No, they wouldn’t put him in Newgate. Perish that thought, stab it and kill it. There were other gaols, none of them gentle, but surely not Newgate. Lillehorne wouldn’t let that happen.
Hudson understood what Berry had meant about finding Matthew when it was too late.
The gaolhouses of London could kill a man in a very short time. Not necessarily a physical death—there was that danger too—but a death of the spirit and soul. He had known several who’d gone into that system on minor offenses and ended up so changed they were from then on worthless to the outside world.
That couldn’t happen to Matthew. He was too strong to be broken that easily.
Wasn’t he?
Hudson suddenly wanted to scream. He found the ale bottle in his hand and his arm cocked back to smash the bottle against the wall…but he took a long breath and quietly set the bottle down upon the table again, because it wouldn’t do to disturb Berry on the other side of that wall.
There was nothing to be done but wait.
And hope, as Berry did, that Matthew continued to be a very lucky young man.
Because he could not sleep for all the coughing, muttering and moaning that came up from the denizens of this dark realm…because he did not wish to sleep, since this was his first night in Newgate and he had been marked as a weakling, Matthew knew when they were coming.
He did not hear them so much as feel their presence. It had occurred to him that at night prisoners from other chambers would be on the prowl, and the only reason they needed for violence was their own history, their own torments and unnamable sins that gnawed at them and found release only in the fist or the stranglehold or the rape. They were coming, and he felt them gathering in the dark around him as the stormclouds had gathered around the Wanderer.
He sat up in the hay. His chains rattled; it was a common sound, many chains rattled as someone moved. His eyes were not used to this darkness, but he reasoned that theirs were. He heard harsh breathing, very close to him. Not the bubbly breathing of Wyler, not Gimlet’s breath nor Danley’s shallow sips of air. This breathing was from lungs heated by passion…either the passion to kill, or the passion to dominate in the worst possible way.
How many of them? Three? Four? Yes, that many. He had no idea if Jerrigan was part of the group, for he realized that his parade through the different chambers today had likely caused all manner of predators to sniff his scent. Whoever they were, they were moving nearer…and now someone was stepped on in the close confines, and this prisoner gave a ragged howl of pain that sounded like a wild dog…and Matthew started to stand up to defend himself as best he could but the chains prevented quick movement, and—
Then they were upon him.
An arm locked around his throat. He was pulled up by several hands. His cry was a strangled bleat, his thrashing of no consequence. The offended prisoner was still howling and now the place exploded with noise, shouts and curses in a mélange of rough voices. Matthew tried to get his legs around anything to stop his progress as he was dragged across the hay and across other bodies but the chains around his ankles would not allow it. A fist drove into his midsection and burst the breath out of him. A hand clamped around his mouth and another gripped his hair. He was lifted off his feet like a gunnysack, and one of them said in what was nearly an inhuman grunt of triumph, “We gots ’im, we gots ’im!”
Still Matthew thrashed, and he would not give up. A hand slapped him across the face. Another hand gripped his still-sore jaw like a blacksmith’s vise. “Easy, be easy,” a voice curled into his right ear. At the same time a fist punched him in the back and another set of hands began to pull his trousers off. It seemed to Matthew in that moment a ridiculous thing, that some of these creatures wished to kill and some wished to rape. Either way, it would not go well for him.
He tried to fight. It was going to be a losing battle. He was aware that several of the other prisoners had used their tinderboxes to flame their precious tapers and were holding lights toward the scene of Matthew’s impending ruin. He got an arm loose and, chains or not, threw an elbow that struck a bearded jaw and brought a hiss of pain. This action earned him a meeting with the wall, as he was flung against it so hard his bones were nearly shattered. In the candlelight the chamber was a world of moving shadows. A hand grasped Matthew by the hair again and a mouth with cracked lips pressed against his ear. “Easy, easy,” it whispered, and someone laughed like a storm of stones.
