Mother Deare watched him eat for a moment, her eyelids at half-mast, and then she said,
“You’ve heard the professor’s story. Would you care to hear mine?”
Matthew realized it was more of a declaration than a question. He dreaded anything this creature was bent on relating to him, but he wondered if there might be something in the tale to stave off Fell’s wrath. “Of course,” he replied, with a polite but quick smile.
She drank a bit from her refreshed glass. She peered into its depths, as if some recollection lay there.
“I was born to a bordello madam,” she said. “Over in Whitechapel, not three blocks from the Broodies’ warehouse. The house isn’t there anymore. It burned down quite a long time ago. When I turned six years old my mother set me to work…not with the bawds, but gathering up the sheets and helping the regular laundress. My mother—Dorothea—was a cunning and very able businesswoman, but she was not well-educated. She simply acted on her instincts. Dorothea Darling, she called herself, and that’s what the others called her. One of the ladies’ mothers had been a school teacher. She became my teacher. She taught me to read, taught me proper English, taught me…many things.”
She swirled the red wine around and around in her glass. “Heady times, Matthew,” she said, her eyes somewhat glazed by the mist of memory. “My mother believed in showing the customers a good evening…the place was dressed up for a party every night. Some nights we even had musicians in the parlor. Of course we were under the thumb of the local gang and my mother had to pay protection, but that was the game. Sometimes she was required to pay more than money…but that also was the game. I can see the house now, just as it was. Two floors…white curtains at the windows…rooms of different colors…strawberry red, midnight blue, deep green and sunny yellow. And she kept it clean, too. Well…I mean to say I kept it clean, sweepin’ and moppin’ and such after the washin’ was done. A place to be proud of, really. My mum didn’t use two-pence whores and none of ’em were under sixteen. If one of ’em got preggers, she didn’t get thrown out. Usually gave the baby up to the church, but none of ’em was ever strangled and buried in the backyard like they did at some of the houses. We had a higher standard.”
“Your father was also involved in this business?” Matthew asked.
“Oh, naw. My pap…” Mother Deare sipped her wine and gently set the glass aside. “My father,” she said, in her affected voice of a proper lady, “was unknown to me. My mother never mentioned him, when I was a little child…but…later…”
She sat for awhile without speaking. She stared into the candle flames.
“Later,” she continued, “when my mother began to lose her mind…she did tell me about my father.”
Matthew had felt himself tense up. He thought that now a line had been crossed and dangerous ground lay ahead, and it was best that he say no more and simply listen.
“It started in small ways,” said Mother Deare. “She became forgetful of details. Miscounted figures. Misspoke names. She developed a very noticeable and alarming facial tic, and her speech began to slur. Then the sores began to appear…first on her body, and then on her face. They would not heal. The ladies began to leave, and those who replaced them were of a poorer class. So too became the customers. My mother took to wearing a veil to hide the sores that only I was allowed to see…and I tell you, Matthew, I wish to this day I had not seen them. The flesh is so…corruptible, isn’t it?”
He gave no reply.
“Corruptible,” she repeated, and then she went on, quietly. “My mother became known as Dirty Dorothea, for the state of things. Beneath the veil…her face was being eaten away. In her skull, her brain also. Our house was falling to ruin. The gang wanted her out, said she was destroying the business. They said they’d give her one week to pack up and leave…but where were we to go? I was eleven years old, Matthew, and she was thirty-seven. Where were we to go? The poorhouse? The beggars’ row? The church? Well…there might have been a possibility, but…”
She left that hanging while she drank again. She looked out upon the dinner feast with eyes that told Matthew she was no longer really here at the table, but was a desperate eleven-year-old struggling to survive in a horrid world with an insane mother who may have contracted leprosy.
