“Giancarlo,” she said. “Help me.”
He stood up. To Matthew’s amazement, Di Petri took a breath and then began to sing what would have been the musical score to the madam’s aria. In a strong, clear voice that was nothing like his tone of speaking, Di Petri was offering the madam an accompaniment simply from memory alone.
“Si!” she said, nodding gratefully. “Grazie, questo e quello che mi serviva!”
But before the diva could continue her aria as the Queen of Hades, there came another sound, this one truly hellish.
Something shrieked past overhead. Its passage shook the glass in the windows. Whatever note Madam Candoleri was about to sing, it stuck in her throat like a fishbone.
From not far away there came the hollow boom of an explosion.
At once Professor Fell got to his feet. One of the remaining guards was already going out the door onto the street. There came a second shrieking noise overhead, and a second explosion off to the left somewhere. Matthew saw a leap of fire through the window that faced in that direction.
Fell’s calm dissolved in an instant. “Out!” he shouted. “Everyone, get—”
The third blast hit to the right of the theater. The window on that side blew in, sending deadly pieces of glass flying into the chamber. The entire building trembled, dust puffing from between the stones.
Matthew was on his feet. Dust swirled past his face. Some of the lanterns had fallen over, cutting the light to a murk. For a few seconds there reigned an eerie quiet…then came the sound of sobbing, followed by the wails of several people severely injured. To the left through the cracked window, at least one cottage could be seen on fire. Another shriek passed overhead, and another explosion that was likely nearer the square. He saw figures staggering toward the door.
He was dazed not by drugs but by the violence of the moment. He realized that Professor Fell’s beautiful grave was under attack, and he pushed past a stunned William Archer in search of Berry.
Forty-One
AMID the moving shadows in the theater, Matthew found Nash, his wife and Berry in the center aisle, heading toward the door. He reached out and grasped Berry’s arm, and she turned her powdered face to look upon him with an expression that was a ghastly mixture of bewilderment, fear and dulled sensibilities.
“Berry!” he said. “It’s me! Matthew! Please try to—”
“Unhand her!” Nash, who had blood running in rivulets down his right cheek from a glass cut at his hairline, pushed Matthew away. His wife began to wail, from terror or pain or the awakening from her soporific drug that the calamity had hastened.
Matthew took hold of Berry’s arm again and now it was she who cried out, a sound that tore at Matthew’s heart. She jerked away from him and clung to Nash, her father by way of whatever foul potion that damned Ribbenhoff had fed her.
“Please!” he tried once more, as another shriek ripped through the air and a blast perhaps fifty yards away made the floorboards tremble. But she was moving away with the Nashes, and the man was now pressing a handkerchief to the wound at his hairline, and Pamela was weeping and trembling, and Matthew thought that the gates of Hell had surely opened and were going to swallow them all.
Should he forcibly take her from Nash’s side? He didn’t know what he should do. Without the antidote and time, she was lost to him. But neither could he simply stand here and watch her go falling away. Still…he feared that if he did take her by force, some mechanism in her brain might employ itself like a coach brake thrust into the earth at too high a speed, and cause an abrupt and total wreckage of the whole.
For the first time in his life, he wanted to find Professor Fell, but the man had already gone.
Several wounded and bloody people had collapsed upon the pews on the right side of the theater. Still another shriek and blast told him that in all likelihood bombard mortars were throwing their explosive shells into the village. But from where? Land or sea?
And then he realized why Mother Deare must have been giving a signal out to sea.
She’d been showing a light at the top of the parapet so the mortar gunners on the bomb vessel that was out there somewhere could calculate the range and trajectory.
From where he stood, it appeared that Mother Deare’s betrayal of Professor Fell was not just about the stealing of the White Velvet, but the destruction of Fell’s empire and possibly the professor’s execution.
She said her father had come back for her, Devane had related.
Her father? The same demoniac that had killed Fallonsby and engineered the slaughter of the Broodies? It was impossible! If Mother Deare was sixty years old, the man would have to be at least near eighty, and eighty-year-old men did not usually take up lives of violent crime and demonstrate a passion for all things Satanic.
