Fly By Night

T is for Trial by Combat

When Mosca emerged from the back room, Clent placed a sealed letter in her hand, but seemed reluctant to release his end of it.

‘You… you do swim well, I trust?’

‘Like a Timberline trout,’ Mosca replied promptly.

‘Ha. Hum. Mosca, when you have delivered this letter, make your way to the Ashbridge. If our dice fall ill, leave Mandelion with all dispatch. If you see smoke rising from the river, assume the worst.’

‘If the worst comes… you’ll let Saracen out of ’is box, won’t you, Mr Clent?’

‘I swear it upon my muse.’

Mosca knew that, like Clent, she wore the expression of one who has heard a trickle above become a rumble, and is waiting for the avalanche. They did not know what was happening in Mandelion, but they were fairly sure it would end up happening to them.

‘They’re… they’re like a sack of kittens chucked in a river,’ Mosca whispered as Clent accompanied her through the crowd of radicals. He slowly lowered his lids once in silent agreement.

Fear made everyone look very alive in a strange and fragile way, like the last flare of a candle before it dies. It cannot end well, said a leaden weight in Mosca’s stomach. Some of them will die, perhaps all.

Mosca wanted to say goodbye to the Cakes, but the older girl was still being saved by Carmine. Indeed, the Cakes seemed to be so very, very safe that Mosca began to wonder if marriage might not rub off on her after all.

In the galley, a trapdoor had been opened in one wall, and a large, sturdy-looking cedar washing tub was being fastened to lines from the ceiling.

‘Madam, take some care climbing in, you are blessing the company with sight of a generous extent of your stockinged… oh, painted smirk of a hopeless dawn, the child is still wearing her breeches…’

Miss Kitely slid a bracelet over Mosca’s wrist, and Mosca saw that tiny wooden figures with carved skeletal faces dangled from it. They were the Little Goodkin, and she realized to her surprise that Miss Kitely thought of her as a child.

Many hands hauled on the ropes. They guided the tub’s giddy ascent towards the hatch, and suddenly Mosca was in the open air, steam from the galley surging out around her, the skin of her face feeling stripped and cold. The tub lowered in jolts, banging against the side of the coffeehouse all the way to the waterline. Under the ‘coffeehouse’ was an ordinary hull, against which the water cast dancing hieroglyphs of light.

Mosca loosed the hooks that held the tub to the lines, and a sudden plunge left the tub lolling in the lap of the river as it fell quickly astern of the Laurel Bower.

‘Ahoy! Catch hold there, we’ll haul you in!’

A line end stung Mosca’s cheek, and she grabbed at it automatically. A little bumboat of the sort that sold provisions to large ships in dock was bobbing in the wake of the Catnip. Over the gunwale peered two burnished faces. The two girls wore their plaits down and, like most gypsies, they wore rich waistcoats over their workday clothes, with the meandering of the River Slye embroidered across their chests.

As water was seeping in between the slats of the tub, Mosca made the line fast to one of the handles. The gypsies hauled it in, arm over arm, and then reached over the side to pull her into the bumboat.

‘Is everyone hale in the Bower?’ was the first question after they had recovered their breath.

‘Not holed yet, as I saw. The Duke’s men just shot a fish and killed a kettle,’ replied Mosca, feeling her arms where the gypsies’ strong fingers had left tender places.

‘What about Him?’ asked the younger of the two,

‘Him?’

‘It’s no secret,’ explained the older. ‘When he swung out and cut away the mooring ropes with his sword, Mr-Woolnough-the-Physician’s-youngest-daughter-Tinda caught a sight of him, and couldn’t stop herself squealing out his name. The Duke’s men and everyone else heard her, and the constables started shouting that Black Captain Blythe was aboard, and if the Bower didn’t pull to they’d run to the Western Spire, drop a carcass in the cannon, and burn ’em to the waterline.’ Mosca had read enough of piratical battles to know that a carcass was a can of oiled rags that could be used to set fire to buildings or ships. ‘Well, we couldn’t be having with that. Not a coward trick like that against brave Captain Blythe.’

‘Brave and handsome Captain Blythe,’ the younger added. ‘Is he as handsome as they say?’

