. That’s why I thought it was so strange…today, hearin’ Josh’s name and seein’ it writ down, and hearin’ about the Cable Street hospital, and all of it come back to me in a flood.” His light moved amid the casks. “Seems like, when you think about it, it was the Velvet struck that woman down. ’Cause that’s what Josh was at the end…ravin’, and sittin’ in his shit, and pleadin’ for a drink, wantin’ to fight and goin’ mad with rage…then huddlin’ up in a corner and sobbin’. All he was at the end was what the Velvet made him…ate up with poison, and wantin’ to find some dream it give him that it took away.” He turned the light upon Matthew. “If there’s a drug in it, tastin’ so sweet and then poisonin’ people in that way…it ain’t fair, is it?”
“No,” Matthew said. “It isn’t.”
“What’s to be done about that?”
“Are you asking me what I would do?”
“Maybe I am.”
“If it were up to me,” said Matthew, “I’d get an axe and I’d go to work down here. Let the rats dream.”
There was a long silence. Then Keen said, feebly, “I can’t do that. If I was to, there’d be no place I could hide, and they’d kill every Broodie who draws a breath.”
Matthew gave no reply, but it seemed to him that London could be a city of prisons. The Broodies and the other gangs were imprisoned by the powers that controlled them, and doubly imprisoned to their territories. Whitechapel was a prison as much as Newgate, and likely the lords and ladies of the city were imprisoned in their silk-lined boxes of strict behavior and family heritage as much as the town’s rowdies were constrained in their freedom of movement. One could be blinded by the bars, which might be made of gold as well as iron. And there was Professor Fell, himself a prisoner to his way of life, imprisoned by his rage after the beating death of his precious and much-loved twelve-year-old son Templeton, set upon a road of conduct that was of course his choice and his sin, and so twisted now as to be desirous of imprisoning thousands of other humans in cages of both greed and affliction. There was a pity in that, if Matthew stepped back and considered it with a mind unfreighted by emotion, for before the murder of Templeton the professor by his own admission had been a stellar member of society and a champion of science. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos were tireless workers, and those three sisters viewed the world of Man with eyes as cold as gravestones.
“I have to go,” said Matthew, impressing upon himself the importance of visiting the appointed tavern at the appointed time.
“’Course you do,” Keen answered. He ran a hand through his flame-colored hair and made a sound like he needed to spit out something foul. “Damn it all, I can’t let you walk into the Sisters by yourself! Hell, even with the proper pointin’s you might miss it and wind up on Drybone Lane, and that’s even worse than Flint Alley! You start wanderin’ ’round out there, you’ll soon be poachin’ on the Cobra Cult and with that Broodie sign on your hand they’ll cut your eyeballs out.”
That was a beautiful thing to ponder, but Matthew said, “I believe I can find the place on my own.”
“You likely can, but do you really want to? What’ll you do and where will you go if he don’t show up? Better question…what’ll you do and where will you go if he does?”
“I’ll figure all that out when the time comes.”
“By the time you figure it all out,” Keen said, “you might be dead.”
Matthew couldn’t disagree. The logic of his going alone into such a hellhole was definitely faulty. Actually, the logic of his leaving this warehouse alone in the dark wasn’t too solid either.
Pie said, “Rory’s right. It’s a mighty low dive to have a high-soundin’ title. You got to be real careful in that place.”
“Second that. They’re our best customer for the Velvet, so you can imagine what it’ll be like in there. And ’round midnight the thieves are gonna be stalkin’ about.” Keen paused to let that nice picture work in Matthew’s mind. “You come an awful long way from New York to die in Flint Alley. Hell, you ain’t goin’ alone. That settles it.”
“I’ll go too,” Pie said.
“No you won’t! The more ain’t the merrier when we’re talkin’ about Flint Alley at midnight. You just stick here. I mean it, Pie,” he said to her defiant thrust of the chin. “You don’t have to prove nothin’ to nobody, but if I see you where we’re goin’ I will be mighty unhappy. Do you hear me?”
