Fly by Night Read online

  ‘I don’t think I can come down.’

  ‘Mosca, the world is not as bleak as it seems right now—’

  ‘No . . . I mean, I’m not sure I can find my way down again. I can’t really turn round easily neither, without falling off the ledge.’

  When Kohlrabi extended his arms, Mosca dropped from her shrine hideaway, and managed not to crush his hat. He caught her under the armpits and set her on her feet, then squeezed her by the shoulders.

  ‘Well done, Mosca. Well done.’ Mosca got the impression that he was not talking just about her jump. He polished the pipe with his sleeve and presented it to her. It was a little singed about the bowl, but the wood was glossy and honey-coloured. Mosca chewed at the stem experimentally, and found that another set of teeth had left a little groove into which her own fitted.

  ‘It’s a different sort of smell from my father’s tobacco, but it’s . . .’ Mosca suddenly realized that she was going to cry and there was nothing she could do about it. She clenched her teeth on the pipe stem, but the world became misty.

  ‘Is it all right? Can you think with it?’

  Mosca nodded, but couldn’t speak.

  ‘Come on, I’ll take you home.’

  Mosca could only shake her head.

  ‘All right . . . not to the marriage house, then.’ There was a pause, and Kohlrabi let out a long breath. ‘You’d better come with me.’

  Saracen had decided he liked being a god, and was coaxed out of the Warren with some difficulty and several breadcrusts. Before leaving the cathedral, Kohlrabi wrapped the Cakes’ blanket around Mosca so that she would not be recognized, but when they reached the street there was no sign of the Floating School children. The crowds outside were still tense and unquiet, but calm pooled around Kohlrabi like a cloak. He smiled and whistled under his breath, as if he was carrying a secret; and after a while Mosca felt calmer, as if she knew it as well. They walked into a wigmaker’s which seemed to have been squeezed thinly between two larger shops.

  ‘Mosca, this is Mrs Nokes.’ A woman in a primrose-yellow cottager’s gown and cap tripped forward, her face wearing a vague smile, as if she had just heard the punchline to a joke and was waiting to understand it. ‘Mrs Nokes, Mosca will be taking that room of yours on the second floor. Can we have the key?’

  Mrs Nokes had to spell out the keys on her chatelaine one by one with great care, and she finally held up the right one with an air of mute surprise and triumph. Kohlrabi folded her hand carefully around a few coins, and held her fingers in place a moment to make sure she did not drop them.

  ‘Mrs Nokes is not one for talking,’ Kohlrabi explained as he led Mosca up the stairs, ‘but she’s an excellent cook. Ah! Here we are. How is this, Mosca? Do you think you can survive here for a few days until things calm down?’

  The room had a proper bed, with chocolate-brown curtains and embroidered pillows. There was a dressing table with, Mosca noted in amazement, a mirror two spans high. There were three candlesticks, good, long ones. There was a little hollow in one wall for visitors to place a pocket idol while they were staying. There was a stand for a wig, and a little bone comb. And . . .

  ‘It’s got wallpaper,’ Mosca said in awe.

  Kohlrabi reached for the purse at his belt. ‘You will be safe here, providing you stay in this room and don’t open the door to anyone but myself or Mrs Nokes. Here’s a few coins to tide you over. Mrs Nokes will bring you meals, but if you need anything else, ask her to go out and get it for you, and give her the money.’

  Mosca did not answer. In reaching for his purse, Kohlrabi had carelessly pushed aside his cloak, and suddenly she knew exactly why the children of the Floating School had run from him.

  Kohlrabi’s eyes dropped to discover the object of Mosca’s fascinated gaze. ‘Oh, that.’ He pulled the cloak back to conceal the pistol strapped to his flank. ‘There is danger on the streets,’ he admitted. ‘Danger on the highways as well, or I might have tried to spirit you out of Mandelion. Some villagers have turned to banditry, they say.’

  ‘There’s going to be a war, isn’t there?’ Everything seemed to be unravelling.

