Freedom of the Mask

by Robert R. McCammon

  The third would-be-robber feinted with the cudgel, but Hudson simply stood his ground.

  “You look to be all of sixteen years old,” Hudson noted. “Is it necessary for me to severely hurt you?”

  The answer was almost immediate. “No sir,” said the youth, and he was gone like a shot.

  Hudson undid his breeches and peed upon both the unconscious cloaked gentleman and the groaning new-nosed fellow. Then he stood in the damp night air rubbing the pain out of his not-too-damaged shoulder. He felt both sad and yet strangely full of energy, and thus decided not to waste his jaunt. He turned around and headed toward the noise of squeezebox and laughter, determined to get a tankard of ale and perhaps a wink from a comely girl out of this sorry misadventure.

  Sure enough, it was the Full Fathom Five from which the carousing issued. Hudson’s entry into the smoke-filled, noisy, dimly-candled, stained-walled and absolutely delightfully dirty establishment went entirely unnoticed by the clientele, who were too busy jabbering or laughing or quaffing from their cups or thumping their tables in time to the three-hundred-pound red-haired woman who played the Devil’s own tune on that squeezebox. Hudson looked around at the happy flotsam and jetsam of Charles Town society and had to grin; this was more his liking, as it reminded him of New York.

  He settled himself at a small table well amid the hurrahicano and ordered his ale from a serving-girl who looked as if she had winked at the patrons a few too many times, as her right eye was afflicted with a continual twitch. Still and all, she commanded a bright smile and clean blonde hair and in the low candlelight she was the Duchess of Desire, so well to the good and squeeze on, sister!

  He had his tankard of ale, an apple-based concoction that might melt the hair off a man’s chest, and a second one to wash down the first. The serving-girl brought him a little plate of half-burnt sausages when he asked for something to chew on. The female squeezebox player finished a last tune and waddled around collecting coins, then she went on her way. Some of the other patrons left and the place quietened down. Hudson was loathe to return to the Brevard House, because there in his room with a single candle throwing more shadows than light he would begin to believe that Matthew might never be found, and that would be a hard reality to stomach. He was contemplating this grievance against Fate and Circumstance and watering his rising anger with the second apple ale when someone at his left side said, “Mr. Hudson Greathouse?”

  He looked up into a man’s face that seemed more prune than flesh, so many were the wrinkles. The dusting of white face powder and cheek rouge the gent wore served only to make his appearance more garish, even frightful. The man was long and lean, was impossible to assign an age to because of the makeup but it was certain he was no young chicken. A leathered rooster he might be, Hudson mused…or, perhaps, a slippery snake. This unpretty picture of a nobleman wore a gray suit with a fancy and surely very expensive ruffled shirt, a pale blue waistcoat and a gray tricorn atop a powdered wig of a thousand curls, the wig being nearly high enough to tip the tricorn off its perch.

  “You are Hudson Greathouse, aren’t you?” The man had a voice that contained a hint of blustering storms, yet tonight he was doing his best to play Zeus and control his own bolts of lightning.

  “I am,” came the reply. “Who wants to know?”

  “Oh dear, disagreeable so soon? Lady Brevard told me you were here and described you. She said that you seemed…how did she put it?…edgy.”

  “I was born edgy. I’m working past irritated to livid. Who the hell are you?”

  “Earl Thomas Kattenberg, at your service.” The man gave a slight nod that threatened to truly dislodge the tricorn. Hudson found himself tensed, ready to catch it. The prune- and powder-faced individual cast a gaze around the room through dark eyes buried in hoods of flesh, and then he focused his full attention upon Hudson again. He said, “Matthew knew me as Exodus Jerusalem, in the fledgling settlement of Fount Royal. God forgive their foolishness there.” He shrugged and his mouth drew as tight as a miser’s purse. “Another page is turned in the book of Life.”

  Hudson had been reaching for his tankard but his hand had stopped with the speaking of the name. “You…know Matthew?”

  “I do. I saw a broadsheet this afternoon. I thought it best to seek you out.”

  “Well…my God, man! Sit down!”

