Fly By Night

‘Girls! To the galley!’ Miss Kitely looked around her for the nearest set of ready arms. ‘You too, Mr Clent.’ Clent was not to be trusted with a pistol, but Miss Kitely was willing to place a ladle in his hands.

In the galley, Miss Kitely swung open the hatch to reveal the startled face of a petty constable, clinging to a rope with one hand and holding a pistol in the other. Concerted blows from three fiercely wielded ladles convinced him to release the pistol, and a faceful of boiling coffee persuaded him to relinquish the rope. He disappeared downwards with a shriek.

Destiny is overtaking us upon wings of canvas, thought Eponymous Clent as he sagged back against the wooden wall, mopping his brow, and it seems I am to die armed with nothing but a spoon. Until now he had remained quiet and cowed, hoping only to escape the wrath of everyone else on the Bower, but his mind had noticed everything as it scurried to and fro like a rat looking to escape a burning room. As he wandered back from a room full of blinding steam to a room full of blinding smoke, his foot struck a rounded something. It answered the blow with a sound like the flutter of wings. Wings of destiny. Wings of destiny…

‘Tell me, young sir, how well can you throw?’

Carmine looked up from loading Copperback’s pistol. ‘Well enough to knock chestnuts from a tree.’ His expression was a question.

‘Could you throw this,’ Clent lifted the wig box into his hands, ‘through one of the windows in the coffeehouse yonder?’

There was a long and prickly pause.

‘I would need to be outside.’

‘I know.’

‘Would it help?’

‘In truth, I cannot say. It might.’

‘Give me the box, sir.’

With the wig box slung over his shoulder, Carmine paused at the bottom of the rope ladder. It did seem hard to be doing something heroic while everyone was too busy to notice. Almost everyone – the Cakes had seen him and was staring up at him in surprise. On impulse he stooped and kissed her on the cheek, clumsily, so that her forehead knocked against his eyebrow.

When he reached the top of the rope ladder the wind blew his collar into his mouth and his short pigtail beat at the base of his neck. Brave Captain Blythe was crouching behind the chimney, cleaning out his pistol. The crew of the Bower ducked low to the deck or ran at a crouch from point to point when the lines needed trimming.

Carmine lay flat on his stomach near the edge of the deck and let his arm dangle over the side, the wig box hanging from his fist by its leather straps. As he began to swing it back and forth, Carmine kept his eye on a window below on the other boat, where a man in a plum-coloured surcoat was beating a playful curtain out of his face and levelling his pistol at Captain Blythe’s hiding place. A swing, and a one, and a two, and a…

The man at the window took the wig box full in the face and staggered backwards. The box bounced against the sill, then tumbled down inside rather than out. The men at the other windows of the Queens’ Heads pulled back, as if eager to find out what had landed in their midst.

‘Pull yourselves together, men!’ someone was bellowing. ‘You dolts! You… you squirrels! It’s a goose, nothing but a goose. Just a distraction. Here, I’ll show you…’

The sounds that followed greatly resembled those that might be caused by locking half a dozen farmyard animals into a dresser and then pushing it downstairs. Somewhere in the confusion someone discharged a rifle. To judge by the edgy, hot-coals dance that the crew on the Queens’ Heads were suddenly performing, they had just seen the bullet hole appear through the deck upon which they stood. The street door flung wide, and someone dived into the water and began swimming to the shore, leaving a cocked hat bobbing behind him.

Carmine scrambled to his feet and ran back to the trapdoor. He paused only for a second at the top of the rope ladder, but suddenly he was staring up at the sky. The deck had charged him from behind like a bully, and something seemed to be gripping his upper arm fiercely as if he might escape upwards into the sky. A wet heat was spreading across his shoulder, and as he tried to sit up the world raised its voice in a chorus of pain and pushed him down again.

Something was pulling at his leg. Looking down the length of his own body, Carmine could see the frightened face of Eponymous Clent, who had pushed his head up through the trapdoor and taken hold of Carmine’s ankle. Carmine wondered dully if Clent was trying to steal his boots, and whether anyone would notice. However, he let himself be dragged inch by painful inch, and at last felt someone grip him under the arms and lower him down through the trapdoor, where he seemed to sink into darkness like a drowner, amid a crowd of supporting hands. He was laid gently on to the floorboards. Voices echoed oddly in his ear, and there were red ringlets trailed across his face.

Blythe saw the young apprentice fall to a pistol shot but was too far away to do more than watch as Clent crept from cover to drag the boy to safety. What a world this is, he thought. Children put us to shame with their pluck, and are shot in the back for it.

The highwayman’s mind was filled with a terrible, aching clarity, for he had no doubt in his mind that he would be dead by evening. He hid this belief from his comrades, just as he hid the fact that his recent influenza had left his throat rough as bracken, and that from time to time his head became so light that the objects around him seemed to glisten darkly. The men who depended upon him needed to see him strong and able.

But they need more than Captain Blythe the hero, they need a dozen more men and as many guns… no, they need a miracle. On the other coffeehouse, Blythe could see men hanging off the outside wall rungs, or perched on sills, or skulking on deck and veranda – anything rather than face whatever it was that was breaking furniture in the main coffeeroom. Carmine’s strange attack had bought the Bower time, but it would not be long before the Queens’ Heads recovered from the crisis.

‘Ahoy the Laurel Bower! The Duke himself commands you to pull to and surrender yourselves to him and his men!’ The cry seemed to come from the veranda of the Queens’ Heads.

Blythe thought again of Carmine’s face as the shot had torn through his arm, and his chest exploded with anger.

‘This is Captain Clam Blythe, and I challenge Vocado Avourlace, called Duke of Mandelion, to a test of pistols. I stand for the rights of the people he robs and oppresses, and will risk my body for my cause. I call upon him to stand against me for the Queens he claims to honour, and let the Beloved decide the Right of it.’ Blythe could hear his own words echoing long after he had spoken them. He realized that little sculls were bobbing not far from the shore, and that the men on them were bellowing his words to a listening multitude on the waterfront.

‘The Duke accepts.’

Praise be to Goodman Varple of Thieves and Vagabonds, and bless his ugly dog, thought Blythe. The Duke truly is mad.

‘Mr Hind, captain of the Queens’ Heads, shall be my second.’ It was the Duke’s voice.

Blythe gave Stallwrath a questioning glance, and received a nod.

‘Mr Stallwrath shall serve as mine.’

While the crew of the Bower hurried to clear the deck, Blythe stood up, so that he could be seen by the men of the Queens’ Heads, the crew of the little boats bobbing nearby and the throngs at the riverside. If they shoot me like a dog now, it will be remembered…

His heart beat as a tall man in jewelled blues and golds climbed on to the roof of the Queens’ Heads, the wind splaying the locks of his pale gold wig