  ‘In Mandelion?’ Kohlrabi seemed to be considering the question seriously. ‘Perhaps a little one, but only a little one. Mosca, things will get worse before they get better, but believe me when I tell you that everything will happen for the best.’ He studied her features with a worried smile-frown.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Lady Tamarind is a very clever woman, and has planned for everything. And when the time comes for you to appear in the Assizes to testify against Clent, I will make sure that you get there and back safely, no matter what hurly-burly there may be on the streets.’

  ‘What . . . I got to go back an’ tell everyone about it again?’ faltered Mosca.

  ‘It would be best,’ Kohlrabi said gently. ‘I can help you write up a deposition, but if you do not turn up at court, there is a chance that Clent may walk free. It is a capital crime, so he will be defending himself, but I hear that he is a gifted speaker . . .’

  Mosca would have to hobble her way through her story again, in a courtroom this time, with the gaze of a thousand eyes pressing the breath out of her. Perhaps Cakes and Bockerby looking on with cold reproach, or the Floating School watching with eyes like coals. Around her laws and rules would lie like invisible wires, and she would snag and tangle in them blindly with every sentence. When she did, Clent would pounce on her mistakes, for Clent would be there, with his silver voice and cold grey eyes . . .

  ‘All right,’ she muttered gruffly.

  Over the next few days, Kohlrabi brought her paper and ink, and helped her word her deposition. He also brought books of law, so that she could understand the traps that might be laid for her in the court. He seemed quite confident of her success. This strengthened Mosca during his absences, as she heard the subdued sea-cave roar of angry crowds, and the crackle of distant musket-fire.

  Night after night, however, Mosca lay awake in the middle of her great bed between the cool, clean sheets, stroking the worn damask of the curtains to comfort herself. Her stomach kept trying to squirm out of her belly, and her mind wriggled around, looking for reasons to run away before the Assizes. But if she ran away, Eponymous Clent would slide through the fingers of the law, and when he came after her there would be no Kohlrabi to protect her . . .

  All too soon, Mosca woke to her breakfast chocolate and realized that the first day of Clent’s trial had arrived. Kohlrabi had brought her a clean white dress and apron for appearing in court.

  ‘How do you feel, Mosca?’

  ‘Like I swallowed a dozen live jackdaws what hate each other.’ Mosca sat on the edge of her bed, staring at her hands.

  ‘The worst of it is the waiting.’ Kohlrabi crouched in front of her. ‘Trust me, compared to that, giving testimony will be the easiest thing in the world.’

  ‘’S funny,’ Mosca said. ‘All this time I’ve been skithered of standing up in court, but that bit of my brain’s gone numb now. Now it feels like the worst of it will be walking through the streets, an’ feelin’ like everybody knows I’m going there to blow the gab on someone, an’ wondering if they’ll throw stones at me again. I’m turning stag, and nobody likes that.’

  ‘All right,’ Kohlrabi said quietly. ‘I know a time when the streets will be empty.’ He left Mosca alone for a few minutes, then returned with two long scarves draped over his arm. ‘We can wrap these around our heads. And these –’ he held out a handful of what seemed to be fragments of waxed cloth – ‘we can put in our ears.’

  ‘You mean . . . Clamouring Hour?’

  ‘Yes. It starts in ten minutes.’

  When they left Mrs Nokes’s shop, fifteen minutes later, the scarves swaddling their heads like turbans, Mandelion had pulled itself indoors and shuttered itself against the war of the bells. Even with her ears plugged, Mosca could feel the sound drumming against her skin like rain. The turmoil of the city had made the ringers more
zealous and aggressive in their clanging competition.

  Mosca felt filled with panic. She was an arsonist, runaway, thief, spy and murderer’s accomplice, and here she was of her own free will taking step after weak-kneed step towards the prison. She turned a final corner, and now she could see the prison waiting to pounce on her, crouched behind the watch house like a panther behind a mound. The prison – the ‘louse house’, the ‘tribulation’, the ‘stone jug’, the ‘naskin’. It would put out a great paw to pin her, and she would never escape it again.

  Perhaps Kohlrabi shared her thoughts because he suddenly halted. But he was staring towards the prison gate, where a dozen scrolls of paper were rolling over lazily like cats so that the wind could stroke them. Spread-eagled on the ground lay three men in the Duke’s colours.

