‘That’s probably what you’re supposed to think. So keep our little secret to yourself for now, all right?’
Meggie agreed, although she didn’t really understand. What did it matter who the old woman was? It all came to the same thing. This time there was no Dustfinger to open the door in the night. It had all been for nothing – as if they had never run away at all. She went over to the locked door and pressed her hands against it. ‘He’ll come,’ she whispered. ‘Mo will come, and then they’ll lock us up here for ever and ever.’
Fenoglio got up and went over to her. ‘There, there!’ he said, putting his arms round her and letting her bury her face in his jacket. It was made of rough fabric and smelled of pipe tobacco. ‘I’ll think of something!’ he whispered to Meggie. ‘After all, I invented these villains. It’ll be an odd thing if I can’t get rid of them. Your father had an idea, but …’
Meggie raised her face, wet with tears, and looked at him hopefully, but the old man shook his head. ‘Later. Now, tell me what makes Capricorn so interested in your father. Is it something to do with the way he reads aloud?’
Meggie nodded and wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘He wants Mo to read aloud to him here, to bring someone out of a book, an old friend.’
Fenoglio gave her a handkerchief. A few crumbs of tobacco fell from it when she blew her nose. ‘A friend? Capricorn has no friends.’ The old man frowned. Then Meggie felt him suddenly take a deep breath.
‘Who is it?’ she asked, but Fenoglio just mopped a tear off her cheek.
‘Someone I hope you’ll never meet except between the covers of a book,’ he said evasively. Then he turned and began pacing up and down. ‘Capricorn will be back soon,’ he added. ‘I must think how best to confront him.’
But Capricorn did not come. Darkness fell outside, and still no one had fetched them from their prison. They weren’t even brought anything to eat. It grew cold when the night air came in through the hole in the wall, and they huddled side by side on the hard floor to keep warm.
‘Is Basta still very superstitious?’ Fenoglio asked at some time in the night.
‘Yes, very,’ replied Meggie. ‘Dustfinger likes winding him up about it.’
‘Good,’ murmured Fenoglio. But he would say no more.
33
Capricorn’s Maid
As I never saw my father or my mother … my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.
Charles Dickens,
Great Expectations
Dustfinger set out when the night could grow no darker. The sky was overcast, with not a single star shining. Only the moon showed occasionally between the clouds, as thin as a slice of lemon.
Dustfinger was glad of such darkness, but the boy jumped whenever a twig brushed his face.
‘For heaven’s sake, I should have left you with the marten after all!’ Dustfinger snapped as Farid clutched his arm in fright yet again. ‘You’ll give us away yet with your teeth chattering like that. Look ahead of you. That’s what ought to scare you – guns, not ghosts.’
Before them, only a little way off now, lay Capricorn’s village. The new floodlights poured light as bright as day over the grey houses.
‘And they say that this electricity of theirs is a blessing!’ whispered Dustfinger as they skirted the car park. A bored-looking guard was strolling round among the parked vehicles. Yawning, he leaned against the truck in which Cockerell had brought the goats back that afternoon, and put on a pair of earphones.
‘Excellent! An army could march up now and he wouldn’t hear it!’ muttered Dustfinger. ‘If Basta were here he’d discipline the man for that – shut him up in Capricorn’s cowsheds for three days with nothing to eat.’
‘Why don’t we go over the rooftops?’ All the fear had gone from Farid’s face. The guard with his shotgun didn’t alarm the boy half as much as his imaginary ghosts. Dustfinger could only shake his head over such foolishness. But the rooftop idea wasn’t stupid. A vine that hadn’t been pruned for years grew up one of the houses beside the car park. As soon as the guard wandered over to the other side of the area, swaying in time to the music that was filling his ears, Dustfinger clambered up its woody branches. The boy climbed even better than he did, and proudly offered him a hand once he was up on the roof. They moved on stealthily like stray cats, past chimneys, aerials and Capricorn’s floodlights, which were angled downwards and left everything behind them in the cover of darkness. Once, a shingle came loose under Dustfinger’s boots, but he managed to catch it just in time, before the terracotta tile could fall and break in the street below.