  “I shall, thank you.” Thomas Kattenberg, the earl of a province that would never be found on any map, seated himself in a rickety chair as if lowering his hind upon a golden throne. His smile in the candlelight was ghastly. “Let us tend to the financials before we travel this road any further. How much money have you brought?”

  “I have…” Hudson recovered his wits in a flash. He snapped, “Now hold that horse a minute! Are you telling me you have information to sell?”

  “Not just any information. The information. You’re wanting to know where Matthew is, correct? I can tell you that.”

  Hudson now did reach for the tankard and took a long drink. His anger at Matthew’s disappearance and the indignity of being attacked by would-be Jonathan Dooms threatened to boil over and make quite a mess. He felt his face reddening. “Listen here!” he said, and he grasped hold of one of Earl Kattenberg’s lacy cuffs, “I suggest you tell me what you know and tell me now, or you might not—”

  The earl laughed. It was even more ghastly than the smile.

  “Dear Mr. Greathouse,” he said smoothly, with a little thunder behind it and the dark eyes catching a glint of crimson, “threats of violence and acts of violence do nothing but scramble the brain and impair the memory. You’re from New York, you’re supposed to be a sophisticate in such things. Alas,” he said as he gently worked Hudson’s fingers loose, “I rather think you’re more hayseed than whipweed. Now: my question stands, sir. How much money have you brought?” He waved away his own query. “Never mind. However much it is, I want it all.”

  “Information first.”

  “Absolutely not. Money first.”

  “I have eight guineas.”

  “Oh, please do better than that.”

  “All right. Ten.”

  “Keep climbing, the peak is in sight.”

  “Were you Matthew’s friend or enemy?” Hudson asked, his eyes narrowed into slits.

  “We understood each other,” said Earl Kattenberg, with a slight smile that moved across the wrinkled face like an oilslick of corruption. “As we do understand each other presently. Your next offer, please?”

  Hudson had decided this man—rooster, snake, whatever he was—could read his mind. “Twelve guineas,” he said, and from his pocket he produced the leather pouch. He dangled this between his fingers before the earl’s so-called face. “That’s it. Everything I’ve brought. I give this to you and I don’t know how I’ll pay for these ales and sausages.”

  “I’m sure,” said Kattenberg, as he daintily took the offering, “an intelligent sophisticate like yourself will think of something.” He opened the pouch to grin at the sight of gold. “I have to say, this is not as much as I’d hoped for, but—”

  A hand closed on his chin, gripped hard, and then patted a rouged cheek with the most gentle of deadly threats.

  “Where is Matthew Corbett?” Hudson asked, leaning forward like an approaching maelstrom.

  “Where, indeed,” said the man who had been Exodus Jerusalem and in fact carried within himself several identities as suited the purpose of the moment. His tongue worked saliva into his lips. “I shall tell you what I saw at the harbor little more than a week ago, and let us hope—dear Jesus, let us hope—that by now young Master Corbett’s bones are not coral made, that he has not suffered a sea-change and that nymphs do not hourly ring his knell, as he lies sleeping in the deep, full fathom five.”

  Three

  A STRENGTHENING breeze. An ominous curtain of clouds from horizon to horizon. A rolling of the sea, a chop of whitecaps, a fluttering of sails and clatter of block-and-tackle as the wind became not friend to the ship but
its adversary. Then as the darkness of ink-black clouds came sweeping across the gray expanse, the thunder blasted its mighty bass voice and forks of lightning stabbed the water, the dolphins abandoned their positions at the prow of the two-masted brigantine Wanderer, bound from Charles Town to the port of Plymouth, and dove away from the calamities of the world of men.

  The Wanderer, being an old ship and beaten by not only other storms but by the neglect of its owners and succession of captains, was hardly seaworthy, yet now came her most perilous hour. From the blackness of clouds shot through with streaks of angry violet, a banshee of winds took the sea within their power and whipped it to a frenzy. One instant the Wanderer was climbing a green mountain, the next it was sliding over a liquid cliff that seemed bound to break the vessel in two, yet a turbulent white fist of water came up and in equal parts supported the ship and slammed the vengeance of Nature into the worm-eaten hull. As the prow descended at an angle that caused women to scream, children to wail and men to soil breeches already damp, the bowsprit knifed the sea and in its rage and indignation the sea exploded over the Wanderer, shuddering its timbers and making its masts shriek out like the high-pitched voices of humans who had unwittingly wandered into a fight for survival, and the realization that Hell was wet, salty, and unforgiving. Though the sails had been reefed, everything possible lashed down and the ship heaved-to before the awesome might of Neptune’s wrath, the Wanderer was ill-prepared for such a blast, and in truth the newest and strongest of any fleet would have been tossed like a trinket.

