The Blind Beak

by Ernest Dudley

  Glancing over his shoulder at the red glow advancing from below, Nick drew the rioters’ glowering attention as he moved forward purposefully; then the one with the axe let fly at him. He dodged and the other, wielding the crowbar, jumped to the attack. Nick stepped aside, thrust him backwards by the throat, so that he came up against the wall with a jolt.

  The man who had thrown the axe now tried to close in, but Nick pushed him off with his left hand, and, as he came at him again, struck him a terrific blow under the jaw and, caught off-balance, he staggered helplessly up against the smashed window, balancing precariously for a moment, then, clawing at the air, toppled over and, screaming, disappeared from sight.

  Struggling with the unarmed adversary who had leaped on him from behind, Nick, as they threshed the floor, managed to fasten his grip round the other’s windpipe. At the same moment the man wielding the crowbar came at him again; mistiming his blow, his foot caught in a broken chair and he sprawled to his knees. Hanging on to his first opponent’s throat Nick had reduced him to insensibility and, leaving him an inert heap, he got to his feet to carry on the fight to the man who was reaching for the crowbar. Nick picked up a heavy broken chairleg, bringing it down with all his force. There was a horrible crack and the other man dropped on his face, his neck broken.

  Half choked with the smoke which was filling the room, Nick got to the slumped, helpless figure in the armchair, his toe stubbing against the crowbar and sending it clattering along the floor. He was untying the Blind Beak when a movement in the doorway brought his head up with a jerk. Crouched there was Babylon, his hair and clothes singed and smoking, blood still running from his mouth. In some miraculous fashion the shoemaker had managed to fight his way up the burning staircase. In his hand he gripped his pitchfork.

  ‘Papist spy!’ Babylon lumbered into the room, and simultaneously the pitchfork flew from his hand. Swiftly as Nick moved, one prong ripped a gash in his left shoulder, inflicting a grazing wound before it embedded itself in the wall behind him. With a thwarted grunt the ape-like figure came on, head sunk in his hunched shoulders, his arms swinging. Nick dived for the crowbar he had scuffed along the floor, in the same movement picking it up to hurl it at the shoemaker. The pointed end struck him full in the chest, stuck there like an arrow for a moment, while Babylon, mouthing a stream of curses, wrenched at it.

  Nick spun round, wrested the pitchfork from the wall where it quivered and as Babylon, raising the crowbar he had pulled free, came staggering forward, the twin prongs buried themselves in the pit of his stomach. Nick turned away, not waiting to see Babylon sink to his knees dragging unavailingly at the grotesquely protruding shaft and roll over on his side, his legs kicking convulsively. Quickly Nick tore away the last bond that held the Blind Beak and, exerting every ounce of his strength, contrived to hoist the massive figure on to his back.

  The dense billowing smoke halted him momentarily at the doorway and the heat from the blazing stairs burned into his aching lungs. The Blind Beak slung sack-like between the wall and him; he edged his way towards the head of the staircase beyond which the landing continued past the door of a room next the sitting room and stairs ascending overhead. Past the stairhead he gained the comparative safety beyond. As he did so the stairs behind him suddenly collapsed with a tremendous roar, and with it that part of the landing along which he had just passed with Sir John. Now the walls and the rest of the landing were afire. Up to the next floor, every bone in his body creaking under the weight of his burden, every nerve and sinew complaining agonizingly.

  At the top of the stairs he was forced to halt, leaning against the wall, still with the Blind Beak on his shoulders, doubting if once he put him down he would have strength to lift him up again. The other’s stertorous breathing indicated he was still alive. There came a resounding crash which shook the entire building as the sitting room floor caved in, accompanied by triumphant shouts of the mob outside. A tongue of flame licked hungrily at the foot of the stairs beneath him and, gritting his teeth against the agony tearing at every muscle of his body, Nick stumbled somehow to the third floor.

  Now the heat was less intense, the air somewhat clearer of the clouds of black smoke. But the menacing roar of flames and the crash of falling wood and masonry as the house began to collapse under the fiery onslaught impelled him still upwards to the roof. He loosened the Blind Beak’s cravat and made sure his heart still beat, though feebly.

