Cardinal Black

by Robert McCammon

  Julian said from the corner of his mouth, “I can barely walk in this get-up, so keep your pain to yourself.”

  They reached the bottom. At his desk the clerk who had signed them in last night stood up from his chair to give a short bow, and to Matthew’s amazement and horror Julian redirected his path toward the man. Matthew followed, thinking that all this weight on him was going to wear him out very soon and he felt like a true circus performer trying to balance a stack of plates on his head.

  “Good evening, Count Pellegar,” said the clerk, with a nod. And also, “Good evening to you, Baron Brux.”

  “Good evening,” Matthew replied, which brought upon him a look from Julian that nearly fried his wig. Oh my God! Matthew thought. He felt sweat spring out from his armpits. I’m not supposed to know any English! But after all it was a dress rehearsal, though it had to be treated as seriously as the real thing.

  Speaking to the false Count Pellegar again, the clerk said, “How may I—”

  “Your night manager. I wish to speak with him.” Julian was making no effort to alter his speech, though the words were delivered with the haughty annoyance of a wealthy dandy who has little to do but belittle others. Matthew thought that was the wisest course since keeping up an affected voice would be most difficult.

  “Oh…of course, your Excellency.” The clerk picked up a small silver bell from his desk, rang it in what seemed all the cardinal directions of the compass, and here came three young attendants on the run. “Jackson!” the clerk said to the first youth who arrived. “Go fetch Mr. Brinewater. Tell him Count Pellegar wishes to speak with him.”

  “Sir!” The youth had nearly shouted it up to the gigantic chandelier. He took off at a run again and the other attendants went back to what they’d been doing.

  “I am so pleased,” said the clerk to Julian, “that your missing bags were located.” Matthew noted that the clerk could not help but be a bit goggle-eyed standing so close to the furnace of all these flaming colors.

  “I as well. Some fool of a servant packed them in the baron’s trunk, as I suspect you heard.”

  “So pleased,” the clerk repeated with a blank but polite smile, as it was not his place to repeat anything he might have heard that spoke against the efficiency of a Prussian servant.

  Julian said haughtily, “I commend you and your establishment for finding a room for Count Mowbrey and Mr. Spottle. But I am not satisfied that acommodations were not made for them at the proper time.”

  Matthew grimaced for fear that Julian was going a room too far.

  “Of course, of course! Ah! Here’s our Mr. Brinewater!” It was said with relief that this international incident would go no further with him involved.

  The heavy-set night manager who had come up after the disturbance was walking toward them. Julian gave him the shortest impression of a bow as he reached the desk. Brinewater’s bow was deeper and more sincere, though his belly got in the way. “Firstly,” Julian began in that same haughty tone, as Matthew hung onto a precipice of pins and needles, “I am in distress that our associates were not offered the glowing hospitality that Baron Brux and I received upon our arrival. Secondly, I wish to tell you that Count Mowbrey erred in not informing you that the damage to our suite is more severe than he revealed. That, unfortunately, is my doing though I have no recollection of such. Thirdly, I am paying now for both our suite and that little closet you’ve put our associates into.” As he said this, he was drawing Brux’s blue purse from within his coat. He snapped it open and gave the coins a jingle. “What is the price?”

  “Uh…” Brinewater was taken aback by this performance and took a few seconds to regain his composure. “You’re staying until when, sir?”

  “At least the twenty-first.” That irritated hand in the ostrich-skin glove came up and slapped the air again. “I don’t tend to such things, my agent does.”

  Brinewater leaned over the clerk’s desk where the clerk was already checking the ledger. “Ah! Staying through the twenty-third!”

  “I thought as much,” Julian said.

  “And…pardon the reminder, but Count Mowbrey said you would—”

  “I know exactly what Count Mowbrey said! Yes, I am paying double for the suite. At the end of our stay you may inspect the damages and inform me of that cost. Now please tally the price, we are on our way out.”

  A price was quoted that Matthew thought he could live on for two years. The golden coins came out of the purse and in truth made quite a dent in Baron Brux’s finances.

