‘I’ll have my money, all right,’ Partridge said grimly. ‘I’ll sell your skin to a drum-maker and have my money.’
Mosca decided that Partridge was not in the right mood for negotiation.
She twisted like a snake and sank her teeth into his right-hand knuckles, all the while tearing at his fingers with her nails. He shifted his grip and she pulled free, hearing a tick-tack-tack of snapping seam threads. On impulse, she leaped a mess of mooring ropes and sprinted for the coffeehouse, which was making ready to cast off.
As the sailors on the roof braced long poles against the quay in readiness for pushing off, Mosca jumped. Her hands snatched at a dangling rope, and then her feet found support on the crude wooden rungs nailed to the coffeehouse wall. Winded, she could only cling and pray that the Laurel Bower would push off before Partridge’s angry hand could close on the scruff of her neck.
It would not have interested her to know that at this very moment she was dangling between two worlds, each with its own laws. Leaping from the shore, she had left behind the city the Duke controlled. On the river, only the free-and-easy rules of the Watermen applied. The coffeehouses of Mandelion criss-crossed the river to escape the shore laws, so that customers could speak freely. Here sedition and wild conspiracies bubbled like the coffee-pots.
Meanwhile, within Miss Kitely’s coffeehouse, the Laurel Bower, the young teacher in blue-tinted spectacles brightened at the sight of a newly arrived friend.
‘Copperback!’ The teacher pushed forward to take the hand of a man who had an angry question locked eternally into his brilliant brown eyes. ‘I am so glad to see you – I was hoping that we might discuss the matter of the recent… that is, aha, hahow. Ow. Er… ow?’
Copperback continued to grip the teacher’s hand with painful firmness until he had watched a man in a crimson waistcoat reclaim his hat and trip out through the street door with a swing of his cane. When the door had been made fast behind him, and the crockery had rattled with the casting off, Copperback’s grip relaxed slightly. Several other men around the room who had been watching the door with earnest interest allowed their shoulders to relax.
‘Beloved above, Pertellis,’ Copperback muttered at last. ‘I thought you were going to spill right in front of him.’
Hopewood Pertellis blinked through his blue spectacles at the room about him, noticing the general tension for the first time.
‘Who…?’
‘A spy for the Duke’s men. I’d stake my eyes on it. What is become of the world if we cannot even talk safely on the river? He came in yesterday and told us he had just arrived in Mandelion from one of the university towns, and wanted to meet other men of letters who “cared for the much-wronged common people”.’
‘Well, I suppose it may have been true,’ Pertellis suggested.
‘No, I think not.’ Miss Kitely herself had drifted in, carrying a dish of coffee for Pertellis. She was a thin, pale woman whose heavy lids could have been ugly but instead just made her eyes acutely blue. ‘He bought coffee for himself, and anyone who would talk to him, and never asked them to return the favour. I had my girl overcharge him, and he didn’t complain. Then he started to talk about how interested he would be in reading fresh-written tracts, and to ask whether anyone could show him some.’
‘Did anyone tell him anything?’ asked Pertellis.
Copperback exchanged a look with Miss Kitely, who lowered her heavy lids in a slow blink, then raised them again. Copperback traded glances with several others in the room, who nodded slightly or raised their eyebrows expectantly, then he faced Pertellis again and folded his arms.
‘And why would you be particularly interested in knowing that?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Pertellis – are you running this infernal printing press?’
Pertellis paused in lifting his coffee dish to his lips.
‘Goodness. Well, that is a question. How would you react if I was?’
Copperback flung his hands up over his head and, finding nothing he could usefully do with them, settled for meshing their fingers and letting them wrestle for a moment, before swinging them down against his thighs with a slap.
‘I knew it had to be you. It has your stamp all over it. Pertellis, by Pipshriek, Protector of the Rash, why did you not tell us? You should have given us the chance to shake some sense into you! You will bring the Stationers down upon every one of us – we shall all have our noses cut off at the next Assizes!’ Copperback flashed a furious and apprehensive glare round the room.
Every regular at the Laurel Bower would have risked arrest as a radical if his papers had been searched and his sympathies investigated. Their views differed, but they shared a passionate belief that the world was arranged unfairly. It was like a broken leg that had healed crooked and would have to be broken again if it was ever to grow straight. They all understood the danger they faced by holding to this belief.
‘I see.’ Pertellis sipped thoughtfully. ‘And how would you react if I said that I was not responsible?’
‘Pertellis…’ Copperback gestured in frustration. ‘Pertellis, we’ve all guessed that it must be you, what with your indomitable passion for circulating tracts. Most of us possess a copy of “Upon the Inequalities of Law” copied out by the children of your Floating School.’
‘Yes, I…’ Pertellis cast a beleaguered smile downwards. ‘I think most of my children now write a pretty fair hand.’
‘The hand is fair enough, but the words! Pertellis, they write down everything you say. On one page of my copy, a paragraph ends with “Oh dear, class dismissed, out of the windmill in single file, children.”’
‘Indeed, indeed. A printing press removes all such problems, and saves a deal of time and risk. It seems that it has been decided all round that I am running such a press. I can hardly resist such a weight of numbers, so I shall not protest.’ The young teacher’s voice rose. ‘Would I be ashamed to be throwing sparks into the tinder of men’s minds in such a way? No, I would not. Last winter, the over-taxed poor starved so that the Duke could build his Spires of Prosperity. This winter, innocent people will perish on the streets because he has knocked down their houses to make way for more follies. Is it worth speaking out against these things? Yes, it is!’
Copperback made an inarticulate, exasperated sound, and strode back to his table, where he sucked at his pipe so furiously that he swiftly vanished in a cloud of scented smoke. The Laurel Bower was dark and windowless out of respect for the window tax, but the sunlight entered the wooden walls through a hundred knotholes, illuminating ghostly swirling spears amid the blue smoke.
Miss Kitely brought Pertellis his own pipe.
‘You are too stubborn,’ she said under her breath.
‘Have I made an enemy?’ he asked quietly.
‘No, just too passionate a friend. He is worried that he will live to see you on the gibbet.’
Pertellis sucked slowly at his pipe and then gave his hostess a glance that was alive with concern.
‘That customer who just left – have you been troubled by many of the Duke’s spies since my arrest last month?’
‘I can scarcely lock my door against them.’
‘No, I suppose not. I had not thought that when they failed to prove a charge of sedition against me, they would turn their attention to my friends. I have put them in danger.’ Pertellis shifted his weight from one elbow to the other, so that his face was a little turned away from Miss Kitely’s hooded eyes. ‘I have been thinking that it was time I found myself a real office instead of coming here… perhaps one I could share with the Winnowing brothers…’