Fly by Night

  ‘Then I shall write the message – if you will excuse us a few minutes, good sir.’

  The constable nodded, affable once more, and Mosca followed Clent back to their room.

  ‘Lady Tamarind, Lady Tamarind,’ Clent murmured to himself. ‘It is a thought, a chance at least. I cannot stay here, waiting for the Locksmiths’ men to trace me. If we can only find sanctuary in the Eastern Spire before the storm breaks . . .’

  Mosca fetched paper, ink, pen and sealing wax and stood behind Clent while he wrote.

  ‘Your most esteemed and radiant Ladyship,

  I enclose the first stanzas of your epic, and hope against hope that their humble worth summons your smile for at least an instant, if only in magnanimous pity for my efforts and struggles of the soul.

  My lady, I must trespass further upon your good will. The payment you have so generously offered I do not claim, but rather ask that you may find occupation and accommodation within the Eastern Spire for myself and my secretary. Our situation has grown precarious, and my lodgings ill-suited to one blessed with your patronage.

  In the name of gratitude I implore you to consent, knowing as you do how this fickle world can knock both high and low on to their axles, and leave them reliant on the assistance of strangers.

  Yours in awe and admiration,

  Your servant Eponymous Clent

  Mosca watched as the hot wax sealed the letter, her heart beating in her ears. As soon as the letter was in her hand she made for the door, blowing on the wax to cool it.

  She stepped into a world washed clean, full of newly woken smells. A nervous wind of stammering gusts broke the clouds like bread. The rain had varnished every street sign. Everything promised newness.

  Mosca ran. She ran to outpace her ill luck. She had to reach the spire before Clent had time to guess at the treachery in her head. If she could only use the letter to get inside the Honeycomb Courts! Once there, by hook or by crook she would find a way to speak with Lady Tamarind. She would tell the noblewoman the truth about the events at the Grey Mastiff, and beg to be hidden in the Eastern Spire, safe from the Locksmiths . . . and from Eponymous Clent. If only she dared tell Lady Tamarind about the murder of Partridge! But Mosca herself was steeped too deep in that.

  The slouching shops of the riverside yielded to square-shouldered houses with gleaming porticoes. Tall windows arched as if raising their eyebrows to see Mosca run past.

  She reached the edge of a broad and busy thoroughfare. On the far side, a row of tall, iron railings held off the curious crowds. The wrought-iron gates were decorated with the outlines of two young women who seemed to be holding hands at the place where the bolt fastened the gates. The Eastern Spire rose from a broad, square sandstone building, braced with columns and teetering with statuary.

  When she approached and tried to speak to one of the guards at the gate, he nodded her in the direction of the tradesmen’s gate.

  The tradesmen’s gate merited only two footmen, who saw no reason to stop playing cards as Mosca approached.

  ‘Letter for Lady Tamarind from Mr Eponymous Clent. I was told to come in and wait. Lady Tamarind’ll want to see me.’

  One of the footmen took the letter and used it to scratch his ear as he looked Mosca up and down.

  ‘Better follow me, then.’

  A door painted with the heraldry of the Twin Queens opened into a corridor of tapestries, musty from too many damp winters. Another door opened, and there was a clean rush of cold air as they stepped out into a wide rectangular courtyard, surrounded by a sheltered colonnade.

  ‘Wait here. Don’t wander off.’ The footman left Mosca in a darkened archway, and hurried off with the letter.

  The courtyard was paved with great, six-sided tiles, glazed in creams and shades of caramel. Across it extravagant figures lolled in sedans, or strolled idly like sun-struck drones over a giant honeycomb. Along the darkened colonnade, footmen paced briskly in cloth-soled shoes, and serving girls tripped with baskets of dry lavender, beating them with pestles to fill the air with its scent.

  Mosca stood nervously cleaning out the dark crescents from under her fingernails and tucking stray hairs under her mob cap. Eventually one of the lavender girls noticed her and approached. She was about fifteen, Mosca guessed. She had a plump prettiness, a narrow waist, and her flouncing frock looked very becoming on her. Her nose turned up enchantingly, and from time to time she would smile down through her lashes and admire it.

