Cardinal Black Read online

  Cardinal

  Black

  robert mccammon

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  Baltimore, MD

  2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Robert McCammon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

  Forest Hill, MD 21050

  http://www.cemeterydance.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-58767-729-8

  Front Cover Artwork © 2019 by Vincent Chong

  Cover Design by Desert Isle Design, LLC

  Digital Design by Dan Hocker

  one.

  into the storm

  one.

  “Hear me well,” said Gardner Lillehorne, resplendent in his overcoat of peacock blue with rolled cuffs of pigeon’s-blood crimson. Atop his head was a selfsame blue color tricorn whose red band clasped a single white dove’s feather. He was, as the popular saying of the day went, birded up.

  His thin ebony mustache twitched upon an equally thin upper lip, while at the downward point of his chin the perfectly trimmed goatee was yet another point, downward. “Well,” he repeated, his small black eyes aflame in the low light of a December’s late afternoon. “I am the honorable assistant to the High Constable. As such I have the power to slam the law down upon you like a two-ton cannon upon a penny’s-weight mouse if you fail to comply with what I have demanded. I have neither the time nor the patience to dally with you an instant longer, therefore I shall ask you only once again before I am compelled to move to action…will you, or will you not?”

  “But…sir,” said the ten-year-old boy, whose gray clothing was indeed mouse-colored and yet ample enough to withstand if not the weight of a heavy cannonfall the tremble of light snowflakes that were beginning to swirl down on the streets, alleyways, crossroads, courtyards, gardens and garrets of cold but bustling Londontown. “It’s just five pence!” the young salesman went on, as snow dappled his black woolen cap. “Surely, sir, you can afford—”

  “My ability to afford is not the issue. I—”

  “Not the issue!” spewed the rough voice and flecks of spittle from the mouth of Lillehorne’s florid-faced henchman and companion in chicanery by the name of Dippen Nack, who stood just behind his master as any good dog should.

  “Nack! I shall speak for myself, thank you!” said the master to the hound in a tone of sharp rebuke, and the two-legged canine pulled his neck in a little tighter to his fur-trimmed fearnaught. Though short and squat by nature, Nack wore beneath his garish purple tricorn hat an ornately curled and powdered white wig that nearly towered over Lillehorne’s shoulders.

  Lillehorne returned his attention to the boy, who he determined was not going to get away with ignoring this demand, which seemed now more important than ever simply for the principle of it. Lillehorne lifted his ebony cane with its hand-grip of a silver lion’s head and placed the tip against the boy’s right shoulder, beneath which was the leather pouch that held the solitary object of his desire.

  “Give me that last copy of Lord Puffery’s Pin,” Lillehorne said. “I command it.”

  “Command it!” barked Dippen Nack, who didn’t realize he had purchased a coat advertised as being trimmed with beaver when in fact it was brown-dyed street cur. The cherub cheeks of his bully-boy’s face seemed to pulse with excited blood stirred by the prospect of a street fight with a diminutive paperboy.

  Nack’s outburst, however rough it sounded, brought forth only a slow blink from the lad and a resigned sigh from the assistant to London’s High Constable.

  “I have determined,” said Lillehorne in a calmer tone to the subject of his obsession, “that I have paid for my last copy of the Pin. That is to say, as befits my position of authority—and responsibility—I expect some items in this city to be given to me freely and with good cheer. Your newssheet shall be one of them.”

  “And why exactly should that be, sir?” dared ask the boy, with a defiant forward jutting of his chin.

