Fly By Night

N is for Not Proven

Just a bad dream…

Mosca lay in her truckle bed, wondering why it was so dark and why she could hear water clicking against the wood like a great tongue. Her questioning fingers discovered that the bed had a lid, locked shut, half a foot above her face. The air was becoming warm and unbreathable. She beat against the lid until the lock splintered.

The lid swung back, and the white face of the moon stared down at Mosca through the lace curtain of the mist. She sat up, and found that she was sitting in the oaken clothes chest, which was floating past the pillar of Goodman Sussuratch.

Close by, a slender galleon gleamed like mother-of-pearl. High up on the deck sat Lady Tamarind upon an ivory throne. The threads that sang from her white spinning wheel stretched away through the mists to every unseen corner of the city. Other threads intertwined with them and linked them, until Mosca started to fancy that they formed a pattern like a great spider’s web.

‘I’m trying to get to the Eastern Spire!’ called Mosca. ‘I don’t want to drown in this black water!’

‘Catch this thread, and my boat will pull you to the spire.’ Lady Tamarind pulled loose a slender thread from the wheel and threw it in Mosca’s direction. It touched the open lid of the box and clung there, as if it sparkled with some sugary, sticky essence. Mosca reached for it, then she hesitated and took a moment to pull her sleeve down over her hand. She did so partly because the line seemed too bright to touch with her grimy fingers, and partly because it frightened her with its ground-glass glitter. While she hesitated, the thread peeled loose, fell into the water, and snaked away from her grasp.

‘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. People 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.

‘Your most esteemed and radiant Ladyship,

I enclose the first stanzas of your epic, and hope against hope that their humble worth summons your smile for at least an instant, if only in magnanimous pity for my efforts and struggles of the soul.

My lady, I must trespass further upon your good will. The payment you have so generously offered I do not claim, but rather ask that you may find occupation and accommodation within the Eastern Spire for myself and my secretary. Our situation has grown precarious, and my lodgings ill-suited to one blessed with your patronage.

In the name of gratitude I implore you to consent, knowing as you do how this fickle world can knock both high and low on to their axles, and leave them reliant on the assistance of strangers.

Yours in awe and admiration,

Your servant Eponymous Clent

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.

Mosca stood nervously cleaning out the dark crescents from under her fingernails and tucking stray hairs under her mob cap. Eventually one of the lavender girls noticed her and approached. She was about fifteen, Mosca guessed. She had a plump prettiness, a narrow waist, and her flouncing frock looked very becoming on her. Her nose turned up enchantingly, and from time to time she would smile down through her lashes and admire it.

‘Were you looking for the servants’ quarters?’ she asked as she drew level with Mosca.

‘No, no, I’m here to see Lady Tamarind. She’s going to give me a job.’ Lady Tamarind would see her, they had an understanding, a connection, Lady Tamarind would see her.

‘So what are you meant to be, then?’

‘I’m a secretary,’ Mosca announced with angry uncertainty.

‘You don’t look like one. Secretaries are men.’

‘I’m different – I’m secretary to a poet.’ Mosca was almost feverish with nerves. ‘I got a practical outlook an’ a concise way of speaking. We’re wordsmiths of no common order.’

The chambermaid looked her up and down.

‘Your bonnet’s on funny.’

‘It’s… it’s fashion!’ Mosca flashed back defensively.

‘It’s not. I work in the chambers of Her Ladyship, and have the handling of her wardrobe. There’s nothing I don’t know about fashion – I see her gowns before everyone in the town copies them. Sometimes -’ she bent forward confidentially – ‘sometimes some of the ladies pay me to tell them how she will be wearing her kerchief tucked to the next party, or whether she’ll be wearing a mantua gown. And when she gives me her cast-offs, the ladies will pay next to anything you like for them.’

‘She gives you her clothes – just gives ’em?’ When I work for Lady Tamarind she’ll give me dresses, ones I can cut down to my size…

‘Lots of them, yes. Good clothes too, but Her Ladyship cannot abide wearing anything with a smudge or a spot on it, even if it’s as small as a pinhead. Sometimes I get her damaged stoats as well.’

Mosca must have looked impressed, since the chambermaid’s haughty expression thawed a little.

