Freedom of the Mask

by Robert R. McCammon

  Things were looking up. He would drink that sip of rum in a mood of celebration, for once these ropes were removed and he was cleaned up and shaved—and perhaps rested for a few days, with a few good meals in his belly—he would be back to, as the Great One might say, “fighting fit”.

  Then…somehow back to New York…and after this experience he was going to crawl to the front door of Berry Grigsby’s house and beg for her forgiveness, and explain to her that though he longed to be at her side he’d thought running her off was the only way to keep her safe from Professor Fell. The professor had a long memory and many arms of evil, as his symbol of the octopus represented; Matthew did not want one of those arms to find and crush that beautiful girl.

  What was to be done? Where could they go, together, to find peace and safety?

  First things first. He had awakened from one ordeal, and was better prepared now to handle what lay ahead. First things first.

  Bring on the rum.

  Two

  A Merry Town

  Black as Sin

  Six

  THE coach’s doors slammed shut. Double boltlocks were thrown. The team of four horses started up under the whip’s crack, and Matthew looked through the barred window at the passing gray buildings of Plymouth as an equally gray drizzle swirled from a vault of leaden clouds.

  His wrists and ankles were free of ropes but weighted with chains. An iron thunder-ball lay at his feet like a mean black dog. When asked, the arresting officer had told Matthew the journey would take seven days, give or take. The man, named Moncroff, was at this moment sitting up with the coach driver, both of them shrouded in black cloaks and hoods to shield against the dampness as best they could. Beside Moncroff was a cowhide valise containing the reports and signed statements of the two witnesses to the indefensible murder of Count Anton Mannerheim Dahlgren.

  Matthew was on his way to stand before judgment in Londontown. As the Chief Constable of Plymouth had told him, “John Roper’s window” yearned to snap his neck. Never had Matthew heard a hangman’s noose described with such ferocious glee. Yet there was hope!

  It seemed, as he sat on the hard plank and was bounced about by the rutted road like a dry pea in a gourd, that he would not be returning to New York anytime in the near future. In fact his plans had begun to go awry when he first stood before the magistrate’s court in Plymouth, the third morning after being led down the Wanderer’s gangplank like the most common of criminals.

  “As I say,” Matthew went on, at the conclusion of his tale concerning his relationship with the deceased and his escape from being turned over to Professor Fell, “Dahlgren surely planned to kill me before we reached England. I was of no further use to him in what he thought would redeem him with Professor Fell, so—”

  “A moment,” said Magistrate Akers, who had a face like an iceberg and thin eyebrows that were painted on. He spoke his words slowly and precisely, with a slight pursing of the lips after each sentence. “I have read thoroughly the sworn statements of the witnesses.” The parchment papers were before him, atop his desk. The pale light of a chill November morning through a pair of high windows further painted Akers, the room, the attendant guards and Matthew in shades of austere winter. “Nowhere is there indicated,” Akers went on, “any proof that your Prussian master planned to kill you aboard the Wanderer after he was saved from the sea. True, it appears you and he had a…violent disagreement…but we are here concerned with his murder, not yours.”

  “He would have killed me! I’m telling you, I—”

  “Murdered him first, in fear for your life? The statements here assert that your attack upon the Count’s lifeline is indefensible, as you were under no clear and immediate threat.”

  “Dahlgren was already a killer!” The sound of rising panic in Matthew’s voice further alarmed him; he realized it would do him no good to appear frantic, so he took control of his breathing and steadied himself. “You do understand what I’m telling you about Professor Fell, don’t you?”

  “I understand you mean such to help your case,” said Akers, “but…unfortunately for you, young man, I have never heard of this person. He is a professor of what? And where does he instruct?”

