Fly by Night

by Frances Hardinge

  The rooms of Pertellis’s house were unusually dark. In Mandelion, as in most cities, a tax was paid for every window, and only the well-off opted to pay for their daylight. Pertellis worked hard, but the clients he chose were seldom rich, and over the years he had boarded up most of his windows. The cheap candles he used gave off a smoky, sulky light and smelt like a mutton joint that had been left out in the rain. Nonetheless, like many quiet men, Pertellis had a stubborn streak wider than the Slye, and that night found him working late on the farmer’s case, squinting painfully in the dim light.

  At the moment when his study door opened, he had just taken off his glasses to rest his aching eyes. So it was that, when he raised his head to discover the source of a furtive wooden creak, he saw only five or so dark shapes which were born from the shadow of the doorway and moved towards him without a sound.

  At midnight a young linkboy, patrolling the darker docks of Whickerback Point with his lantern in search of someone who might need guiding home, chanced to hear a sneeze. By the light of his lantern he discovered the hanging sedan, and within it the shivering Caveat.

  A helpful beadle brought Caveat back to the Telling Word. Thus Toke learned of Caveat’s ordeal, and the contents of Clent’s report concerning Pertellis and the Floating School.

  He quickly roused three Stationers in the Telling Word from their coffee-haunted dreams, waving aside their reluctance to go chasing teachers in the middle of the night.

  ‘Stop mewling, and find your coats,’ Toke snapped. ‘Many of the Birdcatchers were teachers too, never forget that. Teachers to the sons of important men, secretly twisting their infant minds. The boys grew up and became powerful, with the seeds of Birdcatchery lodged in their heads, and nobody knew, until it was too late, how many of them there were. No, children must be taught by Stationers or not at all, or we shall have the same problem again in twenty years. When a head is too full of the wrong ideas, there is no option but to remove it – far better to stop the ideas getting there in the first place.’

  Once ashore, Toke woke the high constable, who recognized Pertellis’s name. The young lawyer had been arrested twice on suspicion of sedition, but acquitted for lack of evidence. His address was included in the records of the trials.

  An hour later, accompanied by his three Stationers and two petty constables, Toke stood before the door to Pertellis’s house and knew instantly that he was too late.

  The locks of front door, back door, closet and writing desk had been picked without leaving so much as a scratch. The housekeeper was found, trussed and gagged, in the metal bath, her muslin cap pulled down over her face. Pertellis was gone. The whole thing had been managed without waking the neighbours, or even the dog that slept in the hallway.

  In the pantry Toke found several hollowed bread loaves, with a different forbidden book hidden in each one. The Stationers now had evidence against Pertellis, but no Pertellis.

  Mabwick Toke knew a Locksmith break-in when he saw one. But why had they taken Hopewood Pertellis? If Toke was correct, the Locksmiths themselves were responsible for printing the pamphlets vilifying the Duke. But if the Duke believed that radicals were running the secret printing press – perhaps the Locksmiths meant to present Pertellis to the Duke in chains as the radicals’ leader, and so win his trust and gratitude. Or could it be that the Locksmiths themselves had been using Pertellis as a cat’s-paw to run the printing press, and were afraid that he might talk if the Stationers caught him?

  ‘In any case,’ Toke muttered to himself, ‘if the Locksmiths think him worth grabbing, he must be important. And I shall snatch him back, Mr Goshawk, just you see if I don’t. I’ve never sought a war with you, but I won’t flinch from one either. I fought the Birdcatchers when they held the country in the palm of their hand, and if they couldn’t frighten me, Aramai Goshawk, then you shan’t.’

  He looked around at the pale, sleep-starved countenances of the other Stationers.

  ‘Gape any wider, and you will yawn your faces inside out. All of you, go into the streets and shout out for a linkboy. Bring back as many as you can find!’

  Within a short time there were half a dozen linkboys in Pertellis’s front hall. Surveying their sly and spotted faces, Toke thought it no wonder that they should welcome the veil of darkness in their nightly work.

  Using a little sharp questioning and careful bribery, he soon learned that the youngest linkboy had seen five gentlemen ‘helping a friend home’. The boy had offered his lantern, but had been told to ‘sling his hook’.

