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.’
‘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?’
‘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.
‘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