  Oh my God, Matthew thought. Again the flames of panic flared high. Matthew stood with his head lowered until he could find the sense to speak again; he was still weak from the voyage, had not been allowed to shave and wore baggy gray clothing after a briskbroom scrubbing that had left his flesh raw. Two days and nights in the grim Plymouth gaolhouse, sharing a cell with a wizened madman who had raped and murdered a ten-year-old child, had not aided Matthew’s attitude of relief at being off that damned ship, and neither had the wretched watery pea soup enriched with shreds of barely-cooked horse meat.

  “Please,” the prisoner said to the magistrate, “contact the Herrald Agency in London. Someone there will at least have heard of me.”

  “I know of this request from Chief Constable Scarborough. Again, neither of us…and no one within our jurisdiction of Plymouth…know anything about this Merrell Agency.”

  “Not Merrell,” said Matthew. “Herrald. It’s—”

  “Yes, I’ve heard what you told Scarborough.” A lily-white hand adorned with a trio of rings rose up to wave Matthew’s voice away. “An agency that solves problems for people?” He gave a little crooked ghost of a smile at the burly bald-headed chief constable who sat at the back of the room. “Lord above, isn’t that our responsibility? I would hate to think what might happen to English civilization should problem-solving be taken away from the courts and given to the dirty hands of the population. But as I say, there is no such record of a Merrell Agency.” The magistrate’s small eyes had taken on the blankness of disinterest, for there were many more defendants to be prosecuted. “To be sure, young man, your story reeks of the madhouse. In the opinion of this court it seems to have been scribed by the hand of Bedlam. Do you have anything further to say?”

  Matthew’s mind was working…sluggishly, deprived of solid food and easy rest…but working all the same.

  He felt Roper’s window tightening about his neck.

  “Let me ask a question,” he said, as a bright beam broke through the overcast in his brain. “I realize that my crime is made worse for a servant murdering his master. That’s not something to let stand as an example for other servants, is it?” He kept going before Akers could shut him down. “My question is…where is the proof that I was servant to Count Dahlgren? Where are the papers of servitude? You have the word of Count Dahlgren through the word of other passengers that indeed I was a servant, but can that be proven? If I were not a servant, does that still make the murder of a Prussian-born individual upon the high seas, not in the realm of the English empire, a hanging offense? Should I not be removed from here to Prussia to stand trial? And indeed, what jurisdiction does an English court have over the murder of a Prussian count on the high seas? And can you even say it was a murder? Where is the corpse? Who to say that Count Dahlgren did not grab hold of a floating spar or piece of debris from the ship, and last until the sharks got him? Therefore should you not send a man-of-war out to gather up in nets all the sharks of the Atlantic and bring them to Plymouth to be hanged? Perhaps Count Dahlgren was stung to death by jellyfish or choked by seaweed. Well, then…there you have your murderers, and it only falls to this court to solve the problem of which jellyfish or piece of seaweed should be incarcerated in the Plymouth gaolhouse. Of course he might have simply drowned…which leaves the entire ocean to appear in this court. To be exact, I did not murder the man, sir. To be exact, I only cut a rope.”

  “Ah, but the cutting of the rope caused him to be killed,” said Akers, with a defiant lift of the pointed chin.

  “Are you absolutely certain he’s dead?” Matthew let that dangle for a few seconds on its own Roper’s window. “Are the two witnesses certain? Did they actually see him perish? I did not. The man had more lives than Satan’s cat. He might wash up here any day, and the first t
hing he’ll do is murder someone for their clothes and money, so watch your beaches.”

  Akers put fingertips to mouth and patted his lips, his eyes firmly fixed upon the accused but now bearing a spark of renewed…might it be called respect?

  “I have a solution,” said Matthew. “I know the newly-arrived Assistant to the High Constable of London. His name is Gardner Lillehorne. Do you know that name?”

  It was a moment before the magistrate answered. Then, “I do.”

  “Lillehorne’s assistant is named Dippen Nack. Do you also know that name?”

  Said cautiously: “I have heard it spoken.”

