“Why?” Hardy asked. “All right, so you brought him in! You can give yourself a pat on the back and an extra slug of rum…or Velvet, if you’re stupid enough.” He took a few seconds to examine Matthew from head to foot. “You’re not a Broodie. You’re play-acting as one. Who and what are you, really?”
Matthew said, “I’m the person who’s going to be sitting right here until Judge Archer wakes up. I can tell you that he’ll want to see me.”
“And why might that be? To thank you? You expect a reward?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Matthew, for answers would certainly be a rich reward.
Hardy turned on his heel and stalked away.
“My ass has gone t’ sleep,” Rory said. “I can’t take no more a’ that flippin’ bench.”
“You should go home,” Matthew advised, if one considered home to be a room in a dirty warehouse full of the vilest corruption ever to be poured upon the desperate souls of London.
“Yeah, I’ll do that.” But Rory didn’t move any nearer the door. He looked around, saw that the hollow-eyed woman was dozing and the two wretches were sitting on a similar bench, talking with their heads close together as if planning where to nab their next nip. Sleeping ass or not, Rory eased himself down again beside Matthew.
“Can you figure that?” he asked quietly. “Josh came down on a judge’s wife? And that judge turned out to be Albion? How come you don’t want to tell the doc?”
“I want to hear what Archer has to say first.”
“Brain me with a cod! A judge is a fuckin’ killer? And I carted him in, knowin’ he was the one cut Ben’s throat! Not to mention he got hisself into Newgate just to see you? And then…” Rory shook his head; it was all too much for him to comprehend. “What do you make of it?”
“I make of it…a puzzle. Many pieces are missing. I think only Archer can supply them.”
“If he dies you’ll never get ’em.”
“I know. One thing we can both be very thankful for: he took care of our predicament tonight, so in effect he saved our lives.”
“My life saved by a flippin’ judge. Who would’ve ever thunk such a thing?” Then Rory’s shoulders sagged and he lowered his face, and he was silent for a time but Matthew knew what must be going around and around in his overburdened mind. It had to do with Oakley, Helen Archer, the bountiful and corrosive supply of Velvet in the Broodies’ hideout, and the far-from-motherly hand of Mother Deare. “She won’t stop lookin’ for you,” he said. “You know. Her.”
“Yes.”
“It’ll get back to her ’bout Frost and Willow by first light. Then she’ll send out more of her hounds.” He looked up into Matthew’s eyes. “You mean the Broodies are really workin’ for Professor Fell? And we been doin’ it for years?”
“Ever since the deal was struck with Mick Abernathy.”
“Years,” said Rory. “Do you think Albion killed Ben ’cause of what happened to his wife? I mean…him bein’ a judge and all, and knowin’ people…he could’ve found out some of the Broodies hang ’round the Sisters, and likely went in there as a regular fella and maybe saw the marks on Ben and Will’s hands?”
“Perhaps, but that doesn’t explain why he killed the other five. They weren’t Broodies, were they?”
“No.”
“I think it has to do with something else. Possibly the death of his wife is part of it, but I believe it’s far from being the whole story. We’ll just have to wait and hope he awakens.”
“That White Velvet,” said Rory. “It’s done an awful lot of damage, ain’t it?”
“It has.”
“How can I just put an axe to it, Matthew?” Rory’s face was lined with pain. “If I did that, they’d kill every one of us. And right now…I’m not sure Will, or John or somebody who wants to take my place would stand by and let me do it.”
“Likely not,” Matthew agreed. It was clear Rory had little choice in the matter, unless he was to throw off his ties to the Broodies and simply walk away. But where would he go? And the Velvet would continue to be sold to the taverns, no matter his involvement or not. The demand, and the power that had cultivated it, was just too great.
They lapsed into silence. For the next hour they watched a tragic parade of people being helped, carried or in some cases dragged into the hospital. A screaming woman with a face covered in blood was brought in by two other females. A well-dressed gent staggered in with what appeared to be a multitude of knife wounds all down his left arm, blood dripping from the fingertips to add their pattern to the floorboards. Three young men carried in a fourth whose head had been bashed in and looked to have already slipped the bonds of life. A thin and ragged woman entered leading a silent, heavy-set man by the hand, but as soon as a doctor came out to speak to them the man became suddenly enraged and attacked the physician with both hands to the throat, whereupon one of the nurses used a club to subdue the offender with a single quick blow to the skull.
