The Queen of Bedlam

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Pardon me, pardon me,” said someone who stepped into Matthew’s line-of-sight and leaned over the pew toward Magistrate Powers. “Sir, may I have a moment?”

  “Oh. Yes, Marmaduke, what is it?”

  “I was wondering, sir,” said Marmaduke Grigsby, who wore spectacles on his moon-round face and had a single tuft of white hair sticking up like a little plume atop his otherwise-barren scalp. His eyes were large and blue and above them his heavy white eyebrows jumped and twitched, a clear sign to Matthew that the printmaster of New York was nervous in the magistrate’s presence. “If you’d come to any further conclusions about the Masker?”

  “Keep your voice down about that, please,” the magistrate warned, though it was hardly necessary amid the returned hullabaloo.

  “Yes sir, of course. But…do you have any further conclusions?”

  “One conclusion. That Julius Godwin was murdered by a maniac.”

  “Yes sir.” The way that Grigsby smiled, all lips and no teeth, told Matthew the questions were not to be turned aside so quickly. “But do you believe this presumed maniac has left our fair town?”

  “Well, I can’t say if—” Powers abruptly stopped, as if he’d bitten his tongue. “Now listen, Marmy. Is this more grist for that rag of yours?”

  “Broadsheet, sir,” Grigsby corrected. “An humble broadsheet dedicated to the welfare of the people.”

  “Oh, I saw that yesterday!” Now Solomon Tully showed an interest. “The Bedbug, is it?”

  “For the last issue, Mr. Tully. I’m toying with calling it the Earwig next time. You know, something that bores in deeply and refuses to let loose.”

  “You mean there’s going to be another one?” the magistrate asked sharply.

  “Yes sir, absolutely. If my ink supply holds out, I mean. I’m hoping Matthew will help me set the type, just as he did the last time.”

  “He what?” Powers glared at Matthew. “How many occupations do you have?”

  “It was an afternoon’s work, that’s all,” Matthew said, rather meekly.

  “Yes, and how many slips of the quill happened the next day because of it?”

  “Oh, Matthew could work us both into our graves,” Grigsby said, with another smile. It faltered under the magistrate’s cool inspection. “Uh…I mean, sir, that he is a very industrious young—”

  “Never mind that. Grigsby, do you know the kind of fear you’ve put into people? I ought to put you out there in the stocks for inciting a public terror.”

  “This lot doesn’t look very terrified, sir,” said the printmaster, holding his ground. He was sixty-two years old, short and rotund and stuffed into a cheap and ill-fitting suit the color of brown street mud—or to be more charitable, the good earth after a noble rain. Nothing about Grigsby seemed to fit together. His hands were too large for his arms, which were too small for his shoulders, which were too bulky for his chest, which caved in above the swell of his belly, and on down to his too-big-buckled shoes at the end of beanpole legs. His face was constructed with the same unfortunate proportions, and appeared at various times and in various lights to be all slab of a creased forehead, then overpowered by a massive nose shot through with red veins (for he did so love his nightly rum) and at its southern boundary made heavy by a low-hanging chin pierced by a cleft the size of a grapeshot. His formidable forehead was of special note, for he’d displayed to Matthew his ability to crack walnuts upon it with the heel of his hand. When he walked he seemed to be staggering left and right as if in battle with the very gravity of the world. Snowy hairs sprouted from the curls of his ears and the holes of his nose. His teeth had such spaces between them one might get a bath if he was full-bore on his esses. He had nervous tics that could be alarming to the uninitiated: the aforementioned twitching of the eyebrows, a sudden rolling of the eyes as if demons were playing bouncy-ball in his skull, and a truly wicked jest from God that caused him to uncontrollably break wind with a noise like the deepest note of a bass Chinese gong.

  Yet, when Marmaduke Grigsby the printmaster decided to stand his ground this almost-misshapen creature became a man of self-assured grace. Matthew saw this transformation happen now, as Grigsby coolly looked down through his spectacles at Magistrate Powers. It was as if the printmaster was not complete until faced with a challenge, and then the strange physical combination of left-over parts from a giant and a dwarf were molded under pressure into the essence of a statesman.

