Fly By Night

M is for Murder

By the time the shrieks and clatter of tumbling brass-ware had faded in Mosca’s ears, rain was falling, in drops so fine that it was scarcely more than a tickle on the skin. After ten minutes the cobbles shone as if with nervous perspiration, and Mosca’s soles began to slither.

‘Mr Clent…’

‘Keep walking.’

‘Can we slow down?’

‘No.’

They took a left through the Drimps, where the tallow-makers’ wares hung behind dusty panes like the pale fingers of ghouls.

Clent at last paused in the empty street and stared up at the moon, which was the clean, startled white of a newly sliced cheese. He blinked as if the creamy light were trickling into his eyes, then wiped his hand up his forehead into his hair. Little panicky stars darted around within his eyes as if trying to escape.

‘Catastrophe,’ he muttered. ‘Utter catastrophe.’

‘But we won, Mr Clent!’ Mosca could only assume that he had missed the end of the fight. ‘Saracen beat the civet and… and quite a lot of other people who weren’t even meant to be in the fight, too.’

‘It will be all over Mandelion by morning,’ Clent intoned hollowly.

‘Looked like half of Mandelion was there tonight already, nobs and guildsmen, and scholars, they all saw Saracen…’

‘All of them at once… one fell swoop…’

‘Yeah, swoops, and peckings and buttings…’

Clent hooked his finger into his cravat to pull it away from his throat, as if he had felt it tightening like a noose. ‘There is no doubt about it. It will mean war.’

Mosca stared at her employer.

‘What?’

At about the same time, some of Mosca’s earlier sentences seemed to penetrate Clent’s absorption.

‘What?’ His gaze was cold, distracted and somewhat annoyed. Then he sighed, and his face took on a look of weary tolerance. ‘Mosca, the Duke has arrested all the Locksmiths in Mandelion.’

‘But… that’s good, isn’t it?’ Mosca asked tremulously.

‘No, it is not good!’

Even during his most petulant bellowing, Mosca had never heard him speak so coldly. Once again she felt that she had glimpsed a sharp and knife-like character sheathed within Clent’s pompous, ponderous exterior.

‘There are Rules, child, Rules! For years, the Guildsmen’s Rules have been the only thing stopping the Stationers and Locksmiths ripping each other apart. That throng we have just left may bellow for this king’s grouse or that queen’s civet, but in their heart nobody believes in the kings or queens any more. The Realm is held together by the guilds, and everybody knows it. And if the guilds fall on each other’s throats, heaven help us all.

‘Mabwick Toke expected the Locksmiths to be shamed, incriminated even, but not arrested! Beloved above, the Assizes begin tomorrow! Do you know what will happen if an entire chapter of Locksmiths is executed? What was the Duke thinking?’

Mosca shook her head.

‘The Locksmiths will assume that the Stationers have deliberately broken the Rules. There will be war. Stationers will be locked in their own closets to starve, or strangled with chatelaines. Locksmiths will be stabbed to death with steel pens, or crushed as thin as biscuits in paper mills. Then the Watermen will take the side of the Stationers, so the Hansoms Guild will back the Locksmiths, and all the other guilds will choose a side, right down to the Playing-card Makers and the Milliners. There will be murder and bloody mayhem on the highways and the waterways. The towns will starve, and soldiers turn to banditry. And all the kings and queens who have waited their chance for decades will see that there is anarchy, and they will arrive with their armies all at once. Does that sound good?’

Mosca’s mouth was dry. She was not sure which she found more alarming: the picture Clent had painted, or the startling intuition that for once he was actually speaking the truth.

‘I didn’t know…’

‘No, why would you?’ Clent gave her a complicated look, half bitterness, half forgiveness. ‘How would you know?’ He sighed. ‘The worst of it is that I do not think the Locksmiths even have the confounded printing press.’

‘What?’ Everything Mosca had been told about the Locksmiths did a neat somersault in her head.

‘I was listening in while they tried to torture Hopewood Pertellis into telling them who was really running the printing press. Then they got sidetracked into talking about the difficulty of finding a docile crocodile on the black market, for some reason. Then they started interrogating the spy they had found behind their door.’

