With one meaty paw, Tantamount O'Bow lifted the twenty-pound bain-marie off the carvery hearth, emptied its scalding contents over one of the yeomen, and then swung it like a tennis racket at the other, who took its cast-bottom full in the face and chest, and cleared three tables and a spitted calf. Then, for good measure, O'Bow thumped the pan down twice on the head of the whimpering, blistered man at his feet. The bain-marie was not quite the same shape when he returned it to the hearth.
There was a spontaneous round of applause, and the regulars emerged from under the tables. They'd seen the same sort of show a hundred times before, but it was always a good idea to clap. There was such a thing as escalation.
There was a whip-round, and congratulatory drinks were bought for O'Bow. They covered a table top. O'Bow was just getting into his stride and dealing with them when a tall, slender man entered the tavern and approached him directly.
"Dung Tongue-Fork," nodded O'Bow, pledging the newcomer with a raised cannikin.
"De Tongfort," corrected the incomer, eyeing suspiciously the two astonishingly broken men being stretchered out of the Rouncey Mare. "How goes it with you, my friend?"
"Fair to mandolin, and please you," replied the humanoid leviathan with a twitch. "Why comes you to the Rouncey this eve, my lesbian friend?"
"Thespian," said de Tongfort, sitting down opposite O'Bow. "I have employment for you, but I'd rather not discuss it in such populated environs."
"There bain't be nothing wrong with these envy irons," replied O'Bow, mid-quaff. "They won't be a-listening to the likes of us. We're bein' dusk Crete." As if to prove his point, O'Bow looked up and twitched a glance at the tavern around them. The tavern quickly found other things to look at.
De Tongfort leaned closer, as close as the stench of O'Bow's breath would allow.
"There is a fellow at the Swan," he said, "a Frenchie called Louis Cedarn. He came to us a lutenist."
"And you'd be wanting this nist back then?"
"Which nist?"
"The one the Frenchie came a-looting?"
"Well" said de Tongfort, struggling but inspired, " we've given up the nist as lost, but we could do with having him punished. In the finite sense."
"Fie night, eh? My pleasure. But it'll cost," said O'Bow.
"There's a dozen sovereigns in it for you," said de Tongfort.
"In what?"
"In this purse," said de Tongfort, producing it. O'Bow took it, weighed it in his hand and nodded.
"How will I knows him?" he asked.
"Blond, cocky, foppish clothes. He has taken to living in the Swan's cupola. You know what a cupola is, do you?"
O'Bow looked at him wearily.
"I'm not stupid," he said. "I know full well what both of them is."
THE SEVENTEENTH OF CHAPTERS.
Dawn came up over London town, a mackerel sky smoked to kipperhood by the rising sun. Yawning, Agnew nudged Uptil awake.
"What? What bloody what?" gurgled Uptil, his eyes still closed. He'd only sat down on the slatted bench a moment before, but his head was so heavy he would have fallen asleep on a bed of nails. Under a bed of nails even.
"Shhh!" warned Agnew. The Thames ferry, Gogmagog, was approaching the south shore, and they shared it with a gaggle of up-with-the-dawn drovers and late-back-for-barracks sailors. No one was paying them much heed. Pinkish light filtered down across the estuary, and rudely loud gulls mobbed in the wind above the ferry. There was a chalybeate taste of spindrift in the air, borne down from the coast.
"Sorry," whispered Uptil, pulling his cloak tighter around his bare muscles. "I forgot where I was."
"Try not to," warned Agnew. "The last thing we want is the Ploy to get as lost as Sir Rupert."
The ferry edged up close to the landing strip. Reluctant longshoremen waited for the out-flung ropes. There was a rocking to and fro that only their kinaesthetic sense registered, and then, with a bump, they moored. The drovers and sailors and stop-outs flocked down the duckboard ramps.
"Come on," tugged Agnew, and Uptil trailed along in his wake.
"When you said we'd trawl London until we found him, I didn't think you meant it literally," Uptil murmured as they plodded down the gangplank.
"You wanted to find him," replied Agnew.
"I assumed there would be intervals for sleeping and eating. You may be able to survive on a flask of tea, but I need refuelling and a stationary pillow," said Uptil.
Agnew turned and gave Uptil his most long-suffering stare. Uptil just soaked it up, oblivious. The quayside was cold and unforgiving, and he ached so much he wanted to die. That was before he even considered the entreaties of his rumbling belly.
"I admit," said Agnew, sagging a little, "that we have achieved the square root of bugger all in our search so far. I fear I am running out of ideas of where to look for our misbegotten master."
"Good. I'm running out of consciousness. Let's go home," said Uptil.
