The Devil's Mask

by Christopher Wakling

  ‘Of course. If the reports are true, the Prince must intervene on the nation’s behalf,’ I said, conscious that this reply was as limp as the flowers now lying on the occasional table at Mrs Alexander’s elbow.

  Heston Alexander’s fingers were still on his shirtfront, beating time to Abigail’s playing. His mouth, a firm line set in the rampart of his face, gave nothing away. Though he lacks his wife’s overt hostility, he still has a knack of making me feel I am off the pace. When I asked for Lilly’s hand in marriage, he assented with a speed which suggested that the deal had been done before I formulated the question.

  ‘Well said. Old George makes less sense than a box of bats these days, by all accounts. Young George should have himself declared Regent without further ado.’

  ‘Eighty years of Georges,’ said Abigail, pausing at the piano. ‘With another one still to come. You’d think they’d give a different name a turn.’

  This sparked a conversation between the two sisters about the name Lilly would give her new puppy, when it arrived, which subject, I realised glumly, aroused as little interest in me as did the state of the monarchy. I accepted a glass of punch and sipped at it politely as I took in the softness of Lilly’s throat, the curve of her shoulder, and my eyes came to rest on the faint blue line in her upturned wrist. How could blood ever run blue? A streak of royalty. Heston Alexander was a Member of the Society of Merchant Venturers, like my father. Maybe he did know more about my prospects than I knew myself. The terms of my inheritance spelled out in Venturer-code over cigars. That would explain Heston’s ready consent to the forthcoming nuptials. The bride-to-be was averring that a dog’s name should be immediately recognisable as belonging to a dog, which explained why Buttons and Dash and Princess topped her list. You had to admire the smooth plane of her cheek. The angle of her sister’s jaw was somehow more severe. That said, Abigail’s advocacy was the more persuasive; I couldn’t help agreeing with her suggestion there might at least be some humour in a dog called George.

  We ate dinner in a room which Mrs Alexander had recently decorated in an oriental style. This seemed principally to involve lacquer. Lilly had helped her mother pick out the new furnishings: I did my best to signal appreciation. I thought I caught a glimpse of Heston winking at Abigail as I nodded approval at a black-wood lamp-stand, and their apparent collusion in a private joke, by placing me in league with Lilly and her mother, was oddly dispiriting. I found myself fiddling with the underside of the new dining table. There was some sort of ingenious mechanism beneath it which meant that the surface could be extended or contracted to suit the number of diners present at any given meal. My fingers brushed the teeth of a ratchet, found the gap between slats, tested the edge of a cogged wheel. I had a ridiculous urge to get down on my hands and knees to examine the device properly, but was drawn up by Heston Alexander’s insistence that I describe, of all things, exactly what it was I was working upon. The man’s eyes, set in his square face, had creased into smiling enthusiasm.

  ‘A number of cases. Contractual disputes and so on. Some regulatory work involving the Dock Company. Nothing much of note.’

  ‘Come now. There must be some juice in it to keep you going. Mount the thing a credible defence!’

  I was tempted to rise to this challenge, but suffered a sudden realisation that I had no real idea how far Mr Alexander’s interests in the dock extended. In all probability he was up to his neck in the silt. I found myself flannelling.

  ‘The work doesn’t tell well at dinner, but rest assured there’s interest in it close up.’

  ‘Lord above! Doesn’t sound like much of an advertisement for the legal life. The cut and thrust of commerce is much more entertaining. That’s where you should reconsider applying yourself. The sharp end!’

  Was that it? Mr Alexander’s tone was jocular, but jokes, like pearls, have a heart of grit. Did he imagine that I would eventually end up working for my family firm, or perhaps even take a position working with him? I smiled back genially. My fingers, beneath the table, had found their way into a sharp-edged recess between two cogs. I dug a knuckle into the gap.

  Lilly was speaking. ‘Business, lawyering, they’re both as dull as each other, aren’t they? I can’t see there’s much fun to be had in a counting house. A playhouse or the recital rooms – those are the place to find entertainment. And I’ve got tickets for us all to go to a poetry recital tomorrow night!’

