what other hands avoid, I seize… Besides which,' she finished with a wry look, 'this singular offers the kind of traveling I desire.'
'Would you join with this Gentleman Budge fellow and his pact, Miss Europe?'
She looked up at him sharp and quick, a mild frown rumpling her forehead, holding his gaze for a moment before returning her attention to the remaining documents in her hand. 'No, I would not,' she said.
With a disconcerted blink, Rossamund read the job-bill again. The Gathephar… He felt as if he might have read of it once in some obscure pamphlet footnote. It certainly sounded terrible enough: a creature emerged straight from the rumors of history.
'Tell me, little man, which would you take?'
He stared at the three papers, willing one of them to give him the right response. I don t want men to die, but neither do I want nickers needlessly ended…
Europe shifted in her seat.
'The third job,' the young factotum declared without certainty. 'That Gathephar basket sounds nastiest, the people the most needful if their prize is anything to go by, and… and nothing can stop the Branden Rose,' he finished a little lamely.
'Hear, hear,' Europe concurred with bland irony.
In truth Rossamund had no notion which nicker was worst; he would simply have to make the best of the course once it had begun.
The fulgar peered at him. 'I think that we shall actually take all three.'
Rossamund's innards sank.
This was going to be harder than he thought.
'The path they make will lead us in a circle of sorts out of Brandenbrass and back again,' Europe continued, 'if we take them in the order you have read them. A fine spell of coursing. It will keep us out for a fortnight or even a month, which shall be timely given the current fuss.' She paused, almost pointedly. 'So, Rossamund, you will need to take our selections to the knavery-and return these,' she said, indicating the pile of unwanted writs. 'Tomorrow you will set to work with Mister Kitchen to ready the landaulet and its stores. This coming Domesday you may have as a proper rest-I am not so severe as to deny you a chance to take your ease-yet I will have us on the road by Solemnday.' Upon returning with Mister Carp to the Letter and Coursing House knavery, Rossamund was dismayed to discover that the Singular Contract for the corpse-eater at Spelter Innings had been filled that very afternoon by-on Carp's inquiry-a certain wit by the name of Flabius Flinch. The man-of-business quietly recommended that the other two jobs would do, and Rossamund followed his advice. So, to the clerical music of turning pages, of paper shuffled, of quills licked, the knavery count was marked, two representations were made, a pair of bills of attainment were filled, the attainment-money was paid-the mighty sum of fifty sous! — and a single certificate of recompense was franked.
An obstruction of wagons on the Dove slowed them on their way back to Cloche Arde, forcing them to go one leisurely clop upon another beside the city-bound wood-lands of Moldwood Park, brooding, quiet and impossibly threwdish.
How can such land stay like this in a city as old as Brandenbrass? Rossamund marveled. Continuing the thought aloud, he said, 'Don't powerful people want to build tenements and mills and foundries on it?'
Carp blinked at him. 'Build tenements and foundries on what?'
'On the Moldwood.'
'Oh.' Carp smiled stiffly. 'Spoken like a true Brandenard,' he said dryly. 'A permanare per proscripta is a powerful thing, Master Bookchild. Besides such, we greatly esteem our broad garden spaces here; it is a mighty city indeed that can waste ground in such a pretty fashion.'
Indistinctly from somewhere within the trees, Rossamund was certain he could hear distant music.Volume ever shifting, it seemed a peculiar, twanging, crashing tune, wild and rolling, the vague hints stirring his soul at turns with grim earthy excitements or foreign, sorrowful longings. 'What is that music?' he asked, leaning out of the dyphr to hear more.
To this the man-of-business gazed absently for a breath at the slow passing park and simply shrugged. 'Brandenbrass is a puzzling place for those not acquainted with her,' he concluded unsatisfactorily, and flicked his horse to pick up its pace.
Reentering the gate of his new home, Rossamund passed a lank-haired fellow exiting the grim town house wearing a cingulum of black edged with white and a look of scarce-contained dismay. By the calibrator in one hand and the thick book in the other, the young factotum recognized the man as a variety of concometrist. As Carp passed him without the merest acknowledgment, the fellow gave Rossamund a brief and mournful glance, a worldly weight heavy in his gaze and a hungry hint of envy too.
'Hallo, sir,' Rossamund greeted him, wondering how it was that a person of such noble profession should look so careworn.
'Well-a-day,' the concometrist replied without conviction, going on and out of the gate.
'Oh, he was a simple illustrator' was Europe's explanation of the stranger, when Rossamund returned to her file. 'One of the many mendicant freelancers who seek me out for my patronage. The fleas take scant time to infest the new-washed dog. This fellow was the second imagineer to come in as many days, asking if I had need of a fabulist to prepare etchings of my travels. Our course will be crowded enough without some inky booby slowing me up to scribble all and sundry too.'
Carp sniggered.
'He looked sorely hipped, Miss Europe,' Rossamund uttered before thinking. 'You might have let him draw you something for a fee. Concometrists are noble fellows,' he concluded.
The fulgar, who had been scribing in her ledger, looked up at her factotum slowly, fixing him with a steely inspection. For a long moment she held him so. Then, eventually looking down to her book again, she said, by way of shifting subject, 'What of my submissions to the knavery? They proceeded simply?'
'Aye, Miss Europe, though the… the singular for the corpse-eater was taken.'
'Who took the contract?' she asked
'It was Flabius Flinch,' Mister Carp interjected, his tone weighty with meaning. 'Filled at one of the parish knaveries.'
'Hmm,' Europe murmured, with a slight curl of lip and a contemptuous cluck of tongue. 'That oily toad still lives, does he…' She picked at some spot on her coat hem. 'Too bad for you, little man: it was my intention to let you receive the entirety of the prize for that writ, but now I guess you must forgo the forty sous.'
'I guess I must, Miss Europe,' he replied in honest indifference. 'It does not worry me.'
'Truly…' The Branden Rose looked long at him again with feline calculation. 'An easy boast for you, Rossamund, when it is another who puts the food on your table and a roof above your sleeping head.'
Stung and painfully aware of the man-of-business standing only a pace to his right, Rossamund could conjure no answer. Instead he looked determinedly at a silk painting immediately behind his mistress-a twisted, strangely posed heldin aboard a flimsy curricle spearing a sea-nicker through the cranium-and kept black thoughts at bay.
'So we are off to remote adventures again, little man!' Europe spoke into the uncomfortable moment with a sudden and strange lightness that Rossamund did not recognize.
Keeping check of his soured temper, he placed all the knavery documentation and the fifty-sou folding note in her expectant palm.
'Before I forget it, Mister Carp!' The fulgar shifted subject as rapidly as she took the papers. 'Write up a presage exemption for our young extravagant here-I do not want the best treacle-tester this side of the Marrow to be suddenly bundled away into naval service by some uppity press gang or a short-listed arming contractor.'
In a moment she had taken Rossamund to the depths of shame and then lifted him to a bliss of gratification. The best treacle-tester this side of the Marrow…, he repeated to himself glowingly as Mister Carp obeyed, rummaging the lock-safe bureau at the near corner with silent efficiency.
A knock at the door brought with it the arrival of Kitchen at the head of another guest: a moderately tall man in long black soutaine, his short, equally inky hair slicked and sleeked back over the dome of his slightly flattened skull. Europe rose and stepped out from behind her marvelous desk, greeting the somber fellow and introducing him to Rossamund as Mister Oberon, Companion of the White, eminent surgeon and examining transmogrifer. 'He has come to make sure my innards have stayed in their proper trim after my excursion to Sinster.'
