The meaning of these words would have been lost on most children – and, for that matter, on many adults – but the eavesdropper in the cannon nook was Mosca Mye, who had begged and bartered for books and broadsheets all her life. This was radical talk – this dripped treason. The teacher below could be hanged for the words he was reading out. Mosca’s eyes glittered vengefully.
‘In this little room of the mind the truths grew strong and strident, and I knew that I must speak them whatever the cost…’
There was a sharp whistle from somewhere directly below Mosca, and with a shock she realized that the boy she had chased had been standing with his back flat against the flint wall, keeping an eye on the street.
‘Class dismissed,’ declared the teacher sharply, slamming his bread shut with a small explosion of crumbs.
Five of the children disappeared through holes in the ruined wall, the smallest leapfrogging through on his hands. The eldest boy scrambled up the side of the nearest house, then hung his arms over the roof’s edge to pull up a smaller friend. Four others dropped to their knees and silently renewed their game of marbles.
The teacher pulled his cravat loose, and then retied it as he walked back towards the street. By the time he reached the mouth of the alleyway he was pulling it back into its bow, for all the world as if he had simply stepped into the alley to get out of the wind and set it straight. At the street corner he passed a tall gentleman in a full-bottomed wig who had just stepped into the alley, the reason for the lookout’s whistle, and nodded to him courteously.
Legs shaking with excitement, Mosca scrambled down the wall, and set off in pursuit of the treasonous teacher. Very soon she was learning a few harsh lessons about spying in a busy city street.
She had long since learned tricks of invisibility. Be still where you can, be as silent as you can, let other small sounds drown your steps. If you cannot fool the eye, then fool the brain – stand where you are not expected and you will not be seen. Keep to the highs, keep to the lows, and avoid eye level if the terrain lets you. But these were tricks for the freckled woodland. Here in the street it was a matter of understanding patterns of flurry and flow. Stillness made one obvious, like a stone in a stream.
Time and again she would knock her bonnet against a swinging milk-pail, or nearly blunder beneath the wheels of a cart. Just to keep the teacher in view she was forced to squeeze alongside walls and between bodies, leaving a trail of trodden toes and murmured annoyance.
Thankfully, her quarry seemed cheerfully unaware of the world around him, but this too presented problems. At one point he stopped dead and dropped to a crouch to examine a snail whose shell had cracked beneath his boot. While an oyster seller’s tray tipped dizzily above his head, he could be seen placing together the fractured pieces of the snail’s shell and nudging it gently on its way. By the time he walked away with an oblivious smile, the road behind him was a tangle of tumbled bodies and overturned barrows. Despite herself, Mosca was impressed. The only other creature she had seen cause so much chaos in a ten-second period was Saracen.
She followed the teacher through Riversliver Race, where mackerel shimmered in slick silver heaps, where prawns with gummed black eyes questingly stirred their jointed legs. Through the Hides, where headless turkeys hung over doorways, plucked of all but wispy feather collars and garters, where rabbits dangled like furred gloves. Through a street sickly with the smell of tanners, through a network of alleys and ginnels. Down to the riverside, and in through the door of a coffeehouse.
‘Welcome back, Mr Pertellis,’ said a coffeemaiden at the door as she took the teacher’s hat and coat.
As the door closed behind him, Mosca watched, agape and aghast.
It was not so strange to see the teacher entering a coffeehouse. What Mosca did not expect was for the coffeehouse to judder, grind gently sideways, then abandon the roadside altogether and drift out into the open river.
A violent wind roared in through the newly opened gap, leaving Mosca to wrestle with her ever-rebellious bonnet. The walls of the coffeehouse had been painted cunningly to give the appearance of brickwork, but she saw now that they were wooden. Above the roof swung two broad, square sails. In the sky, at the end of long, strong tethers, tugged six or so diamond-frame kites, most of them only two feet across, but the largest was six feet wide, and was decorated with a twist of laurel on a white background.
‘You lose somink, love?’ asked a passing stevedore.
‘I lost a coffeehouse,’ Mosca answered indistinctly. ‘It… floated off down the river.’
The stevedore peered after the receding coffeehouse. ‘Half an hour late, too. ’Spect they were waiting for one of their regulars.’ This reply was somehow unsatisfactory.
Mosca tried again. ‘It floated away down the river.’
‘Wanted to catch it, did you? Well, the Laurel Bower stops on Tootle Street for sugar, that’s your best chance of boarding her this side of the river. Ye’ll have to run, though.’
And so, without pausing to question the strangeness, Mosca darted in the direction of his pointing finger.
She struggled down street after street, her eyes following the white kite above the roofline. And yes, at last, there was the coffeehouse, sliding to a halt alongside the jetty.
The door opened, and several men stepped out into the sun. One of them looked slightly familiar, and as Mosca tried to push past him he stepped forcibly into her path.
Mosca was taken roughly by the shoulders, and suddenly her feet were no longer touching the ground. The face of Partridge, the barge captain from the Mettlesome Maid, was inches from her own.
‘Do you know what I want?’ he hissed. The knot in his cheek was tying and loosing itself with frightening rapidity.
Mosca shook her head.
‘I want… my… barge… back.’
‘We ’aven’t got it!’
‘No.’ Partridge glared into her eyes with an intensity almost insane. ‘The goose has it.’
For a moment Mosca had a nightmarish image of Saracen biting through mooring ropes and taking the barge out, perhaps learning to trim the sails by himself…
‘We plucked up the planks to get out our cargo,’ Partridge explained slowly, ‘and the goose got down there, and we couldn’t get it out. And so we couldn’t get our cargo out. And then we sent Dotheril down below deck, and the goose broke his ankle, and now we can’t get him out. I want my barge back.’
Mosca nodded slightly.
‘And I want money – compensation for time and business lost.’
Mosca nodded again, a little uncertainly.
‘And you know what else I want for my trouble with the goose? I want your uncle’s heart spiked on a boat-hook so I can hear it crackle as it bakes in the sun.’
I is for Informer
Mosca looked into Partridge’s eyes, judging his gaze and the force of his fingers against her shoulders.
‘I’ll get yer money! You just got to let me go, an’ I’ll get yer money! Beloved blind me with brands if it ain’t so!’
Partridge stared at her distrustfully, and his grip tightened on her shoulders. There was nothing Mosca had wanted more than to find Partridge and buy back Saracen. However, right now her pockets were empty, and Partridge seemed to have gone a little mad.