Fly by Night

by Frances Hardinge

  While Pertellis and his fellow radicals tried to make sense of what Mosca had told them, Miss Kitely, who had withdrawn through a little doorway, re-emerged, this time without a coffee-pot.

  ‘Mr Pertellis,’ she said, her quiet voice creating a space for itself amid the raised tones, ‘I have consulted him on the matter, and he would like to speak with the girl.’

  ‘Him?’ Mosca looked a question at Pertellis.

  ‘Our leader.’ Pertellis beamed with pride.

  ‘But . . . I thought you were the leader!’ Mosca exchanged a glance with Clent, who seemed as surprised as she was.

  ‘Oh no, not really. The truth is, we’ve never really had a leader.’ Pertellis gave the men around him an abashed smile. ‘We were just a group of friends who did our best to change things for the better in little ways – and met in this coffeehouse so we could talk safely. I suppose I kept everyone in touch with each other, but I was always ready to step down when a true leader came along. And he did – in our darkest hour. A man of action, of decision.’ A number of the Locksmiths were looking curious, and Mosca suspected that perhaps they had not met the mysterious leader either.

  Mosca rose a little unsteadily and found that Clent was also on his feet.

  ‘If you have no objection, I shall accompany my secretary. I would be glad to trade a few words with this incomparable leader of yours.’

  The leader would be someone with eyes as sharp as glass shards, Mosca thought, a man whose mind cut to the heart of things like a knife through cheese, a man like her father. The leader would be a man calm in every crisis, with a clear gaze and a smile as frank as a handshake.

  Pertellis held the door ajar for Mosca and Clent, and he followed them into the room. It had the sick-room smells of vegetable soup and laudanum, but the man seated in a mahogany chair was dressed crisply, not with the slack helplessness of the invalid.

  The radical leader was Captain Blythe the highwayman.

  S is for Sedition

  Captain Blythe, the highwayman. Captain Blythe in a redingote of good green cloth, with his hair combed back in its pigtail, and cobbled boots on his feet.

  ‘This is the young lady with the printed heart.’ Pertellis diligently recounted Mosca’s words.

  Blythe did not offer him so much as a glance. Nor did he look at Mosca. His eyes were set upon the face of Eponymous Clent, as if he hoped to pin him with his gaze like a butterfly to a board.

  ‘How long has this man been here?’ he asked sharply as soon as Pertellis had finished speaking.

  ‘Mr Eponymous Clent was one of many languishing in the jail when your men led the rescue mission using the information and keys that Mr Goshawk gave us. He is . . . not exactly of our party but we took him with us because, well, we were not sure what else to do with him.’

  ‘I need to speak with him. Alone, if you please.’ Blythe remembered Mosca and gave her a fleeting glance. ‘All right, his familiar may stay if she must.’ Pertellis left the room without complaint.

  ‘I must say,’ Clent declared, rallying from his shock, ‘this is not a total surprise to me. When we, ah, met by the road to Mandelion, even then I noted something of a twinkle in your eye and said to myself, here is a gentleman who is more than he seems. Thievery is a game that he plays to, ah, mislead those who seek the leader of the valiant, freedom-loving radicals . . .’ Something in Blythe’s glare quelled Clent’s flow of words.

  The highwayman placed his hands upon his knees, and leaned forward, still piercing Clent with his eyes. ‘Are you aware that you and your infernal ballad have ruined my life?’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  Blythe erupted to his feet and took a few angry paces down the room and back, gripping his own fist as if trying to crush it.

  ‘I always laughed at those gulls who thought going on the highway was the way to become a gentleman. I saw them riding in darbies to the tree in their velvet lapels, with lasses of the town pretending to weep for them. And I laughed at them – for I knew that was not how it was done. It should be blood, and business, and keep your dreams in your head.

  ‘Then your cursed ballad changed everything. All my men started hearing they were my Gallant Company of Merry Rogues, and they took a liking to it. Then one evening, I came upon a big man in a black cap bullying two village lasses. They hailed me as if they knew me – they didn’t ask me to help them, they beamed and told Black-cap that now I was there they would surely see his crown broken. So he rounded on me, and so I rounded on him, and . . . tapped his claret for him. He ran off with his broken nose, and I found myself with a bundle of rosemary and half a rye cake in thanks. I could hardly peel their arms from round my neck. Well, that . . .’

