Fly By Night

R is for Redemption

At least, thought Mosca, at least his hand isn’t nowhere near the lever. So I probably won’t get printed to death when I’m not expecting it.

Through the crack between the metal plates, Mosca watched the glimmering knife of the ragman called Tare as he rent the cream casaque into little squares and tossed the fragments on to a pile of rags in the corner. He slid the blade through the fabric with a patient and careful pride – obviously a man who enjoyed using knives. When the task was over, his silhouette moved across to the wall, where a dozen or so pale squares hung in the darkness.

‘Paper’s nearly dry,’ he called up.

‘Quiet, until we’re out of hearing of the town,’ was the growled response from above. ‘Let’s try to make good speed towards Fainbless before the mists clear. The breeze will be rising soon.’ The music of gullsong, horses’ hoofs and street cries were becoming softer. Somewhere above, a pole churned through the water, and the beams of the raft creaked like the frame of a broken bellows. The river had remembered a lot of deep things it wished to say, and spoke them at length.

From time to time there came a tiny, ponderously regular sound like a whip-crack, which became louder and louder until it was almost deafening, and then was gradually left behind. In between times, curlews and warblers dropped thin spirals of sound into the stillness.

The ragman in the hold grew bored with ripping rags. His trunk of darkness approached the side of the press, and, from somewhere above her, Mosca heard two clicks, like a key turning in a stiff lock. The plate above her jolted and dropped an inch.

‘Tare? Come up and take a look at this.’

The dark shape at the side of the press receded, and there followed the sounds of someone climbing the ladder.

‘What is it?’

‘Take a look for yourself – I’m manning the pole. There, by the hatchway. Do you recall seeing that before?’

‘No, cannot say I have. Looks like a wigmaker’s box.’

In the darkness of the hold below, two black eyes became as round as sovereigns.

‘Well, take a look and see if there’s anything in it.’ There was a huff of someone stooping to lift something, and then a muffled thump-thump-thump as if they had shaken it to find out if it was empty. ‘Careful there, you’ll crush the wig – hi, what’s the matter with you?’

‘Something…’ Tare sounded shaken. ‘Something moved in there, Sorrel. Don’t look at me that way. I’ll show you – hand me that boathook.’ There was a pause, a faint thwoop of a lid sliding away from a wig box, and then two men’s voices joined in laughter.

‘I was expecting a boggling or a snarp at least,’ gasped Sorrel after a while. ‘You’ve an admirer, Tare. Someone’s left you a present. Well, there’ll be goose in the pot tonight, anyway.’

‘Wait.’ The mirth had died in Tare’s voice. ‘By my troth, it is the goose from the Grey Mastiff!’

It was happening, the preposterous scene Clent had painted for Mosca in words. The two men had recognized the valiant goose that had defeated the Civet of Queen Capillarie. They were touched, they were awed. They were remembering the exploits of their forgotten soldiering days and feeling noble impulses rekindle in their hearts. Mosca frowned. The kindling of noble impulses should surely involve less scuffling and shouting.

‘Tare! What are you doing? Are you mad? Put that pistol away!’

‘I tell you, it’s the goose from the Grey Mastiff! I’ve seen it break men’s legs like kindling!’

‘Fire that pistol, and everyone this side of the valley will hear it. Every farmstead, every Waterman between here and Fainbless. Tare, no!’ A mighty thump, a muffled thrashing, a clatter.

‘Well, that’s torn it. Did you see where that landed? White eyes of heaven, it’s coming for us!’

A twin splash. Splutters, swimming strokes receding, and then, a short time later, faint voices in muted conversation.

‘The raft’ll tangle in that tree ahead. We’ll loop a towline and pull her in, then wait…’

Mosca’s limbs were still tender from her fall, and she hoped that all of the moisture on her hands was ink. Wriggling out sideways was no mean task, and once the print plate chafed her face. As she tried to climb the ragladder, it swung foolishly and tried to steal her feet out from under her, but when she kicked off her clogs, climbing became a lot easier.

After the darkness of the hold, the early light seemed like full morning. On a misty bank twenty yards away, two figures sat amid the blackberry bushes, wringing the riverwater out of their hats. Ahead, a fallen tree jutted from the bank and draggled in the water, bearded with dead leaves, foam and flotsam. The pole rested within Mosca’s reach, cradled on two metal hooks, but it looked heavy and cumbersome. The paddle seemed a much better bet.

She crouched behind the pile of rags and paddled like fury. At first it seemed she was doing nothing to change the course of the raft, but then, when she looked up, the tree which had been dead ahead had moved a little to the left, and it seemed the raft might just slide past its grasp.