  Sir John muttered incoherently but Nick never paused; another crash below and a burst of sparks followed by a plume of black smoke urged him upwards. Sweating and gasping he gained the fourth floor, kicked a door open, found himself in an attic opening on to the roof. He laid Sir John on the floor and, shutting the door behind him against the smoke, forced his trembling, exhausted limbs to the gable-roofed window. Opening it and dragging great gasps of air deep into his lungs that seemed to be afire, he clambered out to find himself looking over the back of Bow Street. All about him the sky was filled with the flickering glare of flames, billowing clouds of smoke.

  The only course was to make for a house three or four rooftops away. Therein he and Sir John might shelter and escape the fury of the mob who would still be seeking them. Nick returned to the attic to find the Blind Beak struggling painfully to sit upright.

  ‘Do you be easy,’ said Nick, helping him rest against the wall. At the sound of his voice he observed the strange expression showing through the other’s smoke-begrimed features, then the inscrutable smile lifted the corners of the full-lipped mouth.

  ‘After all, am I in your debt again?’ the Blind Beak croaked painfully, shaking his head.

  Nick did not wait to puzzle out the meaning of this cryptic utterance. ‘Our way lies over the roof-tops,’ and the other mumbled in agreement. ‘I dare not try to carry you now, for one slip and we should crash to the street.’

  ‘I can stand on my own two feet.’ To prove his words Sir John, with Nick aiding him, hoisted himself, grunting and groaning, upright. ‘Do you guide me, I will follow close.’

  Nick was out of the window and, leaning back, helped the Blind Beak climb up beside him. ‘Keep yourself hid best you can, lest we are seen from below and the hue and cry raised after us.’

  Turning to stretch out a steadying hand, he led the hazardous way across the roof-tops. Presently he had neatly forced an attic-window, and Sir John followed, puffing and wheezing and gasping out fervently in thankfulness for his safe arrival, into the empty room. The house they had entered turned out to be vacated, its occupants doubtless having fled the rioters. Taking a surreptitious glance outside, Nick saw ‘No Popery’ chalked upon the door prominently enough.

  Feeling reasonably reassured they were safe from the mob’s further attentions, he got the Blind Beak to bed in one of the upper rooms, obtaining water and sponging the begrimed face and hands and divesting him of his scorched clothes. All this time Sir John was hoarsely trying to impart to him whatever it was lay so uneasy on his mind but was persuaded by Nick to save his strength. Presently he fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Standing before a mirror Nick peeled off his burnt coat, gingerly removed his shirt, all bloodstained from the flesh-wound he had received from the pitchfork. He could not refrain from a sardonic grin at his reflection: half his hair singed off, his eyebrows vanished and his face smirched with sweat and smoke and blistered from flying sparks. The back of one hand was scarred with a great weal, a leg singed from knee to ankle. After tending his shoulder-wound and burns as best he could, he finally dozed in a chair in the room where Sir John lay, the sounds of the rioters still in his ears, punctuated by the rattle of musket-fire, a woman’s scream, the crash of falling masonry. He was awakened with a start by a hoarse whisper. ‘Is all well, Nick? The street sounds quiet.’

  Stretching his cramped limbs he went to the window. It was daylight although a black cloud sagged still over Bow Street. Cautiously glancing out he saw a party of soldiers removing several bodies huddled in the
gutters. Sir John’s voice reached him again from the bed. ‘There is something you have to know’ — the tones grew stronger — ‘which must influence our future together, yours and mine.’ Nick turned with a quizzical expression. ‘I was bent upon encompassing not your ruin, but your salvation...’

  Nick remained silent, his saturnine face shadowed against the window through which, resolutely piercing the overhanging darkness, stole the hope and promise of the new day. ‘But my subtle designs, that in the end would reward you and me,’ Sir John was continuing, ‘and I do not deny I aimed to strike two birds with one stone, my calculated plot, do you hear me, Nick, had at the last to founder,’ drawing an anguished shuddering sigh, ‘upon the shoals of an unforeseen circumstance.’

