Fly by Night

by Frances Hardinge

‘Her Ladyship didn’t say it had to be burned – she said it was all right to sell it, I just had to cut the cuffs off first. But . . . they were such fine cuffs, with real Meidermill lace, and I thought she couldn’t really mean it. And the lady I sold the dress to said she thought the little heart looked rather pretty – like what poets say about wearing your heart on your sleeve. It wasn’t really stealing, it wasn’t, really it wasn’t . . .’

  ‘All right.’ Mosca gave the prisoner one more pinch for luck. ‘You tell nobody ’bout our parley, an’ I’ll tell nobody ’bout the dress.’ She clapped the Cakes on the shoulder, and the red-haired girl followed her out of the alley at a run, leaving the lavender girl quivering under her apron.

  ‘Did we have to do that?’ the Cakes asked when she caught up.

  Mosca shrugged. ‘Don’t have much time, do we?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ the Cakes answered uncertainly. ‘So . . . your ’spicion was right, then?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mosca clapped both hands behind her bonnet, and leaned back to stare up at the Eastern Spire. ‘Lady Tamarind got everyone running mulberry bush after that printing press: the Duke chasing after radicals, the Stationers chasing after Locksmiths. An’ all the time it was hers.’

  ‘So . . . that mark on her dress came from the printing press?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t enough seeing all the hurly-burly she was causing. She couldn’t help herself, she had to go and look at the press.’

  ‘Why?’ The Cakes blinked, nonplussed.

  ‘Power.’ Mosca surprised herself at her own certainty. ‘The press just sits there grinning at you with its metal teeth, like it’s telling you it can turn cities upside down and send dukes mad and cause riots and wars. An’ the thing about power is, it makes you want to get close to it, an’ breathe it in, an’ be part of it.’

  She knew now that it was power that had hypnotized her when she met Lady Tamarind. Lady Tamarind wore power, the way other ladies of the court wore jessamine perfume. Mosca had sensed it: a white, glowing, invisible essence that hung in the air around Tamarind, and she had wanted it without knowing what it was.

  Lady Tamarind would have been bewitched by the press in the same way. Mosca could imagine her running her hands over the press, wanting to feel a tingle of power from the touch . . .

  ‘She wouldn’t know she had to pull out frames and bend them crookways to get the printed page loose,’ Mosca added aloud, ‘so maybe she just tried to reach inside and pull it out. And so she ended up with a big, black mark printed on her sleeve. She got rid of the dress the way she always did, by giving it to that pinchnosed maid, only telling her this time to burn it or cut off the cuffs. But the maid was a silly, greedy hoity-toity who thought she could sell it for a better price with the cuffs still on. And so a lady with a flabby mouth and silly laugh bought it, and wore it to the beast fight, and that’s where I saw her in it.’

  ‘But why? What would Lady Tamarind want with a printing press?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Mosca. ‘And I don’t know why she’s been printing all that radical stuff about the Duke’s taxes on the starving poor. She’s not a radical; I don’t think she gives tuppence for the poor. She’s a Birdcatcher.’

  I must have given her the scare of her life when I told her she had a Stationer spy in her carriage, thought Mosca with a grim smile. Perhaps Tamarind had never seen anything special in Mosca, only a chance to spy on the Stationers, and make sure they were hunting for the press in the wrong places.

  The Cakes shuddered. ‘What are we going to do, Mosca?’

  Mosca realized suddenly that the older girl would follow her lead. If Mosca chose to keep Tamarind’s secret, the Cakes would hold her tongue.

  Mosca had never tasted power before. It was a little like the feeling the gin had given her, but without the bitterness and the numbness in her nose. If she went to the Eastern Spire with what she knew, surely Lady Tamarind would do anything and give her anything to keep her quiet.

  No wonder Tamarind schemed and spun to garner power, if power felt like this! Perhaps from the lofty rooms of her spire Mandelion always looked small and tame. Mosca imagined Lady Tamarind’s long white fingers reaching down from the sky to shuffle the population like cards. Pertellis, shocked and ill, was nothing but a card. Eponymous Clent, ponderous and perspiring, was nothing but a card. Mosca Mye, black eyes alive with rage, was nothing but a card, to be played or discarded at will . . .