The ragmen had seen her and were running along the bank. One of them, Tare she thought, struggled through the tree’s earth-caked fan of roots and scrambled along its trunk on all fours. Just as Mosca was fearing that he might intercept her, he lost his balance sideways and disappeared into the water with a sound like a gulp, leaving his hat bobbing on the surface. By the time he reappeared, huffing and blowing spray, the furthest twigs of the tree were drawing their nails along the boards of the raft. Using all her might, Mosca pushed the boughs away with her paddle, and the raft was caught by the river’s current and swung away into the mist, while Saracen stood at the pinnacle of the rag mountain, his neck raised high and wings beating as if he could move the raft with his own wingstrokes.

‘But, Saracen,’ Mosca whispered to him as the confused cries of the ragmen faded behind her, ‘after this we really got to stop stealing boats.’

She was aware that as a loyal citizen she should be taking the printing press back to Mandelion to hand over to the Stationers’ Guild, and therefore she was going the wrong way. However, the river seemed to have strong opinions about their route, and it seemed rude to argue with it when it was being so helpful.

The faint whip-crack began again, and had just become a furious clack-clack-clack when through the vapour the domed head of a windmill appeared, its aged sails sounding like gunfire. The wind was rising and starting to tug away the mist like sheets from the furniture in an unused house. Beyond either bank lay empty fields and lowlands. At last an autumn sun peered above the grey woods, as bright and cold as toothache, and little golden fringes appeared along the tops of every treeline.

Mosca had watched the ragmen poling up and down the river, and she was fairly sure that the pole was meant to be driven into the riverbed to push the raft along. Her attempts to master the art, however, left her sodden, exhausted and floating far from the bank so that the pole could not reach the riverbed at all.

‘Well, s’pose that’s just Fate, then,’ she said, flinging herself down on the deck. ‘We’ll just ’ave to be swept to sea an’ hope we get captured by smugglers ’stead of pirates.’

Mosca wrung out her skirts, made herself a heaped rag mattress, and lay down upon it with her hands behind her head. Above, the clouds started to peel away like an old poster and show a sky of crystal blue. As she slid away from Mandelion, her heaviness of spirit also seemed to be peeling away. Would it be all that terrible if she did drift away to sea?

She closed her eyes against the aching brightness of the sky, and in a very short time she did drift away, but into sleep. When she awoke, her sky was fringed with rushes, and the feathery fronds of reeds were brushing her face.

The raft had drifted in among a great bank of reeds on the river’s edge and tangled there. Perhaps Fate did not want Mosca to run away to sea after all, and suddenly she was fairly sure that this was not what she wanted either.

For a moment, Mosca’s mind returned to her fellow-traveller, the grim-toothed press beneath the deck. She could almost imagine spider-letters and mad thoughts pouring from between its plates and chittering in the darkness. And yet, her dread of the press was not unmixed with fascination… No, she told herself. She would not let it lure her into its den.

The valley here was almost a plain, and the river had grown broad and lazy. Gleaming flats of mud pushed their faces above the water here and there so that geese and swans could hold conference. Much further downstream an ash-coloured dome seemed to hang unsupported in the morning light, and Mosca guessed that this might be the hill where the ruined city of Fainbless stood.

Plying her pole, Mosca managed to force her raft through the reeds until it nudged against the bank. In the clear morning sun she realized that her hands were dark with more than grime, and that her gown and apron were a smudged mass of printed words.

‘Saracen!’ She gaped at him in horror. ‘Look! I’m all criminally printed!’

Below the rushes, water gleamed, so Mosca pushed them aside until enough water was visible to offer her a little mirror. The disaster was more complete than she had first thought. Her reflection showed her a host of blurry, backwards characters across her forearms and face.

‘Well, I can’t go back to Mandelion like this,’ she muttered. ‘I got an illegal nose.’

There was no saving her apron. She had knelt on it when wriggling out of the printing press, and her knees had crushed the cloth against the inky text plate. Mosca took it off hurriedly and paused to stare at a clear, black mark on the left-hand side of her apron. It was about the size of a hand’s palm, jet-black and shaped like a playing-card heart.

Where had she seen a mark like that before? After a few moments the memory returned, but it placed her in even deeper perplexity. Back in the Grey Mastiff on the night of the beast fight she had seen a woman in a white dress up in the gallery. A woman who tried to look like Lady Tamarind but had a foolish, flabby face, a dress like Lady Tamarind’s but with a black heart just like this one marking the sleeve. Lady Tamarind’s dress, another woman’s face, a black printed heart… it was a dreamlike jumble of oddments that did not seem to fit together.

She would make sense of it later. Cleansing herself of the ink was a more urgent matter. She dipped the corner of her apron into the water and began fiercely rubbing at her skin. After a while the letters on her face started to fade, but the printing on her right forearm was still clear and black. Indeed, it was so clear and black that Mosca was able to make out some of the words as she scrubbed.

‘… and where the sword and cannon hold dominion keep this heart from trembling…’ Mosca frowned. She’d been expecting some radical rantings, or political revelations, but this looked very like an old-fashioned ‘heart’s ease’ prayer. In the time of the civil war many soldiers had marched into battle with a prayer of this sort written out on parchment and folded in the pocket over their heart, in the belief that it would bring them luck and courage.

