The Queen of Bedlam (13 page)

“Possibly, but you might have it the wrong way about,” McCaggers said. “The killer might have wished to make sure he saw Mr. Deverick’s face, probably because he wasn’t carrying a lantern. I think this is not the random act of a madman, and neither was the murder of Dr. Godwin. Because Dr. Godwin was also struck on the left temple, leaving that same bruise in almost exactly the same place.”

Matthew couldn’t reply, for he was left thinking about the preparations the killer must have made in order to be quiet, quick, and successful. Wear dark clothes, no lantern, cudgel at the ready, perhaps a belt under a nightblack cloak to hold the instrument, then the blade in a sheath close at hand. From the ground, the blood wouldn’t have spurted so far up that the killer-who was also ready for that fountain of gore-couldn’t have avoided most of it. Gloves, of course, in case the knife handle did become slick. The cuttings around the eyes, and gone back into the dark.

“What was the connection between Dr. Godwin and Mr. Deverick?” Matthew asked, only if to hear himself voice the question.

“You find it,” said McCaggers. Then with an air of finality he turned his back on Matthew to concentrate solely on his notations.

Matthew waited for a few moments longer, but it was clear his welcome had passed. When McCaggers made a motion to Zed and the slave began cutting away the dead man’s clothes with an expertly applied razor, Matthew knew it was time to pick up his lantern from the floor, its candle burned to a stub, and return to the world of the living.

His ascent toward the door, however, was briefly interrupted. “Sometimes,” McCaggers said, and Matthew knew from the echo of the voice that his back was still turned, “it’s not wise to reveal all to a watchful eye. I leave to your judgment what to tell Grigsby and what to keep concealed.”

“Yes sir,” Matthew answered, and with that he left the cold room.

Eight

“Well? Let’s have it!”

Matthew had barely gotten through the door of City Hall before Marmaduke Grigsby collared him. The printmaster got alongside, step-for-step, but had to struggle to keep up with Matthew’s long strides. “What did McCaggers think? Did he say more about the murder weapon?”

“I think we should not turn this into a public forum,” Matthew cautioned, for even at this hour long past midnight there were still a few men-refugees from the taverns, no doubt-gathered on the street puffing their pipes and discoursing on the callous quickness of the pale rider. Matthew kept walking and turned the corner onto the Broad Way with Grigsby at his elbow. Even as he did, he thought that he had quite a distance to travel on such a dark night, with the Masker now blooded by two killings. The street-corner lanterns had almost burned themselves out, and clouds had slipped in on a damp seabreeze to blank the moon. He slowed his pace. Though he carried his own meager light and occasionally could be seen a lantern here and there as another nocturnal citizen moved about, he decided it was best to have company after all.

“We should not let this linger,” Grigsby said. “We should compare notes and come up with an article for the Earwig at once. I have other announcements and sundry items to fill up the sheet, but this by far merits the ink.”

“I have a full day tomorrow. Today, I mean. Possibly I can help you on Thursday.”

“I’ll go ahead and write what I know to be true. You can go over the article and add your facts and impressions afterward. Then we’ll get to work setting the type. You will help me with that, won’t you?”

It was a tedious task that nearly blinded a person, since the type had to be set up backward. It could take-regardless of what he’d told Magistrate Powers was “an afternoon’s work”-the whole of a day and well into the night. But the operation did require at least two men, one to “beat” the type with ink and the other to “pull” the lever that pressed the page.

“Yes, I’ll help,” Matthew agreed. He did like Mr. Grigsby and certainly admired his spirit. He also enjoyed having a hand in putting the sheet together, and being the first eyes to see some of the items Grigsby had written concerning drunken tavern brawls, fights between husbands and wives, chases of bulls and horses loose in the streets, who was seen dining at what eating-house in the company of whom, and the more mundane stories of what cargo had arrived and what was shipping out, what vessels were due in port from which destination, and the like.

“I knew I could count on you. We’ll need to speak with Phillip Covey, of course, since I understand he was first on the scene. And you second there, how fortunate for me! For the sheet, I mean. Then perhaps we can get an official statement from Lillehorne. Improbable, but not impossible. You know, I think we might even gather a statement from Lord Cornbury, this being such a…”

Matthew had just about stopped listening at the phrase first on the scene. As Grigsby rambled on with his grandiose plans, Matthew was thinking about who had really been second and third on the scene. He recalled Reverend Wade saying to Dr. Vanderbrocken We have to leave him.

And go where?