‘Three times as handsome,’ Mosca answered without hesitation. ‘An’… he got a commandin’ eye which makes him look six times as handsome.’

‘What colour are his eyes?’

Mosca paused. She had no idea what colour Blythe’s eyes were.

‘Well, they sort of change like the sky when the clouds are skittish. When he’s starin’ down a foe, all undomitable, they’re all silvery grey like stone in moonlight. And… when he smiles they go a merry sort of blue. And other times they’re all sorts of other colours.’

‘But sometimes they’re green?’

Mosca could not mistake the note of hope in the younger gypsy’s voice.

‘Oh yes. Course. Most of the time they’re green.’

‘I knew it. Didn’t I say Captain Blythe would have green eyes?’

The musket-wielding deputies on the bank paid the little bumboat All-awry very little heed as it detached itself from the convoy surrounding the Laurel Bower and made for the bank. After all, there were only three gypsy girls aboard, and youthful ones at that. So what if one of them seemed a good deal paler than her companions? Her eyes were as black as theirs, if not blacker.

‘The Telling Word is moored at Whitherwend Street until the next bell,’ the eldest gypsy whispered as Mosca climbed out, ignored by the waterside throng.

The cathedral bell rang when Mosca was halfway down Witherwend Street, and the Stationers’ coffeehouse was still distant. The Telling Word had, it seemed, been searched, along with the other coffeehouses, and outside its fantastical collage walls a number of bewigged and bespectacled gentlemen waited with patient belligerence, many still holding their coffee dishes. As the bell rang, however, they started to file back along the gangplank. The crew on the roof was readying the sails and preparing to cast off.

Everyone in Mandelion seemed to have seethed to the waterside to watch the drama on the river – cooper and cockle-seller, weaver and wheelwright. The carriages could find no way through, nor did they seek it, and dozens climbed on to the motionless wagons for a better view of the water. Facing a wall of fustian fronts and woollen backs, Mosca realized that she was going to miss the coffeehouse.

With trembling hands, she pulled her printed apron from her capacious skirt pocket, and flung it over her own head. She emitted what was meant to be a blood-curdling shriek, but which came out sounding more like the battle cry of a militant shrew. However, the screams that ensued all around her were a lot more convincing and impressive.

‘It’s print! Print! Hide your eyes!’

Suddenly there were no bodies pressed against her. She ran forward, praying to the Palpitattle in her head, to the Little Goodkin around her wrist, and to any Beloved who might be skilled at preventing young girls running blind off the edge of jetties. Just as she was thinking that she must be nearing the Telling Word, someone snatched the apron away from her face, and she found herself staring up at the red-headed constable from the jail. Fortunately he busied himself with flinging the apron into a herring barrel full of brine and lunging at it with his sword to make it sink, so she sprinted the last few steps to the coffeehouse and jammed her clog in the door as it was closing.

‘I got an important message for Mr Mabwick Toke, from Mr Eponymous Clent!’

Two minutes later she was standing in the Telling Word, watching as Mabwick Toke broke the seal on Clent’s letter. He unfolded it, shaking out the two small and elaborate keys Mosca had seen Goshawk give to Clent. Toke read quickly, drawing the side of one long finger to and fro against his tongue, as if sharpening it.

‘Your employer tells me,’ Toke said at last, raising his eyes to Mosca’s face, ‘that he has secured a wealth of evidence against Lady Tamarind as a traitress, dissident and queen of a poison press, all of which he promises to place in my hands in the fullness of time if I act against her now. Is any of this true?’

Mosca nodded.

‘He says that you carry proof of the… old enemy’s involvement?’

The printed apron was drowned in the herring-barrel, so there was nothing for it. Mosca rolled up her sleeve and showed her forearm, bending back her hand to smooth the creases on her wrist.

‘’Fraid I got no Stationers’ seal,’ she remarked, her Chough accent thickening the words in her mouth like dry oats. ‘You goin’ to burn me?’

‘Not while your skin is evidence, girl.’ The corners of Toke’s mouth dragged sharply down in what seemed to be a curious sort of upside-down smile. Then he sat in silence, his eyes flitting, unseeing, from one side of his desk to the other, as if Mosca had passed him a secret thread and he was following it to find out how it twisted through a mighty web.

