Hobgoblin Night: Mask and Dagger 2

by Teresa Edgerton

  How Jem might have answered, Ned would never know, because just then a ghastly shriek ripped across the night.

  One of the young women, who had been dancing in an ecstasy next to the fire, had gone into a fit. What could be seen of her face under the mask was wildly contorted, and froth was bubbling out of her mouth. She flung herself about in a weird parody of her former dance, beating frantically at her own chest, her arms, her belly.

  The moon went suddenly behind a cloud. The fire seemed to burn suddenly redder. The girl collapsed on the ground, where she continued to twitch and to howl. Ned thought he saw something small run out from under her skirt; then he did see something, the size of a mouse, then another, and another. As he watched, horrified, a whole army of skittering, squeaking, frantic field mice came out in a black wave from under her skirt and scurried across the ground.

  The mice were all over Ned before he even realized they were moving his way. He beat at them, crushed their tiny bodies with his big fists, ripped them off and cast them to the ground. Beside him, Jem lost all caution, leaped to his feet, and began to dance around in his efforts to rid himself of the mice. The witches spotted him and sent up an enraged howl.

  Knowing he was a dead man if he stayed where he was, Ned jumped to his feet, grabbed Jem by the arm, and ran for his life, dragging the smuggler behind him . . . through bushes that caught at him, over rocks that cut him, down to the stream and splashing through the water. When he thought that Jem had the right idea, Ned let him loose and ran on by himself, covering the ground with his long strides. He could hear the witches gibbering and howling behind him.

  A long time later, when the hue and cry had finally died down, he stopped and stood panting while Jem caught up with him. "Lost them, did we?" he managed to gasp.

  "For now," said Jem, equally breathless.

  Ned thanked Providence that he and the smuggler had been fresher than their pursuers, and he started off again at a slightly slower pace. His heart was beating so hard, it threatened to burst his chest right open and he had a cramp in one foot, but he would not stop.

  As the moon continued to hide behind a thin veil of clouds, the way was dim but not absolutely black. Ned pushed through a hedge, scrambled over a fence, and landed in the road. It was there that several dark figures leapt out to catch him and pull him down.

  By what unholy power had the witches gotten ahead of him? Ned twisted, struggled, bashed two heads together, and staggered to his feet. He groped for one of his pistols and pulled it out, but his assailants were moving about so much, that it was impossible to get off a good shot.

  Behind him, he could hear another scuffle going on. Then there was a blaze of light as someone uncovered a lantern, and he heard Jem calling out in a stunned voice. "Burn me if it ain't the customs house men."

  The humor of his own situation struck Ned forcibly. To escape from witches only to be captured by excise men! The pistol dropped from his suddenly slackened grip, and he bent over double, gasping with laughter as much as with surprise.

  ***

  It was an hour before sunrise, two nights later, when Hawkins and the highwayman met again at the mausoleum. The tomb was particularly damp and chilly at this hour, and despite his bulk, Ned shivered under his cloak.

  Hawkins, however, appeared unaffected and even amused. "I hear that you recently fell in with some friends of mine. It is just as well that they didn't catch you doing anything illegal. If they had . . . well, I might have used my influence to get you off, but what would that have done to your credit with the smugglers?"

  "It don't bear thinking on." Nor did the memory of how close he had come in his panic to ruining everything by firing his pistol. To kill one of the excise men would have spoiled his chances of getting that pardon—and the worst of it was that he hadn't been in danger of getting arrested to begin with.

  "But them smugglers have let me in now," Ned continued. "I'll be there when the next boat comes in . . . though I can't say yet where they may land her. There's a dozen of us to meet at All Seasons churchyard in six nights' time."

  "Very good," said Hawkins. "But I want to catch all of them red-handed. My men and I will be concealed in the vicinity of All Seasons and we'll follow you down to the beach. But we dare not follow too closely. In case you lose us along the way, you had better give me a signal just before they land."

  Ned did not care for the sound of that. If he gave any sort of signal, he would place himself in danger of being discovered as a spy. Still, he understood that without that signal Mr. Hawkins and the revenue men might have to wait another four weeks, before catching the smugglers at their work. And who knew what might happen in all that time?