  Then the real storm began.

  “Where is the captain? In the name of God, where is the captain?” shouted a gaunt man in a sopping-wet black suit stained with yellow mildew, his eyes near bursting from his head. He held a dirty oil lamp that in the ship’s passageway illuminated one of the few crewmen who on the voyage so far seemed to give a damn about the welfare of the vessel and its fourteen passengers. Water sloshed calf-deep in miniature tidal waves, carrying with it debris that had broken loose from its moorings. “Mr. Roxley!” cried the lamp-bearer, as the ship rose up to what seemed a frightening height. The Right Reverend Enoch Fanning grabbed hold of a rope that had been tied along the passageway just for such purpose, and would have been dashed against the ceilingwork when the Wanderer came down again. As it was, his shoes slipped out from beneath him, he splashed down but was full-witted enough to save the lamp’s flame, and Roxley—who himself seemed already brain-damaged by a previous collision with a bulkhead—was swept away by the fresh torrent of green water that poured through an open hatch the storm had unhinged.

  “Captain Peppertree! Captain Peppertree!” Fanning yelled at the top of his lungs, though his sermon-shout was no match for the whirlwinds. “Jesus Christ, someone take command of this ship!” he wailed. Near sobbing, he struggled up and fought his way aft through the vicious little waves, as small silver fish jumped in panic around him.

  The ship’s manger had been broken open in this tumult, and as Fanning pushed on toward the captain’s quarters one of the three goats brought aboard blocked the passage, its body crashing back and forth with the Wanderer’s violent dance. A dead chicken feathered the sloppy murk. Fanning shouted again, “Captain Peppertree!” but his voice only reached Bessie’s ears. Then the ship rose…rose…rose…the timbers screaming, cracking, near bursting their joints…and very suddenly came down so hard Fanning’s arm was almost torn from its shoulder as he gripped the safety-rope. The goat hit a bulkhead with such force surely its back was broken. Fanning barely dodged being crushed as it tumbled past him along the passage, its hooves scrabbling for purchase. Another Atlantic wave rolled through the ship, and water rained in from the deck overhead.

  Fanning kept going. The door to the captain’s quarters was open, the small nasty compartment aslosh with ocean, littered with wet papers and debris. No light shone there. The sea beat at the hull with both fists and a battering-ram the size of the tower of London. Fanning thrust his lamp into the dark. And there…there at his desk which certainly must be nailed to the floor as well as was the ragged leather chair he sat in…was Captain Gabriel Peppertree, who clenched a half-drained bottle of rum in one hand, his gray-bearded face fully drained of color, his reddened eyes lost, his expression blank, his shoulders hunched forward as if he were either sitting on the hole of his latrine or the edge of his grave.

  “Captain!” the minister shouted, as he supported himself in the doorway. “This ship is breaking to pieces! Please take command and do something!”

  Captain Peppertree stared at him, or at least in the minister’s direction. His eyelids were at half-mast. His mouth gave a twitch, and nothing more.

  “I beg of you!” Fanning pleaded. “You have crew and passengers in your care! Please rouse yourself to the task!”

  Captain Peppertree, whose name suggested perhaps it had been better he remain rooted to the earth his entire existence, regarded the bottle of rum, took a long drink from it and then started to stand, battling the roll of his vessel and the crash of the sea on all sides and above.

  He hesitated in mid-rise.

  Then he vomited a terrible outpouring upon his desk, slumped down and passed out with his face in yesterday’s porridge and today’s sugarcane swill.