His trousers were down around his hips. An arm snaked around his belly. A fist belted him across the back of the neck. His senses were going, everything was a blur and a roar. He was pressed down into the hay on his knees, a painful position to his spine because of the chains. A weight got on his back, increasing the pain. This man was thrown off by another, who took his place. Matthew tried desperately to rise up but it was hopeless, and the man astride him laughed and began to cuff him across the shoulders and back of the head, seemingly just for the fun of it.
Quite suddenly, all noise ceased.
There was an intake of breath, the sound from many lungs.
The weight left Matthew. A hand in his hair released its hold.
The silence lingered.
With great effort Matthew got himself turned around, his own breath rasping and sweat on his face. His assailants stood in a circle with him at the center, none of them moving.
The candlelight caught gold and made it gleam.
A new arrival had descended the stairs and entered the chamber.
This figure wore a black cloak, a black hood and a pair of sleek black leather gloves. Where its face should be was a golden mask. The features were serene. There was a small golden beard carved into the material which was certainly not real gold, Matthew realized even in his distress, but some painted material. It resembled the depiction of a Roman god come to earth, the eyeholes taking in this sorry world as the human kind had shaped it.
The figure also held a saber that shone with reflected light. It was aimed in the direction of the four men who’d attacked Matthew.
The prisoners in the chamber had moved away from this figure as surely as night retreats from day. They had given him all their space and were crowded together like rats. Candles trembled in the hands that held them.
When the figure advanced a single step, the villainous quartet around Matthew retreated. Matthew looked at them and recognized only one: the scar-faced young man who’d been so absorbed in dealing out violence the day before. Now his face was contorted not just by the terrible scarring, but by dread of the nightwalking figure that somehow had gotten past all the doors and locks into Newgate Prison.
A phantom, Matthew thought. But no…he realized he was looking at Albion.
The figure stood motionless for a few seconds. Then, with slow and regal purpose, it pointed the saber’s tip at Matthew Corbett.
With this motion, the four men scrabbled as far away from their would-be victim as Newgate’s walls would permit.
Albion’s gloved left hand rose up, gripped the air, became a fist, and pressed against the center of its chest.
The message was clear.
That one is mine.
Albion held the position for a few seconds more. The golden mask of an ancient god seemed to be regarding Matthew, the head slightly cocked at an angle. Then the figure, still holding the saber out at full length, began to back away. It ascended the steps with a swordsman’s sure-footed grace. Under the archway it hesitated. The masked face scanned the stunned assembly, as if daring anyone to follow. No one moved. Albion stepped back further, out of range of the candlelight. The last glimpse of it had been a faint shadow sliding across a wall. Then gone.
For a long time it seemed that no one in Cairo could breathe.
“Blimey!” said someone, breaking the silence.
Two of the most daring, or foolhardy, prisoners entered the corridor with a lantern in the wake of Albion’s exit but they certainly did not rush. The four assailants had backed against the wall. Matthe
w got painfully to his feet and pulled his trousers up where they ought to be. When he caught the eye of the scarred young man this prisoner averted his gaze, his vicious impulses quelled at least for the moment.
“Blimey!” the same fellow repeated.
“Y’know who that was!” a bug-eyed prisoner said, speaking to all. “I mean to say, what it was! Albion, come right into Newgate like a bleedin’ ghost! God knock my eyeballs out if I ain’t seen what I seed!”
Matthew was still jangled by these incidents and his brain was fogged, but even so he reasoned that copies of the Pin got in here on a regular basis, if one could afford the fees. He staggered and caught himself by grasping a bit of hairlike fungus hanging from the wall. His reserves of strength were almost gone.
“Albion, standin’ right here in Newgate!” The bug-eyes found Matthew. “I know what he was sayin’ to you, too! Come to tell you that when you get out of here, he’s gonna kill you like he done them others got out their cages!” This brought a rumble of assent.
“You’re wrong!” Winn Wyler spoke up. “Albion was givin’ a warnin’ not to do him no harm!” This opinion also brought an assenting rumble. “Think you oughta take that to heart!” he said to the four assailants, at least one of whom belonged to the mob in Helsinki and appeared very uncertain about whether he wanted to return there by the same corridor Albion had disappeared into.