‘What a mind that woman must have!’ he said with admiration. It was the hushed tone of a jeweller studying the largest and finest diamond he will ever see. ‘Where did you find the press?’

‘Ragman’s raft, down under a trap.’

‘Of course… rags… no wonder we could not trace them through their paper, they were making their own… That explains the wool threads mixed in with the cotton, and the poor pulping… clever rats, clever rats. But we have our own clever rats, don’t we, girl?’ He gave her his upside-down smile again. ‘Where is the press now?’

‘Still in the raft, most likely. I ’ad to skip out quick. Didn’t want the ragmen findin’ me.’ The press is mine mine mine mine…

‘No, of course.’ His pale, unblinking eyes were fixed on her face. ‘Let us hope those devils have left the raft tethered far downstream – if I read the wind aright, the next high tide in the estuary will rush the river and cause wild water for miles. The river can tear loose all but the strongest moorings when it’s in that mood, and chew boats to pieces.

‘Now, I trust that you can leave more quietly than you arrived…’

As soon as the coffeehouse had made fast to the shore and the door had shut behind Mosca, Toke’s yellow head snapped up like the lock on a pistol.

‘Wove! Take two men, and do not let her get out of sight!’

‘Who, sir?’

‘The ferrety-looking girl with the unconvincing eyebrows, of course! The world is full of liars of different humours. Coy liars drop their eyes. Bold liars forget to blink. I saw that girl bite a truth into silence, and that’s a lie in another coat. I’m sure she knows where the press is. She believed my fairy story about the estuary tides, so she’ll soon be running to the press to make it safe. Follow her long enough and she will lead you to it – go!’

Wove left with two stout men. Toke took paper from his writing box, penned a hasty letter, then folded and sealed it.

‘Jot! Ride upstream until you find a Waterman – deliver this letter to them and bid them take it to their leader. There is a river battle the Watermen must halt before too many lives are lost. And there is a ship coming from the coast which must be stopped before it reaches Mandelion. Find a fast horse and teach it to fly – go!’

As Jot ran from the room, Toke exhaled and went back to studying the invisible web.

‘What a pity I will never play cards with Lady Tamarind.’ And yet he did feel that he was playing cards with her, trying to read signs in her implacable, snowlike countenance. ‘Do you know what courage is? Not a willingness to fling oneself into danger without proper thought – that is nothing, nothing. There is cowardice in all impulse. Real courage lies in thinking things through, seeing all the risks, and taking them anyway. Lady Tamarind has courage. The question is, do I? I think she has misplayed her hand, but dare I gamble our lives upon it?’ For a few seconds he shook the two keys in his palm like dice, then came to a decision.

‘Caveat, you will need these where you are going. They are the keys to the inner door of the Eastern Spire.’

Caveat was lost in a flutter and a stutter.

‘How. Did we come. By…’

‘Provided with the Locksmiths’ compliments. Haul that jaw back up to your face, man. Is that how you wish to be seen when you walk in to arrest Lady Tamarind?’

‘La… la-la-lady-Tama-ma-ma-rindledindle…’

‘Here.’ A sealed parchment was slapped into Caveat’s hand. ‘The Duke has given us a warrant to search any room or house we please, and arrest all within if we find a trace of the printing press. Be sure you find something, or we shall all dry in the wind after this Assizes. Take three men, and a brace of pistols.’

Some. Kind of boat race probably, thought Caveat, noticing the large, excitable crowd jostling on the jetty. How very foolish and. Dangerous.

Mr Toke always knows exactly. What he is doing how cold. It is I shall have Martha tell the girl. To patch those old curtains and. Hang. Them after all. But no one else is shivering so. Perhaps I am sickening for something. Mr Toke always knows. What he. Is. Doing.

The crowds parted before men in Stationers’ livery, as they always did. The guards at the gate of the Eastern Spire glanced at the Duke’s seal on the parchment, then stood aside.

How shabby I must. Seem next to these fine ladies and gentlemen I wish. I had been. Given time to fetch my. Silk cravat and good bag-wig.

‘Duke’s business!’ he snapped crisply, waving the warrant in the face of the footmen at the door to the spire. Before they could protest, he pulled back his great cuffs and flourished the little silver keys, then turned them in the locks with all the confidence he could muster. The uniform, the keys and the air of confidence were enough. Someone ran off to report, but no one stopped him.

