Woolgathering

by Christina Hambleton

  ***

  The scraping of a key in the door, a heavy slam, and a scream of frustration announced Farley's return that evening. Young Risk was flushed with indignation, his clenched jaw quivering dangerously, the fury of his expression as he rounded the corner to the parlor such that he seemed ten years older beneath all the ruddy anger and glinting eyes. Not that Miss Coombes, perched coyly at his desk with her skirt arranged neatly about her, noticed. She was concentrating most studiously on a sheet of parchment, her stately wrist affecting the most solemn decrees over it in black. At sight of her Farley's vehement scowl quickly reverted to a leer, and he stamped over to fling himself down on the couch.

  "I neglected to recall that you were here," he remarked scathingly. "Then, it's just as I predicted earlier."

  Miss Coombes didn't so much as look up from her task. There was the continued scratching of a quill, and her voice was poised as could be as she ventured to ask, desultorily:

  "What has your trousers in a twist?"

  "My trousers," Farley smirked dangerously. "My trousers?! They've been all over bloody Ghileswick, through the slums, over the bridge, and back again in an attempt to find out which god-damn crime ring was involved in my case. And then what does Hangman's Yard do? How does my mentor repay me? He takes the guard job for the next target right from under my nose. Why, it was my catch! I'm more experienced!"

  "That's the first discernible lie since you walked through the door," came the smooth reply like a reprimand, inches from patronizing. "Did it ever occur to you that perhaps Ulisse is more trustworthy than you? Even if you didn't glide over the details of what happened during your watch you'd doubtless write some trouncing poem on the matter."

  Farley's face twisted into an excruciatingly wide grin. "And what, pray tell," he snarled, "Are you doing in my chair, all comfortable and familiar?"

  "I've written up a contract."

  "I can't read print," the stubborn youth returned as Morrigan finished her work and presented it to him with all the graciousness of a school mistress, or governess.

  "That's lie two," she commented lightly as she waited for Risk to take the parchment from her. When he snatched it up at last he scanned it with an alacrity that took Miss Coombes wholly by surprise. She was less astonished when he threw it at once to the floor.

  "Teacher or nursemaid," he laughed irritably, "You are not bringing those aristocrat's snot-nosed brats into my house, and especially not the urchins. I don't do children."

  "Naturally that's why I would be handling their lessons," Morrigan informed him. "So wherein lies the problem?"

  "It's my house. I hate children. Enough said."

  "You are a child!" she blurted, exasperated. "And if I am to stay here, I need to be able to conduct business as surely as you do!"

  Farley drew out the papers on his wrist and a charcoal pencil, a sardonic hue lighting upon his grinning mask as he said aloud through his penciled ministrations:

  "A lonely woman buries it in charitay.

  Give it to her fast or she'll waste right away."

  "Oh that wasn't even very good," Morrigan scowled with a roll of her eyes. "And does every line of your poems rhyme, or are they all couplets?"

  There was an abrupt change of subject. "Have you eaten yet?"

  Miss Coombes shook her head primly. "Not without you. Some of us have decency. Besides, there was nothing but treats and such in your cupboards."

  Farley's brow twitched with the last, restless fits of his unraveling patience. He sunk deeper into the couch and turned his face from her as though to take a nap. "Then run out and buy what you need, damn it. My change purse is on the mantle." He began writing once more on the pad on his wrist and reading its prior contents.

  Seeing that no improvement could be wrought over his mood Miss Coombes resigned herself to the task at hand, crossing to a dusty brick hearth some distance from the desk and pocketing the silken black pouch lying there. She then regarded the youth sprawled over the furniture with exaggerated dignity.

  "Do try to behave yourself while I'm gone."

  Farley's face was buried in a haze of papers and pencil marks, but he muttered:

  "When dearest mother is here to stay

  Then, my friends, it's a rainy day."

  Morrigan tied the change purse to her side and, crossing the room to don her jacket, said not another word as she slipped into the frigid nighttime din.

  Farley's street, Wotcher, wasn't much frequented, but not far from thence was a tiny, closing bazaar whose occupants were more than happy to oblige her request to take the last of their fresh product at a fresh price. It wasn't a dreadfully interesting marketplace; the stalls were modest, professional wooden stands and there were none of the exotic tents or baubles that crowded dockside entourages.

  Nevertheless, the hunched women and calloused men were easy to deal with— she didn't have to play the ridiculous bartering game. It wasn't long before she had a sack filled with cheeses, vegetables, and breads, and she was just debating whether she would prefer to cook a wild or tame meat for that evening's dinner when the sight of a familiar face gave her pause.

  It was early evening, so the blackened cobblestones were glinting in the lantern-light, but the skies were clinging to an indigo hue that twinkled ominously with a few of the brighter stars. There was a curious half-shadow to everything in the marketplace, rendering faces dim and expressions monotone beneath the veil of pubescent darkness.

  Nevertheless, Investigator Ulisse was unmistakeable with that towering, hunched profile of his, with the obtuse nose and deerstalker. He was advancing from the ally opposite Farley's home, and wore an implacable, weighty frown. As he passed he seemed not to notice Miss Coombes, who beckoned to him; he was, after all, one of only two faces she really knew in the city. But he didn't stop, although she was certain he must have heard her.

