Fly by Night (8 page)

Mosca did not know it, but she was staring at a sign of changing times. The days when followers of rival kings would exchange blows or musketfire on sight were long gone. Every town now accepted with a sigh its share of the different allegiances, and every barkeep carefully laid out a jug of water and a bowl of little loaves on each table so that his customers might toast any monarch they chose.

A captain from a lighter joined their table, and was soon deep in conversation with Partridge.

‘So – what news in Mandelion?’ Partridge asked, stooping to light his pipe at the candle.

‘Well, the Duke’s worse each day. Did you hear about the new Spires of Prosperity?’

Partridge crooked an eyebrow.

‘
Twin
spires, would they happen to be?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Still pairs with him, then?’ Partridge sighed, and shook his head.

Amid the stream of strange names, Mosca sometimes lost the thread of the conversation. There was a lot said about a group called ‘the Locksmiths’, which sounded like the name of a guild, but one she had never heard before. The lighter captain said they were growing stronger in Mandelion, which was something he had hoped never to see. Partridge said it was all right, the Duke’s sister would never let them take over Mandelion the way they had taken Scurrey. If the Locksmiths were just a guild of lock-makers, Mosca could not imagine why people looked so grim and frightened when they talked about them.

The beer in Mosca’s cup seemed as weak as river water, and tasted much as if a hundred ducks had been washing their feet in it. But after a while Mosca started to feel a warm and empty buzzing space near the back of her head. When she tried to understand the conversation, it was like trying to pick up a thread with Saracen’s webbed foot instead of her own fingers.

‘Your niece is looking a little dusky around the eyes. Better put her to bed before she falls off her chair and into the fire.’

‘Bed’ proved to be one of the straw mattresses by the far wall, set somewhat aside from the others. Mosca dared not undress, and she lay down fully clothed, with her bonnet tipped forward to shade her face. From under the brim, she watched Clent brush down his own mattress with fastidious care, remove his coat for use as a blanket, and lay himself down. To her disappointment, he tucked the package under the mattress first.

For the next five hours Mosca stared into darkness, listening to the crunch and rip of Saracen tearing her mattress apart. She had no intention of letting Clent slip off without her again, and she dug straw stems into her palms to keep herself awake. But, exhausted as she was, it was impossible not to doze off, and she was shaken awake at dawn.

‘Shake a leg, there.’ Partridge grinned down at her, not unkindly.

She followed him out to the boat, her stomach raw and green from lack of sleep. Clent was sitting not far from the stern, peeling a boiled egg with his fingers. There was no sign of his parcel.

As Mosca sat down beside him, she became aware that he was observing her narrowly. He took a bite out of his egg, stared thoughtfully at the deck for a moment, then looked back at Mosca.

‘My dear, I hope you have slept well?’ Clent’s tone was courteous, but as cold and crisp as the morning. He paused for a moment to pick at his teeth with his little fingernail. Only when Partridge had moved out of earshot did he continue. ‘Has it struck you that the river is rather . . . higher this morning?’

‘Didn’t hear any rain.’ Mosca stared out at the river, which seemed as languid as ever.

‘I do not mean further up the banks, child, I mean further up the sides of the boat. We are lower in the water than we were yesterday, and I think we cannot put all of that down to the beer and bread in our bellies.’

‘You mean . . . they got us off the boat so we wouldn’t see ’em loading up with something else?’ Mosca squinted about the boat. ‘Is it hid among the bales?’

‘No,’ answered Clent, a little too quickly. ‘No, I think not. Cast your eyes upon the deck. The planks beneath us keep the cargo from bruising the barge’s belly, but in this case I fancy they are fulfilling another purpose.’ Like most barges of its type, the
Mettlesome Maid
had no hold, and the hay bales were piled up on the deck. The deck was a flat layer of planks some little way above the barge’s elmwood bottom.

Mosca noticed for the first time that some strands of straw were clamped between the deck planks, as if the planks themselves had been removed and then replaced. She looked up at Clent, her eyes wide with a question.

‘Now, under that canvas awning is the place where the crew sleeps. There will be no one there now, and if you were to say you wished to rest there for a while, no one would object. Then you need only lever up one of the planks, slip into the belly of the boat, and we shall have our questions answered.’

‘But—’

‘Come now. The powers that be have saddled me with a ferrety-looking child, and as far as I know ferrets have only two uses – poor-quality fur trim, or sending down holes after rabbits. Pray be a good ferret, and be quick about it.’

Mosca mimed a yawn, and picked her way along the deck towards the stern. At the gunwale Partridge rested a lazy hand on the great tiller, his eyes on the river ahead. He paid little attention as Mosca pulled up the awning, and slipped into the darkness beneath.

Prising up the planks was no mean feat. Mosca’s fingernails were short, and the planks were solid oak and a foot wide. She eventually found that she could slide one of the scraps of metal from Clent’s pouch between the planks, and after some painful minutes one rose out of its groove.

Mosca reached deep into the hole, and the flat of her palm struck the grooved wood of the barge bottom. She waved a hand through the darkness, and something knobbed batted at her fingers. Grabbing it, she lifted it into the half-light. It was a small, heavy, wooden figure of Goodman Greyglory, He Who Guides the Sword in Battle. Was there a whole tribe of icons, ripped from their shrines, huddling in the darkness like captives in the hold of a slaveship? And why would anyone be secretly transporting them down the river?

