Mask of Night Read online

There was a thunderous sound and voices calling outside.

  “Open up!”

  “Nick, are you there?”

  Fists beat at the door. My friends shouted out for me. Pearman looked up, or rather he raised his beaked head. I sensed his hesitation, a moment’s hesitation. The thundering of fists on wood redoubled.

  “Revill! Answer if you’re inside.”

  “Open the door!”

  I still held the ragged stump of foil in my right hand. While Pearman was preoccupied with the noise outside, I drove the jagged end into his ankle where he was unprotected, judging the point to a nicety (even if I say it myself) behind the bone. He twisted away to the back of the lobby, tearing out the blade as he did so and leaving it in my hand. He may have cried out or screamed. I don’t know. The battering at the door continued and there was a roaring in my ears, as if the blood was coursing through my head in full spate.

  I scrambled on to all fours, scuttled forward and stabbed downwards with my broken foil. The blow was random and I missed. The second wasn’t so random, and I was lucky. With this second stab I ran him through the foot. I felt the stump of the blade go right through and strike the ground underneath. Pearman was still wearing those plain, simple shoes which – as he’d indicated – were fitting for an apprentice. They did not offer much protection against the jagged edge. And I put more force into the second stroke than I had ever put into anything in my life. It was as if the whole world depended on that blow. And yet, when it came to it, the foil-stump went into his foot as easily as a knife into soft butter.

  And then, still on all fours, I swung round and unfastened the door. Abel and Jack tumbled into the lobby. Andrew Pearman, making incomprehensible noises, reached down to remove the end of the foil from his foot. But he was distracted and needed both hands to do it, for in my desperation I had forced the broken end down so hard that it had stuck in the boarded floor. And in order to unpin his foot Pearman had to lay down the white cane which he had used to such deadly effect.

  Grunting all the while, Pearman jerked at the handle of the foil and it came free – what it cost him in terms of pain I don’t know, but most likely he didn’t feel anything. I have heard that men may be oblivious of their wounds in the heat of battle. Meantime Jack and Abel stood open-mouthed at the sight. A monstrous black-clad insect clawing at its feet.

  Then just as Pearman freed his foot and picked up his cane, Jack and Abel moved forward. Pearman flung away the gory stump of the foil – the lobby was so small that I retrieved it almost immediately – and tried to stagger upright to face these fresh enemies. But there was scarcely room for four men to stand quiet and still in this place, let alone engage in a mortal combat.

  Pearman was at a disadvantage now. Three against one. He was wounded in both feet. I had stabbed him in the ankle of one foot and (by good fortune) run him through in the other, and he seemed distracted. His great beaked head waved up and down, the evil circles which were his eyepieces catching the light which came through the half-open door.

  Jack had obtained another sword from somewhere. Abel produced a small knife. I had got back my broken foil. Without a word, I closed the front door while Jack shifted round to prevent Pearman’s moving into the little room which lay off the lobby. We were so close that we might have been participating in some intimate dance for a foursome. So close that the masked killer found it impossible to lift his cane to achieve a clear, swinging stroke with it. So close that we were like the tightening knot on a noose.

  Without a word being spoken we encircled this man, this wicked man who had murdered Angelica Root and Hugh Fern and (I suspected) his two accomplices, as well as many others whose names I would never know. The noose tightened. I could hear the panting breath of my friends. Blood was still dripping into my eyes.

  We raised our various weapons . . .

  . . . and then we closed in on him.

  Pearman shrank into himself, his back to the wall. All at once he slipped for a second time. He was very unsteady on his poor feet. His arms flailed and Jack leapt in and seized the cane, wresting it from his grasp. Our enemy was now defenceless. I don’t know what we would have done next – and even at a little distance in time I don’t care to consider the bloody course we might have pursued – but no action was necessary.