‘They found a…’ Mosca’s gaze met that of Clent. ‘Oh,’ she mouthed silently.

‘Naturally, when they pulled me in by my collar I told them that I had hunted them out because I had a burning desire to join the Locksmiths. I got no further. They knew who I was. They knew I was working for the Stationers. Before the Duke’s men arrived, it became very clear that they knew everything I had written in my last report to Mabwick Toke. Somehow, I know not how, they must have read it.’

Mosca blinked to clear her head, which seemed terribly crowded all of a sudden.

‘Does that mean we’re working for the Locksmiths now?’

‘No. It means that we are leaving. My name was in that report.’ He sighed. ‘Your name was in it, Mosca.’

The rain seemed to creep into Mosca’s eyes as she ran to keep up, and it tingled at the back of her tongue with a taste that she knew was tears. She did not raise her head, for fear of seeing her beloved Eastern Spire fading before her eyes, stolen by tears and darkness.

‘Mr Clent… you could… you could leave me behind. You could… send a note to Lady Tamarind, sayin’ how you didn’t want a job from her after all and sayin’… she should give me a place instead. I know you’d like it better that way.’

Clent stopped in his tracks, and stared down into her face with no expression at all. The rain was falling more heavily now, and a galaxy of droplets nestled furtively in his wig.

‘No,’ he said quietly at last. He loosed the bow of Mosca’s bonnet ribbon, which had been working its way sideways, and tied it again. ‘No, I do not think I could do that.’

The kennel ditch down the road quickly filled with rainwater which chased mess and market scraps towards the river. With them hurried Mosca and Clent.

At last they found the marriage-house sign swinging above them.

‘Mosca, there is a little boat tied at the back of the shop. Bring it round to the ground-floor window – the one shaped like a scallop shell. Wait in the boat.’

Mosca nodded, her eyes and mind so full of rain that she could not speak or swallow. While Clent fitted his key into the lock and turned it carefully, wincing each time the works clicked, she slipped around the side of the marriage shop and clambered over the pile of kindling that doubled as a fence. A pair of sad, rust-coloured chickens crouched under a rotten board and watched as, with Saracen clasped in her arms, she slithered awkwardly down a bank of mud and sodden grass to the water’s edge.

The boat was round, like an overgrown coracle, with a couple of splintered sculls wedged inside. The mooring rope had been made fast, thoroughly but not expertly, and Mosca had a sudden mental image of the Cakes knotting it over and over for safety’s sake, while her red ringlets bobbed against her nose. Then Mosca imagined the Cakes standing aghast by the waterside in the morning with her scoop of chicken feed drooping from one hand, looking at the place where the boat should have been and starting to cry.

Doesn’t matter, Mosca told herself. She cries all the time anyway.

Mosca stepped into the boat, put Saracen down, and loosed the mooring. The sculls were clammy and heavy, so she manoeuvred the boat along the wall by grabbing handfuls of ivy and pulling. A stone face of St Marpequet, the Warden against Early Frosts, had been carved into the stone sill of the ground-floor window. He stared upwards as if his mouth was gaping to drink the rain. His impressive and aristocratic nose hooked just enough for Mosca to tie the rope to it.

Mosca had decided that she would leave Mandelion with Clent. She did not notice herself making the decision; rather the decision seemed to have fallen into her head from the rain-laden sky. She hoped that there would be no war, and that in time Clent would bring her back. There was a throb in her mind when she thought of Lady Tamarind, but for now someone seemed to want Mosca with them, and that was too strange and new to be thrown away lightly.

She did not hate Clent for the way he had spoken. For most of her life she had been at the mercy of stronger and more powerful people who cared nothing for her. She had always been afraid, and her fear had made her angry. Now, all of a sudden she began to understand that Clent also spent his days feeling powerless and afraid. Perhaps he too was angry at finding himself portly and past his prime with little to show for it, but still having to use every fox’s trick just to stay ahead of the hounds.

