He noted also that he’d been brought a corked glass jug of water and a white drinking cup, sitting on the dresser along with the other items.
He would have to thank Professor Fell for the gracious hospitality, and he planned to do so on the morrow, face-to-face, with no masks between them.
Thirty-Four
THE sun was coming up and the sky promised to be a cloudless and most welcome blue. Matthew had been dressed in his gray suit and waistcoat and waiting for at least an hour. The bed was comfortable enough, but the discomfort of his mind had allowed him not quite three hours of sleep, none of it more than a quarter of an hour at a time.
As the light strengthened and moved across the floorplanks, Matthew remained in a chair in the front room. Through a window he could see people occasionally passing by. He wondered how the place was organized. Were there teams of workers? Were they occupied in such tasks as cleaning the streets, making repairs of walls and woodwork, going out in wagons to cut blocks of peat? Of course everything would be supervised by the guards, and if his assumption about the drugs was correct the workers would be easily handled. What did they do for food here? Was there space for gardens? Did the guards go out on hunting trips? There was the sea, if one could get fishing boats out in what sounded like waves crashing against treacherous rocks. Possibly there was a protected harbor nearby, or a beach from which the boats could be launched.
Matthew considered that Y Beautiful Bedd was quite an endeavor. On his cursory examination last night, it appeared the place had possibly been a medieval-era fortress. How had Professor Fell gotten hold of the place? Maybe it had simply been abandoned for many years, Fell had purchased the property—and how much of the surrounding land?—and rebuilt everything. It would certainly be within his power to do so. But the idea of keeping people here as his prisoners…it was, as Madam Candoleri had said, madness. Though with Professor Fell there was always a method, and what might be deemed madness to most was to him simply a means to an end.
Matthew was afraid.
He tasted the fear in his mouth like the most bitter of wines. He had stayed away from the bottle of water. His throat was hot with thirst. As he’d washed his face and shaved, using that same water, he wondered if he’d been contaminated in some way. The fear had gotten down in his chest, coiled around his heart and started crushing it. To be totally in Fell’s grip was bad enough, but for Berry and Hudson to also be? And soon Judge Archer would be, if the coach carrying him had not already arrived sometime in the early hours, and him taken to a place without the fanfare of a greeting throng and an off-key band. Did they have a town cryer here who went around announcing the imminent arrival of new residents? And how was the news brought to the Beautiful Grave? By a series of fast horsemen who passed the messages along a certain route, was his guess.
Through the blur of his concentration he saw a figure approaching his door. The knock was delivered. Matthew’s heartbeat quickened and he felt sweat on his palms. “Come in,” he said thickly.
Julian Devane had been sent for him. The young blonde man wore a tobacco-brown cloak over his suit, and on his head was the dark green tricorn tilted at a rakish angle. This morning he did not offer the threat of a pistol but his face was unsmiling, the gray eyes chilly. “It’s time,” he said.
Matthew stood up from his chair. “The professor can wait. I want to see my friends.”
“Naturally. I’m to take you to them. The girl first.”
Matthew had been prepared for a test of wills. He was for a few seconds thrown off balance, but he realized that Fell was in no hurry to drive a spike through his brain.
“After you,” said Devane, holding the door open.
Matthew put on his cloak and his own tricorn and left the house, walking into a morning in which the sun shone brightly but the cold wind carried a knife’s edge. Devane walked a few paces behind him until they reached the square, and then he came up alongside to guide the direction. In the more revealing daylight Matthew could see the fortress wall of ancient and weathered stones that protected the village. Matthew counted six guards walking up on the parapets with shouldered muskets, but there could have been others out of sight. A large wooden gate could be seen at the end of a road about a hundred yards to the southeast, with what appeared to be a small guardhouse set off to the left. Nothing could be seen beyond the walls.
