The King of Shadows, page 27
“Started?” He had money as well—a few pounds in a small brown bag—but he doubted it was enough to get anything started.
“Yes! A new life for us!” She looked up at the blue sky as if regarding the fatherly face of God. “We could decide where we wanted to live. A small cottage … in a village somewhere. And I don’t need much, Adam. Really I don’t. Just our being together … and no more shows, no more presenting ourselves as … as … you know.”
“Freaks,” he heard himself say, as if from a vast distance. “That,” she agreed, and now her damp joyful eyes turned again upon the object of her love and her future. “We are young, yes, but … my mother … rest her soul … was married when she was younger than myself. And you … younger, true … but that just means you have your whole life ahead of you. Ahead of us, I mean. We can do this, Adam. We really can do this.”
“Do what?” he asked … groggily, as if drugged on the very air he breathed.
“Escape,” she answered. “And find happiness. At long last, that wonderful thing. I have dreamed of it for so long … so long … and now, it is finally here.”
“Yes,” he said, dreamlike. “Finally here.”
“I know you feel the same way! The only thing I would ask … the only thing, and if you don’t want this then I would understand … but … could our cottage have a white picket fence?”
The world seemed to wheel away from him. He seemed to be suspended alone in a moment of time that stretched on and on, but in reality it was only a few seconds before he found his half-smile and his light-voiced “Of course.”
Her hand in his, her body pressed against him and her head leaning against his shoulder as if they were conjoined in another cruel play of God, Adam Black looked at the future and found it disagreeable. She was, after all, a freak. There was no getting around it. Susan Yarrow would forever be Ursalina, and there was no escape. Oh, she might wish to hide behind the walls of a country cottage protected by the arms of a white picket fence … but it was a fantasy. Laughable, even. And to drag him into that kind of life? It was one thing to play Dominus and troop about with these people for a time—and he felt that the time had suddenly become very short—but to consent to spend the rest of his life with a freak? An abomination of nature, is what she really was.
“I love you,” she said. “Oh Adam, I really, really do!” He heard distant thunder.
A storm was coming, far out on the western horizon: a darker blur of clouds encroaching upon the sunny blue.
Perhaps he had played too much of Dominus. Perhaps the coldness of the character had leeched itself within him, show by show, night after night, and he had hidden its approach from one and all, especially himself. But the singular thought in his fifteen-year-old brain was: escape.
Yes. Escape, while he might.
And another thought intruded, unbidden and surprising in its sudden demand: devil in the blood.
What Mayor Keeler had said about him after the incident with Davy. Devil in the blood, to do such a thing.
What? Adam asked himself. Devil in the blood to survive? Devil in the blood to want to live a normal life? Devil in the blood to stand up against all the clutches that were trying to drag you down and destroy you before you had a real chance to live?
That kind of devil in the blood?
The thunder spoke, a hushed rumble. But soon … the storm was coming.
As they walked back to the camped caravan with Susan continuing to voice her laughable fantasies of happy contentment, the Black Crow’s son had made his decision.
“You know,” he said easily, “since we are going to be together … we should keep our money together. Don’t you think?”
“Our money?”
“Yes. I would like to believe that I as the head of the house—I mean to say, the cottage—would be entrusted with the financials. It would be heartfelt to me if you would allow me to add your money to mine, and to know that we are one in all things.”
“One in all things,” she repeated, and she smiled. “I like that, very much.”
“I hoped you would,” he said.
And in the rainstorm that pounded down that night after the show had ended and the field was a mass of mud that would lock up the wheels for at least a day, Adam Black crept out of his small cot in the little room afforded him in the Saulsburys’ wagon. He dressed, put some clothes in a satchel along with the enlarged bag of money, and he found his hand reaching for the robe of Dominus.
Take it, or not?
Why take it? What was it a reminder of? Ah, yes … power … and escape.
And it was of nice fabric, as well. He might sell it if he chose. But it was a pity to leave it to the next fool, for it had suited him so well.
He pushed the garment into the satchel, buttoned everything up, and eased out into the driving downpour.
He went away into the night as he had come, slogging through the muck step-by-step, his tricorn streaming a waterfall, and the force of nature beating down upon his shoulders like the heavy strop of God.
Twenty-three
A knock at the door, and an answer.
“I’m sorry, young man, but the Portress family has moved away. No, I have no idea where they’ve gone, but my wife and I moved in at the first of July. The house was vacant, I believe, since the end of May.”
And that was that.
The Black Crow’s son returned to the old dray horse he’d been able to buy in a village a few miles south of Choptom, and facing a continuance of a long dusty road he pulled the steed under the shade of an elm tree and pondered his path. Neville and Sarah Portress and their two sons and daughter gone, destination unknown. Leeds was to him an empty pocket in a tattered coat. Thus the time had come for another decision, and he found it when he brought forth a small business card, stained yellow and stippled by God’s rain.
He kicked his heels into the horse’s flanks. With a weary snort the animal started off.
