Fell asked quietly, “How do you plead?”
Archer didn’t answer for a moment. He took a drink of his wine. Then he said, “Guilty, I suppose. Guilty of giving a damn.”
“And damned you may well be,” came the reply. “You know, I’ve heard a lot about you. That you are incorruptible, that you are a steadfast man of so-called honor, far beyond my ability to recruit you as a tool. But now I see…you don’t even understand the nature of crime! How many men have you hanged because you were really hanging me? How many men deserved mercy, and you saw in your warped sense of justice a budding Professor Fell, and so you sent them to the rope? I’ll wager you can count them on more than two hands! Did you think you were really doing anything to save England from itself? What would be your next move, to start sending children to the gallows for cheating in games of marbles, so that the criminal element of England would be destroyed in its infancy?
“Ha,” the professor said, and he started to take another bite of his fish but then he put the fork down and pushed the plate aside as if he had no more stomach for it. “Crime,” he said softly. “You murdered six errand boys, while in Parliament plans are being drawn up to go to war over territory and money for a select few, and in consequence murder sixty-six thousand errand boys. Those in power are the criminals and every day they get away with some form of murder! Yet your eye is turned toward me.”
He shook his head, sadly. “I don’t even know why I bothered with you, except to put you in your place. Well…yes, I do know. You and Matthew are going to be my guests at the opera program at eight tomorrow night. After the program is ended, Albion Archer, you are going to be worked on. I don’t like people knowing my business, and you learned far too much for my comfort. Therefore you are going to be worked on, to get a proper accounting of those who revealed to you my full name and description. Matthew may have spilled that to Mother Deare, but it had to come from you because of that cute little rhyme in the Pin that she brought along. We must remedy this breach. After I get the information I want from you, you’ll be used as a subject for some experiments. Depending on how those proceed, you’ll either live or die.”
“Lovely,” said Archer, with a tight smile.
“Yes, lovely. Now if I were operating under your conditions, I would let you walk free and kill everyone who was a reader of the Pin.” Suddenly the professor’s face contorted. “You disgust me,” he said. He took the napkin from his lap, flung it onto the table and stood up. The chair screeched across the floor. Instantly Martin came into the room from the opposite door.
“We are done here,” Fell said. “Get out of my house, the both of you. And take your mask with you, Archer. You may wish to wear it to bed tonight to make you dream of being anything but a criminal who thinks himself a hero.”
So saying, the professor stalked from the room.
Martin stood where he was, glowering. The message to get out was well-received.
Archer got up from his chair. He reached for the mask and then hesitated. Reached a little further and hesitated again.
Then his hand went all the way, and he took it off the crisped and eviscerated fish.
Thirty-Eight
THE night had gotten colder.
Matthew was walking alongside William Archer, away from the house of Professor Fell. Lanterns glowed on the street signposts and an occasional light showed in a window.
“What street are you on?” Archer asked.
“Lionfish. And you?”
“Bullhead. One over from Thresher.”
Matthew nodded. “You’re aware that most of the residents of this village are numbed by drugs?”
“From the limited part I’ve seen, I had that suspicion. I know there are guards here, but how could Fell keep everyone so docile without narcotics?” He was silent for a few paces. “I suppose by being a subject for experimentation I’ll get first-hand knowledge of this?”
“Yes,” Matthew said.
“Hm. There’s a shaving razor in my cottage. I wonder if I shouldn’t just—”
“I doubt it will be there when you return.” Matthew suddenly stopped, and so did Archer. They faced each other on the street, with the cold wind swirling around them, the near-full moon a bright lamp and the stars burning above. “I imagine you could find a way to remove yourself if you really wanted to,” Matthew said. “You might think it wise to do so, to protect your contacts and also to protect Steven. Did they harm him in taking you from the hospital? I understood that a young man tried to come to your aid.”
“It wasn’t Steven. It was someone else, the husband of one of the nurses I think. I’d told Steven to go home and rest, to come back the next day if he could. Luckily, he took his father’s advice.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Did Steven tell you that he related to me the whole story of this…I am hesitant to call it a plan, so I must call it a desperation.”
“He did. I was fading in and out, but I got the gist that he’d told you everything.”
Matthew looked up at the moon and the expanse of stars, breathtaking in their splendor, and then returned his attention to the judge. He shook his head. “How could you ever think something like this would succeed? Using me as bait to bring Fell to the Three Sisters, where you hoped to kill him on the steps of Flint Alley? You’re a learned and intelligent man, and your son also. How could you have concocted such an insanity?”
“It might have worked. Part of it did, at least.”
“Instead of bringing Fell to you on your ground, it’s brought you to Fell on his. If that’s a success, I have lost my bearings on what the word failure means.” Matthew felt the heat rising in his face. “And how dare you use me in that way! Putting me in Newgate…casting me adrift in Whitechapel…all of it. All of it,” he repeated, holding up the Broodie tattoo in front of Archer’s face.