What tricks would he be pulling from his sleeve now? He did not want to wake the house, so Mosca supposed he was planning to leave with his pockets padded. Blankets from the beds, probably, candlesticks and scraps from the kitchen… in her mind’s eye Mosca followed Clent’s figure from room to room, and then she nibbled her knuckle as she imagined him snatching the offerings from the little shrines to Leampho, Judin, Happendabbit, perhaps even pocketing the icons themselves to melt down or sell later.

He wouldn’t.

Of course he would.

He mustn’t.

The scallop-shaped window opened inwards and, by using the thick stems of the ivy as leafy rungs, Mosca was able to scramble on to the sill and tumble through, into the chapel beyond. To be sure, she had not been able to stop Clent robbing Goodman Postrophe’s shrine, back near Chough, but this time she felt he might listen to her. He wanted her to come with him, and surely that must mean that everything had changed.

She was in the little chapel of Leampho, where Saracen had married the Cakes’ dead mother. She felt her way to the door, glad that she knew her way back to her rooms despite the darkness. By each chapel door she paused to listen, but all was silent. At last she reached the rooms she shared with Clent, and gently pushed the door open. The main room was dark and cheerless, but the closet door was slightly ajar, and through it wavered a timorous hint of candlelight.

Clent had said that under no circumstances should she enter the closet, that he needed the privacy it gave him. But he wanted her to come with him, and surely that must mean that everything had changed.

Mosca pushed open the closet door. There was a candle on the floor, so near the door that for a moment she could see nothing but the brightness of its flame. Without even thinking, she stooped, picked it up, and held it at arm’s length to illuminate the closet. Only then did she stare into the room in front of her and see that everything had changed.

Clent was half stooping over the heavy oaken clothes chest by the wall. His face was flushed with effort, and his knuckles white with the strain of lifting what looked like a great bolt of cloth. Peeping above the edge of the trunk was a wig that Mosca had not seen before, a mass of unpowdered brown curls. Then Clent saw her and slowly stood, and the candlelight softly traced the outline of a tanned cheek beyond the wig, and Mosca knew it was not a wig at all.

An arm was hanging over the side of the chest, she now realized, dangling quite casually like a daytripper trailing his hand over the side of a pleasure boat. There was something terribly wrong with the skin of that hand. It was pale, not an aristocratic powder-pale, not a scholarly shun-the-sun pale. It had an underground pallor, like ripped-up roots, or the eyeless things that children of Chough were told lived in the mountain caverns. The colour seemed shocked as well as shocking, and Mosca knew that the owner of the hand was dead.

The wrist was slightly crooked, as if it had broken once and never quite healed.

‘I thought…’ Clent said, handling each word carefully as if testing its edge for sharpness, ‘I thought I told you to wait in the boat.’

‘I come in out of the rain,’ she said in a voice so small that she hardly recognized it.

‘Do you have anything you want to say?’ There was something frightening about Clent when he used short words.

Mosca shook her head.

‘We will discuss all this later, but for now we must make the best of the situation. Come here and help me with this.’

Mosca hesitated, wondering if she could drop the candle and run.

‘Listen, girl, have you any comprehension of the predicament we would find ourselves in if we were discovered fixed in this tableau?’

Well, you wanted something on ’im, the rasping voice of Palpitattle whispered laconically in Mosca’s imagination. And now, the voice added as she took a few steps towards the chest, now you’re goin’ to be an accomplice an’ he’ll have something on you too.

Partridge’s eyes were closed, at least. He was crammed awkwardly into the chest, as if he had mistaken it for a truckle bed and was determined to sleep there despite all discomfort.

If I run, Mr Clent’ll know I’m going to raise the house, and he’ll catch me and kill me…

She watched as Clent folded Partridge’s errant limbs into the chest. He closed the lid, crouched, gripped one end, and then looked up at Mosca expectantly. It took a few seconds for her to understand his meaning, then she crouched and managed to slide her fingers under the chest.

