“What are you doing out here, you idiot?” asked Julian Devane, still speaking in a hushed tone.
“Walking.” Matthew busied himself rubbing the feeling back into his punished shoulder. “Is that forbidden?”
“I think you were following Mother Deare and Martin.”
“Really? And why do you think that?”
“Because,” he answered, “I was following Mother Deare. I saw you start after her.”
“I was just walking, that’s all.” Matthew thought he needed practice on his stalking skills; he’d never realized anyone might be behind him.
“You’re a stupid fop. Thinking so highly of yourself. I could’ve brained you a dozen times and you never would’ve seen the blow coming.”
“Thank you for the observation. I’ll be on my way now.”
“No.” Devane grasped the front of Matthew’s cloak and swung him around so Matthew’s back was against a wall and his path of escape blocked. “What did you just see?”
“Pardon?”
“Don’t act like an imbecile. You saw something. What was it?”
“I have no idea what—”
“Corbett, listen to me.” Devane’s hand moved to grip the cloak more tightly around Matthew’s throat. “I’m going to tell you something, and I think you have enough sense to realize what I’m saying.”
“You haven’t said anything yet.”
“Hear me. I’ve been in Mother Deare’s employ for a little over a year. Over the last three months, she’s changed. Become…I don’t know…the word I would use is unhinged.”
“Oh, before that she was hinged?”
“It started in small ways, not long after she got back from Pendulum Island,” Devane went on. “Losing her concentration, something on her mind interfering with her business…and that’s not like her. Disappearing for days at a time and not telling anyone where she was going, or where she’d been. Going off alone, without her bodyguards. Again…out of her pattern.”
“Mercy me,” said Matthew. “I’m sorry to hear such a fine lady is losing her concentration once in a while, and wishes to get rid of her odious bodyguards so she might go shopping for the afternoon on Fleet Street like any ordinary female.”
“Stop your feigned stupidity. You work for the Herrald Agency, you’re supposed to be so fucking smart. I’ll ask you again…what did you just see?”
“Two questions to your question: Why are you telling me all this, and why should you care what I think I might have seen?”
“You talk enough to tie a tree in a knot,” said Devane. “I’ll tell you: Mother Deare may be mixed up in something dangerous.”
“I’d say that’s an understatement.”
“I mean mixed up in something that’s dangerous to the professor.”
Matthew was about to throw another nugget of wit into Devane’s face, but he realized what the man was saying, particularly after seeing Mother Deare give what he perceived as a signal out to sea.
He said, “I saw her lift the lantern in a straight line, draw it down in a straight line and move it from left to right and back again near the bottom of that line.”
“Correct. And I’m assuming you know that symbol?”
“Yes,” said Matthew.
Devane released Matthew’s cloak. He looked in the direction Mother Deare and Martin had gone, looked back at the fortress wall, and then returned his gaze to Matthew. His face was in darkness under the tricorn, and all Matthew could see was the shine of his eyes from a bit of reflected moonlight. “I think she’s losing her mind,” he said.
“Really? And she hadn’t lost her mind many years ago?”
“Maybe she had. Maybe she’s just been very apt at hiding it, and now it’s come out.”
Matthew might not have given a fig whether the woman had lost her mind or not, but for one reason. If that lantern signal of the inverted Cross had anything to do with the monster who’d ordered the murders and mutilations of the Black-Eyed Broodies, he was bound by his honor to give a care. “How do you mean?” he asked.
Devane hesitated, as if deciding whether to go any further with this.
“You’ve started it,” Matthew urged. “Go ahead.”
“I have a room in the attic in the house on Seward Street. Mother Deare’s house,” Devane clarified. “Back in October, she was gone for four nights. Had told her staff she needed no bodyguards, and she left in a hired coach. As I say, off her pattern. But we thought it was her business, we are paid to do as we’re told and ask no questions. So…one night I was awakened by a noise on the roof over my head. It was coming from up on the widow’s walk, and it sounded like someone was up there dancing.”