‘Here, you can’t see anyone like that.’ With a superior air, the maid pulled Mosca’s bonnet ribbons loose, looped them across through a set of hooks under the crown, doubled them back and tied a bow beneath Mosca’s chin. ‘There. That’s fashion. Now you won’t look a disgrace when you meet the housekeeper to give her your references.’

‘I’m not here to meet the housekeeper! It’s got to be Lady Tamarind!’

‘She won’t see you. She won’t see anyone today.’ The lavender maid gaped at Mosca’s ignorance. ‘Today’s the first day of the Assizes. She’s getting ready right now to walk with the Duke to the Courthouse for the Grand Opening.’

The lavender girl walked away, while the ground beneath Mosca became a raft and bobbed on a hidden sea.

The Assizes. Mosca had forgotten about it. The chiaroscuro image of Clent stooped over the body of Partridge had driven everything else from her mind. She had forgotten the pale-eyed Locksmiths, nursing vengeful thoughts in their prison cells. She had forgotten the guild war, and the disaster stalking Mandelion.

Lady Tamarind would not see her. The footman would return and show her back to the gate. She would have to return to the marriage house and Eponymous Clent. If she tried to run away now, it would look like guilt, and the constable would send the hue and cry after her for Partridge’s murder. Mosca felt as she had in her dream when the glistening thread had snaked away from her through the black water, taking all hope with it.

No. If the Lady would not see her, she would find the Lady. Peering out cautiously from her appointed post, she slunk from column to column, scanning the gilded multitude.

Excited snatches of conversation reached her ears.

‘… rather a pity to waste such a charming refrain on that miscreant, but all of a sudden it seems that every song is dedicated to Black Captain Blythe…’

‘… how terrible that the treason trial of the Locksmiths takes place in the second week, when I am promised in Pincaster…’ Indeed, here nobody seemed to be interested in the murdered body at Whickerback Point. In the Courts the story of the moment was the arrest of the Locksmiths.

Suddenly, beside the fountain, Mosca saw Lady Tamarind.

‘Your Ladyship!’

The woman turned. She had bulldog jowls under her white powder. Age creased her neck like an accordion. It was not Lady Tamarind.

Out of the corner of her eye, Mosca saw the footman who had brought her through the gates hurrying towards her with a look of thunder. She snatched a snuffbox from the hand of a passing notable, and flung the contents in the footman’s face. As she ran, she heard the false Tamarind squawking in outrage at the black spattering her gleaming gown.

Mosca sprinted through a gilded arch on to a slender lawn where Playing-card Makers were painting portraits of court ladies. And there, adjusting the lily in her elaborate coif, was Lady Tamarind! But no, this Lady Tamarind had a weak and dimpled chin, and she gawped when Mosca grabbed her arm.

Tamarind after Tamarind bewildered Mosca’s vision as she ran. Every other lady aped the brilliant white of Lady Tamarind’s attire. Every other cheek was painted in imitation of her scar. Mosca wondered if they would be so eager to imitate her if she had lost an eye.

Ahead of her, a lady was passing through a gate. Her bombazine gown had enormous ‘panniers’, so that her hips stuck out two feet on either side. Crouching behind this prodigious dress, Mosca managed to avoid detection for long enough to slip through the gate; then she pelted away. As near as she could judge from memory, she was heading towards the spire.

She reached a dead-end courtyard, bordered by a stone lattice wall in which the faces of many Beloved were carved. Through the holes in this wall she could see another courtyard, its hexagonal tiles gleaming with white marble and gold paint.

‘Vocado, I must entreat you.’ It was the voice of Lady Tamarind. ‘Let me send for my men.’

Peering through an aperture, Mosca glimpsed a woman in an immaculate white mantua gown. She had vividly envisaged finding Tamarind dressed as in the coach and in her dream, and for a moment she thought that this was yet another lady imitating Tamarind’s style of dress. The next moment she saw the scar shaped like a snowflake on the woman’s cheek.

Beside her stood a storybook prince. He seemed taller than any mortal man, aided by the raised heels of his wine-red shoes and the stately proportions of his gold-dusted wig. His floor-length frock coat and waistcoat were patterned with eyes like those on butterflies’ wings. It could only be the Duke.