He had to get out of here before a mortar shell came screaming through the roof, which was precisely what the first shells had likely been aimed to do, thereby wiping out Fell and most of the citizens.
“Matthew!”
He turned to find Di Petri standing before him, blood spattered over the front of his suit jacket and a nasty-looking, gory slash across the bridge of his nose. “Please!” he said, his voice ragged. “Help us with Alicia!”
Matthew saw that Madam Candoleri had collapsed upon the platform, where bits of glass glinted in the firelight that issued through the broken window. Rosabella knelt at the lady’s side, trying to revive her. Blood could be seen on the upper shoulder of the elaborate white gown.
He followed Di Petri up the steps to the platform. Outside, two more mortar shells came whistling in, one exploding close enough to make the building shake and the rafters groan, and the other hitting more distantly. As Matthew bent down to offer aid, he thought that the bomb vessel had at least a pair of mortars aboard, and the vessel itself likely stolen from a Naval wharf.
Rosabella spoke to Di Petri in Italian. The madam’s face was unmarked, her only wound appearing to be a gashed shoulder. Most of the butterflies had flown out of her hair and the construction had fallen into a mass of tangles. She was starting to come around. Matthew thought she’d probably passed out not just from her injury but from the shock of the moment.
“Matthew! Do you know what’s happening?”
Archer was standing at the foot of the steps. His suit was dusty but otherwise he was unharmed. Matthew said, “Fell’s competitor has decided to make his move.”
“His competitor? Who?”
Matthew recalled two things Lillehorne had told him, at St. Peter’s Place. There are worse than Professor Fell out there. And: Time moves on.
So time had moved on, and whoever this was that Mother Deare considered her father had decided he wanted all the vanilla cake.
“I don’t know his name, but—” Matthew had a sudden jolt. There were two items in Y Beautiful Bedd that he could not let get away from him: Gentry’s book of potions and Gustav Ribbenhoff, who knew how to apply the drugs.
The book must be somewhere in the hospital, probably locked away and hopefully in a fireproof strongbox. If Mother Deare had told her ‘father’ about that, and how much power it held, to create both poisons and mind-altering drugs, then…
…that could be the entire motive for this attack, for even Mother Deare likely didn’t have the key to get to the book, if indeed it was locked away.
Madam Candoleri had come awake and was chattering in Italian, her voice rising and falling in the manner of someone who was still riding the horse of confusion.
“Let’s get her to the street,” Matthew said. He had no time to aid the others lying wounded in here, and he could only hope that the building wasn’t demolished by a direct hit.
Outside, the street was empty of people but the shouting of several voices could be heard. Down the way two cottages had been reduced to rubble and the thatched roof of a third was ablaze. Smoke and stone dust hazed the night and had turned the full moon a dirty yellow. Several other thatched roofs were burning on different streets. Und
er her own uncertain power Madam Candoleri was guided by Di Petri and Rosabella a distance away from the theater, and then with a cry of “Mi arrendo!” she fell again upon the ground.
The shriek of another incoming mortar shell announced itself. A red streak across the sky made an arc into the center of Fell’s village, followed by an explosion of smoke and debris into the air. Now could be heard the basso booming of cannonfire. New flames leaped up along the parapet as the gunners applied matches to touch holes and the weapons shot their ten pounds of red-hot iron ball at the offending bomb vessel, which might be situated beyond range of the cannons and be sighted only by the flash and streak of the ascending shells.
“Almighty Christ!” said Archer, who had ducked his head as the last explosion bloomed. “Are we in a war?”
“Yes,” Matthew answered, “a war between two evils. I’ve got to get to the hospital. Will you help me?”
“I will.”
Matthew was gratified to see that some of Albion’s strength had returned to Judge Archer. They left Madam Candoleri with Di Petri and Rosabella and headed for Lionfish Street. Cannons were still firing from the parapets, their smoke blowing back from the cliffs to add to the miasma, but Matthew noted that the shellfire had ceased. Perhaps the cannonballs had hit their target and silenced the mortars.