  Suddenly the great beaked head arched backwards and from the base of the hood emerged a thin spike. A dreadful gurgling sound came from under the shrouded head and then blood poured out from the gap between hood and cloak. Pearman had fallen on to the sword tip which had broken off in my hand and which was still stuck fast in the lobby wall. It had run him through. Only a play foil but even in its ragged, jagged state it was capable of inflicting a mortal wound when it struck a vulnerable point in the neck.

  Abel, Jack and I instinctively stood as far back as the confined area would allow, and watched as the black shape wriggled and shook itself into stillness. I put my hands over my ears to silence the terrible wheezing sounds which emerged from this monstrous, dying insect. Eventually a ringing silence fell on the little room.

  We were silent ourselves for a long while after that.

  Pearman was dead. A dreadful end, maybe, but it was hard to see it as anything but just.

  If we’d captured him alive we might, I suppose, have taken him into custody, a wounded and limping prisoner. Then, after due process of a few weeks, Andrew Pearman would have met his end on the gallows. That is, if there had been a judge and jury to try him, gaolers to imprison him, and a hangman to string him up, for the plague was making inroads through all levels of Oxford society. So it’s possible also that Pearman himself might not have lived to see his lawful demise but have fallen victim to the pestilence which he had exploited for his own profit and power.

  We debated for some time what to do with the body. If we hadn’t gone to the authorities before this point, we certainly couldn’t go to them now. Who would believe our account of what was, essentially, an accidental death? Eventually we searched around the little house and found some rags and scraps of cloth which allowed us to handle the corpse without getting ourselves more bloody than we were already. We took down the warm body and prised the gory tip of the foil out of the wall.

  I volunteered to drive the body in the back of the cart in which I myself had so recently been a “passenger” to Doctor Bodkin’s house near St Ebbe’s. The others offered to accompany me but I insisted on doing this alone. We were not interrupted while we removed the body, swaddled in rags, from the Shoe Lane house. This was a dubious area of the town and these were dubious times. Presumably, if we were seen, it was assumed that we were removing a plague victim.

  So I too became, for a half-hour or so, a body-carrier, and a counterfeit one at that. We arrived safely – Revill, Pearman and the horse (I never discovered its name). I may not be much good on horseback but even I can control a worn-out nag meandering its way through known streets. Bodkin’s house was as I’d left it early that morning, quiet as the grave. I tugged the body from the back of the cart and abandoned it in the lobby, rather as Hamlet leaves Polonius in a lobby at Elsinore. I listened long and hard for signs of life from the steps that led down to the cellar but none came. I wondered if the clever Doctor was already free of this life. As for John Hoby’s horse and cart, we left them in the care of one of the other ostlers at the Golden Cross.

  Later, I left an unsigned note outside the Guild Hall indicating an outbreak of pestilence at Bodkin’s house. I don’t suppose anonymous notifications of the plague were very unusual at this time. And the town authorities should be familiar with Bodkin. The Doctor had been one of the most important citizens of Oxford after all. Let them deal with one of their own and all his doings. There would be an anomaly among the corpses discovered in the house, for the authorities would discover one of them to have died by violence (apart from the violence committed by Ralph Bodkin on those who were already corpses, that is). We might not have got away with this in normal circumstances. But then they, B
odkin and Pearman and Kite and the carter Hoby, would not have got away with it either.

  Then I tried to wash my hands of the business. But my hands refused to come clean so easily. I could not forget that terrible cellar in Bodkin’s house nor my mortal combat with Pearman nor the final stage of the struggle as Pearman wriggled to death on the end of the Tybalt foil.

  Later too, for the benefit of Jack and Abel, I outlined the story as far as I could piece it together now that all the participants were dead or dying. I told them that Andrew Pearman had somehow come to an understanding or conspiracy with Ralph Bodkin to supply him with bodies during a time when no very close watch could be kept on the disposal of corpses – in fact, no real watch at all. I wasn’t sure how far Bodkin had been complicit in the murder. His words to me – I have done no murder – suggested not so much that he didn’t know what was going on but that he was prepared, in the interests of his grisly investigations, to turn a blind eye to the provenance of the bodies that were regularly delivered to his doorstep. And, I suppose, from his point of view, the more various the victims and their causes of death, the better. After all he believed that he was working for humankind.

