The Queen of Bedlam (57 page)

He had to figure a way out of this. Unfortunately, there was no way out. He reached up to take off Berry’s hat and at the same time the knife flicked toward him like a rattlesnake’s tongue and Bromfield clasped an iron hand to his shoulder. Then the two rapscallions realized what he was doing and allowed him to de-hat. He put it on his lap, thinking that if he were a real hero pressed from the mold of Hudson Greathouse he would wait for a particularly vicious pothole, flick the straw topper into the boy’s eyes, seize the knife, and plunge it into the largest target, which would be Bromfield’s chest. Of course, getting through that leather waistcoat and the notebook tucked behind it might prove an ill adventure. He decided there was only one Hudson Greathouse, and no place for a hero in this coach.

They were moving faster now, turning onto the Post Road and leaving the town behind. The whip was striking left and right and the four horses were hauling ass.

A nice village in Wales, Pollard had said. Just the place for Berry and I to spend our old age, Matthew thought. If we live long enough to have one.

We, he realized. He had not thought of anyone that way, in conjunction with him, since the incident with Rachel Howarth at Fount Royal. He imagined he’d loved Rachel, when instead he’d wished to be her champion. Love was something he wasn’t sure he yet understood. He knew desire, and the need for companionship…but love? No. He was far too busy for even the idea of it.

Now, however, he looked to be facing a long period of-at the best-retirement. He wished suddenly that he’d been a little less serious and a lot more…how did Marmaduke put it…merry-making. Less chess, perhaps, and more dancing. Or, at the very least, more appreciation of the pretty girls in New York, and yes there were quite a few. It was interesting how a knife pointed at you could direct one’s mind to things that a few weeks ago seemed frivolous and now seemed only sadly lost.

But wait, he told himself firmly. Just wait. He was still alive, and Berry was still alive. Hopefully. There might come a time, and unfortunately very soon, for wailing and lamentations. Now was not that time. He had to remain calm, focused, and ready to act if the situation presented itself.

The coach hit a pothole the depth of his misery and bounced. Matthew’s moment to swat Jeremy’s face with his topper passed. No heroes in this coach. But wasn’t it heroic enough just to hold the nerves together, as they strained and screamed under his skin?

What are you going to do, moonbeam?

The boy had lowered his blade to the seat beside him. Bromfield’s head leaned back, his eyes half-closed as the coach rocked.

“Hey,” Matthew said to Jeremy. Instantly Bromfield’s eyes opened fully and he sat up.

The boy stared blankly at Matthew.

“How old are you?” Matthew asked.

Jeremy glanced at Bromfield, who shrugged, and then back to his questioner. “Fifteen.”

“I left the orphanage when I was fifteen. I was an orphan too, you know.”

“Is that so?”

“What’s your specialty?”

“My what?”

“Your talent,” Matthew said. “What got you out of the orphanage and into Chapel’s school?”

“Ain’t a school. It’s…” Jeremy frowned, calling up a word. Obviously, quick wit was not his ticket. “It’s a university.”

“I’m sure you’ll go far upon graduation. What’s your talent?”

The boy picked up his knife and looked almost lovingly at the blade. “I can throw this,” he said with a full measure of pride, “and hit a fella square in the back from twenty paces. Killed me an Injun kid one time, stealin’ from my papa’s chickencoop. Got him in the back and then I cut his red damn throat and took me his scalp, too.”

“Laudable. You were how old when this happened?”

“Eleven, I reckon. Then them Injuns came and dragged my papa off. They tied me to a fuckin’ tree and torched the house down. That’s how I got left on my own.”

Matthew nodded. A fledgling assassin, perhaps? A killer able to strike at long distance from the shadows? It occurred to him that Ausley had possessed the talent of recognizing the inherent ability-call it the seed of evil, either inborn or created from any of life’s more brutal circumstances-in some of his charges, and Chapel refined that raw substance into a valuable commodity. “What does Mr. Chapel offer you, in return for your loyalty to this…university?”

“Good food,” the boy replied. “A bed. Nobody fuckin’ with me. And I get all the pussy I can handle.”