Matthew and Archer saw that a number of houses had been crushed as if by the boot of a rampaging giant. The flames from burning thatched roofs were shooting higher. From the smoke that clung closer to the ground came the bloodied figure of a man with his clothes in rags about him, having been torn off by a blast. In his arms he carried a crumpled and bloody mass that might have once been a child, and Matthew hoped it wasn’t what was left of the young trumpeter.
A war indeed, he thought. As always, it was those caught between the powers who suffered the most.
The man walked past in silence, heading to a destination that only he could fathom.
Matthew and Archer were crossing the square, where other buildings lay in ruins and fires burned, when another explosion belched flame and debris over toward the entrance gate. A guard with a musket rushed past, running toward the scene of the blast, and another followed a few seconds later. It occurred to Matthew that the mortar fire had simply been the beginning of this onslaught, and now a gunpowder bomb had blown the gate open for the second attack to commence.
“Hurry!” he told Archer. He broke into a run, and the judge followed as fast as he could under the constraint of a still-nagging wound.
They passed a group of three men and a woman huddled together against a cottage wall, in the manner of frightened children trying to take refuge from a particularly violent thunderstorm. Before he made the turn onto Lionfish Street Matthew heard the distinct high cracks of musketfire, and looking back both he and Archer saw that a pair of Fell’s guards had discharged their weapons into two of the huddled group, gunsmoke still swirling about the bodies, and were in the process of stabbing the others to death with their bayonets.
It was clear that Mother Deare had converted more than Martin and Stoddard to the rebellion. Not all the guards in Fell’s village considered him their master any longer, and thus Matthew realized he and Archer must beware everyone with a weapon.
They reached the hospital, Archer showing no ill effects from their haste other than being out of breath. The cannons had stopped firing. More musket shots could be heard from the direction of the front gate. At least a few of the guards were still loyal to the professor, but it appeared at the moment a losing proposition with so many enemies striking at once.
Matthew saw through a window a light moving within the hospital. The light spread: a second lantern had been lit, and then a third. He went to the door and found it locked. With the strength of desperation he slammed a kick against the door, just below the handle. It did not give. A second effort cracked the door, but the lock still held.
“Hold up!” said Archer. “Together, on three!”
They knocked the door halfway off its hinges with a combined effort. Matthew rushed ahead into the hospital, following the glow of the lamps toward the rear of the building.
A lantern suddenly came flying out of a doorway at him and past his right shoulder, shattering against the wall. Burning oil dripped down the plaster and made a flaming puddle on the floor. Gustav Ribbenhoff emerged from the doorway holding in his left hand a small book of probably forty pages or so, bound in red leather. His right hand gripped a saber.
“You Prussians and your damned swords,” Matthew said, backing away from the blade as Ribbenhoff advanced.
“I am going to pass and go out of here,” the chemist said. “There is no need for bloodshed.” He caught sight of Archer blocking his way. “You! Step aside!”
“That’s Gentry’s book of potions?” Matthew demanded, but he got no answer. “Where are you taking it?”
“I have orders to put it in the professor’s hands should I feel it necessary. Now, it is necessary. Get out of my way, please.”
“I think someone else is coming to get it.”
“My thought exactly. It is worth gold and jewels to whoever can concoct these formulas. I know most of them by memory now, but the book itself must go to the professor.”
Matthew made a snap judgment. He had to make a choice between the two warring evils, with Berry at the center of the decision, and at the moment it was all he could think to do.
He said, “All right. Some of the guards have turned against him, and it’ll be a dangerous trip between here and there. Do you have any other weapons?”
“Nein. This one came from my house.”
“We’ll go with you.”
“What? Why should you of all people help me?”
“Don’t waste time. Let’s go.”
Still wary, Ribbenhoff kept the sword at the ready as he passed Matthew and Archer. They started for the open doorway, but before they reached it a black coach pulled by four horses halted in front of the hospital.