"I really thought we'd got somewhere at the Star. And Mr de Vries at Grey's Inn seemed a hopeful lead. But now I'm really down to the last of my knowledge of Sir Rupert's life and doings," Agnew said, rubbing his reddened nose on his hanky.
"So let's go home and sleep on it. I'll wager Rupe is tucked up in his Amen Street four-poster right now," said Uptil.
"There is one last place - that's why we're here," Agnew replied.
Uptil wilted further, looking around for a bollard to sit on. Agnew led him over to a pile of lobster baskets, and they slumped together into its damp, wicker clutches. The elderly manservant reached into the folds of his cloak and produced a stoppered costrel. He took a long swig, flinched, and offered it to Uptil.
"What is it?" asked the Beachovite.
"Just take a sip"
Uptil did. He swallowed, and then shuddered for some time. When he had finished shuddering, he was aware that his toes were still clenched.
"That's not tea," he commented accurately.
"Elixir vitae, concentrated," said Agnew as his breath returned properly. "It hits the spot when all else fails. When tea fails, anyway. So now one last hunt?"
Uptil stretched and stood up.
"Okay," he said, "one last hunt and then home to beddyboos. Where are we?"
"Deptford," said Agnew.
"Uh, why?"
"Last possible lead, my titanic friend. Our last chance. If this fails, we say 'oh well', and forget Sir Rupert entirely."
Agnew led the cloak-swathed autochthon down the quay and into the empty streets of Deptford. Oxstalls Lane was devoid of everything except a water-butt and a slumbering sailor who'd missed his bunk by about three hundred yards.
"Come on," whispered Agnew. "Down this way."
Down this way, Oxstalls snaked around into a rutted track, marked Butt Lane. Uptil plodded along in the mud after Agnew, grimacing at the dawn-chorus. If life with Rupert Triumff had taught him anything, it was that dawn and its accompanying ornithological cheeping was the sign of a good night overdone. For many, the daybreak song of birds was a symbol of rebirth and reawakening. For Uptil, birdsong and the encroachment of light were symbols of a jug too far.
"Where and why are we going?" Uptil asked, squelching through the Butt Lane mud.
"There," pointed Agnew. The building ahead was a nondescript walled affair with a placard out front. The shutters were closed, the gates shut, and the building seemed to be breathing the deep breath of slumber.
"Who lives here?" asked Uptil.
"With luck," said Agnew, "if my information is correct, an old and secret friend of Sir Rupert's. I propose we reconnoitre the place first."
They left the wet mud of the road for the wet mud and wetter grass of the paddock adjacent to the walled property. The air was ripe with the smell of damp herbs.
"Give us a leg-up, and I'll take a look," Uptil suggested. Reluctantly, Agnew made a stirrup of his hands, and hoisted the bulky man up the wall. Uptil scrabbled at the wet brick and slippery creepers for purchase.
"Okay," h
e grunted, with his armpits and chin over the top of the wall.
"What can you see?" whispered Agnew, beginning to shake with the effort of holding up Uptil's weight.
"A garden. Some fruit trees. Back door to a kitchen. Gnngg."
"Gnngg?" asked Agnew.
"I was losing my grip. I don't think there's anyone up."
"Well it is five o'clock in the morning."
"What did you say?" asked Uptil, trying to glance back down at Agnew.
"I didn't," Agnew replied.
The support gave way, and Uptil slithered back to earth with a yelp and several handfuls of Virginia Creeper. Agnew stood with his back to the wall, facing a thick-set, balding man, who had come out of nowhere with a pair of leather breeches, and a cleaver of significant size.
"We didn't mean to wake you, sir," Agnew began.
The man took a step forward.
"You CIA? Militia operatives? Or are you" he asked, before pausing, and squinting down at Uptil, and then back up at Agnew.
"You're Agnew. Triumff's man. And this must be the fellow from Beach," he said, lowering the cleaver and expelling a relieved breath. "I thought you were government agents or worse. Sorry about the cleaver. I sleep with one eye open these days."
"I presume you are Mr Bluett?" asked Agnew. "Your appearance is somewhat different to that which I remember."
"I'm known as Severino now, but you're right," answered Bluett, "and I can guess what you're looking for."
"Any word of Master Rupert would be most appreciated," said Agnew. "Have you seen him?"
"Of course he has," snapped Uptil, getting to his feet and brushing himself down. "He called me that fellow from Beach, not Australia or the Terra Incognita. How long ago did Rupert leave here, Mr Bluett?"
"You'd better come inside," said Drew Bluett.
Doll pinched at his shorn, bleached locks.
"It's not really you, is it?" she ventured.