  Andrew Pearman, though, was working for no one but himself. His murderous career most likely predated the outbreak of plague in Oxford but he could sniff the air, smell the way things were going. Could see that there would soon be many opportunities for a man of his bent. Where those opportunities did not exist, then he might create them by the application of potions and poisons. These poisons he had learned about during his period as Fern’s apprentice and he had probably stolen the ingredients from his master too. He also stole Fern’s clay figurines and used them to try to cast spells since, as everyone knows, there is a magic in medicine, good and bad.

  This conspiracy, once established, brought benefits to both Pearman and Bodkin. Bodkin gained the bodies which he could cut up and investigate. Jack and Abel were similar to me in that – even when they’d laid aside their abhorrence of such a practice – they could see little point in such investigations.

  Meantime Pearman and his confederates were paid twice over – by the Doctor for the bodies they produced and by the profit they could turn on the disposal of goods looted from plague-houses (for the sake of the recipients I hoped they’d been fumigated). There was more to it than this, however. Pearman enjoyed what he’d called his “secret labours”. Dressing up in a costume protected him from the pestilence, but it gave him a necessary disguise and, I suspected, fed his vanity or arrogance. “I am invulnerable,” he’d said to me. But he was only invulnerable through killing off anybody who suspected him or might have harmed him. In the end he turned on his confederates.

  Abel asked me once more whether Susan Constant was involved in this dreadful affair and I said no, I didn’t think so. I didn’t mention my private speculation that she had been animated by dislike and envy of her cousin, who was to marry the man she was herself in love with. Glimpsing on a couple of occasions the figure of Andrew Pearman, out and about at dawn and dressed in his outlandish costume, she had concocted a poison plot against Sarah (perhaps because that was what some small, dark part of her wanted too). Even a clay figure left outside the Constant door became, in Susan’s eyes, an attempt to cast a spell on Sarah. Then the upright, respectable part of Susan came to me and outlined the same plot, requesting that I should investigate the matter. Later, perhaps coming to her senses and seeing that the Sadler-Constant marriage was going ahead anyway, she’d asked me to forget the whole business.

  (William Sadler and Sarah Constant did marry, I heard a while later. Whether they’re happy or not, I don’t know. Will was a casual fellow and Sarah was a delicate thing. But at least one couple was able to drive away from this wreckage in what you might call Cupid’s car – as opposed to the plague cart. And it may be that Hugh Fern’s wish to have a private staging of Romeo and Juliet bore fruit in this way.)

  It was true that Abel Glaze did have a soft spot for Susan Constant but we were not staying long enough in Oxford for him to pursue matters, even if she, a “lady”, would have considered a connection with a mere player. In fact, after what had happened in Shoe Lane it seemed safest for us to beat a fairly hasty retreat from this university town. Almost all of our fellows, including the seniors, had left by now and there was a general eagerness to get back to London, however difficult the situation might be there.

  First we had a couple of small tasks to perform. I returned Flower’s Herbal, the book which I had borrowed from Nathaniel Thornton. The dusty old bookseller with the white beard was still sitting behind his desk as if he hadn’t stirred since my last visit. He accepted the heavy volume without surprise.

  “Are you still carrying the ratsbane?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  (In fact, I’d almost forgotten that I was wearing the little leather pouch about my neck.)

  “And I can see you are still alive. Though you have that great swelling on your head.”

  “More or less alive.”

  “I told you ratsbane was the thing,” he said.

  “So far I’ve seen off the rats,” I said.

  I also took back, with the help of the others, the plate and carpet and other goods which Andrew Pearman and Christopher Kite had stolen from the house in Grove Street. Jack was particularly keen we should do this since he felt that the theft of items from his mistress’s house was partly his responsibility. I said that, if it was anyone’s, it was mine since I had come up with the scheme to lure the thieves with a pretended outbreak of the pestilence.