Biting her lip white with caution, she lowered the Goodman back into darkness, and replaced the plank. She pushed the canvas aside, and emerged on hands and knees, and began crawling alongside the hay bales on the side furthest from the bank, and from Eponymous Clent.

The secret cargo was not hidden among the bales, but she was fairly certain that something else was.

Why had Clent hidden the parcel of papers? Perhaps he was afraid that a waterman’s scull might slip alongside the barge and he might be forced to open it. Where had he hidden it? Somewhere out of sight, but easy to reach in a hurry if he had to make a quick escape.

If Mosca had not been looking for something of the sort, she would never have noticed the string trailing from between two bales. Simple, but effective. In an emergency, he could pull the string, and . . .

She drew on the string, and the parcel slid out from its hiding place. Taking the bundle binding in her mouth, she cat-padded her way back on all fours, and dived into the darkness beneath the canvas awning.

When she had dragged off the string and pulled away the burlap, Mosca found herself with a lap full of printed papers. Most were chapbooks of criminals’ lives, the pages roughly stitched into their cloth covers. Some were large loose pages, or ‘broadsheets’, most of which had ballads printed upon them. All bore the seal of the Company of Stationers. Between them, however, was the packet Clent had laboured to hide. It opened to Mosca’s eager fingers, and she was at first disappointed to find that it seemed to be a letter of introduction, ‘. . . Testifying that Eponymous Clent is acting upon the behalf of the Company of Stationers in investigating certain illicit . . .’

The page suddenly became a great deal easier to read as the canvas awning was twitched back, and Eponymous Clent pushed his head into the little cave.

His smile slid away like water off a candle, and his plump face became absolutely expressionless in a way that told Mosca that he was very angry. She stared back, her black eyes burning with triumph.

‘How did you find those?’

‘You’re working for the Stationers? You’re a spy?’

‘You can read?’ Clent stared at her in disbelief as he struggled into the makeshift cabin.

‘Full of surprises, me,’ whispered Mosca savagely.

At this moment the awning was flung violently aside and, as one, Mosca and Clent jumped to sit on the papers, landing with a thump, hip to hip.

Partridge was stooping at the opening, the crooked corner of his mouth flexing and relaxing like an angry fist.

‘Are you people trouble to me?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘Only there’s five or so Watermen wherries blocking the river up ahead, and it looks to me like they’re searching boats.’

D is for Daylight Robbery

Mosca and Clent exchanged glances, and silently settled a single matter between them. They were on thin ice, on the brink of disaster, but for now they were also on the same side.

‘Ah, now, it would seem that we have an interest in common,’ Clent began quickly, turning back to Partridge. ‘You do not wish the Watermen to discover that you have been taking passengers illegally, and we . . . we are in no hurry to be found. So let us hurry to an understanding, and, ah . . .’

‘And what? What exactly do we do, you lily-handed sack of suet?’

In answer, Clent reached down and knocked once on the planks of the deck, which answered hollowly.

‘What, stow you below boards and risk your bootnails inside the belly of the
Maid
? I’ll see you gull food first. Dotheril!’ The head of another crewman appeared at the opening in the awning. ‘I think you’d better hail the Watermen and tell ’em we’ve just this minute found a couple of stowaways. Doesn’t it look that way to you?’

‘I’d say so, sir,’ agreed Dotheril coolly. ‘Guess they must have crept aboard while we was docked at the Halberd.’

‘If you give us up,’ hissed Mosca, ‘I’ll tell them about the other stowaways already down there.
They
don’t seem to be hurting your boat none. More of holiness than holes down there, I’d say.’

Clent rallied well, considering that he had no idea what Mosca was talking about.

‘Yes, I fear the secret is out. We know that your boat, like many other “maids”, hides a secret in her belly. My niece, you see, has an enquiring mind and, while I have tried to damp her desire to peek and pry, it is her nature and there is little I can do about it. Well, Captain, I am at
my
wits’ end – have you decided what is to become of us all?’

‘We cannot dally long,’ whispered Dotheril. ‘We could nudge the bank and buy time that way, but if we did that, there might be a rattling in the . . .’ His eyes dropped pointedly towards the deck.

Partridge’s mouth twitched once, twice, as if he was trying to crack a tiny nut between his teeth.

‘Take up the planks,’ he ordered in an undertone. ‘But if either of you makes a sound, I’ll nail the deck in place above your heads, seal the cracks with pitch, and leave you to your prayers.’

They had to lever up three planks before Eponymous Clent was able to squeeze through. He disappeared into darkness with a muffled squawk.

‘Quiet!’

‘Merciless Fates! I would like to see you hold your tongue if you had just taken Good Lady Shempoline in the eye—’

‘Silence!’

Mosca followed her employer into the cramped darkness below the deck. The darkness was almost absolute, apart from a few strands of light visible above between the deck planks. She raised her hand and felt the coarse wooden underside of the deck and wished she hadn’t. It was like finding oneself inside a wooden coffin.

The voice of the water was now far louder. Here you could hear the thoughts of the barge, how it clicked its tongue in annoyance as the wavelets slapped its flank, how it boomed and droned with effort as it strained against the ropes of the hauliers, the drag of the current.

A crickle, a crackle. Somewhere not far from Mosca’s head lay Clent’s fistful of papers. Somewhere among them lay the Stationers’ letter. Even the few lines Mosca had read were enough to prove Clent a Stationer spy. This was her chance to gain something that might give her a hold over him. ‘Somink big,’ Palpitattle’s voice echoed in her head. Her long fingers reached out stealthily and touched a papery corner.