  “Simply because,” came the silkily spoken reply, “without the protection of the law to Lord Puffery’s business—and indeed to all the businesses in this fair city—he should see his Pins snatched away by ruffians at the very door of the printshop…if the printshop itself is not burned to ashes on the ground. We—I—am the sturdy wall of order that stands between Lord Puffery’s door—and every door you might look upon all along this street—and the evil tentacles of chaos. I assume you know the meaning of that—”

  “Ah! At last I’ve found a Pin! Five pence here!” A round-bellied gent in a brown overcoat and a same-hued tricorn atop his own pile of wigcurlings had suddenly pushed his way onto the scene, namely the corner of Farringdon and Stonecutter streets a few blocks west of the Old Bailey, from which Lillehorne and Nack had emerged strutting and full of if not the flames of justice then the steady embers of avarice. The new arrival had silver pennies in one hand, offering them up, and was already reaching for the newssheet with the other.

  “Hold! Hold!” Lillehorne nearly shouted, as if finding a Pin this day were like trying to pluck out a haystraw from a stack of needles.

  “Hold, he says!” And to back up this statement came Nack’s wicked ebony billyclub, his favorite fiend. Nack plunged forward past Lillehorne like the devil’s pitchfork and put the pain-giving end of the club beneath the intruder’s descending terraces of chins. “You’ll not have it!” Nack snarled. “It’s already took!”

  The gent staggered back on his polished bootheels. “This is…this is an outrage!” he sputtered, looking back and forth from one man to another and finding them both as ugly as toenail soup. “You have no claim on the paper! Where is your money, sir?”

  “Here’s our roll a’dough!” Nack gave the man’s chins a thrust of the billyclub. “It’s good and solid, ya toad-faced warthog!”

  “An outrage and an injury as well! I’m going for the law! There’s a constable hereabouts, I’m sure!”

  “To be sure, there is!” said Nack, with a crooked grin that displayed his unfortunate mouthful of jagged teeth. “You’re lookin’ at one! And right here’s the assistant to the High Constable hisself, so bite on that apple and piss a prune!”

  “You men are mad!” came the unsteady response. “Crude louts as constables? What’s this world coming to?”

  “I don’t know ’bout the world, but you’re comin’ near to a ride in the gutter! Off with you!”

  “Outrage! Outrage!” cried the man, and though he puffed steam amid the drifting snowflakes he gave up the battle as lost and retreated into the moving mass of London humanity at his back.

  “No you don’t!” Lillehorne reached out with his free hand to clutch the paperboy’s shoulder, as the lad had made a move to dart away but it had been at first a twist of the head rather than a leap of the legs. “Take the sheet, Nack,” Lillehorne said, and so it was done.

  “My manager’ll skin me for this! He counted all the copies out!” the boy protested.

  “Some advice to you.” Lillehorne released the shoulder and placed the cane’s tip alongside the boy’s cheek. “Tell your manager he miscounted by one. Look him directly in the eyes when you say this, and believe it yourself. Believe it so fervent
ly that it becomes true. You’ll have no trouble, if you believe it with enough ferocity.”

  The boy paused. Then, with a quizzical expression and a knotting of the eyebrows: “Thank you?”

  “You are welcome. Now run along.” Lillehorne gave the cheek a quick pat with the cane, the paperboy scurried away with his lesson on how to be an adept liar, Lillehorne snatched the Pin from Nack before Nack had a chance to read a word of it, and Lillehorne said with the air of the victor’s satisfaction, “Let us retire to Mr. Chomley’s coffeehouse. He already understands the importance of a cup of free coffee to a hard-working public servant.”

  “Two hard-workin’ public servants!” said Nack, nearly adding a chortle.

  “Um,” Lillehorne replied with a frozen expression. Off they went, one following the other as had been their custom in New York for several years and now in London the same.

  As the pair progressed westward along Stonecutter toward Chomley’s establishment on Norwich Street, Lillehorne mused that on this day of the twelfth month of 1703 the entire six hundred thousand population of the city must be out on the streets, chattering and nattering, steaming the air with their breath and the noxious odors of their nags pulling coach, carriage and wagon. Most of them, it seemed to him, clutched copies of Lord Puffery’s Pin in their gloved mitts. Oh, what a farce they played, these fancy prigs of London! he thought. Prancing to and fro to display their winter finery, their new hats and expensive powdered wigs, jostling and elbowing, crowding past each other for a look into the windows at some fresh geegaw or sugared dumpling, and they smiled and smiled their false smiles with eyes as hard as iron and teeth ready to bite the heads off their neighbors’ children if it took that to prosper in this city.