Halfway up the stairs he passed a young man with a warm and open face who gave him a look of guileless curiosity but did not question him. Caveat climbed the stairs, his pistol barrel chilling him through his shirt.

Lady Tamarind sat at her dressing table, mending her face. A tiny crack in the powder had appeared at the corner of one eye. The blemish was so small that it would probably have been invisible to any eye but hers, but she plied a tiny cat’s hair brush dipped in powder and smoothed her skin back to perfection.

How had her mask of powder cracked? Had she winced at something, crinkling her eye? What was there to wince at? Her Birdcatcher spies had informed her of the stand-off between the Laurel Bower and the Duke’s men. She was sure that the Duke would soon lose patience and rain fire upon the coffeehouse, and let the little convoy burn or scatter. Soon the highwayman Blythe, Pertellis’s radicals and the Locksmiths on board would be nothing but a sad and sooty memory. Soon the ship carrying her Birdcatcher allies would slide into Mandelion, ready to take control.

On the dressing table lay two letters, which her forgers had written in the handwriting of the Twin Queens, just like the others. She had sealed them with the false signet ring she had brought back with her from the Capital. The letters thanked the Duke for his faithful service. They also included a list of men and women who should be arrested immediately. It was a short list, for Tamarind was patient. Later letters would contain longer lists.

There was no need to falter or fear now. Her plans were perfect.

In the glass she surveyed the face that she had made hers, looking for any hint of a flaw. Perfect.

Lady Tamarind reached out to lay her brush next to her powder tin, and stayed her hand. The smooth white perfection of the powder in the tin was marred by a struggling blackness, battered black armour, dull shards of wing-glass. It rucked and ravaged the creamy surface, scrambling a trail. It was a fly.

There were footsteps on the stairway outside her door, and a pulse fluttered beneath the scar on her cheek.

Through ear-slits like buttonholes in its leathery hide, the crocodile heard the silvery chuckle of key in lock. It heard the swish of skirts as Lady Tamarind stood up hastily. As the door opened to let in four men, the crocodile’s mouth opened to let in the taste of the air. The men brought smells that meant nothing to it: ink, pipesmoke, by-the-way mud. But they definitely smelt of strangeness and of fear, and the crocodile was fairly sure that this meant it was allowed to eat them.

Its belly scales rasped against the mosaic floor as it slithered from its basking place.

Linden Kohlrabi had been surprised to see four men in Stationers’ uniforms hurrying up the stairs with a look of furrowed purpose, but not enough to halt his step. There was no point in following them. You were likely to learn more from finding out where they had just come from. At the entrance to the Honeycomb Courtyard the guards were showing their nervousness by questioning everyone sharply before opening the gates. Kohlrabi, however, slid through easily on the grease of remembered tips, and learned in a few quiet words the direction from which the Stationers had arrived. With swift strides he headed towards the river.

On the jetty he paused to put on his gloves, and he drew deep breaths. Here the air braced him with its chill, the dry scent of a distant storm, and the rousing smell of gunpowder.

In one part of the street the crowd was hushed and huddled. An emergency of some sort had taken place. He strode to the centre with quiet confidence and the crowd parted, assuming that he had come to solve the problem. Kohlrabi had delved his cane into the barrel of brine and hooked out part of the sodden apron when the red-headed constable laid a hand on his arm.

‘Printed matter, sir,’ he whispered urgently. ‘No Stationers’ seal.’

‘I can see that. This is a child’s garment – I hope she is not still in it?’

‘No… she threw it down and ran.’

‘Did you get a good look at her?’

‘Good enough,’ muttered the constable. ‘Ferrety-looking girl with pink hair and unconvincing eyebrows. She boarded the Telling Word.’

To the constable’s consternation, Kohlrabi bent to peer at the wet folds of the apron more closely.

‘Oh, Mosca Mye, what dangerous games you play. I had better find you before anyone else does,’ he murmured under his breath.

The constable’s attention was quickly diverted from he young man with the unassuming smile who had vanished back into the crowd. People were pushing forward so keenly to watch the river battle that those in front were in danger of being pitched into the water.