  When the money had changed hands, Brinewater said, “Your Excellency, I would be glad to give your associates a better room on the—”

  “Nonsense!” Julian interrupted. “They’re settled in now and in fact are tending to my business in another part of your city. Kensington, is it? As for our own suite, have a servant bring up our hot water at ten o’clock. We intend to enjoy a leisurely supper.”

  “Our own tavern is but a few steps from—”

  “Not a tavern,” said the icy voice. “A restaurant.”

  On their way out with directions to what Brinewater said was an establishment that specialized in only the best, Matthew found his own voice where it had gone down to hide somewhere behind his knees. “I hope you’re proud of nearly making me wet my new breeches.”

  Julian gave a twisted smile. “I’m damned good, aren’t I?”

  Matthew grunted. “For a bad man,” he said.

  During the course of the night Matthew understood the wisdom of the dress rehearsal. They had to become accustomed to these costumes and wear them as if they were born to the breed. Matthew also had to get used to wearing the gloves at all times, and even though they were relatively skin tight they still presented a challenge to handling small objects without fumbling, as he did with the knife and fork at their restaurant of choice. If Cardinal Black was present at the house and saw the Black-Eyed Broodies tattoo, it was the end of the masquerade and likely their lives.

  Both Matthew and Julian took the opportunity to dine well on the Prussians’ money, with a platter of beef ribs, bone marrow, corncakes and a selection of various stewed vegetables accompanied by the best two bottles of ale in the house. Neither man spoke about the forthcoming night, and toward the end of the dining experience Matthew was thinking that if this was a last meal it was a good one. But he shook that thought off so it wouldn’t hobble him; he had to keep his focus on finding that book and somehow getting it out of the house—if indeed it was there—and anything else in his brain was mental debris.

  Promptly at ten o’clock a servant brought the hot water to the Grand Suite, where Matthew and Julian were still in costume for his arrival but had removed their coats and tricorns. Matthew saw the young man cast a look of horror at the wreckage of the front room on his way to the washstand, and indeed he seemed to trip over his own feet when he spied the remains of the harpsichord. After the hot water was poured the servant offered to deposit their coats in the closet, to which Julian responded with a calm negative and Matthew breathed a sigh of relief that a third body was not going to be chucked atop the first two. Matthew thought the Mayfair Arms wasn’t hurting for funds to buy a new harpsichord, they would hopefully be out of here before the corpses were discovered or began to be odious, so there was no need for any further concern regarding the state of the suite.

  When the servant left, Matthew immediately threw off the hideous wig and got out of the elephant-skin boots and the shiny mud-hued jacket. He set about scrubbing Baron Brux’s face from his own with the dreadful knowledge that the dress rehearsal was ended. Tomorrow night he was one of the principal actors in a deadly play, and he sent up a small prayer to God and a secret wish to Fate that they would both survive to the final curtain.

  fourteen.

  “No!”

  And there it had been again as last night, Matthew thought as he lay on the canopied
bed: Julian’s cry from the tortured depths of his sleep, which seemed to be a fearful place for him since it was a land beyond his control.

  But this night, as the frigid wind whistled beyond the window in the front room, Matthew had also found sleep to be a horse that throws its master after a short spate of equine comradery.

  He thought that since he’d prepared himself to rest he must’ve dozed, awakened, dozed and awakened eight or nine times. It was one of those nights when the pitiless hours moved past at a slow crawl, and one knew sleep was necessary for the rigors of tomorrow but…no, it wasn’t going to be so simple.

  He heard the sofa’s frame creak softly as Julian shifted his weight upon it. Then there came a peculiar sound: Julian drew a long breath as if it were his last draught of air in the world, and when he let it out it ended in what was very much like a sob.

  Matthew got quietly out of bed, put on the maroon blouse and the brown-checked breeches he’d worn the evening before and picked up a lantern from the bedside table. He walked into the front room and found Julian standing before the window, his cloak bound tightly around himself, his face pressed nearly against the cold glass.

