The Devil's Mask (20 page)

The temperature dropped that afternoon and the wind rose. A biting cold skewered us within the carriage. By the time we made it back to Bristol, it was needling my joints. The exposed skin on my cheeks, forehead and the backs of my hands felt taut and raw.

Without asking my opinion on the matter, my father had us driven straight to Bright House, where the fire in his study was already lit. We'd exchanged no further words for the remainder of the journey. A familiar curtain of reticence had descended to hold us apart, yet anticipation coloured it: I knew he had something else to say.

He stood to one side of the fireplace, and I stood at the other, leaning on the marble surround, warm beneath my palm. Father sent for a bottle of rum and two glasses and, again without asking, he poured a generous measure for us both.

‘Only so much warmth to be had from without,' he said, handing me a glass.

I took a sip. The rum bloomed abrasively in my chest.

Father followed suit, then lifted his glass. ‘Success,' he said.

This seeming an absurd toast in the context, I merely nodded.

‘I have admired your tenacity a long while, Inigo. I like the fact you decided not to take my advice over the Dock
Company issue, your resolve in choosing to pursue your case come what may.'

I sensed a ‘but' coming, and held my tongue, and here it came.

‘But … the ins and outs of that particular matter aside … I worry that you are pitting your talents in the wrong direction.' He winced back another sip of rum. ‘There are two sorts of folk in this world, according to my experience. Those in control, and those held down. Success is as much about choosing the right game to play as it is about winning it.'

There was something unsettling about listening to this wisdom, not because I disagreed, but because of the oddly solicitous tone with which Father was delivering it. The speech felt premeditated, and the idea of him thinking in advance what to say to convince me – of what, exactly, I didn't yet know – was as cloying as it was touching. I would have felt more comfortable faced with told-you-so scorn: practice had taught me how to push back against that.

‘In this city, now as before, the game to be in is trade. Lawyering is worthy, as is doctoring, or any other of the professions. But the whip hand, here in Bristol, goes to business.'

I watched his face, glowing now, balloon and shrink in the bottom of his glass as he raised and lowered it again.

‘Neither Sebastian nor John have your strengths. I haven't always seen it that way, I know, but I do now. The pressure of this difficult patch has made things clear. The upset has made John …' he picked his words out of his raised glass … ‘overly reliant on this stuff. And Sebastian's … sensitivities seem to
have got the better of him again. You, by contrast, have held firm in your own adversity. As a result I'm asking you to reconsider your position. Come back to work for our common good. Bright & Co. needs you.'

Warmth spread through my chest, and it wasn't the drink; I could not stem a sense of satisfaction at having risen above John in Father's estimation. But the feeling didn't last long. Something was not right, not right at all. Given that he'd just had to rescue me from bungling powerlessness, referring now, of all times, to previously unseen ‘strengths' made little sense. Added to which, there was a beseeching quality to this overture. My father was looking at me now with filmy eyes. That could indeed have been a result of the rum, but I suspected it had to do with something else. He smiled and dipped his brow, nodding. Waiting for my answer.
Hanging
upon it.

‘Why would you not use your influence to ensure the release of Blue?'

Father stopped nodding. His face was blank.

‘Joseph Blue. The sailor I stood falsely accused alongside.'

‘The Negro?'

‘Yes.'

There was bafflement in his eyes. ‘I know nothing about the man. How could I possibly vouch for him?'

‘I did.'

‘Yes, but. Have you not heard my offer?'

‘I vouched for him.'

‘Inigo,' my father said, and in that one word, my name, said in that flat tone, was a lifetime's dominance.
I'm in charge until my last breath
, he might as well have said.

‘I'm grateful to you, Father, both for what you've done this morning and for this … compliment. But I have a new career. My duty is to Adam Carthy and this case. I must return to Thunderbolt Street to see whether he has been released. And then I need to take steps myself to prove the sailor's innocence.'

Very carefully, my father placed his unfinished glass of rum on the leather top of his desk. He screwed it one way and then the other. ‘I had not realised the extent of your faith in this man, Blue,' he said. ‘What do you know about him?'

‘He did not kill the
Belsize
's captain, or Doctor Waring.'

‘So you say. But beyond that?'

I put my glass down next to my father's.