  Kohlrabi signalled to Mosca to stay where she was, and he sprinted to the watch house. He beat on the door, but there was no response. He had started running back towards Mosca when the prison gates swung wide and three men ran out into the street. Their faces were muffled and they carried muskets.

  Kohlrabi reached Mosca, grabbed her wrist and spun her around. The next moment the pair of them were running away from the prison at full pelt, with the heavens clamouring above them.

  Q is for Questioning

  They returned to the wigmaker’s shop at the tail end of Clamouring Hour and had to wait for Mrs Nokes to unfasten the door. Gently but firmly Kohlrabi guided Mosca inside, then ran off down the street again without explanation.

  In her upper-room eyrie, Mosca pulled the stoppers out of her ears. One by one the bells lost breath and hushed, until one lone, monotonous bell rang without ceasing. Hugging her knees in the window seat, Mosca listened in an agony of suspense to running feet, shouted queries.

  Two hours passed before Kohlrabi returned. Mosca’s heart plummeted when she saw his expression.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Mosca, I don’t want you to be worried or upset . . .’

  Mosca was instantly worried and upset.

  ‘What’s happened? Something’s happened! I’m going to be arrested! You’re going to be arrested! Something’s happened to Lady Tamarind!’

  ‘No, steady, Mosca, none of those. But . . . there’s been a prison break.’

  At first Mosca thought of Pertellis, perhaps being carried out by a mob of pistol-wielding children. Then another possibility occurred to her.

  ‘Mr Clent!’

  ‘Yes, it seems he has escaped . . . but that’s only a part of the truth. The fact is, the entire prison has been broken out. Every single convict. All of them.’ Kohlrabi gave a wry smile. ‘That, I suspect, is what comes of trying to keep Locksmiths under lock and key.’

  This is what had happened.

  Just after the start of Clamouring Hour, when all petty constables unlucky enough to be on duty in the streets had wads of cotton in their ears, a cart parading Stationers’ colours had sauntered up to the jail. Because so many pamphlets from the illegal press had been found, the sheriff had ordered a small furnace to be built by the jail, so that they could be burned quickly. The Stationers themselves had taken to bringing little cartloads of suspicious papers to burn in this furnace, and the guards had grown used to turning their faces away, as if they were plague carts carrying the dead.

  The guards at the gate of the jail said later that the driver of the cart seemed to be shouting something to them, and gesturing with a sheaf of parchments, none of them bearing the Stationers’ seal. Then the wind rose, the driver gestured too freely, and the papers escaped, capering and spiralling upon the breeze.

  The guards had, of course, reacted with horror. One paper wrapped itself playfully around a man’s leg, and he had buckled up as if it scalded him. One was chased around the corner of the wall by two tumbling sheets, which seemed to flank him like hounds pursuing a deer. The third man curled into a little ball, and was in no position to stop someone coshing him neatly on the head.

  None of these guards had the key to the main gate of the jail, but it seemed that the intruders in Stationers’ clothing had. Furthermore, they seemed to have the keys to the holding cells, the Question cells, the Forgotten Fall, and the Vaults of Silence. Meanwhile, when the Duke’s men in the nearby barracks finally realized that something was amiss, the door to the barracks remained obstinately closed, and precious minutes were lost kicking it open. When they sprinted to the armoury, that door also snubbed them.

  One guard inside the building, who was overcome, pinioned and gagged, explained later that when the first musket shot was heard, cell door after cell door had opened from the inside, and the Locksmiths had stepped out, casually kicking off their manacles as they did so. Without bothering to claim the guards’ keys, they had walked calmly through the passageways, picking all the locks with combs, spoons and spectacle frames, so swiftly that they scarcely broke stride.

  Outside in the courtyard, the Duke’s men finally knocked in the door of the armoury and surged inside. They shouldered muskets and blunderbusses, seized pistols and pikes, turned to leave, and discovered that the door was jammed again.

  The streets were virtually empty, and those few people who were hanging out of their windows to shake their bells were simply amused when they saw a scattered horde of men and women fleeing through the streets with their hands over their ears. Only when the Hour had ended, and the ears of the observers had stopped ringing, did they become aware of the sad, lonely clanging of the alarm bell.

