Blythe lifted himself on to his elbows and directed a red-faced, disbelieving glare around the room.
‘Weeping Lord of the Bloody Eye, will you all get down? They are shooting at us.’
The other men in the Laurel Bower obediently lowered themselves, some of them carefully laying down their coffee dishes first, others looking around for the cleanest place on the floor. When a second shot punctured a sampler and gonged off a coffee-pot, the floorboards suddenly looked a lot more comfortable to everyone.
‘They cannot be.’ Miss Kitely’s voice was fragile. ‘No one… no one would shoot at us on the river… The Watermen would never… never allow…’ Blythe grabbed for her sleeve to pull her down. Her skirt ballooned about her as she sank to her knees, then subsided around her with a silken sigh.
Clent and Mosca had crouched scarcely a second after Blythe had flung himself flat, and now they peeped at each other between their fingers.
‘Madam,’ Clent muttered, ‘I owe you an apology. You were correct, and I was in error. The Duke is pixelated.’
‘Where’s the Cakes?’ Mosca looked about.
She need not have worried. Carmine had taken it upon himself to save the Cakes. This involved dragging her down to a corner of the floor and wrapping his arms protectively around her. Even the floor must have seemed quite a dangerous place to him, since he appeared to be in no hurry to let her go.
‘Dulcet!’ A flush was creeping up from Miss Kitely’s collar. ‘Dulcet, run to the galley and put another cauldron on the boil, then come back here with those three muskets. Shrewlie, go with her and bring back as much shot as you can carry. You other girls, help them carry.’ Seeing both the coffeemaidens scampering for the internal door, Mosca suddenly realized that ‘you other girls’ must mean the Cakes and herself. It did not look as if the Cakes would escape from her saviour at any time soon, so Mosca followed the coffeemaidens.
The galley was blisteringly hot. Heaps of coffee beans glistened through the steam like burned-out mountains of some volcanic land. Squat little Moscas of different sizes were reflected in the bowls of a dozen ladles. The table was also a cupboard, the top folded back to show everything stowed tidily on hooks and in lined pockets, ready to be ‘battened down when the coffeehouse was underway’.
‘Take these.’ Dulcet, the tall girl with honey-coloured hair, looped the strings of four heavy leather pouches over Mosca’s wrists. ‘And some of them snuffbottles. The green ones. Blue ones are snuff, green ones are gunpowder.’ The muskets that filled Shrewlie’s arms gleamed with a dull oiliness, and smelt of beeswax.
This is more like it, Mosca decided, as she filled her hands with tiny, scarab-shaped bottles. When they struggled back into the main room, the door had been wedged so that it stood open barely the width of a hand. Blythe lay on his belly, aiming a pistol through the aperture. Without the view of the bobbing shore it did not feel so much as if they were in a boat, rather a parlour with hiccups.
Another shot punctured the door and tore apart the head of a stuffed fish that decorated the wall, showering bystanders with sawdust.
‘How do you come to have so much lead shot, Miss Kitely?’ Pertellis seemed bewildered by the laden appearance of the girls.
‘Mr Copperback has been expecting something of this sort for a while. He has been making his own shot, and it seemed most sensible to hide it on the Bower.’ Miss Kitely continued to clean out a pistol barrel in a business-like manner.
‘But where in the name of goodness did you find the lead?’
Copperback opened his mouth to say something, but forgot what it was when Miss Kitely gave him a meaningful look.
‘It is a long story,’ Miss Kitely explained coolly, as she took a snuffbottle from Mosca and began trickling the powder into the pan. In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell. In this case she thought it probably involved stolen shrine icons.
‘Um… I could swear that this bullet has an eye.’
‘A freak of the mould, Mr Pertellis.’
Mosca left the last pouch of shot in the eager hand of Copperback, then ran to press her eye to a knothole in the shoreward wall. She could see a gaggle of Duke’s men in black and green standing on the jetty, now a reassuring distance away. There was a downy puff, like a dandelion clock being torn apart by the wind. Only as the smoke unravelled did Mosca glimpse the musket barrel behind it. Just as she was wondering how the gun had fouled, she heard a crack and felt the wall tremble against her cheek.
It was all so odd and unreal, she could not feel any sense of danger. She was marvelling at this when a dun yellow cloth slid across the scene like a theatre curtain. Her cry of surprise was echoed by several others nearby.
‘It’s the Catnip! They’ve pulled alongside us!’ was the call from above.
‘Call out to them! Let them know they’re likely to be caught in the crossfire!’ Miss Kitely called back.
‘They’re saying nothing, but they’re keeping pace and giving us the wave.’ Stallwrath sounded bewildered.
It was true. The little lighter with the yellow sail had slowed to hold its place between the Laurel Bower and the jetty where the Duke’s men levelled their muskets in vain. ‘Her mainsail is shaking, but they’re making no move to right her. I think… she’s shielding us from fire.’
From Mosca’s knothole she could see nothing but the yellow sail, but a minute later she heard gasps from a couple of the radicals at other spyholes.
‘It’s the Peck o’ Clams,’ cried Miss Kitely, ‘sails close-hauled to hide us, dragging anchor to slow her down to our pace. What are they doing?’
There was no answer to this question. All that Stallwrath could report as he crouched behind the safety of the coffeehouse chimney was that they were suddenly surrounded by a convoy of little boats, whose grimly smiling captains saluted them but offered no explanation. For the moment there was little danger of being shot, and as little chance of firing at their attackers on the bank. Everyone on the Bower quickly realized they could get on with the argument they’d been itching to have.
Miss Kitely was sure that if the Watermen knew what was happening, they would rush back to defend the Laurel Bower, then charge to the coast to stop the Birdcatchers. Everyone else thought that the Watermen were unlikely to accept the word of a huddle of outlaws against the word of a duke.
Goshawk wanted to send one of his men on a fast horse to the Locksmith troops waiting upstream, so that if everyone in the Laurel Bower perished, ‘the Duke would pay the price’. Everyone else thought this sounded extremely dangerous, and they were not at all keen on the bit about everyone in the coffeehouse dying.
Hopewood Pertellis suggested that he should borrow a little dinghy from the convoy and approach the shore under a flag of parley to explain everything ‘and stop all this foolishness’. Everyone else was very polite about this idea, then changed the subject completely.
‘There is another way,’ Eponymous Clent said. In fact, he said it several times without anyone hearing, but Copperback accidentally sparked the powder in his pan, deafening everyone and filling the room with smoke. While they were all still coughing, Clent declared loudly, ‘There is another way. Perhaps the Watermen will not listen to us, but they will certainly listen to the Stationers’ Guild. The two guilds have been on excellent terms for years.’
‘Which does us little good, since the Stationers’ Guild will certainly not listen to us,’ retorted Copperback, as he primed his rifle again.