‘You forget', he said quietly, ‘that I have experience of dealing with blacks. You cannot trust them, much less know their true intentions.'

Outside, the wind was stripping leaves from the birch tree. I stared at them, streaks of dirty-silver. No matter how many tore past, the tree seemed undiminished. It had an endless supply. In the aftermath of the drink, I felt my exhaustion afresh.

‘And if this ship', my father went on, ‘was indeed carrying slaves, then you have to admit that he or his kind are among those most likely to bear a grudge. That's their common character, a sense of obstinate aggrievedness.'

‘As I say, I need to return to Carthy's house.'

He took a step towards me and grasped my wrist. I pulled away, but there was iron in his grip.

‘Think on my offer, Inigo. Your tenacity has stood you in good stead until now, but push this matter any further and I
will not be able to help you. By joining the firm you will be saving face, not quitting.'

‘I thank you, but no. For now, I cannot.'

His face was close enough for me to see the moisture glittering within the pores of his skin. I heard the grinding of his teeth before he said, ‘There's the matter of your wedding to consider. It presents an opportunity to unite the Bright and Alexander cause. But if you refuse me now …'

Unmistakably, this
if
was the precursor to a threat. But he pulled up short of explaining himself, and released my forearm, and patted my shoulder, and forced a smile.

‘The offer still stands,' he repeated. ‘Think about it.'

The man comes for Oni again.

She dreams of the three-legged lion which terrorised the village when she was a girl. It first broke through at night and stole a goat. Nobody saw or heard it but it left tracks, three massive paw prints, the gap between them longer than a man's stride. A hunting party followed the trail, which disappeared in rocky ground. For a whole season the lion did not return. The village lost interest. But then it did come back and this time it stole a child. It walked into a hut and dragged a seven-year-old boy from where he lay. Hunters followed its trail again, back to the rock ledges. They found what was left of the boy's body – a foot, the head – but the lion had vanished.

The elders raised a thorn cordon around the village and set a watch which saw nothing from full moon to full moon.

Then the lion came back and killed one of the watchmen at his post – the ground beneath his mat was sticky with blood – and again dragged the body away without being caught. The elders demanded a doubling of the guard, but the volunteers were scared and inattentive.

As fear overran the village, the lion grew bolder. It killed another child the following week, and two days after that took an old man from his sickbed in daylight still capable of casting a shadow. A day later it returned to the village and killed a young woman carrying water, but this time the killing was different
because the lion did not carry its victim away. Her torn body was discovered fifty paces from the well.

In her dream Oni knows the lion is coming for her next. She is unafraid. The lion makes sense. It was wounded once and reduced to killing people and its addiction to the taste of human flesh has grown. Oni dreams it will be caught, as it was eventually caught in reality, and strung up from a pole by its three huge paws, the withered hind leg hanging wing-like at its side. The difference is that in the dream this won't happen until the lion has taken her from her bed into the night.

The house no longer bore the false-hope smell of laundry and scones. I knew as I stood in the hallway removing my coat that Carthy still hadn't returned. Mercifully, Aunt Beatrice wasn't there either. Adam's wife and young Anne were in the parlour together, but separately engaged: Anne was drawing and her mother was making alterations to a dress. Or at least she was pretending to do so. She had removed the garment's arms, which lay outstretched at her feet. The bodice was crumpled in her lap. She made to get up as I entered, but slumped back down on registering my expression and said nothing. Anne, meanwhile, clapped her hands and began babbling at once. Something to do with the natural habitat of canaries and the drawing she was making to replicate it. I sat down on the floor next to her and we discussed how accurately to depict a coconut tree. I suggested it might have the broad leaves of a walnut, and she set about translating that into scribbles.

There was a chill in the room. I banked up the fire. With my back to Mrs Carthy it was easier to suggest that I was still making investigations and expected to turn up answers yet.

But I could not remain there long. I felt guilty. I had not asked to become involved in this case. That was Carthy's doing. And yet the black heart of the thing seemed to beat within me now. I had poisoned this house and endangered its
occupants; my presence now was just making things worse. I told Anne she should incorporate the coconut tree landscape into a map of her canary's imagined island, and crossed the street to Thunderbolts. Coffee would help me take stock.

