Fly By Night

Mosca wanted to say goodbye to the Cakes, but the older girl was still being saved by Carmine. Indeed, the Cakes seemed to be so very, very safe that Mosca began to wonder if marriage might not rub off on her after all.

In the galley, a trapdoor had been opened in one wall, and a large, sturdy-looking cedar washing tub was being fastened to lines from the ceiling.

‘Madam, take some care climbing in, you are blessing the company with sight of a generous extent of your stockinged… oh, painted smirk of a hopeless dawn, the child is still wearing her breeches…’

Miss Kitely slid a bracelet over Mosca’s wrist, and Mosca saw that tiny wooden figures with carved skeletal faces dangled from it. They were the Little Goodkin, and she realized to her surprise that Miss Kitely thought of her as a child.

Many hands hauled on the ropes. They guided the tub’s giddy ascent towards the hatch, and suddenly Mosca was in the open air, steam from the galley surging out around her, the skin of her face feeling stripped and cold. The tub lowered in jolts, banging against the side of the coffeehouse all the way to the waterline. Under the ‘coffeehouse’ was an ordinary hull, against which the water cast dancing hieroglyphs of light.

Mosca loosed the hooks that held the tub to the lines, and a sudden plunge left the tub lolling in the lap of the river as it fell quickly astern of the Laurel Bower.

‘Ahoy! Catch hold there, we’ll haul you in!’

A line end stung Mosca’s cheek, and she grabbed at it automatically. A little bumboat of the sort that sold provisions to large ships in dock was bobbing in the wake of the Catnip. Over the gunwale peered two burnished faces. The two girls wore their plaits down and, like most gypsies, they wore rich waistcoats over their workday clothes, with the meandering of the River Slye embroidered across their chests.

As water was seeping in between the slats of the tub, Mosca made the line fast to one of the handles. The gypsies hauled it in, arm over arm, and then reached over the side to pull her into the bumboat.

‘Is everyone hale in the Bower?’ was the first question after they had recovered their breath.

‘Not holed yet, as I saw. The Duke’s men just shot a fish and killed a kettle,’ replied Mosca, feeling her arms where the gypsies’ strong fingers had left tender places.

‘What about Him?’ asked the younger of the two,

‘Him?’

‘It’s no secret,’ explained the older. ‘When he swung out and cut away the mooring ropes with his sword, Mr- Woolnough-the-Physician’s-youngest-daughter-Tinda caught a sight of him, and couldn’t stop herself squealing out his name. The Duke’s men and everyone else heard her, and the constables started shouting that Black Captain Blythe was aboard, and if the Bower didn’t pull to they’d run to the Western Spire, drop a carcass in the cannon, and burn ’em to the waterline.’ Mosca had read enough of piratical battles to know that a carcass was a can of oiled rags that could be used to set fire to buildings or ships. ‘Well, we couldn’t be having with that. Not a coward trick like that against brave Captain Blythe.’

‘Brave and handsome Captain Blythe,’ the younger added. ‘Is he as handsome as they say?’

‘Three times as handsome,’ Mosca answered without hesitation. ‘An’… he got a commandin’ eye which makes him look six times as handsome.’

‘What colour are his eyes?’

Mosca paused. She had no idea what colour Blythe’s eyes were.

‘Well, they sort of change like the sky when the clouds are skittish. When he’s starin’ down a foe, all undomitable, they’re all silvery grey like stone in moonlight. And… when he smiles they go a merry sort of blue. And other times they’re all sorts of other colours.’

‘But sometimes they’re green?’

Mosca could not mistake the note of hope in the younger gypsy’s voice.

‘Oh yes. Course. Most of the time they’re green.’

‘I knew it. Didn’t I say Captain Blythe would have green eyes?’

The musket-wielding deputies on the bank paid the little bumboat All-awry very little heed as it detached itself from the convoy surrounding the Laurel Bower and made for the bank. After all, there were only three gypsy girls aboard, and youthful ones at that. So what if one of them seemed a good deal paler than her companions? Her eyes were as black as theirs, if not blacker.

‘The Telling Word is moored at Whitherwend Street until the next bell,’ the eldest gypsy whispered as Mosca climbed out, ignored by the waterside throng.

The cathedral bell rang when Mosca was halfway down Witherwend Street, and the Stationers’ coffeehouse was still distant. The Telling Word had, it seemed, been searched, along with the other coffeehouses, and outside its fantastical collage walls a number of bewigged and bespectacled gentlemen waited with patient belligerence, many still holding their coffee dishes. As the bell rang, however, they started to file back along the gangplank. The crew on the roof was readying the sails and preparing to cast off.

Everyone in Mandelion seemed to have seethed to the waterside to watch the drama on the river – cooper and cockle-seller, weaver and wheelwright. The carriages could find no way through, nor did they seek it, and dozens climbed on to the motionless wagons for a better view of the water. Facing a wall of fustian fronts and woollen backs, Mosca realized that she was going to miss the coffeehouse.

With trembling hands, she pulled her printed apron from her capacious skirt pocket, and flung it over her own head. She emitted what was meant to be a blood-curdling shriek, but which came out sounding more like the battle cry of a militant shrew. However, the screams that ensued all around her were a lot more convincing and impressive.

‘It’s print! Print! Hide your eyes!’

Suddenly there were no bodies pressed against her. She ran forward, praying to the Palpitattle in her head, to the Little Goodkin around her wrist, and to any Beloved who might be skilled at preventing young girls running blind off the edge of jetties. Just as she was thinking that she must be nearing the Telling Word, someone snatched the apron away from her face, and she found herself staring up at the red- headed constable from the jail. Fortunately he busied himself with flinging the apron into a herring barrel full of brine and lunging at it with his sword to make it sink, so she sprinted the last few steps to the coffeehouse and jammed her clog in the door as it was closing.

‘I got an important message for Mr Mabwick Toke, from Mr Eponymous Clent!’

Two minutes later she was standing in the Telling Word, watching as Mabwick Toke broke the seal on Clent’s letter. He unfolded it, shaking out the two small and elaborate keys Mosca had seen Goshawk give to Clent. Toke read quickly, drawing the side of one long finger to and fro against his tongue, as if sharpening it.

‘Your employer tells me,’ Toke said at last, raising his eyes to Mosca’s face, ‘that he has secured a wealth of evidence against Lady Tamarind as a traitress, dissident and queen of a poison press, all of which he promises to place in my hands in the fullness of time if I act against her now. Is any of this true?’

Mosca nodded.

‘He says that you carry proof of the… old enemy’s involvement?’

The printed apron was drowned in the herring-barrel, so there was nothing for it. Mosca rolled up her sleeve and showed her forearm, bending back her hand to smooth the creases on her wrist.

‘’Fraid I got no Stationers’ seal,’ she remarked, her Chough accent thickening the words in her mouth like dry oats. ‘You goin’ to burn me?’

‘Not while your skin is evidence, girl.’ The corners of Toke’s mouth dragged sharply down in what seemed to be a curious sort of upside-down smile. Then he sat in silence, his eyes flitting, unseeing, from one side of his desk to the other, as if Mosca had passed him a secret thread and he was following it to find out how it twisted through a mighty web.

‘What a mind that woman must have!’ he said with admiration. It was the hushed tone of a jeweller studying the largest and finest diamond he will ever see. ‘Where did you find the press?’

‘Ragman’s raft, down under a trap.’

‘Of course… rags… no wonder we could not trace them through their paper, they were making their own… That explains the wool threads mixed in with the cotton, and the poor pulping… clever rats, clever rats. But we have our own clever rats, don’t we, girl?’ He gave her his upside-down smile again. ‘Where is the press now?’