Matthew’s heart was hammering. “Is there a back way out of here?” he asked Ribbenhoff, but just that quickly two men burst from within the coach and were already drawing swords as they hurled themselves into the hospital.
For a few seconds Matthew was paralyzed. One of the men held a lantern and was the pipe-smoker in the brown skullcap who Matthew had seen in Mother Deare’s torture chamber, the other one unknown to him. Then from the coach and into the hospital came two more figures, moving at a more stately pace. One was squat and thick-bodied and also carried a lamp. The other was an anatomical freak, a slender man nearly six and a half feet tall. He had to duck his head several inches to clear the doorframe.
“How wonderful that all of you are present!” said Mother Deare after she’d taken stock of the scene. She clung to one of the man’s pale hands with her workwoman’s paw, clad in a pink lace glove. She looked giddy with delight, dressed for the occasion of betrayal in a pink gown with lavender frills and a dark purple cloak and hood. Her grin, if not that of a demoniac, was at least half-insane. She was speaking directly to Matthew, her eyes bulging, when she said, “I want you to meet my father, Cardinal Black.”
Before he gave a slight bow, the man showed a glint of teeth that looked sharpened into points.
Then Matthew realized the true depth of the madness of Miriam Deare.
Her father, yes.
Her father, if one believed the demented tale Dirty Dorothea had told a terrified child in a decaying whorehouse.
The man who was called Cardinal Black was the exact image of the figure Mother Deare had described to Matthew. It was open to conjecture whether that entire tale was true or not, or if Mother Deare had manufactured a memory.
Cardinal Black was clad in an ebony suit and glossy cloak that had settled around his body like a pair of ravens’ wings. On the third night…into the room with the midnight wind, Mother Deare had said, 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. So too was Cardinal Black, who appeared to be fifty years short of eighty. The abnormalities of his birth had made overlarge his hands with their long slender fingers and sharpened nails. On his fingers he wore a multitude of silver rings formed into skulls and satanic faces. His own face, framed by a long mane of sleek black hair, had been stretched to what seemed a disturbing dimension. The pallid flesh looked drawn drum-tight against the jutting cheekbones and the point of the chin, and perhaps the flame of the lantern Mother Deare held did throw a scarlet cinder into the center of the eyes, which seemed to hold within their depths all the darkest secrets of the night.
“Mr. Corbett,” he said in a quiet, well-bred voice. “I’ve heard much about you.”
Matthew was unable to find his own voice for a few seconds. Then he said, “Should I be pleased?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard the saying: any kind of attention is better than none.” The eyes shifted toward Archer. “And I understand that here,” said Cardinal Black, “we have the famous Albion, otherwise known as the upstanding Justice William Atherton Archer. I have made acquaintance with one of your breed, Judge Fallonsby.”
“He was not of my breed,” Archer answered.
“Men are all the same breed, sir. They have inherited the sin of Adam. What simply separates one from another is the price they place upon their souls.” The eyes found the red leather-bound book in Ribbenhoff’s hand. “That is the volume?” he asked Mother Deare.
“Yes, Father.”
“I will have that,” said Cardinal Black. He gave the flick of an index finger adorned with a silver skull whose eyeholes held the coils of a snake. The man Matthew had recognized from Mother Deare’s cellar stepped forward. The sword had pierced Ribbenhoff’s guts before the chemist could act to defend himself. Ribbenhoff cried out and staggered backward, dropping the book and his own blade as his knees buckled. A swing of the sword slashed across his throat as he was on his way to the floor, and the lifeblood spurted from a severed artery.
Matthew and Archer had retreated several paces from this display of ferocious murder. Cardinal Black drew a small hooked knife from his cloak. Matthew made out enigmatic lettering and figures etched into the steel. The man bent his long body over to place a hand atop the bald pate of Ribbenhoff’s shuddering shape, and with the blade he carved the Devil’s Cross on the dying man’s forehead.
Freedom of the Mask Page 52