Fly By Night

‘But why? What would Lady Tamarind want with a printing press?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered Mosca. ‘And I don’t know why she’s been printing all that radical stuff about the Duke’s taxes on the starving poor. She’s not a radical; I don’t think she gives tuppence for the poor. She’s a Birdcatcher.’

I must have given her the scare of her life when I told her she had a Stationer spy in her carriage, thought Mosca with a grim smile. Perhaps Tamarind had never seen anything special in Mosca, only a chance to spy on the Stationers, and make sure they were hunting for the press in the wrong places.

The Cakes shuddered. ‘What are we going to do, Mosca?’

Mosca realized suddenly that the older girl would follow her lead. If Mosca chose to keep Tamarind’s secret, the Cakes would hold her tongue.

Mosca had never tasted power before. It was a little like the feeling the gin had given her, but without the bitterness and the numbness in her nose. If she went to the Eastern Spire with what she knew, surely Lady Tamarind would do anything and give her anything to keep her quiet.

No wonder Tamarind schemed and spun to garner power, if power felt like this! Perhaps from the lofty rooms of her spire Mandelion always looked small and tame. Mosca imagined Lady Tamarind’s long white fingers reaching down from the sky to shuffle the population like cards. Pertellis, shocked and ill, was nothing but a card. Eponymous Clent, ponderous and perspiring, was nothing but a card. Mosca Mye, black eyes alive with rage, was nothing but a card, to be played or discarded at will…

Mosca pulled out her handkerchief, unfolded it and shook out the seed-pearl she had wrapped in it for safety’s sake. When she held the pearl to the light, it glowed like something eternal, but when she laid it on a cobblestone and ground her heel against it a few times it crushed like wax.

‘We stop her, that’s what we do. Whatever she’s doing, we stop her. But first I’ve got to find Mr Clent.’

The Cakes blinked, overwhelmed. ‘We’d better find Carmine.’

Carmine, the clothier’s apprentice, was no longer to be found briskly billowing silks and damasks outside his master’s shop. He was in the cellar of a neighbouring chandler, his forehead as creased as his clothes, as if he hoped not to be found at all. His face brightened exceedingly when he saw the Cakes, and darkened in equal measure when he saw Mosca.

‘Dormalise, what’s she doing here?’

‘Who’s Dormalise?’ asked Mosca. The Cakes gave her a nervous little smile. It struck Mosca too late that ‘the Cakes’ was probably not her original name.

‘She wants to help… She thinks you know where Mr Pertellis is hiding, an’ she wants to talk to him about…’ The Cakes gave Mosca a careful glance.

‘Matters of Consequence,’ finished Mosca.

‘You should never have brought her here.’ Although he sounded bitterly exasperated, Carmine was gently patting at the Cakes’ hand.

‘I know who’s been running the printing press. I know where it is. Only if I’m going to tell you, Mr Pertellis has got to help me find my Mr Clent. I know he escaped with Mr Pertellis, and I got to find him.’

Carmine looked surprised, but he immediately dropped his eyes and tried to hide it.

‘Oh, so you think finding the crooked printers will make everything better for Mr Pertellis, do you?’

‘Yes,’ Mosca declared with more confidence than she felt. ‘No one cares about anything ’cept the press. The Duke is just angry cos someone was rude about the Twin Queens, an’ the Stationers just want to have all the presses to themselves, right? An’ when they know who has really been running the press, they won’t care a bee’s pouch ’bout Mr Pertellis or any of you any more.’

‘Who is it, then?’ Carmine folded his arms.

Mosca leaned forward. She told him, and watched the colour drain from his face.

The Laurel Bower coffeehouse was fastened near the Ashbridge when a fifteen- year-old apprentice approached it along the jetty, a few paces ahead of two younger girls.