She said, “On the last night…the house was almost empty. Even the slatterns had deserted us. I think…I recall a couple of them…drunk and debased, lying in their beds. I recall…how the house looked. The curtains torn and dingy, the paint on the walls cracked and scabbed…falling to pieces. And my veiled mother pacing the floor like an animal, and raging against fate. She stopped very suddenly, was silent, and I knew she was looking at me through the veil, and she said, ‘You’. She lifted a thin arm, with gnarled fingers, and she pointed at me and said again, ‘You’. Then she asked me…if I would like to know who my father was. I did not speak, because I was terrified of her. But…she told me anyway.”
Mother Deare’s mouth was twisted. Her eyes found Matthew for only a few seconds before her gaze drifted off again.
“She said my father had come to her over three nights. On the first night he appeared as a black cat with silver claws. On the second night, as a toadfrog that sweated blood. On the third night…into the room with the midnight wind…he came as his true self, tall and lean, as handsome as sin, with long black hair and black eyes that held a center of scarlet. A fallen angel, he announced himself to be, and he said he was going to give her a child who would be her joy…and yet…some price must be paid for this, he said, and in his world joy must always lead to misery. My mother said…this demon promised her wealth and beauty with the birth of the child…promised music and light. But…at the whim of Hell this would be taken away, all of it smashed, all of it corrupted…because that was the way of his world. So he said…enjoy it, while you might, for payment must be made for services rendered.”
The twisted mouth became still more twisted. “She didn’t exactly say those words, Matthew. She didn’t speak very well. Couldn’t speak very well, with her lips as they were. But that’s what I understood her to mean. Then she said I had been born from a demon’s cock that shot fire, and to fire I must return. So she broke open a bottle of whale oil and rubbed the oil into my scalp…my beautiful red hair the ladies liked to brush when I was little. Rubbed it over my face and neck, let it run down my back and my front. She poured the rest of into a puddle on the floor, and then with a scream she smashed a lantern into the puddle and it burst into flame. I think…I must have been in shock. Would that be the term for it, Matthew? Shock? Or maybe…I was thinkin’…my mum was gonna come out of it, any minute. She was gonna wake up, and rush to hug me…and I would let her hug me, even though by that time I couldn’t hardly bear to look at her.”
Matthew saw her shiver. It was just a quick thing, there and then gone.
“I said, ‘Don’t, Mum!’ ’Cause I saw she was fallin’ into a place she couldn’t get out of, and how was I to help her? ‘Don’t, Mum!’ I said, but she wasn’t listenin’ to me no more. Then…she hit me. She was a strong woman, even then. She hit me and I fell down. Next thing I knew…she was grabbin’ hold of my ankles, and she was liftin’ me up…and then she held me over that fire and she screamed for him to come and take me. She screamed so loud it like to bust my ears…then I kicked out of her hands and I scrabbled ’cross that room. I used the curtains to put out the fire in my hair…but there was so much oil. It was ever’where. The curtains caught, and the floor was on fire. I remember that heat, and how them flames grew so fast. And right there in the smoke and fire I saw my mum start dancin’, ’round and ’round in the room, like she was hearin’ the music that used to play downstairs. I knew…there wasn’t no savin’ her, and if I was to live I was gonna have to save myself. That was an awful minute, Matthew, when I saw her dancin’ in the flames and I knew I had to leave her there…and all of a sudden she tore her veil off and her face…it was ate up…no nose…ate up nearly to the bone. She reached
down with both hands into the fire…and the oil on her hands caught…blue flames, I remember that…and she put the fire to her face like she was tryin’ to wash herself with it.”
Mother Deare stopped speaking. She stared into space, her mouth partly open. Matthew could hear her harsh breathing.
“Then what happened?” Matthew dared to ask.
A few seconds passed in which Mother Deare did not blink, nor speak, nor otherwise show that she had not herself left the realm of sanity.
At last she picked up her fork, speared a piece of venison and brought it to her mouth. She looked at it as it hung before her lips. “I got out of that room and out of that house,” she said.