‘Sir…’ A petty constable tugged at his sleeve.

The constable turned to find the crowd parting in awe and consternation before a sedan chair decorated in whorls of gold and blue. There was no mistaking the heraldic device emblazoned on the side.

Oh Beloved Above, not now… The constable had often daydreamed of meeting the Duke, perhaps by catching a thief with one of His Grace’s rose-silk gloves, or by besting a burly footpad within sight of the ducal coach. But here and now the constable wished only that the Duke was away in his spire, having his teeth powdered, or his eyebrows scented, or some equally aristocratic activity.

He used his sleeve to clean the sweat from his face, and hurried to the side of the sedan. He was not sure when to bow, so he started bowing halfway to the chair, and trotted the rest of the way stooped, as if passing through an invisible tunnel.

At first glance the chair appeared to be entirely full of an enormous wig, powdered pale lilac and cunningly shaped to resemble a sultan’s turban. On second glance the constable discovered a long, handsome face beneath it, with beauty spots carefully painted in the same place on either cheek. The face was smiling, but the smile looked out of place, as if the Duke were holding it for someone else.

‘Why,’ asked the madly smiling, richly rouged mouth, ‘are none of your men on the river?’ The Duke’s voice was pitched higher than the constable had expected. ‘I am told that the highwayman Blythe and the seditious rabble responsible for every ill in Mandelion are mocking you from the waters with impunity.’

‘Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but no boat will take us.’ The constable could not prevent desperation and frustration creeping into his voice. ‘All the skippers say that it’s against the Watermen’s rules – only the Watermen’s wherries can take passengers… I swear it, Your Grace, I all but clapped a pistol to their heads, but they wouldn’t say different.’

‘Then call a wherry!’

‘Your Grace… there aren’t any. They’ve all vanished upstream… searching for the highwayman, some say…’ The constable licked his lips. ‘There’s the coffeehouses, of course, but you have to hand in your weapons when you enter them…’

‘They will not ask me to disarm,’ the Duke declared. ‘Feldspar! My hat and my walking wig.’ He ducked out of the enormous, turban-like wig, which remained exactly where it was, hanging from great pins that jutted out of the walls of the sedan. The Duke’s valet slipped a silky, flowing wig in the ‘natural’ style on his master’s head, and perched a triangular hat trimmed with peacock feathers on the top.

The crowd on the waterfront hushed as the Duke stepped out of the chair, resplendent in sapphire and kingfisher-blue, his silk waistcoat shimmering beneath his full-skirted velvet coat. The raised heels of his crimson shoes turned him from a tall man into a gleaming giant out of a court painting. Staring across the water, he treated his people to the sight of the famous, handsome profile of the Dukes of Mandelion.

‘See!’ He suddenly pointed upwards. High above hovered a great kite, decorated with two female heads that faced one another and seemed to smile a secret. ‘The owners of that kite honour Their Majesties, and so in turn they shall be honoured with our custom.’

The kite belonged to a coffeehouse known as the Queens’ Heads. The balding proprietor was clearly taken aback when he opened the door to find the glittering figure of the Duke bearing down on him, heralded by a constable, flanked by armed deputies, and followed by a middle-aged valet laden with boxes, muffs and spare wigs.

‘We are honoured… beyond honour… Your most gracious Graceness…’ This coffeehouse was a favourite haunt of persons who were fiercely loyal both to the Avourlace family and to the Twin Queens, and as the Duke strode in through the door the customers showed this by choking on their coffee and throwing themselves into a series of elaborate and possibly dangerous bows.

‘You may all be of the greatest service to Their Majesties,’ the Duke declared to the room at large. His long hand seized a curtain and tugged it down with one motion. He pointed a trembling finger out through the window towards the Laurel Bower. ‘Follow that coffeehouse!’

‘The Queens’ Heads is casting off again,’ remarked Miss Kitely. ‘Curious – she should be at her address on Mettlemonger Street for two more bells.’

‘Another for our convoy?’ Pertellis tried to focus on the distant coffeehouse through his borrowed monocle, but quickly gave up.

‘I doubt it somehow, Mr Pertellis. Most of her customers are Royalists of the old school, who will take a birch to a serving girl if she spills their tea, and will ride over a poor child rather than risk their carriage wheels in the kennel ditch.’