"No. Neither is playing at sodding espial, working for Woolly or any of this cloak-and-dagger stuff," said Rupert. "I'm really scared, Doll. I don't think I'm in control of anything any more."
Daybreak was slicing open the envelope of night, in a wide tear across the City, and a clambering sun began to illuminate Doll and Rupert, who were sitting together by a puffing brazier in the litter-strewn arena of the Swan.
There had been a certain amount of shouting and yelling and running backwards and forwards the night before, the sort of business that would have made the basis for a good Aldwych farce if anybody had been taking notes. After ten minutes of dodging the bitter salvos Doll fired at him, the stage rigging she swung at him, and the scenery flats she toppled at him, Triumff had managed to calm her down to a just-less-than-piercing shriek and impress upon her the seriousness of his disguise.
Doll's relief at seeing him alive overcame her fury at seeing him hiding out under a peroxide crew-cut and a promiscuous actress, and they kissed and made up, not altogether unsuccessfully. Then her rage, and the stinging realisation that she seemed to have been worrying about him whilst he had been having a whale of a time, in turn, overcame her fluttering relief, and there was a little more stomping and snarling. Luckily those in the Swan who overheard her angry attack had dismissed it at once as a creative difference and hadn't paid it any mind, and hadn't noticed that she was saying things like "Where have you been, Rupert?" and "Triumff, you bastard, do you know how worried I've been?" Gaumont, brushing wigs in the property wardrobe, had chuckled at the sound of the argument, unperturbed. He had a certain fondness for the sound of creative differences, as a parent does for the sound of his children squabbling at play. Wllm Beaver, who had slid into sleep in the gallery seat, roused briefly at the uproar, but was soon snoring again. Of de Tongfort, there had been no sign.
The shouting had gone on for another fifteen minutes. After that, there was a truce as they carried Mary Mercer to the tiring room and dropped her on her cot. The drink and confusion had rather got the better of her, and she'd opted for the unconscious approach.
When he had finally got her sitting down and listening quietly, it had taken rather longer for Rupert to recount his recent doings to the bewildered Doll. She listened to his tale, and took it rather well.
"I thought it was better if you didn't know where I was," Rupert explained. "It kept you out of danger. Whoever's behind this plot has made damn sure I'm the fall guy. There are people, people like Gull, who would run me through as soon as know me."
"Infernal Affairs, too," said Doll. "Some lizard called Jaspers came round a couple of times yesterday. He was so creepy."
Triumff yawned and rubbed his eyes.
"The worst of it is, I've got nothing," said Triumff. "Not a clue. Woolly got me in here because he thought the theatres were somehow caught up in the conspiracy. But I don't even know what I'm looking for. Maybe it was all a ruse by Woolly to get me out of the picture. Or maybe he's playing me off somehow. Maybe I'm another pawn in his game. I wouldn't be hugely shocked if it turned out that the CIA were behind it all anyway."
He threw a stick in the spitting fire.
"I've been in some fixes before," he continued, "some as deadly as this. But there's always been an obvious plan of attack, a sensible course. There have always been facts I can marshal and details I can assess the speed of the wind, the run of the tide, the number of guns, the strength of the enemy. I take the facts on board and work out a solution, but this is a whole different thing. I don't know who the enemy is, what he wants, what I have do to beat him, or how I will know I have, if I do. I know who's trying to kill me, but they may not necessarily be the enemy. I know who's keeping me alive, but they may not
necessarily be a friend. I'm stuffed."
"You look stupid too," said Doll. Triumff looked up with a hurt expression, but found her smile. It was a brave smile, one that fought through tiredness to make it onto her face. He savoured it.
"I live in hope of Drew coming up with something," he said, dredging his weary mind for reassurances. "Trouble is, though I trust him, I have no idea how much else of the Intelligence Service I can trust."
"The cardinal, the CIA" she ventured.
"I think if they really cared about me they wouldn't have buried me in this pantomime. It would have been far safer for me if they'd kept me under house arrest somewhere rural and quiet. No, this" - and by "this" he seemed to mean his bleached hairdo - "this marks me out as nothing more than a fall guy. It's hardly the greatest ever disguise. By keeping me in circulation, Woolly wants to draw the conspiracy out. If I get a knife through the ribs in the process then that's just hard knocks, as long as I've pointed out the traitor, or at least writ his name in my blood on the cobbles of whatever back-alley I die in."
"Is pessimism part of your cover too?" Doll asked.
Triumff growled a no.
"Then what happened to the hero of the high seas, the valiant sail-dog who was the talk of London, and the Queen's favourite, the man who'd laugh in the Devil's face, slap his cheek and leave him to pay the bill?"