  Blythe looked distracted and waved a finger.

  ‘That bit was not so bad.

  ‘But word got out. Black-cap was a beadle, it turned out, with a turn for bullying extra tax, and by morning the new songs had it that I was defending the poor and helpless against the Duke’s men. I was a hero standing between little lowly folk and their oppressors. And the little lowly folk believed it, and so did the oppressors, right up to the Duke himself, His Grace of the Cloven Brain.’ Blythe ran a distracted hand over his hair. ‘The Duke’s men searched every garret and barn for us. But the villagers hid us in cellars, they fed us and lent us their best boots when ours were run to rags, then turned hopeful eyes on us because they knew we had come to help them. So somehow I found myself stopping families being thrown out of their cottages, and beating off taxmen so that villagers could eat that night.

  ‘I was taken sick with an ague after hiding in the heather for three nights, and a family of farmers smuggled me into Mandelion in their market cart to find a physician. I have lain low in this coffeehouse ever since, and cannot show my face for fear of the constables.

  ‘Your damnable way with words has brought me to this pass. I am leader of a valiant resistance, whether I will or nay, and trapped beyond my wits to remedy. Any suggestions?’

  Clent cleared his throat. He took some time about it, and Mosca guessed that his feverish mind was searching for words.

  ‘My dear good sir, your story is extraordinary, indeed one that I would be proud to have written, but I cannot see why your anger has turned upon me. You wished to become the stuff of ballads, and that you are. Perhaps you are a little more legendary than you hoped, but you have no one to blame for that but yourself. I fulfilled my part of the bargain, and you needed only to keep a cool head and revel in your glory until some other brisk blade with a good seat on a horse came along to steal your thunder.’

  ‘A cool head? A week ago the Duke’s men arrested a young farmer because he would not betray me. His wife rode through dark and storm in nothing but her gown to tell me of it, so that I should rescue her husband before he could be taken to Mandelion to stand trial. What was I to do? Say no?’

  ‘Yes,’ Clent replied promptly. ‘I would have done, and so would countless other men. If you have weakened to the siren songs of valour and virtue, I hardly see how you can blame me.’

  The door behind Mosca opened again, and Miss Kitely put her head around it.

  ‘The boy we sent for Mr Trifish the barber-surgeon is back, Clam. He found a kerchief dropped on the step – the signal Mr Trifish said he’d leave if the Duke’s men had taken him.’

  ‘Cast off, then. Trifish is a milk-and-mallow cove, and will squeak if they prick him. The constables will be here any minute.’

  Miss Kitely withdrew, closing the door behind her, and Blythe gave Clent a blazing look.

  ‘You see? They rely on me. Even she . . .’ He waved a despairing hand at the door. ‘. . . she relies on me.’

  ‘A-a-ah . . . I think I understand. There is a charming complication in the matter, a delicate dilemma, a sweet distraction . . .’ Clent halted as Mosca elbowed him sharply in the ribs. ‘My dear fellow,’ he continued more soberly, ‘if you have managed to complicate things by forming a sentimental attachment in less than a week, then I doubt t
here is anything I can do for you. You, sir, are a romantic, and I suspect your condition is incurable.’

  There were feet moving on the roof above, and ropes ticked as they were played out. Paintings rattled against the wall as the room lurched, then accepted the river as a dancing partner. Suddenly there was the crash of a crockery catastrophe, raised voices in the next room, and feet thundering above.

  Blythe threw the door open, and Mosca and Clent followed him through it.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  A grimy boy Mosca recognized from the Floating School was recovering his breath.

  ‘The Duke’s men, sir – they’re searchin’ all the coffeehouses at moorings, sir.’

  ‘Cast off quickly! Cut the ropes if you have to! Have we men still ashore?’

  ‘Only Hamby and Foddle loosing the lines. Here they come!’

  The street outside was sliding to the right and a dark mouth of a gap slowly opening between the waterfront and the doorstep. First one man and then a second leaped for the doorway, and each was caught by a forest of waiting arms and pulled to safety. When the doorway cleared, two coffeemaidens knelt on the threshold, bracing a broom and a warming pan against the street’s edge to push it away.