“Dancing,” Matthew repeated.
“Stomping back and forth, actually. I climbed up the ladder to the walk. There I found Mother Deare, dancing around and around and holding a bottle of rum. She was obviously drunk, and her wig had gone crooked.”
“Her wig?”
“Yes. Underneath it, her scalp is burn-scarred. I’d never seen it before, but I’d heard tell. Anyway, I neared her and I asked if there was anything I could do for her. She said no, for me to go back down and let her be. But she was grinning and very happy about something. She almost seemed…the way I’d describe it would be delirious.”
“So you left her there?”
“I did. But just before I started down the ladder she called my name, and she said her father had come back for her.”
“Her father?” Matthew thought back. He recalled the woman telling him My father was unknown to me.
“That’s what she said. I went back down and left her alone. Since then, there were two other times she disappeared for several days. The last one was a week or so before she sent me off with Stoddard and Guinnessey to stake out that circus.”
Matthew grunted. It was very strange. He recalled that Mother Deare had told him she’d seen the circus that week before his capture.
Had her father taken his daughter to see the show?
Her father?
“She told me she had no idea who her father might be,” he said. “Except—” He stopped, because the rest of her story had come back to him with stunning force.
Dirty Dorothea…veiled, her face being eated away…in the crumbling wreckage of the cathouse…the madness of the mother, raging against fate…telling her terrified daughter about her real father…
She said my father had come to her over three nights. On the first night he appeared as a black cat with silver claws. On the second night, as a toadfrog that sweated blood. On the third night…into the room with the midnight wind…he came as his true self, tall and lean, as handsome as sin, with long black hair and black eyes that held a center of scarlet. A fallen angel, he announced himself to be…
“Except what?” Devane asked.
“Nothing, just thinking,” said Matthew.
“You do a lot of that. Where has it gotten your life?”
“Where has your life gotten you?” Matthew shot back.
Devane didn’t answer. His hand came up and Matthew thought it was going to seize the collar of his cloak again, but then Devane seemed to think better of it and the hand was lowered.
“At least,” said Devane, with a sneer in his voice, “I don’t have to watch the mind of anyone I give a damn about turn to pudding.”
“Oh? Do you give a damn about anyone, then?”
Again, there was no response. The uneasy silence stretched.
Matthew broke it. “To the point…you saw the same signal that I did. If you suspect that Mother Deare may have any hidden agenda, shouldn’t you tell the professor?”
“A hidden agenda? What do you mean?”
“I mean what you already know I mean, but I’m going to spell it out for someone who is more highly intelligent than they wish to appear. You suspect that Mother Deare may have something to do with the man who’s been murdering Fell’s people and stealing the Velvet. A demoniac, as Fell describes him. She gave the signal in
the shape of an inverted Cross out to sea. Why would she do so?”
“Someone’s watching on a ship out there.”
“Of course. She’s not just signalling to the batfish. Martin took care of the guard’s attention while she did so, meaning that Martin is also in on this…whatever it is.”
“I don’t like what you’re saying.”
“Like it or not,” said Matthew, “something’s going on. How did you come to be following her?”
Devane didn’t reply for a moment and Matthew figured he was at his end of sharing confidences. But then Devane shifted his balance a little, as if he’d made a decision which way to lean. He said, “I don’t sleep very well, so—”
“I wonder why,” Matthew interrupted.
“Do you want me to tell this, or don’t you?”
“Right now I’m thinking I am the only one you can tell, which is exactly why you’re telling me. Go ahead, but for some reason your voice makes my jaw ache.”
Devane continued without comment on this observation. “I went to the tavern last night, about this same time,” he said. “Mother Deare and Sam Stoddard were sitting in there at a table toward the back, talking. They were alone but for the barkeep. There was an empty chair at their table, so I went to sit with them. Before I could draw the chair out, Mother Deare looked up at me and said they were having a private conversation. Her eyes were strange.”