  Mosca pulled out her handkerchief, unfolded it and shook out the seed-pearl she had wrapped in it for safety’s sake. When she held the pearl to the light, it glowed like something eternal, but when she laid it on a cobblestone and ground her heel against it a few times it crushed like wax.

  ‘We stop her, that’s what we do. Whatever she’s doing, we stop her. But first I’ve got to find Mr Clent.’

  The Cakes blinked, overwhelmed. ‘We’d better find Carmine.’

  Carmine, the clothier’s apprentice, was no longer to be found briskly billowing silks and damasks outside his master’s shop. He was in the cellar of a neighbouring chandler, his forehead as creased as his clothes, as if he hoped not to be found at all. His face brightened exceedingly when he saw the Cakes, and darkened in equal measure when he saw Mosca.

  ‘Dormalise, what’s she doing here?’

  ‘Who’s Dormalise?’ asked Mosca. The Cakes gave her a nervous little smile. It struck Mosca too late that ‘the Cakes’ was probably not her original name.

  ‘She wants to help . . . She thinks you know where Mr Pertellis is hiding, an’ she wants to talk to him about . . .’ The Cakes gave Mosca a careful glance.

  ‘Matters of Consequence,’ finished Mosca.

  ‘You should never have brought her here.’ Although he sounded bitterly exasperated, Carmine was gently patting at the Cakes’ hand.

  ‘I know who’s been running the printing press. I know where it is. Only if I’m going to tell you, Mr Pertellis has got to help me find my Mr Clent. I know he escaped with Mr Pertellis, and I got to find him.’

  Carmine looked surprised, but he immediately dropped his eyes and tried to hide it.

  ‘Oh, so you think finding the crooked printers will make everything better for Mr Pertellis, do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mosca declared with more confidence than she felt. ‘No one cares about anything ’cept the press. The Duke is just angry cos someone was rude about the Twin Queens, an’ the Stationers just want to have all the presses to themselves, right? An’ when they know who has really been running the press, they won’t care a bee’s pouch ’bout Mr Pertellis or any of you any more.’

  ‘Who is it, then?’ Carmine folded his arms.

  Mosca leaned forward. She told him, and watched the colour drain from his face.

  The Laurel Bower coffeehouse was fastened near the Ashbridge when a fifteen-year-old apprentice approached it along the jetty, a few paces ahead of two younger girls.

  ‘No customers!’ called out one of the Bower deckhands, climbing down the wooden rungs from the roof. ‘Lady of the house is ill – we’re just stopping to take on food and physick. Oh – hello, Carmine.’ His voice dropped to a lower and friendlier tone. ‘Didn’t recognize you. Since it’s you, you can nip right in, but be sharpish about it, and don’t let anyone see you.’

  Carmine leaned forward to murmur into his ear, and the sailor cast a suspicious glance at Mosca before gripping the apprentice by the arm and drawing him in through the coffeehouse door. Despite a pleading look from the Cakes, Mosca slipped up to press her ear against the door.

  It did not sound much like an invalid’s house. There seemed to be a lot of people behind the door, all talking at once.

  ‘Dormalise Bockerby says she’s flash,’ Carmine was saying, ‘and I took ’em here the long way by the Scrapes so I was sure we weren’t followed. I didn’t like it at first, but I think you’ll want to hear what she has to say.’

  ‘That girl is clearly a pawn.’ An educated, excitable voice that somehow reminded Mosca
of a colt’s harness bells. ‘It little matters whose pawn – we can find out only to our cost.’

  ‘Am I to understand that the poor girl is actually waiting there on the doorstep as we speak?’ It was unmistakably the voice of Hopewood Pertellis, tired and patient. ‘Then for goodness sake bring her in. If there is damage to be done, I would say it has already been done – she knows where we are. Bring her out of the cold and give her some chocolate.’ There was a ripple of protest. ‘My friends, either someone must let her in, or I shall go out and talk to her personally.’

  Mosca managed to withdraw a few steps before the door was opened to admit the Cakes and herself.

  Inside she had to blink a few times before her eyes grew used to the windowless dark. Daylight bored in through knotholes in the wooden walls, and a candleholder was fixed to the centre of every table. Between the tables rose two wooden pillars, each the base of one of the masts above. They had been painted in genteel stripes to match the walls.