Ah, Matthew thought. So Charity LeClaire was also a valuable commodity. “Have you killed anyone else since you were eleven?”

“That’s enough,” Bromfield warned. “Shut up and keep shut.”

The voice was harsh enough to tell Matthew he should pursue this no further if he cared to keep his teeth. Matthew settled against the backrest. He watched as Jeremy continued to admire the knife as if it were his declaration of power in a world that ground young men into pulp beneath ten-league boots.

At last-and much too soon-Matthew felt the coach slowing. He heard the whipman ring his signal bell and there was a pause as the gate was opened. Then the coach rolled forward, gained speed once more, and a hundred yards later came the cry, “Whoa! Whoa!”

The coach creaked to a halt, the door on Matthew’s right was opened and Lawrence Evans, well-dressed and immaculately groomed, stood there in the bright spill of afternoon light. But he was certainly not alone, for around him and peering into the coach was a crowd of young faces of every description and, as Chapel had said, a variety of ages between twelve and eighteen, with possibly two or three a few years elder. Nineteen of them, according to Evans. Maybe so, but to Matthew it seemed there were enough to fight an English brigade.

Bromfield got out first and then Matthew, followed by Jeremy and his knife. The boys instantly began to hoot, cat-call, and snicker, until Evans said crisply, “That is enough. Show respect, even to the enemy. Make way, now.”

As the whip cracked and the coach was driven away toward the vineyard, Matthew was escorted into the manse. Quickly, though, he noted that the university’s “students” were all dressed more or less the same, in white shirts and black or brown breeches with cream-colored stockings. Notable also were paper badges that they worn pinned to their shirts in crayoned colors of crimson and royal blue and in different shapes of square, triangle, circle and-glimpsed only briefly and belonging to the oldest boys-a combination of blue circle within a red triangle within a blue square. Medals of some kind? he wondered. A way to distinguish between “years” for the students, as a real university would classify first year, second year, and so on? He was through the door and the door was closed behind him as one of the boys shouted, “You’ll get what’s comin’!”

He dreaded to think.

He was escorted-rather roughly by Bromfield with a hand to the nape of his neck-past the staircase and into the tapestry-draped corridor. Further back, the huge dining room with its fan-shaped arrays of swords had been recently the site of a late and obviously recently interrupted luncheon feast, for platters full of chicken bones sat amid the gleaming silver trays, salt and pepper bowls, and the other implements that Chapel felt created a gentleman’s table. Matthew felt a bit of satisfaction, thinking that his arrival might have propelled Chapel up from his repast.

The door to the left of the room was open. Within it a staircase curved upward. Light glowed through a long, narrow window. “Up, please,” Evans said as he ascended first. A shove almost knocked Matthew up the stairs before he could take the initial riser. The stairs rose to an office with circular windows overlooking the garden like the portholes of a ship. Everything was dark oak and black leather. It was the same as might be the office of any man of means: a wide desk, chairs, a file cabinet, and on shelves bookcases with many leatherbound volumes that in happier times Matthew might have wished to prowl through.

The two things in this particular office that stood unpleasantly out were Simon Chapel seated behind the desk, the light slanting across his face, the bulk of shoulders and battering-ram head, and Berry Grigsby in a peach-colored dress with yellow lace trim. She was sitting in a chair off to the side. Her hands were bound behind her with white cords, and likewise was she bound around her waist to the back of the chair. Her hair was wild and tangled, her eyes were wild and very frightened, and a vivid blue bruise lay across her left cheekbone.

“Hello, Matthew,” Chapel said, his elbows on the desk’s green blotter and his fingers steepled. The light lay fiery in his spectacles. “Pardon me if I don’t stand up.”

Matthew had no witty remark to throw at him. His mouth was a dry well. He saw Charity LeClaire, as elegant and beautiful as she was wretched and soul-ugly, standing directly behind Berry. In a chair on the opposite side of the room, the lizardy Count Dahlgren in his elegant beige suit sprawled as if basking on a warm rock.