“It burned down before anyone could think to start a bucket brigade, but by that time no one cared very much about Dirty Dorothea. They were glad to see the house burn to the ground. I was injured a bit. My hair burned away…my scalp…injured. Other burns that healed in time. I was taken to a hospital—not the one on Cable Street, it wasn’t there then—and I…well…I lived.” She offered Matthew a fleeting smile before she put the venison in her mouth. Her pegs worked at destroying the meat.
“Your mother died in the fire?”
She swallowed the food and took a sip of wine before she answered. “Certainly. I heard much later that a local tavern owner found her blackened skull in the ruins. A great story was circulated about her—oh, it would’ve put the Pin to shame!—that she appeared as a ghost to the owner of the Gray Dog Tavern not far from where the house stood, and her ghost said that whoever touched her skull would have good luck in love and money. So the owner of the Gray Dog promptly renamed his tavern the Lucky Skull and put it on display for his patrons to fondle. It was still there, thirty-nine years later, when I bought the Lucky Skull Tavern and renamed it the Gordian Knot, after a story I particularly enjoyed hearing. My first task as the new owner was to take a club, smash that skull to pieces and sweep it out with the trash.” She showed Matthew her teeth. “I was never very lucky at love, but extremely lucky with money…and, as I do so love money…all is well in the end.”
“An unfortunate childhood,” Matthew said.
She shrugged. “Most are, in one way or another. I was taken in by the woman who had worked at my mother’s house and taught me manners and the proper way of speaking. By that time she was well on her way to becoming a madam herself, which she did very successfully in later years. I grew up in the trade, but after I became involved with the professor—through a series of circumstances that were part coincidence, part hard work and part my willingness to do whatever was necessary to help him succeed—I was moved into another area of the professor’s interests, and the business of managing the houses he owned given to a young jayhawk named Nathan Spade. Oh!” She pressed a sausage of a finger against her lower lip. The froggish eyes widened. “You’re familiar with that name, aren’t you?”
Matthew allowed himself a faint smile. “Nathan Spade” had been his alias and disguise during that nearly-deadly adventure on Pendulum Island in March.
“Nathan Spade is dead,” said Mother Deare. She lifted a fork high. “Long live Matthew Corbett.” The fork came down with fierce strength and impaled her next choice of meat, her thrust making the entire table tremble.
Matthew had another drink of wine. Wherever they were going on this ten-day trip, it was not going to be an easy journey travelling with Mother Deare and her gang of toughs. And then…at the end of the ten days…the professor would be waiting.
Long live Matthew Corbett indeed, he thought grimly. Long live Berry Grigsby, long live Hudson Greathouse, and long live Judge William Atherton Archer, otherwise known as Albion.
They would be gathered together at this mysterious place, in ten days’ time, and then it would be seen how much longer they all had to live.
Moment-to-moment, Matthew thought. Each in its own space.
He had many things to think about, many mental burdens and fears for Judge Archer and the two who’d come such a long way to find him. Would he ever again hold Berry’s hand and stroll along the Broad Way in the cool of an autumn afternoon?
Right now, it wasn’t looking too good for that.
Matthew decided he was going to finish everything on his plate and have a second helping. He was going to eat slowly, bite-by-bite, and when the dessert was served he would have his fill of that too. After all, he was a guest in the house of the very lucky Mother Deare.
He held up his empty glass.
“Another bottle,” he said.
Thirty-Two
SMELL that?” Mother Deare asked. She inhaled deeply, her nostrils flaring. “The sea.”
Matthew smelled the salty aroma of the Atlantic in the chill wind that slipped around the coach’s drawn windowshades. He had been drowsing, for this—the tenth day—had been a particularly long haul of travelling, beginning at first light, and night had fallen several hours ago. Usually the coach would pull into an inn at sunset. This meant, he knew, that they would soon reach the lair of Professor Fell.
