Ambergate (19 page)

“Won’t you get beaten?” I said anxiously.

He shrugged, nonchalant.

I hugged him. “You are a friend, Shadow, a true friend.”

Something came into his eyes then. “I do want to be a friend to you, Miss Scuff,” he said, looking up at me earnestly; his
dirty face had the tracks of tears. “Believe it, I do.”

Then he slipped from the galley before I had a chance to say goodbye.

Though I’d had so little of the toddy, my head was starting
to swim. I tried to pull myself together; I combed my hair with the tortoiseshell comb and wiped my face with an edge of cloth.
My clothes were dirty, but at least I’d not stand out in this part of the city.

Then I put the box back in the bag and put the strap over my neck. Lifting my skirts, I climbed the ladder for the last time.
I was clumsy, especially with the box banging against my legs. When I looked back down into the galley, it seemed to blur
before my eyes.

I stood on deck, swaying a little and blinking in the gray afternoon light, the box under my arm.

Two bargees stepped forward. “Come, we’ll help you disembark, Miss Scuff.”

I didn’t refuse their help; I knew I needed it to struggle to the wharfside across the boats that lay along us. When I’d placed
my feet safely on the muddy stones, I wondered if I could walk steady, all alone.

“We’ll guide you,” said one, and he took a firmer hold of my arm. Neither man listened to my protests. With a boatman gripping
each arm, I was almost carried from the wharf.

The toddy was drugged!
I thought hazily.

I looked back as I was borne between the houses and I saw Shadow on deck. I heard his thin cry: “I’m sorry, Miss Scuff!”

Has Shadow betrayed me all along
?

“What are you doing?” I mumbled to the men, the selfsame men that had listened to my songs that morning. “Where are
you taking me? You’ve no right!” Panicked, I began to twist in their grip, forcing them to stop.

“Mr. Butley’s orders, Miss,” panted one of them as he pinioned my arm. “You are a cheat, Miss. Mr. Butley says so.”

“What?” I cried.

The other one chimed in, shaking his head. “You took back the box that was to pay for your passage.”

“Our skipper don’t like to be the loser on a deal,” said his friend.

Outrage seized me, clearing my head. “It was given me…,” I began. Then, “Take the box back! It’s in the bag.”

For a moment the bargees looked disconcerted. “Mr. Butley said we was to take you to the slave market.”

At his words I began to struggle in real terror. “Take it yourselves then, keep it! Only let me go. Don’t sell me, I beg you!”

“We’ll get a share of the proceeds if we sell you. What would we do with a box?”

“And you’ll ‘ave a roof over your head tonight,” said the other. “Now, come along like a good girl.”

Now they gave me no opportunity of stopping, but swung me along so that my feet scarcely touched the ground. I might have
been a bale of merchandise; I suppose I was, to them. I could feel my heart beat thickly; I remembered hearing about the slave
markets and what happened to those who were sold. If they were sold as servants, they were lucky, though they’d always carry
a stigma.

But sometimes girls and women were bought for prostitution, or taken north to the coal mines and never saw daylight
again. Others were bought to work in the chalk pits and lime kilns, where their lungs drowned in dust; or in the blubber factories,
where I’d heard they made soap from human fat.

All this ran frantic through my mind as I was pulled along. The courtyards and alleyways reeked of urine and rotting vegetables.
Packs of wild dogs nosed the rubbish, snarling at each other, fighting over old bones. Ravens, pecking at the cobbles, shuffled
out of our way with raucous croaks, so that I longed to touch the amber beneath my bodice.

I was desperate for help, but the streets were deserted. The hour of Curfew was coming; even in the open places the light
was beginning to fade. Only a beggar huddled in a doorway peered at me dully as I was dragged along.

Then suddenly I saw my salvation: a lamplighter, coming down his ladder from the lighted oil lamp.

“Help!” I cried out. His grease-smeared face turned toward me. “Please—help me!”

But in the pool of yellow light he saw the two muscular bargemen. He grabbed up his trimming scissors and pitchy rope and
vanished into the dusk, without even waiting to collect his ladder.

“You shut your mouth, you hear?” growled one of my captors, his face brutish. He shoved his fist under my nose, and I was
dragged on.

