Fly by Night (17 page)

Legs shaking with excitement, Mosca scrambled down the wall, and set off in pursuit of the treasonous teacher. Very soon she was learning a few harsh lessons about spying in a busy city street.

She had long since learned tricks of invisibility. Be still where you can, be as silent as you can, let other small sounds drown your steps. If you cannot fool the eye, then fool the brain – stand where you are not expected and you will not be seen. Keep to the highs, keep to the lows, and avoid eye level if the terrain lets you. But these were tricks for the freckled woodland. Here in the street it was a matter of understanding patterns of flurry and flow. Stillness made one obvious, like a stone in a stream.

Time and again she would knock her bonnet against a swinging milk-pail, or nearly blunder beneath the wheels of a cart. Just to keep the teacher in view she was forced to squeeze alongside walls and between bodies, leaving a trail of trodden toes and murmured annoyance.

Thankfully, her quarry seemed cheerfully unaware of the world around him, but this too presented problems. At one point he stopped dead and dropped to a crouch to examine a snail whose shell had cracked beneath his boot. While an oyster seller’s tray tipped dizzily above his head, he could be seen placing together the fractured pieces of the snail’s shell and nudging it gently on its way. By the time he walked away with an oblivious smile, the road behind him was a tangle of tumbled bodies and overturned barrows. Despite herself, Mosca was impressed. The only other creature she had seen cause so much chaos in a ten-second period was Saracen.

She followed the teacher through Riversliver Race, where mackerel shimmered in slick silver heaps, where prawns with gummed black eyes questingly stirred their jointed legs. Through the Hides, where headless turkeys hung over doorways, plucked of all but wispy feather collars and garters, where rabbits dangled like furred gloves. Through a street sickly with the smell of tanners, through a network of alleys and ginnels. Down to the riverside, and in through the door of a coffeehouse.

‘Welcome back, Mr Pertellis,’ said a coffeemaiden at the door as she took the teacher’s hat and coat.

As the door closed behind him, Mosca watched, agape and aghast.

It was not so strange to see the teacher entering a coffeehouse. What Mosca did not expect was for the coffeehouse to judder, grind gently sideways, then abandon the roadside altogether and drift out into the open river.

A violent wind roared in through the newly opened gap, leaving Mosca to wrestle with her ever-rebellious bonnet. The walls of the coffeehouse had been painted cunningly to give the appearance of brickwork, but she saw now that they were wooden. Above the roof swung two broad, square sails. In the sky, at the end of long, strong tethers, tugged six or so diamond-frame kites, most of them only two feet across, but the largest was six feet wide, and was decorated with a twist of laurel on a white background.

‘You lose somink, love?’ asked a passing stevedore.

‘I lost a coffeehouse,’ Mosca answered indistinctly. ‘It . . . floated off down the river.’

The stevedore peered after the receding coffeehouse. ‘Half an hour late, too. ’Spect they were waiting for one of their regulars.’ This reply was somehow unsatisfactory.

Mosca tried again. ‘It floated away down the river.’

‘Wanted to catch it, did you? Well, the
Laurel Bower
stops on Tootle Street for sugar, that’s your best chance of boarding her this side of the river. Ye’ll have to run, though.’

And so, without pausing to question the strangeness, Mosca darted in the direction of his pointing finger.

She struggled down street after street, her eyes following the white kite above the roofline. And yes, at last, there was the coffeehouse, sliding to a halt alongside the jetty.

The door opened, and several men stepped out into the sun. One of them looked slightly familiar, and as Mosca tried to push past him he stepped forcibly into her path.

Mosca was taken roughly by the shoulders, and suddenly her feet were no longer touching the ground. The face of Partridge, the barge captain from the
Mettlesome Maid
, was inches from her own.

‘Do you know what I want?’ he hissed. The knot in his cheek was tying and loosing itself with frightening rapidity.

Mosca shook her head.

‘I want . . . my . . . barge . . . back.’

‘We ’aven’t got it!’

‘No.’ Partridge glared into her eyes with an intensity almost insane. ‘The goose has it.’

For a moment Mosca had a nightmarish image of Saracen biting through mooring ropes and taking the barge out, perhaps learning to trim the sails by himself . . .

‘We plucked up the planks to get out our cargo,’ Partridge explained slowly, ‘and the goose got down there, and we couldn’t get it out. And so we couldn’t get our cargo out. And then we sent Dotheril down below deck, and the goose broke his ankle, and now we can’t get
him
out. I want my barge back.’

Mosca nodded slightly.

‘And I want money – compensation for time and business lost.’

Mosca nodded again, a little uncertainly.

‘And you know what else I want for my trouble with the goose? I want your uncle’s heart spiked on a boat-hook so I can hear it crackle as it bakes in the sun.’

I is for Informer

Mosca looked into Partridge’s eyes, judging his gaze and the force of his fingers against her shoulders.

‘I’ll get yer money! You just got to let me go, an’ I’ll get yer money! Beloved blind me with brands if it ain’t so!’

Partridge stared at her distrustfully, and his grip tightened on her shoulders. There was nothing Mosca had wanted more than to find Partridge and buy back Saracen. However, right now her pockets were empty, and Partridge seemed to have gone a little mad.

‘I’ll have my money, all right,’ Partridge said grimly. ‘I’ll sell your skin to a drum-maker and have my money.’

Mosca decided that Partridge was not in the right mood for negotiation.

She twisted like a snake and sank her teeth into his right-hand knuckles, all the while tearing at his fingers with her nails. He shifted his grip and she pulled free, hearing a
tick-tack-tack
of snapping seam threads. On impulse, she leaped a mess of mooring ropes and sprinted for the coffeehouse, which was making ready to cast off.