“Yes,” said Archer. His eyes had gotten hard and a muscle jumped in his jaw. “I’ve seen that mark before, on the body of the young man who came crashing down to destroy my Eleanor.”
“Perhaps you can be comforted in the fact that the gang to which Joshua Oakley belonged has been reduced to one final member: myself. They’re all dead, everyone but their leader murdered at the hand of whoever killed Judge Fallonsby and his family. A demoniac, Fell calls him. Someone trying to muscle his way onto the professor’s territory by stealing shipments of the Velvet. The leader of that gang was murdered in front of my eyes by Mother Deare, and he had his rough edges but he was a decent man who deserved much better than what life shoved at him. Now the professor has in hand two of my friends—pardon me…a correction, my best friend and the woman I love—in this village of the damned and their minds are so overcome by drugs neither one can recognize me.”
Matthew put a hand to his forehead, as a dizziness swept over him. He had a few seconds of sheer panic, in which he feared he’d been poisoned again, but then he realized he was still in control of his faculties and what he was experiencing was the poison of the situation. He said, “I am used to finding a way to solve problems. In the past I’ve been in complications in which I racked my brain almost to pieces, but I always did devise a solution. This time, I can’t find one.” He lowered his hand. “If anyone ought to have the right to leave this life by his own effort, it should be myself,” he said. “I have caused the worst thing I dreaded in this world to happen, and I’m powerless to change it. The only thing I can do is to hang on for another minute, hour and day, and hope I can conjure an answer that will at least save my friends. So…if you wish to kill yourself you could find a way, but that would really show what a misguided attempt this has been.” He paused to let that register. Then he said, “Salvage some pride from the ashes, sir. Hang on a bit longer.”
“I have only one more day in which to hang.”
“I imagine many of the men who were awaiting the rope because of your decision looked at a single remaining day, and they made the best of it. Even the professor believes you to be of sterner stuff than a will
toward suicide, or he would never have let you leave the house.”
“True,” the judge said, in a quiet voice. He gazed around at the little houses for a time, and Matthew could tell that the man’s mind—though certainly burdened—had begun to work at the problem. A simpleton could not have played the part of Albion or devised the plan, even as flawed as it was. “This afternoon I walked the length of the wall,” Archer said. “I saw the very well-guarded front gate and a back gate over the cliffs. The rocks are treacherous there, but I could see a road that winds down maybe a quarter of a mile to a protected harbor. Two fishing boats and a larger sailing craft were docked there. Do you think it possible to break that gate open and get to one of the boats?”
“I’ll have to take a look,” Matthew said, but he was already thinking how difficult that would be. Even if there were no guards down at the boats…locked gate…guards on duty walking the parapet…armed with muskets. The bars had looked strong enough to defy Coalblack. And on the very slight chance that Archer might somehow get away, Matthew could never abandon Berry and Hudson to save his own skin even if both front and back gates were wide open.
Archer drew a long breath and released it. He stared at the ground for a moment, as if contemplating his place on the surface of the earth. Then he lifted his gaze and said, “Matthew, I will say to you the same thing I said to my Eleanor: I am truly and deeply sorry, and I humbly apologize.”
“That will have to do, I suppose.” Matthew frowned. “You apologized to your wife for what? The accident?”
“No. For giving her an overdose of laudanum that last night. I couldn’t stand to see her in such pain any longer. The doctors said she would linger indefinitely.” Archer’s own face seemed to have tightened into a mask, but it was one that allowed not an inch of freedom. “Steven doesn’t know I sent her off. So you see,” he said, “I really am a murderer.”
Matthew saw not necessarily a murderer standing before him, but a conscience-stricken man of the law who was a prisoner in his own cage of bones.
With that admission, Archer’s eyes seemed to have retreated into his head and he had shrunken as if trying to hide himself in a place where there was nowhere to hide. When he spoke again his voice held the rough gravel of pain. “I’ll walk on now. Goodnight to you.”
“Goodnight,” said Matthew, and he stood where he was until Judge Archer had walked to the next street and turned to the left, carrying the mask of Albion at his side.
In his cottage on Lionfish Street, Matthew could not have slept if Spenser’s faerie queen had drifted in and blown a shimmering handful of forget-the-world dust up his nostrils. He sat in a chair in the front room and played twiddle-thumbs while in his fevered brain thoughts roamed far and wide and leaped about like wild animals.
Did an hour pass? Did two hours creep by? The candle in his lantern hissed out. Matthew had not the heart to relight it and look at his pocketwatch, for the passage of every minute was a torture. To think of Berry in that house on Redfin Street, her mind devolving into porridge…and Hudson, the Great One, on his belly trying to crawl beneath a mattress to escape his living nightmares…
God, it was too much.
He sat in the dark, with the moonlight through the windows his only companion.
He longed to go to Berry, to hold her and kiss her and tell her that everything would be all right, but it would be the most blatant lie. And when she looked at him, would she see Ashton McCaggers or some other phantom that Fell had ordered inserted into her head?
In the end, she will revert to being an infant in a cradle, and I may let you rock her from time to time.