“Aren’t they always?”
“They were faraway. Distant. Yet…I don’t know…sharp, too. Stoddard’s no better than me. He’s been with her for about two years, but he’s no better. In fact, he’s much of a clod.”
“Do tell.”
“So I sat there, had my cup of wine and wondered why I’d been cast off…which I was, and I couldn’t understand it. I watched them talking, but I couldn’t hear them. Something about it just wasn’t right, especially because of the other things that’ve happened. They left the tavern and I followed them. They did the exact same thing that she and Martin did tonight,” Devane said. “Stoddard took the nearest guard’s attention and Mother Deare made that same signal out to sea. The Devil’s Cross, they call it. Like what was carved into—”
“Yes, I saw the bodies.”
“Right. So tonight I was on my way to the tavern again. I passed her house and saw a light moving inside. I decided to wait and see if she would come out. She did, and then you got between us.”
“I see.”
“That’s not all. A few weeks ago Stoddard and I were on a collection run. Just strong-arming an idiot politician for an extra two hundred pounds. The fool got carried away in a sex game and strangled a young whore to death. Unfortunately for him she was not a nobody, she had a mother and two small children at home.”
“Spare me the sordid details of your livelihood,” Matthew told him.
“On the way,” Devane said, “Stoddard asked me if I was content working for the professor. He made the comment that Fell was losing his grip on events, and that time wasn’t going to wait for him to come out from hiding. I remember very clearly…Stoddard said—his opinion only—that the professor was getting weak, and how long did I want to work for a man whose empire might soon crumble away.”
“And how did you reply?”
“I told him to watch his tongue, because Mother Deare would cut it out if she heard one word of what he was saying.”
“Did he respond to that?”
“He said I might be surprised what Mother Deare would do, and that she might have her own plans that didn’t include the professor. Then he didn’t say any more, and he didn’t bring anything like that up again. I assume he was testing the water and found it cold.”
“Agreed,” said Matthew. “You haven’t told Fell any of this?”
“Jesus, no! For one thing, this is the first time I’ve been anywhere near him in months, and for me to get in to see him privately would have to go through Mother Deare. There’s a hierarchy here, you don’t just walk in off the street to see the professor.”
“And you think if you made such a request, she would want to know why?”
“Certainly she’d want to know why. She’s a smart woman. Cunning, I should say. She’d see right through any lie I told her, and anyway there’s no possible reason for me to want to see the professor privately. Any issue I might have is supposed to be taken care of in our own house.”
“And I presume you haven’t told any of your other compatriots because you don’t know whom to trust?”
“Exactly. One word to the wrong person and I’d wind up as dogfood.”
Matthew nodded. The moonlight had moved, but still Matthew could not fully see the man’s face, only the glint of the eyes. “Don’t you think that this is a ridiculous moment, Mr. Devane? You, who brought myself and Rory Keen to Mother Deare at gunpoint, now asking my opinion about what your course of action should be?”
“Who said I’m asking your opinion?”
“You are asking it, whether you’ve stated so or not. But if you don’t want it, kindly step aside and let me get to my beautiful bed.”
“I don’t know why the hell I even stopped you,” said Devane, with a hint of anger behind it. “I should’ve let you blunder on.”
“Perhaps you should have. I find myself in a situation that couldn’t possibly be any worse.”
Devane still didn’t step aside.
“My opinion,” Matthew said, “is for you to first get me the book of potions and antidotes from wherever it’s hidden. Then free Hudson Greathouse from his cell in the professor’s dungeon. After that, go to the stable that must be here somewhere, get a horse and ride out, and when you leave this damned place, make sure the gate is left open so whoever can stagger, stumble or crawl can also escape. Get away from here to wherever you can have a new life, and never look back. Your problem is therefore solved, and I won’t even charge you a shilling.”