As the sailors on the roof braced long poles against the quay in readiness for pushing off, Mosca jumped. Her hands snatched at a dangling rope, and then her feet found support on the crude wooden rungs nailed to the coffeehouse wall. Winded, she could only cling and pray that the
Laurel Bower
would push off before Partridge’s angry hand could close on the scruff of her neck.

It would not have interested her to know that at this very moment she was dangling between two worlds, each with its own laws. Leaping from the shore, she had left behind the city the Duke controlled. On the river, only the free-and-easy rules of the Watermen applied. The coffeehouses of Mandelion criss-crossed the river to escape the shore laws, so that customers could speak freely. Here sedition and wild conspiracies bubbled like the coffee-pots.

Meanwhile, within Miss Kitely’s coffeehouse, the
Laurel Bower
, the young teacher in blue-tinted spectacles brightened at the sight of a newly arrived friend.

‘Copperback!’ The teacher pushed forward to take the hand of a man who had an angry question locked eternally into his brilliant brown eyes. ‘I am so glad to see you – I was hoping that we might discuss the matter of the recent . . . that is, aha, hahow. Ow. Er . . . ow?’

Copperback continued to grip the teacher’s hand with painful firmness until he had watched a man in a crimson waistcoat reclaim his hat and trip out through the street door with a swing of his cane. When the door had been made fast behind him, and the crockery had rattled with the casting off, Copperback’s grip relaxed slightly. Several other men around the room who had been watching the door with earnest interest allowed their shoulders to relax.

‘Beloved above, Pertellis,’ Copperback muttered at last. ‘I thought you were going to spill right in front of him.’

Hopewood Pertellis blinked through his blue spectacles at the room about him, noticing the general tension for the first time.

‘Who . . . ?’

‘A spy for the Duke’s men. I’d stake my eyes on it. What is become of the world if we cannot even talk safely on the river? He came in yesterday and told us he had just arrived in Mandelion from one of the university towns, and wanted to meet other men of letters who “cared for the much-wronged common people”.’

‘Well, I suppose it may have been true,’ Pertellis suggested.

‘No, I think not.’ Miss Kitely herself had drifted in, carrying a dish of coffee for Pertellis. She was a thin, pale woman whose heavy lids could have been ugly but instead just made her eyes acutely blue. ‘He bought coffee for himself, and anyone who would talk to him, and never asked them to return the favour. I had my girl overcharge him, and he didn’t complain. Then he started to talk about how interested he would be in reading fresh-written tracts, and to ask whether anyone could show him some.’

‘Did anyone tell him anything?’ asked Pertellis.

Copperback exchanged a look with Miss Kitely, who lowered her heavy lids in a slow blink, then raised them again. Copperback traded glances with several others in the room, who nodded slightly or raised their eyebrows expectantly, then he faced Pertellis again and folded his arms.

‘And why would you be particularly interested in knowing that?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Pertellis – are you running this infernal printing press?’

Pertellis paused in lifting his coffee dish to his lips.

‘Goodness. Well, that is a question. How would you react if I was?’

Copperback flung his hands up over his head and, finding nothing he could usefully do with them, settled for meshing their fingers and letting them wrestle for a moment, before swinging them down against his thighs with a slap.

‘I knew it had to be you. It has your stamp all over it. Pertellis, by Pipshriek, Protector of the Rash, why did you not tell us? You should have given us the chance to shake some sense into you! You will bring the Stationers down upon every one of us – we shall all have our noses cut off at the next Assizes!’ Copperback flashed a furious and apprehensive glare round the room.

Every regular at the
Laurel Bower
would have risked arrest as a radical if his papers had been searched and his sympathies investigated. Their views differed, but they shared a passionate belief that the world was arranged unfairly. It was like a broken leg that had healed crooked and would have to be broken again if it was ever to grow straight. They all understood the danger they faced by holding to this belief.

‘I see.’ Pertellis sipped thoughtfully. ‘And how would you react if I said that I was not responsible?’

‘Pertellis . . .’ Copperback gestured in frustration. ‘Pertellis, we’ve all guessed that it must be you, what with your indomitable passion for circulating tracts. Most of us possess a copy of “Upon the Inequalities of Law” copied out by the children of your Floating School.’

‘Yes, I . . .’ Pertellis cast a beleaguered smile downwards. ‘I think most of my children now write a pretty fair hand.’

‘The hand is fair enough, but the words! Pertellis, they write down everything you say. On one page of my copy, a paragraph ends with “Oh dear, class dismissed, out of the windmill in single file, children.”’

‘Indeed, indeed. A printing press removes all such problems, and saves a deal of time and risk. It seems that it has been decided all round that I am running such a press. I can hardly resist such a weight of numbers, so I shall not protest.’ The young teacher’s voice rose. ‘Would I be ashamed to be throwing sparks into the tinder of men’s minds in such a way? No, I would not. Last winter, the over-taxed poor starved so that the Duke could build his Spires of Prosperity. This winter, innocent people will perish on the streets because he has knocked down their houses to make way for more follies. Is it worth speaking out against these things? Yes, it is!’

Copperback made an inarticulate, exasperated sound, and strode back to his table, where he sucked at his pipe so furiously that he swiftly vanished in a cloud of scented smoke. The
Laurel Bower
was dark and windowless out of respect for the window tax, but the sunlight entered the wooden walls through a hundred knotholes, illuminating ghostly swirling spears amid the blue smoke.