He decided this was an instance of what perhaps should not be shared with Grigsby, at least until he’d had a chance to hear what Lillehorne would learn about those two gentlemen, and where they’d been going that was more important than waiting for a constable at a murder scene. Had perhaps they heard or seen something that bore telling? If so, they were poor witnesses to be such town pillars, for they’d surely disappeared this night.

“How did Mrs. Deverick take the news?” Matthew asked as they neared Trinity Church.

“Stoically,” remarked Grigsby. “But then, Esther Deverick has never been known to display emotion in public. She lifted her handkerchief and hid her eyes, but whether she shed a tear or not is up for question.”

“I should like to interview Robert again. Surely he knows something about who might have wished his father harm. Or maybe he knows, but doesn’t realize it.”

“You’re making the assumption, then, that the Masker”-Grigsby was aware of how his voice carried down the Broad Way’s silent length, and he lessened the volume considerably-“that the Masker has a plan and a purpose? How do you come to the conclusion that we don’t simply have a lunatic in our midst?”

“I didn’t say the killer wasn’t a lunatic, or at least half-mad. It’s the other half that concerns me and ought to equally concern Lillehorne. If two people have been murdered by the same hand, why shouldn’t we expect a third, or a fourth, or…however many. But I’m not sure this is so random.”

“Why? Because of some information McCaggers gave you?”

Matthew could feel Grigsby tensed like a lightning rod. Once the printer’s ink got in a man’s veins, it ran there through all of life’s ambitions. “I can get the final report through Magistrate Powers,” he said, not wishing to comment on the possibility that Deverick might have been struck down in the process of recognizing a fellow gentleman or-God forbid-business leader. It had come to Matthew that the Masker might indeed wear his own mask of community service and industry fellowship, and that this “half-madness” had been festering into action for months if not years. “I think it best to wait for McCaggers’ opinions before we-”

Both he and Grigsby were startled as a well-dressed man in a beige suit and tricorn hat came around the corner of King Street, quickly walked past them without a word, and disappeared into the further dark. Matthew had just had a few seconds to register that the man was even there, but he’d thought he recognized him as the individual who’d thrown apples so viciously into the face of Ebenezer Grooder.

What was more interesting, however, was that in the breeze of the man’s passage Matthew imagined he caught the faint aroma of clove-scented cologne.

But then again, Ausley’s realm was only a block to the east, where the iron fence and gate stood around the building of leprous-colored walls on the corner of King and Smith. Whenever Matthew walked so near to that place, his skin crawled and his nostrils flared, so perhaps Ausley’s reek emanated from the yellow bricks here, or from the very air as it moved past the shuttered windows and darkened doors.

“Um…Matthew,” Grigsby said, as he looked at the little flickering flame from the tallowcandle lamp on the cornerpost. “Please don’t think me cowardly in my elder age, but…would you mind walking with me a little further on?” He correctly read Matthew’s hesitation to leave his own straight route home. “I do have something important to ask of you.”

Matthew wasn’t certain what was important enough to get killed for, on an early morning when New York seemed not quite the familiar town it had been yesterday, but he did think that whoever the Masker was, the murder of Mr. Deverick might have been to him as much an aid to sated sleep as a hot toddy. “All right,” he agreed.

Soon they were walking past the almshouse. Grigsby didn’t speak, perhaps in deference to Matthew’s history there, though of course he knew nothing of Ausley’s nocturnal punishments to his charges. Matthew looked neither right nor left, but kept his gaze fixed upon the middle distance. What had been one orphanage building in Matthew’s time had now expanded to become three buildings, though still known collectively as the “almshouse.” The eldest and largest still housed the boys of the streets, the castoffs of broken families, the victims of violence both by Indian and colonist hands, those who were sometimes nameless and bore no recollection of a past nor hope for a happy future. The second building kept orphaned girls and was watched over by a Madam Patterson and her staff, who’d come from England sponsored by Trinity Church for the purpose. The third building, the most recently constructed but still ugly for its gray brick and black slate roof, was under the jurisdiction of the chief prosecutor and contained those debtors and impoverished miscreants whose actions were not exactly criminal but who would be expected to work the blemishes off their records by physical labor on behalf of the town. This building, with its low squat structure and barred windows, had lately become better known as the “poorhouse” and was guaranteed to give a shiver down the spine of every working man and woman whose coins could not equal their credit when the bills came due.