The box was even heavier than she expected, and she had to drop her end on to her knee. In a shambolic, improvised way the pair of them tilted and wobbled the chest between them until Clent was supporting most of the weight. They proceeded from the room one clumsy step at a time, a strange, four-legged creature with a wooden body, Mosca walking backwards.

At any moment someone would open the door, and there they would be. ‘Thieves’, would be the cry. Bockerby would fling open the chest, and the cry would change to ‘Murderers’. Mosca suddenly felt how the cold wind would whip her clothes about her as she stood upon the scaffold. And the universities would cut her heart out to see how black it was.

Please, Mosca prayed silently to each and every Beloved, please let me get away with this. I’ll never ask for anything else, I promise, and if I get away with this, then some day I’ll make myself rich and give all the money to the shrines, but please, please, I need to get away with this. Otherwise I’ll be strung up, and hung up on a gibbet and ate by rooks and then I can’t do nothing for any of you.

In the shrine of Leampho, Clent bit off bitter words under his breath. ‘We will never get the box through the window. We shall have to sit him between us with a coat over his head.’

Saracen stared up from the boat as Mosca climbed down from the sill, and he offered no comment. A moment later, Partridge’s dead face appeared through the window, framed by the ivy. Then Clent could be seen with his arms around the river captain’s waist, heaving him through the hole.

Mosca tried to slow Partridge’s descent, but her hands seemed able to grip only feebly, and in the end the dead man fell into the boat with a crash and a splash. Mosca sank to a crouch to stop herself falling overboard as the boat bucked, and watched as one of Partridge’s boots floated away down the river, filling with water as it went.

‘Keep your eyes open. Our lives depend upon your perspicacity.’ Clent climbed down into the boat, the creeper crackling under his weight. He took up the oars and steered the boat carefully along the wall, dipping the oars silently and drawing slowly. He paused by the bank to scrabble up some slick, fist-sized stones with his plump fingers, and then he heaved on the oars again, and the bank swung away and abandoned them.

For a while the river’s current rolled the little boat about, the way a child rolls a marble between his hands. Houses fled away giddily to the left, only to reappear from the right, and the moon circled above Mosca’s head like a moth. Fat raindrops hit the dark glass of the river’s skin, each leaving a coin-shaped dent with a crinkled edge. The papery sound of the rain was so loud that Clent had to lean towards Mosca to make himself heard.

‘The island…’ He pointed towards the lonely pillar of Goodman Sussuratch in the middle of the river, then gestured towards Partridge. ‘Stones… in his clothes.’ He had to repeat it several times before Mosca understood.

The stones were deathly cold, but Mosca dared not speak or disobey. She unbuttoned Partridge’s shirt just enough to slide some stones inside, holding them all the while at arm’s length. She was afraid that if she leaned forward, Partridge’s parted lips would start to whisper.

I want your uncle’s heart spiked on a boathook so I can hear it crackle as it bakes in the sun…

There were deep creases running down each of Partridge’s cheeks, as if twin tears had worn grooves. They joined in a red crease under his chin. Maybe all dead faces looked that way, thought Mosca. Maybe death crumpled you up like a ball of paper.

They were so low in the water that when they finally reached the island the little boat slid right under the jetty, and knocked against the rocky side of the great pillar.

‘Now we wait for the mists to thicken,’ Clent said quietly.

Peering out from beneath the jetty, Mosca realized that the distant row of houses was already dimming, as a veil of vapour stealthily rose from the river. Feeling the chill of water seeping into her shoes, it suddenly occurred to her that, if Clent wanted her silence, her current position was more dangerous than it had ever been in the marriage house. She kept her breathing as steady as she could, and peered stealthily at Clent. He seemed to be staring out at the mists, but she could see his face only in silhouette, so she could not be sure that he was not stealing glances at her.

Clent’s manner had seemed so natural and casual when he had told her never to enter the closet. He had seemed so kind and good-humoured when he had given her the day off and thus kept her away from their rooms. Had it really all been an act? But Clent had been afraid of Partridge, and sometimes fear made you angry. Perhaps after years anger cooled, like a sword taken from the forge. Perhaps in the end you were left with something very cold and very sharp.

