The Devil's Mask (25 page)

There's a seagull standing on the wall not three feet from my table, just the other side of this windowpane. If I move my head a fraction one way or the other its defiant outline bends and blurs a little. Imperfections in the glass. I raise my coffee cup, still watching the bird. Its beer-bottle neck twists this way, registering the movement with unblinking eyes, monumentally unconcerned.

Across the street, the curtains on the top floor are still drawn. Adam Carthy has yet to rise from his bed. He sleeps late most mornings, and retires early, but he's gradually regaining his strength. Anne is his greatest comfort, of course, and precisely because she does not try to comfort him. Young children don't accept weakness in their parents. Even when he was at his most broken, she could do nothing but ply him with normality, and demand that he wake up and read to her. His first words, on pulling through his month of darkness, were to Anne. ‘You need to learn for yourself,' he told her. ‘A is for anchovy.'

We have not returned to work. The clients have been understanding. No doubt Adam will take up the reins again, when he is well enough, but I shall be unable to assist in any official capacity. Although Justice Wheeler has apparently been persuaded to drop his charges against me, the part I played in helping Joseph Blue and Ivan Brook escape could
not go entirely unpunished. For paying the law so little respect, I have been struck from the list of Bristol's attorneys.

It was acknowledged that I had tried to right an injustice, and Ivan Brook has been exonerated in absentia, but Blue, wherever he may be, still stands charged with the murders of Captain Addison and Doctor Waring. He confessed to those crimes, after all. Though he made his righteous motive clear to me, I had still not fully believed him guilty, not until my brother John explained the notes – Carthy's and Addison's – to me. John wrote them himself. On hearing of the Captain's unbalanced demeanour, Father sent John to scare Addison off, or ensure his silence by other means. When John discovered Addison already dead – apparently strangled – he was fearful an investigation might focus unwanted further attention on the
Belsize
, and determined to rearrange the scene so as to suggest suicide. He never imagined Carthy's ransom note would fall into the same hands. Though loyal and willing, strategy has never been John's strongest suit.

But it's not just my wrongdoing in releasing the prisoners that has turned some of the town's masters against me. I am a murderer's son, and I am tainted. From his first interviews with the authorities, Father was at pains to discredit me by all means possible. He began with the secret of my mixed heritage. Nobody has referred directly to this accusation, save Sebastian, whose vehement denial had the odd effect of making me certain that Father had spoken the truth. It makes sense. The face I see leaning down to me in dreams has, for as long as I can remember, been of a dusky hue.

In any event, the disgrace brought upon our family has been enough to fulfil Father's prophecy: the Alexanders lost
no time at all in disentangling themselves. I have seen Lilly once, in the company of her mother, whose official line was that circumstances made it best that we put off our plans. Needless to say, her puckered little mouth twisted happily around the word ‘indefinitely'. The strange thing was the look I shared with Lilly as her mother laid down her decree: clear-browed relief. She giggled nervously when we said goodbye, and pushed a strand of sunlit hair behind her pink ear, and in that moment she had never appeared more serenely beautiful – or profoundly unsuited – to me.

If Mary has heard the rumours, and with her sense of what's what I've no doubt that she has, then she's not been outwardly concerned by them. She still regards me – like a joke she enjoys retelling – with a mixture of warmth and amusement, and bumps into me on purpose when delivering coffee to my table. Some folk swamp superficial concerns. She was the only person to tell me she was sorry to hear that my father had died.

He took his own life three weeks after his arrest. At least that's what the news-sheets reported. He'd been before the beak for a preliminary hearing the day before, and it is possible that he hanged himself after seeing the strength of the case against him. Perhaps it dawned upon him then that he would never again walk free – even following transportation. But I am not so sure. His true motive, like the real workings of this city, remains largely opaque to me. All I know is that he was not the sort to give up even in the face of a lost cause.

It's more likely, I think, that those he colluded with in the Western Trading Company were determined to limit their exposure to further damage. They are attempting to depict
the
Belsize
as a rogue ship, exploited by Addison to his own ends, and with the Captain dead, and the ship's log a fabrication, they may yet succeed in escaping much of the real blame. Addison's suicide note would indeed have played into their hands. If anything the slave-murder case has offered the city a distraction from the more endemic evil in its midst: so far the magistrates have appeared less than vociferous in pursuing the slave-trading charge. They say there is not enough evidence. When Mr Carthy is well enough to take up the cudgels again, he will at least have my chronological record of the Company's dealings, secure beneath Anne's rocking horse, to make a start with.

And Oni, the last slave woman, will bear testimony one day. The fear in her eye when my father appeared before her, even in chains. I blink now and see the bodies of her disinterred friends, splayed on the wet grass. My own father …

At present Oni is convalescing in Mrs Carthy's care. Upon hearing how Adam and the woman were found together, Carthy's wife lost no time in taking her in. Beatrice made the mistake of expressing distaste at this development, and found herself on the front step within the half hour. Oni now occupies the guest bedroom Aunt Beatrice vacated. In time, I imagine, she will want to return home. There will be money enough in Father's estate to see to that, come what may.

I say that Mary was the only person to offer me her condolences on the death of my father, but that's not quite true. I also received a letter from Edie Dyer, in which she commiserated with both my loss and involvement in such an abominable course of events, and praised, as she put it, the strength of mind it must have taken for me to see the thing
through. Anything but! I was propelled by many things. If a sense of duty towards Carthy, and via him to the truth, came into it, those motives were cut with low curiosity, antipathy toward my desk job, and a self-destructive streak. In her letter Edie also repeated her offer to comment on my drawings. That's three times she has asked now, and when I penned my reply I found myself, for the wrong reasons no doubt, agreeing to show her those few sketches I'd managed which might merit her attention.

And yet, on looking them over again last night in search of a workable selection, I discovered what I always do, that they are no good. The only thing that can be said for them is that they make me want to try again.

I glance back through the window, see again the seagull standing sentry on that wall. It lifts a wing and rams its beak deep into the soft feathers of its breast, so that for a moment, from behind, the gull appears to be headless. Then it stretches out its neck and flaps both wings, white and grey and
black-tipped
, with its beak stretched screamingly wide. These images will do for a start.

But before I return to my room in Carthy's house to scratch them down in ink, I have first to keep my appointment at the barber's shop. I have resolved to stick with a fuller head of curls, but they need trimming all the same.

Christopher Wakling was born in 1970. He has worked as a teacher and lawyer. His first novel was
On Cape Three Points
. He lives in Bristol with his wife and children.

ON CAPE THREE POINTS

BENEATH THE DIAMOND SKY

THE UNDERTOW

TOWARDS THE SUN