“You know I can’t do any of that.”
“You are free to act on my opinion or not.”
“Free,” said Devane. “Sure I am.”
“We have all made our beds, whether they are beautiful or not. And now I’m going back to what passes as four walls of comfort, and I will say good night…or, rather, good morning.”
After a brief hesitation Devane stepped out of Matthew’s way, and said nothing more as Matthew walked past him and back on the route toward Lionfish Street.
Matthew’s head was full to bursting. Mother Deare giving a signal to sea in the shape of a Devil’s Cross? Had he really seen that? And all that about her father? Then Stoddard’s probing of Devane’s loyalty?
What to make of it?
Was there a possibility, he wondered as he walked on, that this new figure on the scene—the upstart, Fell had called him—had somehow made contact with Mother Deare and convinced her to plot against her master?
If that were so…
…then not only was Mother Deare creating turncoats in her own sphere, but in all likelihood she had told this new man about the White Velvet in the Broodies’ hideout, and she was responsible for their murders. Likely also, she was telling this man about the other caches of Velvet stored around the city.
Was it possible?
If she’d been holding a low-simmering grudge at Fell’s taking away the management of the bordellos and giving it to Nathan Spade…that, and coupled with her own obvious ambitions, insanities, and all this about her father…
Yes, Matthew decided. It was possible.
And…probable, if what Devane had just related was the truth. Matthew guessed that Devane didn’t know even half of the story, and if his loyalty remained with Professor Fell he could be in danger of a throat-cutting.
But why the signal? Signalling what? And, more importantly, to whom?
It suddenly seemed to him that this silent village might be due for a rude upheaval. Could he find even an hour’s mercy of sleep before the sun came up? He didn’t know, but instead of being on Lionfish Street he found himself on Redfin, and
standing before Berry’s cottage.
He thought of her in there sleeping. Did she dream of him? Did she even by now remember his name?
I’ll bring you back to me, he vowed. Somehow, I’ll bring you back.
But not this day.
Matthew returned to Lionfish, a sole figure moving in the village beneath the blaze of stars.
Forty
IN his favor, the professor appreciated the finer things of life.
As Matthew approached the theater near eight o’clock with the cadaverous but chess-companionable Harrison Copeland as his escort, he saw that the place had been done up to befit Madam Candoleri’s honor. The lamplighters’ league must’ve been in full glow today, for at least a dozen lanterns were festooned on netting that hung along the roof’s edge. The two fiddle players and the accordionist were positioned in front of the theater, and though their music was not of operatic quality they were quite accomplished, Matthew thought, at the tavern variety. However, the young trumpeter and the tambourinist had not joined the troupe this evening.
A goodly number of the village’s citizens were entering the theater, most of them dressed for a special occasion. Matthew had seen the broadsheets advertising this program up in the Question Mark today, when he’d gone to get something to eat. The special today—and only thing offered—had been crab soup and biscuits. As to the broadsheets, the printmaster who’d created them had done a respectable job with the Italian, listing the program as A Grand Evening With Madam Alicia Candoleri, Performing Arias From The Operas L’Orfeo, La Dafne, Euridice, And L’incoronazione di Poppea, Appearances As Proserpina, Dafne, La Tragedia And La Fortuna, Eight O’Clock, Village Theater.
Matthew had never attended an opera and knew not what to expect. He only knew he was to hear a musicless rendition of selections from four productions, and who could tell how the evening would go? In any case, he was ready for fireworks.
He went inside with Copeland behind him and hung his cloak and tricorn up on hooks in the anteroom with those already hanging there. Within the main chamber, he saw firstly in the glow of many lanterns sitting on small wooden wall sconces that the audience numbered around thirty so far. Then, secondly, he saw standing nearby Professor Fell in an elegant black suit with gold buttons down the front, talking to a heavy-jowled gray-haired man similarly dressed with an elegant gray-haired woman at his side, and between them…