A rope ladder had been lowered from the trapdoor in the roof, and Blythe stood on the upper rungs, high enough to peer across the deck towards the other coffeehouse.

‘There are men taking positions at her windows,’ he called down. ‘Duke’s men – I see their colours.’

‘That is what I feared,’ murmured Miss Kitely. ‘It will take some time for her to gather away while she’s beam-reaching, but even if she cannot head us off, she will fall in behind us and try to take the wind out of our sails. She will press us hard – her master-kite is much bigger than ours, and she has eight dog-kites to our six. Take her a little to port, Mr Stallwrath.’

The pursuing coffeehouse was painted spring-green. It was lower and faster than the Laurel Bower, and at its stern was a little veranda for riverside supping. On this veranda two deputies now crouched, using an overturned table for cover. They disappeared behind a flower of smoke, and a sharp crack echoed across the water.

‘What was that, a shot across our bows to ask for surrender?’

‘No! Look at the Catnip!’ The helmsman of the lighter had slumped across his rudder, a dark patch spreading over his coat near the hip. As his fellow crewmen dragged him below, the prow of the Catnip began to wander. ‘Her mainsail’s taken the wind – she’s pulling away despite herself.’

‘I hope they’ve seen that aboard the Dry Spell and the Peck o’ Clams,’ whispered Miss Kitely, ‘or they’ll ram her as she turns.’

From within the Laurel Bower it was impossible to see past the struggling lighter, but from astern came a grinding crack that set everyone’s teeth on edge.

‘The Dry Spell has steered clear,’ Stallwrath called down, ‘but they’re standing a-luff now. The Peck o’ Clams has ploughed into the Catnip, and I think she’ll be tangled there for a time. The Queens’ Heads is going about, and her crew is whisker-poling the jib. Skipp’am, she’s goose-winged and bearing down on us.’

The pursuit was all the more tense owing to the fact that both coffeehouses were going rather more slowly than the average oyster barrow. A race run through treacle is very hard on the nerves.

‘We could go faster straddling a cat,’ Captain Blythe was heard to mutter.

Another shot was fired, and one of the little bumboats rowed away for the shore, water spewing in from a hole beneath its waterline. When those on the Laurel Bower could make out the pattern on the curtains of the pursuing coffeehouse, the pistols came into their own, and soon the main coffeeroom of the Bower was lost in a fog of gunsmoke. Still the Queens’ Heads gained, and as the Bower’s sails sagged the remaining gap closed all the more quickly.

‘What was that?’ A loud rattle above, from the neighbourhood of the chimney.

‘Boarders! It’s a grappling iron!’ Blythe’s legs disappeared as he scrambled up the ladder to the deck. ‘I think it’s meant to be, anyway,’ his voice continued more faintly. ‘It looks like part of someone’s grate…’

‘Girls! To the galley!’ Miss Kitely looked around her for the nearest set of ready arms. ‘You too, Mr Clent.’ Clent was not to be trusted with a pistol, but Miss Kitely was willing to place a ladle in his hands.

In the galley, Miss Kitely swung open the hatch to reveal the startled face of a petty constable, clinging to a rope with one hand and holding a pistol in the other. Concerted blows from three fiercely wielded ladles convinced him to release the pistol, and a faceful of boiling coffee persuaded him to relinquish the rope. He disappeared downwards with a shriek.

Destiny is overtaking us upon wings of canvas, thought Eponymous Clent as he sagged back against the wooden wall, mopping his brow, and it seems I am to die armed with nothing but a spoon. Until now he had remained quiet and cowed, hoping only to escape the wrath of everyone else on the Bower, but his mind had noticed everything as it scurried to and fro like a rat looking to escape a burning room. As he wandered back from a room full of blinding steam to a room full of blinding smoke, his foot struck a rounded something. It answered the blow with a sound like the flutter of wings. Wings of destiny. Wings of destiny…

‘Tell me, young sir, how well can you throw?’

Carmine looked up from loading Copperback’s pistol. ‘Well enough to knock chestnuts from a tree.’ His expression was a question.

‘Could you throw this,’ Clent lifted the wig box into his hands, ‘through one of the windows in the coffeehouse yonder?’