  He knew them. Knew what they were thinking of him, when they gave him those sideways glances that one might give a clump of horse figs in the street so as to avoid leaving a boot print upon it.

  Yes, he knew them. And he hated them, for their thoughts and their looks.

  Lately he’d realized he was a foreigner here. He was no longer a true citizen of England for he had the roughness of New York about him, he carried it wrapped around himself like a cloak of brine-soaked ropes, and no matter how he dressed or tried to cover it over, its essence—its phantom—was there to betray him. That last dinner party he’d been talked into attending turned into a nightmare of his ill-taken witticisms and botched choices of what fork to use for which dish of clotted grease. He feared he had lost his sophistication during his years across the Atlantic, and now what seemed to pass as sophistication here were caustic remarks aimed at belittling the colonists, delivered as if one were speaking through a clench of lockjaw. If it were up to him he would book passage on the next ship leaving for the colonies, but…he had this prominent position, his wife the Princess had clutched upon this place like a mollusk on a sea-slimed rock, her oppressive—at least to him—mother and father had paid for their very fine living quarters, had bought their home furnishings and purchased for them two matched chestnut horses and a carriage, therefore…

  Meet Gardner Lillehorne, assistant to the High Constable of London, oh-so-happy denizen of this great metropolis and ex-resident of the rustic town of New York, likely never to return there.

  But the truth was…he felt he’d really been someone of importance there, with a job to do, and had earned the respect of all. Well…almost all. Here the title was grand, but he was naught but a bootscrape to the men above him. And above him were so many.

  “Damn, what a mob!” he said to no one in particular, as he and Nack advanced against a stiffening and more frigid wind. The snowflakes were beginning to fly into their faces. In the sky the low gray clouds were interlaced with the black streamers of coal smoke rising from the industrial chimneys that stood tall over even the best parts of the city, as if reminding the population that one tumble and spate of bad luck could turn the finest of fashionables into a grime-streaked furnace stoker chained to the never-ending job of feeding power into London’s massive maw.

  Within a few minutes the blue-lettered sign of Chomley’s Coffee Parlor came into view, and with great relief to remove himself from the swift currents of humanity Lillehorne entered the place with Nack at his heels. A coal-burning stove and a brick fireplace provided heat, and hanging lanterns cut the gloom. Though there were already too many patrons in the parlor for Lillehorne’s complete satisfaction, he guided himself and his compatriot to a vacant table at the rear and, after doffing his overcoat, he settled his rump into a high-backed chair beneath a dusty oil portrait of a stern bewigged gent who seemed to be scowling at the new generation of Londoners from his current position in Eternity.

  “Coffee, of course!” Lillehorne told the young girl who came to take their order. He was already spreading the Pin upon the table before him. “Two!” he said, before Nack could open his fanged mouth and frighten the dame. “Black and medium-sweet,” he went on, with no mind nor care as to what Nack desired. “Oh…and by the by,” he said with silk in his voice, for this was not the same girl who had served him three days before on his last visit, “remind Mr. Chomley that this order is for Gardner Lillehorne, Esquire. He will know the name and the position, and that all shall be square with the bill.” Then, with the maid’s departure, he turned his attention to the news of the day, read beneath a flickering lantern and a dead man’s disapproval.

  “Lord God!” Lillehorne said, at his first sighting of the large print declaration across the top of the sheet.

  “Read it, read it!” Nack was pressing forward over the table, his cheeks flushed with excitement.

