‘A true Locksmith will always wear gloves, because the outline of a key is branded into his right palm,’ Clent whispered back. ‘The head of each secret cell also wears a chatelaine at his belt – with keys on the belt that match the brands of all the men that answer to him.’
‘Mr Clent… most gentlemen wear gloves out o’ doors, don’t they?’
‘Yes, child, they do.’ Clent’s eyes darted from one street corner to the next. ‘Anyone we meet on the street might be a Locksmith spy.
‘Goshawk himself is a shadow among shadows. It is said that his fingers are slender and dainty as a child’s, and that he has kept them so by binding them every night in lemon-drenched muslin. He has fashioned keys so quaint that only he can use them, and he can pass through a triple-locked and bolted gate as easily as you or I might walk through rain. He can sense a secret passage or compartment the way a cat’s pink nose can scent a crock of cream. We have been commanded to spy upon the Wind.’
H is for High Treason
The next day, the letter from Lady Tamarind arrived in a whitewood scroll box, and Clent began fussing over his apparel like a dowager before a dance.
‘Oh false fates, to leave me without wig powder – child, see that you whisker your way to the kitchens for a spoonful of flour, it will have to serve…’ And again, ‘I cannot go to the Honeycomb Courts without scented gloves… pray slip into one of the ten-shilling rooms and borrow a basin of rosewater.’
‘What ’bout me?’ Mosca scattered flour liberally over Clent’s wig, and then brushed the loose grains out of his eyebrows. ‘What do I wear?’
‘I have let your aspirations climb too hastily,’ Clent declared, washing his hands daintily in the rosewater, and examining his nails. ‘Because I have allowed you to meet the most eminent Stationer in the city, now you think yourself ready for a debut in ducal circles. I can scarcely walk the Honeycomb Courts trailing some unweaned driggle-draggle.’
Mosca pushed her tongue into her cheek, and tweaked Clent’s cravat into shape. Nothing in the unweaned driggle-draggle’s manner revealed that her head was buzzing with a dozen furtive plans of her own, and that she was feverishly calculating for how many valuable hours the Honeycomb Courts would keep Clent out of her hair.
‘You, madam, have a pair of voracious and inquisitive ears. I recommend that you employ them around the city, and see if they can gather anything of use.’ And with that, Clent was out of the door with a swing and swagger.
Five minutes later, his secretary slipped out of the marriage house into the cool of the early morning.
Mosca’s plan was this. She would hunt down the ‘ragged school’ her father had mentioned, and dazzle them with her learning. Perhaps Mr Twine, the schoolmaster her father had mentioned warmly, would remember the name of Quillam Mye and lend her some money, so that she could buy back Saracen when Partridge reached Mandelion. If not, then there was nothing for it but to work for the Stationers and hope that they paid her before Partridge sold Saracen or ate him.
When she thought of Lady Tamarind, her heart tried to tug itself in two. She had promised to report the Stationers’ plans to Tamarind, but so much had happened since then. For better or worse, she had signed articles with Clent, and been taken on as a Stationer apprentice. If she gave away Stationer secrets and they ever found out, they would use her hide to bind books. And after all, did she know anything worth reporting? Only that the Stationers did not trust the Locksmiths.
For a while Mosca walked north with the wind at her back, hoping that it would carry her to a busier thoroughfare where she could ask directions to the Ragged School. When the breeze changed direction, however, Mosca lost her bearings. The river she had left behind startled her by appearing on her right. She could not know that it curved around on itself, the city nestling in the crook of its elbow.
This was disappointing. Irrationally, Mosca felt she should have inherited her father’s intimate knowledge of Mandelion. His throwaway comments about the city should have magically meshed in her mind, giving her a faultless instinct for finding her way around.
Eventually she called out to one of the ‘ragmen’ who poled their laden rafts up and down the Slye, bartering for scraps and discarded cloth. He was glad of a conversation with someone who had travelled beyond Mandelion. Mosca traded him some extravagant lies about life in the Capital in exchange for some drab facts about local geography.
‘Don’t know that there’ll be much there for you, though.’ The ragman stared quizzically at her departing figure, and Mosca concluded that he did not think she looked scholarly.
Only as she neared the right street did her self-confidence falter and her insides start leapfrogging. What if the teachers sneered at her grimy muslin or asked about her background? What if they expected her to be able to read Old Acrylic?
She turned the final corner, and stared.
The school’s weathervane had been fashioned in the shape of a crouching man with a book in hands, head jutting forward eagerly, and Mosca easily recognized the pointed features of Goodman Whiskerwhite, He Who Searches for Truth.
Unsteadily, Mosca walked forward and prodded the weathervane with her foot. It was half buried among broken, mossy roof-tiles. Raising her head, she looked across at the mounds of rubble shored against the few remaining walls of the school, their gaping windows sad and jagged with broken leads. She shrugged both shoulders like a bird settling itself.
To judge by the advance of the moss and decay, the Ragged School had been dead longer than Mosca had been alive. Only as the dream broke and its shards cut her did she realize how close she had been clutching it. She had not hoped the school would accept her, she had known they would. At the back of her mind, she had believed that her father had meant her to hunt down the school, had made plans to ensure her future happiness when he was gone…
‘Daft old dunnock.’ Mosca could hardly recognize her own voice. ‘What’s the point of sending me here? That’s it, is it? That’s the best you can do?’ Quillam Mye’s mention of the Ragged School had not been a clue, or a part of some all-wise and all-knowing plan. He had died and abandoned his daughter without making any provision for her future. The ruin of the Ragged School was a devastating disappointment, but it also felt like a betrayal.
Mosca scrambled across the ruined school, her eyes stinging. The demolition was too complete to be a matter of accident or time, and there were no traces of fire. She found a hiding place beneath the lean of a tumbled timber, and hugged her knees there for a while, while ivy tickled the back of her neck.
While she was glowering numbly at her own clogs, she noticed something square-cornered and yellow-white wedged between two nearby bricks. Mosca wrestled it out, and found herself staring at a child’s hornbook. Gripping its handle, she shook the dust off it, and raised it up to stare into it like a hand mirror. The layer of horn meant to protect the paper underneath was grimy and cracked, and the weather had blotted the letters of the alphabet almost beyond recognition. The backing board was rotten.
As a child she had spent hours sitting with such a hornbook beside her father’s desk, while he wrote and she laboured over her lessons. Not a word or a look between them in an hour, just a strange, silent sense of connection. Despite herself, Mosca glowed with the memory.
This was something, at least, and there might be more treasures to be found. She crawled out of her cave, and began searching through the rubble. She was just starting to conclude that dozens of other looters had stripped it bare, when she looked up and found she was not the only forager.