  The lady of the house did not look ill. She was pale, but pale by nature, and perhaps from living in a halflight. Her vivid blue eyes were clear and calm beneath their heavy lids. A few roughly torn linen bandages hung over one arm, and the steaming bowl in her hand smelt of herbs.

  Pertellis looked far more like an invalid, although he seemed to have recovered a little since Mosca had seen him in the watch house. He was muffled to the chin in a woollen kerchief, but although he was still pale his skin was less patchy, and he was clean-shaven.

  There seemed to be a large number of men in the room, some unshaven, some sporting bandages. If these were Pertellis’s radical conspirators, they didn’t look like the leaders of a revolution. Mosca could not help noticing a smaller group that stood apart from the rest. They all wore gloves and had chatelaines dangling conspicuously at their belts. They accepted dishes of coffee from the serving girls with reflexive courtesy, but the wary politeness between the two groups spoke of uneasy alliance rather than trust. They all avoided the seated figure of Eponymous Clent in a corner, his head bowed as if happy to avoid notice. Eponymous Clent, crumpled and crestfallen . . . but seemingly uninjured.

  There were a lot of eyes resting on Mosca’s face as she stepped forward to breast the wave.

  ‘I am Mosca Mye, and I . . . want to fix everything.’

  ‘Really?’ Pertellis’s forehead crinkled as he smiled ruefully. ‘I suppose that makes two of us. Oh, pardon me, about fifteen of us, within this house alone. Its all right, come and sit down. Miss Kitely has brought you up a dish of chocolate.’

  Mosca took a dish from the lady of the house in silence. So this was a nest of radicals. She thought a hotbed of sedition would involve more gunpowder and secret handshakes, and less shuffling of feet and passing the sugar.

  ‘I understand you know something about this printing press?’

  ‘I found it. It’s in a hidden hold on one of the old ragmen’s rafts, only I had to get out again quick.’ Mosca pulled a crumpled mass of linen out of one of her pockets and passed it to Pertellis.

  ‘What’s this?’ He shook it out across the table.

  ‘My old apron.’

  Pertellis pulled a chipped monocle out of his waistcoat pocket and held it a few inches from his eye so as to peer at the letters. Then he slowly straightened, and his hand strayed back to his waistcoat, where it made three or four uncoordinated attempts to slide the monocle back into its pocket. His forehead was puckered and he was blinking very fast.

  ‘My word,’ he murmured.

  ‘Birdcatchers.’ Mosca voiced the unspoken.

  There was a hush, and then the word took wing and fluttered, frightened, from mouth to mouth, stirring up questions and exclamations and fear and incredulity.

  ‘I cannot believe it.’ There was something in Pertellis’s expression like that of a young child understanding about death for the first time. ‘Can there really be a man or woman on this beloved earth who would wish those days of horror back upon us? Who would do this?

  ‘I can tell you that right enough,’ Mosca answered grimly. Feeling their eyes pressing upon her, she told the story of Lady Tamarind’s dress.

  There was an appalled silence.

  ‘I find it hard to believe that a lady like . . .’ Pertellis hesitated, and coughed. ‘There is something elevated in the female spirit that will always hold a woman back from the coldest and most vicious forms of villainy.’

  ‘No, there isn’t,’ Miss Kitely said kindly but firmly, as she set a dish in his hand. ‘Drink your chocolate, Mr Pertellis.’

  ‘I believe I can perceive the lady’s strategy, Pertellis.’ One of the Locksmiths spoke with a soft rasp, as if through a mouthful of chalk powder. He was seated in a dark corner of the coffeehouse, and his face was all but lost in the murk. One slender ray of light fell across the tiny, gloved hands that lay, clasped, upon his knee.

  Goshawk, thought Mosca. She could just make out light pooling palely where his eyes had to be.

  ‘Ruling Mandelion is a matter of pulling the Duke’s strings. That much must be obvious to all of you. And if you know what a man wants most, and fears most, and which lies he tells himself, then you may puppet-dance him for your pleasure until the end of his days.’

  Several of Pertellis’s companions bristled slightly at these sentiments, but Goshawk continued unabashed.

  ‘Lady Tamarind has twisted her brother around her little finger since she was a child, and she would have done so forever if we had not appeared on the scene. For nearly six months we have been fighting her for control of the Duke – and slowly but surely we were winning.

