Cardinal Black

by Robert McCammon

  So far, his feeble plan was going to the domain of Cardinal Black’s master.

  “In you go,” said the Owl, as he pulled a release lever that lowered a small set of collapsible wooden steps below the doors on the coach’s side. Matthew saw the guard opening the gate. He was in for it now, no matter what happened. He went up the steps, turned a brass handle and was instantly pushed from behind by Bogen into the coach.

  “Good trip!” Matthew heard the Owl call. There came a whipcrack and the driver’s voice shouting “Hiiiiiyupppp!” The coach gave a shudder and began moving, but slowly through the gate and onto Endsleigh Park Road.

  “Settle back,” said Bogen, who sat down across from Matthew. He moved his cloak aside just enough for Matthew to get a glimpse of the pistol’s handle at his belt. For emphasis to this implied threat, Bogen reached into his jacket and brought out a powder horn on a leather strap, which he placed around his bulk of a shoulder.

  Matthew took quick stock of his surroundings. The dark blue interior was built to carry six passengers facing each other on bench seats of red leather, with an uncommonly generous space for leg room between. A pair of lamps built onto the sides gave off enough light for a small chapel, but even Lash’s money and influence couldn’t reduce the fishy odor of the whale oil. White linen curtains covered small round windows—portholes—on either side. Matthew saw on the floor near his feet a wicker basket. The promised breakfast, of which he might make a use.

  The coach was still not moving very fast, due to the horses plodding their way through what must’ve been five inches of snow. But Matthew realized that his time to act was fast running out. Still, if he was to make a move at all, he had to wait until the coach had gotten some distance away from Lash’s house and that guard at the gate.

  He had decided he had only one option, in this wonderful plan of his formulated when he’d found the coal dust on the clothing of the dead constables.

  He had to break back into the house.

  But first…there was this beast of a bodyguard to take care of.

  Matthew picked up the basket and opened it. Bogen watched him with his piggish eyes. Inside the basket were some slices of ham and sausages wrapped up in waxed paper, another packet of biscuits, a few slices of apples, and a wooden flask that Matthew presumed held water. “Biscuits?” he asked Bogen, offering him the packet.

  Bogen took one and instantly pushed almost the whole thing into his mouth.

  Matthew uncorked the flask and took a drink. Yes, it was water. He drank again. His pulse was pounding. The horses were moving steadily though not yet fast and there was no need for the whip. How far were they from the house? It was hard to tell, but—

  “Water,” said Bogen, holding out his hand. The biscuit crumbs were still falling from his mouth.

  Matthew gave him the flask.

  It was now or never.

  When Bogen put the flask to his lips and tilted his head slightly back, Matthew drew a deep breath. He grasped the edge of his seat for traction and swung both legs up to kick the flask squarely into the man’s teeth.

  twenty-three.

  Maybe it was the toughness of the elephant-hide boots.

  Maybe it was pure animal desperation. Or maybe just pure fear.

  Whatever it was, the power of Matthew’s double kick to the flask as Bogen held it to his mouth broke the front man’s teeth out and down into his throat. Bogen’s head rocked back and cracked against the coach’s wall behind him. Matthew had an instant to think that surely the drivers had heard it…but then with a dazed blink of his eyes and a smear of blood at his mouth Bogen righted himself and reached for his pistol.

  Matthew seized the gun hand before it got there and held on for dear life. Bogen was making a strangling noise but nothing else was coming out through the crimson foam at his lips.

  A hard fist with plenty of strength behind it struck Matthew’s left shoulder and nearly broke his grip, but the heavy polar bear coat took most of the impact. The second blow that grazed his jaw sent stars flying through his head. He hung on as the pistol came up out of Bogen’s cloak like a cobra and also like that deadly reptile swayed back and forth, Bogen trying to get a bead on Matthew and at the same time to secure his finger on the trigger.

  They grappled at close quarters in the coach. Bogen got his hand under Matthew’s jaw and shoved his head back with a force that sent spears of pain through his skull, and then Matthew twisted around and slammed an elbow into Bogen’s face. The pistol came loose and fell to the floor. When Matthew went for it Bogen got an arm around his throat from behind and starting choking him, all the time making an unintelligible wheezing noise as if his lungs were laboring for air. Matthew shot an elbow into Bogen’s ribs, which did absolutely no good. He kicked out again, this time against the seat before him, and drove both himself and the bodyguard crashing backward.

  “What’s goin’ on in there?” Matthew heard one of the drivers shout, the voice muffled by the wind. Bogen reached up to open the sliding viewslit between the drivers and the coach’s interior but his arm was stopped when Matthew hit him in the face once, twice and again in rapid succession.

  The bloodied Bogen bore down on Matthew with ferocious strength and crushed him to the floor. The man’s hands clamped to his throat and began to squeeze. Matthew hammered at Bogen’s sides but it was like beating on solid stone.

  He heard the noise of the viewslit sliding back from the other side. “Christ, they’re fightin’!” one of the men cried out. “Pull the horses up!”

  Bogen was strangling Matthew, who felt the blood pounding in his face and his lifeforce ebbing by the second. Matthew got a hand up and tried to push at Bogen’s chest but again it was a shove against heavy stone.