  And the sardonic lift at the corners of his craggy brows softening with a hidden gentleness, and as of old finding himself experiencing the extraordinary sensation the other was all the time observing him from behind his black bandage, Nick heard the Blind Beak unfold how Fate chose to step in to tangle his bizarre machinations and twist them all awry.

  30.

  Nine o’clock of an evening some six weeks since London had quaked under the terror of Lord George Gordon’s rioters, the tall, dark figure on the quarterdeck of H.M.S. Swiftsure, tugging gently at her moorings, idly contemplated the masts of fishing-boats and sailing barges, the ships’ tenders proceeding to and fro against the warehouses and buildings of the waterfront as the July dusk deepened over Portsmouth Harbour.

  He had but lately been conveyed from the busy quayside in the captain’s barge, and come aboard the sturdy man-o’-war due presently to slip out on the evening tide, his baggage for the voyage stowed away in his cabin and now was taking a turn above decks. All about him the bustling activity of last-minute preparations for getting under way; sailors swarmed up aloft and harsh-voiced commands echoed across the water; the canvas creaked and bellied in the salt-laden breeze from off Portsea Island, sea-birds dipped and curved, uttering their poignant cries, the lap-lap against the ship’s sides, in his nostrils the pungent smells of tar and bilge-water and all the time his thoughts and fancies far ashore in London.

  Immediately following his rescue of and reconciliation with Sir John Fielding the latter had arranged for him quietly to slip away and, adopting a pseudonym, lie low in a deserted, rustic place, there to await the ship wherein he was to embark upon the secret journey the Blind Beak had ready planned for him. His only contact with London — despatches from Bow Street dictated to the ever-faithful Mr. Bond, recovering now from his sufferings at the hands of the mob — and newspapers to provide him with the current political news necessary to his own immediate prospects.

  He had been duly amused to read the reports as well of his sensational escape from Tyburn the even more graphic accounts of the discovery in a Long Acre stews of his battered, bludgeoned corpse, the journalists giving full play to their colourful imagination and sententious moralizing in their versions of how that notorious scoundrel, Nick Rathburn, though eluding justice at the rope’s-end, had yet met a deserved retribution in some drunken quarrel with his fellow criminals. Which device had been Nick’s, suggested by his having witnessed, from the house wherein he and Sir John had found refuge, the corpses being collected in the grey morning light from Bow Street’s gutters.

  The Blind Beak was drawing to a close his narration of his elaborate scheme, aimed with characteristic persistence at reclaiming Nick for his service, and which had so nearly ended in disaster. ‘Since I had failed to persuade you from obstinately pursuing your own violent road to ruin,’ he had elucidated, ‘to let you continue then, was my next best plan, to precipitate that perdition you so eagerly sought, since the sooner you reached it the sooner must you, like any wandering black sheep, return to the fold. Thuswise would I let necessity serve upon virtue.’

  It was, however, vital to the outcome of his scheme that the world should believe Nick Rathburn had been ruthlessly hounded down, hence, as much as he twisted and turned, eluding a thousand cunning snares, his capture, as he himself had foreseen and anticipated with his fatalistic fortitude, was inevitable. ‘But two persons shared my secret,’ Sir John concluded, ‘Shadow — no, not Lord Tregarth, never the real inkling had he of what was in my mind — and a certain clergyman visiting the Condemned Hold, whom, you may recall, incurred your suspicious disfavour, and was in fact an actor recruited through my good friend, Mr. Garrick. Expert in such matters, his role, at the appropriate time — and that two days before you were doomed to hang — was to make-up your features as if you were afflicted by typhus. Pronounced dead and with an excellent coffin ready prepared for your accommodation, the prison officials would have been only too anxious for your speedy removal from the premises.’