  ‘Miss Kitely! We’re like to catch our doorscraper in the figurehead of the Spry Squirrelhawk!’ squeaked the shorter and plumper of the two coffeemaidens, sidling up against the jamb to brace herself.

  Miss Kitely snatched up a long mop and beat the handle-end against a trapdoor in the roof until it cracked open.

  ‘Mr Stallwrath, hard-a-chimneyside, if you would.’ A harassed-looking sailor above gave a hurried salute.

  Mosca pushed her eye against a knothole. She could see a group of Duke’s men pushing through the crowd carrying cudgels, and two of them seemed to be shouldering muskets. Their leader was calling something aloft, hailing the sailors up on the deck of the Bower. He pointed at the jetty, as if ordering them back to their moorings. As the coffeehouse drifted further away, his mouth shrank to an angry crack across his face. He started to drive his way through the crowd with a new fierceness and resolution.

  ‘Up kites, Mr Stallwrath!’

  ‘But Miss Kitely, we ain’t ten paddle-lengths clear of the bank . . .’

  ‘We shall worry about the fine later, Mr Stallwrath.’

  There was a squeal of consternation from the coffeemaidens as the first Duke’s man reached the jetty side.

  ‘Grab their lines! Stop that coffeehouse!’ someone was shouting. ‘There are fugitives and cell-breakers aboard!’

  ‘Sussuratch smile!’ murmured Miss Kitely. ‘She’s gathering away – we are finding our pace at last.’

  Perhaps they were. Perhaps this was fast for a coffeehouse. Mosca could not help noticing that they were still being overtaken by ducks.

  A shout of triumph. One of the Duke’s men lifted a dripping boathook with a trailing line looped across the end. Four deputies seized hold and braced their weight against it, the drift of the Laurel Bower dragging them towards the brink in stuttering steps. Drawing his sword, Blythe pushed his way to the doorway and swung himself out and to one side. Mosca recollected the rungs set in the outside wall.

  A blade flashed downwards once, twice, and the cluster of deputies fell backwards, the severed rope-end flicking back into their faces like a cow’s tail swatting flies. Blythe swung back into the room and turned to stand in the doorway, daring anyone on the jetty to leap for the boat. No one seemed ready to take up the challenge.

  ‘We’re clearing the Squirrelhawk . . . we’ll clear the Donkey Dancer . . . our stern’s three paddle-lengths from the shore, Skipp’am!’ The final word, to judge by the confused salute that accompanied it, was a compromise between ‘skipper’ and ‘madam’.

  ‘Gentlemen, we are on the river, and out of the Duke’s jurisdiction!’ Miss Kitely’s declaration was met by a brief burst of cheering on all sides. One radical even slapped Blythe heartily on the back, almost toppling him forward into the water, and earning himself a glare.

  There was a violent crack, like a tree bough snapping, and suddenly there was a new knothole in the northern wall, and another in the southern wall.

  ‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Pertellis in consternation, gazing down at Blythe, who was now lying at full length upon his face. ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  Blythe lifted himself on to his elbows and directed a red-faced, disbelieving glare around the room.

  ‘Weeping Lord of the Bloody Eye, will you all get down? They are shooting at us.’

  The other men in the Laurel Bower obediently lowered themselves, some of them carefully laying down their coffee dishes first, others looking around for the cleanest place on the floor. When a second shot punctured a sampler and gonged off a coffee-pot, the floorboards suddenly looked a lot more comfortable to everyone.

  ‘They cannot be.’ Miss Kitely’s voice was fragile. ‘No one . . . no one would shoot at us on the river . . . The Watermen would never . . . never allow . . .’ Blythe grabbed for her sleeve to pull her down. Her skirt ballooned about her as she sank to her knees, then subsided around her with a silken sigh.

  Clent and Mosca had crouched scarcely a second after Blythe had flung himself flat, and now they peeped at each other between their fingers.

  ‘Madam,’ Clent muttered, ‘I owe you an apology. You were correct, and I was in error. The Duke is pixelated.’

  ‘Where’s the Cakes?’ Mosca looked about.