  There was a false gaiety in Lilly’s voice, yet it was less worrying in that instant than the fact that my finger, pushed into the table’s winding mechanism, had somehow contrived to get … stuck. It would not wriggle free. I gave a tug, which caused the cutlery to shiver and the teeth of the device to dig painfully into my knuckle, but the finger would not budge.

  ‘That’s settled then,’ Heston Alexander boomed. ‘A family outing!’

  Mercifully, the family’s attention shifted from me as they discussed the arrangements for the theatre trip. As a boy I got my leg enmeshed in a set of wrought iron railings at Bright House. Panic, that was the problem. Clarissa had eventually freed me, as much with calm reassurances as by rotating my foot, calf and knee. I licked the palm of my free hand surreptitiously and greased the trapped knuckle under the table with spit, all the while nodding and giving the appearance of listening, though the conversation had moved on and, in truth, I had no idea what Abigail and her sister were talking about. It was no good. Maybe the ratchet had tightened a notch, or perhaps the cog I’d slid my finger past was in some manner … barbed? Lilly was breathlessly recounting the story of another dead woman, found stuck in the mud of the river, and the sound of that word … stuck … worked on me with a suddenness which caught me unawares. Before I could stop myself I yanked my hand back ferociously, causing the plates on the table to jump and wine to slop and my trapped finger to rip back free of the confounded pernicious device beneath the table’s polished leaves.

  Everybody stopped talking. Mrs Alexander reached out a hand to steady her glass. ‘My!’ she said. ‘What on earth is the matter?’

  I pressed my torn knuckle into the knot of my napkin. ‘Nothing. I’m sorry. A cramp.’

  ‘Might it have been the story of the woman murdered in the mud?’ Abigail offered. ‘A spasm of sympathy, perhaps? I know how much the Clifton Killer has played on poor Lilly’s nerves.’

  ‘Cramp,’ I murmured.

  ‘But, but … she wasn’t murdered,’ Lilly explained, happy to offer me consolation, but unable, it seemed, to erase entirely her disappointment with that anticlimactic fact. ‘They have the Clifton Killer’ – here she shuddered theatrically – ‘locked up safely. It seems this unfortunate soul either fell into the river and drowned, or was caught unawares by the rising tide, or, most likely, through force of circumstance, was driven to … well … the article mentioned felo de se … by which I think they mean there’s evidence to suggest the poor woman robbed herself of her own life.’

  ‘God forgive her!’ said Mrs Alexander absently. She dabbed at the slopped wine, adding, ‘Shocking!’ as she inspected the napkin.

  The spillage, it seemed, concerned her more than the lost soul; she kept glancing from the stained cloth to her napkin as the meal wore itself out. We left the scene of one crime for another then, retreating en masse to listen to Abigail’s syrupy piano-playing again.

  Eighteen

  Mary was working the morning shift. As an excuse to waylay her again, I asked for a copy of the latest edition of Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal when I was halfway through my second cup of coffee. She fetched it and brought it down on the table in front of me with a thwack. The place was full; she was busy. Did that explain her confrontational air? I glanced up to see her looking me over, a red hand planted on the swell of her hip.

  ‘Sorry to have troubled you.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘Well, you have my thanks.’

  ‘Thank goodness. Can I get you anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Y
ou’re sure?’

  Another customer called out from the café’s darker recesses.

  ‘I’m fine, for now,’ I said.

  ‘Anything at all, you just ask.’ The waitress smiled, still surveying me levelly. As she turned away I was sure I heard her add, ‘Even a comb.’

  I watched her rounded skirt swish between the chair-backs, and was unable to resist the temptation to run my hand through my hair. The barber’s, today, definitely.

