CHAPTER 37

THE DROPPED MASK AND THE DEAD CITIZEN

It was a good thing for Issachar Templebane’s digestion that he had not been able to see Mountfellon in his carriage as he drove away from their meeting: the moment the door was clapped shut and he was alone, he had discarded the anger that had clouded his face as easily as a carnival-goer drops a mask, stretched back in the seat and smiled.

He was still smiling as he exited his carriage and entered his house on Chandos Place in the west of the city, a handsome Georgian building whose windows were glazed in opaque milk-glass for privacy. He did not notice the Raven finding a perch on the crest of the roof of the house opposite. It had followed the coach easily as it had wound its way west through the City and on past the dangerous jumble of Seven Dials and the equally illfavoured rookeries of St Giles until it had turned north into the more civilised streets of Marylebone.

Mountfellon walked through the hall and on through the long ballroom behind it. He descended the stone stairs to the basement and knocked on a door.

“Entrez, Milord,” said a voice from within, faint and scratchy as a dry nib on parchment.

Mountfellon entered another long room, at the end of which was a very old man in a sea-green coat sitting at a desk snowed under with papers and books. The collar of the coat was tall enough to brush his ears, and his face was lined and twisted like a walnut. But the eyes which looked back at Mountfellon were made young by the incorruptible thirst for knowledge that blazed out of them.

Behind him was a cage.

“Good day, Citizen,” said Mountfellon.

It was a peculiarity of their relationship, which was one of equals, that the old Frenchman called Mountfellon “Milord” whereas Mountfellon called him “Citizen”, the peculiarity being that though both used the words in irony, neither resented it.

“Well?” said The Citizen. “Do we have the key?”

Mountfellon was a man of many secrets but his partner, the hidden resident of Chandos Place, was the deepest secret of all: The Citizen was the reason all the windows were opaque, for he was not just old–nearly ninety by Mountfellon’s reckoning–but he was also dead. He was not dead in the sense of being a mysteriously reanimated corpse, he was merely dead in the eyes and mind of the outer world. That world was convinced that he had died a long time ago, publicly and incontrovertibly separated from his head by a guillotine, itself an ironic fate for a former Jacobin and beheader of kings and aristocrats.

Mountfellon never called him by his real name. He was just The Citizen.

“The key is a stratagem for the foolish by which they seek to draw out those who covet their secrets,” said Mountfellon. “It was a lure, as you conjectured. The key is not a key, I am almost certain of it.”

“And the girl?”

“The girl is gone. She did not succeed.”

The Citizen betrayed no interest in the fate of Lucy. He just shrugged his shoulders.

“Tant pis. And were you sufficiently foolish?”

Mountfellon smiled.

“I was very foolish and very haughty and very convincingly angry. Issachar Templebane thinks me a perfect aristo, blinded by arrogance and a so thoroughgoing dupe, and The Oversight is now, I would say, aware of me.”

“Good,” said The Citizen. “We shall teach them a thing or two about luring and the long game. And now what shall you do?”

Mountfellon was collecting paper and pens and brushes from a bureau.

“And now I shall be very industrious for the next few days. We may not have grasped the Blood Key but all was not a failure, for I walked into the great treasure house of The Oversight with my eyes open, did I not?”

“Indeed. You may have seen things of great power whose purpose we do not yet understand,” said the Citizen. Mountfellon nodded.

“It would be a crime against science and rational thought were I not to catalogue them while they sit clear in my head before the freshness of recollection passes. And you, my friend, your strength is still on the wane?”

The Citizen shrugged.

“I have an arrangement for the full moon, the same I engaged in before I came to this country. If the rendezvous is kept, my vigour shall be quite recruited as before. I shall then make the creature an offer to remain here permanently.”

“A wise precaution,” said Mountfellon, smiling without mirth. “And your studies are deep enough to keep your mind from the pain, I trust?”

The Citizen tapped a book in front of him and jerked his thumb back towards the cage. On closer inspection it appeared to contain a naked man whose skin was green. His mouth was gagged and he lay curled like a dog on the floor.

“I have been reading Denys’s monograph on blood transfusion again,” said The Citizen. “I would still be interested to see what would happen were we to swap blood with one of them one day…”

Mountfellon took his equipment and headed for the stairs.

“One day, Citizen, one day. And we will get to that day one plan at a time. I must go and work.”

And with a half bow he closed the door behind him, leaving the dead man to his studies.