Mosca was taken roughly by the shoulders, and suddenly her feet were no longer touching the ground. The face of Partridge, the barge captain from the Mettlesome Maid, was inches from her own.
‘Do you know what I want?’ he hissed. The knot in his cheek was tying and loosing itself with frightening rapidity.
Mosca shook her head.
‘I want . . . my . . . barge . . . back.’
‘We ’aven’t got it!’
‘No.’ Partridge glared into her eyes with an intensity almost insane. ‘The goose has it.’
For a moment Mosca had a nightmarish image of Saracen biting through mooring ropes and taking the barge out, perhaps learning to trim the sails by himself . . .
‘We plucked up the planks to get out our cargo,’ Partridge explained slowly, ‘and the goose got down there, and we couldn’t get it out. And so we couldn’t get our cargo out. And then we sent Dotheril down below deck, and the goose broke his ankle, and now we can’t get him out. I want my barge back.’
Mosca nodded slightly.
‘And I want money – compensation for time and business lost.’
Mosca nodded again, a little uncertainly.
‘And you know what else I want for my trouble with the goose? I want your uncle’s heart spiked on a boat-hook so I can hear it crackle as it bakes in the sun.’
I is for Informer
Mosca looked into Partridge’s eyes, judging his gaze and the force of his fingers against her shoulders.
‘I’ll get yer money! You just got to let me go, an’ I’ll get yer money! Beloved blind me with brands if it ain’t so!’
Partridge stared at her distrustfully, and his grip tightened on her shoulders. There was nothing Mosca had wanted more than to find Partridge and buy back Saracen. However, right now her pockets were empty, and Partridge seemed to have gone a little mad.
‘I’ll have my money, all right,’ Partridge said grimly. ‘I’ll sell your skin to a drum-maker and have my money.’
Mosca decided that Partridge was not in the right mood for negotiation.
She twisted like a snake and sank her teeth into his right-hand knuckles, all the while tearing at his fingers with her nails. He shifted his grip and she pulled free, hearing a tick-tack-tack of snapping seam threads. On impulse, she leaped a mess of mooring ropes and sprinted for the coffeehouse, which was making ready to cast off.
As the sailors on the roof braced long poles against the quay in readiness for pushing off, Mosca jumped. Her hands snatched at a dangling rope, and then her feet found support on the crude wooden rungs nailed to the coffeehouse wall. Winded, she could only cling and pray that the Laurel Bower would push off before Partridge’s angry hand could close on the scruff of her neck.
It would not have interested her to know that at this very moment she was dangling between two worlds, each with its own laws. Leaping from the shore, she had left behind the city the Duke controlled. On the river, only the free-and-easy rules of the Watermen applied. The coffeehouses of Mandelion criss-crossed the river to escape the shore laws, so that customers could speak freely. Here sedition and wild conspiracies bubbled like the coffee-pots.
Meanwhile, within Miss Kitely’s coffeehouse, the Laurel Bower, the young teacher in blue-tinted spectacles brightened at the sight of a newly arrived friend.
‘Copperback!’ The teacher pushed forward to take the hand of a man who had an angry question locked eternally into his brilliant brown eyes. ‘I am so glad to see you – I was hoping that we might discuss the matter of the recent . . . that is, aha, hahow. Ow. Er . . . ow?’
Copperback continued to grip the teacher’s hand with painful firmness until he had watched a man in a crimson waistcoat reclaim his hat and trip out through the street door with a swing of his cane. When the door had been made fast behind him, and the crockery had rattled with the casting off, Copperback’s grip relaxed slightly. Several other men around the room who had been watching the door with earnest interest allowed their shoulders to relax.
‘Beloved above, Pertellis,’ Copperback muttered at last. ‘I thought you were going to spill right in front of him.’
Hopewood Pertellis blinked through his blue spectacles at the room about him, noticing the general tension for the first time.
‘Who . . . ?’
