The Devil's Mask

by Christopher Wakling

  ‘The reason I came by this evening is to explain how –’

  ‘But there’s no need now, is there?’ she said, her fingers curling into mine.

  ‘I think I owe it to you to be truthful.’

  ‘You can’t help but be, Inigo. These past weeks, I’ve seen it.’

  ‘You’ve seen what?’

  ‘At dinner the other night. The cutlery dancing on the table. And at the wretched poetry recital. Turning up late and distracted.’

  ‘And you think this signifies what exactly?’

  ‘Please don’t make me spell it out.’

  She sniffed and I looked down at her and she turned away. One of her hands slipped out from within mine. She used the heel of her thumb to rub at her cheek and sniffed again. ‘A delay just means a new date in the future, when we’re, when you’re –’

  ‘But Lilly,’ I said, digging at my collar, which felt suddenly tight again. ‘I really must speak plainly, I must.’

  A bustling noise behind me caused me to tense in my boots ahead of Mrs Alexander’s arrival.

  ‘Lilly and I were talking …’ I began.

  ‘Yes. I can see that. And yet cake was demanded! I’ve brought it myself. See. Here it is. Cake! Lilly? Shall I cut it or will you? To what do we owe this unexpected pleasure, Mr Bright? I hope your arrival at this hour, and unannounced, doesn’t presage bad news. Explain yourself!’

  Something caused the coals in the grate to shift and collapse forwards upon themselves now, so that a small spillage of ash fell across to the hearthstone, and this gave Lilly the excuse to break away from me and tend to it. She looked small, bent forwards like that, her shoulders narrow. I stepped forwards to help her.

  ‘Leave that, Lilly,’ said Mrs Alexander. ‘Heavens! One of us playing the domestic is surely enough. Now. Do carry on. What were you talking about?’

  Without pausing Lilly said brightly, ‘The new dog, mother. Lo and behold, Inigo does care what we call it, after all!’ She stood up and turned around and brushed herself down. Her lips were already fixed in a cheerful smile. She advanced to the sideboard and put a hand on her mother’s shoulder, suddenly authoritative, so that for an instant I saw the true depth of her knowledge of me, and felt ashamed. ‘Here,’ she said, taking the knife. ‘Let me do that.’

  Sixty-three

  Though a lamp would have helped me return to Stratton Street without splashing about in the mire, I was in no hurry, and a clandestine approach, even from this distance, seemed best. Skirting Back-Bridge Street I heard a commotion ahead and arrived adjacent to a house just as the argument within it spilled outside in the form of a barrel-chested woman in bare sleeves, her skirt awry. The door slammed behind her and she swore at it and turned around and fell silent immediately upon perceiving me. I held up my hands in a gesture of innocence, but she shrieked and began hammering at the door again. I put my head down and, blind-footed, hurried on my way.

  I approached the Justice’s quarters obliquely, pleased to note the four black windows in its face. To one side of the front door stood the pile of pallets upon which the Justice’s cat had sought refuge from his daughter. As quietly as I could, I lifted the top pallet from the pile. Then I felt my way down the alleyway towards the rear of the building. Here was the back wall of the courtyard, a single storey of greasy brickwork. I leaned the pallet against this façade, put one foot on top of it, and thrust myself up to reach the top of the wall, where it met the sloping roofline. Without pausing to consider the consequences of failure, I hauled myself upwards, boots scrabbling beneath me. Chin, chest and midriff cleared the parapet; I swung a leg up to one side and banged my knee on to the ledge. Up and over I went, my coat-front dragging across the gull-shit, until I was kneeling on the back of the low roof. I spread my weight evenly on all fours and held myself still for what felt like a long, long time, listening and watching. None of the rear windows of the Justice’s house proper blinked to life, and I heard nothing from that direction. The only noise was a muffled cough, which drifted up from somewhere beneath me, but just the one, before the quiet thrum of the town pressed down from above again. Slowly, moving one limb at a time, I crawled forwards to the front lip of the courtyard roof. The recess beneath me was a square of deeper darkness, a shadow within shadows. I took a deep breath, swung my legs out over the void, dropped from chest to chin to fingertips, and let go. Though I tried to cushion the impact by landing with bent knees, the heaviness with which my heels struck the dirt floor jarred my teeth in their sockets. I saw the cask slamming into the deck of the Belsize again. It seemed the commotion must surely have disturbed somebody, but though I lay still for further long minutes, I could still hear nothing but the wind sniping through rigging in the distant docks and the yip of stray dogs.

