The Queen of Bedlam (2 page)

The figure just stood there, seemingly staring at him though Matthew was unable to make out a face beneath that tricorn. Matthew’s heart had begun to hammer in his chest. If this was the Masker, he thought, then damned if he’d give up his life without a fight. Good thinking there, boy, he told himself with a twinge of morbid humor. Fists against a throat-slashing blade always won the day.

Matthew was about to call to the figure-and say what? he asked himself. Fine night for a walk, isn’t it, sir? And by the by would you please spare my life?-but abruptly the mystery man turned away, strode purposefully out of the lantern’s realm and was gone. The breath hissed out of Matthew. He felt the chill of sweat at his temples. That wasn’t the Masker! he told himself with a little stupid fury. Of course not! It might have been a constable, or someone just out walking, the same as himself! Only he was not out just walking, he thought. He was a sheep, tracking a wolf.

Ausley and his tavern companions had gone. There was no sight of them whatsoever. Now the question was, did Matthew continue along this ash-reeking lane or retrace his way back to where the Masker was waiting? Stop it, idiot! he commanded. That wasn’t the Masker because the Masker has left New York! Why should anyone think the Masker was still lurking in these streets? Because they hadn’t caught him, Matthew thought grimly. That’s why.

He decided to go ahead, but with a watchful eye at his back in case a piece of darkness separated itself from the night and rushed upon him. And he had gone perhaps ten paces farther when a piece of darkness shifted not at his back, but directly in front of him.

He stopped and stood stone-still. He was a dried husk, all the blood and breath gone from him on a summer night suddenly turned winter’s eve.

A spark leaped, setting fire to cotton in a little tinderbox, and from it a match was lighted.

“Corbett,” said the man as he touched flame to pipe bowl, “if you’re so intent on following me I ought to give you an audience. Don’t you think?” Matthew didn’t reply. Actually his tongue was still petrified.

Eben Ausley took a moment lighting his pipe to satisfaction. Behind him was a fire-blacked brick wall. His corpulent face seethed red. “What a wonder you are, boy,” he said in his crackly high-pitched voice. “Laboring at papers and pots all day long and following me about the town at night. When do you sleep?”

“I manage,” Matthew answered.

“I think you ought to get more sleep than you do. I think you are in need of a long rest. Don’t you agree with that, Mr. Carver?”

Too late, Matthew heard the movement behind him. Too late, he realized the other two men had been hiding in the burned rubble on either side of-

A lumberboard whacked him square in the back of the head, stopping all further speculations. It sounded so loud to him that surely the militia would think a cannon had fired, but then the force of the blow knocked him off his feet and the pain roared up and everything was shooting stars and flaming pinwheels. He was on his knees and made an effort of sheer willpower not to go down flat on the street. His teeth were gritted, his senses blowsy. It came to him through the haze that Ausley had led him a merry traipse to this sheep-trap. “Oh, that’s enough, I think,” Ausley was saying. “We don’t want to kill him now, do we? How does that feel, Corbett? Clear your noggin out for you?”

Matthew heard the voice as if an echo from a great distance, which he wished were the truth. Something pressed down hard upon the center of his back. A boot, he realized. About to slam him to the ground.

“He’s all right where he is,” Ausley said, in a flat tone of nonchalance. The boot left Matthew’s back. “I don’t think he’s going anywhere. Are you, Corbett?” He didn’t wait for a reply, which wouldn’t have arrived anyway. “Do you know who this young man is, my friends? Do you know he’s been trailing me hither and yon, ’round and about for…how long has it been, Corbett? Two years?”

Two years haphazardly, Matthew thought. Only the last six months with any sense of purpose.