  “Rid yourself of me and throw me upon their briarpatch,” Matthew went on. “You have done your duty in introducing me into the legal system. These questions of Prussian nationality, unproven servitude and unproven murder should be foisted upon the London courts, and good riddance for the halls of Plymouth and for yourself, whom I am sure has more pressing matters to attend.”

  Silence reigned o’er the court.

  At last Magistrate Akers made a small noise, perhaps a clearing of the throat, and he quietly spoke the word, “Ha,” without any note of humor.

  Thus it was that within twenty-four hours Matthew was on his way to London in the prison coach. His spirits had risen for he’d had a good meal of beef stew last night—real beef, and one could taste the difference from meat of a diseased horse—and a mug of ale to wash it down, plus he had been removed from the presence of the muttering madman and afforded his own cell, which meant he’d had a full night’s sleep. He still wore the gray outfit of a Plymouth gaolhouse prisoner and had been refused a shave as it was not the policy to let the inmates anywhere near a razor, but at least he was out of that grimy box and on his way to see someone he knew. And if he’d known a year ago that he would relish the sight of Gardner Lillehorne and Dippen Nack he might’ve crawled into the cell beside Tyranthus Slaughter and told the keeper to swallow the key for he was surely struck with incurable moon madness.

  The horses went on at a quick walk, the wheels turned over English mud, the little villages drifted past one after another, and Matthew thought he had won a small victory in getting out of Plymouth with his neck unbroken. Now to play his cards right, explain this whole mess to Lillehorne and be granted a pardon…then, with—gad, the thought!—the help of that erstwhile gentleman get his tail back aboard a ship and—gad, that thought too!—be sailed again across the Atlantic to his dairyhouse paradise.

  It was not an easy trip. The English roads were as rough as those around New York, and perhaps rougher for the amount of coach and wagon traffic they sustained. He, Moncroff and the coach driver stayed in a succession of inns along the route. Most times Matthew was obliged to sleep on the floor but Moncroff turned out to be an amiable companion and usually bought his charge a good kidney pie, boiled sausage or some such stomach-filler. Though yet thin and still recovering from his ordeal aboard the accursed Wanderer, Matthew was steadily gaining back his strength and resolve, and to Moncroff’s credit the young New York problem-solver was never allowed to go hungry. He was beginning to take note of the quality of some of these English countrymen—and women—who seemed to delight in rattling his chains, pretending to poke at him with a blade or longstaff until Moncroff called them to account, or otherwise harass him with injurious actions or foul names. The children were just as bad as the adults, and in fact worse because they moved faster after they gave Matthew a kick to the ribs or shins. In every village they stopped for the length of the week, word quickly spread that a convicted murderer was on his way to London to be hanged by the neck until gray-faced and dead, and this brought mobs of people gawking at the inn’s windows and the braver ones pounding at the door for a closer look-see. By the time they reached their last stop, Matthew learned through Moncroff who had heard from the inn’s owner that this young wild-haired, black-bearded killer had decapitated three women and a number of children in Plymouth, had planted the heads atop fenceposts after painting them up with garish colors, had regularly bathed in blood in a room decorated with furniture made from human bones, and kept two nanny goats that he dressed in women’s clothing. That night the mob almost tore the place down to get a look at him, so much so that Moncroff stationed himself on the front porch with a blunderbuss and remained there until another drizzly dawn.

  Now, as the coach travelled on along a path that was more rut than road, a plank-weary Matthew Corbett looked out the barred window upon a dank morning of gray fog, with glimpses of gnarled trees, stone cottages with thatched roofs, and the occasional shadow of a green hill. The air was not bitterly cold, yet carried a bite. After awhile he noted that the number of thatched-roof cottages was increasing, and they stood closer together along the road. Also, the coach’s speed fell when the driver put his concentration to more tightly controlling the horses, as an army of wagons, coaches and carriages of all description seemed to materialize out of the gloom. Matthew knew it before Moncroff pushed back the little viewslit between them and said, “London’s just ahead.”