‘A spy for the Duke’s men. I’d stake my eyes on it. What is become of the world if we cannot even talk safely on the river? He came in yesterday and told us he had just arrived in Mandelion from one of the university towns, and wanted to meet other men of letters who “cared for the much-wronged common people”.’
‘Well, I suppose it may have been true,’ Pertellis suggested.
‘No, I think not.’ Miss Kitely herself had drifted in, carrying a dish of coffee for Pertellis. She was a thin, pale woman whose heavy lids could have been ugly but instead just made her eyes acutely blue. ‘He bought coffee for himself, and anyone who would talk to him, and never asked them to return the favour. I had my girl overcharge him, and he didn’t complain. Then he started to talk about how interested he would be in reading fresh-written tracts, and to ask whether anyone could show him some.’
‘Did anyone tell him anything?’ asked Pertellis.
Copperback exchanged a look with Miss Kitely, who lowered her heavy lids in a slow blink, then raised them again. Copperback traded glances with several others in the room, who nodded slightly or raised their eyebrows expectantly, then he faced Pertellis again and folded his arms.
‘And why would you be particularly interested in knowing that?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Pertellis – are you running this infernal printing press?’
Pertellis paused in lifting his coffee dish to his lips.
‘Goodness. Well, that is a question. How would you react if I was?’
Copperback flung his hands up over his head and, finding nothing he could usefully do with them, settled for meshing their fingers and letting them wrestle for a moment, before swinging them down against his thighs with a slap.
‘I knew it had to be you. It has your stamp all over it. Pertellis, by Pipshriek, Protector of the Rash, why did you not tell us? You should have given us the chance to shake some sense into you! You will bring the Stationers down upon every one of us – we shall all have our noses cut off at the next Assizes!’ Copperback flashed a furious and apprehensive glare round the room.
Every regular at the Laurel Bower would have risked arrest as a radical if his papers had been searched and his sympathies investigated. Their views differed, but they shared a passionate belief that the world was arranged unfairly. It was like a broken leg that had healed crooked and would have to be broken again if it was ever to grow straight. They all understood the danger they faced by holding to this belief.
‘I see.’ Pertellis sipped thoughtfully. ‘And how would you react if I said that I was not responsible?’
‘Pertellis . . .’ Copperback gestured in frustration. ‘Pertellis, we’ve all guessed that it must be you, what with your indomitable passion for circulating tracts. Most of us possess a copy of “Upon the Inequalities of Law” copied out by the children of your Floating School.’
‘Yes, I . . .’ Pertellis cast a beleaguered smile downwards. ‘I think most of my children now write a pretty fair hand.’
‘The hand is fair enough, but the words! Pertellis, they write down everything you say. On one page of my copy, a paragraph ends with “Oh dear, class dismissed, out of the windmill in single file, children.”’
‘Indeed, indeed. A printing press removes all such problems, and saves a deal of time and risk. It seems that it has been decided all round that I am running such a press. I can hardly resist such a weight of numbers, so I shall not protest.’ The young teacher’s voice rose. ‘Would I be ashamed to be throwing sparks into the tinder of men’s minds in such a way? No, I would not. Last winter, the over-taxed poor starved so that the Duke could build his Spires of Prosperity. This winter, innocent people will peris
h on the streets because he has knocked down their houses to make way for more follies. Is it worth speaking out against these things? Yes, it is!’
Copperback made an inarticulate, exasperated sound, and strode back to his table, where he sucked at his pipe so furiously that he swiftly vanished in a cloud of scented smoke. The Laurel Bower was dark and windowless out of respect for the window tax, but the sunlight entered the wooden walls through a hundred knotholes, illuminating ghostly swirling spears amid the blue smoke.
Miss Kitely brought Pertellis his own pipe.
‘You are too stubborn,’ she said under her breath.
‘Have I made an enemy?’ he asked quietly.
‘No, just too passionate a friend. He is worried that he will live to see you on the gibbet.’
Pertellis sucked slowly at his pipe and then gave his hostess a glance that was alive with concern.
‘That customer who just left – have you been troubled by many of the Duke’s spies since my arrest last month?’