‘Goshawk has escaped,’ Tamarind continued in the same level, urgent voice. ‘He has almost certainly sent for that boat of Locksmith troops waiting upstream. The Watermen have agreed to delay them, but that buys us only a little time. The ship with my troops is some distance down the coast, and the roads to the ocean are slow and overgrown. Even if we send a messenger now, it will take ten days for the ship to reach us. Vocado – we must send for them now.’

‘Very well, Tammy. I shall sign the order.’ The Duke’s voice was light and musical, but somehow a little off-key.

A young man tripped forward and held out a scroll while the Duke signed it. Mosca was just wondering why he looked familiar when two strong arms seized her round the middle.

‘Your Ladyship!’ Mosca hooked her fingers into the stone lattice and hung on in a quicksilver rush of madness. ‘Your Ladyship!’ Everything she wanted was beyond the wall.

The Duke turned to look at Mosca, and her stomach jolted as she met his dead brown eyes. She remembered a fox she had once seen flopping about in a strange sickness. Don’t go too close, it’ll bite yer…

‘A radical spy,’ he said, in a tone with the same meaningless music to it.

‘No.’ The white lady gazed into Mosca’s urgent, contorted face with eyes the colour of mist. ‘Merely an errand girl. She wants to bother me for money. Give her a shilling and throw her out.’

The young man beside Tamarind raised his gaze to look at Mosca, and his chestnut eyebrows rose in surprise. Although his hair was now brushed and carefully fastened into a pigtail, and though he now wore a smart but simple coat of dark blue wool, Mosca immediately recognized Linden Kohlrabi, the man who had helped her by hiding her under his travelling cloak.

Mosca’s fingers lost their strength. The footman dragged her from the wall and carried her back the way she had come. She had no spirit to fight. She did not blame Tamarind for the way she had spoken – how could she? Instead, she hated herself with a leaden anguish. Tamarind had been busy with something really important, probably something to do with saving the city from the guild war and the Locksmiths. Mosca had blundered in, shouting like a lunatic in front of the Duke, in spite of Tamarind telling her never to seek her out. Talking to Tamarind had seemed like her only chance, but now she realized she had spoilt everything. Lady Tamarind would never forgive her.

‘It’s all right.’ A quiet voice behind her. ‘You don’t have to throttle the girl. She’ll be coming with me.’ Mosca was lowered to her feet, and she reached up a trembling hand to straighten the ribbons the lavender girl had tied so carefully. She did not look into Kohlrabi’s face, but she fell into step with him as he walked back through the gates to the thoroughfare.

There was a great crowd in front of the Honeycomb Courts and Courthouse, but beyond them the streets were all but empty. As the crowd thinned around them, Mosca stole a glance at Kohlrabi.

‘You work for Lady Tamarind.’ Mosca had not intended it to sound like an accusation.

‘And you, it would seem, work for Eponymous Clent.’ Kohlrabi’s tone was tired and a little wary.

‘She told you that?’

‘Lady Tamarind told me that I was to see you safely outside the gates, and tell you that she could not be seen speaking to you, but she would arrange an interview with you once the Assizes had run their course. Until then, she says you should continue as before.’

Mosca’s felt a small surge of hope. She had not been abandoned after all, perhaps. Could she and Clent survive until after the Assizes?

‘I do not know what your dealings are,’ Kohlrabi continued, ‘but I know that Her Ladyship seldom does anything without a reason. Why did you come to the Courts, Mosca? Did Eponymous Clent send you?’

There was a hint of sharpness in his tone, and Mosca gave him a narrow look.

‘You don’t like Mr Clent.’

‘No. I know too much about him to like him. How much do you know about your employer, Mosca?’

Mosca nibbled at her fingertips and stared at him mulishly. ‘I’m just working for him right now, that’s all. I don’t know nothing about him, and I don’t look to.’

‘Mosca…’ Kohlrabi stopped, closed his eyes for a moment, and sighed. ‘You may not believe me, but I am duty bound to warn you – Eponymous Clent is a very dangerous man. I know what I am talking about – I have spent the last month trailing him from post to post, observing the disaster in his wake.’