There was a long and prickly pause.

‘I would need to be outside.’

‘I know.’

‘Would it help?’

‘In truth, I cannot say. It might.’

‘Give me the box, sir.’

With the wig box slung over his shoulder, Carmine paused at the bottom of the rope ladder. It did seem hard to be doing something heroic while everyone was too busy to notice. Almost everyone – the Cakes had seen him and was staring up at him in surprise. On impulse he stooped and kissed her on the cheek, clumsily, so that her forehead knocked against his eyebrow.

When he reached the top of the rope ladder the wind blew his collar into his mouth and his short pigtail beat at the base of his neck. Brave Captain Blythe was crouching behind the chimney, cleaning out his pistol. The crew of the Bower ducked low to the deck or ran at a crouch from point to point when the lines needed trimming.

Carmine lay flat on his stomach near the edge of the deck and let his arm dangle over the side, the wig box hanging from his fist by its leather straps. As he began to swing it back and forth, Carmine kept his eye on a window below on the other boat, where a man in a plum-coloured surcoat was beating a playful curtain out of his face and levelling his pistol at Captain Blythe’s hiding place. A swing, and a one, and a two, and a…

The man at the window took the wig box full in the face and staggered backwards. The box bounced against the sill, then tumbled down inside rather than out. The men at the other windows of the Queens’ Heads pulled back, as if eager to find out what had landed in their midst.

‘Pull yourselves together, men!’ someone was bellowing. ‘You dolts! You… you squirrels! It’s a goose, nothing but a goose. Just a distraction. Here, I’ll show you…’

The sounds that followed greatly resembled those that might be caused by locking half a dozen farmyard animals into a dresser and then pushing it downstairs. Somewhere in the confusion someone discharged a rifle. To judge by the edgy, hot-coals dance that the crew on the Queens’ Heads were suddenly performing, they had just seen the bullet hole appear through the deck upon which they stood. The street door flung wide, and someone dived into the water and began swimming to the shore, leaving a cocked hat bobbing behind him.

Carmine scrambled to his feet and ran back to the trapdoor. He paused only for a second at the top of the rope ladder, but suddenly he was staring up at the sky. The deck had charged him from behind like a bully, and something seemed to be gripping his upper arm fiercely as if he might escape upwards into the sky. A wet heat was spreading across his shoulder, and as he tried to sit up the world raised its voice in a chorus of pain and pushed him down again.

Something was pulling at his leg. Looking down the length of his own body, Carmine could see the frightened face of Eponymous Clent, who had pushed his head up through the trapdoor and taken hold of Carmine’s ankle. Carmine wondered dully if Clent was trying to steal his boots, and whether anyone would notice. However, he let himself be dragged inch by painful inch, and at last felt someone grip him under the arms and lower him down through the trapdoor, where he seemed to sink into darkness like a drowner, amid a crowd of supporting hands. He was laid gently on to the floorboards. Voices echoed oddly in his ear, and there were red ringlets trailed across his face.

Blythe saw the young apprentice fall to a pistol shot but was too far away to do more than watch as Clent crept from cover to drag the boy to safety. What a world this is, he thought. Children put us to shame with their pluck, and are shot in the back for it.

The highwayman’s mind was filled with a terrible, aching clarity, for he had no doubt in his mind that he would be dead by evening. He hid this belief from his comrades, just as he hid the fact that his recent influenza had left his throat rough as bracken, and that from time to time his head became so light that the objects around him seemed to glisten darkly. The men who depended upon him needed to see him strong and able.

But they need more than Captain Blythe the hero, they need a dozen more men and as many guns… no, they need a miracle. On the other coffeehouse, Blythe could see men hanging off the outside wall rungs, or perched on sills, or skulking on deck and veranda – anything rather than face whatever it was that was breaking furniture in the main coffeeroom. Carmine’s strange attack had bought the Bower time, but it would not be long before the Queens’ Heads recovered from the crisis.

‘Ahoy the Laurel Bower! The Duke himself commands you to pull to and surrender yourselves to him and his men!’ The cry seemed to come from the veranda of the Queens’ Heads.

Blythe thought again of Carmine’s face as the shot had torn through his arm, and his chest exploded with anger.