  Needless to say, the intruders were not Stationers at all, and the Stationers had no idea who they were.

  ‘Don’t look so alarmed, Mosca. The Duke’s men are raiding every rat-hole in the city, and will have rounded up most of the convicts by dawn. If Eponymous Clent is still in the city, he will be run to earth in no time. If he has fled Mandelion, he will be declared an outlaw, and perhaps you will never need to testify in court against him. Either way, I will see you safe, and so will Lady Tamarind. I have spoken with her again – she has an interest in you.’

  ‘Lady Tamarind! What did she say?’

  ‘“I think we must find work for that girl, or she will tear the spires apart with her fingernails, looking for it.” And then she laughed to herself. Her Ladyship never laughs. She sees something special in you, Mosca, and I think I understand why. Do you remember the part of the cathedral where the font of the Little Goodkin stands?’

  Mosca nodded.

  ‘Perhaps you did not notice, but in that part of the church the roof is lower and the stone flags more chipped. The truth is, back when Mandelion was little more than a village, a square little church stood on that very spot. It was not pretty; it looked as severe as a fortress – which is exactly what it was. The villagers at that time lived in fear of pirates, and a watchtower stood where the Eastern Spire now rises. When the lookout glimpsed the sails of a cutter, he would ring an alarm, and the whole village would run to hide in the church and hold off the attackers.

  ‘The walls of the church still stand, hidden under the gilt of the cathedral marble. To the west, although you cannot see them, there are spouts so that boiling oil can be poured down into the courtyard. In the southern wall, below the Heart of the Consequence, there are hidden arrowslits facing the river.

  ‘I think that when Lady Tamarind looks at you, she feels as the cathedral might if it suddenly remembered that once it had been a grim little church facing down musket fire and a cruel sea wind.’

  That is all very well, thought Mosca after he had gone, it’s all very well me being a grim little church, but what do I do when I don’t know who the pirates are, or where they’re coming from, and I don’t have no arrows anyway? She amused herself with trying to think of ways to defend her room if she found herself besieged by pirates or anyone else, but even with Saracen as her champion this became boring after a while.

  It is all very well being safe, thought Mosca, but how can I be safe if I don’t know what’s happening?

  She gave Mrs Nokes money f
or news broadsheets, but poor Mrs Nokes was easily confused, and brought back improving stories about little girls whom the Beloved blessed because they never swore and worked harder than their brothers and sisters. Mrs Nokes smiled so hopefully that Mosca thought there was little point in complaining.

  It was at an early hour on the second morning after the prison break that she turned her attention to the dressing table and mirror. There was a bone comb with nearly all its teeth, a brush with a cracked enamel back, a little pot of face powder, a block of rouge and all sorts of strange little brushes, patches and pincers. There were jars of wig powder coloured white, creamy yellow, lilac and pale peach respectively. She spent half an hour fiddling with her bonnet, and succeeded in arranging the ribbons as the lavender girl had shown her. Then, remembering Lady Tamarind’s marble pallor, Mosca dipped one of the brushes into the face powder and dabbed it experimentally on her face. She moved the candles nearer to the mirror and leaned forward so that she could examine her face more closely as she did so.

  How strange it was to see her face reflected so clearly in a real mirror! Tiny candle flames were reflected in her eyes, which pleased her. She was even more delighted to notice that her eyebrows were starting to grow through, black at the roots. Saved at last from the Chough water, they were turning the same colour as her hair.

  Mosca pulled off her bonnet and cap to extract a lock of her black hair so that she could hold it against her eyebrows and compare. She lifted a candle to let more light fall on her face, then set it down abruptly with a jolt.

  Faint creases ran down each of Mosca’s cheeks, as if twin tears had worn grooves in them. They joined in a red crease under her chin. They were almost identical to the marks she had seen on the face of the dead Partridge.

  Maybe all dead faces looked that way. Maybe death crumpled you up like a ball of paper. Maybe she was starting to die and hadn’t noticed and maybe the creases would become deeper and deeper and her skin would turn blue and . . .

  . . . and perhaps there was a quite different explanation.