From Dr. Hardy there was no word, though he did reappear from time to time to speak with other patients and accompany them to the back. He cast not even a glance in the direction of Matthew and Rory, and Matthew surmised there was no change in Archer’s condition.
At last, as it must have been near daylight, Rory stood up and stretched so hard his bones popped. “I can’t do no good here,” he said. “I’d best get back to the others, they’ll be wonderin’ what’s happened.”
“I’ll need to stay,” Matthew said.
“Figured. Listen…it’s almost light, so…if you want to go your own way, that’s fine. If not, can you find you way back to the warehouse?”
Matthew nodded.
“Ain’t too far. Like I say, you want to get on with what you need to do, that’s your business, but if you need a place to roost you can always come back. You’re one of us.”
“Even without proving myself in combat?”
“I reckon we just had us combat enough. Don’t fret on that. If you hang with the Broodies you’ll have plenty of chances for fightin’.”
“You’re not worried about Mother Deare knocking at your door to find out what happened to her men?”
“Naw. Frost and Willow ain’t gonna be doin’ no more talkin’. Yeah, she’ll send more men, but she ain’t gonna know what happened out there, and I’m in the clear. So…anyhow…decide whatever you please.”
“Thank you,” Matthew said.
“Welcome.” He started to move away and then hesitated, for there was something else he needed to convey. “Matthew,” he said, “that doc was right. You got the mark, but you don’t belong here. You’re flyin’ in higher air than me. Ought to fly on ’fore Whitechapel gives you a fall.”
Matthew nodded at this but he could neither add nor subtract from what Rory had expressed, as it equalled the truth.
“All right, then,” Rory said, and he turned away from Matthew, walked across the blood-stained boards and out of the Cable Street hospital.
Murky daylight was beginning to show through the room’s windows. Beyond the dimpled glass in their unpainted frames, carts and wagons were trundling along the street through the dwindling tentacles of fog. Matthew wondered if the sun would ever shine again upon London. He placed his hand upon Albion’s mask in the pocket of his cloak. He longed to inspect it more closely, to see how it was sewn, but here was not the place. He caught one of the square-bodied, husky nurses staring at him; he hadn’t given anyone but Dr. Hardy his name, and he sincerely hoped that on one of the woman’s many excursions to the patients’ ward Hardy hadn’t mentioned his name to her, and her a reader of the Pin, and now that the nightly dramas of life-and-death here had quietened she wasn’t putting a face to the Monster of Plymouth.
He couldn’t help it if she was. He smiled at her and she quickly looked away, but leaned toward another nurse to speak softly in her ear. Well, he wasn’t leaving and that was that. Bring on all the constables you please, he mentally told her. Albion is lying back there, so bring on the dev
il if you please but I’m sticking.
He situated his back against the wall and closed his eyes. For all the questions that whirled in his mind, he was asleep within a minute and slept in a dreamless void.
He was awakened seemingly only seconds after his eyes had closed. Someone had grasped his shoulder and given him a shake. He looked up into the face of not Dr. Hardy but another man, this one older than Hardy with white hair tied back in a queue and wearing spectacles. “Corbett?” he asked.
“Yes.” Matthew realized the light through the windows had strengthened, though it could barely be called strong, and the faces of the people in the hospital’s waiting-room were all different. “What is it?”
“Judge Archer has awakened and is asking for you.”
At once Matthew was on his feet, though still a bit groggy. He took his cloak and tricorn and followed the man out of the room, along a hallway and through a door into the patients’ ward, which was a long chamber crowded with beds. Not a single bed was empty. Mercifully most of the patients were sleeping, but some were raving as they fought against the leather straps that constrained them. One—a woman—was sobbing and shrieking, while a little boy stood next to the bed holding her hand. The smells of sickness and infirmity overpowered the bittersweet odor of the soap used to clean the linens and scrub the floors. Nurses moved back and forth to give aid, but all in all it was a hellish scene.