At the length of another fourteen days, stopping at various inns and barns along the way, the horse on its last legs brought him to the outskirts of London, where it suddenly halted and—being of an accommodating nature and having at least a modicum of respect for its master—allowed him to slide from the saddle before it took a final unsteady lurch to the side of the road and with a wheeze like the dying note of a broken church organ fell to its knees amid the sumptuous weeds. No strength of pulling at the bridle could raise the animal from its death stance, and therefore Adam with his satchel in hand turned away from the task and began to walk toward the dark pall of coalsmoke that hung above the great sprawling city.
He was able to travel the last three miles on the back of a lumber wagon, and there he watched London grow and grow around him, from outlying cottages to stone buildings, from dirt track to crushed cockleshell. Then the city seemed to swell about him in a rush of dirty bricks, chimneys spouting plumes of orange, yellow, red and black smoke, the highest roofs and windows he had ever seen, walls like fortresses on all sides, and a seething of humanity that made him think of an anthill kicked over by a steel-toed boot. It was both terrifying and fascinating in equal measures, and the deeper the wagon carried him into this frenzied picture of urban civilization the more he realized he might be in a foreign land, so little did he know of such a vast metropolis. Everywhere he looked from his seat beside the gnarled old driver he saw streets intersecting like a mad maze, and upon those streets every manner of cart, wagon, and carriage with people in their hundreds darting about as if on urgent missions of life and death.
He had no map nor true sense yet of London’s size. “Can you direct me to Hightower Lane?” he asked the driver, over the tumult of the city’s noise that sounded like both a crash of drums and the strident blare of trumpets.
“Never ’eard of it,” came the snaggle-toothed reply. “I’m bound for the sawmill at Toombs Crossin’. Doubt if there’s where you’re pleasin’ to go. Best get off here, I’d say.”
“Right,” Adam decided. Then: “Would you stop the wagon?”
The codger looked at him and gave a grin that made his left eye cock. “Jump,” he said.
It was not a difficult leap, as the lumber wagon was currently rolling at a walking pace due to the jam of traffic that stretched ahead to an interminable distance, hard to accurately discern due to yellow waves of bitter-smelling smoke wafting across the thoroughfare. Adam grasped his satchel, put a hand upon his tricorn so as not to lose it in the endeavor and jumped. He came down in a pile of horse figs that swallowed his boots up to the ankles.
He had arrived.
It took him all the day to locate one-thirty-three Hightower Lane, not for want of asking citizens on the street and shopkeepers in their stalls. Eventually he was able to narrow the location to a northeastern neighborhood, yet as evening fell and the lamplighters were at work touching flame to the oil wicks he still had not found the exact address. He noted however that he had sometime in the late afternoon entered an area far removed from the struggle, smoke and chaos of the central city. Here the streets were quiet but for the soft passage of a few persons dressed in finery and the polite clopping of horses employed in pulling carriages painted in shiny black lacquer with red and gold accents. Here the corner lamps seemed to glow with a haloed radiance, and from the houses themselves—with their bannistered staircases leading up to the doors from the lane— the lamps burning from the windows not curtained held not welcome but a question delivered with a polite lift of the eyebrows, that question being: do you belong here?
In time he found the desired number, nearly at the end of the lane, and with but a short hesitation Adam ascended the stairs and used the door’s gilded knocker to announce himself.
It was opened in a moment by a middle-aged woman with curly gray hair and an austere visage. She was wearing a black uniform of some kind, with a flourish of ruffles at the front.
Her pencilled eyebrows lifted. “Yes?”
“I’m looking for—” He showed her the card before going any further.
She took it, regarded it and him—her gaze being snagged for a few seconds by the satchel—then regarded the card once more. “Name?” she asked.
“Adam—” He stopped again. “I am called Dominus,” he said.
“Wait,” she told him, and the door was closed. He waited.
Two carriages rolled past in the time it took. Then the door was opened again, and with a final rather disdainful inspection of the boy from top to bottom to top she stepped back to allow him entry. As he crossed the threshold she gave a small head bow at the base of the neck and then she said, “Follow.”
He did, across polished timbers and magnificent carpets, the walls adorned with framed art, the rooms wide and high and holding immaculate furniture the like of which the Black Crow’s son had never seen before. And at last the woman opened a pair of broad oak doors that made absolutely no sound in their opening, and Adam was escorted into a dining room ablaze with multiple tapers that ringed a huge crystal chandelier.
“Here is the boy,” a man said.
There were three at the long gleaming table, which held the ravaged platters of what must’ve been a splendid supper. Not much remained of the central roast beef but a few scraps in a pool of blood. In a pair of silver candelabras the candles had burned down about halfway.
“Sir,” the woman said, and when she stopped Adam halted as well.
Two men in dark suits and a woman in a lavender-hued gown sprinkled with gemstones occupied the table. One man sat across from the woman—a young woman, or youngish, for she wore a high white wig and her face was so heavily rouged and whitened that her true age was a mystery—and the second man was seated at the head of the table. He held a glass of a pale brown liquid in his right hand, and downing the drink he stood up.