  “Leave me,” he said without a glance at Matthew. His voice…strained…terribly weak.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Matthew asked.

  “I said…leave me.”

  “No,” Matthew replied.

  Julian’s bald head swivelled around. The lantern’s light fell upon a fierce, sweat-damp face in which the teeth were bared. “Get away from me,” he breathed. The voice was all the more terrifying because it was a whisper instead of a shout. “You don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “What I have done. What I am capable of doing. No one knows…not really.”

  “I don’t think you’re as much the bad man as you pretend to be,” Matthew said. “But you might think of giving up your present course of life so as to get a good night’s rest.”

  “Ha,” came the answer, delivered as if the solemn laugh of the dead from the city of graves.

  There was a quiet in which the wind could be heard keening and crying beyond the glass. The early morning lamps of London burned out in the dark and once more everything out there was shapeless and ghostly white.

  “Before I go out with you to that house,” Matthew said, “I think I deserve—”

  “Deserve,” from the crimped mouth.

  Matthew went on with hardly a pause. “I deserve to know what’s wrong with you. At that house, if you have some kind of breakdown or something—”

  “I do not break down,” Julian said.

  “Whatever’s troubling you, you ought to let it go. It seems not to be worth keeping.”

  “Certainly. It’s just as easy as you say. I shall begin anew and afresh tomorrow, and all will be right with the world.” As Julian said this, Matthew got a glimpse of intense and harrowing fire in the other man’s eyes, but it quickly flamed away. Left in its place was the smoke of sadness.

  “Well,” Matthew said, “I’m going back to bed. If you please, refrain from waking me again with your shouts.”

  “You weren’t sleeping. Just like me…trying to grip on what we have to do tomorrow. I mean…today.”

  “All the same, I’m—”

  “I was born not far from here,” said Julian in a wan, distant voice. “On a street, not far from here.”

  “On a street? I thought you were—”

  “Who I became. What I became,” he corrected. “Born on a street not far from here.”

  Matthew didn’t move nor say anything. After a moment he set his lantern down on a sidetable. There was more to come from the man who had confided Mother Deare’s increasing insanity to Matthew, and who in the end had killed her.

  “Aren’t you going back to bed?” Julian asked, the acidity returned to his speech.

  “No,” Matthew answered. “I’m going to sit in that chair for a while.” He eased into it and waited.

  “What are you waiting for? A bedtime story?”

  “I’m waiting for the truth,” said Matthew. “Which can be as good for the soul as a solitary walk in the snow.”

  Again there was that small solemn laugh, but this time delivered not quite so harshly.

  “Which street?” Matthew prompted, after another long silence.

  Julian stood without response. Then he placed his forehead against the cold glass, beyond which the whirlwinds blew. “Not far from here.” His voice was once more distant and haunted. “I could see it yesterday morning from this window. Oh…it’s not near enough to this inn where the guests would walk. It is a low street. But I could see it, all the same. I always see it.”

  “Something happened there?”

  “Something,” Julian replied. He once more drew a long breath and let it out. Before his face a ghost bloomed. “I committed my first murder on that street,” he said. “I killed a little boy.”

  Adderlane, Matthew thought. The dead child in the tower, and the mother’s reaction of horror.

  “Does that shock you?” Julian asked, his face still against the glass. “Does that make you think I am among the most vile of men?”

  “I don’t know the story,” Matthew said.

  “The story. You say that as if it were something that made sense. Something that had a beginning and an end. It did not and does not. I killed a child on that street, and…he did not deserve such a death.”

  “Does any child?”

  “Are you coming to my defense, Matthew? Now isn’t that jocular…a member of the Herrald Agency…a law-abiding, stuff-shirted prick who thinks the world can be controlled by order…coming to my defense. It’s all Fate, Matthew. And Fate knows only chaos and confusion. All right, if you wish a bedtime story, I’ll give you one. A story to warm your heart on a cold winter’s morn. Would you like that?” The face he turned toward Matthew was ghastly.