“We have him in a private area,” the man—another doctor, Matthew presumed—said as he led the way through the ward. He stopped briefly to confer with a nurse and check something off with his pencil on a sheet of paper, and then he continued on through a door and into a short corridor with two rooms on either side. The doctor motioned toward the nearest room on the right. “Your name was the first he spoke. I can only give you a few minutes.”
“I understand.”
“Oh,” the man said before he retreated, “Dr. Hardy has told me he’s sent a messenger to the Old Bailey to give them word.”
“I see.” Matthew still felt dazed. “Can you tell me what time it is?”
The doctor referred to a very fine-looking silver pocketwatch. “Sixteen minutes before nine. I’ll send a nurse to inform you when you should leave. Judge Archer is still in a precarious condition.”
“All right.” Matthew entered the room, the doctor withdrew, and there upon a bed of snow-white linen with the topsheet pulled up to his chin was the Hanging Judge himself, his pallor gray, his breathing all but imperceptible, his eyes closed.
Matthew waited a few seconds but the eyes did not open. He said, “I am here, sir.”
The eyelids came up with sluggish strength, as obviously the drugs in Archer’s system were highly potent. They drifted down again before, seemingly by sheer force of will, he corrected the descent.
“Mr. Corbett,” he whispered, in a frail voice no one on earth would have recognized as belonging to the fiery and combative William Atherton Archer. “Closer,” he urged.
Matthew stepped nearer the bedside. Archer simply stared at him, as if trying to gather enough strength to speak again. To the judge’s silent struggle, Matthew said, “I thank you for saving the lives of myself and my friend.”
“Fool,” whispered the judge.
“Sir?”
“Not you. That…fool…who kept coughing. Might have lost me…in the fog…otherwise.”
“Ah. I presume you saw them take us from the Three Sisters and you got around in front of them in the fog?”
“’Course. Didn’t…hop…like a cricket, did I?”
“I’d be surprised if you couldn’t. Albion can walk through walls like a phantom, so hopping like a cricket would be a minor effort.” Matthew was aware that time was passing fast and the judge’s strength might collapse at any second. “I have Albion’s mask,” he said. “Can you tell me what all this is about?”
“Professor Fell,” Archer answered, still in a tenuous rasp. “The White Velvet. Murder…and despair. The…corruption…of…everything I hold dear.”
“I thought you believed Fell to be only a—”
“Don’t interrupt,” came the reply, with surprising force. Then: “Who were…those men…Albion sent to their graves?”
“Fell’s men, working with a woman who calls herself Mother Deare. She—”
“Yes, yes. I know that…odious name. You see? My plan…my plan has worked.”
“Your plan, sir? What would that be?”
“My plan,” said the judge, “to…lure Fell out from hiding…by using you as bait.”
“What?”
“All this…to lure Fell…or his people…to show themselves. To let him know you…a…formidable foe…who has bested him…are in London…and your only friend…is Albion, the…killer of his underlings.”
Matthew had the sudden memory of the vicious guard named Baudrey at Newgate, calling him baitfish. It seemed that he had been the sardine on a much more important hook than Baudrey had ever dreamed.
“I knew…sooner or later…they would find you. But I had hoped…Matthew…that I would be at your side…when they showed themselves. I fear my…plan…has not quite…succeeded as I intended.”
“That’s all right, Father,” said someone at Matthew’s back. “God willing, it shall yet succeed.”
Matthew was startled, but he already knew who he would see when he looked behind.
The story in the Pin…the name of Joshua Oakley…the person who knew the comings and goings at Newgate as well as did Judge Archer, and the one also who had lost a loved one to the tragic insanity of the White Velvet.
“Greetings, Steven,” Matthew said to the young man with the straw-colored hair and the square-lensed spectacles.
“And to you, sir,” Steven replied, with a quick and respectful bow of the head.
Twenty-Six
IT is time,” said Matthew, “for answers.”
“Agreed,” Steven said.
“The whole story. Leave nothing out.”
