Fly by Night (28 page)

‘I didn’t catch it!’ she called out, distraught. ‘Please, can you throw it to me again?’

‘There is only ever one chance,’ answered Lady Tamarind and, above her, white lace sails swelled despite the stillness. The web-threads swung softly over their reflections as the pearl-galleon slid away through the mist. ‘Someone wishes to speak with you.’

The wake of the galleon was a ruffled ribbon of white lace, and in its throes bobbed a sodden shape, face down, its hair floating like weed and its wet shirt ballooning on its back. It drifted towards Mosca in spite of the tug of the current and the drag of the galleon’s wake.

There were splintered sculls in her hands, so in terror she started to row. The marriage house floated up to greet her, without bothering to bring the shore with it. She clambered in through the scallop-shaped window, and stumbled from room to room. Behind her she heard a dripping and a dragging and the flabby slapping of dead, wet feet against floorboards. She ran into her room and hid in her truckle bed, knowing that Goodman Postrophe could not stop the dead coming home, because she and Clent had eaten all his mellow-berries.

And it was in her bed that she awoke, wondering why it was so light, and why she could hear only the lap of the water, and the screech of the gulls, and the sound of a town crier bellowing his news in the street.

‘. . . Body found Stabbed through the Vitals with Brutal Force . . . Body found Tangling in the Trout Nets by Whickerback Point . . .’

Mosca clenched her eyes shut, and pushed her fingers into her ears.
Let it be a dream let it be a dream let it be a dream
. . . She gave the Beloved every chance to rearrange the world so that the events of the previous night had not happened, but when she pulled her fingers out of her ears the crier was still shouting.

Perhaps Clent had taken flight in the night? Mosca sat up carefully and peered hopefully towards the larger bed. But no, there he was, his great stomach swelling and falling in slumber, his nostrils widening and narrowing as he breathed steadily.

Saracen’s tiny wounds had faded from live-poppy-red to dead-poppy-red, and he was demonstrating his hearty good health by trying to eat the spluttered mess of candlewax. He looked up at Mosca as she swung a leg out of the truckle bed, and if he saw her as a murderer’s helpmeet there was no hint of it in his coal-chip eyes. Mosca knew that she could have laid waste to whole cities without losing his regard, and she felt a throb of comfort.

‘Mr Clent!’ A token knock at the door was followed by the sudden entrance of the Cakes, her pointed face pink and excited. ‘The constable has come for to ask everyone some questions an’ can you come down to the breakfast room please?’

Clent sat up with impressive if graceless promptness, snatched his wig from a bedknob, and slammed it on his head back to front. Only then did he go about the business of actually waking.

‘I beg a multitude of pardons . . . a constable?’

The Cakes nodded, pleased and self-important.

‘He says I’m a sharp young thing,’ she announced happily, ‘on account this morning I noticed our coracle was tied under the window not to the tree how it always is. And I run down to report it to the beadle, and they says it might have something to do with a body they found this morning. An’ the constable thinks maybe it’s a gang of wandering cut-throats and robbers, who might have tried to get into our house to steal from the shrines and kill us in our beds . . .’

Clent and Mosca had remembered to return the clothes chest to its place. They had forgotten about the coracle.

Oh sweet Beloved Spare us Sores
, thought Mosca.
Look at us
,
we
’
re thieves
,
and mill-burners
,
and spies
,
and one of us is a cut-throat as well
.
We
’
re Criminals of the Murkiest Hue
,
and we
’
re not even very good at it
.

‘We would of course be delighted to speak with your admirer, madam,’ Clent assured her with haggard courtesy. ‘Perhaps you will allow us a few minutes to refresh and make ourselves respectable.’ The door closed behind Cakes, leaving Mosca and Clent to furious whispering.

‘Yer wig’s on back to front!’

‘And your eyebrows are smudged down over your nose! And where by the feathered head of St Minch are my . . . oh, there they are. Turn your apron inside out. The right side looks as if you have been chasing rats up chimneys.’

‘Yer boots are all over mud, Mr Clent . . .’

‘And a hundred men’s boots will be so in this weather, calm yourself. Wait – bring the ewer and bowl to me. Stand still . . .’

Mosca’s shoulder blades knotted themselves as Clent dipped his handkerchief in the bowl and dabbed at her face. It took all her willpower to avoid flinching from his hand, as he wiped away her coal-dust eyebrows and carefully drew on a new set with a pencil, his own eyebrows waggling with concentration as he did so.

‘We returned from the beast fight and went directly to bed,’ he muttered as he added the final touches. ‘Nothing woke us, we heard and saw nothing. If we both hold to this, I think we shall brave the storm without capsize.’

Mosca followed Clent down the passage with her heart bursting. Goodlady Syropia regarded her with pitying wooden eyes. Goodman Trybiscuit hardly dared watch her through his painted fingers.
Please I need to get away with this please please please
. . .

The constable was a man in his forties with ragged red hair and tired-looking eyes that drooped downwards at the corners. A bottle of gin stood on the table, suggesting that the Cakes had added a nip of comfort to his coffee to take away the chill of his morning walk. He was playfully tossing his hat from one hand to the other as he talked to her, and his laugh only faded into formality when Mosca and Clent entered the room.

‘This is the gentleman who lodges with you regular, then?’

‘I am Eponymous Clent, and the honour is mine. I fear I am unlikely to be of help to you, sir, but any trifling assistance I can offer you is indubitably yours.’

