第57章 THE MARPLOT(3)

Lovel outside stood for a second hesitating.His chance had come.His foe had gone of his own will into the place in all England where murder could be most safely done.But now that the moment had come at last, he was all of a tremble and his breath choked.Only the picture, always horribly clear in his mind, of a gallows dark against a pale sky and the little fire beneath where the entrails of traitors were burned--a nightmare which had long ridden him--nerved him to the next step."His life or mine," he told himself, as he groped his way into a lane as steep, dank, and black as the sides of a well.

For some twenty yards he stumbled in an air thick with offal and garlic.He heard steps ahead, the boots of the doomed magistrate and the slipshod pattens of the woman.Then.they stopped; his quarry seemed to be ascending a stair on the right.It was a wretched tenement of wood, two hundred years old, once a garden house attached to the Savoy palace.Lovel scrambled up some rickety steps and found himself on the rotten planks of a long passage, which was lit by a small window giving to the west.He heard the sound of a man slipping at the other end, and something like an oath.Then a door slammed violently, and the place shook.After that it was quiet.

Where was the bloody fight that Godfrey had been brought to settle?

It was very dark there; the window in the passage was only a square of misty grey.Lovel felt eerie, a strange mood for an assassin.Magistrate and woman seemed to have been spirited away....He plucked up courage and continued, one hand on the wall on his left.Then a sound broke the silence--a scuffle, and the long grate of something heavy dragged on a rough floor.Presently his fingers felt a door.The noise was inside that door.There were big cracks in the panelling through which an eye could look, but all was dark within.There were human beings moving there, and speaking softly.Very gingerly he tried the hasp, but it was fastened firm inside.

Suddenly someone in the room struck a flint and lit a lantern.Lovel set his eyes to a crack and stood very still.The woman had gone, and the room held three men.One lay on the floor with a coarse kerchief, such as grooms wear, knotted round his throat.Over him bent a man in a long coat with a cape, a man in a dark peruke, whose face was clear in the lantern's light.

Lovel knew him for one Bedloe, a led-captain and cardsharper, whom he had himself employed on occasion.The third man stood apart and appeared from his gesticulations to be speaking rapidly.He wore his own sandy hair, and every line of his mean freckled face told of excitement and fear.Him also Lovel recognised--Carstairs, a Scotch informer who had once made a handsome living through spying on conventicles, but had now fallen into poverty owing to conducting an affair of Buckingham's with a brutality which that fastidious nobleman had not bargained for....

Lovel rubbed his eyes and looked again.He knew likewise the man on the floor.It was Sir Edmund Godfrey, and Sir Edmund Godfrey was dead.

The men were talking."No blood-letting," said Bedloe "This must be a dry job.Though, by God, I wish I could stick my knife into him--once for Trelawney, once for Frewen, and a dozen times for myself.Through this swine I have festered a twelvemonth in Little Ease."Lovel's first thought, as he stared, was an immense relief.His business had been done for him, and he had escaped the guilt of it.His second, that here lay a chance of fair profit.Godfrey was a great man, and Bedloe and Carstairs were the seediest of rogues.He might make favor for himself with the Government if he had them caught red-handed.It would help his status in Aldersgate Street....But he must act at once or the murderers would be gone.He tiptoed back along the passage, tumbled down the crazy steps, and ran up the steep entry to where he saw a glimmer of light from the Strand.

At the gate he all but fell into the arms of a man--a powerful fellow, for it was like running against a brick wall.Two strong arms gripped Lovel by the shoulder, and a face looked into his.There was little light in the street, but the glow from the window of a Court perruquier was sufficient to reveal the features.Lovel saw a gigantic face, with a chin so long that the mouth seemed to be only half-way down it.Small eyes, red and fiery, were set deep under a beetling forehead.The skin was a dark purple, and the wig framing it was so white and fleecy that the man had the appearance of a malevolent black-faced sheep.

Lovel gasped, as he recognised the celebrated Salamanca Doctor.He was the man above all others whom he most wished to see.

"Dr.Oates!" he cried."There's bloody work in the Savoy.I was passing through a minute agone and I saw that noble Justice, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, lie dead, and his murderers beside the body.Quick, let us get the watch and take them red-handed."The big paws, like a gorilla's, were withdrawn from his shoulders.The purple complexion seemed to go nearly black, and the wide mouth opened as if to bellow.But the sound which emerged was only a whisper.

"By the maircy of Gaad we will have 'em!...

A maist haarrid and unnaitural craime.I will take 'em with my own haands.

Here is one who will help."

And he turned to a man who had come up and who looked like a city tradesman."Lead on, honest fellow, and we will see justice done.'Tis pairt of the bloody Plaat....I foresaw it.I warned Sir Edmund, but he flouted me.Ah, poor soul, he has paid for his unbelief."Lovel, followed by Oates and the other whom he called Prance, dived again into the darkness.Now he had no fears.He saw himself acclaimed with the Doctor as the saviour of the nation, and the door of Aldersgate Street open at his knocking.The man Prance produced a lantern, and lighted them up the steps and into the tumbledown passage.Fired with a sudden valour, Lovel drew his sword and led the way to the sinister room.The door was open, and the place lay empty, save for the dead body.