  Matthew pressed his face against the bars and craned his neck to get as much of a first look as possible.

  There was only fog, pale gray, making ghostly figures of the wagons and other vehicles that shared the widening road. But ahead and to the right about fifteen degrees, the fog became a sulphurous yellow color shot through with streaks of darker brown. The area of discoloration was massive, and it was then that Matthew had a sense of the size of London though he could see none of its buildings. Ten times as large as New York? Oh, twenty times at least. Matthew knew from his reading that this was a city founded by the Romans, with a checkered history of triumphs and disasters; it had suffered extreme destruction in the Great Fire of 1666, and therefore—according to articles in issues of the London Gazette, which Matthew had read in New York—mostly done away with wooden buildings in favor of brick and stone. The wharves and warehouses along the Thames had already existed for generations, had collapsed and been rebuilt over and over again; indeed there were such a number of those, in Matthew’s impression, that counted alone they would be many times the size of New York. This was the central point of the home country, from which all blessings flowed to the colonies and a major power in the world at large, so naturally it would be a huge and sprawling city, a nearly-living thing that took disaster in stride and grew larger from it.

  For now, though, all Matthew could see was the ugly discoloration of fog that shrouded London’s towers. Even so, and even in his remembrance while in the comfort of New York of wishing someday to see this great city, now that the day had arrived he was struck with a sense of dread; he had come here in chains, burdened with a thunderball and under threat of hanging unless he could silver-tongue his way out of this. In New York he was someone, known and for the most part liked…here he was no one, a thin and bearded prisoner whose only hope for survival was the mean-spirited individual whom he disliked and he knew felt equally toward himself. He began to feel smaller and smaller as the coach advanced through the fog, as it was locked in by other vehicles and its progress slowed to the walk of a one-legged man, as it had to sit still for over an hour with the horses nickering and nervous because a haywagon ahead had broken a wheel and crashed into a carriage, causing a traffic jam while the road was cleared, and again a long delay at a stone bridge over a dirty river lined with what must be slaughterhouses because Matthew saw blood in the sluggish water and smelled the bitter scent of terrified beasts.

  As the coach neared the city proper, there arose what seemed an endless assemblage of small villages—a few houses, a stable, a tavern, a number of shops and the like—separated by patches of woods, reedy ponds or stretches of marshland. Indeed, it seemed to Matthew that London must have been constructed atop a vast swamp, for the wet morass at places came up over the roadway and mud sucked at the wheels and hooves.

  Then he was aware of two things at about the same time: an odor of damp rot, as one might catch at the oldest
and most decrepit wharf in New York, commingled with the burnt smell of gunpowder, or the scent left in the air after the striking of a flint against stone, and the second thing…a noise.

  It began as a humming, discernible over the sound of the coach’s wheels and the other London-bound traffic. It was as much felt in the bones as heard by the ears. Within a few minutes, the hum had built to what Matthew likened to the low growl of an unseen animal in its lair. He realized it was the sound of the city, all the thousands of voices at different volumes and pitch, all the sound of cart wheels and horse hooves, all the noise of latches opening and closing, of the rusty hinges of iron gates, of the footfalls of boots on wood and stone, of the great river hissing around the multitude of pilings and hulls of ships, of hammering and sawing at more towers going up, of retchings and belches and farts, of shouts of delight and screams of rage, all there…all there.

  And then the city suddenly opened up through the brown fog before them, and pulled them in as if into a seething whirlpool of humanity.

  Seven

  I KNEW this day was coming,” said Gardner Lillehorne, who was dressed in pale lavender and wearing a tricorn the same color, topped with a dark purple feather that matched the hue of his waistcoat. He reached out with his thin black-lacquered cane. Its silver lion’s-head tapped Matthew none too gently on the shoulder. “Here you sit accused of murder,” said the assistant to the High Constable of London, “and much too far from home, I do believe.”