  ‘Were you looking for the servants’ quarters?’ she asked as she drew level with Mosca.

  ‘No, no, I’m here to see Lady Tamarind. She’s going to give me a job.’ Lady Tamarind would see her, they had an understanding, a connection, Lady Tamarind would see her.

  ‘So what are you meant to be, then?’

  ‘I’m a secretary,’ Mosca announced with angry uncertainty.

  ‘You don’t look like one. Secretaries are men.’

  ‘I’m different – I’m secretary to a poet.’ Mosca was almost feverish with nerves. ‘I got a practical outlook an’ a concise way of speaking. We’re wordsmiths of no common order.’

  The chambermaid looked her up and down.

  ‘Your bonnet’s on funny.’

  ‘It’s . . . it’s fashion!’ Mosca flashed back defensively.

  ‘It’s not. I work in the chambers of Her Ladyship, and have the handling of her wardrobe. There’s nothing I don’t know about fashion – I see her gowns before everyone in the town copies them. Sometimes –’ she bent forward confidentially – ‘sometimes some of the ladies pay me to tell them how she will be wearing her kerchief tucked to the next party, or whether she’ll be wearing a mantua gown. And when she gives me her cast-offs, the ladies will pay next to anything you like for them.’

  ‘She gives you her clothes – just gives ’em?’ When I work for Lady Tamarind she’ll give me dresses, ones I can cut down to my size . . .

  ‘Lots of them, yes. Good clothes too, but Her Ladyship cannot abide wearing anything with a smudge or a spot on it, even if it’s as small as a pinhead. Sometimes I get her damaged stoats as well.’

  Mosca must have looked impressed, since the chambermaid’s haughty expression thawed a little.

  ‘Here, you can’t see anyone like that.’ With a superior air, the maid pulled Mosca’s bonnet ribbons loose, looped them across through a set of hooks under the crown, doubled them back and tied a bow beneath Mosca’s chin. ‘There. That’s fashion. Now you won’t look a disgrace when you meet the housekeeper to give her your references.’

  ‘I’m not here to meet the housekeeper! It’s got to be Lady Tamarind!’

  ‘She won’t see you. She won’t see anyone today.’ The lavender maid gaped at Mosca’s ignorance. ‘Today’s the first day of the Assizes. She’s getting ready right now to walk with the Duke to the Courthouse for the Grand Opening.’

  The lavender girl walked away, while the ground beneath Mosca became a raft and bobbed on a hidden sea.

  The Assizes. Mosca had forgotten about it. The chiaroscuro image of Clent stooped over the body of Partridge had driven everything else from her mind. She had forgotten the pale-eyed Locksmiths, nursing vengeful thoughts in their prison cells. She had forgotten the guild war, and the disaster stalking Mandelion.

  Lady Tamarind would not see her. The footman would return and show her back to the gate. She would have to return to the marriage house and Eponymous Clent. If she tried to run away now, it would look like guilt, and the constable would send the hue and cry after her for Partridge’s murder. Mosca felt as she had in her dream when the glistening thread had snaked away from her through the black water, taking all hope with it.

  No. If the Lady would not see her, she would find the Lady. Peering out cautiously from her appointed post, she slunk from column to column, scanning the gilded multitude.

  Excited snatches of conversation reached her ears.

  ‘. . . rather a pity to waste such a charming refrain on that miscreant, but all of a
sudden it seems that every song is dedicated to Black Captain Blythe . . .’

  ‘. . . how terrible that the treason trial of the Locksmiths takes place in the second week, when I am promised in Pincaster . . .’ Indeed, here nobody seemed to be interested in the murdered body at Whickerback Point. In the Courts the story of the moment was the arrest of the Locksmiths.

  Suddenly, beside the fountain, Mosca saw Lady Tamarind.

  ‘Your Ladyship!’

  The woman turned. She had bulldog jowls under her white powder. Age creased her neck like an accordion. It was not Lady Tamarind.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Mosca saw the footman who had brought her through the gates hurrying towards her with a look of thunder. She snatched a snuffbox from the hand of a passing notable, and flung the contents in the footman’s face. As she ran, she heard the false Tamarind squawking in outrage at the black spattering her gleaming gown.