What exactly was it that Clent did for the Stationers? Was it just spying? Or were there times when a quill was not enough, and a knife was needed? Was that why they used him? Perhaps Partridge had bullied his way into the marriage house to find Clent, and found him in the middle of doing something very terrible… the way Mosca herself had just interrupted him.

‘Now,’ Clent whispered at last, ‘take his feet.’ The jetty was too low to let them stand, but somehow amid the rocking and struggling there was a splash, and suddenly there was nothing left of Partridge except a circle of foam, and his loosed cravat tracing a question mark on the water’s surface. Tiny bubbles fizzed for a few moments. Silence followed, and then Clent gave a croak of alarm.

‘There!’

Something had surfaced, ten yards downstream, and was gliding away with its wet shirt ballooning on its back.

‘Slice the moon, the fellow has shed ballast!’ Clent struggled with the paddles, but in his haste one handle became wedged between the planks of the jetty. By the time he tugged it free, the sodden shape had been swallowed by the mist.

Without a word, Clent abandoned their pursuit; he pushed away from the jetty and rowed in silence for some time. At last a bank crept into distinctness, and Mosca saw the marriage house loom into view with a mixture of relief and confusion. Why had Clent returned? Was he no longer trying to escape Mandelion?

She followed Clent up the ivy with Saracen. Obeying Clent’s silent signals, she helped him carry the chest back to their rooms. Although it was now empty, her legs trembled, and twice she almost dropped it. When they reached their rooms, they found the candle low in a mess of tallow.

‘Why’ve we come back, Mr Clent?’

Clent gave a bitter little shrug, and dusted off his lapels with a shadow of his usual manner.

‘That fellow will be found. If we vanish the same night, the hue and cry would be after us. I fancy we have little choice but to brazen the matter out.’ He pulled off his wig and stretched himself out upon the bed without bothering to remove his boots. His lids drooped for a moment with an air of utter exhaustion, and then flicked open once more. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I…’ Mosca had taken a few steps towards the door without even thinking. ‘I got to see to Saracen. The civet hurt him, an’ I got to rub the place with brandy. The Cakes got some.’

‘Very well. But do not go far, and be sure not to wake me when you return.’

Mosca took up Saracen’s leash in one slack hand, and led him away.

The Cakes opened the door to Mosca’s knock. She was wearing a knitted nightcap, and her red ringlets hung to her shoulder. She had been looking pinker and happier since the midnight marriage, Mosca noticed.

‘Come in! Are you hungry?’ The Cakes seemed pleased and surprised at her nocturnal visitor, although her smile crumpled a little as Mosca pushed through the open door, dropped to a squat, and tucked her knees to her chin. ‘What is it?’

Mosca buried her nose between her knees, and stared up at the other girl with big, black, helpless, hostile eyes.

‘Mosca… what is it?’ The Cakes’ face started to take on that drooping, beaky look it always had when she was about to cry. ‘You’re scaring me. Has someone hurt you?’

Mosca shook her head.

‘Is it a bad dream? I know how it can be with dreams. You can stay here for a bit if you like.’ The Cakes went back to her bed and sat down on it, sensible and big-sisterish. She pulled off her nightcap, and combed her fingers through the ringlet-wrangle on her head. ‘There’s some pieces of cake there on the dish, if you’re hungry; they’re a bit stale but still good enough. A couple we had earlier went straight to bed without eating a thing – the bride was so far in her altitudes she couldn’t hardly stand.’

The Cakes floated before Mosca’s eyes in her halo of candlelight. It seemed to Mosca that she was looking up at the other girl from the bottom of a well so dark that she could not see her own hands, and that the Cakes’ world was a tiny, bright bubble drifting almost beyond reach. Mosca wanted to reach out to that world, but it seemed to her that if she did she might burst it, and then she would be left alone in an infinite blackness.

‘Was it a dream?’ The Cakes wrinkled her nose as a stray hair tickled it.

‘Yes,’ said Mosca huskily. ‘It was just a dream.’