  Lillehorne did: “Albion and the Monster Of Plymouth Still At Large.” Beneath that was a declaration in smaller print but no less emphatic: “Constables Fear Renewed Murder Spree.” And tucked under that, a third: “Beware Albion’s Wicked Blade and the Evil Hand Of Matthew Corbett.” Then Lillehorne repeated his first reaction, but with a quieter breath: “Lord God.”

  “I knew that damn Corbett was a rotten apple!” said Nack, with the smack of his palm against the tabletop. “Couldn’t sit still in New York, he had to follow our tails over here! I shoulda brained him when I had the chance!” He frowned. “What’s a spree? Sorta like a squirt?”

  “In this instance, more like a puddle of piss.” Lillehorne shook his head. “Zounds, what nonsense! As far as I know, we fear no renewed murder spree, or squirt, or whatever. At least not from Albion or Corbett. I have to say, Nack…this puts a sodden rag on my belief in the Pin. Of course many of these articles are fantastical—the item about the ape rampaging through Parliament, for one—but I had thought there was a fig of truth in most of it.”

  “What?” Nack sounded shaken to the soul. “Y’mean Lady Everlust didn’t birth no two-headed child?”

  “Entertaining, but doubtful. This thing about Albion and Corbett…well, it’s true they’re connected in some way, but…” Lillehorne let it trail off. The golden-masked killer and phantom of the night had indeed taken Corbett from a guarded coach bearing the New York ass-pain to Houndsditch prison nearly three weeks ago, and from there both Albion and Corbett had seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. Then Hudson Greathouse and that irritating Grigsby girl had come to the Old Bailey wanting to know where Corbett was, and what could be said? Nothing but the truth, and it be damned: somewhere, if he were still alive, Matthew Corbett was in the clutches of a masked maniac who had already dispatched six victims by the sword.

  For that matter, what had happened to Greathouse and the girl, who evidently had accompanied that big oaf to London because she was in love with Corbett? Lillehorne had expected them to show back up at the Old Bailey to press their presence and oppress himself, but…no, they had not.

  It was obvious to Lillehorne that Lord Puffery had decided the association of Albion and Corbett still warranted publication to a bloodthirsty audience. How Lord Puffery had gotten that story to begin with was no doubt
easily explained by one of the coach’s guards giving over the tale for a few coins. He might have done the same, had he been confronted by Albion that night. But larger questions remained: what need did Albion have of Corbett, and where were they?

  The cups of hot coffee came. “Mr. Chomley says the bill is square,” the serving-girl offered. “He says he wants no trouble with the law.”

  “There shall be none,” Lillehorne replied, but he couldn’t help giving the girl’s ample bottom a push with his cane when she turned to walk away. In that instant of misdirected attention Nack grabbed up the Pin and squinted hard over its bounty of print in the yellow lamplight.

  “This has been a strange time,” said Lillehorne, who decided to sip his coffee and rest his eyes from any further inflammations of the names Albion and Corbett. “Judge Archer is still missing, you know. All that in the Gazette about him being kidnapped from the Cable Street Hospital in Whitechapel, and him suffering from a gunshot wound. Well, what was he doing in Whitechapel and who has him? Somebody with a grudge against him, to be sure. And then the clerk—Steven Jessley—doesn’t come in to work one morning and it seems the address he has given on his employment papers is false. No one can find him, either. It makes no sense! Nack, are you listening to me?”

  Obviously he was not. “Says here a wall was busted down off Union Street and they found an old sea trunk with ten shrunken heads in it. Can you fathom such a thing?”

  “It is beneath me,” said Lillehorne. “I no longer can trust Lord Puffery.”

  “Can you trust this?” Nack began to haltingly read. “Word comes to us…that the missin’ Italian opera star…Madam Alicia Candoleri…has been spirited away by her lover…the pirate Redjack Adams…taken to his secret hideout…Paradise Cove…more to come.” Nack looked up and grinned, a frightening sight. “Ain’t part of your job supposed to be findin’ her?” His grin fractured as his brain came up with a thought. “Hey. Might be she run off with this pirate and don’t want to be found.”