‘I can scarcely lock my door against them.’
‘No, I suppose not. I had not thought that when they failed to prove a charge of sedition against me, they would turn their attention to my friends. I have put them in danger.’ Pertellis shifted his weight from one elbow to the other, so that his face was a little turned away from Miss Kitely’s hooded eyes. ‘I have been thinking that it was time I found myself a real office instead of coming here . . . perhaps one I could share with the Winnowing brothers . . .’
‘I have in store a great many of those little brandy cakes of which you are so fond,’ Miss Kitely declared evenly. ‘They are too bitter for most tastes, and if you stopped coming here I would probably lose the money for them. I would take that hard, Mr Pertellis.’
Pertellis made a small noise, as if he had drawn in too large a lungful of tobacco.
‘The funny thing is,’ he continued after a moment, ‘I think I would have given up the school a long time ago, but that the children are keener than I. It is all their arrangement now – I never know as I walk down the street what corner they will have found and made ready for the lesson. I have explained the dangers to them a hundred times, but they have such a passion to learn. None of them can afford the fees for the Stationers’ schools, and even if they could, what would those schools teach them? How to be obedient and useful servants and never question anything, that’s all.
‘So my school goes on, and it seems that every month there is a new, bright face among the children. Even today, I am sure I noticed a young girl I had never seen before following me. I suppose she must have heard about the school from one of the others. She was too shy to approach me, or I would have talked to her. But I dare say I will be seeing more of her . . . she had that hungry look . . .’
Pertellis’s view of Mosca’s hunger for knowledge might have changed if he had been aware of the many salty terms her mind had devoured over the years. Most of them were being muttered under her breath at that very moment. A gaggle of small children had noticed her clinging to the rungs and had taken it upon themselves to run along the quayside, pointing out the stowaway at the tops of their shrill voices.
‘Oi!’ A reddened face appeared above her. ‘No passage ’cept to customers! ’Op it!’
‘Where do I ’op? I’m not a bleedin’ frog!’
‘Should have thought of that before. No passage. Watermen’s rules.’ The sailor straightened, and took a long look up and down the river’s broad expanse. ‘Take her starboard.’
In the middle of the river rose a pillar of rock upon which stood a bronze figure of Goodman Sussuratch, He Who Preserves the Unwary from the River’s Embrace. A little wooden jetty stretched beside it. With much wrestling of kite wires, the coffeehouse was turned to glide alongside the jetty.
‘You get off here. Now ’op it! Hail yerself a wherry.’
Reluctantly, Mosca released her hold and dropped on to the jetty.
‘I hope maggots crawl in through your ears and lick your brain clean from the inside!’ she shouted after the coffeehouse as it surged away. She had no money to hire a Waterman.
But what was this, churning softly through the brown water of the Slye like an oversized tea chest? It was another coffeehouse, to judge by the sign swinging above the door, but this was a dingy edifice that seemed to have been stained coffee colour from the inside out. Its kites bore a picture of a stag, and over the door were painted the words ‘The Hind at Bay’.
The men on the roof of this coffeehouse had fallen foul of a sudden change in the wind’s direction. The boom had jibbed, and all hands were now busy working to bring the boat back into the wind. None of them noticed a short figure scaling the stone steps that spiralled up Goodman Sussuratch’s pillar, and then crouching, ready to jump. Their ears were too full of the deafening crack and slap of the slack sail to hear a gentle weight drop on to a corner of the roof.
Thump.
Not a loud noise, but loud enough to wake a man.
The man it woke did not move immediately but lay, frowning, for a few seconds, as if becoming gradually aware of the awkward posture of his head against the chair back, and then he opened eyes the colour of verdigris.
He blinked at the discoloured walls, at the tired faces of the drapers who chatted over the Tradesman’s Companion, at the copper gleam of the coffee-pots beyond the hatch.
Lapsing back into his chair, he dozed off with the speed of one used to sleeping on the move. Only when the entire room jolted to starboard, causing regulars to lunge with a practised gesture to save their coffee-pots, did his eyelids flicker open again.