  It would not be possible for me to climb back up on to the overhang of the roof from inside the courtyard: if this gambit didn’t pay off, I’d be stuck here overnight for Wheeler to find in the morning. A trickle of sweat threaded its way through my eyebrow and into my right eye. Very slowly, I rolled on to my side, brushed it away, and stood up. Again the soft snort behind me, whether coming from Blue or Ivan Brook I could not be sure. The darkness was the colour of wet slate, but it was not complete. Rectangles swam toward me as I moved across the courtyard towards the rear entrance of Wheeler’s lodgings. I reached the door, gripped the latch, held my breath, and eased it open. Utter quiet. I let the breath go, and stepped inside.

  With one hand tracing the hallway dado rail and the light grey of my stockinged feet padding beneath me, I set off to the front of the house, found the front door, eased back its bolts, and stood it ajar. From there I headed to Wheeler’s paperless office. To the right of his desk, on the wall, hung his pompous bunch of keys. I gripped the shafts so as to muffle any jangling, and lifted the bunch free. With the keys clutched to my chest, I soft-footed my way back down the hall, and was standing on one leg in the doorway, struggling to pull my boot back on one-handed, when the cat squirmed against my planted foot and very nearly undid me. Unsure of what it was for a second, I almost cried out. But no, I bent down and pushed the creature away and trod carefully across the courtyard to Blue’s cell again. As stealthily as I could, I tried one and then another key in the lock.

  ‘It’s the one with the square shank, Inigo,’ Blue said matter-of-factly from within the cell’s dark recess.

  ‘Christ! Hush!’ I hissed.

  ‘He’ll be drunk asleep by now,’ the sailor went on, his normal voice deafening to me.

  ‘He has a family. Hold your tongue!’

  ‘Still, Blue’s right,’ a second, gravelly voice cut in. ‘If your slamming about all over the shop hasn’t awoken him, a bit of talk out here is unlikely to make much difference.’

  ‘Please!’

  * * *

  Once Blue’s door was open, I undid the labourer’s. He was as innocent as the sailor, and besides, he’d be a help with what we had to do next. Both men’s bravado quietened on the threshold of the house proper. We stole along the corridor and out of the front door, the cat a cut-out shape watching us from the stairs.

  Sixty-four

  We were mud-encrusted to the knees, not to mention worn out, even before we began digging. The walk out to the hamlet of Horfield was along a road of rain-soaked clay: tough going in daylight, grindingly slow under cover of darkness. Still, I had plenty of time to explain my theory along the way. Ivan Brook took some convincing. His instinct told him that no amount of proving his innocence would add up to the benefit to be had from running away. But I suggested that in so fleeing Ivan would, in effect, be carrying out the court’s transportation order in advance, and the labourer reluctantly agreed (‘I was thinking more of Swindon than Sydney Cove’) to wait until after we’d assessed the evidence before deciding what to do.

  We searched the cemetery for fresh graves at daybreak, having passed the small hours in the groundsman’s hutch, huddling back to back for warmth. As I scanned the field for newly turned ear
th, it struck me how far away I was from my own world of turned pages. The boredom of the Dock Company’s files seemed a positive paradise by contrast to this: a slope of slantwise headstones and rotting crosses, the lot tumbling down to a scraggy hawthorn hedge, black against the eaten-out sky. Corpse-fed grass, knee-high and rank with dew, soaked my boots and obscured the view, but we discovered where the women had been buried eventually. Three oblongs of raised mud nosing the bottom of the slope as if intent on slipping their moorings and floating away.

  The three of us gathered round the graves and looked down upon them in silence. Somewhere along the hedgerow a blackbird began singing. Ivan Brook was breathing heavily beside me. He passed the spade he had taken from the groundsman’s shed from one hand to the other, then leaned upon it. I noticed that his knuckles were pale on the shaft.

