The entirety of the next day was spent making preparations for the knave. In the morning Rossamund worked in the rear parts of Cloche Arde guided by the ever-humorless Mister Kitchen and hindered by the territorial Mistress Clossette, directing the staff bustling to collect all the necessaries.
In the afternoon he went out to the stalls across the Harrow Road, and there, with Latissimus, the gentleman-of-the-stables, attached a laborium-one of the marvels bought from Pauper Chives, a cooking-box that abolished the need to make fires for testing-to the back step of the landaulet. Spent but satisfied after a day of such busyness, at mains he ate hungrily.
'So, what are your plans for your Domesday vigil?' Europe asked over her glass of claret. 'Will you lie abed all day? Have a jaunt to the seaside?'
'Maybe a jaunt to the seaside,' Rossamund declared cheerfully. 'I might ask Fransitart and Craumpalin to join me.'
The fulgar beheld him with twinkling eyes. 'Perhaps you could take Master Right's letter of refund to his agents and redeem our crossing fee,' she posited. 'A small errand.You may keep the proceeds as payment for your effort.'
Rossamund finished his meal with the hunger of the diligent and the rapidity of the excited and retired early. After a profound sleep, he woke excitedly to a brilliant Domesday morning that glowed with the promise of a day of leisure ahead. Rising with a loud, stretching yawn, Rossamund stared through open windows out over the mysterious roofs to the pink dawning sky.
Nine days until Fransitart's mark will show.The dark thought intruded, and he frowned at its unwelcome gloominess.
Peering down into the long sparse yard below, he could see a modest flock of sparrows sitting atop the yard wall, scooting and diving and playing chase-a-tail in threes and fours among the runners of a glory vine that spread across its face. Others were darting and disappearing in the compact branches of the cypress, and there Rossamund discovered one all-too-familiar brother of their kind sitting on his own upon a high branch, attention fixed on him.
Good morning, little spy.
Chattering excitedly, a pair of female sparrows swooped up to land on either side of this lone watcher. In turn the bird puffed his feathers with a distinct air of grave self-importance and made a show of ignoring them utterly. Clearly expecting a different reaction, the female birds flapped about their brother for a moment and made to squabble and fret as sparrows normally do, yet the little fellow would have none of it. He gave a single loud and a rather angry Chirrup! that stopped the girl-sparrows still. They seemed to give each other a quick look that-to Rossamund-appeared to say, Well, if that is how you want to be! and darted away, leaving this pompous sparrow- spy to his lonely spying.
Rossamund smiled at their antics and drew in a deep, bracing breath. Just for one day he refused to be troubled by the insoluble complexities of his life and rumor's wicked work. He washed, applied what Craumpalin now called his Abstinker-an improvement on Exstinker reformulated by the old dispensurist in a letter sent from the Dogget amp; Block-hurried on his old longshanks, weskit and blue frock coat, tested Europe's treacle, ate breakfast promptly with little more than a 'Good morning, Miss Europe!' took Master Right's letter of refund and set forth in the landaulet.
It was the strangest sensation to be at such liberty, largely unhindered to pursue his own plans, driven about by Latissimus like some young lord on important business. A feeling of expansion, of being capable of besting all useless doubts and hindering fears spread like dawning warmth through him, and it seemed almost that his soul might stretch out to fill every circuit of the wind. His first port was his old masters' hostelry to ask if they cared to join him while he secured the refund, and after that he would let the day do as it would.
The gentleman-of-the-stables took him slowly by roads he had not yet been, joining all the Domesday strollers and sunshine soakers in their vigil ease.Yet even now under the fancy dress, the parasols, the smiles and friendly greetings, the city hummed with irrepressible haste and industry.
As he stared and marveled, he found that the sparrow-spy was following, the bird making darting, stop-start loops from branch to wall-top, roof-spout to red-painted lantern, keeping pace with the landaulet, trailing them all the way to the Dogget amp; Block. Glowering his disapproval at this more penurious end of town and the lane just broad enough to admit the carriage, Latissimus let Rossamund alight at the very front of the alehouse.
'Hold tightly to hat and wallet here, m'boy,' the gentleman-of-the-stables warned, and, with a dour look up at the beetling salt-stained tenements, set back for Cloche Arde.