“He was sayin’ he’s gonna kill the fella, if that one ever gets out!” came the adamant response.
“I saw it as a warnin’ to every man here!” said Wyler. “Why the Devil would Albion slip into Newgate to say he was gonna kill somebody on the outside? He don’t know even know if the boy’s ever gonna get out!”
“He knows, all right!” said a gray-bearded wretch who held a candle. “Albion ain’t human…he knows ever’thin’! Gonna slice that fella’s throat or run ’im through, soon as Newgate spits him clear!”
There was agreement to this by others and it was met by forceful denials by those who saw the incident as Wyler had. As Matthew clung to both his consciousness and his sanity, he thought the chamber was going to soon erupt into an epic shouting match between the tribes of differing opinion. All Matthew was concerned with for the moment was that he was alive and relatively unharmed, and the four nasty villains had begun to slink away from him as if seeking to hide their faces in the darkest corner.
The men who’d gone into the winding corridor returned, along with five others from the nearest chamber. “Ain’t nobody there,” said the man who held the lantern. “They heard the noise over in ’Sinki…but they ain’t seen nobody pass through.”
“Albion’s a fuckin’ spirit!” someone else in the chamber said. “You ain’t gonna catch that one!”
“He may be a spirit,” replied a man who had taken a moment to pack his pipe and light it from a candle’s flame, “but his sword’s real enough. Killed how many, Simms?”
“Six so far,” croaked the prisoner who Matthew figured was able to procure the Pin from the outside, and from him it was passed around to the others. “Seven, when this poor soul gets out.”
“That ain’t what Albion was meanin’!” Wyler insisted, with a measure of annoyance. He looked for someone in the throng and found him pressed up against a wall trying to pretend to be just another formless shadow. “Jerrigan! You got some sense! What d’you say?”
The half-nosed mother-murderer said nothing. Others were looking to him expectantly. Matthew figured the man—whatever he otherwise might be—held some clout among this tribe. It was a moment before Jerrigan responded at all, and when he did he came toward Matthew with his head lowered, as if in deep thought.
He stopped before Matthew and held out the pair of shoes that were amongst his winnings from the card game. “Take ’em, they’re yours,” he said. “I’m clean with you.” And then to Wyler and the rest of the room: “I dunno what Albion was sayin’ exactly, but I know I don’t want no part of it. I ain’t gettin’ a blade ’cross my neck in the middle of the night, nossir!” His fear-struck eyes returned to Matthew, who reached out and retrieved his shoes. “We’re clean, ain’t we?” Jerrigan asked in the manner of a small child needing reassurance. “Say we’re clean.”
“We’re clean,” Matthew answered, in a croak that was even more froggish than Simms’s.
“Clean, we are!” Jerrigan hollered it toward the corridor, just in case the golden-masked phantom had not heard distinctly. “Turk Jerrigan’s mindin’ his own bloody business, ain’t causin’ nobody no trouble!”
“Good to hear,” Matthew said, his ears ringing in addition to all his other pains.
To complete his absolutions, Jerrigan clapped Matthew on the shoulder as if they were as close as bread torn from the same loaf. Matthew thought for an instant that Jerrigan was going to hug him, with one eye on the corridor, but then the brawler turned toward the four offenders. “You lot!” he snarled. “Shame on all your heads, and ’specially yours, Jonah Falkner! You with a wife and three children out there!”
“Two wives and five children,” Jonah Falkner corrected, contritely.
“Ahhhhh, the Devil with all of ya!” Jerrigan waved a disgusted hand at the group, which was the cue for the scar-faced young man and another thin brute to make their way across the chamber, up the steps and out, while Falkner and the fourth offender settled down on their bedding.
“Let me help ya,” said Old Victory, appearing suddenly beside Matthew and perversely licking his lips, but Matthew had the sense and strength enough to decline. With shoes in hand he made his unsteady path back to his own piece of hay. A couple of the others went to pains to help him along, and they too cast fearful glances at the corridor.