  I took the spade from him and he stumbled backwards a few paces, apologising to the ground.

  The spade was heavy. I scraped at the topsoil of the nearest grave, once, twice, and again, fearing each time that the blade would bite something solid within the crust, which was ridiculous, as Blue made clear. He had taken a pick from the shed, but his torn thumb meant he was unable to swing it with any purpose. After three weak blows with it he paused, wincing, and said, ‘They sink even paupers below a man’s waist.’

  I took off my coat and handed it to Brook and I dug to the sound of the blackbird’s chattering. The deeper I dug, the more the broken ground seemed to smell of decay, though I suppose this was my imagining. My shirt, tight across the shoulders, was soon damp with sweat, and the hole I’d created was small.

  ‘Here,’ said Brook gruffly, returning to my side. ‘Digging up the same corpse twice is abominable, but it’s more painful still watching you try.’

  I stood panting next to Blue as the labourer’s spade cut the hole square and then went deep, each bite precise and rhythmical and apparently effortless. There was a mesmerising quality to the man’s movements. Only when I looked from the flowing spade-tip to his face did I see that he was weeping.

  I rejoined my efforts. Blue dropped to his knees and helped scoop the loose earth from the grave with his good hand. The blackbird’s song swelled and the sun tipped colour into the scene: oxblood earth, fir-green hedgerow, salmon sky. The hole stayed a filthy black.

  Eventually, I uncovered sacking cloth. I flinched from it at first, then gritted my teeth and, working with Blue, prised the sack free. Together we manhandled it out of the hole and up on to the wet grass. Within minutes Ivan Brook had placed a second sack-covered bundle next to the first. He wiped his palms on his trouser legs after putting it down and – I could not help it – I looked back at his sack to see that one end of it appeared to be leaking.

  The three of us worked swiftly to exhume the last body. It was in the freshest – and shallowest – grave. When we’d lain it next to the others, I motioned for the labourer to stand aside. He cleaned the tools on the grass, then used them as an excuse to walk back to the hut.

  Blue watched him go. The whites of his eyes were yellow; his skin still looked grey. He turned his gaze upon me as I mustered the courage to open the first sack.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. Then, as I protested, he continued, ‘Whatever’s inside, I’ve seen worse.’

  The mouth of each sack had been roughly stitched with red thread. I shut my eyes and saw snakes. Blue ripped the sacks open and the snakes broke to maggots, dead in the long grass.

  I tightened my jaw and stepped forwards.

  Three dead women.

  The first, here, charred and missing in the middle, so that she looked half-made, inhuman almost, but no, recognisably elbows, the skin heartbreakingly clean just there, and a black hand stretched out, and yes, I knew it, chained ankle to ankle, manacles.

  The second, here, intact, her eyes shut, peaceful, asleep, but her stomach bloated, and there, the sole of this foot split to the yellow bone, and she was tall, elegant even in death, but there, on this side, her left thigh, just as the child said, marked.

  And the third, here, her arm an unnatural shape, double-jointed or torn from its socket, and the eyes lidless, gone, something moving in the hole, making me look away, to the scarring round the neck, and the torn shin, and I crouched down by that leg see the same mark high on its thigh, yes, branded.

  I looked to Blue and he shrugged his shoulders as if to say what did you expect? What did I expect? Exactly what I saw.

  Three dead black slave women.

  Manacles, markings, branded.

  The same initials cut into flesh and metal.

  W.T.C.

  Sixty-five

  At that moment, as the two of us stood side by side staring down at the sorry corpses, I noticed that the blackbird had stopped singing. Turning towards where it had been, I saw Justice Wheeler advancing along the hedgerow. He had a pistol levelled at us and even from here I could see both that he was wheezing with the effort of moving doubled-up, and that there was a malevolent grin stitched into his face. Something about the narrow ridiculousness of the man hollowed me out.

  When he saw that his approach had not gone unnoticed, he straightened up and strode the final paces bellowing, ‘Stay where you are! Attempt to run and I’ll shoot!’