When they reached the square where the church and Capricorn’s house stood they let themselves down from a gutter. For a few breathless moments Dustfinger ducked behind a stack of empty fruit crates, looking out for guards. Both the square itself and the narrow alley to one side of Capricorn’s house were bathed in light. A black cat was sitting on the edge of the well outside the church. Basta’s heart would probably have missed a beat at the sight of it, but Dustfinger was much more concerned about the guards outside Capricorn’s house. Two of them were lounging by the entrance. It was one of these, a small, sturdy man, who had found Dustfinger four years ago in a town up in the north, just as he was about to give his last show. He and two companions had dragged the fire-eater back here, where Capricorn had, in his own characteristic way, questioned him about Silvertongue and the book.
The two guards were arguing, and as they were so absorbed Dustfinger plucked up his courage, took a few rapid steps, and disappeared down the alley beside Capricorn’s house. Farid followed him, as soundless as his own shadow come to life.
Capricorn’s house was a large, bulky building which might once have been the village hall, a disused monastery or a school. All the windows were dark, and there were no other guards to be seen in the alley. But Dustfinger remained watchful. He knew the guards liked to lurk in dark doorways, invisible as ravens at night in their black suits. Indeed, Dustfinger knew almost everything about Capricorn’s village. He had walked these streets often enough since Capricorn brought him here to look for Silvertongue and the book. Whenever he felt the sharp pangs of homesickness he had come back here to his old enemies, where he didn’t feel quite so out of place. Even his fear of Basta’s knife couldn’t keep him away.
Dustfinger picked up a flat stone, beckoned Farid to his side, and threw the stone down the alley. Nothing moved. As he had hoped, the guard was doing his rounds. Dustfinger hurried to the high wall behind which Capricorn’s garden lay: vegetable beds, fruit trees and herbs, protected by the wall from the cold wind that sometimes blew from the nearby mountains. Dustfinger had often entertained the maids as they hoed the beds. There were no floodlights in the garden, no guards either – who’d steal vegetables? – and only a door with a grating over it, a door that was locked at night, that led from the yard into the house. The dog kennels lay beyond the wall too, but when Dustfinger swung himself up and over they were empty. The dogs had not come back from the hills. They’d shown more sense than Dustfinger expected, and Basta obviously hadn’t got new dogs yet. Stupid of him. Stupid Basta.
Dustfinger signalled to the boy to follow him, and stole past the carefully tended beds until he had reached the back door with the grating. The boy looked at him questioningly when he saw the solid bars, but Dustfinger just laid a finger to his lips and looked up at one of the windows on the second floor. The shutters, black as night, were open. Dustfinger mewed in so lifelike a fashion that several cats answered, but nothing moved behind the window. Dustfinger cursed under his breath, listened to the sounds of the night for a moment, then imitated the shrill cry of a bird of prey. Farid jumped and pressed close to the wall of the house. This time, something did move behind the upstairs window. A woman leaned out of it. When Dustfinger waved to her she waved back – and then quickly disappeared.
‘Don’t look like that!’ whispered Dustfinger, seeing Farid’s anxious glance. ‘We can trust her. Quite a few of the women aren’t too fond of Capricorn and his men – many of them didn’t even come here of their own free will. But they’re all afraid of him: afraid they’ll lose their job, afraid he’ll burn the roofs over the heads of their families if they talk about what goes on here, or perhaps send Basta to call on them with his knife. Resa doesn’t have to worry about that kind of thing. She has no family.’ Not any more, he added to himself silently.
The door behind the grating opened, and Resa’s anxious face appeared behind the bars. It looked pale beneath her dark blonde hair.
‘How are you?’ Dustfinger went over to the grating and put his hand through the bars. Smiling, Resa pressed it, and nodded at the boy.
‘This is Farid.’ Dustfinger lowered his voice. ‘You could say he’s adopted me. But you can trust him. He doesn’t care for Capricorn any more than we do.’
Resa nodded, looked at him reproachfully and shook her head.
‘Yes, I know it wasn’t sensible to come back. You heard what happened?’ Dustfinger couldn’t prevent something like pride creeping into his voice. ‘They thought I’d put up with anything, but they were wrong. There’s still one copy of the book left, and I’m going to get my hands on it. Don’t look at me like that. Do you know where Capricorn keeps it?’