But if Albion still lurked there, he did not reappear.
Sleep for this night was impossible. Matthew put his shoes on as if he were actually going somewhere, but at least they were a link to the outside world. The talking back and forth continued on with no sense of time, as time was meaningless here anyway except for the burning down of the candles.
“I still say Albion’s markin’ him!” said the bug-eyed prisoner, whose name Matthew had not caught.
“Markin’ him for protection from the likes of in here!” Wyler fired back. He turned his attention to Matthew, who with bruised throat, sore jaw and rattled bones felt as if he might pass out at any minute, yet the vision of Albion was still sharp in his mind. Wyler kept his voice low when he asked, “What’d you do to stir Albion up?”
“I have no idea.”
“The whole prison’ll know about this by first light. Maybe it’ll help us get some damned food.” Their section had been skipped for the evening gruel, as the pots had gone empty. Wyler’s face lightened. “We might be what they call celebatories.”
“Celebrities,” Matthew corrected. His gaze kept sliding toward the corridor, for in the dim light of the few candles the prisoners feared to blow out he continued to imagine he saw furtive movement there.
“Yeah, that. Well…to tell you the truth I don’t know if you’ve got a friend or an enemy in Albion, but ride the horse while it’s saddled.”
Matthew nodded. The entire episode was beginning to seem more and more like a dream within a nightmare. What indeed had he done to stir Albion up? And for that matter, how had he become of interest to Albion, since he’d only been in London a few days and all that time in gaol? And the central question: who was Albion and what the hell was he about? Not to mention the fact that getting in and out of Newgate Prison was no easy trick, even for a phantom.
“Lord, what a thought I just had!” said Wyler, his excitement further heightened. “We might make mention in the Pin for this!” Then he lay down on his mattress and stared up at the cracked stones far above his head, as the voices quietened to muttering. Two of the candles reached their end and hissed out. Wyler had a coughing fit, spat up blood and looked at the streamers of it on his hand, then he licked the blood away as if unwilling to give any part of himself up to the crushing c
onfines of Newgate.
Matthew lay on his side in the hay. He realized that if he thought too much about what had happened since he’d left New York for that damned Sword of Damocles ball in Charles Town he might lose what was left of his diminished sanity. The Herrald Agency…Berry…Hudson…all his friends in New York…everything he’d gone through and survived, to wind up here in a sorry bedding of stinking hay with a shrunken belly and a golden-masked maniac pointing a saber at him and making some kind of demonstration of either friendship or enmity. It boggled the mind, which was already double-boggled.
For a terrible moment he thought he might be reduced to tears, and where would that put him here, among this den of criminals?
Six months in this place? How could he stand another day?
He heard sobbing. At first he thought it was himself, and so alarmed was he about this breakdown of willpower that he brought his knees up higher so he could press both hands to his mouth.
But it was not him, he realized in another moment. It was some other inmate across the chamber, someone who likely had a family outside these walls and who for one unfortunate reason or another had been sentenced to this perdition for more years than were left in his life.
Still, Matthew kept his hands pressed hard to his mouth, just in case.
Thirteen
MATTHEW Corbett! Get yer ass up here!”
The brassy holler had come from the guard Baudrey, who stood under the archway with his leather tricorn tilted rakishly on his head and the glass-spiked billyclub resting against one shoulder. Behind him stood a second guard, a lean whip of a man Matthew hadn’t seen in his three days of confinement in Newgate.
“That one calls, you’d best move quick,” Wyler advised, and so Matthew hauled himself up in the chains that seemed ever heavier, or perhaps it was just because his diet consisted of one bowl of brown gruel and a piece of cornbread per day. An added bit of nutrition, however, were the scores of weevils in the cornbread; Wyler said he thought those were better than the bread, and Matthew had to agree with him. Matthew had tried the water, had thrown it all up, tried it again from sheer thirst, and now had no telling what swimming in his internals.