Authors: Paul Finch
Following
Abbab
, the Amazing
Mandelsons
came on; acrobats and knockabouts in
fleshings
and greasepaint.
They wore so much greasepaint that their faces could have been masks. They hurled each other around for several minutes before the audience began to hurl abuse. Only feats of prodigious strength brought renewed interest. The
Mandelsons
, three brothers, could easily form human pyramids, stand on each other’s shoulders or turn somersaults. None of them was particularly large or strongly-built however. In fact, musculature was oddly lacking.
Professor
Feltencraft
followed with more facetiae, this time a pleasant little ditty about wayward women of the cloisters. Crude verse followed crude verse, but made no impression on the two robbers, aside from setting Ketch fidgeting. Bobber glanced up at him, knowing that patience was not his sidekick’s prime virtue. Ketch, physically the larger and more brutish of the two, had started out in the Grenadiers. As a career, it hadn’t proved successful. Badly wounded at Waterloo, he’d later been sent to India, where he’d come down with malaria. Even now, twenty years later, he still had regular bouts, which, in his own words, sent him “clear off his trolley!” It was at times like these when Ketch most enjoyed his work. Sweating, head bursting – none of that mattered. The main thing was it was easier to pull the trigger on someone when you suddenly thought they were one of Napoleon’s Old Guard.
Feltencraft
stepped back again, this time for the “wondrous
warblings
of that querulous queen”, the Singing Violet. A thin woman in a purple gown, a butterfly mask held to her face, came forward and singing. Her delivery was more graceful than the master of ceremonies’, if a trifle raucous, but the tone of the song was largely the same. She told a tale of abuse and chastisement at the hands of a cruel and “voracious” master.
As the obscenities flowed, the audience leaped up and down, their shrill squeals set to raise the roof. The two thieves said nothing. In fact, they were growing tense. Sweat glistened on Ketch’s florid brow. Bobber nudged him. “Soon, me old mate, soon.”
Ketch nodded tightly.
The final performance of the evening was by far the most popular. ‘Flash-dancers’ Dora and Fanny came on-stage to thunderous applause. They were dressed as Parisian washer-women and commenced a furious can-can, which as they wore only garters and stockings beneath their voluminous skirts, was the crowning glory of the evening’s sauciness. It seemed odd that they were masked, again decked as butterflies in that curious masquerade style. Perhaps they were harridans, Bobber thought. It scarcely mattered. Who was looking at their faces? And what they may have liked in elegance, they made up for in
vigour
. The dance lasted ten minutes, with the artistes scarcely missing a step and never once tiring. So great was the
clamour
after they’d finished, that they came back on for an encore, and went through the whole routine again.
Bobber and Ketch endured it in strained silence. It seemed that another hour had passed before the curtain finally fell and the noisy audience streamed back out to the gin-houses. The thieves held their ground as folk shouldered roughly past. Only when they were finally alone could they could truly see what a drab and litter-strewn place
Feltencraft’s
gaff was. Tough on him, really – he wasn’t going to be sprucing it up with tonight’s takings.
They drew their neckerchiefs over their faces, pulled down the brims of their hats and walked to the stage. Clambering up via the piano stool, they lifted the curtain and slid underneath. It was dark back there, but lantern light flickered from a stone arch to one side. Bobber drew his weapons and moved towards it. Ketch covered his back, blunderbuss at the ready.
A moment later, they were descending stone steps into a small, damp room with no furnishings. They halted and listened. There wasn’t a sound, but various doorways led off. It was from one of these that the lamplight shone, and beyond it, the thieves saw another chamber. Inside, a lantern sat on a table, showing a wall of old cupboards and in one corner a screen with faded Chinese etchings on it.
Bobber ventured forward and kicked the screen away. It fell with a clatter. The Singing Violet was standing behind it, fully clothed and masked, but apparently frozen in shock. Bobber jammed the pistol under her chin.
“Where’s your boss!” he hissed. She neither spoke, nor moved. “Tell me!”
Still, she said nothing, and enraged, he drew back the cutlass and cut her with it; once, twice, thrice! At the same time, Ketch weighed in with the blunderbuss, smashing its butt against her head. She went down in a heap under the flurry of blows.
When they stood back, they were panting.
“How’s that for being chastised?” Ketch said.
The next set of steps led upwards again, to a longer gallery. Pegs ran down its wall, with a variety of gaudy costumes hanging on them. At the far end, another door stood open. Candle-light flickered beyond and they could hear a voice; the voice of a man counting. They looked at each other and nodded. However, half way down they stopped. Previously unseen amid the hanging costumes, they noticed
Alab
Abbab
, the Rubber Man. He was seated against the wall, legs crossed, hands joined. The eyes were closed in his odd grey face.
They stared at him wonderingly. Then Ketch snickered and, raising a heavy boot, slammed
Abbab’s
head against the bricks with a
crunch
of cracking bones.
The counting in the next room abruptly ceased.
“Quick!” Bobber said, making a dash for the door.
They crashed through it together, but everything going on in there was happening in a whirl of speed. A central table was heaped with coins, but Professor
Feltencraft
was in the act of sweeping them into a sack and rushing for an open panel behind him. At the same time two seated figures leaped up and blocked the intruders’ path; one was the masked woman from the theatre’s front door, the other a man in a bottle-green tail-coat, who they hadn’t noticed. He too was masked.