Resa shook her head. There was a rustling behind them and Dustfinger spun round, but it was only a mouse scurrying over the quiet yard. Resa took a pencil and a piece of paper out of her dressing-gown pocket. She wrote slowly and neatly, knowing that Dustfinger found it easier to read capital letters. She had taught him to read and write so that they could communicate with one another.
As usual, it took some time for the letters to make sense to Dustfinger. He felt a fresh sense of pride every time those spindly symbols finally fitted together into words and he could prise their secret out of them. ‘I’ll look around,’ he read softly. ‘Good. But be careful. I don’t want you risking your pretty neck.’ He bent over the paper again. ‘What do you mean, The Magpie has Basta’s keys now?’
He gave her the note back. Farid watched Resa writing, as spellbound as if he were watching someone work magic. ‘I think you’ll have to teach him too!’ Dustfinger whispered through the bars. ‘See how he’s staring at you?’
Resa looked up and smiled at Farid. Awkwardly, he looked away. Resa passed her finger round her face.
‘You think he’s a nice boy?’ Dustfinger twisted his mouth in a teasing smile, while Farid felt so embarrassed he didn’t know where to look. ‘And what about me? Beautiful as the moon, am I? Hmm, what am I to make of that as a compliment? You mean I have almost as many craters?’
Resa pressed her hand over her lips. It was easy to amuse her; she laughed like a young girl. That was the only time you could hear her voice.
Shots rang out in the night. Resa clung to the bars, and Farid, terrified, crouched down at the foot of the wall. Dustfinger pulled him to his feet again. ‘It’s nothing!’ he whispered. ‘Just the guards taking pot-shots at cats. They always do that when they’re bored.’
The boy looked at him with disbelief, but Resa went on writing. ‘She took the keys away to punish him,’ Dustfinger read. ‘Basta won’t like that at all. The way he acted with those keys, you’d have thought he was looking after Capricorn’s most treasured possession.’
Resa mimed taking a knife from her belt, looking so grim that Dustfinger almost laughed out loud. He quickly glanced around, but the yard was silent as the grave between its high walls. ‘Oh yes, I can well imagine that Basta’s furious,’ he whispered. ‘In that mood he’ll do anything to please Capricorn – slit throats, gash faces open, anything.’
Resa reached for the paper again, and once more it took him a painfully long time to decipher her clear, neat writing. ‘Oh, so you’ve heard about Silvertongue. You want to know who he is? Well, but for me he’d still be locked up in Capricorn’s sheds. What else? Ask Farid. Silvertongue plucked the boy out of his own story, too, like a ripe apple. Luckily, he didn’t bring out any of the ghouls the boy keeps carrying on about. Yes, he reads aloud very well indeed, much better than Darius. As you can see, Farid doesn’t limp, his face probably always looked the way it does now, and he still has his voice too – even if you might not think so at the moment.’
Farid cast him a angry glance.
‘What does Silvertongue look like? Well, I can at least tell you that Basta hasn’t decorated his face yet.’
A shutter creaked above them. Dustfinger pressed close to the grating. Only the wind, he thought, nothing but the wind. Farid was staring at him, eyes wide with fear. No doubt the creaking sounded to him like a demon, but the figure who leaned out of the window above them was a creature of flesh and blood: Mortola, or the Magpie as she was secretly nicknamed. She was in charge of all the maids, and nothing was safe from the Magpie’s eyes and ears, not even the secrets the women whispered to each other in their bedrooms at night. Even Capricorn’s strongboxes had better accommodation than his maidservants. They all slept in his house, four to a room, crammed in like sardines (except for those who had struck up a relationship with one of his men and moved to another house).
The Magpie leaned over the windowsill and breathed in the cool night air. She stayed there for what seemed an endless time, so long that Dustfinger could happily have wrung her neck, but finally she appeared to have filled every inch of her body with fresh air and closed the window.
‘I must go, but I’ll be back tomorrow evening. Maybe you’ll have found out something about the book by then.’ Dustfinger squeezed Resa’s hand. Her fingers were rough from laundry work and cleaning. ‘I know I’ve said it before, but all the same – be careful, and keep away from Basta.’ Resa shrugged her shoulders. How else could she respond to such unnecessary advice? Almost all the women in the village kept away from Basta, but he didn’t keep away from them.
Dustfinger waited outside the grating until Resa was back in her room. She signalled to him through the window with a candle.