He closed his eyes again. He was quite sick of the sight of Mother Deare, who never failed to wear her gaudy gowns and variety of lace gloves, which made her froggish appearance and affected manners even more abrasive. He felt a certain empathy for what she’d experienced at the insane hands of Dirty Dorothea, but the reality of Mother Deare’s current existence was that she was a cold-blooded killer. He was well aware that if she didn’t think Fell would reward her in some way for presenting Matthew to him, he would have gone to the dogs in pieces like Rory Keen.
It had been an arduous and tiring journey, made bearable by the happy discovery that Harrison Copeland carried with him a small chess set and was actually very skilled at the game, having bested Matthew in eight out of nineteen, with four stalemates between them. The half-dozen other men accompanying Mother Deare on this trip, riding in two separate coaches, sometimes watched these games but soon turned away out of disinterest and retired to their sullen corners with bottles of rum or wine. Julian Devane, who sat next to Mother Deare in the coach Matthew occupied, was unfailingly cool and aloof, usually silent, and regarded Matthew as one might watch a cricket crawling across a floor. Matthew had the feeling that Devane would like nothing more than to lift a perfectly-polished boot and crush the cricket into paste.
The sleeping arrangements had been awkward. Some nights he’d stayed in a room with Copeland and Devane, other nights it had been two different men. After the second night, it was determined that Matthew was not going to try to escape. He knew that because he was aware of an easing in the manners of his guards, in that he was allowed to walk outside on the grounds of the inn and no one was right on his tail. He was also allowed to have meals by himself, and no one shook him down to see if he’d swiped a knife. They had obviously come to the conclusion, as he had at the beginning of this caravan, that his priority was in seeing that Berry and Hudson were safe, and one certain way to get their throats slit was to try to slip away or start blabbing about his situation to some innocent bystander.
Some of the innkeepers and tavern owners knew Mother Deare and a few of the other men by name, so it was a certainty that they had travelled this route several times—many times?—before. No one acted as if the slightest thing in the world was wrong. It was simply a business trip, and the inns and taverns were glad to take Mother Deare’s money. She kept a record of how much she was spending in a little book bound with calf’s-hide, and her habit of constantly licking the tip of her pencil was one of her mannerisms that drove Matthew up the oak-planked wall.
Once they’d gotten out of London, the clouds had thinned and a few rays of sun had touched the earth. By its rise and descent, Matthew ascertained that they were heading northwest in the direction of Wales. It was on the third morning when he was sitting opposite Mother Deare and Devane in the coach, being jostled and jarred by the wheels over a rutted road, that a memory came back to Matthew with a suddenness that caused him to catch his breath.
�
��What is it?” Mother Deare had asked sharply.
“Nothing,” he’d said. “Just this rough road getting to me, I suppose.” But what he’d recalled was being in a coach with two men he thought were going to kill him, during the affair of the Queen of Bedlam. Both of them had been working, indirectly, for Professor Fell.
One of them had said: We don’t waste talent, even if it is misguided. Our benefactor keeps a nice village in Wales where people can be educated as to the proper meaning of life.
So…Wales it was. And the destination was Fell’s village, where Matthew was sure the education was applied most severely.
He did smell the sea. It made him think of Rory’s desire to make a sea voyage, and the fact that the young man had never before experienced this bracing aroma of windblown brine. It made him think of the promise he’d vowed to Rory to find out who had raided the stronghold of the Black-Eyed Broodies and committed that massacre. It made him also register the fact that at least twice a day for the last two weeks he had either come awake from sleep with the memory of the single pistol shot ringing in his brain, or some loud and errant noise had made him jump because it too reminded him of the pistol’s report.
In his meals taken with Mother Deare, hearing her snore in the next room through the wall, sitting across from her in the soft yellow lamplight of this coach…he never forgot who she was, what she had done, and what she was capable of doing.
The coach driver gave out a holler.
“Ah!” said Mother Deare, her eyes upon Matthew. “It’s in sight.”
“Fell’s village,” Matthew said.
Her thick lips made an o of surprise and her brows lifted. “You are such a smart young man,” she said. “I’m sure no one told you. How did you know?”
“My secret,” he decided to say, just to nettle her.
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