The Devil's Mask Read Free

ladder for his next visit, but I can see the shop’s front door from my bedroom window, and have been a patron for six years!
    That morning – on which I first heard mention of the Belsize – began like any other. I spied the only free seat in Thunderbolts, sidestepped through the crowd and claimed it. Bleary-eyed, I looked down. My flies were undone. Should I risk drawing attention to the oversight by doing the buttons up, or reach for a news-sheet to spread across my thighs? Mary was at my side before I’d done either, bearing my regular order on a raised tray. Mercifully, her attention seemed to be fixed on the back of my head.
    â€˜Bad dream? Or have they laid a hedge down the middle of the street?’
    I smoothed my wretched curls with one hand, leaving the other in my lap.
    â€˜You’d do better flattening that with an iron,’ said Mary, winking. ‘I’ll lend you mine, if you’re good.’
    For a horrible moment I did not know what she was referring to. My lap-hand leapt up to reveal my innocence, but the waitress was already turning away. Bugger bed-hair! Itwas Lilly’s fault, for encouraging me to grow it long. I resolved to visit the barber’s at lunchtime.
    â€˜Thank you, Mary,’ I said to the waitress’s retreating back.
    Mornings present a circular problem. Until I’ve had a cup of coffee, I can only ever manage this confused, half-awake state. At its worst, the torpor glues my head to the pillow. But to get that first cup I have to prise myself from bed. Which means that although my desk in Adam Carthy’s office is in the same building as my own bedroom (lodgings were part of the deal as an articled clerk: I’ve not found the time or inclination to move out since qualifying) I invariably manage to arrive at work late.
    My pocket watch suggested I was already late that morning.
    But I’ve been a bona fide attorney for six months now. Though my work – and wages – still come through Carthy, it is surely up to me to decide exactly when I do it? As ever, the coffee – venomous, scalding – worked its wonders on my powers of reason, or at least my instinct for self-justification.
    I sipped at my cup, considering the travails waiting for me back across the street.
    As the week before, and the week after next, I would be spending much of my day sifting through dock records. Reconciliation. Carthy won the Dock Company as a client recently, and consequently the job of cross-checking port records for the past umpteen years, in the hope of rooting out and chasing down ships and traders who hadn’t paid their dues. This has necessitated a thorough examination of the documented history of port fees paid and import duties levied and bills-of-lading disclosed and wharfage accounts and … I found myself yawning and reaching for my cup again, nothalfway through the list. A forced march, infantry work, which Carthy, the cavalry, passed straight on to me, eyes blazing beneath bristling brows (they own his face, Carthy’s magnificent eyebrows) when he described the importance of the job. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite muster my master’s reformist zeal. Where Carthy saw an opportunity to help the Dock Company bring the port into the new century, I could not help thinking that the recently formed authority was made up of the very people responsible for bogging the city down in the corruption of the century just gone. The Society of Merchant Venturers, who also make up most of the City Council, as it happens: the same folk who set the port duties so prohibitively high (double London, three times Liverpool), exacerbating the problem of fee-avoidance in the first place.
    Any consternation I might have shared with Carthy in the face of such entrenched crookedness was dampened by the fact that I, and not he, was the man facing months amongst the document crates.

Two
    Better equipped for that morning, at least, I drained my