The slave market was being held on a scurfy patch of open ground surrounded by ruined buildings, their staircases open to
the wind. The auction was almost over and the crowd beginning to leave. As we arrived, two rough-voiced assistants came up
and took details from the boatmen. Then they led us
toward the center of the ground. The bargees held me fast; there was no chance of escape.

On the makeshift platform three tiny children were roped together, their faces gaunt in the light from the flaming brands.
They looked scarce old enough to work, but their parents had brought them here to sell. I could see a ragged couple hovering
below, waiting for the auctioneer’s speech. The mother was wringing her hands and weeping; the father didn’t look at his children
but at a sprouting weed by his feet.

“We have here a girl and two boys, in good health, meek, easy to train. One lot, or separate. What am I bid?”

The two boys were sold immediately to a prosperous-looking businessman, accompanied by a bodyguard and a link-boy bearing
a lamp—a factory owner, perhaps—but the little girl was rejected.

She ran in joy back to her mother, but the father prised her away and forced her back to the platform. Her sobs were terrible.
Eventually she was sold to a hard-faced madam in a stiff black hat for a single scathing. The mother wept as the father took
the paltry coin, his face bitter.

“And now we have a pretty young maiden, ripe for work, an experienced housekeeper and cook, sound of limb. Also, one amber
amulet, of very fine quality. Items to be sold together or separate.”

The two bargemen and the auctioneer’s assistants thrust me up onto the platform; the bag with the box was flung after me.
Almost blinded by the flaring brands, I could see nothing, only hear a ripple of interest from the people that had remained
in the ground. The assistants kept firm hold of me.

“Turn around, Miss, lift your skirts—show us your shapely ankles—now roll back your sleeves,” ordered the auctioneer, breathing
roast onions in my face, and to my horror, his own repulsive, pudgy hand came at my breast to pull out my amber. I closed
my eyes and did as he told me; I had no alternative.

I felt I could not sink any lower than to be sold as if I were an object and had no soul. How could I face Aggie again, if
her mother’s amulet were separated from me and sold to a stranger?

In my shame, I tried to cast myself far away in my mind—to Murkmere. And immediately I thought of Miss Jennet: of what she
would say in such a situation.
It does not matter what these people think of you, but what you think of yourself
.

So I held my head proudly and looked, clear-eyed, into the dusk beyond the flames and the ring of gawking, orange-lit faces
below me.

And suddenly I saw out of the corner of my eye, against a ruined wall, the pale glimmer of a shirt—surely the calico shirt
I had mended for Erland and that I’d seen him wear so often? But when I looked back I saw it was a trick of the light. The
moon was rising above the broken buildings, a full moon that shone in the puddles of the open ground.

At that moment the Curfew bells began to toll warningly through the Capital, a tuneless clamor of many different pitches.
The auctioneer was in a hurry to have the business of the evening over and be safe inside his walls. He prodded me farther
forward, to the very edge of the platform.

“So, ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted. “What am I bid for this willing young creature? See her straight limbs, her strong
back? She is an excellent hand in the kitchen; I have the strongest recommendation from her former employer. It would be a
veritable crime, ladies and gentlemen, to start with a bid less than a double revere. Come and have a closer inspection if
you wish.”

To my horror, dark figures stirred in the crowd. Several people were moving forward to climb onto the platform: to poke me
all over, inspect my teeth, finger the amber. I tried to struggle, but the auctioneer’s assistants held me more tightly still,
and down below the bargemen, eager for their money, were ready to help.

Two women were the first to climb the steps: one, panting with the exertion and bulky—I could make out her shape but little
more in the torchlight; the other, younger, agile, reached the platform first. She stepped out of the darkness, seized up
my bare forearm, and peered at it.

“I thought so!” the girl exclaimed in tones of triumph. “She is an orphan.” She held my arm out to the auctioneer. “Look at
that brand mark, Sir. See the square after the number? She was one of ours at the Gravengate Home. We’ve the right to claim
her for Recompense. She’s our property!”

I stared at the girl. I saw the flames gleam in her little currant eyes. I knew that smirk. It was the same expression she’d
had on her face when she used to taunt me at Murkmere.

I’d never expected to see Doggett in the Capital.