  “I have time,” Matthew replied.

  “Time past,” said Julian. “When I was supposed to be an officer in the Royal Navy. That was my father’s plan. To make an upstanding officer out of the boy who had come upon the earth and killed his wife. He had no use for me, but I was supposed to follow my elder brother’s course. Oh, what a wonderful time. He sent me to school here. The lessons he arranged for me, from the grand old men of the navy. Day in and day out…navigation and seamanship, and order and discipline and discipline and discipline and…” He stopped, because it sounded to Matthew as if he were starting to grind his teeth together.

  “Discipline,” Julian went on, when he could speak again. “I despised all that. It was supposed to be good for me. Poor Julian, that ill-starred boy who now and again stole small items from shops and thumbed his nose at the law. And thumbed his nose at the Lord…and the lords who swaggered on their decks and treated their crews like garbage in the streets. That’s who I was supposed to be. One of them, and that would bring me into fine favor with society. Society,” he repeated, with a caustic edge. “As if that ever mattered to me.”

  Julian was silent for a while, but Matthew did not speak or otherwise try to prompt anything more. If it was coming, it would come.

  “On the day of my examinations,” Julian said quietly, “I did not go. I had decided the life was not for me. But I knew what I was going to get from my father. More and more of the same. I went into a tavern and decided to drink. The whole day, I drank. Then I went out—stumbled out—and I got on the fine horse I had stolen the week before. Poor, poor Julian…that ill-starred boy.” He shook his head back and forth like a wounded animal. “That fine horse got away from me. A second of inattention, an errant pull on the reins, too sharp a dig with a spur…whatever happened, it was fast, and suddenly the horse was running wild. I tried to control it, tried to get it off the street…and then there he was, right underneath me. And I ran him down. I ran him down a
s if he were a little bag of nothing.”

  On that street, Matthew thought. That street not far from here, and forever in Julian’s nightmares.

  “But the worst,” Julian whispered. “The worst.” His voice seemed to shatter like fragile glass. “I stood over the boy. He was a beggar child in rags. All broken, all done. But then…behind me…a woman screamed. My boy! she screamed. My boy! I turned…and there she was…a beggar woman, also in rags, her hair wild and dirty…screaming for her son. A woman my father would have called the dregs of the earth…my boy, she screamed…in anguish, I could feel her anguish…but her boy was dead…his skull was crushed…I said I’m sorry I’m sorry I didn’t mean for this to—” He blinked, dazed by the impact of memories. It took him a moment to go on. “She saw I was drunk, that I could barely stand. She fell upon him, cradled him…his head, all bloody. And she cried, as if the heart had been torn from her breast. That sound…her crying…I can’t stop it. I hear it…always. And then she rose up…that beggar woman, suddenly as fierce as a queen who had lost the prince of her life…and she said into my face, Murderer. The tears were running down her cheeks…she was what my father would call a wretch but…in that moment…she had more dignity than I had ever seen in my life. Murderer, she said. Not loudly, but her voice carried.”

  Julian halted. He made a gasping sound, as if he were hearing that word flung into his face for the first time.

  “Then…then,” Julian continued, with an effort, “they came for me, summoned by her cry. They came from every nook and cranny on that street. They hobbled on their crutches and on their stumps. They crawled toward me like seething snakes, and they were everywhere. All the beggars and wretches of the world, it seemed, squeezing out from their holes and hideouts. Summoned by her cry. Yes. Murderer, she said. Yes. And they came at me with the filth of the street, flinging it in my face…my eyes…my hair. Someone threw a bottle. The first one hit me in the side. The second grazed my head. I ran, with that woman behind me trying to scream life into her dead son again. I ran…but the beggar army was on me…everywhere I turned, they were there. Pelting me with filth, and they took up the cry…murderer, murderer. It rang up and down the street like a firebell. There was no mercy for a drunken young fool in fine clothes who had let a fine horse run wild on the street…oh no…they were going to kill me, that much I knew. They were going to have their revenge…their justice…right then and there, and I was much too far from home.”