  Mosca sprinted through a gilded arch on to a slender lawn where Playing-card Makers were painting portraits of court ladies. And there, adjusting the lily in her elaborate coif, was Lady Tamarind! But no, this Lady Tamarind had a weak and dimpled chin, and she gawped when Mosca grabbed her arm.

  Tamarind after Tamarind bewildered Mosca’s vision as she ran. Every other lady aped the brilliant white of Lady Tamarind’s attire. Every other cheek was painted in imitation of her scar. Mosca wondered if they would be so eager to imitate her if she had lost an eye.

  Ahead of her, a lady was passing through a gate. Her bombazine gown had enormous ‘panniers’, so that her hips stuck out two feet on either side. Crouching behind this prodigious dress, Mosca managed to avoid detection for long enough to slip through the gate; then she pelted away. As near as she could judge from memory, she was heading towards the spire.

  She reached a dead-end courtyard, bordered by a stone lattice wall in which the faces of many Beloved were carved. Through the holes in this wall she could see another courtyard, its hexagonal tiles gleaming with white marble and gold paint.

  ‘Vocado, I must entreat you.’ It was the voice of Lady Tamarind. ‘Let me send for my men.’

  Peering through an aperture, Mosca glimpsed a woman in an immaculate white mantua gown. She had vividly envisaged finding Tamarind dressed as in the coach and in her dream, and for a moment she thought that this was yet another lady imitating Tamarind’s style of dress. The next moment she saw the scar shaped like a snowflake on the woman’s cheek.

  Beside her stood a storybook prince. He seemed taller than any mortal man, aided by the raised heels of his wine-red shoes and the stately proportions of his gold-dusted wig. His floor-length frock coat and waistcoat were patterned with eyes like those on butterflies’ wings. It could only be the Duke.

  ‘Goshawk has escaped,’ Tamarind continued in the same level, urgent voice. ‘He has almost certainly sent for that boat of Locksmith troops waiting upstream. The Watermen have agreed to delay them, but that buys us only a little time. The ship with my troops is some distance down the coast, and the roads to the ocean are slow and overgrown. Even if we send a messenger now, it will take ten days for the ship to reach us. Vocado – we must send for them now.’

  ‘Very well, Tammy. I shall sign the order.’ The Duke’s voice was light and musical, but somehow a little off-key.

  A young man tripped forward and held out a scroll while the Duke signed it. Mosca was just wondering why he looked familiar when two strong arms seized her round the middle.

  ‘Your Ladyship!’ Mosca hooked her fingers into the stone lattice and hung on in a quicksilver rush of madness. ‘Your Ladyship!’ Everything she wanted was beyond the wall.

  The Duke turned to look at Mosca, and her stomach jolted as she met his dead brown eyes. She remembered a fox she had once seen flopping about in a strange sickness. Don’t go too close, it’ll bite yer . . .

  ‘A radical spy,’ he said, in a tone with the same meaningless music to it.

  ‘No.’ The white lady gazed into Mosca’s urgent, contorted face with eyes the colour of mist. ‘Merely an errand girl. She wants to bother me for money. Give her a shilling and throw her out.’

  The young man beside Tamarind raised his gaze to look at Mosca, and his chestnut eyebrows rose in surprise. Although his hair was now brushed and carefully fastened into a pigtail, and though he now wore a smart but simple coat of dark blue wool, Mosca immediately recognized Linden Kohlrabi, the man who had helped her by hiding her under his travelling cloak.

  Mosca’s fingers lost their strength. The footman dragged her from the wall and carried her back the way she had come. She had no spirit to fight. She did not blame Tamarind for the way she had spoken – how could she? Instead, she hated herself with a leaden anguish. Tamarind had been busy with something really important, probably something to do with saving the city from the guild war and the Locksmiths. Mosca had blundered in, shouting like a lunatic in front of the Duke, in spite of Tamarind telling her never to seek her out. Talking to Tamarind had seemed like her only chance, but now she realized she had spoilt everything. Lady Tamarind would never forgive her.

