Widow's Welcome

by D. K. Fields

  The coach that carried the Wayward storyteller to his death.

  Sixteen

  Easterton Coach Station was a strange place. Cora had felt that before, the few times she’d had to visit the place while working a case. It was the clash of it. The small office – little more than a room where the fare clerk worked – and behind it a huge space filled with coaches. So much land that had escaped being built on as the city sprawled. It was rare, and it wasn’t right, somehow. Reminded her of being in a Seat, and yet none of the Audience were at Easterton to hear her stories. Just coaches and gigs coming and going, horses being led into and out of their traces, drivers hailing one another or cursing when their way was blocked. The air was full of the creak of wood and the smell of leather.

  She stepped inside the office. The square room was small, and three of its sides were lined with a deep counter top. With a couple of drivers before her, leaning on the counter to tell the clerk their fares, the office felt even more cramped. Cora hung back in the doorway and listened.

  ‘Uppercroft to Bank Street,’ said the slim woman in the uniform of Garnucks: the rusted red colour matched the Rustan who had set up the company. ‘Seven trips between Bank and the Hook barge,’ she said, ‘then to the Wheelhouse before coming back here.’

  The fare clerk was writing on a large square of paper. He wore the pale purple of Commission underlings: those whose work wasn’t deemed important enough to get the full, deep purple of senior staff or the tunics of election staff. But everything was important, in some way, to the Commission. Every mile of Fenest crossed, every mark earned. It all had to be recorded.

  ‘You didn’t go through Murbick on the way back?’ the clerk said to the Garnuck’s driver, without looking up.

  ‘I’m not wanting to join the Audience just yet,’ the woman said. ‘Even if the constables hadn’t blocked off the streets and there was a way through, I wouldn’t risk catching anything.’

  ‘I heard people are offering double if you can find a way through the blockades,’ the other driver said. ‘Might pay triple to get close to Burlington.’ He was older than the woman and wore the pale grey uniform of Clotham’s.

  Cora wasn’t surprised to hear a driver from the smaller coach company talk of higher fares for grubbier, riskier journeys. That was the only way they could compete.

  The woman took a step back from the Clotham’s driver and eyed him with disgust. ‘Damn you to Silence if you bring any of that sickness here.’ Then she jabbed a finger at the clerk behind the counter. ‘It shouldn’t be allowed, Pete. These penny-grubbing bastards ought to be barred from Easterton. I’ve said it before.’

  ‘And don’t think I haven’t heard you.’ The clerk looked at the woman over the tops of his half-moon glasses. Pete, she’d said his name was. ‘You know how those Perlish Chambers like to drive up the competition.’

  ‘Don’t get me started on the Perlish, Pete. The roads! Whoever comes next has got to do something about—’

  ‘These fares all from this morning?’

  ‘They are. Coach fifty-eight twenty-three.’ She untied the coin purse that sat on her hip and handed it to the clerk, who briskly counted the coins and made a note on the paper. ‘You want to put gloves on for touching Clotham’s dirty money,’ she said, tying her coin purse back on. She passed Cora on her way out, glowering, as if Cora might also try to bring plague to Easterton.

  Cora moved further inside while the Clotham’s driver gave his fares to the clerk. She recognised those little stories all too well: short trips to whorehouses and chequers’ halls, from stitcher rooms to the docks. So many stories within those journeys. She didn’t want to know them today. She had enough to do with the dead Wayward and his single, final ride.

  ‘And how can I help you, Detective?’ Pete said, once the Clotham’s driver had left.

  ‘I’m here about a fare that’s already been paid.’ She gave him the date the Wayward storyteller had left his lodging house. ‘Coach arrived just after midnight.’

  ‘Which company?’

  ‘Could be any of them.’

  He reached down and opened a hatch in the floor, then, with much grumbling that Cora knew was for her benefit, descended into the fare archives that stretched beneath the small office. He returned with several ledgers: thick blocks of square pages sewn together. She thought of Ento’s sewn lips. Perhaps she was about to learn his secrets. The reason he’d been strangled and dumped and silenced. A thin sheen of sweat appeared on her palms and made the pages stick to her as she leafed through them.