  I put a hand on Blue’s arm.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said.

  ‘Good morning? What in the name of Christ do you think you’re doing, Mr Bright?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Robbing graves! That’s what. Robbing graves with a criminal! My God! I awake to find my prisoners freed, and I think of our conversation, and I think he’ll never have done it, he’ll never have gone straight there! But I come here and here you are! Incredible! You’ve done it to yourself. Never mind not practising again, you’ll swing for this. You’re ruined!’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said quietly.

  ‘What’s that? Look at you!’

  ‘It’s not me you should be looking at, but them.’ I gestured at the corpses.

  ‘You’re standing next to a confessed murderer, Mr Bright. And another is at large because of you!’

  ‘These women died at the same hand. They were shipped here together, tormented and killed. The link is written on them. You’d have to be blind – or paid – to miss it.’

  The Justice shook his head and snorted. ‘Step away, up the slope.’ He waved his flintlock at us.

  ‘He’s mad,’ said Blue. ‘Do as he says.’

  I glanced sideways, surprised by his conciliatory tone. Together we could rush the man; I doubted he’d ever fired his pistol in anger. But Blue’s head was down and he was walking backwards, as instructed. Wheeler pressed on after us. The barrel of his gun shook as he wheezed closer. I found myself tracking the sailor up the slope. He picked us a way through the jutting headstones towards the hut we’d slept in and beyond it to the cemetery entrance. The blackbird’s whistling started up again, fainter now, further away. I glanced back down at the hedge and saw smoke curling from a chimney pot in the distance. The town had woken up. We should have begun digging in the dark; it would not have been impossible to find the new graves then, if we had looked. I hadn’t imagined Wheeler would be up checking on his prisoners so early, much less that he’d figure out where we’d gone and set off in pursuit immediately, and in that way I’d underestimated the man. He was still coming on, panting harder.

  He walked heavy-booted across the middle of a tended grave.

  A shape materialised behind him.

  Ivan Brook rushed out from within the plank-walled hut, the spade raised two-handed above his head.

  Before I could react he had swung the flat of the blade down in a vicious arc. It glanced off the back of the Justice’s head. Wheeler staggered drunkenly sideways but did not immediately go down. The pistol waved a bewildered circle as his legs fought to regain balance, but his thoughts were unconnected to his fingers, and no shot sounded. Seeing the man still upright Ivan Book quickstepped towards him and struck
him again, harder still, a sickening blow beneath which he collapsed sideways into the headstone of the grave he’d just stomped across.

  A high, hilltop silence followed.

  Then Blue was bending down over the fallen man and Brook was inspecting the back of the spade and both of their faces bore much the same expression: they were marvelling at what they saw.

  I could hear my pulse in my ears.

  Finally the labourer cast the spade aside and said, simply, ‘That’s me gone. No amount of proving my innocence can help now.’

  And Blue murmured, ‘I knew you’d do it, though.’

  Brook dusted down his coat-front, as if finishing a day’s work, looked at me and said, ‘One good turn deserves another.’

  ‘It puts us both beyond the law,’ Blue said.

  ‘All three of us,’ I said.

  Blue flipped a thumb in the Justice’s direction and said casually, ‘It’s only him that can put you here. And he won’t be able to if I finish him off.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  The labourer was already walking away.

  ‘You’re sure?’ said Blue at length. He looked at me, his dark eyes unblinking and untroubled. ‘It won’t upset me to do it.’

  He wasn’t joking. The deep calm of the man was unequivocal. I found myself sputtering, ‘He may deserve it, but …’

  ‘Addison deserved it. Waring deserved it,’ said the sailor gently. He looked down the slope. ‘Those women did not.’

  ‘But you’re not saying …’

  ‘The Doctor conducted experiments on board. The Captain let him. Between them they duped us. They made me complicit. Retribution wasn’t possible in the confines of the ship. But on shore … There was no way I could let them get away with it.’ He returned his gaze to mine, his eyes liquid black. ‘I needed someone to know I’d done it. That’s why I took you to Addison’s lodgings. How was I to know that his corpse would have been meddled with?’