  She need not have worried. Carmine had taken it upon himself to save the Cakes. This involved dragging her down to a corner of the floor and wrapping his arms protectively around her. Even the floor must have seemed quite a dangerous place to him, since he appeared to be in no hurry to let her go.

  ‘Dulcet!’ A flush was creeping up from Miss Kitely’s collar. ‘Dulcet, run to the galley and put another cauldron on the boil, then come back here with those three muskets. Shrewlie, go with her and bring back as much shot as you can carry. You other girls, help them carry.’ Seeing both the coffeemaidens scampering for the internal door, Mosca suddenly realized that ‘you other girls’ must mean the Cakes and herself. It did not look as if the Cakes would escape from her saviour at any time soon, so Mosca followed the coffeemaidens.

  The galley was blisteringly hot. Heaps of coffee beans glistened through the steam like burned-out mountains of some volcanic land. Squat little Moscas of different sizes were reflected in the bowls of a dozen ladles. The table was also a cupboard, the top folded back to show everything stowed tidily on hooks and in lined pockets, ready to be ‘battened down when the coffeehouse was underway’.

  ‘Take these.’ Dulcet, the tall girl with honey-coloured hair, looped the strings of four heavy leather pouches over Mosca’s wrists. ‘And some of them snuffbottles. The green ones. Blue ones are snuff, green ones are gunpowder.’ The muskets that filled Shrewlie’s arms gleamed with a dull oiliness, and smelt of beeswax.

  This is more like it, Mosca decided, as she filled her hands with tiny, scarab-shaped bottles. When they struggled back into the main room, the door had been wedged so that it stood open barely the width of a hand. Blythe lay on his belly, aiming a pistol through the aperture. Without the view of the bobbing shore it did not feel so much as if they were in a boat, rather a parlour with hiccups.

  Another shot punctured the door and tore apart the head of a stuffed fish that decorated the wall, showering bystanders with sawdust.

  ‘How do you come to have so much lead shot, Miss Kitely?’ Pertellis seemed bewildered by the laden appearance of the girls.

  ‘Mr Copperback has been expecting something of this sort for a while. He has been making his own shot, and it seemed most sensible to hide it on the Bower.’ Miss Kitely continued to clean out a pistol barrel in a business-like manner.

  ‘But where in the name of goodness did you find the lead?’

  Copperback opened his mouth to say something, but forgot what it was when Miss Kitely gave him a meaningful look.r />
  ‘It is a long story,’ Miss Kitely explained coolly, as she took a snuffbottle from Mosca and began trickling the powder into the pan. In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell. In this case she thought it probably involved stolen shrine icons.

  ‘Um . . . I could swear that this bullet has an eye.’

  ‘A freak of the mould, Mr Pertellis.’

  Mosca left the last pouch of shot in the eager hand of Copperback, then ran to press her eye to a knothole in the shoreward wall. She could see a gaggle of Duke’s men in black and green standing on the jetty, now a reassuring distance away. There was a downy puff, like a dandelion clock being torn apart by the wind. Only as the smoke unravelled did Mosca glimpse the musket barrel behind it. Just as she was wondering how the gun had fouled, she heard a crack and felt the wall tremble against her cheek.

  It was all so odd and unreal, she could not feel any sense of danger. She was marvelling at this when a dun yellow cloth slid across the scene like a theatre curtain. Her cry of surprise was echoed by several others nearby.

  ‘It’s the Catnip! They’ve pulled alongside us!’ was the call from above.

  ‘Call out to them! Let them know they’re likely to be caught in the crossfire!’ Miss Kitely called back.

  ‘They’re saying nothing, but they’re keeping pace and giving us the wave.’ Stallwrath sounded bewildered.

  It was true. The little lighter with the yellow sail had slowed to hold its place between the Laurel Bower and the jetty where the Duke’s men levelled their muskets in vain. ‘Her mainsail is shaking, but they’re making no move to right her. I think . . . she’s shielding us from fire.’

  From Mosca’s knothole she could see nothing but the yellow sail, but a minute later she heard gasps from a couple of the radicals at other spyholes.

  ‘It’s the Peck o’ Clams,’ cried Miss Kitely, ‘sails close-hauled to hide us, dragging anchor to slow her down to our pace. What are they doing?’