“Just so you know,” he said, “and bear well the fact, that I have beaten you, boy. No one will witness against me. Not yesterday, not today, nor tomorrow. And why might that be? Possibly because they all know-all of them, they all do-that they deserved what they got? That they took themselves to be more mighty than they were, and I brought them back down to size. Well, someone had to do it! Had to teach those boys a lesson, and one they won’t ever forget! That’s what my job is, that’s my profession!”
Matthew couldn’t even begin to respond to this tipsy tirade, so he remained silent. The old anger of even two days before had faded, though. He had begun to realize that his life was ahead of him, with all its opportunities and adventures, and Eben Ausley was part of his past. Maybe the man had escaped proper justice and maybe that was neither fair nor right, but Matthew had done all he could. He was ready now, after all this time, to let it go.
“Beaten you,” Ausley repeated, his mouth wet with saliva. “Beaten you.” He nodded, his eyes glazed and heavy-lidded, and then he lurched away from Matthew and staggered west along Barrack Street, steering himself with his walking-stick and his lantern flickering at his side. For a moment Matthew thought he was truly a pathetic spectacle. And then he came to his senses, spat on the ground to clear the bad taste out of his mouth, and continued on his northward trek.
He was shaking a little from the encounter. A solid blow from that stick would’ve crowned him good and proper. He pulled his mind away from Ausley and looked ahead, thinking about what he was going to say to John Five. Maybe he should refuse to make a comment on the man’s destination until he followed Reverend Wade a second night. He wondered what Mrs. Herrald would suggest. After all, she was the expert in such-
He took one more pace and stopped.
He listened carefully to the night, his head cocked. Was it his imagination, or had he just heard glass break?
Behind him a distance. He looked back.
The street was deserted.
If he’d indeed heard glass break, the sound had come from Barrack Street.
Ausley’s lantern, Matthew thought. The drunken fool had dropped his lantern.
I saw you following me, he’d said.
I saw you step back around the corner.
A dog was barking a few streets over. From somewhere else, a man was singing in a ragged and incomprehensible voice, the noise fading in and out as if carried by the whims of the night breeze.
Matthew stared back toward the corner of Barrack Street.
I saw you following me.
“Ausley?” he called, but there was no reply. He walked to the corner and looked up the dark length of Barrack. And louder: “Ausley!”
Leave the bastard, Matthew thought. Lying drunk up there, that’s all. Just leave him and go home.
It was amazing how alone one could feel in a town of five-thousand souls.
Matthew’s throat clenched. He thought he saw something moving in there. A darkness against the darkness, hard at work.
He put his hand on the dirty lantern that hung from the cornerpost and lifted the lamp off its nail. He had an instant of thinking that he ought to be right now shouting for a constable but he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. His heart slamming, he began walking cautiously along Barrack Street.
There the dim light found Eben Ausley lying on the sidewalk on his back, the broken lantern nearby. A little red flame still burned in a puddle of wax. Next to Ausley’s right hand was the walking-stick, as if it had slipped from a nerveless grasp.
Matthew tried to say Get up but at first he couldn’t speak. He tried again and still only managed a hoarse whisper.
The man did not move, and as Matthew stood over him and shone the blue eye of light down upon the body it was clear-terribly, bloodily, throat-cuttingly clear-that Eben Ausley had seen his final turn of cards.
As repulsed as Matthew was, as much as panic wanted to shoot along his nerves and send him running, the cool analytical center of himself took control. It sharpened his senses and steeled his will, and so he stood looking down at the body and taking impressions with the same clinical and almost distant judgment as did him well at his games of chess.
Ausley’s throat had been brutally slashed, that much was perfectly clear. The blood was still jumping. So too were Ausley’s hands, which involuntarily shivered as if finding that the banisters on the stairs leading down to Hell were icy. His mouth was open in shock, as were his eyes, which had become bloodshot and gleamed like sea-damp oysters. A knife had been at work on Ausley’s face as well as throat, for Matthew saw the glistening red shapes around his eyes as the blood oozed down. If not fully expired the man had only seconds to live, as his flesh was taking on that chalk-colored waxy look so popular among corpses. There was nothing to be done for him short of sewing his head back on his shoulders, and Matthew doubted even Benjamin Owles could save this suit.
As Matthew stared down at the dying man, himself in a kind of trancelike state, he was aware of a slow, almost liquid movement in the dark beyond.
Matthew saw it then: a shape, all black and black within black, sliding out of a doorway twenty feet up Barrack Street. Matthew lifted his lantern, caught the white blur of a face, and saw that the man-or was it a man?-wore a midnight-hued cloak with a high collar and a black stocking-cap covering the head. In that instant of realizing he was looking at the Masker, he saw the object of his attention begin running with a burst of speed toward the Broad Way, and it was only then that Matthew got his throat working and the cry came up into the night: “Help! Help! Constable!”
The Masker not only killed quickly, but he was quick on the run. By the time a constable got here, the Masker would be in Philadelphia. “Help! Somebody!” Matthew shouted, but he was already reaching down for Ausley’s walking-stick. He let out one more “Constable!” so Dippen Nack might hear it in his bedchamber, and then he had to save his breath because he shot forward in pursuit.
Sixteen
At a full run the Masker wheeled to the left at the corner onto New Street and Matthew followed, narrowly missing banging his knee against a watering-trough.
It was true that Matthew was neither a sportsman nor a swordsman, but it was equally true that he could run. This skill had probably been refined during his days as a waterfront urchin before he was forcibly taken to the orphanage, as it took the fleet of foot to steal food and dodge billyclubs. Now it served him well, as he was catching up to his quarry; also paramount in his mind was the fact that it was safer to keep the Masker in front of him, yet he was ready at any second for the man to whirl around with an outstretched blade. Ausley didn’t need the walking-stick any longer, but Matthew clung to it like life.
“Constable!” Matthew shouted again, and now the Masker took a severe turn to the left and, cloak flying, disappeared into the space between the silversmith’s and the house next door. Matthew lifted the lantern with its paltry light; his pace faltered and he had only seconds to decide whether to go in or not before the Masker would be lost.
He held up the stick to ward off an attack, took a breath, and darted to the chase. The little passageway was so narrow it nearly scraped his shoulders. He came to another opening and found himself in someone’s garden. A brick pathway led off to the right, with a white wall and a gate on the left. A dog began barking furiously to the right and in that direction the voice of some frightened citizen shouted, “Who’s there? Who’s there?”
Matthew could hear shouts also from over on Barrack Street. Ausley’s body had been discovered. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought. He began running again along the pathway and in a moment passed under a rose arbor. Then there was another wall ahead of him with the wooden gate open, and when Matthew went through this there was a holler, “I see you, damn you!” from the house on his right. With a flash and a bang a pistol discharged from an upper window and a lead ball shrieked past Matthew’s ear. He didn’t wait for further introductions; he took to his heels, went over a waist-high picket fence, and then the dog that had been barking lunged at him with snapping teeth and wild eyes but its night-chain yanked it back before flesh could be served.
Now Matthew didn’t fear the Masker so much as whatever else lay in wait, but going through another gate he came around a privy where the lantern’s light picked out a dark shape climbing over a stone wall about eight feet