  ‘His great, mad dream is to see the Twin Queens return to the Realm to rule Mandelion. We encouraged him to believe it could happen. More than anything, he fears men like you, Pertellis, dangerous idealists who cannot be frightened or bribed into being sensible. So we stoked the flames of his fear, and taught him to see a great and bloody radical conspiracy in every paltry highway robber, every drunken riot, every rumour of a Floating School.’

  ‘It sounds as if you were so busy trying to frame us, you did not notice Her Ladyship setting out to frame you.’ The speaker was a young man whose bright brown eyes made him look twice as awake as everyone else, and three times as angry. Mosca recognized the ‘colt harness’ voice she had heard while eavesdropping.

  ‘Succintly put, Mr Copperback,’ said Goshawk, without any sign of resentment. ‘Three months ago, the Duke was almost ready to sign any charter we wanted. Her Ladyship must have set up the secret printing press as a last desperate gamble. An inspired gamble, with one important effect – the Stationers’ Guild became involved. She persuaded the Stationers that we were running the press in order to manipulate the Duke. Then she made it appear that the Stationers had plotted our arrest. No doubt she has amused herself greatly watching our guilds tearing one another apart.’

  ‘But surely that is a rather short-sighted plan?’ Pertellis blinked across at the Goshawk-shaped patch of murk. ‘In time, both sides were bound to compare notes and realize they had been tricked. She will be left vulnerable.’

  Mosca’s blood suddenly ran cold.

  ‘No, she won’t,’ she said. ‘I heard the Duke give her a by-your-leave to bring in a big ship from the coast, all up to its ears in troops for keeping order. That’s who the new Birdcatcher printings are for . . .’

  ‘The Watermen would never allow it!’ exclaimed Miss Kitely.

  There was a murmur of assent from the rest of the room.

  ‘In case you have not noticed, madam,’ Goshawk interjected, ‘there are currently hardly any Watermen in Mandelion. Most of them disappeared upstream several days ago.’

  Mosca looked sideways at the Locksmith leader. ‘I heard Lady Tamarind say something about that too. They’ve been sent to “delay” the Locksmith troops that she knew were waiting upstream.’

  ‘Are you saying that the waterway is clear for a ship full of Birdcatcher troops to sail into Mandelion and take it over?’ Pertelli
s was cleaning his monocle hard enough to push the lens out. ‘When does this ship arrive, Miss Mye?’

  ‘She said it would take ten days to get ’ere. An’ that was . . . about ten days ago.’

  ‘Beloved above,’ whispered Pertellis. ‘They could turn up at any moment.’

  The conversation became very animated and confusing, so Mosca went and sat next to Eponymous Clent, and kicked her heels against the chair leg for a minute or so.

  ‘So, you just found the barge captain’s body in the clothes chest, then, did you?’ she asked at last. She was not very good at apologizing.

  ‘On the bed, actually. When you found me, I was trying to, ah, hide it. I fear I was not thinking with my usual crystalline lucidity. I even suspected for a while that you might have been responsible for, as it were, spilling the fellow’s claret. You need not look so shocked – younger than you have done worse, and you have a wealth of rage in that reed-like form of yours.’

  ‘But you didn’t cackle on me?’

  ‘No.’ Clent looked a little embarrassed, as if he had been caught out in a weakness. ‘When you denounced me in the watch house I saw myself reflected in your eyes as a monstrous mankiller, and I realized that you truly thought I was guilty. I suppose I could have exposed your petty little crimes and dragged you to the gallows with me, but . . . what would have been the point?’

  ‘I came back to sort it all out,’ said Mosca, after an awkward pause.

  ‘Ah,’ Clent responded without the faintest trace of hope.

  ‘Thought I’d better. No one else cares ’bout you at all, do they?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. Have you been rubbing ashes into your hair as a sign of penitence?’

  ‘That’s just powder. I’m in disguise.’

  ‘As a wig-seller?’ Clent nudged the wig box with his toe.

  ‘The box is just borrowed,’ Mosca explained quickly. ‘Had to put Saracen somewhere, didn’t I?’

  ‘Of course.’ Clent lowered his face into his hands. ‘The sad and weatherbeaten violins of my existence are tuning up for the coda of my life’s symphony, my hopes and dreams are preparing to drain into the forgetful sands like so much rain – and my last and darkest hours would not be complete without the presence of The Goose.’