  ‘Followed ’em as far as the Drimps in case they changed their mind,’ the boy added, then gave a gap-toothed grin as Toke put a coin in his hand.

  On the narrow street known as the Drimps lived a blind tallow-maker who always slept with his shutters open. When Toke visited him the next morning, he was able to recall that, a little after second bell, he had heard half a dozen men moving with haste along the Drimps, and down Strangeway.

  Hearing this, Toke’s eyes glittered. Strangeway was a crooked, covered alley which led all the way to the city wall, and emerged opposite a tavern called the Grey Mastiff.

  The Grey Mastiff was famed throughout Mandelion for the quality of the ‘beast fights’ held within its walls every fortnight. For some time, however, Mabwick Toke had suspected that the Grey Mastiff was also used secretly as a Locksmith meeting place and safe house. Several known Locksmiths had been seen to congregate there every time a beast fight was held, and Aramai Goshawk’s supercilious silhouette had been glimpsed at one of the upper windows.

  ‘They’re not taking him to the Duke, after all. Not straight away anyway. This man Pertellis is hidden there, I’d stake my wig on it,’ Toke muttered to himself as a sedan took him back to the Telling Word. ‘But how to tweak him out?’

  Toke had no men who could pick a lock or scale a wall the way Goshawk’s underlings could. But did he need them? He had enough evidence to draw up a warrant for Pertellis’s arrest. Could he not send his men into the Grey Mastiff with the warrant and have them boldly arrest the man and walk out with him?

  Toke’s eyes became sharp and hard as a further idea occurred to him.

  ‘The Duke wants to believe in a radical conspiracy against him, does he?’ he murmured speculatively. ‘Well, let him! I shall make this Pertellis out to be the leader of the conspiracy, the owner of this demon printing press and chief enemy of the Twin Queens, whether he is or isn’t. Then I shall have my men march in and arrest him on the night of the next beast fight, when the Locksmiths have their meeting in the Grey Mastiff. I’ll make sure my men bring a constable with them, so he’ll see the “radical leader” ringed around with Locksmiths. Let’s see how much the Duke trusts Mr Goshawk once he hears reports that the Locksmiths have been discovered hiding the leader of the radicals from the forces of justice . . .’

  The Locksmiths would be disgraced but, importantly, they would not be arrested. None of them would be placed in danger, and so nobody could accuse Toke of breaking the guildsmen’s Rules.

  ‘I shall have to send in Clent and his bold-eyed girl to spy out the place before we act,’ Toke resolved. If Goshawk had read Clent’s report, he would know the poet’s name, but would probably not recognize his face. In any case, it was better to risk an irrelevant rogue than one of the Stationers’ valued guildsmen. ‘Casualties of war,’ Toke growled, as he picked up a pen to write out Clent’s new orders.

  That evening, Toke’s letter lay on the dinner table in front of Clent, liberally smeared with gravy. Toke had given a sparse account of the night’s events, naturally omitting all mention of Clent’s intercepted report. Somehow, as Clent repeated this account to Mosca, it became a tale of breakneck chases and exchanged pistol fire.

  Mosca listened, wide-eyed. ‘So . . . the Locksmiths got Mr Pertellis in this Grey Mastiff, then?’

  ‘Yes – and in three nights’ time, the Stationers plan to march into the Grey Mastiff and snatch this radical teacher from Goshawk’s very own gloved fing
ers. Word will reach the Duke that when this firebrand Pertellis was arrested, he was caught in a conspiratorial tableau with the Locksmiths . . . and the Duke will smite his noble brow with grief at his own blindness, and throw off his Locksmith flatterers. Our task is to spy out the tavern beforehand, and make sure that Hopewood Pertellis is within. A simple matter for two fox-witted souls like ourselves.’

  The fox-witted souls bickered cheerfully over the last helping of broth, unaware that in another part of the city Aramai Goshawk was rereading Clent’s report and peering at the names of Eponymous Clent and Mosca Mye.

  K is for Kidnapping

  ‘I want my goose back!’

  ‘Mosca, while your affection for your anserine accomplice does you credit, I hardly think—’

  ‘I want my goose back!’