  "I'll fire off one of my pistols," he said at last. "I reckon that ought to be sufficient."

  ***

  The night was dark, the dying moon reduced to an icy sliver of light, but the sky blazed with a thousand stars. Ned did not know this stretch of beach. He and the smugglers had ridden for what seemed like hours since the meeting at All Seasons, and they had reached the shore by a circuitous route. He could only hope that Hawkins and his men were following—perhaps somewhere along the white chalky cliffs which towered above the beach.

  The beach ended abruptly where the cliffs jutted out into the water. But that did not stop the man in the lead. He urged his mount into the shallow water where the waves came curling in, and the other riders followed his example. Near the end of the line, Ned did the same. A faint breeze played on his face, the black stallion fought the bit, but Ned was firm and they entered the water. There was a light, sucking undertow as the waves retreated.

  Once they rounded the point, the smugglers arrived in a secluded cove. Here and there, the sandy expanse of the beach was broken by some great, upthrusting pillar of stone, like an ancient pagan monument. In the shadow of one of these natural pillars, the smugglers dismounted, and began to swarm around on the beach. Was this the place they were to meet the boat—or had they merely stopped to rest and to stretch their legs after the long ride? Ned hesitated, uncertain whether the time had come to give the signal.

  Just then, he heard the sound of approaching oars. One longboat . . . two longboats . . . then a third appeared, dark shapes blotting out the stars reflected in the water. Gathering his nerve, Ned pulled out one of his pistols and fired it into the air.

  The men nearest to him jumped at the explosion. "What was that for, you great looby?" hissed Jem.

  "I thought I seen somebody up on the cliffs. But it was just a bush moving in the breeze."

  "I thought you had the nerve for this, but I guess I was wrong." Jem scowled at Ned in disgust, but the highwayman knew that when Hawkins and the revenue officers finally arrived, the smugglers would quickly realize that a signal had been given.

  As the first boat came in, half the men went down to pull it out of the shallow water. While everyone was engaged in unloading the one boat and in pulling the next one ashore, Ned faded into the absolute darkness at the base of the cliffs.

  Only moments later, Hawkins and a troop of men came riding around the point. Shots rang out on both sides; a man pitched from his saddle onto the beach; another fell out of one of the boats and landed in the water. A fierce battle followed, with firearms, cudgels, knives, oars . . . anything that came to hand. Men shouted, horses milled about, more shots exploded in the salt air.

  Ned watched it all from a distance. He had been promised a pardon on the grounds that he did no harm to anyone; he was not certain whether this extended to anything he might do in aid of the customs house men, but he was taking no chances.

  And as it turned out, he was not even needed: the government agents outnumbered the smugglers, and they were better armed. In half an hour, they had killed a third of the smugglers, wounded most of the rest, and were tying up the few able-bodied ones and carrying them away on horseback.

  When Ned finally ventured out of his hiding place, he found Hawkins on the beach, taking charge of the injured prisoners.
Ned stood back for a few moments more, watching in sheer amazement. The fastidious little gentleman had made a fire, and was busily cauterizing wounds, binding up bloody limbs, and easing the pain of the dying with the contents of a bottle he drew out of his coat pocket.

  "Blister me!" said Ned, walking out to meet him. "First you was an excise man, then you was a clergyman, and now damme if you ain't a doctor! But what are you when you're at home?"

  Hawkins did not answer. He had an abstracted look, like a man who was sleepwalking. But as the first light of dawn was staining the sky, he finally left his patients and, along with Ned, went down to the tide-line to inspect the bales and boxes, and to learn what sort of contraband the raid had netted.

  "Brandy and silk," said one of the revenue officers, indicating a bale and a barrel. "But none of those other things we were hoping to find. And something that we weren't expecting." He threw open a large wooden chest, which was seen to contain hundreds of small linen bags. He untied one of the bags and poured a fine, crystalline powder into his palm. "It is Sleep Dust, you see. Which, as you know, has a very high duty."