‘That’s very gentlemanly of you, sir.’ The constable seemed a little flabbergasted by Clent’s manner. ‘But I do not know why you should feel you cannot be of help.’

‘Perhaps I have misunderstood,’ Clent began again, quickly.
Too quickly
,
Mr Clent
,
careful
,
Mr Clent
. . . Mosca was horrified to find herself trying to advise a murderer to caution in her mind. ‘I apprehended that some blackguards tried and failed to rob this house, and cut the throat of some other poor devil later in the night. I fear that I was in too profound a sleep to have heard anything of use.’

‘Well . . . I don’t see that they can have failed to get in, sir. There was a boat tied up by the window, you see, sir, and if they didn’t get in that way . . . then how did they get back to the bank? There’s another thing, sir –’ the constable reached out and broke off a single husk of honesty, and rubbed its papery disc between his thumb and forefinger – ‘there were lots of these in the dead man’s collar and hair. You don’t get them growing round here, not till you’re way downriver to Fainbless. I think our poor devil was in this house not so long ago.’

There was a small noise like a trodden fledgling. Mosca wondered at it for a moment until she realized that she had made it. The constable did not seem to have heard, but Clent gave her a wary glance.

‘Then it would seem that I have tumbled into misapprehension,’ he said with a smile, lowering his weight into a chair and resting his elbows on the table, where his hands began nervously tearing pieces of crust and arranging them in lines. ‘I am of course solicitous to answer your questions, but perhaps I might send the girl away. Her years are rather tender for matters of mortality, and she has her errands to perform.’

Too clever
,
Mr Clent
,
too wordy
. P
eople don
’
t like you when you
’
re too knowing
.

‘Can I ask what errands are so urgent that she cannot pause to help track down a murderer?’ The constable’s tone was cold.

Inspiration suddenly bit Mosca like a gnat.

‘I got to deliver a message to Lady Tamarind.’ She spoke reflexively, just as she might have slapped at an insect’s bite. ‘Mr Clent works for Lady Tamarind.’

‘Lady Tamarind . . .’ The constable was shocked back into courtesy. ‘Can you prove this, sir?’

Clent went pale, then he evidently remembered Lady Tamarind’s letter introducing him as a poet in her employ, and sent Mosca to fetch it. The constable’s face relaxed as he read it, and soon he was wearing his jovial expression again.

He rolled the letter carefully and handed it back with a new respect. ‘Well, good sir, make no delay for me, I would not have Her Ladyship kept waiting on my account.’

‘Then I shall write the message – if you will excuse us a few minutes, good sir.’

The constable nodded, affable once more, and Mosca followed Clent back to their room.

‘Lady Tamarind, Lady Tamarind,’ Clent murmured to himself. ‘It is a thought, a chance at least. I cannot stay here, waiting for the Locksmiths’ men to trace me. If we can only find sanctuary in the Eastern Spire before the storm breaks . . .’

Mosca fetched paper, ink, pen and sealing wax and stood behind Clent while he wrote.

Mosca watched as the hot wax sealed the letter, her heart beating in her ears. As soon as the letter was in her hand she made for the door, blowing on the wax to cool it.

She stepped into a world washed clean, full of newly woken smells. A nervous wind of stammering gusts broke the clouds like bread. The rain had varnished every street sign. Everything promised newness.

Mosca ran. She ran to outpace her ill luck. She had to reach the spire before Clent had time to guess at the treachery in her head. If she could only use the letter to get inside the Honeycomb Courts! Once there, by hook or by crook she would find a way to speak with Lady Tamarind. She would tell the noblewoman the truth about the events at the Grey Mastiff, and beg to be hidden in the Eastern Spire, safe from the Locksmiths . . . and from Eponymous Clent. If only she dared tell Lady Tamarind about the murder of Partridge! But Mosca herself was steeped too deep in that.

The slouching shops of the riverside yielded to square-shouldered houses with gleaming porticoes. Tall windows arched as if raising their eyebrows to see Mosca run past.

She reached the edge of a broad and busy thoroughfare. On the far side, a row of tall, iron railings held off the curious crowds. The wrought-iron gates were decorated with the outlines of two young women who seemed to be holding hands at the place where the bolt fastened the gates. The Eastern Spire rose from a broad, square sandstone building, braced with columns and teetering with statuary.

When she approached and tried to speak to one of the guards at the gate, he nodded her in the direction of the tradesmen’s gate.

The tradesmen’s gate merited only two footmen, who saw no reason to stop playing cards as Mosca approached.

‘Letter for Lady Tamarind from Mr Eponymous Clent. I was told to come in and wait. Lady Tamarind’ll want to see me.’

One of the footmen took the letter and used it to scratch his ear as he looked Mosca up and down.

‘Better follow me, then.’

A door painted with the heraldry of the Twin Queens opened into a corridor of tapestries, musty from too many damp winters. Another door opened, and there was a clean rush of cold air as they stepped out into a wide rectangular courtyard, surrounded by a sheltered colonnade.

‘Wait here. Don’t wander off.’ The footman left Mosca in a darkened archway, and hurried off with the letter.

The courtyard was paved with great, six-sided tiles, glazed in creams and shades of caramel. Across it extravagant figures lolled in sedans, or strolled idly like sun-struck drones over a giant honeycomb. Along the darkened colonnade, footmen paced briskly in cloth-soled shoes, and serving girls tripped with baskets of dry lavender, beating them with pestles to fill the air with its scent.