“Matthew,” Berry said hoarsely, her lower lip cut and swollen. He saw fingermarks on her neck where Carver had throttled the beginnings of a scream. Her eyes begged for rescue, as if this were the most terrible mistake and surely it would be all right, now that he’d come in like Sir Lancelot.

The knight of the moment noted something very disturbing indeed. On the floor beneath Berry’s chair was a spread of sailcloth. To protect the expensive brick-red rug, he thought. From what? Again, he dreaded to think.

“He was carryin’ this, sir,” said Bromfield, as he fished the notebook free and put it down on the desktop blotter. Chapel immediately picked it up and opened it to the page that had been dog-eared by the Masker’s thumb.

“Ah, yes. Very good.” Chapel’s smile was a wet gash. “The last book! Now I can rest easy, can’t I.” It was a statement, not a question.

Matthew saw there was one other person in the room. Over on the right, in the shadows that clung to the bookshelves like black cobwebs, was a boy of indeterminate age. Small-boned, pale of skin, and weirdly fragile. His silky hair was the color of dust. He wore the same uniform as his fellow students. His shirt-badge was the circle. He had a long thin scar running up through his right eyebrow into his hairline, and his eye on that side was a cold orb of milky-white.

“Restrain him,” said Chapel, as he paged through the notebook.

Bromfield had moved behind Matthew, and now he locked an arm around Matthew’s throat while Lawrence Evans displayed that an ex-clerk could have a suspiciously good relationship with a rope. Matthew’s arms were pulled back, the cord was tied around his wrists, knotted so hard he thought he would pee in his breeches, and then he was shoved down into a chair so graciously slid beneath his buttocks.

Chapel took snuff from a silver case. One pinch up each nostril, snort and snort, but only in the most gentlemanly way. He used a white lace handkerchief to brush the refuse from the coat of his suit, which was the color of rich brown tobacco anyway.

“I want to know,” he said as he folded his handkerchief and put it away, “from where you got this notebook. Will you tell me that, please?”

Matthew got his dry well watered enough to rasp, “Certainly. Very simply, the coroner had misplaced it. In a different drawer. I returned to his office and-”

“Why would he give it to you, sir?” The topaz eyes flared, just a fraction.

Careful, Matthew thought. “He trusts me. I told him I knew Miss LeClaire, and that I would give it to her. Of course I was going to bring it here.” He took advantage of the pause. “I told Mr. Pollard the same thing. He’s going to go speak to Mr. McCaggers.”

“He knows everything,” Bromfield said, which made Matthew want to kick him in the nuts.

“I know he knows everything,” Chapel replied irritably. “Perhaps not everything, but enough. All right, Matthew, let’s put aside the notebook for a moment. I want to talk to you about the Masker. Do you know who he is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Are you positively sure about that?”

“I’m…I’m sure,” Matthew said, and damned his nervous stutter.

“Well, the reason I ask is that the Masker has killed three men who featured large in our project. You know what project I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“No sir, I don’t.” And he quickly added, “You don’t really have to tell me, either.”

“Sir?” It was back-stabbing Jeremy. “He asked me in the coach what my talent is. He called our university a fuckin’ school.”

“Watch your language, please. That’s demerits off.” Chapel returned his languid, scorching attention to Matthew’s sweat-sparkling face. “Who dog-eared that particular page?” Matthew went deaf and dumb. “The page with the orphans’ names,” Chapel prodded. “Who dog-eared that? Mr. McCaggers?”

“I suppose so, sir. Possibly I did it, I don’t exactly-”

“You are slobbering bullshit,” said Chapel, very quietly. It was odd, how sometimes a quiet voice could make your backbone shiver. “I think you do know who the Masker is. I think the Masker killed those three men particularly because of one of our endeavors. I think he has some grandiose scheme of vengeance, which means he has a connection to the Swanscott family.”

“The who, sir?” Matthew asked, though strangled.

“Mr. Bromfield, if he speaks without being spoken to again, I want you to make a violent response. Do mind the carpet, though. It’s new and I don’t want blood on it.”

“Yes sir.”