Mosca’s eyes widened as a memory stirred. Suddenly her nose was filled once again with the smell of damp, and rot, and dove-droppings, and wind-blown smoke. Suddenly she knew where she had heard Kohlrabi’s name before, and she remembered words spoken by a young voice, a reassuring voice like warm milk…

‘You were in Chough, talkin’ to the magistrate!’ The words were out before she could stop them.

‘Dry Stones and Thistles,’ Kholrabi murmured. ‘I wondered where I had heard your accent before. Chough. How could I be so stupid? Of course – you must be the little girl who burned down the mill.’ Mosca must have looked terrified, because he put out a hand soothingly and gave a slight laugh. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right. I have no thought of handing you over for your most heinous crime. But in the name of the most holy, Mosca, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent?’

Because I’d been hoarding words for years, buying them from pedlars and carving them secretly on to bits of bark so I wouldn’t forget them, and then he turned up using words like ‘epiphany’ and ‘amaranth’. Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn’t since they burned my father’s books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers…

Mosca shrugged.

‘He’s got a way with words.’

‘You caused quite a sensation, disappearing like that. For a while they thought you had burned to death in the mill, until they found the magistrate’s keys missing and Clent gone. You should go home, you know – I’m sure your family will understand that the fire was an accident. They’ll just be glad to have you home again.’

Mosca gave a little crow-cough of a laugh.

‘You didn’t meet my uncle and aunt, did you?’

Kohlrabi studied Mosca’s face.

‘No, I didn’t.’ He didn’t ask her any more about her family.

They had come to a halt at the edge of a square in which a gibbet dripped sullenly and a set of scaffolds swayed their ropes in the breeze, a patient motion like the swing of a cat’s tail as it waits by a mousehole.

‘What’s wrong, Mosca? You look ill. Come, the wind is chill, and we should get indoors soon anyway, before the Clamouring Hour.’

As they approached, the landlady of the nearest alehouse had fastened her shutters and was closing the door, but she took pity on them and let them slip inside before she barred it closed.

There was very little conversation in the alehouse, partly because all the patrons had pushed little wads of linen or leather into their ears.

From some distant bell came a series of rapid chimes, not unlike someone sounding a dinner gong.

‘Ah, that sounds like Goodlady Winterblossom’s fanfare,’ Kohlrabi murmured. ‘She always likes to get her word in first. The others won’t be far behind. Well, I suppose we have privacy of a sort. No one is listening.’ Kohlrabi smiled at Mosca. It felt oddly exciting to be part of a little faction daring enough to leave their ears unblocked.

‘So why were you followin’ Mr Clent?’

‘I was in Long Pursing on an errand for Lady Tamarind when I first heard his name. He had vanished overnight, leaving ruinous debts to about a dozen tradesmen. That same night the landlord he owed two months’ rent apparently fell into his own well and drowned. I promised the dead man’s son that I would listen out for word of Clent, and that promise has led me a ragged route from hostelry to hamlet, following his trail. I lost track of him in Chough… only to find when I returned to Mandelion that Clent was already here.’

Mosca thought of herself snatching Clent from beneath the nose of the patiently pursuing Kohlrabi, and little prickles came and went across her face.

‘There is blood on that man’s hands,’ Kohlrabi added quietly. ‘I haven’t found proof yet, but I don’t doubt it is there to be found.’ Mosca could not speak, but watched him with eyes as hard and shiny as obsidian coins. Kohlrabi leaned towards her. ‘Mosca – do listen to me when I say this. No one is as they seem, particularly in Mandelion. You may see them day after day, until their every gesture becomes as familiar as the song of the birds, but still you do not know them.

‘Perhaps I can explain what I mean with a story. As you know, twenty years ago the Birdcatchers were chased into hiding, and those that were caught were hanged or burned. In one parish the congregation gathered every year in their church to celebrate their victory over the Birdcatchers. One night, when the celebration was at its height, someone smelt smoke and found that the church was on fire. No one had time to do anything about it, though, because a moment later the flame reached the gunpowder stored in the vault. Later the few survivors worked out that the man they had hired to sweep out the crypts had been buying and smuggling in gunpowder for over four years. He was a Birdcatcher waiting for vengeance, and no one had guessed.’ Kohlrabi smiled wryly. ‘I… tend to remember this well. My father was lost in the explosion – you might say that it was rather a formative incident.’