  ‘Those cover eleven o’clock until one,’ Pete said. ‘What address?’

  ‘I’ll find it.’ No need to go advertising the specifics.

  He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. I got enough to do here. Audience send me a Casker Assembly – they know how many people it takes to run things.’

  ‘Let’s hope enough people vote for them, then,’ Cora said.

  ‘If it was me casting a stone, if I didn’t work for this lot—’ He tugged at his Commission uniform ‘—I would’ve given the Caskers a yes, even if the story was dull enough to sober the Drunkard.’

  ‘It certainly wasn’t dull,’ Cora said.

  ‘Heard it, did you?’ He gave a low whistle. ‘They barely let me leave the office these days.’

  A group of Clotham’s drivers came in then and Cora was pushed into the corner with her records while they relayed their fares to the clerk. An achingly dull job that would be. Day after day, hearing parts of the city listed over and over until they became a meaningless babble. No longer places.

  She was beginning to experience that herself as she searched through the fare records for the night Ento left Mrs Kettleby’s for the last time.

  But there was no fare recorded for just after midnight on Teilo Street, where the lodging house was. Cora checked further back, to eleven o’clock, in case Mrs Kettleby had made a mistake in judging the time. Nothing. And nothing later in the night either. The landlady had no obvious reason to lie about a coach collecting her lodger, or the time it had arrived. Perhaps Cora needed to try a different angle. Start from the story’s end.

  She called over the noise of the Clotham’s drivers to ask for the records for Hatch Street and Green Row, where Ento had been found. Pete scowled at being interrupted but did as she asked, grumbling back down the stairs. Cora felt the curiosity of the drivers and, when the clerk handed her the new records, she turned her back to hunch over the papers.

  She checked the fares from midnight onwards, which was easy, given that there were fewer that time of night. Time of morning, she corrected herself. She saw her own trip from the station to the alley when she’d gone to see the body, but nothing else that had gone that way. She shoved the ledger away from her. Maybe she’d been foolish to expect whoever had dumped Ento in the alley to use a recorded coach, but people were often stupid, and when they weren’t they were just as often arrogant.

  The coach had to have existed. Even though there was no record of it at the start or end of the journey, Ento was last seen climbing into one outside Mrs Kettleby’s lodging house and was found several miles across the city. He had to get there somehow. But this coach was a shadow, always slipping around the next corner, always just out of her sight.

  The last driver left the office. Two more were inbound but Cora closed the door on them.

  ‘Hey, you can’t do that!’ Pete said.

  ‘Looks like I can. I want the records for private coaches.’

  ‘Clue’s in the name,’ he said with a greasy smirk. ‘Off the record.’

  Cora grabbed him by his shirt and hauled him half over the counter.

  ‘All right, all right!’ he said. ‘No need for—’

  ‘What about the Commission’s coaches?’ she said.

  ‘Kept separate, they are, honest. I’ll get them for you.’

  But there was nothing in the Commission fare records either. She went through them again, not caring when she tore pages in her growing exas
peration. Then she asked the question she knew she shouldn’t.

  ‘What about the Chambers? Are their journeys recorded here, along with the Commission nobodies?’

  The clerk nodded, eager to keep her placated. ‘They all go in the same records. All the coaches. Well, I guess not all of them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’re not supposed to use them, the coaches withdrawn from service. They’re too old, and too big.’

  ‘Too big?’

  ‘It’s the width. They don’t fit the newer parts of the city, which is most of it. One of them got stuck, few years back now. Wedged in an alley. The woman inside had to cut a hole in the roof and climb out.’

  ‘But they do get used,’ Cora said.

  ‘Sometimes, when we’re really pushed.’ He touched his shoulder, wincing. She hadn’t been that rough with him. ‘Not many of them are fit for the job, though they’re all still taking up room at Tithe Hall.’

  ‘No one records those trips,’ Cora said, ‘because you’re not supposed to be using those coaches?’

  ‘Exactly, so you won’t tell— Hey, now, where are you going?’