They passed into the square. Several people spoke good morning to Devane, but he ignored them. A wagon trundled past carrying a load of a dozen or so casks, but these were of a much smaller size than those that had held the White Velvet in the Broodies’ hideaway. Was the drugged gin being created here? Such common casks could be made anywhere, but why were they differently-sized from the others? He saw a couple of women and a little boy at work sweeping the stones. Two men, both well-dressed and looking well-fed, stood before a shopfront marked with the sign General Goods. They were engaged in a conversation that might have been about the weather or the state of politics in Parliament, their faces ruddy with the cold but bearing no hint of dismay at being confined against their will within Fell’s fortress.
On the other side of the square Devane herded Matthew onto a street that bore the sign of Redfin. Here the small cottages of slate roofs and thatched roofs spouted smoke from their chimneys and in some places there stood neat white picket fences separating one property from another. It appeared an idyllic setting, but there was not a single tree in sight and no birds sang.
A little further, they came upon a middle-aged woman in a blue bonnet and gown dancing in the street as if with an invisible partner. She was doing a slow, graceful movement Matthew knew to be called a minuet. The smile she offered to her ghostly companion was to Matthew nothing less than a horror. Her eyes appeared glazed over. She stopped her movements to bow into the wind.
“Keep walking,” said Devane, for Matthew had slowed a step.
The woman began dancing once more. Matthew had noted that she was very thin, and the folds and ruffles of the gown hung off her frame. He wondered if what she’d been given had cursed her mind into believing she was in attendance at a dance that had no end, until she dropped dead from it.
“Here is the house,” Devane announced, and motioned toward a thatched-roof cottage that had a frame of pale blue paint around the windows. He gave a tight and unfriendly smile. “I’ll wait.”
Matthew walked to the door. His heart was again hammering furiously in his chest. He balled up his fist to knock…
…and in the next instant the door came open and a coppery red-haired female of his dearest acquaintance threw herself into his arms. “I saw you coming!” Berry said breathlessly, her mouth up against his ear. “I couldn’t wait! They told me someone was coming, and I was to stay here…but I would’ve been outside to meet you if I’d known…they told me to stay inside, I wasn’t to—”
“Shhhhhh,” he told her, and he put a finger against her lips and looked at her for the first time in over three months.
She appeared tired, with purplish hollows under her eyes and the dark blue of them also murky, like peering into shallow ponds that had been stirred up by the passage of heavy boots. Otherwise, he thought she was simply and unsurpassably beautiful. Her strong features, her finely-chiselled nose, her freckled cheeks, the wildness of her locks that seemed to have burst free with excitement from the bonds of several small and brightly-colored haircombs, the invigorating lemony scent of her, the warmth of her body and the nearness of her lips…he nearly staggered under the spin of what could only be called dizzying ecstacy. Then she crushed herself into him again, and he held tightly to her and they stood that way for a time, heart-to-heart, as their merged shadows lay behind them almost to the toes of Devane’s shiny boots.
“Let’s go inside,” Matthew said, his voice both weakened and roughened with emotion. Tears had started to burn his eyes. He blinked them away, because they were tell-tales of his fear for Berry’s life and he could not—must not—let her see them.
Her abode was not much different from his own, except she’d started a peat fire burning in the hearth. After Berry had closed the door behind them, Matthew just couldn’t let go of her hands.
“I still can’t believe this!” he said. “That you’re here, and I’m here, and…oh my Lord, I’m so glad to see you!”
She hugged him again and he put his arms around her. Once more he felt dizzied with pure and soaring joy, and at the same time terribly frightened for her life.
“I’m sorry for those things I said to you,” he told her. “Can you ever forgive me?”
“What things?” Berry asked, with her head resting against his shoulder.
“You know. The things I…well, never mind that, because we should let all that go. Just understand that I only said those things to keep you from harm.”
“I do understand,” she said. “I know you didn’t want me to come here.”