  “It is my task to inform, sir,” said Grigsby, in a voice neither soft nor harsh but, as Hiram Stokely would say about a fine piece of pottery, well baked. “Just as it is the right of the citizens to be informed.”

  The magistrate had not gotten to be a magistrate by sitting on his opinions. “Do you really think you’re informing the citizens? By making up this…this damned Masker business?”

  “I saw Dr. Godwin’s body, sir. And I was not the only one who remarked upon that bit of cutting. Ashton McCaggers also speculated the same. In fact, it was he who mentioned it first.”

  “McCaggers is nearly a fool, the way he carries on!”

  “That may be so,” Grigsby said, “but as coroner he does have the authority to examine the dead for the benefit of High Constable Lillehorne. I trust you believe he’s fit for that task?”

  “Is all this bound for your next broadsheet? If so, I think you’d best direct your questions to the high constable.” Powers frowned at his own remarks, for he was not a man suited to show a foul temper. “Marmy,” he said, in a more conciliatory tone, “it’s not the broadsheet that bothers me. Of course we’ll have a proper newspaper here sooner or later, and perhaps you’re the man to publish it, but I don’t approve of this appeal to the low senses. Most of us thought we were leaving that behind in London with the Gazette. I can’t tell you the harm an ill-reported or speculative story might do to the industry of this town.”

  It never hurt London, Matthew almost said, but he did think silence was the wisest course. He read the Gazette religiously when copies arrived by ship.

  “I reported only the facts of Dr. Godwin’s murder, sir,” Grigsby parried. “As far as we know, I mean.”

  “No, you made up this ‘Masker’ thing. And perhaps it did come from McCaggers, but the young man didn’t set it in type, you did. That kind of presumption and fear-mongering belongs in the realm of fantasy. And I might add that if you wish in the future to improve your list of subjects as to whom you will check facts, you should at the present time constrain your imagination.”

  Grigsby started to reply, but he hesitated whether by force of the magistrate’s argument or his own desire not to disrupt a friendship. “I see your point, sir,” he said, and that was all.

  “Well, it’s a damnable thing,” Solomon Tully said. “Julius was a fine man and an excellent physician, when he wasn’t in his cups. You know, he’s the one who recommended my dental work. When I heard he’d been murdered, I couldn’t believe my ears.”

  “Everyone had kind words to say about Dr. Godwin,” the printmaster offered. “If he had any enemies, they weren’t apparent.”

  “It was the work of a maniac,” said Powers. “Some wretch who crawled off a boat and passed through town. It’s been almost two weeks now, and he’s well gone. That’s both my opinion and that of the high constable.”

  “But it is odd, don’t you think?” Grigsby lifted his eyebrows, which seemed a Herculean task.

  “What?”

  “Odd,” said the printmaster, “in many ways, not least the fact that Dr. Godwin had so much money in his wallet. And the fact that his wallet was right there inside his coat. Untouched. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Emphasizing the fact that a maniac killed him,” Powers said. “Or possibly someone frightened the man off before he got the wallet, if indeed robbery was a motive.”

  “A maniacal robber, then?” Grigsby asked, and Matthew could see his mental quill poised to scribe.

  “I’m speculating, that’s all. And I’m telling you before witn
esses I don’t wish to see my name in the Bedbug…or Earwig or whatever you’re calling it next. Now find a place to prop yourself, here come the aldermen.”

  The official door at the opposite end of the room had opened and the five aldermen—representing the five wards of the town—filed in to take their seats at the long, dark oak table that usually served to give them a surface to pound their fists on as they argued. They were joined by twice their number of scribes and clerks, who also took their chairs. Like the waiting crowd, the aldermen and lesser lights were dressed in their finest costumes, some of which had probably not seen sunshine from out a trunk since the Wall had come down. Matthew noted that the old Mr. Conradt, who oversaw the North Ward, looked gray and ill; but then again, he always appeared thus. So too, the Dock Ward alderman Mr. Whitakker was hollow-eyed and pale, as if all the blood had left his face, and one of the scribes spilled his papers onto the floor with a nervous twitch of his arm. As Marmaduke Grigsby retired from the aisle, Matthew began to wonder what was up.