With one hand fighting its way through the tangle of my hair, and the other brushing down the front of my coat, I crossed the threshold intent upon spotting the waitress before she saw me.

Yet it wasn't Mary who caught my eye upon entering Thunderbolts, but the poetess, Edie Dyer. She was sitting at a table reading a news-sheet, alone. She looked up as I entered and her face split into a genuine smile, the first such that I had seen in days. She stood and cocked the paper at me, indicating that I should join her, and at that precise moment, as I was lurching woodenly towards her, Mary intercepted me.

She stood close enough for me to catch her honey and sweat smell above the coffee. I blinked and saw grey pillowslips. She, too, was smiling, but wryly.

‘I keep telling you. It's no use pawing at hair like yours. Curls that thick have too much spring.' Her gaze worked its way down my chest and for a moment I suspected she might reach out and touch me in plain view of everyone.

‘A bowl of coffee, please, Mary, as usual,' I said, and made to pass her.

She stepped sideways with me and our thighs collided and she smiled as she let me go.

I therefore arrived at Edie's table flushed hot under the collar and, at first, unable to concentrate upon what she was saying. It was all I could do to respond, when she stopped
speaking, with an apology for not having sent thanks for the packet of quills she sent me.

She looked at me curiously.

‘Of course. Have you tried them?'

Something in me wanted to lie: it felt bad saying I hadn't.

‘I'm looking forward to doing so. But I've been distracted.'

‘What by?'

Her directness took me aback. There was something in the combination of her sharp openness which made it hard for me to dissemble. ‘A case I'm working on has taken an unexpected turn.'

‘What's it about?'

I studied her face. The contradiction between the tautness of its harsh angles and that wide mouth. ‘Murder,' I said.

She swallowed, blinked, and said, ‘Goodness.'

‘It wasn't to begin with. At the outset I was checking import duties, which was boring yet manageable. I wish that is how it had remained. But it has not.' I looked at my fingertips and repeated simply, ‘It is about dead people now.'

‘Not
this
poor soul, I trust?' she said, smoothing the news-sheet down on the tabletop.

I bent to read the item she was pointing at, but my view was blotted out by a bowl of coffee which slopped upon the paper as Mary plonked it down.

‘Oh dear,' the waitress said. ‘I am sorry.'

I picked up the bowl and set it down next to the paper. ‘That's all right, Mary.'

She didn't leave. Instead she leaned across me to dab at the spillage. I felt like a traitor, pressing back into my seat to avoid contact with her free arm. It brushed against me
nevertheless. She stood up, stared levelly at Edie, and said, ‘How is Miss Lilly, Inigo?'

‘She's well, thank you.'

‘The wedding preparations are not taxing her too much?'

‘No.'

‘That's good to hear. Send her my best wishes.' She gave me the same wry look and brushed her hip against me again as she turned away. When I glanced back up at Edie her smile had broadened – there's no other way to put it – to an amused grin. She
knew
.

I looked back down at the now blotchy news-sheet. There, at the top of the page, stood the story Edie had been referring to. It told of a recently discovered dead body. My first thought was Addison. Perhaps Justice Wheeler had come to his senses and determined that the Captain had not committed suicide. But the first line of the report made it clear that the body in question had been discovered in undergrowth on Brandon Hill, and dread immediately wormed oily in the pit of my stomach.

Not Carthy, please, no.

I forced myself to read on, and had to restrain myself from slapping the tabletop in relief on reaching the word
woman
. On I read. The unfortunate's corpse had been discovered just the day before, in a clump of blackberry bushes, by an elderly lady out walking her dog. It was wrapped in a sack which the dog had torn free, and when the owner saw what was beneath it she had suffered a fainting fit. A passing stranger had helped her up. Rats, apparently, were thought responsible for at least some of the disfigurement to the dead woman's face. Justice Wheeler was reported as having ‘no exact idea' of how long
the corpse had lain there undetected. Nobody had reported a missing person, after all. Perhaps, the article speculated, this death had to do with the terrible suicide of the other black woman found recently drowned in the Avon Gorge.

Other
black
woman?