“If I’d had my way, neither one of you would’ve!” He looked into her face again. She was smiling a little wistfully, it seemed to him, and her eyes…they were very murky. He caught sight of a half-drained bottle of clear liquid—water and not the White Velvet, he assumed—on a table next to the entrance to the bedroom. A drinking cup sat beside the bottle.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m not going to give up. I’m going to do what I can to get us out of here. You, me, Hudson, and…there’s another person I’m going to try to get out too. So I know things look grim right now, and I wish to God you weren’t in this situation, but I want you to be strong and brave and—”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, and she drew back a little ways.
“The situation!” he repeated. “Being here! I’m going to find a way to get all of us out! Where did they take Hudson?”
“They…” She frowned, and it seemed as if a shadow passed across the freckled, open face and for an awful instant he didn’t recognize her. “I suppose he was taken to the house they were so kind to offer.”
Matthew didn’t reply. So kind to offer. He didn’t like the sound of that. Her eyes…murky…unfocused…puddles of mud.
“Berry,” he said, and he took hold of her shoulders. “Do you know where you are?”
“Of course, silly,” she answered, with a lopsided grin that quickly slid off her face. “We’re in a beautiful village in Wales. Where do you think we are, Ashton?”
His mouth made the word, but he heard it as though muffled through cotton. “What?”
“I said, where do you think we are?” She gave him a puzzled look, and then she hugged him again and gave him a sisterly kiss on the cheek. She retreated a few steps, leaving Matthew’s hands gripping the air. “I cannot believe you found us, Ashton! And you came all that way…why? They told me last night that someone was coming to see me this morning, but I didn’t know who it might be. Then…when I saw you through the window, I…I could hardly keep myself from rushing out. Did you leave New York just after we did? But tell me…really…I know you didn’t want me to come here, and…yes…I do recall that you said you thought this trip a wild and dangerous endeavor, but…why did you feel the need to follow me?”
He wanted to shake her. Wanted to say Look at me, and tell me who I am, but he did not because again he was afraid. He thought he should be very careful now, very careful indeed, for as he looked at her he saw what appeared to be the quick flickering of many emotions across her face, like viewing the tumult of terrible storms at a distance. He glanced again at the bottle of water. Half-drained. How many others had she emptied? And now here stood before him the woman he loved, the woman he had finally realized he needed and wanted to be with, and she was a stumble and a shriek away from Bedlam.
She was seeing Ashton McCaggers when she looked at him, that much was clear. But why? Why him? What had the drug triggered in her brain that so clouded and distorted her vision?
He said, “So…” It was a moment before he could steady himself to go on. She was staring at him expectantly, and suddenly she reached out and took his right hand. If she was even able to see the tattoo between his thumb and index finger, she made no mention of it. “So,” he repeated, “you haven’t found…” God, to speak this meant that she really was afflicted, and this was no bizarre nightmare. He felt near bursting into tears. He had to make himself continue. “You haven’t found Matthew?”
“No,” she said, and both her voice and her eyes were sad. “Our friend here…he’s an educator with a local university, I understand. His name is…Dr. Idris. Yes, that’s right. He says he’ll help us find Matthew. Hudson spoke to him.”
“Hudson told you this?”
“No…another man told me. But he said Hudson had explained everything to Dr. Idris, and the doctor had promised to help us. I haven’t met him, but he seems like a very good man to take such an interest.”
“I’m sure.” Matthew had spoken through clenched teeth. His stomach had lurched; he feared he was going to be sick all over this neat and tidy parlor. “Berry…please…tell me how it was you and Hudson came to this place.”
“I had an accident in London,” she said, with no hesitation. “I remember…falling. On a set of stairs, I believe. I think I struck my head. I remember travelling in a coach…I remember watching a fly on the wall in a room. I recall eating a bowl of beef broth. But I must’ve been dazed, quite a bit. My head didn’t clear until I’d been here awhile.”
“Did Hudson tell you that you’d suffered this accident?”