  ‘I can see that your orphaned state has caused you to regard the bird as a family member, perhaps a particularly beaky uncle—’

  ‘Mr Clent, I want my goose back!’

  ‘Have you forgotten that by your own account Mr Partridge is planning to roast my heart in the sun?’ bellowed Clent. The conversation had made little progress over the last half-hour and he was starting to lose his temper.

  ‘You could give him money. Bet he wouldn’t eat your heart if you give him enough money. Bet the Stationers gave you money for what I found out.’ Clent had been so delighted with Mosca’s discovery of the Floating School that the pair had actually got on tolerably well for two days. However, Mosca had just woken to a gleaming morning, and the sight of Clent trying on a new cravat. Instantly she had guessed that he had been paid without telling her. ‘They did pay you, didn’t they? That’s my money, or near enough anyway.’

  ‘Read through our “ship’s articles” again, child, if you have not forgotten your letters as well as your duties. You are bound to obey my orders, and you stand to receive a generous salary at the end of the year. Before this explosion of ingratitude, I had even considered recommending that the Stationers grant you a place in a school, as you requested.’ It seemed to occur to Clent that their voices had become rather loud given the thin walls of the marriage house, and his voice dropped to a whisper. ‘If, of course, you would rather throw away all hopes of bettering yourself in favour of buying yourself a mangled old fowl that seems to be harbouring all the demons of fable within his moth-eaten breast, then so be it. The choice is yours.’ Clent folded his arms, and his mouth became an adamant plum.

  A place in a Stationer school . . . Somehow Mosca’s thoughts were not where she had left them; the idea of school had been so real to her. She had imagined the cool of a slate between her fingers, and had seen herself cutting quills for the younger children. She had even puzzled over how she would stop Saracen eating the inkbottles. Now the school seemed a means to an end, and that end was Lady Tamarind and the Eastern Spire.

  Two images flitted before Mosca’s eyes.

  Mosca saw a woman stepping out of a white carriage, lifting her hem slightly to protect it from contact with the street. Two footmen dusted the cobbles with swans-down brushes so that they could not stain her satin shoes. She swept through a door into a ballroom where the walls were hung with the hides of white tigers. She danced, and, from mahogany tables, stuffed ermine stoats watched her with pearls instead of eyes. She drank from a crystal glass. She was too beautiful to smile or flush, and her eyes were black, black as pepper. They were Mosca’s eyes.

  Then Mosca saw the darkened hold of the Mettlesome Maid. Saracen was scrambling unsteadily over a heap of wooden and leaden Beloved, his leathery feet sliding on ridged faces and graven wings. He gave little chuckling noises in his throat, but his neck drooped with weariness and hunger. He nibbled at the pointed nose of the Kind Lady of Fools, and then shook his head disappointedly. Soon, when he was weaker, the sailors would pull up the planks and come after him with spades and boathooks . . .

  ‘Well?’ Clent was waiting with a look of satisfaction on his face. ‘Have you recovered your senses and made your choice?’

  She had.

  ‘I Want My Chirfugging Goose Back!’

  ‘Well, you can’t have it!’ Clent snapped, scarlet-faced.

  ‘Then you’re a mouldy-mouthed liar an’ a cheat an’ I’m not doing nuffin’ for you no more!’ screamed Mosca. Before she had finished the sentence, Clent had stormed from the room, slamming the door.

  His boots made a very satisfying thud as they hit the wall. All Mosca’s strength was not enough to tear the sleeves of his coat from the body, so she settled for stamping his new wig flat until it resembled a terrier that had fallen foul of a dustcart-wheel.

  As she was standing, panting, her boots dusted with flour from Clent’s wig, she suddenly saw with absolute clarity what it was that she needed to do. If she could squeeze no reward from Clent and the Stationers, she could think of only one person who might give her money for Saracen’s ransom, and that was Lady Tamarind.

  Clent had left paper, quill and inkbottle in the window seat. Snatching them up, she scratched out a quick letter.

  Dear Ladyship,

  The Stationers have an antipathy to the Locksmiths, on account of they suspect they are running a printing press to make the Duke go into fits. This is all to help them take over the city somehow.