“This young man was one of my dearest students,” Ausley went on, smirking now. “One of my boys, yes. Raised up right there at the orphanage. Now I didn’t take him off the street myself, my predecessor Staunton did that, you see. That poor old fool saw him as a worthwhile project. Wretched urchin into educated gentleman, if you please. Gave him books to read, and taught him…what was it he taught you, Corbett? How to be a damned fool, like he was?” He continued merrily along his crooked road. “Now this young man has gone a far travel from his beginnings. Oh yes, he has. Went into the employ of Magistrate Isaac Woodward, who chose him as a clerk-in-training and took him out into the world. Gave him a chance to continue his education, to learn to live a gentleman’s life and to be someone of value.” There was a pause as Ausley relit his pipe. “And then, my friends,” Ausley said between puffs, “and then, he betrayed his benefactor by falling in with a woman accused of witchcraft in a little hole of a town down in the Carolina colony. A murderess, I understood her to be. A common tramp and a conniver, who pulled the wool over this young man’s eyes and caused the death of that noble Magistrate Woodward, God rest his soul.”

“Lie,” Matthew was able to say. Or rather, to whisper. He tried again: “That’s…a lie.”

“Did he speak? Did he say something?” Ausley asked.

“He mumbled,” said the man standing behind Matthew.

“Well might he mumble,” Ausley said. “He mumbled and grumbled quite a lot at the orphanage. Didn’t you, Corbett? If I had killed my benefactor by first exposing him to a wet tempest that half robbed his life and then breaking his heart by treachery, I’d be reduced to a mumbling wretch too. Tell me, how does Magistrate Powers trust you enough to turn his back on you? Or have you learned a bewitching spell from your ladyfriend?”

“If he knows witchcraft,” another voice said, “it hasn’t done him any good tonight.”

“No,” Ausley answered, “he doesn’t know witchcraft. If he did, he’d at least make himself into an invisible pest instead of a pest I have to look at every time I venture out into the street. Corbett!!”

It had been a demand for Matthew’s full attention, which he was able to give only by lifting his throbbing brain-pan on its weakened stalk. He blinked, trying to focus on Ausley’s repugnant visage.

The headmaster of King Street’s orphanage for boys, he of the jaunty cockatoo and the swollen belly, said with quiet contempt, “I know what you’re about. I’ve always known. When you came back here, I knew it would start. And I warned you, did I not? Your last night at the orphanage? Have you forgotten? Answer me!”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Matthew said.

“Never plot a war you cannot win. Isn’t that right?”

Matthew didn’t respond. He tensed, expecting the boot to come down on his back again, but he was spared.

“This young man…boy…fool,” Ausley corrected himself, speaking now to his two companions, “decided he didn’t approve of my correctional methods. All those boys, all those grievous attitudes. Some of them like animals wild from the woods, even a barn was too good for them. They’d bite your arm off and piss on your leg. The churches and the public hospital daily bringing them to my door. Family perished on the voyage over, no one to take responsibility, so what was I to do with them? Indians massacred this one’s family, or that one was stubborn and would not work, or this one was a young drunkard living in the street. What was I to do with them, except give them some discipline? And yes, I did take many of them in hand. Many of them I had to discipline in the most strict of manners, because they would abide no-”

“Not discipline,” Matthew interrupted, gathering strength into his voice. His face had reddened, his eyes glistening with anger in their swollen sockets. “Your methods…might make the church elders and the hospital council think twice…about the charity they give you. And the money the town pays you. Do they know you’re confusing discipline with sodomy?”

Ausley was quiet. In this silence, the world and time seemed to hang suspended.

“I’ve heard them scream, late at night,” Matthew went on. “Many nights. I’ve seen them, afterward. Some of them…didn’t want to live. All of them were changed. And you only went after the youngest ones. The ones who couldn’t fight back.” He felt the burn of tears, and even after eight years the impact of this emotion stunned him. He pulled in a breath and the next words tumbled out of him: “I’m fighting back for them, you jackal sonofabitch.”

Ausley’s laugh cracked the dark. “Oh ho! Oh ho, my friends! View the avenging angel! Down on the ground and fighting the air!” He came forward a few steps. In the next pull of the pipe and the red wash of cinder-light, Matthew saw a face upon the man that would have scared even the winged Michael. “You make me sick, Corbett! With your stupidity and your fucking honor. With your following me, trying to get under my feet and trip me up. Because that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Trying to find out things? To spy on me? Which tells me one very important thing: you have nothing. If you had something-anything-beyond your ridiculous suppositions and made-up memories, you would have first fetched your dear dead magistrate Woodward upon me, or now your new dog Powers. Am I not correct in this?” His voice suddenly changed; when he spoke again he sounded like a nettled old woman: “Look what you’ve made me step in!”