“The whole story,” Steven repeated with an air of bitter sarcasm. He spent a moment to stir a spoonful of sugar into his cup of coffee. “The story of at least two lives, if not two hundred thousand.”
Matthew had decided to take his coffee strong and unadorned. He took a drink of it and imagined feeling renewed vigor race through his veins, a sensation he sorely needed.
They were sitting in a small coffee shop called the Rising Sun, one street to the south and a block to the west of the Cable Street Publick Hospital. It was the nearest place they could find that guaranteed a modicum of privacy. The brown brick walls were cracked and the place wasn’t very clean, but the coffee smelled good and the tables were more or less level, so this establishment suited the purpose.
Barely thirty minutes had passed since Matthew had been called to Judge Archer’s bedside. Steven had gone to his father and hugged him, they’d spoken quietly for a short time, and then it was clear the judge’s strength was again ebbing because he couldn’t raise even a whisper. A nurse came to tell them it was time to leave, and so after Matthew had washed the blood off his hands in a horse trough they’d taken their discussion to this house of the Rising Sun.
“I should tell you,” said Steven, “that two people from New York are here looking for you. Their names are Hudson Greathouse and Berry Grigsby. They’re—” Matthew’s gasp gave him pause, and then he went on. “They’re staying at the Soames Inn off Fleet Street. Very near the printer who produces the Pin, by the way.”
“I visited the Pin yesterday.” Matthew had to down nearly half his cup, for he’d been shaken to the core by the news Steven had just delivered. It figured that Hudson had likely gone to Charles Town in search of him and located someone who could help—possibly Magnus Muldoon—and therefore had been put on the track to Rotbottom. Much of that remained a painful blur, but it stood to reason that Hudson had followed the trail to the departure of the Wanderer, because he was after all a very able problem-solver himself though in his case muscle won over m
entality. Matthew thought how much he could use the Great One’s help now; going to the Soames Inn and finding him was nearly a scream in his ears, and yet…
Berry was with him.
Damn it! he thought angrily. And here he’d been thinking he had no other skin to worry about in London but his own! Why the hell had she come? Why the devil hadn’t she stayed in New York, where she…
Then he realized that she was here, searching for him with Hudson, in spite of those terrible things he’d said to her. She was here because she had put those soul-crushing things aside. Her feelings for him were stronger than the pain he’d dished out to her. There was much to be said for that, and again he was shaken by the thought of someone with that much devotion. She must believe in me very much, he thought. She must love me with a conviction that overcomes the lies of a moment, and by now Hudson has made her understand that they were lies.
Still…she shouldn’t be here. He couldn’t go to Hudson for help. Couldn’t even let the man know where he was. No, this was now a deadly battle with three sides: Matthew Corbett, Professor Fell, and Albion.
“You can begin,” Matthew said, “whenever you like. But please start at the beginning.”
“You’re aware of the beginning,” Steven answered. Though younger than Matthew, the eyes behind the spectacles held the darkness of experience gained only through suffering. “It begins with Professor Fell.” This was spoken in a guarded tone that would carry no further than to Matthew. “His crimes and his ambition. His desire to destroy everything my father has spent his life to preserve and protect. Fell might not consider this, but my father certainly has: if Fell is not stopped, he will destroy the very fabric of England itself. Right now it strains and rips. You see it, with the spread of the White Velvet. And you’ve seen it before, I’m sure, in your other encounters with him.”
“I have. But please tell me this: why was I was sent to Newgate?”
“For your protection.”
“My protection? Ha! Excuse me while I laugh again.”
“Consider,” Steven said calmly, “that as the general clerk for all the justices, I was the first to see Mr. Lillehorne’s plea to Judge Greenwood to hear your case. In that plea was mentioned your connection with the Herrald Agency in New York, and your past experiences with Fell by way of explaining the unfortunate incident at sea. Never—ever—have we had access to anyone who has gotten as close to the professor as you have. I immediately took the document to my father and he deliberated over it. Very quickly he saw how you could be—excuse the term—used. He approached Judge Greenwood with the intent of meeting you and hearing what Lillehorne had to say, and as Judge Greenwood is a younger man and my father has a few years seniority there was no argument.”
Freedom of the Mask Page 33