Fly by Night (21 page)

A place in a Stationer school . . . Somehow Mosca’s thoughts were not where she had left them; the idea of school had been so real to her. She had imagined the cool of a slate between her fingers, and had seen herself cutting quills for the younger children. She had even puzzled over how she would stop Saracen eating the inkbottles. Now the school seemed a means to an end, and that end was Lady Tamarind and the Eastern Spire.

Two images flitted before Mosca’s eyes.

Mosca saw a woman stepping out of a white carriage, lifting her hem slightly to protect it from contact with the street. Two footmen dusted the cobbles with swans-down brushes so that they could not stain her satin shoes. She swept through a door into a ballroom where the walls were hung with the hides of white tigers. She danced, and, from mahogany tables, stuffed ermine stoats watched her with pearls instead of eyes. She drank from a crystal glass. She was too beautiful to smile or flush, and her eyes were black, black as pepper. They were Mosca’s eyes.

Then Mosca saw the darkened hold of the
Mettlesome Maid
. Saracen was scrambling unsteadily over a heap of wooden and leaden Beloved, his leathery feet sliding on ridged faces and graven wings. He gave little chuckling noises in his throat, but his neck drooped with weariness and hunger. He nibbled at the pointed nose of the Kind Lady of Fools, and then shook his head disappointedly. Soon, when he was weaker, the sailors would pull up the planks and come after him with spades and boathooks . . .

‘Well?’ Clent was waiting with a look of satisfaction on his face. ‘Have you recovered your senses and made your choice?’

She had.

‘I Want My Chirfugging Goose Back!’

‘Well, you can’t have it!’ Clent snapped, scarlet-faced.

‘Then you’re a mouldy-mouthed liar an’ a cheat an’ I’m not doing nuffin’ for you no more!’ screamed Mosca. Before she had finished the sentence, Clent had stormed from the room, slamming the door.

His boots made a very satisfying thud as they hit the wall. All Mosca’s strength was not enough to tear the sleeves of his coat from the body, so she settled for stamping his new wig flat until it resembled a terrier that had fallen foul of a dustcart-wheel.

As she was standing, panting, her boots dusted with flour from Clent’s wig, she suddenly saw with absolute clarity what it was that she needed to do. If she could squeeze no reward from Clent and the Stationers, she could think of only one person who might give her money for Saracen’s ransom, and that was Lady Tamarind.

Clent had left paper, quill and inkbottle in the window seat. Snatching them up, she scratched out a quick letter.

She rolled the letter into a narrow pipe, tucked it intoher apron pocket, and hurried from the marriage house with her heart beating.

‘’Scuse me.’ She tugged at the sleeve of a woman with a basket of gillyflowers. ‘Can you tell me the way to the Plumery?’

The woman’s smile faded. She was of middle age, with a broad, cheerful face that sun and hard work had polished and cracked like wood. She gazed sadly at Mosca as if she had seen a ghost of a dead daughter standing behind her.

‘Of course, blossom.’ She whispered directions gently, as if she was talking to an invalid, and Mosca left her, feeling more ill and uncertain than before. As she walked, the streets dwindled into alleys, the houses became dwarfish, and then she took a turning into an open square and stopped dead.

Even before Mosca saw the shrines of Goodman Postrophe at every corner she sensed something deathly in the square’s stillness. No sheep or goats cropped the central green. Among the grass, their quills planted deep into the earth, nestled thousands of feathers – pigeon, magpie, dove, pheasant, rook. Most were broken-backed from the wind, and ragged from rain. Mosca felt superstitious fear climbing her spine on spider-feet.

Mosca had never seen a plumery before. She remembered a pedlar talking about the Plumery in the Capital:

. . .
didn
’
t have room to do it proper
,
you see
,
not inside the city walls
. ’
Sides
,
most of the time the bodies were shovelled into the same great pits outside the city bounds
,
and even after the Birdcatchers fell
,
nobody had the stomach to go pickin
’
through the bones all jumbled together and working out what was whose
. . .

There would be a similar desolate memorial in every city in the Realm. Each of those feathers represented a grave, a man or woman or child killed by the Birdcatchers. This she had already known, but she had not expected to feel as if she were staring into the city’s open wound. Mosca could not guess how many thousands of feathers twitched in the early breeze. There were too many to think about safely, and she decided not to care whether the tiniest downy feathers were children.

She realized that she was not alone. People moved around the green in ones and twos, talking in church whispers or bowing their heads in silence. Some knelt between the feather plots, replacing broken plumes with fresh. The Praymaster chaplains from the cathedral would renew all the feathers on St Berrible’s day, but clearly some of the departed had families who liked to keep their graves in fine feather.

On a little pedestal sat a statue of Goodman Claspkin, He Who Carries Our Words to Departed Kin, one hand extended as if to cup the chin of a beloved child. Her knees weak with cliff-edge shakiness, Mosca knelt and reached a trembling hand towards the clump of pheasant feathers at his feet, as if she too had come to renew the plumes on a loved-one’s grave.

She tugged at a feather. It slid out, to show a tube of horn fastened to the feather’s stem. Struggling against the urge to look around, she pulled her letter out of her pocket, slid it into the tube, and pushed feather and tube back into the earth. It was done. She had broken the Stationers’ oaths of secrecy, and if they ever found out, they would put her in a printing press and crank it down until she popped like a chestnut . . .

She hurried back to the marriage house, thinking that everybody was wearing gloves and was watching her strangely. She opened the door of the room she shared with Clent, and Clent himself turned to stare at her, a queer and unfocused expression on his face.

‘What?’ Her hands twitched. Had he seen the earth on her knees? Did he suspect her? How could he suspect her? If he did, Mosca just wanted him to say so. ‘What?’