  ‘Tithe Hall.’

  ‘You can’t get anywhere near there today,’ Pete said.

  Her hand on the door stilled. She turned back.

  ‘Don’t you read the pennysheets?’ he said.

  If she had a mark for every time someone said that to her, she’d be able to buy the press that printed The Spoke and get the constables to smash it to pieces.

  He grinned. ‘Place is sealed until tomorrow.’

  She fought the urge to haul him back over the counter and make him talk straight. ‘Why?’ she managed to say through gritted teeth.

  ‘It’s the venue for the Lowlander story.’

  Seventeen

  Cora was at Tithe Hall at dawn the next day. The day of the Seeder story.

  The Easterton clerk, Pete, was right: the place was sealed off. From her spot in an alley opposite, Cora counted twenty-five purple Commission tunics at the Hall’s main entrance, and a fair few constables to manage the queue for the public gallery that was already snaking down the street. There would be more purple tunics at the rear too, in the yard. On a normal day that was where traders parked their wagons: Wayward bringing livestock; fish from the Caskers; Seeder fruit and vegetables; and sometimes Perlish ‘white gold’ – that was what they called their cheese. Rancid stuff, far as Cora was concerned.

  But no one would be selling anything today. The yard was shut, its gates locked. Her badge had been no use when she’d tried to jump the queue to see the Casker Hook. She couldn’t see why it would be any use here either. There was no chance of climbing over the yard’s walls, which were half as tall as the Hall itself. And according to Pete at Easterton, that yard was where the old Commission coaches were kept. Her only lead and here was the election blocking her way. Everything seemed to come back to it.

  She wished she had some bindleleaf. She missed the feel of it on her fingers, in her chest, even on her tongue. To distract herself she went over the pieces of the case, trying to make them fit into a story. She had the beginning and the end, but not how to get from one to the other. Ento was seen getting into a coach on Teilo Street at around midnight. Nullan, the Casker storyteller, expected him at Corner House but he never appeared. Had he planned to disappoint her, or was he waylaid on the journey?

  Most of her thinking put suspicion on the driver of Ento’s coach, but she couldn’t rule out the coach being attacked by someone else, planned or otherwise. Coaches were known to be boarded as they passed alleyways, the thieves waiting in the shadows, and it happened often enough for Garnuck’s and the like to avoid certain parts of the city. Usually it was just purses taken, rarely kidnapping or murder. If that was how Ento had died, caught in a hold-up that went wrong, then it was nothing more than bad luck a storyteller was killed.

  But then there was the mouth.

  The message of Ento’s sewn mouth; that wasn’t chance, that was something else. Which brought her back to the driver again, back in the centre of things. She had to find the coach that took Ento from Teilo Street, and the person who drove it.

  She turned up the alley, away from Tithe Hall. There might just be another way into the yard.

  It took her a few minutes to get her bearings among the jumble of backstreets, but eventually she found the boarded door she was looking for. On the wall above was a rusted lamp, the glass broken and the oil-wick long gone. No lamp-man called here. Cora checked up and down the alley, then pulled at the fitting. It moved smoothly out of the wall, at odds with the broken look of it, and slipped just as smoothly back.

  Nothing happened. No movement, no sound in the alley. But somewhere behind the boarded door, a bell would be ringing.

  *

  She waited, hoping that codes and phrases were no longer the fashion, or at least reserved only for the Dancing Oak. Minutes passed and she was starting to think she wasn’t wanted. Then the boarded door swung open and she stepped inside, into darkness.

  ‘You’re too late for last night’s games,’ someone said in a gruff voice. A voice more used to hawking pennysheets than acting doorman.

  ‘But not too early for today’s,’ Cora said.

  Marcus said something in reply but her words were lost inside a yawn.

  ‘I don’t know why you choose to sleep in a games house,’ Cora said.

  ‘Beulah keeps the fires going and the stew pot full. Worth a lot, that is.’