“Dominus!” The craggy, handsome face of Gavin Flay smiled, causing lines to deepen on either side of the fulllipped mouth. “A surprise, to be sure! Come, come!” He motioned with the glass in his hand. And to Adam’s escort, a curt: “Leave us, Lillian.”
The woman withdrew and the doors were silently closed. “Are you hungry?” Flay inquired.
“Well … yes, sir, I could eat.”
“Then sit down! There, beside Ember! And my friend Markam is across the table. Please meet … what is your real name again?”
“It is—”
“No matter, Dominus suits you. My friends, meet Dominus! Yes, sit down!” Flay picked up a little bell beside his plate and rang it in the direction of an open doorway behind him. By the time Adam had set aside his satchel and taken the luxuriously cushioned chair next to the painted woman who smelled faintly of something burning a thin, sallow uniformed man with a bald head that gleamed under the tapers emerged from the doorway. Instructions were given to this servant to bring another place setting, another glass, and another bottle of brandywine.
When Adam was settled and Flay had taken his own seat, the woman named Ember regarded the new arrival with frank interest, her dark brown eyes under her white-powdered brows seemingly searching his every secret crevice. She spoke in a soft, cultivated voice that might have issued from an angel’s throat: “This is a boy, Gavin?”
“Fifteen years, as I recall. Isn’t that correct?”
“Yes sir,” Adam said.
“Tall for the age,” said Markam, a lanky, languid-looking gent, his black hair ashine with some kind of oil and tied in a queue with a simple black ribbon. A pinch of snuff was poised at the flare of his nostrils. “Extremely tall. Long, I mean to say.”
“The face and head,” Ember went on. “Yes, long. The hands and fingers … look at those.”
When Adam shifted uneasily in his chair, his cheeks reddening, Flay said, “Oh, let’s not put the young man under such a microscope! Have your manners fled the room? Ah, here’s your plate and utensils, Dominus! Um … I presume you are familiar with a knife and fork?”
This question more than nettled him. The man was obviously wealthy and well-bred, but Adam had not come this distance through thick and thin to be insulted. “Sir,” he said stiffly, his face a pallid mask of stone, “I am neither an idiot nor a centerpiece for your table. If my presence displeases you and your friends, I am sure I can find another supper.”
A silence reigned.
But only for a short time. Flay laughed a burst and then the others laughed—Markam’s a bray, Ember’s a bell—and the master of the manse clapped his hands together. Still chortling in the throat, Flay said, “Spoken as strongly as the nature I hoped you possessed! Let me ask though, with some trepidation … you won’t put a curse on us, will you?”
All three stared at him, waiting.
Quite suddenly he knew what they wanted. What they were waiting for.
It was, as Ambrose Saulsbury had said: A character fantastic. Someone to inflame the curiosity and dominate the imagination. Someone, perhaps, from the darker side. From a world the vicars and the saints would fear to walk.
These three, in this fine dining room, wanted—needed, perhaps—the spice of the unknown to go along with the bloody roast beef.
And smoothly—very smoothly indeed—the Black Crow’s son slipped from being Adam Black back into the flesh of Dominus.
“A curse?” he asked in a quiet voice, somewhere between the identities. “Sir … that is the purpose of my life.” He brought up a cold smile, just as on the stage though here the illumination was from above and not below. “My purpose,” he continued, leaning slightly toward his host, “is to place a curse upon all who cross my path, the guilty and the innocent alike. Surely you must have known that, when you invited me here.”
Gavin Flay stared solemnly at him.
Then the man smiled and lifted a glass golden with newly poured brandywine.
“Guilty,” he said.
And three seconds later Ember and Markam applauded as if this was the most wonderful admission in the world.
Flay got up, brought the bottle to Adam and poured him a full glass. He put a hand upon the boy’s thin shoulder. There was power in the grip. “Well said, young man. Eat your fill, and the bottle is at your disposal. I must ask … are you here alone, or with your … um … associates?”
“Alone, sir. I decided my time with the show was done.”
“Ah. Your time with that show was done, you mean.”
“Sir?”
The grip strengthened still. “We will have much time to talk. I presume you need a place? To stay, I mean? There’s an apartment toward the back of the house. I’ll have Lillian prepare it for you, if you like.” He went on before Adam could respond. “You’ll find it very comfortable. I’ve enjoyed many guests. All right?”
Adam nodded. His last sleep had been twenty hours ago and the walking today told his legs they weren’t going anywhere else tonight except that apartment.
“Fine. Pardon me, I’ll speak to Lillian.” With a last hard squeeze, Flay released his hand and left the room.
A few moments after Flay was gone, and Adam digging into the remnants of the beef and having a drink of a liquor that seared his mouth, Ember regarded him once more.
“I can’t believe,” she said, “that you’re only fifteen years old. How long you are!”
Adam didn’t know how to respond, so he simply shrugged and kept eating.
She leaned closer, and closer still, and whispered in his ear: “I smell shit.”
His boots, he realized. The walking had not scraped them completely clean.
“But I don’t mind that,” she said. “Not at all.” And under the table her hand gave his thigh a pat.