  Sir John had sighed with disappointment that the circumstances of the riots, together with the determination of Mr. Ackerman, not being party to the plot, that Nick Rathburn should not be rescued by the mob, had forestalled him from putting into practice his ingenious if a trifle macabre stratagem. ‘Poor Shadow, his death another of Fate’s tragical twists, kept me in touch with your situation while you lay in Newgate, but was prevented from advising me of Ackerman’s plan, of which of course I remained in ignorance, or would you have been saved your horrible ordeal at Tyburn.’ Nick’s own account of his escape from the noose had excited the other’s enthusiasm. ‘You possess a boldness and unique resource; I could never rest until I had enlisted you again under my badge. Then, when you must go and blab out aloud in public — no, I know you were unaware of my contriving — you had been in my employ, though I had to deny it, yet my hand was forced further, for I was compelled to take the most elaborate pains that all suspicion should be allayed. Only your presumed death would for ever end any conjecture.’

  Nick had answered all was not lost, Sir John might still attain the aim he had so painstakingly and with such cunning plotted, and indicated how the world could be convinced his career had met its appropriately rakehell finish. The other approving enthusiastically and the deception being put into operation, the newspapers carrying the cleverly concocted fiction in due course, Nick Rathburn accordingly took his departure from the scene with, for an epitaph, that he had met his end where he had found his beginning, in a London gutter.

  Now the canvas above creaked and cracked more loudly as the sails swelled to the breeze, the decks resounded to the clamour of running men going about their tasks, the rattle of winches and more urgent shouts of command; the brass of the cannon glinted, the pipe-clayed ropes glimmered white in the descending shadows, and the Swiftsure’s timbers, moaning as if loathe to stir from her sheltered moorings, she weighed anchor and her proud bows nosed forward.

  Nick watched the fading twilight more and more separate the vessel from the waterfront until presently it was a dark blur pierced by twinkling eyes of light. Now did he find himself engaged upon yet one more mission, bound to meet unknown hazards in the service of the ever-intriguing Blind Beak, obsessed with his ambitious schemes for creating an espionage system whose tentacles should spread half across the world to combat and defeat England’s foes.

  Nick had duly noted that the newspapers included among the despatches he had received, reporting the aftermath of the riots: how the troops had tardily assumed control over the situation; that Lord George Gordon had been conveyed to the Tower on a charge of High Treason and that one hundred and thirty-five rioters had also been arrested, twenty-one of whom were duly hanged at points near the scene of the crimes they had committed, had made much of French and American secret agents lurking behind the destructive upheavals.

  One of Sir John’s despatches headed: ‘Secret Information’, read: ‘I have intelligence that none other than a certain American named Bailston, a leader of the Boston mob who destroyed the tea, had been in London in touch with Gordon, with what purpose in view it is not difficult to imagine.’ Followed a list of others suspected of acting as secret agents for the American, Franklin, and the despatch
had concluded: ‘The execrable scheming of our deadly enemies abroad is to be found responsible for fomenting the riots.’

  Smiling at the other’s full-blooded, exuberant zeal, transparently seeking to condition him for the secret mission which lay ahead of him, Nick was reminded of those past days when the Blind Beak had first enrolled him as his underworld spy. Then had he been possessed of subtly winding schemes and wily plots for the attainment of his driving ambition to outwit and out-master his adversaries.

  A few hours before he had embarked, Nick received a fare-well message from Bow Street. ‘Would I might be present to clasp your hand in Godspeed, my dear Nick, but business, as usual, prevents my leaving London, nor does my health overmuch favour journeying to Portsmouth. But you will not require me to communicate to you the profound gratification I feel that you are once more in my service, which is dedicated to England’s cause. The past mistakes of which we have both been guilty are done with, it is to the future we bend our minds, you and I, in mutual trust and confidence. This assignment you are undertaking promises much for you, more shining reward perhaps than at this moment of reading you can appreciate, but that you will learn something of from your sealed orders, which you will not open till safe cast-off from England’s shores. What time you are outward bound I shall be thinking of you and wondering what is in your heart.’ The heavily sealed parchment crackled in the inside-pocket of his black full-skirted velvet coat as the breeze sprang more strongly from the English Channel and he turned away from watching the disappearing glimmer of Portsmouth Town to tear open the envelope beneath the light of a swinging lamp.