It was hideous. He would rather have gotten on his knees and let Fell swing the blade that took his head off, rather than to have to watch that slow death.
I will tell you, dear Matthew, that she is lost to you forever, because even if the dosage ceased today—which it will not—she would fail to recover without vigorous and steady application of the antidote.
The antidote. It would be in Gentry’s book of potions, and where would the book be? Kept in the Publick Hospital? The building had been dark when Matthew had passed by. If he could break into the hospital…find the notebook…if the notebook was there…if the antidote was there, and clearly marked…if…if…if…
He was no chemist. What if he found Ribbenhoff and forced the man to give him the antidote? Ribbenhoff. Another damned Prussian?
Vigorous and steady application, the professor had said.
Meaning what? Once a day for a week? Four times a day for four weeks? Six times a day for six weeks? It was impossible.
Matthew leaned forward and put his head in his hands. He was near weeping. He felt himself coming apart, and he was reasonably sure he wasn’t even drugged. No, the professor wanted to keep him clear-minded and open-eyed, so he could witness the utter destruction of the two human beings who meant the most to him in the world.
He needed a drink.
Without further hesitation he got up and put on his cloak and tricorn. He didn’t care to take the time to fire his tinderbox and light the lamp. He just left the house and strode along Lionfish toward the square.
The village was silent. All the houses were dark. He saw the movement of lanterns up on the parapets, where the guards were walking back and forth. Surely Fell paid them a goodly sum for such deadening work, or else he paid them in some other currency…perhaps in addition to money, food and drink he gave them the Beautiful Bedd’s residents when those were used-up and of no further value to him, to do with what they would. Matthew shook from his mind the images of a group of men throwing themselves upon a wan and stupidly-smiling Rosabella, or a mute and compliant Madam Candoleri, or using their fists and muskets to smash Di Petri into red sauce. He shook those images away because they were frighteningly like what he thought Fell would envision.
Matthew came out of himself when he saw a figure with a lantern crossing his path ahead.
He slowed down, then stopped in the middle of the street.
Who was that? A squat though broad-shouldered and formidable figure, moving with quick purpose. A guard, reporting for duty? No, the moonlight did not reveal a musket. The figure wore a dark cloak and hood. A woman, he thought. Did he recognize the rather mannish walk? And then the wind swept in and fluttered the figure’s cloak and hood, and Matthew caught a glimpse of cottony white hair.
Mother Deare. Going somewhere in a hurry.
But not toward the professor’s house.
Toward the wall that ran along the sea cliffs.
He stood very still. What time could it possibly be? The moon was sliding down. He judged it to be near three o’clock.
Mother Deare on the move at three o’clock in the morning. Interesting, he thought. And more of a mind-cleanser to tag along after her—just for a looksee, see?—than sitting in that damn tavern feeling the seconds of his, Berry’s and Hudson’s lives ticking away.
So be it.
He was on the hunt, all senses questing.
He followed her, staying at a respectful distance. He sighted a guard walking toward him and had to duck between two cottages, but the guard turned away and so freed him to continue on.
Matthew didn’t have to follow her very far before another interesting thing happened. She met someone waiting for her near the back gate that Archer had mentioned and Matthew had seen the night before. This person—a good-sized man—was also carrying a lantern. They stood together, talking for a moment, and then they went up a set of stairs to the parapet with Mother Deare in the lead.
Matthew positioned himself next to the nearest cottage to be able to watch their progress along the parapet. They were moving to the right. They came to a guard, who they stopped and began talking to. The man who was with Mother Deare called the guard aside and seemed to be talking earnestly with him, and Matthew noted that the man had worked his stance so that the guard’s back was turned to the sea.
Then…
…Mother Deare stepped to t
he edge of the wall, facing the sea, and quickly she lifted her lantern and made a motion with it in the air. It only took a second, after which she lowered the lantern and joined the conversation that her companion was having with the guard.
Matthew’s eyes narrowed. Was it his imagination, or had her lantern moved in the shape of an inverted Cross?
She’d been making a signal to someone out there. Whether the signal had been returned or not, he didn’t know…but…a signal, just the same.
Meaning what?
Mother Deare and the man were coming down from the parapet on that same set of steps. Matthew had the desire to see who the man was. He could say he had emerged for a walk and just by happenstance had come upon them. Yes, that would hold water.
He started toward them. Should he lift an arm and say hello? He was getting closer. They were going to be crossing his path in—
A hand gripped his mouth, another hand pinned his right arm behind him, and he was dragged on his heels into a darkness beyond the moonlight.
“Quiet,” whispered a voice into his ear.
Thirty-Nine
MOTHER Deare and the man walked past. In the glow of the lamps Matthew thought the man might be the hulking Martin, from Fell’s house, but he couldn’t be sure. The hand continued to seal his mouth and his right arm felt near the breaking point.
A few seconds after the pair had gone by, the hand went away and Matthew’s arm was released. Matthew spun around to face his attacker.
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