‘Well?’ Clent was waiting with a look of satisfaction on his face. ‘Have you recovered your senses and made your choice?’
She had.
‘I Want My Chirfugging Goose Back!’
‘Well, you can’t have it!’ Clent snapped, scarlet-faced.
‘Then you’re a mouldy-mouthed liar an’ a cheat an’ I’m not doing nuffin’ for you no more!’ screamed Mosca. Before she had finished the sentence, Clent had stormed from the room, slamming the door.
His boots made a very satisfying thud as they hit the wall. All Mosca’s strength was not enough to tear the sleeves of his coat from the body, so she settled for stamping his new wig flat until it resembled a terrier that had fallen foul of a dustcart-wheel.
As she was standing, panting, her boots dusted with flour from Clent’s wig, she suddenly saw with absolute clarity what it was that she needed to do. If she could squeeze no reward from Clent and the Stationers, she could think of only one person who might give her money for Saracen’s ransom, and that was Lady Tamarind.
Clent had left paper, quill and inkbottle in the window seat. Snatching them up, she scratched out a quick letter.
Dear Ladyship,
The Stationers have an antipathy to the Locksmiths, on account of they suspect they are running a printing press to make the Duke go into fits. This is all to help them take over the city somehow.
The Locksmiths are hiding a radical called Hopewood Pertellis who teaches forbidden books to a school in alleys and I seen him do it. They are hiding him in the Grey Mastiff. Tomorrow night the Stationers will go in and arrest him when he is all ringed about with Locksmiths, so the Duke will find out how tricky and toad-spotty the Locksmiths are and slap his head.
Mosca from the Road.
She rolled the letter into a narrow pipe, tucked it intoher apron pocket, and hurried from the marriage house with her heart beating.
‘’Scuse me.’ She tugged at the sleeve of a woman with a basket of gillyflowers. ‘Can you tell me the way to the Plumery?’
The woman’s smile faded. She was of middle age, with a broad, cheerful face that sun and hard work had polished and cracked like wood. She gazed sadly at Mosca as if she had seen a ghost of a dead daughter standing behind her.
‘Of course, blossom.’ She whispered directions gently, as if she was talking to an invalid, and Mosca left her, feeling more ill and uncertain than before. As she walked, the streets dwindled into alleys, the houses became dwarfish, and then she took a turning into an open square and stopped dead.
Even before Mosca saw the shrines of Goodman Postrophe at every corner she sensed something deathly in the square’s stillness. No sheep or goats cropped the central green. Among the grass, their quills planted deep into the earth, nestled thousands of feathers – pigeon, magpie, dove, pheasant, rook. Most were broken-backed from the wind, and ragged from rain. Mosca felt superstitious fear climbing her spine on spider-feet.
Mosca had never seen a plumery before. She remembered a pedlar talking about the Plumery in the Capitaclass="underline"
… didn’t have room to do it proper, you see, not inside the city walls. ’Sides, most of the time the bodies were shovelled into the same great pits outside the city bounds, and even after the Birdcatchers fell, nobody had the stomach to go pickin’ through the bones all jumbled together and working out what was whose…
There would be a similar desolate memorial in every city in the Realm. Each of those feathers represented a grave, a man or woman or child killed by the Birdcatchers. This she had already known, but she had not expected to feel as if she were staring into the city’s open wound. Mosca could not guess how many thousands of feathers twitched in the early breeze. There were too many to think about safely, and she decided not to care whether the tiniest downy feathers were children.
She realized that she was not alone. People moved around the green in ones and twos, talking in church whispers or bowing their heads in silence. Some knelt between the feather plots, replacing broken plumes with fresh. The Praymaster chaplains from the cathedral would renew all the feathers on St Berrible’s day, but clearly some of the departed had families who liked to keep their graves in fine feather.
On a little pedestal sat a statue of Goodman Claspkin, He Who Carries Our Words to Departed Kin, one hand extended as if to cup the chin of a beloved child. Her knees weak with cliff-edge shakiness, Mosca knelt and reached a trembling hand towards the clump of pheasant feathers at his feet, as if she too had come to renew the plumes on a loved-one’s grave.
She tugged at a feather. It slid out, to show a tube of horn fastened to the feather’s stem. Struggling against the urge to look around, she pulled her letter out of her pocket, slid it into the tube, and pushed feather and tube back into the earth. It was done. She had broken the Stationers’ oaths of secrecy, and if they ever found out, they would put her in a printing press and crank it down until she popped like a chestnut…
She hurried back to the marriage house, thinking that everybody was wearing gloves and was watching her strangely. She opened the door of the room she shared with Clent, and Clent himself turned to stare at her, a queer and unfocused expression on his face.
‘What?’ Her hands twitched. Had he seen the earth on her knees? Did he suspect her? How could he suspect her? If he did, Mosca just wanted him to say so. ‘What?’
‘Perhaps…’ Clent held up a finger, and peered at a point over Mosca’s head, trying to stare his thoughts into clarity. ‘Perhaps if you truly wish it we will retrieve this winged warzone you call a goose. But.’ He waved his finger. ‘But. The Goose Must Earn His Keep. If it becomes necessary, he must be considered a… an Agent of the Stationers’ Company, and committed to their cause.’
Mosca stared at him, uncertain whether to feel relieved or suspicious. Clent seemed to have gone slightly mad, but mad in her favour. Lady Tamarind might not pay her for a day or two – why not take advantage of Clent’s change of heart?
‘S’pose that’d be all right,’ she agreed warily.
‘Splendid. Make my wig and coat ready, and we shall brave Mr Partridge after breakfast.’
The wig!
Clent strode down to order breakfast.
A few minutes later, Mosca was knocking at the Cakes’ door with a muffled, rapid urgency. There was a tiny noise within that she took to be a call to enter. She had flung open the door and taken two steps into the room before she realized it had been nothing of the sort. The Cakes was on her knees by her bed, a piece of embroidered cambric gripped in both hands and her mouth making a loose, rubbery shape as if she were about to cry.
Apologies did not come naturally to Mosca, so she did not make one. Instead she ruefully held up the wig by way of explanation.
‘It’s Mr Clent’s… I… stepped on it.’
The Cakes sniffed, and her face sharpened into its usual business-like expression.
‘Looks like most of the Mandelion militia stepped on it an’ all.’ She stood up, biting in both her lips, and walked over, taking the wig from Mosca’s hand. ‘Here, I got a brush for this kind of thing. We rent out wigs to grooms as can’t afford it and you should see the state we get some of ’em back in…’