The guard in the car park still had his earphones on. Deep in his own thoughts, he was dancing among the cars, shotgun in his outstretched arms as if he were dancing with a girl. By the time he finally looked their way, the night had already swallowed up Dustfinger and Farid.
They met no one on the way back to their hiding-place, only a fox who slunk away with hunger in his eyes. Gwin was eating a bird inside the walls of the burnt-out cottage. Its feathers were shadows in the darkness.
‘Has she always been mute?’ asked the boy as Dustfinger lay down under the trees to sleep.
‘As long as I’ve known her,’ replied Dustfinger, turning his back to the boy. Farid lay down beside him. He had made this his habit from the first, and however often Dustfinger moved away the boy was always close beside him when he woke up.
‘The photograph in your rucksack,’ he said. ‘It is her.’
‘So?’
The boy did not reply.
‘If you’ve taken a fancy to her,’ Dustfinger mocked him, ‘forget it. She’s one of Capricorn’s favourite maids. She’s even allowed to take his breakfast and help him get dressed.’
‘How long has she been with him?’
‘Five years,’ said Dustfinger. ‘And in all that time Capricorn has never once let her leave the village. She can’t even go out of the house very often. She ran away twice, but she never got far. One of those times a snake bit her. She never told me how Capricorn punished her, but I know she never tried to run away again.’
There was a rustling behind them. Farid jumped, but it was only Gwin. The marten was licking his muzzle as he leaped and landed on the boy’s stomach. Laughing, Farid plucked a feather out of his fur. Gwin snuffled busily around the boy’s chin and nose, as if he had missed him, and then he disappeared into the night again.
‘He really is a nice marten!’ whispered Farid.
‘No, he’s not,’ said Dustfinger, pulling his thin blanket up to his chin. ‘He probably likes you because you smell like a girl.’
Farid’s only answer was a long silence.
‘She looks like her,’ he said at last, just as Dustfinger was dropping off to sleep. ‘Silvertongue’s daughter, I mean. She has the same mouth and the same eyes, and she laughs in the same way.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Dustfinger. ‘There’s not the slightest resemblance. They both have blue eyes, that’s all. It’s not unusual here. Hurry up and go to sleep.’
The boy obeyed. He wrapped himself in the sweater that Dustfinger had given him and turned his back to his companion. Soon he was breathing as peacefully as a baby. But Dustfinger lay awake all night, staring at the stars.
34
Capricorn’s Secrets
‘If I were to be made a knight,’ said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, ‘I should … pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.’
‘That would be extremely presumptuous of you,’ said Merlin, ‘and you would be conquered, and you would suffer for it.’
T.H. White,
The Sword in the Stone
Capricorn received Meggie and Fenoglio in the church. About a dozen of his men were with him. He was sitting in the new black leather armchair they had installed under Mortola’s supervision, and this time, for once, his suit was not red but pale yellow, like the morning daylight filtering in through the windows. He had them brought to him early, while the mist still hung above the hills, with the sun swimming in it like a ball floating in murky water.
‘By all the letters of the alphabet!’ whispered Fenoglio as he and Meggie walked down the nave of the church with Basta close behind them. ‘He really does look exactly the way I imagined him. “Colourless as a glass of milk.” I think that’s how I put it.’
He began walking faster, as if he couldn’t wait to see his creation at close quarters. Meggie could hardly keep up with him, and Basta held him back before he had reached the steps. ‘Here, what’s the idea?’ he hissed. ‘Not so fast – and bow, understand?’
Fenoglio merely glanced scornfully at him and remained perfectly upright. Basta raised his hand, but when Capricorn almost imperceptibly shook his head he lowered it again like a rebuked child. Mortola was standing beside Capricorn’s chair, her arms folded like wings behind her back.
‘You know, Basta, I still wonder what you were thinking of not to bring her father too!’ said Capricorn, letting his gaze wander from Meggie to Fenoglio’s turtle-like face.
‘He wasn’t there. I told you.’ Basta sounded injured. ‘Was I supposed to sit about waiting for him like a toad beside a pond? He’ll soon be here of his own accord! We all know how besotted he is with his daughter. I’ll bet my knife he’ll be here by tomorrow at the latest!’
‘Your knife? But you’ve already mislaid your knife once recently.’ The mockery in Mortola’s voice made Basta grind his teeth.