‘I have in store a great many of those little brandy cakes of which you are so fond,’ Miss Kitely declared evenly. ‘They are too bitter for most tastes, and if you stopped coming here I would probably lose the money for them. I would take that hard, Mr Pertellis.’
Pertellis made a small noise, as if he had drawn in too large a lungful of tobacco.
‘The funny thing is,’ he continued after a moment, ‘I think I would have given up the school a long time ago, but that the children are keener than I. It is all their arrangement now – I never know as I walk down the street what corner they will have found and made ready for the lesson. I have explained the dangers to them a hundred times, but they have such a passion to learn. None of them can afford the fees for the Stationers’ schools, and even if they could, what would those schools teach them? How to be obedient and useful servants and never question anything, that’s all.
‘So my school goes on, and it seems that every month there is a new, bright face among the children. Even today, I am sure I noticed a young girl I had never seen before following me. I suppose she must have heard about the school from one of the others. She was too shy to approach me, or I would have talked to her. But I dare say I will be seeing more of her… she had that hungry look…’
Pertellis’s view of Mosca’s hunger for knowledge might have changed if he had been aware of the many salty terms her mind had devoured over the years. Most of them were being muttered under her breath at that very moment. A gaggle of small children had noticed her clinging to the rungs and had taken it upon themselves to run along the quayside, pointing out the stowaway at the tops of their shrill voices.
‘Oi!’ A reddened face appeared above her. ‘No passage ’cept to customers! ’Op it!’
‘Where do I ’op? I’m not a bleedin’ frog!’
‘Should have thought of that before. No passage. Watermen’s rules.’ The sailor straightened, and took a long look up and down the river’s broad expanse. ‘Take her starboard.’
In the middle of the river rose a pillar of rock upon which stood a bronze figure of Goodman Sussuratch, He Who Preserves the Unwary from the River’s Embrace. A little wooden jetty stretched beside it. With much wrestling of kite wires, the coffeehouse was turned to glide alongside the jetty.
‘You get off here. Now ’op it! Hail yerself a wherry.’
Reluctantly, Mosca released her hold and dropped on to the jetty.
‘I hope maggots crawl in through your ears and lick your brain clean from the inside!’ she shouted after the coffeehouse as it surged away. She had no money to hire a Waterman.
But what was this, churning softly through the brown water of the Slye like an oversized tea chest? It was another coffeehouse, to judge by the sign swinging above the door, but this was a dingy edifice that seemed to have been stained coffee colour from the inside out. Its kites bore a picture of a stag, and over the door were painted the words ‘The Hind at Bay’.
The men on the roof of this coffeehouse had fallen foul of a sudden change in the wind’s direction. The boom had jibbed, and all hands were now busy working to bring the boat back into the wind. None of them noticed a short figure scaling the stone steps that spiralled up Goodman Sussuratch’s pillar, and then crouching, ready to jump. Their ears were too full of the deafening crack and slap of the slack sail to hear a gentle weight drop on to a corner of the roof.
Thump.
Not a loud noise, but loud enough to wake a man.
The man it woke did not move immediately but lay, frowning, for a few seconds, as if becoming gradually aware of the awkward posture of his head against the chair back, and then he opened eyes the colour of verdigris.
He blinked at the discoloured walls, at the tired faces of the drapers who chatted over the Tradesman’s Companion, at the copper gleam of the coffee-pots beyond the hatch.
Lapsing back into his chair, he dozed off with the speed of one used to sleeping on the move. Only when the entire room jolted to starboard, causing regulars to lunge with a practised gesture to save their coffee-pots, did his eyelids flicker open again.
A farewell word for his host. He had a pleasant voice, with a reassuring quality like warm milk. A smile for the girl who brought his hat and walking cane. He had a pleasant smile, as frank as a handshake. A few steps through the door and his hat was knocked from his head as something pale and pointed descended on wings of muslin as if from the heavens, to land a-crumple at his feet.
Mosca blinked up into the sun. The man standing above her seemed young. He seemed startled. He seemed to be wearing a long gentleman’s travelling cloak.
She seemed to be sitting on his hat.
Perhaps she could hand back his flattened hat with a curtsey, and make a bolt for it before his surprise turned to anger? She stood unsteadily, and the man instinctively reached out to catch her arm, and prevent her falling through the crack between doorstep and jetty.
‘Steady, there,’ he said, not unkindly.
Mosca did not answer, but froze, staring past the stranger’s shoulder.
‘What’s wrong?’ He turned, and saw what she had already seen, the figure of Partridge on the quay, shielding his eyes to stare at the roof of the coffeehouse. It suddenly occurred to Mosca that, for all their busily swelling sails and struggling kites, the coffeehouses moved at something less than walking speed, and Partridge had probably been keeping pace with her along the shore. The barge captain seemed to have lost sight of her for the moment, but it would not be long before he spotted her. She shrank back behind the man in the travelling cloak, who turned to her to look a question.
He thinks I’m a pickpocket or a stowaway or a runaway apprentice or a murderer…
Mosca could only look up at the stranger with terrified appeal, and shake her head.
Partridge stroked his jaw, took a few hasty steps towards the coffeehouse… and disappeared, taking the world with him, as Mosca was swallowed by a total blackness. The darkness was warm and smelt of wet roads and grass seeds. It took Mosca several panic-stricken seconds to realize that the stranger had swept his cloak around her.
‘Keep pace if you can.’ The voice was low and slightly muffled by the cloth. ‘Try not to stumble, and maybe he will not notice the extra pair of feet.’
Walking at half a crouch, she tried to stay as close to her unexpected saviour as she could without jostling him. Nonetheless, she was continually bumped and buffeted, presumably by other walkers who tried to push through the billowing slack of the cloak without realizing that it was full of crouching, terrified girl.
The sound of the wind had faded a little by the time the cloak pulled back and returned Mosca to a world of sunlight. She shifted her skewed mob cap on to the back of her head, and blew loose hair out of her eyes. She was standing with the stranger in an alley between a sandstone wall and the cold, high flank of the cathedral.
So – to what terrible act have I just become an accessory?’ Her rescuer smiled, and folded his arms. When he smiled, his eyebrows rose into two neat chestnut crescents, as if they knew the world was destined to surprise them again and again, and were determined to believe in pleasant surprises. Not gentlemanlike enough to be handsome, thought Mosca. He wore no wig for one thing, just his own unpowdered red-brown hair, tied back with black ribbon. Instead of fashionable pallor, his face was tanned to a tea-stain. And yet somehow he did not have a manservant’s careful self-importance. He had the modest assurance of someone who carries the world in his watchcase.
Mosca flushed. Some impulse of gratitude compelled her to attempt the truth.
‘My goose sort of stole that man’s boat, but he didn’t mean to – he was prob’ly just frightened. An’ now he’s angry an’ wants to put everyone’s hearts on spikes an’ cook an’ eat them.’