Fly By Night

jamb to brace herself.

Miss Kitely snatched up a long mop and beat the handle-end against a trapdoor in the roof until it cracked open.

‘Mr Stallwrath, hard-a-chimneyside, if you would.’ A harassed-looking sailor above gave a hurried salute.

Mosca pushed her eye against a knothole. She could see a group of Duke’s men pushing through the crowd carrying cudgels, and two of them seemed to be shouldering muskets. Their leader was calling something aloft, hailing the sailors up on the deck of the Bower. He pointed at the jetty, as if ordering them back to their moorings. As the coffeehouse drifted further away, his mouth shrank to an angry crack across his face. He started to drive his way through the crowd with a new fierceness and resolution.

‘Up kites, Mr Stallwrath!’

‘But Miss Kitely, we ain’t ten paddle-lengths clear of the bank…’

‘We shall worry about the fine later, Mr Stallwrath.’

There was a squeal of consternation from the coffeemaidens as the first Duke’s man reached the jetty side.

‘Grab their lines! Stop that coffeehouse!’ someone was shouting. ‘There are fugitives and cell-breakers aboard!’

‘Sussuratch smile!’ murmured Miss Kitely. ‘She’s gathering away – we are finding our pace at last.’

Perhaps they were. Perhaps this was fast for a coffeehouse. Mosca could not help noticing that they were still being overtaken by ducks.

A shout of triumph. One of the Duke’s men lifted a dripping boathook with a trailing line looped across the end. Four deputies seized hold and braced their weight against it, the drift of the Laurel Bower dragging them towards the brink in stuttering steps. Drawing his sword, Blythe pushed his way to the doorway and swung himself out and to one side. Mosca recollected the rungs set in the outside wall.

A blade flashed downwards once, twice, and the cluster of deputies fell backwards, the severed rope-end flicking back into their faces like a cow’s tail swatting flies. Blythe swung back into the room and turned to stand in the doorway, daring anyone on the jetty to leap for the boat. No one seemed ready to take up the challenge.

‘We’re clearing the Squirrelhawk… we’ll clear the Donkey Dancer… our stern’s three paddle-lengths from the shore, Skipp’am!’ The final word, to judge by the confused salute that accompanied it, was a compromise between ‘skipper’ and ‘madam’.

‘Gentlemen, we are on the river, and out of the Duke’s jurisdiction!’ Miss Kitely’s declaration was met by a brief burst of cheering on all sides. One radical even slapped Blythe heartily on the back, almost toppling him forward into the water, and earning himself a glare.

There was a violent crack, like a tree bough snapping, and suddenly there was a new knothole in the northern wall, and another in the southern wall.

‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Pertellis in consternation, gazing down at Blythe, who was now lying at full length upon his face. ‘Are you all right, sir?’

Blythe lifted himself on to his elbows and directed a red-faced, disbelieving glare around the room.

‘Weeping Lord of the Bloody Eye, will you all get down? They are shooting at us.’

The other men in the Laurel Bower obediently lowered themselves, some of them carefully laying down their coffee dishes first, others looking around for the cleanest place on the floor. When a second shot punctured a sampler and gonged off a coffee-pot, the floorboards suddenly looked a lot more comfortable to everyone.

‘They cannot be.’ Miss Kitely’s voice was fragile. ‘No one… no one would shoot at us on the river… The Watermen would never… never allow…’ Blythe grabbed for her sleeve to pull her down. Her skirt ballooned about her as she sank to her knees, then subsided around her with a silken sigh.

Clent and Mosca had crouched scarcely a second after Blythe had flung himself flat, and now they peeped at each other between their fingers.

‘Madam,’ Clent muttered, ‘I owe you an apology. You were correct, and I was in error. The Duke is pixelated.’

‘Where’s the Cakes?’ Mosca looked about.

She need not have worried. Carmine had taken it upon himself to save the Cakes. This involved dragging her down to a corner of the floor and wrapping his arms protectively around her. Even the floor must have seemed quite a dangerous place to him, since he appeared to be in no hurry to let her go.

‘Dulcet!’ A flush was creeping up from Miss Kitely’s collar. ‘Dulcet, run to the galley and put another cauldron on the boil, then come back here with those three muskets. Shrewlie, go with her and bring back as much shot as you can carry. You other girls, help them carry.’ Seeing both the coffeemaidens scampering for the internal door, Mosca suddenly realized that ‘you other girls’ must mean the Cakes and herself. It did not look as if the Cakes would escape from her saviour at any time soon, so Mosca followed the coffeemaidens.

The galley was blisteringly hot. Heaps of coffee beans glistened through the steam like burned-out mountains of some volcanic land. Squat little Moscas of different sizes were reflected in the bowls of a dozen ladles. The table was also a cupboard, the top folded back to show everything stowed tidily on hooks and in lined pockets, ready to be ‘battened down when the coffeehouse was underway’.

‘Take these.’ Dulcet, the tall girl with honey-coloured hair, looped the strings of four heavy leather pouches over Mosca’s wrists. ‘And some of them snuffbottles. The green ones. Blue ones are snuff, green ones are gunpowder.’ The muskets that filled Shrewlie’s arms gleamed with a dull oiliness, and smelt of beeswax.

This is more like it, Mosca decided, as she filled her hands with tiny, scarab-shaped bottles. When they struggled back into the main room, the door had been wedged so that it stood open barely the width of a hand. Blythe lay on his belly, aiming a pistol through the aperture. Without the view of the bobbing shore it did not feel so much as if they were in a boat, rather a parlour with hiccups.

Another shot punctured the door and tore apart the head of a stuffed fish that decorated the wall, showering bystanders with sawdust.

‘How do you come to have so much lead shot, Miss Kitely?’ Pertellis seemed bewildered by the laden appearance of the girls.

‘Mr Copperback has been expecting something of this sort for a while. He has been making his own shot, and it seemed most sensible to hide it on the Bower.’ Miss Kitely continued to clean out a pistol barrel in a business-like manner.

‘But where in the name of goodness did you find the lead?’

Copperback opened his mouth to say something, but forgot what it was when Miss Kitely gave him a meaningful look.

‘It is a long story,’ Miss Kitely explained coolly, as she took a snuffbottle from Mosca and began trickling the powder into the pan. In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell. In this case she thought it probably involved stolen shrine icons.

‘Um… I could swear that this bullet has an eye.’

‘A freak of the mould, Mr Pertellis.’

Mosca left the last pouch of shot in the eager hand of Copperback, then ran to press her eye to a knothole in the shoreward wall. She could see a gaggle of Duke’s men in black and green standing on the jetty, now a reassuring distance away. There was a downy puff, like a dandelion clock being torn apart by the wind. Only as the smoke unravelled did Mosca glimpse the musket barrel behind it. Just as she was wondering how the gun had fouled, she heard a crack and felt the wall tremble against her cheek.

It was all so odd and unreal, she could not feel any sense of danger. She was marvelling at this when a dun yellow cloth slid across the scene like a theatre curtain. Her cry of surprise was echoed by several others nearby.

‘It’s the Catnip! They’ve pulled alongside us!’ was the call from above.

‘Call out to them! Let them know they’re likely to be caught in the crossfire!’ Miss Kitely called back.

‘They’re saying nothing, but they’re keeping pace and giving us the wave.’ Stallwrath sounded bewildered.

It was true. The little lighter with the yellow sail had slowed to hold its place between the Laurel Bower and the jetty where the Duke’s men levelled their muskets in vain. ‘Her mainsail is shaking, but they’re making no move to right her. I think… she’s shielding us from fire.’