the portholes of a ship. Everything was dark oak and black leather. It was the same as might be the office of any man of means: a wide desk, chairs, a file cabinet, and on shelves bookcases with many leatherbound volumes that in happier times Matthew might have wished to prowl through.
The two things in this particular office that stood unpleasantly out were Simon Chapel seated behind the desk, the light slanting across his face, the bulk of shoulders and battering-ram head, and Berry Grigsby in a peach-colored dress with yellow lace trim. She was sitting in a chair off to the side. Her hands were bound behind her with white cords, and likewise was she bound around her waist to the back of the chair. Her hair was wild and tangled, her eyes were wild and very frightened, and a vivid blue bruise lay across her left cheekbone.
“Hello, Matthew,” Chapel said, his elbows on the desk’s green blotter and his fingers steepled. The light lay fiery in his spectacles. “Pardon me if I don’t stand up.”
Matthew had no witty remark to throw at him. His mouth was a dry well. He saw Charity LeClaire, as elegant and beautiful as she was wretched and soul-ugly, standing directly behind Berry. In a chair on the opposite side of the room, the lizardy Count Dahlgren in his elegant beige suit sprawled as if basking on a warm rock.
“Matthew,” Berry said hoarsely, her lower lip cut and swollen. He saw fingermarks on her neck where Carver had throttled the beginnings of a scream. Her eyes begged for rescue, as if this were the most terrible mistake and surely it would be all right, now that he’d come in like Sir Lancelot.
The knight of the moment noted something very disturbing indeed. On the floor beneath Berry’s chair was a spread of sailcloth. To protect the expensive brick-red rug, he thought. From what? Again, he dreaded to think.
“He was carryin’ this, sir,” said Bromfield, as he fished the notebook free and put it down on the desktop blotter. Chapel immediately picked it up and opened it to the page that had been dog-eared by the Masker’s thumb.
“Ah, yes. Very good.” Chapel’s smile was a wet gash. “The last book! Now I can rest easy, can’t I.” It was a statement, not a question.
Matthew saw there was one other person in the room. Over on the right, in the shadows that clung to the bookshelves like black cobwebs, was a boy of indeterminate age. Small-boned, pale of skin, and weirdly fragile. His silky hair was the color of dust. He wore the same uniform as his fellow students. His shirt-badge was the circle. He had a long thin scar running up through his right eyebrow into his hairline, and his eye on that side was a cold orb of milky-white.
“Restrain him,” said Chapel, as he paged through the notebook.
Bromfield had moved behind Matthew, and now he locked an arm around Matthew’s throat while Lawrence Evans displayed that an ex-clerk could have a suspiciously good relationship with a rope. Matthew’s arms were pulled back, the cord was tied around his wrists, knotted so hard he thought he would pee in his breeches, and then he was shoved down into a chair so graciously slid beneath his buttocks.
Chapel took snuff from a silver case. One pinch up each nostril, snort and snort, but only in the most gentlemanly way. He used a white lace handkerchief to brush the refuse from the coat of his suit, which was the color of rich brown tobacco anyway.
“I want to know,” he said as he folded his handkerchief and put it away, “from where you got this notebook. Will you tell me that, please?”
Matthew got his dry well watered enough to rasp, “Certainly. Very simply, the coroner had misplaced it. In a different drawer. I returned to his office and-”
“Why would he give it to you, sir?” The topaz eyes flared, just a fraction.
Careful, Matthew thought. “He trusts me. I told him I knew Miss LeClaire, and that I would give it to her. Of course I was going to bring it here.” He took advantage of the pause. “I told Mr. Pollard the same thing. He’s going to go speak to Mr. McCaggers.”
“He knows everything,” Bromfield said, which made Matthew want to kick him in the nuts.
“I know he knows everything,” Chapel replied irritably. “Perhaps not everything, but enough. All right, Matthew, let’s put aside the notebook for a moment. I want to talk to you about the Masker. Do you know who he is?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Are you positively sure about that?”
“I’m…I’m sure,” Matthew said, and damned his nervous stutter.
“Well, the reason I ask is that the Masker has killed three men who featured large in our project. You know what project I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“No sir, I don’t.” And he quickly added, “You don’t really have to tell me, either.”
“Sir?” It was back-stabbing Jeremy. “He asked me in the coach what my talent is. He called our university a fuckin’ school.”
“Watch your language, please. That’s demerits off.” Chapel returned his languid, scorching attention to Matthew’s sweat-sparkling face. “Who dog-eared that particular page?” Matthew went deaf and dumb. “The page with the orphans’ names,” Chapel prodded. “Who dog-eared that? Mr. McCaggers?”
“I suppose so, sir. Possibly I did it, I don’t exactly-”
“You are slobbering bullshit,” said Chapel, very quietly. It was odd, how sometimes a quiet voice could make your backbone shiver. “I think you do know who the Masker is. I think the Masker killed those three men particularly because of one of our endeavors. I think he has some grandiose scheme of vengeance, which means he has a connection to the Swanscott family.”
“The who, sir?” Matthew asked, though strangled.
“Mr. Bromfield, if he speaks without being spoken to again, I want you to make a violent response. Do mind the carpet, though. It’s new and I don’t want blood on it.”
“Yes sir.”
“I was saying,” Chapel continued, “that the Masker has a connection to the Swanscott family. Obviously. I think, you being an associate now of Mr. Hudson Greathouse and that highly lauded woman’s agency, that for whatever reason and whatever bizarre circumstances the Masker approached you because of that notice in the broadsheet. So it must be someone you know, and who knows your current association. He presented you with the notebook he’d taken off the body of Eben Ausley, that dead asshole. Now the Masker had a problem: he wished to know who might have engineered the adventure in Philadelphia, in…what was the date, Lawrence?”
“1697, sir.”
“Yes, quite correct. He wishes you to find out who put the plan together, so he might strike that man down. If you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re talking about myself. I don’t take very kindly to having to watch my throat, sir, even if this Masker would be stepping into a slaughterhouse were he to set one foot over that wall. So…I should like to know his name, that I might bring him here and empty his head of its brains. You’re going to tell me his name, sir. You’re going to tell me his name within one minute. Mr. Ripley?”
The boy moved sinuously from the shadows. Instantly Charity LeClaire grasped two handfuls of Berry’s hair and jerked her head back. Lawrence Evans, a jack of all evils, stepped forward and fixed some kind of metal clamp to Berry’s right eye which held the lids apart as much as she cried out and tried to struggle. For good measure, the elegant lady shoved a dirty leather glove into Berry’s mouth.
Ripley slid from his pocket a long and terribly sharp blue knitting needle.
Forty-Five
The boy floated like an angel of death. There was a grace about him, an ethereal blue glow. Or perhaps that was just light glinting off the needle.
He came steadfastly forward, neither in haste nor with time to waste. Berry tried to kick at him but he neatly and effortlessly sidestepped. He might have been a shadow, though he was fearfully real. When Berry attempted to overthrow the chair, the beautiful lady behind her simply applied more pressure to the red locks.
Ripley reached his victim. Without hesitation, he pushed forth the needle toward the center of Berry’s trapped eyeball.
“I’ll tell,” Matthew said.
“Stop, Mr. Ripley,” Chapel commanded. The boy immediately obeyed. His living eye on the side sinister, which was a black marble, twitched toward his headmaster. “Step back, but remain ready.” Chapel got to his feet, said to