The reporter had seen fit to omit this detail until the second column! He went on to report the Justice's speculation that the woman may have been a vagabond. In all probability she had sought shelter within the bushes, her sack an inadequate covering, and died of cold. But no, the
broad-minded
detective conceded, it wasn't possible to rule out foul play in this instance. He would be keeping an open mind.

I took a mouthful of coffee, swilled it burning over my tongue, gulped the heat down whole.

‘Sickening, isn't it?' said Edie simply.

‘Yes it is.'

‘But nothing to do with your case I'm sure.'

I caught the poetess's penetrating gaze and held it a fraction too long. There was something shrewd in those close-set eyes which forced me to see the thing clearly myself. Though she had no notion of it, this death, this
murder
, had to be connected. They all did.

What was it Blue had said before he left our cell? That there was ‘
a grudge in the hold coming home, too
'. The
Belsize
had carried a cargo of blacks across the Atlantic and sold them into slavery in the Indies. I had taken Blue to mean that somebody – himself perhaps – had objected to the clandestine slaving, and brought their grudge home to avenge. But just because the ship had been refitted – as Addison had been so keen to show me – for her homeward leg, during which she'd
carried an innocuous cargo of sugar and rum, did not mean that she had brought nothing else home with her as well. Two unknown black women had been found dead in the city since she docked. A third
charred
corpse had been discovered as well. Were the poor women on board? Had the
Belsize
conveyed slaves – however few – to these shores, too?

‘The honest answer,' I said, and I noticed that my fingertips were trembling, so pressed them into the oiled tabletop to keep them still, ‘is that I do not know. I have lost true north. The case has so shocked me that I am disorientated. Those closest to me are also, it seems, drawn in. I no longer know where the thing begins and ends; I never did, in truth, but I certainly don't any more. And … I am unsure of what to do.'

The poetess leaned forward and covered the rigid backs of my hands with her own fingers. They were cool and bony and she pressed down firmly with them, just as I was pressing down on the table. Gradually, she released the pressure.

She said, ‘I don't trust people who pretend they always know what to do.'

I glanced back down at the news-sheet.

‘The shocking thing about this is that you can tell nobody minds much about it,' she said. ‘They're not even interested in finding out why she died.'

‘She was black.'

‘So?'

I looked up at her. The question seemed genuine, which I found suddenly annoying.

‘The city has spent two hundred years trading blacks. Just because that's supposed to have stopped hasn't elevated the Negro race much above livestock in many people's eyes. They
aren't predisposed to mourn them any more than they're set up to grieve for the cow which gave them their roast beef.'

She smiled at me again, and when she did so the teeth at the sides of her mouth revealed themselves whitely. ‘But some of us have never considered there was much of a difference between them and us,' she said. ‘Have we?'

I drained my coffee, felt grit from the crushed beans swill over the back of my tongue, and shrugged.

‘So why is it that you care about the Negroes, Inigo?'

‘I don't, particularly.'

‘Yes, you do. I would go as far as to say you have an affinity for them, and that it was that aspect of this story,' she tapped the paper again, ‘which so moved you.'

‘You'd be mistaken. If my family has had any undue affinity for the race, it's because selling them has lined our pockets.'

‘I wasn't asking after your family.'

‘No. But I spent the first years of my life in the Indies. Though I left when I was a child, they will have left their mark.'

‘I don't doubt that. The question is what sort of mark they'll have left. You're uncomfortable on the subject. And this particular news story upsets you. You say you are lost within your case. It has to do with murder. There have been no other suspicious deaths reported, so I'm guessing that it's the other black woman you're talking about. This Justice fellow may be denying there's anything afoot, claiming it's all suicides and frozen vagabonds, but you've already concluded otherwise. And the fact that they're blacks makes the matter worse for you, and it's that which –'

‘Please!' I said, with sufficient force to make heads turn
round. I waited for the hubbub to reassert itself before continuing. ‘I'm sorry. The truth in what you're saying doesn't change anything. I still don't know what to
do
. There are other factors which further complicate the thing, trust me. Matters even you are unable to guess at, despite your … preternatural … gift for divining the source of my troubles.'

‘There's nothing preternatural about it. I'm observing and drawing conclusions. Given the impasse you've reached in your case you might want to fall back upon the same technique. With patience you can trace even the most tangled vine back to its roots.'