  I turned the pages of the paper and sipped my coffee. A house of ill-fame had been discovered in Marlborough Street. Its existence having been common knowledge for as long as I could remember, The Society for the Prevention and Suppression of Vice had apparently grown new teeth of late. What else? Yet another story about mad dogs plaguing the townspeople. Two children having died from the rabies this last week, there were further calls for a general culling of any unattended cur within the city limits. Cull away. Overleaf a chair-mender specialising in rush-bottomed something or other was touting for etcetera. His advertisement stood above the story of the discovery of a drowned woman in the river downstream of the Hot Well. I found myself reading the article. This was the case Lilly had spoken about so warmly last night. I ran my cut knuckle across my lips. A suspected suicide, as Lilly had said. No mention was made in the paper about a link – or lack of one – to the recent murder in Clifton. That had been Lilly’s imaginative leap. But it mattered, somehow, all the same. I drained my already empty cup. The story made it clear that the drowned woman was as far from a Clifton lady as could be possible. She was a Negro. This, the writer seemed to imply, was justification enough for her having seen fit to do away with herself. Most likely the corpse belonged to a domestic servant, a one-time slave perhaps, shipped over from the Indies.

  I shuddered and shut my eyes and pressed my torn knuckle to the softness of my lips again. I heard the wet thump of the cask hitting the stevedore aboard the Belsize, and the gravelly echo as it rolled across the deck, initials burnt into the wood of its lid. The Western Trading Company had dealt in slaves pre-abolition. There were no connections between these things, no logical links. I knew that.

  I cast my eyes back over the story again. The body had been discovered by children playing on the banks of the Avon, a brother and sister from across the river in Long Ashton. It wasn’t a big village. I left a tip generous enough to draw attention to itself next to my spent cup and sidestepped my way to the door. Gulls, more gulls, slashed about high above Carthy’s rooftop across the street. I turned away from them and my office and headed to the docks. Work could wait.

  Nineteen

  As soon as the children were standing before me, I sensed that tracking them down had been a waste of time. The link I’d imagined between the suicide, the stamped cask, the Belsize, and my … tedious endeavours on behalf of the Dock Company, had broken. The boy did not pause from chewing the mashed end of a willow wand to return my greeting. He had an insolence about him. And the girl, though cherubic in appearance, had so far remained mute. What I’d hoped to glean from them seemed ridiculously remote. I thrust my hands into the pockets of my greatcoat and dug out the oranges anyway.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Just oranges?’ said the boy.

  His mother – if that’s who she was; she seemed young for the job – immediately stuck her head out of the cottage door and hissed at him to mind his manners. He did not flinch, just slid both hands – and the fruit – behind his narrow back, as if suspecting the woman might snatch it.

  ‘That’s all I thought to bring,’ I explained. ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘The only reward worth having is one that goes clink.’

  ‘Reward?’

  ‘For the dead blackamoor. We found it, and we didn’t need to tell anyone.’

  ‘Tell anyone what?’

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’

  I turned to the girl and asked her name. Kitty. She was still inspecting the orange I’d given her, and sucking on her plump lower lip. With her head bent forward I saw that her hair was a mat of curls streaked with sun and dirt. I thought of Anne Carthy’s dreaded baths, and my own resolution to visit the barber, and was pricked with sympathy for the girl.

  ‘I’ve got a brother who can fit an orange in his mouth whole,’ I told her.

  She lifted her gaze to mine. ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s true. He started out more modestly, on hard-boiled eggs.’

  ‘That’s not nice.’

  ‘No. And I wouldn’t recommend that you try it. There are better things to be good at.’

  The boy was looking at his orange again. ‘I don’t think he can eat it when it’s in his mouth, can he? Chew it and such, I mean.’

  ‘No. I don’t think he can.’

  ‘So there’s no point in it.’

  ‘Which one of you actually found this body then?’

  ‘We both did,’ the boy said.

  ‘Both of you?’ I repeated, looking at Kitty. She had begun biting at her lower lip again.

  ‘And after you found it, what happened then?’

  ‘I went to get Sammy. He’s our uncle. I’m in business with him.’

  ‘You both did?’

  Kitty was shaking her head.

  ‘Just your brother went?’

  Now she nodded.

  ‘Somebody had to stay with it in case it floated away,’ the boy explained. He tossed the orange from one hand to the other. ‘What about apples. Could your brother manage one of them?’

  ‘I think the stalk might be a problem.’