  The Locksmiths are hiding a radical called Hopewood Pertellis who teaches forbidden books to a school in alleys and I seen him do it. They are hiding him in the Grey Mastiff. Tomorrow night the Stationers will go in and arrest him when he is all ringed about with Locksmiths, so the Duke will find out how tricky and toad-spotty the Locksmiths are and slap his head.

  Mosca from the Road.

  She rolled the letter into a narrow pipe, tucked it intoher apron pocket, and hurried from the marriage house with her heart beating.

  ‘’Scuse me.’ She tugged at the sleeve of a woman with a basket of gillyflowers. ‘Can you tell me the way to the Plumery?’

  The woman’s smile faded. She was of middle age, with a broad, cheerful face that sun and hard work had polished and cracked like wood. She gazed sadly at Mosca as if she had seen a ghost of a dead daughter standing behind her.

  ‘Of course, blossom.’ She whispered directions gently, as if she was talking to an invalid, and Mosca left her, feeling more ill and uncertain than before. As she walked, the streets dwindled into alleys, the houses became dwarfish, and then she took a turning into an open square and stopped dead.

  Even before Mosca saw the shrines of Goodman Postrophe at every corner she sensed something deathly in the square’s stillness. No sheep or goats cropped the central green. Among the grass, their quills planted deep into the earth, nestled thousands of feathers – pigeon, magpie, dove, pheasant, rook. Most were broken-backed from the wind, and ragged from rain. Mosca felt superstitious fear climbing her spine on spider-feet.

  Mosca had never seen a plumery before. She remembered a pedlar talking about the Plumery in the Capital:

  . . . didn’t have room to do it proper, you see, not inside the city walls. ’Sides, most of the time the bodies were shovelled into the same great pits outside the city bounds, and even after the Birdcatchers fell, nobody had the stomach to go pickin’ through the bones all jumbled together and working out what was whose . . .

  There would be a similar desolate memorial in every city in the Realm. Each of those feathers represented a grave, a man or woman or child killed by the Birdcatchers. This she had already known, but she had not expected to feel as if she were staring into the city’s open wound. Mosca could not guess how many thousands of feathers twitched in the early breeze. There were too many to think about safely, and she decided not to care whether the tiniest downy feathers were children.

  She realized that she was not alone. People moved around the green in ones and twos, talking in church whispers or bowing their heads in silence. Some knelt between the feather plots, replacing broken plumes with fresh. The Praymaster chaplains from the cathedral would renew all the feathers on St Berrible’s day, but
clearly some of the departed had families who liked to keep their graves in fine feather.

  On a little pedestal sat a statue of Goodman Claspkin, He Who Carries Our Words to Departed Kin, one hand extended as if to cup the chin of a beloved child. Her knees weak with cliff-edge shakiness, Mosca knelt and reached a trembling hand towards the clump of pheasant feathers at his feet, as if she too had come to renew the plumes on a loved-one’s grave.

  She tugged at a feather. It slid out, to show a tube of horn fastened to the feather’s stem. Struggling against the urge to look around, she pulled her letter out of her pocket, slid it into the tube, and pushed feather and tube back into the earth. It was done. She had broken the Stationers’ oaths of secrecy, and if they ever found out, they would put her in a printing press and crank it down until she popped like a chestnut . . .

  She hurried back to the marriage house, thinking that everybody was wearing gloves and was watching her strangely. She opened the door of the room she shared with Clent, and Clent himself turned to stare at her, a queer and unfocused expression on his face.

  ‘What?’ Her hands twitched. Had he seen the earth on her knees? Did he suspect her? How could he suspect her? If he did, Mosca just wanted him to say so. ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps . . .’ Clent held up a finger, and peered at a point over Mosca’s head, trying to stare his thoughts into clarity. ‘Perhaps if you truly wish it we will retrieve this winged warzone you call a goose. But.’ He waved his finger. ‘But. The Goose Must Earn His Keep. If it becomes necessary, he must be considered a . . . an Agent of the Stationers’ Company, and committed to their cause.’

  Mosca stared at him, uncertain whether to feel relieved or suspicious. Clent seemed to have gone slightly mad, but mad in her favour. Lady Tamarind might not pay her for a day or two – why not take advantage of Clent’s change of heart?

  ‘S’pose that’d be all right,’ she agreed warily.