The same evening, Mather and Chance were back at the Palace of the Protectorate. For what would be the final time, Mather
was to interrogate the Protector’s special prisoner: his niece, Miss Leah Tunstall, formerly of Murkmere. Chance himself had
never before seen the girl whom everyone in the Palace whispered about, the girl who might be one of the despised and blasphemous
avia.

Full of curiosity, he followed Mather into a courtyard, past the armed guards that stood to attention at the entrance to one
of its corner towers. He noted that the prisoner had been confined as far away as possible from the main Palace building with
the Protector’s reception rooms. He could hear her yells blasting down the shadowy stone stairwell as they climbed.

“Get out, you doltheads, out of my sight!”

There was a crash above them.

A man came hurrying down, almost falling over his feet. It was the doctor from the day before, redder in the face than ever.
He glared at Chance, then at Mather. “I don’t advise seeing her just now. Ill-tempered little…” He floundered as he registered
Mather’s uniform, spat out “Pah!” and blundered past them.

“There will be no more medical checks on Miss Leah from today, Doctor,” Mather called down after him. “They will not be necessary.”

The doctor stopped short and looked up. Hope suddenly lightened his heavy jowls. “Really, Officer? On whose authority?”

“There is only one who could give such a command,” said Mather with a touch of reproof. “The Lord Protector himself will inform
the medical team shortly.”

It seemed to Chance that the doctor went on his way with a positive spring in his step.

Two more physicians in long black tailcoats came out through a chamber door as they reached the top. They were shielding their
heads, wisely it seemed, since a shoe came flying out after them and almost hit Mather in the face. The guards either side
of the door stepped aside with the alacrity of long practice.

Chance bent and picked the shoe up. It was a blue silk shoe, elegant but uncommonly large for a female. He followed Mather
in and, as the door was locked behind them, presented it to the girl crouching on the floor. “Your shoe, Miss.”

“Who on earth are you?” She glared up at him from the middle of a ring of assorted objects—more shoes, books, belts, bottles—her
ammunition, he thought. The room was bordered with broken plates, though he noticed she’d sensibly eaten her luncheon off
them before she began throwing. “Are they sending boys to interrogate me now?”

Mather looked with disapproval at the disorder on the floor and sidestepped it fastidiously. “This is my bodyguard, Corporal
Chance, Miss Leah. I’ve not brought him before.”

Leah gave a hollow laugh. “An excellent precaution to bring him today, then, Mather. I’ve a feeling you’re going to need him.”

Mather did not look in the least disconcerted. “I think not.
I have some good news for you, Miss Leah. Your doctors are being dismissed. You’ll suffer daily examinations no longer.”

Leah listened, then gave a suspicious frown. The frown, daunting though it was, made no difference to her beauty, Chance thought.
She was, in fact, the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, with pearly translucent skin and long fair hair that gleamed silver
in the candlelight. Her bare feet were large, it was true, but delicate-boned and somehow of a piece with the rest of her,
for when she stood up she was exceedingly tall in her blue silk dress, as tall, almost, as Mather.

“Sit by the fire, Mather, and tell me more about this change of heart” she said drily, pulling a fringed shawl around her
shoulders.

“If you will sit also, Miss.”

They both sat down, Leah curling herself gracefully into an armchair of quilted silk, Mather stiff-backed and stiff-faced
in another.

The chamber was sparely but luxuriously furnished, as was fitting for the Protector’s niece. It did not resemble a prison
cell, but that was what it was. Chance, hovering awkwardly around the perimeter of their conversation, noticed bars on the
window between the heavy velvet drapes. Outside the locked door of the chamber he could hear the guards stamp and shuffle
in the cold.

“So, what’s brought this about?” said Leah. “Dismissing the medical team! What’s my uncle scheming now?”

“Really, Miss Leah. I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Oh, I am.” She shot out her words like bullets. “I’m fed to the teeth with those fools, forever pestering me with their idiot
questions.” She put on a high, persnickety voice: “’If you put the swanskin around your shoulders now, what do you think would
happen?’… ‘What did you eat during your time as a swan—weeds, or insects, or little fish?’… ‘Did you make a nest somewhere
in the pleasure parks?’” She glared at Mather, but he didn’t flinch.