Barely a minute after the door had closed behind them, it opened again, and Goshawk walked out through it. His stride spoke of calm haste, but his pale eyes were opalescent with rage. As he reached the street door he made a small, impatient gesture as if dusting something from his cuff, then he slid a set of manacles from his wrists and hung them over the side of an unattended tankard. He vanished out into the street – without, Mosca noticed, bothering to retrieve his cane and hat.
Two of the Duke’s men burst out through the back door and stood on tiptoe, scanning the crowd with expressions of alarm and annoyance. As Mosca watched, two more of them re-emerged, each gripping one of Hopewood Pertellis’s elbows. His tricorn and his spectacles were missing. There was a bloodied slit in the corner of his lip. Something plummeted in Mosca’s stomach, and the taste of her cider thickened and sickened on her tongue.
Behind this trio followed the rest of the Duke’s men, frog-marching a group of startled-looking middle-aged men who all wore elaborate chatelaines at their belts, calfskin gloves, and keys on chains round their necks.
‘Mosca.’ Somehow Clent had appeared beside the gallery steps. ‘Much as I hate to drag you away from these entertainments, I find that they start to pall.’ His plump face was glistening with perspiration.
It was a lot easier to approach the pit now, because no one seemed quite so keen to cluster around it any longer. The civet’s owner was leaning over the edge of the pit, while a friend held on to the back of his breeches, and making ‘Here, puss’ tweeting sounds to lure it out from behind Saracen’s crate. Fortunately, it seemed that someone had tried to throw a chair at Saracen at one point, which made it an easy matter for the goose to clamber up on it, and then beat his way through the air to Mosca’s waiting arms.
‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ The announcer could be heard shouting, his voice ragged as Mosca and Clent pushed their way to the street door. ‘Contain yourselves, please, gentlemen, no pistols! The fight is called to a halt, but I am glad to announce that the Star-crested Eagle of King Prael has shown the greatest valour, and is the victorious…’ The door closed behind them before he could finish his sentence.
If Mosca’s mind had had room for anything but Saracen’s safety, it might have occurred to her that something must be badly wrong if Clent was not claiming the five shillings for his victory. She might have thought it strange that Clent was leading them away through the night streets alone without looking for a linkboy to light them. And if she had looked up from Saracen’s tiny cuts to observe Clent’s face, white and haggard in the moonlight, she would have realized that the night was only just beginning.
M is for Murder
By the time the shrieks and clatter of tumbling brass-ware had faded in Mosca’s ears, rain was falling, in drops so fine that it was scarcely more than a tickle on the skin. After ten minutes the cobbles shone as if with nervous perspiration, and Mosca’s soles began to slither.
‘Mr Clent…’
‘Keep walking.’
‘Can we slow down?’
‘No.’
They took a left through the Drimps, where the tallow-makers’ wares hung behind dusty panes like the pale fingers of ghouls.
Clent at last paused in the empty street and stared up at the moon, which was the clean, startled white of a newly sliced cheese. He blinked as if the creamy light were trickling into his eyes, then wiped his hand up his forehead into his hair. Little panicky stars darted around within his eyes as if trying to escape.
‘Catastrophe,’ he muttered. ‘Utter catastrophe.’
‘But we won, Mr Clent!’ Mosca could only assume that he had missed the end of the fight. ‘Saracen beat the civet and… and quite a lot of other people who weren’t even meant to be in the fight, too.’
‘It will be all over Mandelion by morning,’ Clent intoned hollowly.
‘Looked like half of Mandelion was there tonight already, nobs and guildsmen, and scholars, they all saw Saracen…’
‘All of them at once… one fell swoop…’
‘Yeah, swoops, and peckings and buttings…’
Clent hooked his finger into his cravat to pull it away from his throat, as if he had felt it tightening like a noose. ‘There is no doubt about it. It will mean war.’
Mosca stared at her employer.
‘What?’
At about the same time, some of Mosca’s earlier sentences seemed to penetrate Clent’s absorption.
‘What?’ His gaze was cold, distracted and somewhat annoyed. Then he sighed, and his face took on a look of weary tolerance. ‘Mosca, the Duke has arrested all the Locksmiths in Mandelion.’
‘But… that’s good, isn’t it?’ Mosca asked tremulously.
‘No, it is not good!’
Even during his most petulant bellowing, Mosca had never heard him speak so coldly. Once again she felt that she had glimpsed a sharp and knife-like character sheathed within Clent’s pompous, ponderous exterior.
‘There are Rules, child, Rules! For years, the Guildsmen’s Rules have been the only thing stopping the Stationers and Locksmiths ripping each other apart. That throng we have just left may bellow for this king’s grouse or that queen’s civet, but in their heart nobody believes in the kings or queens any more. The Realm is held together by the guilds, and everybody knows it. And if the guilds fall on each other’s throats, heaven help us all.
‘Mabwick Toke expected the Locksmiths to be shamed, incriminated even, but not arrested! Beloved above, the Assizes begin tomorrow! Do you know what will happen if an entire chapter of Locksmiths is executed? What was the Duke thinking?’
Mosca shook her head.
‘The Locksmiths will assume that the Stationers have deliberately broken the Rules. There will be war. Stationers will be locked in their own closets to starve, or strangled with chatelaines. Locksmiths will be stabbed to death with steel pens, or crushed as thin as biscuits in paper mills. Then the Watermen will take the side of the Stationers, so the Hansoms Guild will back the Locksmiths, and all the other guilds will choose a side, right down to the Playing-card Makers and the Milliners. There will be murder and bloody mayhem on the highways and the waterways. The towns will starve, and soldiers turn to banditry. And all the kings and queens who have waited their chance for decades will see that there is anarchy, and they will arrive with their armies all at once. Does that sound good?’
Mosca’s mouth was dry. She was not sure which she found more alarming: the picture Clent had painted, or the startling intuition that for once he was actually speaking the truth.
‘I didn’t know…’
‘No, why would you?’ Clent gave her a complicated look, half bitterness, half forgiveness. ‘How would you know?’ He sighed. ‘The worst of it is that I do not think the Locksmiths even have the confounded printing press.’
‘What?’ Everything Mosca had been told about the Locksmiths did a neat somersault in her head.
‘I was listening in while they tried to torture Hopewood Pertellis into telling them who was really running the printing press. Then they got sidetracked into talking about the difficulty of finding a docile crocodile on the black market, for some reason. Then they started interrogating the spy they had found behind their door.’
‘They found a…’ Mosca’s gaze met that of Clent. ‘Oh,’ she mouthed silently.
‘Naturally, when they pulled me in by my collar I told them that I had hunted them out because I had a burning desire to join the Locksmiths. I got no further. They knew who I was. They knew I was working for the Stationers. Before the Duke’s men arrived, it became very clear that they knew everything I had written in my last report to Mabwick Toke. Somehow, I know not how, they must have read it.’