  Fanning let out a moaning cry, for with Roxley out of his senses and the captain gone from this world there was literally no one left to take charge. The rest of the crew had burrowed even deeper into the ship to hide than had the passengers. There was nothing to be done. The minister turned away from this sorry sight of tragedy toward another sorry sight: a drowned pig being washed along the passageway, drowned as they all must surely be when this Godforsaken and masterless ship was dashed apart…which, by the sound of the Devil’s waves and wind gnawing at the spars, was not to be long in coming. Fanning had no choice but to splash and careen his way forward again, and to the hold where his fellow passengers were huddled, soaked and trembling, awaiting word from the decrepit captain that there was hope yet to be found and a plan to keep this ship from capsizing.

  The ocean-drenched space was nearly beneath the Wanderer’s figurehead, a carved female who might have once appeared serene as the moon, yet whose face had been wiped clean by the violence of past storms. The thirteen other passengers were gathered together and held onto ropes to keep from being tossed like bowling pins. Hezekiah Montgomery, a businessman from Liverpool, held an oil lamp and so did the blacksmith Curt Randolph, who had the misfortune of sharing his approaching death with his wife and two daughters, one hardly out of her swaddling. There was the farmer Noble Jahns, along with his wife, his young son, his mother and his one-legged father. There was the Charles Town lawyer Grantham Briarfield, a shrill-voiced dandy who was in a hurry to reach London for a business deal that meant he could not wait for a better ship to book passage upon, and…

  …there was the Prussian Count Anton Mannerheim Dahlgren, and his black-haired, black-bearded, taciturn and decidedly strange young servant who he called Matthew.

  “It’s all up!” cried the minister to this assembly of despair. “Roxley is out of his head and the captain is useless!”

  To which, as if in taunting reply, the ocean lifted the ship once more and plunged it down again. The sea burst through a thousand cracks and swamped the space before it ran off through a thousand more cracks into the hull below, and the shoals of human beings were nearly ripped from their ropes.

  “Let us pray!” said Randolph’s wife, a sturdy woman who cradled her infant child with her free arm while her husband’s thick forearm gave a purchase for the elder daughter to hold onto. “Please, reverend! Lead us in prayer, that at least our souls and those of our children be saved!”

  “Yes, yes!” Fanning agreed, though that last violent rise, plummet and cannonblast of sea against the prow had nearly unhinged his own senses. “God will have mercy on our souls if we pray!”

  “Ha! Vat a load of shit!”

  The half-choked, half-growled response had come from t
he Prussian, who stood at the far edge of the light with his servant behind him, both of them clinging to ropes, the servant with both arms and the Count with the one that did not have a severely crooked wrist. Dahlgren’s dirty blonde hair was plastered to his skull, seaweed caught in his beard, his green eyes sunken and his gray teeth bared in the wolfish face. “Ve are dead! And your God is haffing a good laugh!” he said. “Listen to him roar!”

  “Please,” the woman repeated to the minister. “For all of us who believe.”

  “Yes…of course. Let us bow our heads.”

  Everyone who could understand did, except the Count and his servant. And then, just before Fanning began, the servant also bowed his head. Water ran from his hair, over the crescent scar on his forehead, and dripped from the sharp tip of his nose.

  “Dear God,” the minister started. The sea and wind gave no mercy in the volume of their attack, thus Fanning had to speak as loudly as he could. “Dear God,” he repeated, for quite suddenly and after fourscore and ten of sermons he did not know what to say, at this moment of moments. He floundered, searching, and then it came upon him as if it had been quilled upon his heart.

  “We praise Thee,” he said, “even in this hour of our trial. We praise our Heavenly Father, and lift our eyes and trust, for we know we live in the great house of the Lord, and though the seas may crash asunder and the wind tear apart what Man has created, the Word and Deed of the Lord Almighty goes on and on, and…”

  The sea and wind did not like this and they let the Wanderer and her passengers know it, but the minister went on after the Atlantic had rolled over their backs again.

  “…and we love the Word and Deed, for that is our bond for everlasting life, and in this…this great house that the Lord has created…we know there will be storms aplenty, and suffering too, and trials and tribulations to be conquered for that is the way of things, and we cannot ask why, we can only try our best to walk in God’s light and do…what is right, for our loved ones and the community of Man.”