“No, another man did. The same man I told you about. His name is…oh, that’s odd. I can see his face, but I can’t think of his name. Well…I’m getting dotty, Ashton. I think I’ve been so worried about Matthew…I just can’t keep all of it in my poor head anymore.” She smiled at him, but it was terrible because he saw that her eyes were more dead now than when he’d first arrived. “How it happened…this woman knew Dr. Idris, and said not only could he give us shelter while I…you know…recuperated, but he knew many people and had many connections and he could help us find Matthew, but it might take some time. Oh!” she said suddenly, a startled sound that caused Matthew renewed alarm.
“What is it?”
“It’s so strange. I thought for a moment you weren’t wearing your spectacles.”
Matthew had to look down at the floor. He said, “I’m very glad you were so excited to see me.”
“I still can’t believe you’re here! That’s another strange thing. This man…his name is…Danley? Daniel?…something…asked me who I would go to if Matthew was never found. He asked who I might find comfort in if…you know…Matthew was dead. I told him about you.”
“Ah,” Matthew said, a small noise.
“And then,” she went on, “I began having the strangest dreams about you! It seemed I saw your face in my dreams every night. You came to me…telling me everything was going to be all right…to calm myself and trust in Mr. Daniel and Dr. Idris. I could see you as plain as day, sitting at my bedside, speaking to me. And here you are! Oh, Ashton!” she said, and she rushed herself into his arms again, but as she did a shiver rippled up Matthew’s spine. “I’m so grateful to you for being here!”
“I presume,” he replied, “that when you told this man about me…he asked you to describe me in detail. Is that correct?”
“I suppose so. Yes, he did. I think. Well, I’m sure I did.”
“I’m sure,” said Matthew.
“We shouldn’t have to stay here too much longer. Just for me to get all well again. And while we’re here Dr. Idris is going to help us. He knows many people and has many connections and he can help us find Matthew, but it might take some time.”
“Yes,” Matthew said, “it might.” He pressed her close to him, and there were tears in his eyes again because he was going to have to let her go, and when he walked out of this damned bright sunlit cottage in this lovely cemetery he might break down on the street and he could not give Devane the satisfaction of seeing that. And Berry…dear God…what if Berry was lost to him forever
?
That was a place he just could not allow himself to go.
“I need to see Hudson,” he told her. “I’ll come back a little later. All right?”
“Yes. Please. We can have dinner together at the tavern.”
Matthew blinked the tears away before he kissed her cheek, and then he looked into her face but chose not to look too deeply, for the Berry he knew and loved was here in body, but in mind and spirit somewhere far distant. “Until later,” he said with the best smile he could muster. He squeezed her hand, and then he pulled away from her and started for the door.
He was reaching for the knob when she said, “Ashton?”
Her voice quavered. There was something in it of the cliff’s edge.
He turned toward her again. “Yes, Berry?”
Her smile flickered on and off. Did she have a slight sheen of perspiration upon her forehead? A wildness came up in her eyes and then quickly receded, for the afflicted mind could not grasp reality.
“I’ve never known you to call Hudson by his first name,” she said. “Only ‘Greathouse’.”
He thought quickly, though his own mind seemed sluggish. “I’m trying to be less formal than my usual manner,” he explained.
“Oh. I’m sure he’ll be very pleased to see you.”
“I hope.” He smiled at her again, she returned the smile like that of a painted doll, and then he got out of the cottage and into the cold wind and brightness of the sun and Julian Devane stepped out of a shadow beside the house and said, “That was a short visit.”
Matthew felt an animalish rage leap up within him. He tensed himself to spring at Devane’s throat, to tear the eyes from the head, to use his teeth if need be to send the man to his well-deserved reward. The furies of Hell almost came out of him…almost…but Devane said with maddening calm, “Settle yourself, Matthew.” He swept an arm along Redfin Street. “Your other New York friend is waiting.”
Freedom of the Mask Page 44