‘It’s like someone’s getting ready for a battle,’ she murmured under her breath. Why were the heart’s ease prayers being printed, rather than hand-written by a priest? Could it be that there was too little time to write them out – or too many soldiers to supply?

‘… the land has sunk into a sickness of the soul… a poison that can only be removed by letting blood… our figures seem dark for the Light is behind us…’ Mosca read on with new interest. ‘… our glorious brethren of the-’ The next word was hard to read, running as it did across Mosca’s wrist. She twisted her arm about and squinted until the smudged ink revealed its secret to her.

She sat back with a crash. The air was suddenly full of birds. They erupted from the rushes on all sides, their wings beating like frightened hearts, the white undersides of their wings flashing with each beat. The air they left behind them shook and rippled and would not settle.

But they’re dead, thought Mosca desperately, they’re all gone, everyone knows that…

With urgent eyes she stared at the smudges on her skirts, skin and stockings, tracing the threads of sooty letters that wound about her like snakes.

‘… with a sword of fire… and even their children… purity…’

And there again was the word she had found on her wrist. And there, and there…

Birdcatchers…

The morning air was as golden as ever, the wild rosehips still bobbed gaily on the hedges, but the breeze had a new taste now, and the cries of the birds sounded like tearing metal.

Birdcatchers…

Anything was possible now. Mosca thought she could hear bland hillsides groaning open to release the monsters of the past. The worst of the dead times were rising from their graves, and it would take more than Little Goodman Postrophe and a mountain of mellowberries to stop them coming home.

But no, Mosca realized, the truth was less childish and more frightening. The Birdcatcher army that awaited these prayers would not be a spectral horde. Its soldiers would be flesh and blood, men and women of Mandelion, all waiting through the years for the right moment with a ghastly patience, like the Birdcatcher church attendant in Kohlrabi’s story. The Birdcatchers had never been extinguished at all. They had just remembered how to be invisible.

And now they were ready to act. A battle was being planned, and beyond it Mosca seemed to see a world where trees screamed under the weight of hanged bodies, and the fears that still lurked like bats in the eaves of every mind surged out and blackened the sky.

Before her the clear, black heart on her apron burned into her gaze until it seemed to pulse with the heartbeat she heard in her ears. It was the Heart of the Consequence, the essence of purity, the drum of an unseen army. But it was more than that, and as she stared, Mosca started to see a new meaning in the mark.

Seven hours later, amid the crush of Mandelion’s main thoroughfare, two young girls huddled by a ragged outcrop of the old city wall and talked in low, urgent voices. The taller of the two had red ringlets too unruly for her cap, and she kept her hands bunched in her apron to keep them warm. The shorter had black hair, caked and clinging with earthy-pink powder, and she wore a patched olive-green dress of a style too old for her. On a strap over her shoulder hung a round, red wig box, and her clogs were caked with mud. Looking at the pair, a passer-by might think they were two shopkeepers’ daughters taking a moment out of their errands to gossip. Few would suspect that they were discussing gods, and guilds, and the fate of the nation.

‘I’m still not really talking to you,’ the Cakes insisted for the sixth time. She scanned the crowds in front of the wrought-iron gates of the Eastern Spire. ‘Remind me – what does she look like again?’

‘Plump and peachy,’ muttered Mosca. ‘With a flouncety walk, and a nose stuck up like this.’ With a fingertip she pushed up the tip of her own nose.

‘I never done anything like this before,’ murmured the Cakes nervously.

‘You just got to throw her apron over her head, and hold on. You won’t need to say anything.’ Mosca grabbed the Cakes’ arm. ‘There! There she is! Come on!’

The lavender girl had stopped at the gate to preen the frills at the bustle of her pretty saque-backed gown. She smiled her way past the guards, observing their admiration through lowered lashes, then paused to look for a gap in the ebb and flow of bodies and coaches. This hesitation was her undoing.

The first the poor lavender girl knew of her danger was when she found herself with a face full of linen. Before she could recover or scream, four thin hands gripped her arms, hurried her off her feet into an echoing alley and pushed her against a wall. The Cakes held on to her like a drowning sailor clinging to a beam, while Mosca placed a couple of well-aimed pinches on the prisoner’s plump arms.

‘Who are you? What do you want? Ow!’

‘You weren’t supposed to sell that dress, were you?’ hissed Mosca.

‘What? What dress?’ The lavender girl was still too bewildered to pull the apron from her face.

‘Lady Tamarind give you a snow-white dress, foaming with lace and all over pearls, with a heart-shaped stain on the sleeve. You was told to burn it, weren’t you? But you didn’t – that’s stealing, that is. They’re holding an Assizes right now for people like you.’

The lavender girl gave a whimper.

‘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?’ Pertellis 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.’

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.