  At last the crier came to the speaker’s podium that stood before the council table, drew in a mighty draught of air, and bellowed, “Hear ye, hear ye, all—” Then his voice cracked, he cleared his throat like a bassoon being blown, and he tried it again: “Hear ye, hear ye, all stand for the honorable Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, Governor of the Queen’s colony of New York!”

  The crier stepped back from the podium and the assemblage stood up, and from the door came with a rustle of lace and a swoop of feathers not Lord Cornbury but—shockingly, scandalously—one of Polly Blossom’s bawds seeking to make a laughingstock of the sober occasion.

  Matthew was struck senseless, as was everyone else. The woman, who made her madam look like a pauper’s princess in her yellow-ribboned gown and her high lemon-hued sunhat topped with an outrageous sprouting of peacock feathers, marched right past the aldermen as if she—as Solomon Tully might have said—owned the damned place. She wore white kidskin gloves with gaudy sparkling rings displayed on the outside of the glove-fingers. From underneath her skirt of flouncing ribbons came, in the silence, the sharp clack-clack of high French heels on the English wood. The sunhat and feathers tilted at a precarious angle above a snow-white, elaborately curled wig decorated with glitter-stones and piled high to the moon, and the result of this was that she appeared to be a giantess of a woman, well over six feet tall.

  Matthew expected someone to holler or storm the podium, or one of the aldermen to leap to his feet in outrage, or Lord Cornbury himself to burst through the door red-faced and raging at having a prostitute upstage his entrance in such a way. But none of these things happened.

  Instead, the wanton spectacle—who Matthew suddenly noted did not glide, as might be expected by a woman of leisure, but had a decidedly ungraceful gait—went right past the crier, who seemed to shrink into himself until he was just eyes and a nose at the collar of a shirt. Still no one rose or protested to stop her progress. She reached the podium, grasped it with gloved hands, regarded the citizens with her long, rather horsey pale-powdered face, and from her pink-rouged lips came the voice of a man: “Good afternoon. You may be seated.”

  five

  NO ONE SAT DOWN. No one moved.

  From far back of the room Matthew thought he heard the sound of a bass Chinese gong, muffled. He caught a movement beside him and looked over at Solomon Tully, whose mouth was stretched wide open and whose new choppers, wet with spit, were sliding out of the gaping aperture. Without a thought, Matthew reached out and pushed them back in until something clicked. Tully continued to stare open-mouthed at the colony’s new governor.

  “I said, you may be seated,” Lord Cornbury urged, but the way his peacock feathers swayed had some already mesmerized.

  “God above,” whispered Magistrate Powers, whose eyes were about to pop, “the lord’s a lady!”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” a voice boomed from the back. There came the tap of a cane’s tip, followed by the noise of boots clumping on the pineboards. High Constable Gardner Lillehorne, a study in purple from his stockings to the top of his tricorn, strode up to the front and stood at ease, one hand resting on the silver lion’s head that adorned his black-lacquered cane. “Ladies also,” he amended, with a glance toward Polly Blossom. “Lord Cornbury has asked you to be seated.” He heard, as did the whole assemblage, the noise of giggling and scurrilous chatterings back where the crowd became a mob. Lillehorne’s nostrils flared. He lifted his black-goateed chin like an axeblade about to fall. “I,” he said, in a louder voice, “would also ask you not to show discourtesy, and to remember the manners for which you are so justly famous.”

  “Since when?” the magistrate whispered to Matthew.

  “If we are not seated,” Lillehorne went on against what was mostly still shock instead of resistance, “we will not witness Lord Cornbury’s address this day…I mean, his remarks this day.” He stopped to pat his glistening lips with a handkerchief that bore the new fashion, an embroidered monogram. “Sit, sit,” he said with some annoyance, as if to wayward children.

  “I’ll be damned if my eyes haven’t gone,” Tully told Matthew as they sat down and the others got themselves settled again, as much as was possible. Tully rubbed his mouth, vaguely noting that the corners of his lips felt near split. “Do you see a man up there, or a woman?”

  “I see…the new governor,” Matthew answered.