  The pennysheet girl led Cora down a narrow corridor towards the glow of candle light in the distance. Dark wood and a plush red carpet tried to make the corridor more cosy than claustrophobic, but Cora wasn’t buying it. She heard a shout and then muffled laughter from somewhere deeper inside the building.

  ‘I’m not stopping,’ she said to Marcus’ back.

  ‘Of course, Detective.’

  ‘I mean it, I just need to see Beulah. I want one of the back doors. One of the more… sensitive ones.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Who you hiding from?’

  ‘Never you mind.’

  They came out of the corridor into a large, square room with carpeted staircases leading from all four corners.

  ‘Wait here,’ Marcus said, heading up the stairs towards where the better games were played.

  Cora paced the room. There were expensive paintings and tapestries on every wall, but it was the stuffed animals that gave her pause. One in particular: a huge creature that loomed over her. No matter how many times she had seen it she hadn’t become used to it. All spines, claws and scales, it was terrible to look at even knowing it was stuffed – a favourite of the Dissenter. She had known its name, a long time ago. The creature came from the Tear, she was sure of that much. But she’d come to know too many living, breathing monsters since then to remember.

  More muffled laughter from beyond the staircases, then the unmistakeable noise of furniture being kicked over. She heard a door open somewhere, but the metal clank that followed told her it wasn’t Beulah on her way.

  A Rustan woman came down the stairs. She was already telling her story to the Brawler, who was always ready to listen to a good betting tale. Between muttered curses about bad hands and loaded dice, the woman’s metal lockports clanked. Cora watched her closely; you never quite knew where you were with Rustans. Someone who was happy to replace a leg bone with a metal splint might be just as happy to add knives to their wrists. Cora couldn’t see any of this Rustan’s additions, covered as they were by a long coat made of some kind of animal hide, but the noise told her this one was more metal than bone.

  ‘Do yourself a favour, friend,’ the Rustan said as she headed for the passage that led to the street. ‘Take your money and run. This house is rigged.’

  ‘The Brawler loves a bad loser,’ a voice called down the stairs. It was Beulah, with Marcus just behind her.

  The Rustan left, but not before she made a gesture that Cora could well believe meant somethin
g pretty strong in the Rusting Mountains.

  ‘This had better be good, Detective,’ Beulah said, coming down the stairs. ‘I have some players to placate.’

  ‘I need a back door,’ Cora said.

  ‘Our mutual friend here could have helped you with that.’

  ‘I need a back door for Tithe Hall,’ Cora said.

  ‘I see,’ Beulah said. ‘There are easier ways to hear the Seeder story, not that it has a chance.’

  ‘What are the num— No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. I need to get into the yard behind the Hall.’

  Beulah sighed, and the slips in her many pockets rustled. ‘A favour.’

  ‘What?’ Cora said.

  ‘It’ll cost you a favour. Of my choosing, when the time comes.’

  ‘Beulah, don’t be ridiculous. Ask for something normal: name a figure and I’ll pay it. A debt that needs collecting. Maybe a—’

  ‘I hope you can climb walls, Detective.’ The diminutive ringmaster turned to leave.

  ‘Fine! A favour. Just… within reason.’

  ‘When have you known me to be anything but reasonable?’

  Cora and Marcus waited respectfully as the ringmaster wrote out a slip, as if this were simply another of Cora’s side bets.

  ‘East side or west?’ Marcus said.

  ‘I… I don’t know.’

  ‘West’s safer. You come out behind the old water troughs. East is closer to the Hall; won’t be carts loading today but might be purple tunics.’

  ‘West it is then,’ Cora said.

  And with that the girl grabbed a candle and set off deeper into the games house, towards the passageways.

  *

  Cora emerged, blinking, into the light of day. A heavy thunk made her spin round, but there was nothing to see except a battered wash tub that now hid the entrance to the tunnel. It was just one among many dented tubs and cracked barrels repurposed as water troughs for the cart horses bringing wares to market. If anyone decided to move that one particular wash tub, and if they found the tunnel, and if they were foolish enough to go down it, into the unlit twisting turns that were more dead ends than ways back, then they were no threat to Beulah or her games house. They’d only be found by the stench of their rotting corpse.