‘My father just died one day. He went into his study sayin’ he had a headache, an’ then when I brung in potage he was dead, so I went an’ hid in the Chimes’ kiln. I would have stuck there in the study if I’d thought everyone was goin’ to burn his books. All of them… all. I’d never even had the chance to read most of ’em.’ Mosca frowned to keep her face from crumpling.

‘Do you have anything of his?’

‘I had his pipe.’ Mosca sniffed, thinking regretfully of the much-chewed pipe in Jen Bessel’s hand. ‘I used to chew on the stem, cos then I could taste his pipesmoke. I couldn’t make his voice in my head. I mean, if you know someone well, you can sort of make them say things they’d say in your head, an’ I can do Palpitattle any time I like, but I can’t do my father. Still, when I could taste his pipesmoke, it was sort of like he’s there at a desk next to me, an’ we’re both too busy to talk, but I’m there in the study with the books an’ I can think clearly… He didn’t like Chough, I know he didn’t.’

‘It wasn’t much of a place for a scholarly man, if that’s what he was.’

‘He was more than that.’ Mosca gave Kohlrabi a sly, wary look. ‘He was Quillam Mye.’

‘Quillam Mye!’ Kohlrabi’s eyebrows climbed. ‘Quillam Mye’s daughter!’ He sat back in his chair and stared at her, while in the city beyond the door bell after bell raised its voice in excitement.

‘“I had to leave Mandelion because of an altercation” – that’s all he ever said about it to me,’ Mosca said, feeling shy and alarmingly important.

‘I saw him once!’ Kohlrabi leaned forward again. Outside was a chaos of metal tongues, and he was forced to shout. ‘The height of the “altercation”, Mosca! I was ten years old, and running with a crowd through the streets, because we’d heard that the Stationers were sending men to arrest Quillam Mye. Hundreds of us, you could not breathe for the press of bodies.’

Mosca leaned across the table, hands cupped around her ears to funnel his words into them.

‘His windows were dark, he had sent his servants away so they would not be arrested. And when we got there, a Stationer carriage was at his door. He came out with no fear on his face, and climbed into the carriage, but we…’ Kohlrabi gave a flinching smile and half-covered his ears. Mosca could only hear snatches of his words now. ‘… knew they would take him to his death… crowd swarmed the carriage… hurled off the driver, detached the horses… dragged the carriage through the streets ourselves… to safety… and I saw his face at the window… Hundreds of us, Mosca! Hundreds… all shouting his name…’

Her father, a hero then, drawn through the streets of Mandelion. Her father, dying amid the dull hostility of Chough, where nobody knew what he had been.

Outside the doors of the tavern a thousand strident bells argued like an army clashing their shields. Kohlrabi’s words were swallowed, but Mosca could see him still shouting and gesturing, his eyes bright with excited memory.

‘I’m sorry!’ she shouted, knowing that Kohlrabi could not hear her. ‘I want to tell you everything, Mr Kohlrabi, I want to, but I can’t!’

Kohlrabi was still speaking, more sombrely now, an earnest and rather sad light in his eyes, as if he had noticed some of the anguish in her face.

‘It’s too late!’ she went on. ‘I didn’t know ’bout Mr Clent’s wolfkin ways, an’ now I’m in blood up to my wading breeches.’

Kohlrabi ceased speaking, gave her a wincing laugh, and covered his ears.

‘An’ I can’t bear to tell you now, not when I might get away with it, not when maybe you don’t ever need to know what Quillam Mye’s daughter done. I’m sorry, Mr Kohlrabi, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’

She sat staring at Kohlrabi while the bells’ clamour waned. When Goodman Boniface’s deep chime signalled the passing of the ‘Hour’, she took her hands from her ears and stood up.

‘I got to go back to Mr Clent now, Mr Kohlrabi.’

‘Mosca… if you learn anything of Clent’s plans, or if you need my help, then for Daylight’s sake come and find me at my coffeehouse, the Hind at Bay. Do not try to ride this out alone.’

Mosca could not look into Kohlrabi’s face. The secret of Partridge’s murder seemed to have bound her to Eponymous Clent more surely than if Bockerby had wed them. She walked out of the tavern in silence.