  ‘It’s all right.’ A quiet voice behind her. ‘You don’t have to throttle the girl. She’ll be coming with me.’ Mosca was lowered to her feet, and she reached up a trembling hand to straighten the ribbons the lavender girl had tied so carefully. She did not look into Kohlrabi’s face, but she fell into step with him as he walked back through the gates to the thoroughfare.

  There was a great crowd in front of the Honeycomb Courts and Courthouse, but beyond them the streets were all but empty. As the crowd thinned around them, Mosca stole a glance at Kohlrabi.

  ‘You work for Lady Tamarind.’ Mosca had not intended it to sound like an accusation.

  ‘And you, it would seem, work for Eponymous Clent.’ Kohlrabi’s tone was tired and a little wary.

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘Lady Tamarind told me that I was to see you safely outside the gates, and tell you that she could not be seen speaking to you, but she would arrange an interview with you once the Assizes had run their course. Until then, she says you should continue as before.’

  Mosca’s felt a small surge of hope. She had not been abandoned after all, perhaps. Could she and Clent survive until after the Assizes?

  ‘I do not know what your dealings are,’ Kohlrabi continued, ‘but I know that Her Ladyship seldom does anything without a reason. Why did you come to the Courts, Mosca? Did Eponymous Clent send you?’

  There was a hint of sharpness in his tone, and Mosca gave him a narrow look.

  ‘You don’t like Mr Clent.’

  ‘No. I know too much about him to like him. How much do you know about your employer, Mosca?’

  Mosca nibbled at her fingertips and stared at him mulishly. ‘I’m just working for him right now, that’s all. I don’t know nothing about him, and I don’t look to.’

  ‘Mosca . . .’ Kohlrabi stopped, closed his eyes for a moment, and sighed. ‘You may not believe me, but I am duty bound to warn you – Eponymous Clent is a very dangerous man. I know what I am talking about – I have spent the last month trailing him from post to post, observing the disaster in his wake.’

  Mosca’s eyes widened as a memory stirred. Suddenly her nose was filled once again with the smell of damp, and rot, and dove-droppings, and wind-blown smoke. Suddenly she knew where she had heard Kohlrabi’s name before, and she remembered words spoken by a young voice, a reassuring voice like warm milk . . .

  ‘You were in Chough, talkin’ to the magistrate!’ The words were out before she could stop them.

  ‘Dry Stones and Thistles,’ Kholrabi murmured. ‘I wondered where I had heard your accent before. Chough. How could I be so stupid? Of course – you must be the little girl who burned down the mill.’ Mosca must have looked terrified, because he put out a hand soothingly and gave a slight laugh. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right. I have no thought of handing you over for your most heinous crime. But in the name of the most holy, Mosc
a, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent?’

  Because I’d been hoarding words for years, buying them from pedlars and carving them secretly on to bits of bark so I wouldn’t forget them, and then he turned up using words like ‘epiphany’ and ‘amaranth’. Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn’t since they burned my father’s books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers . . .

  Mosca shrugged.

  ‘He’s got a way with words.’

  ‘You caused quite a sensation, disappearing like that. For a while they thought you had burned to death in the mill, until they found the magistrate’s keys missing and Clent gone. You should go home, you know – I’m sure your family will understand that the fire was an accident. They’ll just be glad to have you home again.’

  Mosca gave a little crow-cough of a laugh.

  ‘You didn’t meet my uncle and aunt, did you?’

  Kohlrabi studied Mosca’s face.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ He didn’t ask her any more about her family.

  They had come to a halt at the edge of a square in which a gibbet dripped sullenly and a set of scaffolds swayed their ropes in the breeze, a patient motion like the swing of a cat’s tail as it waits by a mousehole.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mosca? You look ill. Come, the wind is chill, and we should get indoors soon anyway, before the Clamouring Hour.’

  As they approached, the landlady of the nearest alehouse had fastened her shutters and was closing the door, but she took pity on them and let them slip inside before she barred it closed.

  There was very little conversation in the alehouse, partly because all the patrons had pushed little wads of linen or leather into their ears.

  From some distant bell came a series of rapid chimes, not unlike someone sounding a dinner gong.