Matthew allowed himself to look at the boys’ orphanage building before they passed. It was completely dark and oppressive in its stillness, its wretched weight of bricks and mortar, its hidden secrets. And yet…and yet…did the faint shine of candlelight move past a bolted shutter? Was Ausley on the move in there, crossing from room to room, listening to the breathing of the young and defenseless? Did he pause by a particular cot in a chamber and cast the dirty light down upon a sleeping face? And did his older “lieutenants,” recruited to keep violent order among those who had known only brutality and suffering, turn their eyes away from that light and settle again into their own night’s refuge?

That kind of thinking led nowhere. Without witnesses, there was nothing. Yet still in the future someone might emerge from that place willing to reveal their torments to the law, and on that day Matthew might still see Ausley hauled away in the back of a wagon.

They continued past more houses and business establishments, but in this area of town with the almshouse at their back and the harbor ahead of them by two long blocks there was a gray cast to the air even on the sunniest day, and night seemed darker still. Not far distant, to their right, was a slave cemetery; on their left was a paupers’ field, the occupants identified-as much as possible-with painted names written on small wooden crosses. A Dutch farmer named Dircksen still worked two acres of corn just east of the paupers’ graveyard, and his sturdy white brick farmhouse looked as if it might last the ages.

“My granddaughter is arriving soon,” said Grigsby.

“Sir?” Matthew wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

“Beryl. My granddaughter. She’s arriving…well, she should have been here three weeks ago. I’ve asked Reverend Wade to put up a prayer for me, on her behalf. More than one, actually. But of course everyone knows how errant those ship schedules can be.”

“Yes, of course.”

“They might have lost the wind for a time. They might have had problems with a sail, or a rudder. Everyone knows how difficult those voyages can be.”

“Yes, very difficult,” Matthew said.

“I expect her any day now. Which is what I wished to ask you.”

“Sir?”

“Well, it connects to what I wished to ask you. Beryl is very headstrong. Very much like her father. Full of life and energy and…really, too much for an elder statesman like myself to handle.”

“I didn’t know you had a granddaughter.”

“Oh, yes. I have a second son, also, and two grandsons. They saw me off at the wharf, when I left to make my name in the colony. They’re all fine and settled. But Beryl…she needs guidance, Matthew. She needs…how shall I say this?…watching.”

“Watching? You mean, supervision?”

“Yes, but…she also has a great appetite for…adventure, I suppose is the word.”

Matthew was silent. They were getting close to Grigsby’s house amid the grouping of houses and nautical wares establishments ahead.

“She’s just turned nineteen. A difficult age, wouldn’t you say?” Grigsby continued when Matthew advanced no comment. “She did have a position, though. For eight weeks she was a school teacher in Marylebone, before the school burned down.”

“Pardon?”

“No one was injured, thankfully. But Beryl has now found herself adrift. I don’t mean that literally, of course. She assured me the ship she booked passage on has made the crossing six times, so I should think the captain knows the way. Wouldn’t you?”

“I would,” Matthew said.

“But it’s her temperament I really worry about, Matthew. She wants to find a position here, and at my urging-and due to that very flattering article on Mrs. Brown’s bakery in the last sheet-headmaster Brown has offered to give her a chance at the school. First she’ll have to prove her ability and her seriousness to the task. So: are you up to it?”

Matthew was taken aback by the question and certainly didn’t know what Grigsby was talking about. He smelled apples on the breeze. There was an orchard on a hill nearby, and a house whose elderly Dutch family refined the most wonderful cider in town. “Up to what?” he asked.

“Up to squiring Beryl about. You know. Ensuring she doesn’t get into any trouble before the headmaster has a chance to make up his mind.”

“Me? No, I don’t think I’m suited for it.”

Grigsby stopped walking and looked at him with such amazement that Matthew had to stop as well. “Don’t think you’re suited for it? Lord, boy! You’re the only one I can think of who is suited for it! You’re serious, no-nonsense, and down-to-earth. You’re reliable and trustworthy. You don’t get drunk and you don’t go chasing every skirt you see.”

Matthew gave a slight frown. “I didn’t know I was so boring.”

“No, I mean what I say. Your influence would be very good for Beryl. A steadying hand, from someone nearer her own age. Someone to set an example for her. You see?”

“An example? Of absolute crushing boredom? Come on, I have to get home.” He started walking in the direction of Grigsby’s house again, and the printmaster quickly caught up with him. Or, to be more accurate, quickly caught up with the circle of lantern light.

“Think about it, won’t you? Just to squire her around a bit, introduce her to some trustworthy people, make her feel comfortable here?”