  “Pray continue, sir!” Lillehorne had turned around to face Lord Cornbury, and perhaps only Matthew saw that he squeezed his lion’s head so hard his knuckles were bleached. “The audience is yours.” With a gesture of his arm that would have made competent actors challenge Lillehorne to a duel for the honor of the theater, the high constable retreated to his place at the back of the room where, Matthew considered, he could watch the reactions of the crowd to see how the popular wind ruffled Cornbury’s feathers.

  “Thank you, Mr. Lillehorne,” said the governor. He gazed out upon his people with his purpled eyes. “I wish to thank all of you as well for being here, and for showing me such hospitality as I and my wife have enjoyed these last few days. After a long sea voyage, one needs time to rest and recuperate before appearing properly in public.”

  “Maybe you need more time, sir!” some wag shouted back in the gallery, taking advantage of all the swirling smoke to hide his face. A little laughter swelled up but it froze on Lillehorne’s wintry appraisal.

  “I’m sure I do,” agreed Lord Cornbury good-naturedly, and then he gave a ghastly smile. “But rest will do for some other day. On this afternoon I wish to state some facts about your town—our town now, of course—and offer some suggestions as to a future avenue toward greater success.”

  “Oh, mercy,” quietly groaned Magistrate Powers.

  “I have been in consultation with your aldermen, your high constable, and many business leaders,” Cornbury went on. “I have listened and, I hope, learned. Suffice it to say I have not accepted this position lightly from my cousin, the Queen.”

  Lillehorne thumped his cane tip against the floor, daring anyone to chortle for fear of a night in the gaol.

  “My cousin, the Queen,” Cornbury repeated, as if chewing on a sweet. Matthew thought he had very heavy eyebrows for such a lady. “Now,” the governor said, “let me outline where we are.”

  For the next half-hour, the audience was held not in rapture but rather by the droning on of Cornbury’s less-than-majestic vocal skills. The man might be able to carry a dress, Matthew mused, but he couldn’t manage a decent speech. Cornbury meandered through the success of the milling and shipbuilding businesses, the fact that there were nearly five thousand residents and that now in England people saw New York as not a struggling frontier town but a steady venture able to return sterling investment on the pound. He gave his lengthy opinion on how someday New York might surpass both Boston and Philadelphia as the central hub of the new British Empire, but added that first a shipment of iron nails that had accidentally gone to the Quaker town from the
old British Empire must be retrieved so as to rebuild the structures unfortunately burned in the recent fire, as he did not trust treepegs. He waxed upon the potential of New York as a center for farming, for apple orchards and pumpkin fields. And then, going on forty minutes in his dry dissertation, he hit upon a subject that made the citizens sit up.

  “All this potential for industry and profit must not be wasted,” Cornbury said, “by late-night carousings and the resulting problem of slugabeds. I understand the taverns are not closed here until the last…um…gentleman staggers out.” He paused a moment, surveying the audience, before he clumsily plowed ahead. “Forthwith, I shall decree that all taverns close at half past ten.” A murmur began and quickly grew. “Also, I shall decree that no slave is to set foot in a tavern, and no red Indian shall be served—”

  “Just a moment, sir! Just a moment!”

  Matthew and the others up front looked around. Pennford Deverick had stood up and was casting an eagle-eye at the governor, his brow deeply furrowed as a sign of his own discontent. “What’s this about the taverns closing early, sir?”

  “Not early, Mr. Deverick, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. Mr. Deverick it is.”

  “Well. Not early, sir.” Again the hideous smile emerged. “I wouldn’t call ten-thirty at night early, by any stretch. Would you?”

  “New York is not a town constrained by a bedtime, sir.”

  “Well, then, it ought to be. I’ve done a study on this. Long before I set out from England, many wise men afforded me their opinions on the wastage of available manpower due to—”

  “The blazes with their opinions!” Deverick said sharply, and when he spoke sharply it was like a very loud knife to the ears, if a knife might be loud. Matthew saw the people around him flinch, and beside him Robert Deverick looked as if he wished to crawl under the nearest stone. “Do you know how many people here depend on the taverns?”

  “Depend, sir? On the ability to consume strong drink and in the morning be unable to go about their duties to themselves, their families, and our town?”