‘Perhaps . . .’ Clent held up a finger, and peered at a point over Mosca’s head, trying to stare his thoughts into clarity. ‘Perhaps if you truly wish it we will retrieve this winged warzone you call a goose. But.’ He waved his finger. ‘But. The Goose Must Earn His Keep. If it becomes necessary, he must be considered a . . . an Agent of the Stationers’ Company, and committed to their cause.’

Mosca stared at him, uncertain whether to feel relieved or suspicious. Clent seemed to have gone slightly mad, but mad in her favour. Lady Tamarind might not pay her for a day or two – why not take advantage of Clent’s change of heart?

‘S’pose that’d be all right,’ she agreed warily.

‘Splendid. Make my wig and coat ready, and we shall brave Mr Partridge after breakfast.’

The wig!

Clent strode down to order breakfast.

A few minutes later, Mosca was knocking at the Cakes’ door with a muffled, rapid urgency. There was a tiny noise within that she took to be a call to enter. She had flung open the door and taken two steps into the room before she realized it had been nothing of the sort. The Cakes was on her knees by her bed, a piece of embroidered cambric gripped in both hands and her mouth making a loose, rubbery shape as if she were about to cry.

Apologies did not come naturally to Mosca, so she did not make one. Instead she ruefully held up the wig by way of explanation.

‘It’s Mr Clent’s . . . I . . . stepped on it.’

The Cakes sniffed, and her face sharpened into its usual business-like expression.

‘Looks like most of the Mandelion militia stepped on it an’ all.’ She stood up, biting in both her lips, and walked over, taking the wig from Mosca’s hand. ‘Here, I got a brush for this kind of thing. We rent out wigs to grooms as can’t afford it and you should see the state we get some of ’em back in . . .’

Mosca watched as the other girl made little fussy, twitching gestures with the brush, which somehow seemed to tease curls out of their tangle, so that they sprang back into their intended shapes.

‘So . . . Bockerby beats you a lot, then?’ As far as Mosca was concerned, crying alone meant one thing.

‘What? Oh no, almost never . . . it’s just weddings. I always cry at weddings.’

Mosca stared.

‘What – at all of ’em? But you live in a marriage house! No wonder you’re so thin, you must be all dried up inside with squeezin’ out tears.’

‘I just like weddings,’ the Cakes said sadly. ‘I like watching folks write their names in the register – the ones that can write. I like giving ’em the Cakes. I like the happy ones, an’ the frightened ones, an’ even the ones in their altitudes with gin. I like watching ’em in their best bits of ribbon and their grandfather’s smartest waistcoats. I like throwin’ the honesty pods over ’em for good luck. I guess I just . . . keep hoping some of it’ll rub off on me, somehow.’

The hand holding the brush drooped miserably. Clearly the Cakes had to be cheered up, or the wig would never be salvaged.

‘Well, it might rub off. You’re not ugly or anything. You’re just sort of pointy.’ Mosca had a feeling that these encouraging words had sounded better in her head, but as it happened the Cakes was too despondent to take offence.

‘Doesn’t make any difference. No one’s going to want me with my Base Beginnings.’ The Cakes gave Mosca a narrow glance, then sighed. ‘Oh well, someone’ll tell you, I guess. My father meant to marry my mother, but somethin’ put it out of his mind and he went to sea instead, and when he came back my mother was dead and I was ten.’

‘Didn’t he do nothin’ for you?’

‘Course,’ the Cakes answered curtly, then gave Mosca another appraising glance. ‘Took me in, didn’t he? Gave me a position. Can’t say fairer than that.’

‘Bockerby’s your father?’

‘Course. An’ he’s kind when we’re alone, treats me right and everything. I think he’s sorry he didn’t marry and can’t call me his daughter. It’s funny really – we write out lots of marriage licences for people, and sometimes if they ask us to, we write down the dates a bit earlier than they should be, so children look like they were born proper and legal after the wedding. But it’s too late to do that for me.’

The Cakes pushed up her fists inside the wig and turned it about, inspecting it critically. ‘That’ll do, I think.’

By the time Clent returned to his rooms, Mosca was waiting for him and polishing his boots. Her expression of unaccustomed innocence seemed to alarm him a little, but he passed no comment, and they walked down to breakfast without further argument.

He was unusually quiet throughout breakfast. Mosca decided that his head was probably full of Schemes, and that if he wished to share them with her, sooner or later he would. Her own head was full of Saracen and the thought of seeing him again.

From Bockerby they learned that most barges and narrowboats could be found moored on the wharf near the Dragmen’s Arches, and after breakfast they set off for the wharf.

The Dragmen’s Arches had been cut into the old fortified wall so goods could be unloaded from boats and brought into the city. Mosca and Clent slithered down one of the brick ramps that descended through the arches, covered with wooden slats so barrels could be rolled up more easily.

‘There she lies.’ Mosca tugged Clent’s sleeve and pointed.

The
Mettlesome Maid
had been laid up at the end of the quay, at a slight distance from the other barges, as if, despite her name, she had become timorous or coy. One of her crewmen squatted on deck, twisting and plaiting some narrow lengths of line, the cotton startlingly white against his tanned fingers.

‘Indeed. Mosca – I fear it is often incumbent upon a gentleman to prevent injury to the feelings of others, regardless of his own sentiments. At this moment I sense that Mr Partridge must be quite mortified at the way he spoke of me to you. If I were to approach the boat, and he were already in a state of mental turmoil, the sight of me might cause him considerable distress, and he might . . .’

‘. . . rip your heart out an’ spike it on a boathook an’ roast it an’ eat it an’ throw the bits he didn’t like to the seagulls . . .’