  ***

  "But my dear Francis, how remarkably chagrined you must have been," said a certain young gentleman who stood very high in the confidence of the Crown Prince of Mawbri. More than a week had passed since the raid near Brantley, and he was entertaining the hero of the day at a private supper at his country estate. "Of course, you can still get the drug . . . but the expense, the expense! Your smugglers, it appears, had cornered the market on duty-free Dust. By shutting down their operation, you have driven up the price of the legal drug many times over."

  Francis Skelbrooke—otherwise known as Emmanuel Hawkins—made an impatient gesture. "Do you really think that is why I'm so bitterly disappointed? It's a most damnable inconvenience, I will admit, but one I am likely to survive. "

  His friend gave him a sympathetic look. "How much of the drug must you take before it sends you to sleep?"

  Skelbrooke shrugged. "There isn't enough of the Dust in Mawbri to give me a good night's rest, the drug has such a hold on me. I use laudanum to sleep at night, the Dust to hold back the horrors during the day."

  "And the nightmares?"

  "Perhaps one night out of every three. I doubt they will ever leave me entirely. I still see the children . . . especially the two that I unwittingly lured into Lucinda's clutches."

  There was a momentary silence, broken at last by his host. "But, my dear boy, doesn't anything you've accomplished soothe your conscience at all?"

  "I accomplished so very little at Brantley. There were no girls being shipped out, no mummies or magic scrolls coming in . . . you'll not be able to charge the surviving smugglers with kidnapping or black magic. The common scoundrels will almost certainly hang, but as for the others . . . a bribe here and a bribe there, and the ringleaders will go to prison, but not forever. You know how these things go.

  "Besides, I wanted the Blagmoor witches as well. But no one has named anyone but the farmer we already knew about. When we went to question him, he was found dead. Do you know . . . this was my third attempt to enter and destroy their circle? They will be cautious for a long time. I will have to turn my efforts elsewhere."

  "In any case," said his friend, "you've made the Blagmoor and Brantley countryside a kindlier place for people to live. The honest fishermen, ploughmen, and farmers will rest easier for many years to come."

  He offered Skelbrooke a glass of brandy, which was accepted.

  "Duty free?"

  "Of course. There was no need to hold it all for evidence. But stay . . . what of that romantic highwayman of yours? Surely you did that fellow some material good."

  "Romantic?" said Skelbrooke. "He was a great clodhopper in a frieze coat, and not a young man either. I hope that woman of his proves faithful. It would be a sad thing if he returned to his village and found that she hadn't even waited for him."

  He gave a bitter laugh. "Most likely she hasn't. This is a wicked world that we live in, and it seems that every time I try to do anyone any good in it, I fail miserably."

  ***

  But for Ned, with the pardon safe in his pocket and the black stallion burning up the miles beneath him, it was a night full of promise. The moors were a hundred miles behind him, and he had finally arrived in heartbreakingly familiar territory: the countryside where he had grown up.

  So it was over a fence and across a bridge, then down a winding lane, and at long last, the cottage of Mary's father, where she had retired after Elijah's death, finally came into view. Ned pulled up under an oak tree, about thirty yards from her door.

  The stallion had carried him valiantly over a long distance. He could not abandon the brute now, though his head was light and he could barely breathe for the pounding of his heart. Ned led the stallion into the stable and did all that was needful, before proceeding on to the cottage.

  There, grown suddenly apprehensive, he peeked in at a window. He saw Mary sitting alone by a small fire. She looked older, to be sure, but he still recognized the winsome, dark-eyed girl he had loved so many years before. Gathering his courage, he pushed open the door and entered without knocking, but he paused shyly on the threshold as Mary started up from her seat.

  "You had my letter?" he asked gruffly. She nodded her head, her eyes filling with tears. "And your answer?"

  "It is yes, Ned, yes. Could you really doubt it?"

  Then he crossed the floor in a rush, caught her up into his arms, and there he was with his own dear love resting her head on his shoulder, alternately laughing and crying for joy.