  Then Bogen’s wheezing turned into a gurgling noise, he suddenly let go of Matthew’s throat to grasp at his own, his small piggish eyes were bloodshot and his mouth dripped ruddy foam. He began to thrash like a man gone mad, kicking at the air and clawing at his throat, and through his own considerable distress Matthew realized that Bogen was strangling on the teeth that must’ve gone down into his windpipe.

  The coach had stopped. In a few seconds one or both of the drivers would be upon him, and one might have that musket in hand.

  Matthew found the pistol as Bogen rolled this way and that between the seats, gasping like a dying fish. As he cocked the hammer, the doors to his right opened.

  He put the pistol in the faces of the two men who stood there, one indeed with the musket in hand but not yet levelled to take aim.

  “Drop that,” Matthew said.

  Either the ferocity of his command or the blood coming out of both his nostrils spoke for quick obedience, because the musket fell into the snow.

  “Don’t shoot, sir,” the other driver said, lifting his hands. He cast a quick glance at the strangling and thrashing Bogen, and then he said, “I’m a hired man, sir, I don’t have no dog in this fight.”

  “Move back. Both of you put your hands behind your heads.” As they did so, Matthew climbed down from the coach on the little wooden steps one of the men had lowered. He kept the pistol aimed somewhere between them. If they knew how wrecked he felt they might have rushed him; he only had a shot for one man, but it appeared that neither one wished to take a ball for the vice admiral and certainly not for Bogen.

  Where were they? Matthew quickly took his bearings. A faint purple blush had begun to paint the darkness of the clouds. Through the falling snow he saw they were still on Endsleigh Park Road but the illuminated windows of the Lash mansion looked to be at least a hundred yards away. Was the guard still at the gate? Had he seen the coach stop? Possibly he’d gone into the house for warmth after the coach had pulled away? Matthew couldn’t worry about that at the moment; he had to move and move fast while that party of killers still sat at their feast.

  “Both of you start running,” Matthew
said. He kept the pistol as steady as a man suffering with the shakes could. He pointed with his free hand in the direction opposite Lash’s house. “That way. If I see either one of you coming back, I swear to God I’ll shoot to kill.”

  The two drivers might fear the wrath of Samson Lash but since Lash was not present, they feared the wrath of Matthew Corbett much more, particularly as he was wild-eyed and spraying spittle, hoarse-voiced and most importantly with that gun in his grip looked like a very bad man.

  “Go now,” Matthew croaked. “Be glad you didn’t wind up as shark food.”

  They went, without realizing Matthew had likely saved them from a horrible death at the hands of Professor Fell. Within seconds they were taken from sight by the currents of snow.

  But he doubted they’d go very far without trying to get back to the house. They would hunker down somewhere, probably in the park, and wait until their courage had—

  Bogen fell on him from the coach.

  He went down under the man’s weight, but desperately he held onto the gun as he clawed himself out from underneath the body.

  When he recovered his wits he realized it was indeed a body, for Bogen’s face had taken on a blue tinge, his hands were still clutched to his throat, his eyes and mouth were open and the snowflakes made little hissing noises as they melted upon flesh soon to be as cold as the wind, for Bogen the bodyguard was dead.

  Matthew didn’t know if this made him a murderer or not, but he doubted very many people had been killed by a water flask.

  He made the quick decision to shrug off the polar bear coat, for its weight would be an impediment. He tossed it into the coach. A rapid search of Bogen’s jacket under the cloak turned up a small fringed leather pouch that Matthew’s fingers could feel contained ammunition balls and extra flints. He put that into his own jacket. The powderhorn had come off Bogen’s shoulder and lay up on the coach’s floor next to the flask, so Matthew retrieved that and bound its strap over his head and across one shoulder. He scanned the darkness and saw no return as yet of the drivers, but he pushed the musket deeper into the snow with his foot so it would be too wet to fire. His own pistol was probably too wet as well, in this weather, but he knew from experience that flintlocks were finicky things. After he had crushed the musket down, he turned his attention toward the park itself.

  Through the snowclad trees he could see the gazebo at the park’s central point. The multicolored lanterns had gone out. Matthew figured that as owner of the park, Lash probably had his servants attend those festive lamps as Lash desired to appear a herald of the Christmas season to the residents of this exclusive neighborhood; he thought that Lash might disdain the small man, but the vice admiral wished to curry favor with those of equal wealth. In any case, Matthew had decided that if a coal wagon pulled up alongside the park and delivered warm bodies to the house for RakeHell Lizzie to slaughter, the entrance to a tunnel might be thereabouts—near enough to the manse but far enough away that no disturbance would draw unwanted attention. The gazebo, being a solid structure, might be concealing a trapdoor to a tunnel.

  He climbed to the driver’s bench, unhooked a lantern from one of the pedestals and made his way through the snow to the gazebo, which had a peaked roof and stood up from the ground a few feet by a set of four wooden steps. He ascended and by his light searched the gazebo’s floor. The place looked fairly new, maybe built in the last few years; the floorboards had received a dusting of snow, but the roof had kept any real accumulation away. He was looking for pieces of coal that might have been caught in the clothing of the constables, but he found none. Dropping to his knees for a closer search, he could find no hatch nor other obvious opening in the gazebo’s floor.