‘No customers!’ called out one of the Bower deckhands, climbing down the wooden rungs from the roof. ‘Lady of the house is ill – we’re just stopping to take on food and physick. Oh – hello, Carmine.’ His voice dropped to a lower and friendlier tone. ‘Didn’t recognize you. Since it’s you, you can nip right in, but be sharpish about it, and don’t let anyone see you.’

Carmine leaned forward to murmur into his ear, and the sailor cast a suspicious glance at Mosca before gripping the apprentice by the arm and drawing him in through the coffeehouse door. Despite a pleading look from the Cakes, Mosca slipped up to press her ear against the door.

It did not sound much like an invalid’s house. There seemed to be a lot of people behind the door, all talking at once.

‘Dormalise Bockerby says she’s flash,’ Carmine was saying, ‘and I took ’em here the long way by the Scrapes so I was sure we weren’t followed. I didn’t like it at first, but I think you’ll want to hear what she has to say.’

‘That girl is clearly a pawn.’ An educated, excitable voice that somehow reminded Mosca of a colt’s harness bells. ‘It little matters whose pawn – we can find out only to our cost.’

‘Am I to understand that the poor girl is actually waiting there on the doorstep as we speak?’ It was unmistakably the voice of Hopewood Pertellis, tired and patient. ‘Then for goodness sake bring her in. If there is damage to be done, I would say it has already been done – she knows where we are. Bring her out of the cold and give her some chocolate.’ There was a ripple of protest. ‘My friends, either someone must let her in, or I shall go out and talk to her personally.’

Mosca managed to withdraw a few steps before the door was opened to admit the Cakes and herself.

Inside she had to blink a few times before her eyes grew used to the windowless dark. Daylight bored in through knotholes in the wooden walls, and a candleholder was fixed to the centre of every table. Between the tables rose two wooden pillars, each the base of one of the masts above. They had been painted in genteel stripes to match the walls.

The lady of the house did not look ill. She was pale, but pale by nature, and perhaps from living in a halflight. Her vivid blue eyes were clear and calm beneath their heavy lids. A few roughly torn linen bandages hung over one arm, and the steaming bowl in her hand smelt of herbs.

Pertellis looked far more like an invalid, although he seemed to have recovered a little since Mosca had seen him in the watch house. He was muffled to the chin in a woollen kerchief, but although he was still pale his skin was less patchy, and he was clean-shaven.

There seemed to be a large number of men in the room, some unshaven, some sporting bandages. If these were Pertellis’s radical conspirators, they didn’t look like the leaders of a revolution. Mosca could not help noticing a smaller group that stood apart from the rest. They all wore gloves and had chatelaines dangling conspicuously at their belts. They accepted dishes of coffee from the serving girls with reflexive courtesy, but the wary politeness between the two groups spoke of uneasy alliance rather than trust. They all avoided the seated figure of Eponymous Clent in a corner, his head bowed as if happy to avoid notice. Eponymous Clent, crumpled and crestfallen… but seemingly uninjured.

There were a lot of eyes resting on Mosca’s face as she stepped forward to breast the wave.

‘I am Mosca Mye, and I… want to fix everything.’

‘Really?’ Pertellis’s forehead crinkled as he smiled ruefully. ‘I suppose that makes two of us. Oh, pardon me, about fifteen of us, within this house alone. Its all right, come and sit down. Miss Kitely has brought you up a dish of chocolate.’

Mosca took a dish from the lady of the house in silence. So this was a nest of radicals. She thought a hotbed of sedition would involve more gunpowder and secret handshakes, and less shuffling of feet and passing the sugar.

‘I understand you know something about this printing press?’

‘I found it. It’s in a hidden hold on one of the old ragmen’s rafts, only I had to get out again quick.’ Mosca pulled a crumpled mass of linen out of one of her pockets and passed it to Pertellis.

‘What’s this?’ He shook it out across the table.

‘My old apron.’

Pertellis pulled a chipped monocle out of his waistcoat pocket and held it a few inches from his eye so as to peer at the letters. Then he slowly straightened, and his hand strayed back to his waistcoat, where it made three or