Barely avoiding a trip over a pole festooned with dead rats and mice tied on by their tails and rabbits tied by their ears, Rossamund entered the pleasing world of timber pillars, hammer beams, high wattle-and-daub walls, eonsmudged wood benches and a crackling fire for a cool spring day. He nodded good morning to a sweet-smelling, remarkably clean scarper sat taking a tipple near the door, a rest between patrons-it must have been his rat-pole leaning against the door outside.
Rossamund's inquiry of the horribly scarred and one-eyed Casimir Fauchs after his masters was met with the information that Fransitart and Craumpalin were not in-rather they had gone out to find a former-time sweetheart of one of them or some such thing, that it was unknown where they had gone to or when they might be back.
Assiduously avoiding the eye of the collection of musty-looking patrons, Rossamund sat in a dim corner stall facing the door and, with a jug of pale duke to sip and a crust of bread to gnaw, waited for his onetime masters to come in. Toward the rear of the establishment was a gang of ticket-of-leave men-shore-going vinegaroons living large. These merrymakers, already sodden by the day's middle, banged out a gusty chant:
Twofold, threefold, fourfold, five, Once I caught a nick alive! When I tried to wring its hide, It knocked me down upon me side. As I went to stand up straight, It put its jaws about me pate. Happy then to quit the scene, I tore the basket tooth from spleen. Now its head hangs on the high, Its mark a-puncted on me thigh…
Clashing mugs and whole demijohns together, they looked for all the here and vere just how Rossamund thought landed limey Jack tar sea-dogs should.
An old, rudimentary horologue mounted sideways on the wall above the small tapery to prove the excellence of its workings quietly tapped away the count of life.Through the magnifying dome of the glass face of the clock he watched the hands wind off half an hour… yet no show from his masters. I'll wait five minutes more, he told himself several times until forty-five minutes were gone, still without the advent of either aged vinegaroon. After yet another false hope-some shuffling white-haired street seller stepping in for a tot still wearing his cumbersome tray-Rossamund paid for his beer and walked to the rush and commerce of Tight Penny Circle. There, among the strange red-bricked, blue-roofed market halls, he found several scarlet-doored takenys.Their drivers, sitting high at the rear of the conveyances and dressed in weskits of horizontal red-and-white stripes under coats of blue or bottle green, were simple to mark in the flurry.
'Phlynders amp; Pugh Commutation Agents, please, mister takenyman,' he declared firmly, reading the address given on the master of the Widgeon's recommendation. 'It's on the Mill Strand, Subtle Bench-'
'I fully reckon where it is, Master Squidgereen!' the takenyman scolded, and whipped off with a tumbling lurch.
Through all fashions and repair of architecture Rossamund was taken southeast, passing under no fewer than three bastion gates on the way. By one stood the famed Old Gate Sanguinarium with its axiomatic pensioners, the destination of most over-prime vinegaroons. Stiff as an Old Gate pensioner went the expression, even north in Boschenberg. Peering up through the takeny's window at the moldering stonework and blank windows, he did not like the idea one mite of Fransitart or Craumpalin ending up here to wait out their last days shut away.
Emerging from between the high buttresses of the mill works and imposing cartel buildings, the takeny found the sea, turning right down the crowded waterside way of Mill Strand. Instead of being protected by a sea wall, the entire district was raised well over twenty feet from the lapping harbor on a great man-made tableland of masonry. Rossamund stared in wonder at edifice upon edifice of enormous smoke-belching mills and famous mercantile concerns. Plain-gulls and mollyhawks spun and circled in vast flocks above it all, riding on the updrafts of vented steams, adding their squawking discord to the clanging thunder and human bustle of modern industry. Rossamund thought he could almost feel the great hammering of the gastrine-driven hammers pounding out all manner of metal and stone. He wrinkled his nose at the piquant confusion of stenches: the vinegar sea, foundry fumes, creosote, animal sweat and animal dung, and traces of a more chemical nature straight from a skold's testtle.
'Phlynders amp; Pugh, Mill Strand!' the takenyman cried, and abruptly halted, letting Rossamund alight after a fare of a quarter and two cobs-nine guise-before a row of tall and rather similar mercantile clericies.