  A feeling of panic gnawed at him. If he was wrong about this, all was for naught. He didn’t have much time to spend scrabbling about trying to find a tunnel entrance, if indeed one existed here. But where else would it be? This seemed the most logical place. His light uncovered nothing, no bits of coal…nothing.

  An image came to him of the lever that operated the coach’s collapsible steps. A nice invention. Might Samson Lash, being of a mechanical mind, have put that idea to use elsewhere?

  Matthew went back down the steps and searched around them. Again, the lantern’s light revealed nothing. He felt along the edges of the steps. Nothing but weather-roughened wood. His sense of panic—and impending doom—flared higher. At the bottom of the steps he got on his knees once more, brushed away as much snow as he could, and felt along the ground level.

  At the center, just beneath the lowest step and certainly impossible for anyone who didn’t know it was there to find, was a bolt. He threw it from its latch. Nothing happened. What now?

  He put the lantern aside, lodged the pistol in his waistband and used both hands to push the last step upward, thinking that maybe the whole thing collapsed in some way.

  There came the rasping of a hidden hinge. The entire set of four steps, hollow within, lifted up. Revealed beneath was a dark cavity from which bloomed the dank odor of old stones. Matthew continued to push the set of steps up until they rested against the gazebo’s floor. He shone the lantern down upon another set of steps, these also of wood—certainly of modern construction instead of Roman—that descended into darkness beyond the light.

  He went down.

  The staircase descended about twenty feet and had been built with a railing. At the bottom the floor was composed of what appeared to be old flagstones, worn smooth possibly by the ancient traffic of the Roman city. The passage was at least ten feet wide and the walls were formed of rough and broken stones though some of it had fallen to piles of rubble, exposing the dark earth behind. Matthew judged the direction from the gazebo to Lash’s mansion to be to the northwest, and he began following the lantern’s light.

  He came across three small pieces of coal on the floor that must’ve been caught in the constables’ clothes. So far, so good, but not far enough nor good enough.

  It was soon apparent that he might not be striding along Roman roads, but instead following passageways in what could have been an ancient fortress. His light showed cavernous chambers on both sides. Here and there stood columns of stones that rose up to the ceiling. He was aware of the shrill squeaking of rats scampering away from beneath his boots, and he mused that the rodents had no respect for the glory of Rome.

  He reached a fork in the passageways and took the one leading off to the left, thinking that was a more northwesterly heading. Within half a minute he came to a solid stone wall. He retraced his path, took the other passage and sped his pace, for if the drivers regained their courage and got back to the coach or the house before he did, all was lost. He was wondering also if Lash wouldn’t use his second private coach to soon take Lioness, Merda, Krakowski and Montague back to their inns or wherever they were lodged, and in so doing the halted coach and Bogen’s body would be found.

  It all added up to the fact that he had to hurry.

  The passageway narrowed and its ceiling dropped lower, nearly brushing the top of Matthew’s head. The rats were bolder here and made hissing noises of anger beneath his boots. He passed a chamber where the rats were nearly climbing over themselves to get down into what looked to be an old well or something of the sort, and Matthew reasoned the bodies of the first constable, the loud-mouthed Victor and Dippen Nack—God rest a hopeless bully—had been thrown in there and served to feed the rodents as had RakeHell Lizzie’s other victims.

  He came to a door.

  Now before him was the real test. He put the lantern down and took hold of the door’s handle.

  He turned it.

  Or tried to turn it.

  Because it would not turn.

  The door was locked.

  All the breath came out of him. His brain burned with the idea of defeat. So much for the brotherhood and sisterhood of the Black-Eyed Broodies! What now? was the question th
at rang like an alarm bell in his ears.

  There was a quiet click.

  The door opened, and before Matthew stood Elizabeth Mulloy.

  Her mouth was a grim line. Her eyes took in the damage done by Bogen. “I was waiting for you,” she said. Behind her about thirty feet was the light of the open door that led out to the pit. “They’re finishing up their breakfast. Samson will be taking them to their inns in about half an hour. What did you do with the coach?”

  “It’s up the road, not far.”

  “You had to kill the bodyguard,” she said, with a glance at the pistol.

  “Not directly, but he’s taken care of.” He left the lantern where it was and passed her, walking cautiously toward the pit. “The drivers are out there somewhere.” He stopped just short of the pit and turned to face her. “Where are they keeping Julian?”

  “The second floor, the third door on the right. There’s no guard but the door will be locked. I can’t help you with that.”

  “And Firebaugh?”

  “The first door on the left.”

  “All right. Thank you. Will you do me one more thing?” Before she could reply, he said, “Bring me the book of potions. Please.”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m sorry, I can’t do any more for you. I’ve got to make it appear that the door was left unlocked by mistake, so I have to return this key to the study. Then I wash my hands of it.”

  Matthew doubted that any amount of washing could remove the bloodstains. “Very well. Just stay out of my way.”