  Although the widow of John Hoby had decamped from Oxford with her children and with most of the booty from the gang’s robberies – going God knows where, but obviously well stocked to begin a new life and getting some recompense for the apparently accidental death of her husband – she must have quit the city before that final theft. So when the three of us looked round the pinched house in Shoe Lane once Pearman had been . . . dealt with, we discovered the Grove Street takings still wrapped up in the carpet in the single downstairs room. Pearman must have deposited them there that night, after leaving me and Kite at Bodkin’s. There was nothing else. Whether it was then or later he’d discovered that Mrs Hoby had run away with the takings, I don’t know. And don’t much care. I’ve explained enough, haven’t I?

  Queen Mother

  Our return to London was subdued. Yet the days were growing clear and warm, even if the nights were still cold or wet. The early flowers had come and gone, but the banks were bright with daffodils and the hedges were more than speckled with fresh green. The three of us followed in reverse the route we had traced out as a Company only a few weeks before, stopping at the same inns overnight and often halting to refresh ourselves at the same wayside spots during the day.

  For the most part we walked along without talking. When we shared food at meal-times or a bed for the night there was an absence of the usual jokes and players’ banter. One night we had a halting discussion about which was the worse: Ralph Bodkin or Andrew Pearman. The one had (at the least) connived at death and murder in pursuit of some grisly project of discovering what lies under our skins, and then claimed he was doing it for the best. The other, Pearman, had killed simply for power and profit. This was a more human, though still terrible, motive. We came to no conclusion, and the discussion petered out.

  It was not surprising that Jack, Abel and I were subdued. We had been present at a man’s violent death – even if the death was in a sense self-inflicted – and we seemed to be bound together by bloody strings. This couldn’t but cast a pall over our spirits, although as we approached London we grew less oppressed by ourselves.

  Of the three of us Abel ought to have been the most accustomed to blood since he had been a soldier, albeit in his youth. But, like some other military veterans, he now eschewed violence. As for Jack Wilson, he’d been involved in some strong affrays in his younger, wilder days, even ending up in the Clink on one occasion. And as fo
r myself, although I’d been caught up in three or four similar homicidal adventures before, my nights were troubled by dreams of shadowy figures tussling together in a sealed room from which they would never be freed. I couldn’t avoid the thought either that, just as in WS’s Romeo and Juliet, the sword used by Tybalt (or Jack) had been responsible for an accidental, mortal stabbing.

  Strangely it was also in my dreams that I obtained a kind of absolution when the image of Hugh Fern came to me with a reassuring expression on his face. The Doctor clasped me by the shoulder, and I distinctly heard him say, “Do not be too hard on yourself,” the very words which he had spoken to me in the yard of the Golden Cross Inn shortly before he was murdered by the treacherous Pearman. Although that comment had been in relation to some trivial matter – my stupidity in falling off a stage, I think – I chose to apply it to the events in Shoe Lane and elsewhere.

  From time to time – just for sake of a diversion, as it were – it was fear rather than guilt which bobbed around in my head. Maybe the fear was a counterweight to the guilt, maybe it was an outgrowth of the guilt. This was the fear that I must have been infected with the pestilence because I had passed a night in Bodkin’s charnel house and then been close to the man himself in his last hours. Also I had pretended to have the infection, after being made up by Abel with the false tokens and so on. Was this to tempt fate, or to avert it?

  Yet at the same time I did not really believe I was contaminated, perhaps because any alternative to that belief would have been so troubling. Instead I trusted to my ratsbane, rather as Jack trusted to his hyacinth-stone and Abel his powdered unicorn-horn. So far we had been preserved. And there’s another thing. The more you are surrounded by such forceful reminders of mortality, the more you come to accept that profound philosophy which applies to the pestilence and many other undesirable things besides. Which is: if you’re going to catch it, then you’re going to catch it. And if not, not. It’s in the stars.