  I turned back to the girl, who was looking at me with a blank detachment which made her face ageless for a moment, so that I could see both the infant she had been and the woman she would become. I lowered myself to her level, squatting. ‘So you were with the body a long while, as the evening grew dark,’ I said gently. ‘And I’m sure that must have been horrid.’

  The girl gulped and nodded and the gesture felt to me like the first mark on a page, the mark which makes others possible, and I had a sudden hope that the thought I’d had may still return, and become sensible, with this girl’s help.

  ‘I imagine that you didn’t want to look at it, but that you did, because you’re a clever girl, and clever people are inquisitive.’

  ‘She didn’t do anything to it!’ said the boy. ‘She just guarded –’

  ‘I know, and that was kind, kind to the dead woman, and sensible, because Kitty is a sensible girl. I can see that. I think she kept watch over the body very properly, just as you told her to, and I imagine that she looked at it carefully, just in case it would be helpful.’

  The girl’s eyes had a taken on a translucent quality which I suspected presaged tears. I went on quickly. ‘And if she is able to help me’ – I glanced at the boy – ‘if either of you are, then I’m sure I will manage a reward, and heaven knows, it may even clink. What I’m keen to find out, and what I’m sure Kitty can tell me, is this. Was there anything unusual about the woman’s body? A mark on it, perhaps?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘And you saw it, didn’t you, Kitty? You looked closely?’

  ‘There was lots of marks.’

  My spirits slumped. I pressed on regardless. ‘But was one of them perhaps special, like a word, or some lettering?’

  The girl nodded again and sniffed. ‘Yes,’ she said, pointing to her thigh. ‘Here.’

  ‘Can you tell me what the lettering said?’

  The girl gnawed at her lip again and looked to her brother, who stuck his chin out and said, ‘She can’t read, Sir, and nor can I.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Still squatting, I bounced impatiently upon my heels. The bellow of a distant cow gave way to the sound of the breeze swishing through treetops. ‘How foolish of me,’ I murmured at length.

  ‘A crown,’ muttered Kitty.

  My knees cracked as I stood up. Was the girl no better than her grasping brother? Still, what an ordeal to have gone through. ‘A c
rown indeed,’ I smiled. ‘You’ll have to make do with a farthing each.’

  The girl shook her head. ‘No. The scar thing on her leg. It looked like a crown, and a tree thing, and a moon.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I knelt before Kitty again, a hand on the knob of her shoulder. I tossed a coin to her brother, who caught it, and I popped a second farthing into the pocket of her dress. Very gently, I said, ‘A crown, eh. With a tree and a moon. If we can just borrow that stick from your brother, and smooth out the dirt here, like so, do you imagine you could draw what you saw for me?’

  Twenty

  I made my way back through Leigh Woods, past the new quarries, open wounds in the flanks of the gorge, and dropped down to follow the river. Soon I was amongst the glass factories and iron foundries of Bedminster. Their haze stained the sky and lay thick upon my tongue. Finally I crossed the Avon, at low tide, a slit in the mud beneath the bridge, to enter Bristol proper.

  As I walked, my boots turning grey and then reddish and then black with muck, Captain Addison was foremost in my mind. The Captain hadn’t been straight with me. But he had not been the only man aboard the Belsize.

  A world in miniature, that’s what they called a ship. It was impossible to keep secrets in such a confined space. The decks were drum-skins reverberating with rumours; intrigue buzzed in the rigging. I turned the corner into Prince’s Street. Home was a street away and I felt better for the walk. I would seek out some other of the ship’s crew to interview.

  But before I could turn into Thunderbolt Street, a presence materialised beside me and immediately whoever it was had gripped me harshly above the right elbow. I lifted my arm to remonstrate, whereupon my assailant, in an unnaturally low voice, growled, ‘Easy, now!’ and shoved something sharp into the softness of my armpit. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that he was masked; a red neckerchief strained high across the bridge of his nose. Outrage gave way to fear, which flooded through me with nauseating suddenness. The man levered my arm back down to my side without lowering the knife, and marched me forward, his face now above and behind my shoulder, flat assurances coming at me in a gruff whisper, the two of us cinched together like a pair of monks in private conversation.