  Perhaps she looked the part of a beggar or miscreant in the fading light?

  Much as she doubted it, Morrigan found herself watching as Ulisse wound into the diffused, nearly abandoned bazaar. His soft boots didn't seem to make a sound over the crooked rises of the makeshift plaza, and there was even more of an object, even more of a resolve behind his steady advance than usual. He was stealthy and bristling with power, as though galvanized by the chase. Was he after a criminal, she wondered? The one Farley had mentioned, earlier?

  No, she realized as a slim woman dressed in yeoman's garb met him. They drew close in the dark gray shadow of a baker's shop, the baker's stall and business having long since withdrawn to the welcoming fold of storage or bed. The sinuous young lady greeting Ulisse was certainly ready to hit a mattress, her wide dark eyes sparkling, her form accentuated by unnecessary gesticulations as she conversed with the Investigator.

  He didn't seem interested, predictably. Indeed, Morrigan would wager that, hidden though he was in the aforementioned swathe of darkness, Ulisse's pragmatic features hadn't moved. He must have said something, because the woman pouted (even Coombes could see that full lip jutting out) and presumably simpered before a reprimand enticed her to take something from her pockets. It glinted briefly in what little refulgence pierced the site of their rendezvous, and Ulisse hid it swiftly in the folds of his great-cloak.

  He didn't even seem to stay to hear the woman's farewell. Instead, he was off, plunging into the greater obscurity of the bridge's narrow alleyways. The woman's posture and too-swift stride from that place indicated frustration, but Coombes did not care for her. With the investigator gone she turned away. Meat was all but forgotten as she bustled toward Farley's once more, her groceries nearly flattened beneath her excited grip.

  What a queer scene she'd happened upon! What a mystery the Investigator's actions were! And who had the woman been? In her haste Morrigan scuffed her right shoe, and much as she prided herself on taking care of her possessions she didn't notice as she flew right up to 939 Wocker street and admitted herself, short of breath and cheeks flushed by the kind of fantasies that o
nly an educated imagination can entertain.

  "Risk," she called out as she entered, "I saw Investigator Ulisse in the market!"

  As she swept in Farley looked up from his armchair by the hearth. The desk showed evidence of his restless sojourn there, so she could only assume that he had been alternately pacing and switching seats. There was still something dour to his grin as he looked up at her, raising a brow.

  "From the looks of it he stole you away on a cloud only to return you without your purity or, judging by the looks of your grocery bag, meats, unless you sinned and placed them in the bottom."

  "Oh hush!" she reprimanded him as she set the bag down on the floor. "He was speaking to this woman—."

  "You're a gossip. Why am I not surprised?" Farley said scathingly, though there was a glimmer of interest peeking lambently from behind his fading smile, the careful arrangement of disinterest. Morrigan was, at the present, too eager to divulge to make him beg for her information, and thus she made a breach in her usual discipline and continued:

  "He was speaking to this woman, and she was trying to win him over coquetting, but he didn't seem interested. Then she slipped him something silver and he left."

  "Unusual," Farley said ruminatively. "Normally he's the one slipping the women something silver. He's a real scamp about the female race. I doubt that you should get so worked up, however, Miss Coombes. In all likelihood he's scouting out the politics of our present case."

  "But it wasn't a courtesan—or, not a fancy one," Morrigan insisted with some acumen as she ignored the lie about Ulisse's habits. "It was a dark woman dressed like a yeoman."

  "Dark, did you say?" Farley asked. "Dark in the same manner as our Investigative friend?"

  "Yes! And when I tried to speak to him he didn't seem to recognize me at all."

  "Hmmm..." Smiling again, reflexively, young Risk stroked at his chin. "This thins the plot considerably."

  "Thins it?"

  "Yes," Farley told her. "Thins. You've been somewhat useful today. There is rabbit in the cellar; I wasn't going to tell you there was meat, but I suppose you've earned that trifling of honesty." He turned back to the papers he'd lain over himself, staring at all the parchment at once as though if he could fit them all together they'd be a map, or a diagram.

  "Clearly," Miss Coombes admonished him as he didn't offer to help with the heavy bag, nor the meal, "Investigator Ulisse works much more studiously than you do."

  "Clearly," Farley repeated noncommittally, breezily.

  "Do you ever look into politics?," she wondered aloud, conversationally. "You'd be good at it."

  "No," Risk told her, and for a moment she could have sworn that he wasn't grinning like an idiot, but then, perhaps it was her imagination. "In politics you have to believe what you say so much you start thinking it's real. You have to lose yourself in the lie. And the day I get that tangled will be..." he hesitated. "Unfortunate."

  Morrigan paused in the doorway, studying him as he fixed his eyes pointedly back at the charcoal smudges over his arrangement. He was very young, but there was an air of experience about the boy, she would give him that. Harrowing experience. She wondered where he'd come from, that his morals and decorum had been so warped. She wondered if he had ever known pain.

  "...how much of what you just said was false?" she asked at length, much more casually than she meant it.

  Farley smiled. "All of it, of course."

  But then that, too, was a lie.