She resisted until he asked her again, more sharply, and then she responded with the briefest and most petulant nod.
“We’ll fetch your cloak, your tricorn and that fancy dagger you came in with, and you can take a lantern too,” said Keen. “We can eat and drink for free in the Sisters if we want to, since they’re always beggin’ more Velvet.”
Suddenly Pie approached Matthew. She got up on her tiptoes to give him a kiss on the cheek. In the lamplight her brown eyes with their flecks of gold were shining, but they were sad.
“That lady of yours in New York is a lucky one,” she said, and gave him the best smile she could offer. It didn’t stick very long. “I’d be with you if I was let by that horse’s ass over there. But watch them close shaves, Matthew,” she advised, with a serious face. “Sooner or later you get cut.”
He knew that was true. The trick was surviving the blade. Was it worth going there and hoping that Albion in his real identity also would choose this night to maintain watch at the Three Sisters? Yes, it was. His curiosity…his burning desire to wrap up all loose ends…the power that pushed him to often throw caution to the winds and dare those Sister Fates at the cost of life and limb…his need to think of himself as good, in this world of increasing evil…
The bars of his own prison?
Perhaps.
It was time to get ready.
Twenty-Four
THE rain had stopped and the wind had died. Following the black ribbon of the winding Thames came the damp yellow fog that began to slowly and silently spread itself block by block, street by street, and mile by mile across the great metropolis.
This night, approaching the strike of twelve, the fog held trickery. It transformed the moving coaches and carriages into misshapen creatures of demented dreams, their eyes ablaze with red centers of flame, their drivers dark blots in the gloom laying lash upon snorting fog-smeared behemoths. The buildings became of grotesque shape and size as if seen through rippled and dirty glass, and distances seemed elongated as if the fog had corrupted the very nature of space and time itself. Footsteps echoed here and there, with no one walking. A blurred face faintly touched by candlelight might appear at a broken window where murder was most recent, and no one living there anymore. A riderless horse might burst from the fog and then be swallowed up again in an instant, and a black dog might trot along at the heels for a spell before it wheeled and was swept away like a whirl of dead leaves. Voices or the memory of voices might issue from this room with a blood-stained floor, or this alley where the bones were found so gently wrapped, or from the chinks in this wall that held the
beggar when he died standing up.
Fog set free the ghosts of London, Matthew thought as he followed Rory Keen through the labyrinth of hauntings. He could feel the spirits in the air, and he was not much one to dwell on such things…but still and all, they were here. Was the gnarled woman real who reached her thin arms toward him, and said in a ragged whisper, “My boy”? Was the fat man in a long coat and feathered tricorn real, who called, “Come here, come here” and gave a laugh as if he knew the central secret at the soul of the world? Was the little auburn-haired girl in the stained green dress real, who simply stood and stared at him with a lamb’s-gut condom in her hand as if to an offering of the god of Whitechapel?
They must have been real. When Keen said harshly to all of them, “Away!” they were gone when Matthew looked back. So, yes…they must have been.
“Not much further,” Keen told him. Even at this short distance, his voice seemed to come not from in front of Matthew but behind him, another directional trick of the fog. The lanterns they both carried cast weak beams that penetrated only a few yards into the miasma; all around them were walls of slowly undulating mist.
Matthew pulled his cloak a bit tighter. The weight of the dagger in its sheath at his side, beneath the cloak, was a small comfort; in truth he didn’t want to have to stab anyone with it, and so doubly feared the furtive movements he imagined he caught in the doorways and alleys they passed. Keen had put on a brown cloak and skullcap; beneath his cloak he also carried a dagger, and Matthew noted that he always kept his lantern in his left hand so the right was free to quickly draw the blade.
High-pitched laughter floated in and away. There came the distant sound of a woman’s voice, singing a song that must have been bawdy for the raucous hollering that accompanied it, and then both those noises of the night also faded out. An infant cried somewhere nearby, really startlingly close…then abrupt silence. More spirits wandering the void, Matthew thought. In spite of his rational nature, the hairs prickled at the back of his neck.
Freedom of the Mask Page 30