  Fifteen years of exile, loneliness, danger, all melted away in an instant. For Ned Talbot had finally come home . . . and the world was a very fine place indeed.

  This little tale, told in the manner of a folk story, was written during the brief period between the publication of Goblin Moon and The Gnome's Engine, especially for the magazine Midnight Zoo. It is based on English and Scandinavian folklore, and is the result of research I did when writing the Mask and Dagger series, research I was unable to incorporate into the novels themselves.

  Here you will find no characters from the novels (unless you count "Old Mezz," who is mentioned in passing) and only one or two place names in common, but because I was still immersed in the setting, I decided to set this story in the same world, though several hundred miles to the north of Thornburg.

  Later, it occurred to me that this must be a story collected by Hermes Budge's friend, Mr. Gumley, Professor of Languages and Folklore, at the University of Ghyll, less than two hundred miles East of Grall.

  THE GHOST IN THE CHIMNEY

  A Tale from the Isle of Grall

  They said the minister at Bruwikk was a sorcerer who knew the Black Book. Certainly he was a foreigner, born and bred in Verminghast, all the way to the other side of the island, and he had studied at the University of Ghyll in Nordmark, across the water and hundreds of leagues distant—and no telling what queer habits he had picked up in those parts! They said, too, that he had come into the world with a caul over his head and one earlobe longer than the other, a sure sign of a man with uncanny powers.

  His reputation as a sorcerer, however, rested on a more solid foundation than that. He had laid a restless spirit, not a fortnight after he arrived in Bruwikk, the draug of old Elvy Dass who scandalized the parish for an entire season by wandering about in her rotting winding sheet with the worm-eaten flesh fairly sloughing off her bones. A few words from the young minister, and Elvy went shambling back to her open grave, lay down in her coffin as docile as you please, and never a curse nor a word of protest while the clods fell and the gravediggers covered her up again.

  Moreover, the minister had been observed, on more than one occasion, strolling in the graveyard, deep in conversation with the Prince of Demons, Mezztopholeez himself . . . chatting away just as natural as you please, as if on terms of easy intimacy with the infernal, or else haggling with "Owld Mezz" over the soul of this man or t
hat woman recently deceased—while the ghost looked on, blue-faced and shivering, awaiting the final outcome. It usually fell out that Mezztopholeez got the worst of the bargain and the Reverend Mr. Jakob Fenn the credit for saving some poor sinner from eternal damnation.

  All this, you understand, was highly acceptable. A minister who could lay night-walking spirits and bargain with the Prince of Darkness was just what the people of Bruwikk wanted.

  But Mr. Fenn exerted an unseemly effect on the ladies, which caused the menfolk to feel uneasy—every female in the parish, with the exception of the grannies and the very smallest lasses, went mad for him. He was a little finicking man, too, very precise and gentlemanly in his black frock coat and clerical bands . . . not much to look at, being whey-faced and ginger-haired . . . not much to listen to, either, for he was an indifferent speaker in the pulpit and full of inconsequential conversation elsewhere—or so said the men of the parish. The woman had it differently: they thought Mr. Fenn a pretty little fellow, and admired his easy discourse.

  "Oh Mr. Fenn," says Mistress Sturluson the Mayoress, plump and wheezing, after a mad dash to catch up with him as he ambled down the cobblestone street, "won't you join us for dinner on Sunday night? We'll be dreadfully dull without you."

  "My mother, Mr. Fenn, sir . . . she'll be that disappointed, I don't bring you home for tea the way I promised," says a pretty country lass, blushing like a rose.

  Oh yes, he was very popular, was the Reverend Mr. Fenn, and invitations to dine came thick and fast; not one night in ten did he eat at home. He was a perfect guest, too: Whether supping with farmers or herders or craftsmen, or dining with the Mayor and his lady and their six strapping daughters, he escorted his hostess in with rare grace, handed her to her place at the foot of the table, and kept up a light, amusing flow of conversation throughout the meal—while the women all made sheep's eyes at him and the men grumbled under their breath wondering what unholy power it was that he practiced on the ladies.