‘This is Captain Clam Blythe, and I challenge Vocado Avourlace, called Duke of Mandelion, to a test of pistols. I stand for the rights of the people he robs and oppresses, and will risk my body for my cause. I call upon him to stand against me for the Queens he claims to honour, and let the Beloved decide the Right of it.’ Blythe could hear his own words echoing long after he had spoken them. He realized that little sculls were bobbing not far from the shore, and that the men on them were bellowing his words to a listening multitude on the waterfront.

‘The Duke accepts.’

Praise be to Goodman Varple of Thieves and Vagabonds, and bless his ugly dog, thought Blythe. The Duke truly is mad.

‘Mr Hind, captain of the Queens’ Heads, shall be my second.’ It was the Duke’s voice.

Blythe gave Stallwrath a questioning glance, and received a nod.

‘Mr Stallwrath shall serve as mine.’

While the crew of the Bower hurried to clear the deck, Blythe stood up, so that he could be seen by the men of the Queens’ Heads, the crew of the little boats bobbing nearby and the throngs at the riverside. If they shoot me like a dog now, it will be remembered…

His heart beat as a tall man in jewelled blues and golds climbed on to the roof of the Queens’ Heads, the wind splaying the locks of his pale gold wig until it seemed to circle his head like a halo. With a throb the highwayman remembered that, as the man challenged, the Duke would be allowed to take the first shot.

As Blythe willed himself to stand firm, the Duke carefully polished a slender, girlish pistol with a flared muzzle, then turned to regard his enemy shoulder-on, and brought his pistol down to bear. The other coffee-house was close enough for Blythe to see the flash of the powder before the surge of smoke. There was a bang so loud it seemed as if someone had slapped their palms hard against the highwayman’s ears. He took a deep breath, and found that his lungs were still whole. The Duke had missed.

Blythe raised his own pistol and slowly lowered it, until he stared down the barrel at the figure of the Duke, bright as a damselfly. With a single shot he could take the Duke’s madness out of the world. But on either side, hundreds watched, and he felt the bating of their breath like the silence before thunder. Their eyes and hearts were full of Captain Blythe, the hero for whom villagers had risked the scaffold and the stocks, for whom the radicals would fight to the last man, for whom skippers of little boats would hazard fire and musketball. If he took mean advantage of a now unarmed man, the Duke of Mandelion would die, but so would the Hero.

Blythe raised his gun to aim far above the Duke’s head, and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet through the string of the pursuing coffeehouse’s master-kite. As he lowered his smoking gun, Blythe heard a roar of applause erupt from the banks. There were cheers nearby from the lighters and dugouts, the dinghies and sculls.

He was turning away from his opponent when the applause changed to a gasp. Blythe saw shock on the faces of the Bower’s crew, and turned to see the Duke pulling from his coat a second pistol, identical to his first, and levelling it with one smooth gesture. The beating of Blythe’s heart suddenly seemed too loud for one chest, as if he were hearing the heart of every watcher pounding for his peril. There was no time to throw himself flat. There was time only to think, so this is how it feels to be a hero…

Then the frozen second ended, and from the skies swooped the severed master-kite, its canvas juddering with a sound like a mighty wingbeat. It struck the Duke on the back of the head with a chopping-block thud and tumbled him overboard. After the splash, nothing rose to the surface but a seethe of bubbles and the Duke’s three-cornered hat.

Why have his men stopped firing at us? Blythe wondered, as he leaned against the chimney for support. A glance over his shoulder answered his question. The sky was thick with kites, all bearing the Watermen’s insignia. The swift wherries had slipped in among the other river traffic, only now throwing up kites to declare their presence. There would be no more gunfire on their patch.

Skin me, thought Blythe, that girl must have got her message through to the Stationers after all. The far cries of the crowds were as shrill and gleeful as gull calls over a ploughed field, and Blythe looked about him, dazed, as distant hats were hurled into the air, and little boats ran up flags of celebration.

Among the figures thronging the Ashbridge, Blythe thought for a moment he saw a short and slender figure in an olive-green dress, a point of stillness amid the jubilation. But a fit of light-headedness came over him again before he could be sure whether it was Mosca, and by the time it cleared the figure was gone.