Then, after a meditative pause: “Mr. Bromfield, drag Corbett over here, won’t you?”

A hand grabbed Matthew’s collar and another took hold of his shirt low on his back. He was dragged fast and sure by a man who knew how to move a body. Matthew tensed and tried to convulse himself, but a knuckled fist-Carver’s, he presumed-jammed into his ribs just enough to tell him that pride led to breakage.

“You have a filthy mind,” Ausley said, standing closer with his odors of cloves and smoke. “I think we should scrub it a bit, beginning with your face. Mr. Bromfield, clean him up for me, please.”

“My pleasure,” said the man who’d seized Matthew, and with diabolical relish he took hold of the back of Matthew’s head and thrust his face down into the fly-blown mass of horse manure that Ausley’s boot had found.

Matthew had seen what was coming. There was no way to avoid it. He was able to seal his mouth shut and close his eyes, and then his face went into the pile. It was, by reason of the analytical part of Matthew’s brain that took the cool measure of all things, distressingly fresh. Almost velvety, really. Like putting one’s face into a velvet bag. Warm, still. The stuff was up his nostrils, but the breath was stuck hard in his lungs. He didn’t fight, even when he felt the sole of a boot press upon the back of his head and his face was jammed through the wretched excess near down to the cobblestones. They wanted him to fight, so they could break him. So he would not fight, even as the air stuttered in his lungs and his face remained pressed down into the filth under a whoreson’s boot. He would not fight, so he might fight the better on his feet some other day.

Ausley said, “Pull him up.”

Bromfield obeyed.

“Get some air in his lungs, Carver,” Ausley commanded.

The flat of a hand slapped Matthew in the center of his chest. The air whooshed out of his mouth and nostrils, spraying manure.

“Shit!” Carver hollered. “He’s got it on my shirt!”

“Step back then, step back. Give him room to smell himself.”

Matthew did. The stuff was still jammed up his nose. It caked his face like swamp mud and had the vomitous odor of sour grass, decayed feed, and…well, and stinking manure straight from the rump. He retched and tried to clear his eyes but Bromfield had hold of his arms as strong as a picaroon’s rope.

Ausley gave a short, high, and giddy laugh. “Oh, look at him now! The avenger has turned scarecrow! You might even scare the carrion birds away with that face, Corbett!”

Matthew spat and shook his head violently back and forth; unfortunately some of this unpalatable meal had gotten past his lips.

“You can let him go now,” Ausley said. Bromfield released Matthew and at the same time gave him a solid shove that put him on the ground again. Then, as Matthew struggled up to his knees and rubbed the mess out of his eyes, Ausley stood over him and said quietly, the menace in his voice commingled with boredom, “You are not to follow me again. Understand? Mind me well, or the next time we meet shall not go so kindly for you.” To the others: “Shall we leave the young man to his contemplations?”

There was the sound of phlegm being hawked up. Matthew felt the gob of spit hit his shirt at the left shoulder. Carver or Bromfield, showing their good breeding. After that, the noise of boots striding away. Ausley said something and one of the others laughed. Then they were gone.

Matthew sat in the street, cleaning his face with his sleeves. Sickness bubbled and lurched in his stomach. The heat of anger and the burn of shame made him feel as if he were sitting aboil under the noonday sun. His head was still killing him, his eyes streaming. Then his stomach turned over and out of him flooded the Old Admiral’s ale and most of the salmagundi he’d put down for his supper. It came to him that he was going to be laboring over a washpot tonight.

Finally, after what seemed a terrible hour, he was able to get up off the ground and think about how to get home. His roost on the Broad Way, up over Hiram Stokely’s pottery shop, was going to be a good twenty-minute walk. Probably a long, malodorous twenty minutes, at that. But there was nothing to be done but to get to doing it; and so he started off, seething and weaving and stinking and being altogether miserable in his wretched skin. He searched for a horse trough. He would get himself a bath in it, and so cleanse his face and clear his mind.