A farewell word for his host. He had a pleasant voice, with a reassuring quality like warm milk. A smile for the girl who brought his hat and walking cane. He had a pleasant smile, as frank as a handshake. A few steps through the door and his hat was knocked from his head as something pale and pointed descended on wings of muslin as if from the heavens, to land a-crumple at his feet.
Mosca blinked up into the sun. The man standing above her seemed young. He seemed startled. He seemed to be wearing a long gentleman’s travelling cloak.
She seemed to be sitting on his hat.
Perhaps she could hand back his flattened hat with a curtsey, and make a bolt for it before his surprise turned to anger? She stood unsteadily, and the man instinctively reached out to catch her arm, and prevent her falling through the crack between doorstep and jetty.
‘Steady, there,’ he said, not unkindly.
Mosca did not answer, but froze, staring past the stranger’s shoulder.
‘What’s wrong?’ He turned, and saw what she had already seen, the figure of Partridge on the quay, shielding his eyes to stare at the roof of the coffeehouse. It suddenly occurred to Mosca that, for all their busily swelling sails and struggling kites, the coffeehouses moved at something less than walking speed, and Partridge had probably been keeping pace with her along the shore. The barge captain seemed to have lost sight of her for the moment, but it would not be long before he spotted her. She shrank back behind the man in the travelling cloak, who turned to her to look a question.
He thinks I’m a pickpocket or a stowaway or a runaway apprentice or a murderer . . .
Mosca could only look up at the stranger with terrified appeal, and shake her head.
Partridge stroked his jaw, took a few hasty steps towards the coffeehouse . . . and disappeared, taking the world with him, as Mosca was swallowed by a total blackness. The darkness was warm and smelt of wet roads and grass seeds. It took Mosca several panic-stricken seconds to realize that the stranger had swept his cloak around her.
‘Keep pace if you can.’ The voice was low and slightly muffled by the cloth. ‘Try not to stumble, and maybe he will not notice the extra pair of feet.’
Walking at half a crouch, she tried to stay as close to her unexpected saviour as she could without jostling him. Nonetheless, she was continually bumped and buffeted, presumably by other walkers who tried to push through the billo
wing slack of the cloak without realizing that it was full of crouching, terrified girl.
The sound of the wind had faded a little by the time the cloak pulled back and returned Mosca to a world of sunlight. She shifted her skewed mob cap on to the back of her head, and blew loose hair out of her eyes. She was standing with the stranger in an alley between a sandstone wall and the cold, high flank of the cathedral.
So – to what terrible act have I just become an accessory?’ Her rescuer smiled, and folded his arms. When he smiled, his eyebrows rose into two neat chestnut crescents, as if they knew the world was destined to surprise them again and again, and were determined to believe in pleasant surprises. Not gentlemanlike enough to be handsome, thought Mosca. He wore no wig for one thing, just his own unpowdered red-brown hair, tied back with black ribbon. Instead of fashionable pallor, his face was tanned to a tea-stain. And yet somehow he did not have a manservant’s careful self-importance. He had the modest assurance of someone who carries the world in his watchcase.
Mosca flushed. Some impulse of gratitude compelled her to attempt the truth.
‘My goose sort of stole that man’s boat, but he didn’t mean to – he was prob’ly just frightened. An’ now he’s angry an’ wants to put everyone’s hearts on spikes an’ cook an’ eat them.’
The young man in the cloak pressed his lips firmly together, and stared intently at the ground. He nodded twice very slowly, as if this answer was just what he had expected.
‘Mm. I see.’ His tone was slightly tremulous, and Mosca realized that he was trying not to laugh. ‘Well, I dare say that if you had been setting out to deceive, you would have come up with a story that made rather more sense than that. So I think I must accept your words as the truth. And anyway, even if it is a lie, then I am sure it is a great improvement upon the facts.’
‘It’s true!’ It seemed too hard that on one of the few occasions when she was trying to be honest she should be doubted.
‘All right, my apologies. What’s your name?’
‘Mosca.’
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