Ketch
barrelled
into them, while Bobber jumped to one side, cocked his pistol and took a shot at the escaping professor. His aim was true. A second before he disappeared through the
panelling
,
Feltencraft
was thrown sideways, grabbing at his arm. His sack of money hurtled to the floor and exploded.
Ketch laughed crazily and punched the woman on the side of the head, sending her staggering back and dislodging her mask. Only then did he see why she’d been wearing it. The laugh died in his throat.
Bobber meanwhile was grappling with the man in the green coat. He hit the bloke with his pistol, and ran him through with the cutlass. It had no initial effect. Yanking it free, Bobber skewered the bloke a second time, but incredibly the fight went on. Only when the thief stepped back and slashed broadly, striking the head clean off, did resistance falter. The man didn’t die, however. Instead, he jerked wildly about and began to play an invisible piano.
Bobber felt madness screaming inside his head, but no more so than Ketch, who was still
paralysed
by the woman’s face.
For it had dried and rotted – only shreds of pasty flesh covered the yellowing bones.
When she stumbled towards him, he had no hesitation in raising the blunderbuss and firing pointblank. It sounded like a cannon in the enclosed room, and the fusillade of metal flung her back against the wall with savage force.
But when the smoke cleared, a new horror awaited him. He peered at the corpse, his eyes almost starting from their sockets. Blindly he grabbed at Bobber, who was still transfixed by the headless pianist. Only slowly did Bobber look round – and register the various cogs and wheels now visible through the woman’s shattered ribs. He looked back at the pianist – and noticed the springs hanging from the stump.
“Clockwork,” he said in a daze. “He’s stuffed ‘
em
with clockwork!”
Feltencraft
, still leaning on the wall and clutching his wounded arm, roared with laughter. “You bloody fools ... I said I was a genius. You think I’d get living acts for the money I pay!”
They gazed at him dumb-struck – before the pianist suddenly stopped his playing and turned sharply to face them; before the smashed woman began to twitch and turn and drag herself back to her feet.
Bobber and Ketch didn’t wait to see more, but tore off down the gallery. Half way along, the Indian Rubber Man scuttled out, his head misshapen and hanging at a crazy angle. They bounded over him.
At the foot of the next flight of steps, they staggered into the room where they’d killed the Singing Violet. Now she was back on her feet, hacked and tattered, mask askew. At the sight of her, Ketch cried out, but Bobber grabbed up the lantern and threw it. It hit her square on, shattered and ignited. In a second she was blazing from head to toe. She still tottered towards them, arms out-stretched. Ketch swung the table at her, driving her back, but Bobber ducked around and made for the door. As he got there, two of the cupboards flew open and out came Dora and Fanny, dancing wildly.
It could have been comical had Dora not kicked Ketch in the legs as he tried to run past, and Fanny kick him in the head as he hit the floor. Bobber watched helplessly as his mate scrabbled and screamed and tried to get to his feet. But even when he did, they kicked him down again. They were kicking him repeatedly, with bone-breaking force.
Bobber turned and fled up the final flight to the darkened stage. And that was where the Amazing
Mandelsons
were waiting for him.
Like Ketch, Bobber, for all his violence, was no match for machinery. They had him for a good ten minutes, throwing him around – up and down in the air, from one side of the stage to the other, treating him like a theatre-prop, which by the time
Feltencraft
arrived and called a halt to proceedings, was what he’d become.
The professor walked around the body. One by one, the rest of his troupe emerged from the darkness, limping, shuffling, bits crushed and dangling off them, gears audibly ticking in their broken shells. Fanny and Dora were least damaged, but still the last to arrive. They threw Ketch’s body alongside Bobber’s.
“We’ll take ’
em
down to the workshop,”
Feltencraft
finally said. “We need a pair of broker’s men for next year’s pantomime.
Should have ’
em
ready by then.”
He surveyed his ravaged crew. “In fact ... I reckon we’ll all of us make a visit to the workshop, eh. There’s no-one ’ere couldn’t do with a bit of rendering.”
One by one they hobbled away, dragging the two thieves by the feet.
Feltencraft
went last. As he did, he poked a spring back in through the bullet-hole in his arm.
All through the December of 1688, it snowed heavily in the English ‘West Country’. A bitter northerly wind blew down from the Welsh mountains, rivers and streams froze, and many of the more isolated roads became impassable. However, none of this prevented the local populace from coming outdoors to celebrate the stately advance of Prince William of Orange, as he and his fifteen-thousand Protestant mercenaries proceeded eastwards from his landing-place at
Brixham
, in Devon, and later from Exeter to embark on the final leg of his journey to London.
The reign of the Catholic King James II was over. After four years of intrigue, chicanery, ‘popish plotting’, and aggressive absolutism at the very heart of government, the least popular monarch since Bloody Mary had finally abandoned the throne of England. When the news broke on Christmas Eve that James had fled to France, Whig and Tory gentlemen alike left their country residences to join the merry throngs in the snowbound villages. This, it appeared, would be a very happy Christmas indeed.
*
“Not a good night for you,
O’Calligan
, I dare say,” Lord
Chillerton
said, dabbing his mouth with a napkin.