by Dan Abnett
"Look," he said, "could you do me a real favour?" The roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd, the eldorados of my life, were so close, I could almost taste them. They didn't taste very nice in point of fact, but I was sure I would get used to them. Like scotch. I was damned if I would let anything jeopardise their acquisition at this eleventh hour. I was determined to know the right people, make the right moves, grease the right palms, and do just about anything and everything I could to endear myself to anyone and everyone who could bunk me up the ladder of stardom, one rung at a time (though I drew the line at getting anything pierced, and other peoples' beards brought me out in a rash).
I smiled Cedarn a smile so broad each point ended in an ear-lobe.
"Anything," I said, selflessly.
In an unmarked sedan chair, parked unobtrusively down a rent-passage behind the Swan, Serjeant Clinton Eastwoodho lowered his telescope and noted down the time in blue pencil in his blue-pencil log.
Eleven forty-six, he wrote. Unknown subject entered Swan seventeen minutes ago. Believed to have spoken with Agent Borde.
Eastwoodho underlined the word spoken. He sat back in the darkness of the shuttered box, and sucked grape juice through a straw from his Service-issue flask. The bourbon he'd laced the juice with at a frozen five-thirty that morning crept sluggishly into his body like warm quicksilver.
He stretched, as best the box would allow, and reached over to his waiting telescope. Then, with a snap of his hand, he lunged around and drew his pistol from the holster on the seat nail. The all-steel weight of the ten-shot pinfire harmonica felt good in his hand, and a frighteningly brief blur was all that linked its position in the holster to its place in his hand.
The scent of gun-oil wreathed the close air.
"Boom boom boom boom," he breathed, through his teeth, pointing the massive handgun through his spy-slit.
"I gotcha, punk," he murmured. "Do you feel opportune?"
Eastwoodho lowered the gun. The view through the spyhole had suddenly got interesting. A blond gent in Frenchie clothes, carrying a lute, had just emerged from the Swan, and hailed a sedan. Already, he was moving off down Pawket Street towards the Colchester Road.
"Oi!" bellowed Eastwoodho from the sedan chair.
The two army bruisers, who were leaning on the wall nearby, smoking roll-ups, leapt up and accelerated away with the chair.
"That chair! Follow it!" yelled Eastwoodho through the sideflap. Officer Eastwoodho. In Pursuit. First and Pawket he wrote on his message slate and tossed it out of the window to his runner.
The chair-boys he was chasing were good. They jogged into the slow lane on Skinner's, and then cut a daring sharp right across the traffic onto Mermaid. A keg-wagon had to break sharply as they cut it up, and almost jack-knifed. Traces and wiffleboards tore loose, and upset barrels exploded on the road. His own chair-men were highly trained and fitted with the latest in anti-slip boot soles. They leapt the debris, dodged the prancing horses and the bellowing drover, and banked hard into Mermaid.
Ahead, the quarry rounded into Cordwainer Street, the chair leaning out dangerously with the torque. Eastwoodho lit his blue-lensed lamp, hung it out on the roof of the chaise, and began ringing his handbell. People stopped and looked. They got out of his way quickly, and he liked it like that.
From Cordwainer, they really picked up speed, and began to close on the suspect vehicle. The runaway's men were panting and red in the face. His CIA men were known for their high performance and road-holding. Eastwoodho had his gun ready.
Without warning, the quarry cut left into Swithen's. Eastwoodho's vehicle overshot, did a heel-brake turn, ran backwards, and pelted off after it. A dangerous corner down into Craven Hill almost had them spinning out. The right shoe of his front runner pattered out across the cobbles, but he managed to right himself and keep up the pace. Eastwoodho rang his bell so hard, the clapper flew off out of the window.
They drew alongside the quarry: chairs and runners bobbing and thundering down Broderers Lane, neck and neck. Eastwoodho leaned out of the window.
"Pull over!" he yelled. The blond man in the other chair looked across at him and shrugged in confusion.
"Me?" he mouthed.
Eastwoodho reached for his gun, but heard his front chairman gasp in alarm. The end of the lane was the site for an occasional market, and Friday was one of those occasions. The stalls narrowed the lane width to single file. The thoroughfare wasn't wide enough for both speeding sedans.
"Brakes!" screamed Eastwoodho. They skidded, and knocked sideways into a stand of vegetables.
Eastwoodho screeched, leapt out of the pranged chair and spat out a lump of rogue aubergine.
The quarry had fared no better. Trying to pull clear, it had caught on the awning of a lace-maker's stall, and the chairmen were currently trying to reverse out of a pile of ruffs. Eastwoodho ran across to them with his gun braced in a straight-armed, two-handed grip.
"Hands up! Now!" he snarled. The chair-men obliged, and the sedan thumped heavily onto the cobbles.
"You in the chair! Step out! Keep your hands where I can see them. Step out and place your hands on the hood. Now!"
The blond man in French clothes clambered out of the sedan as instructed.
"Trying to give me the slip, eh, punk?" Eastwoodho began. He narrowed his papercut eyes.
The blond wig slipped off.
"I think that was sort of the idea," smiled I, Wllm Beaver. "Now what happens?"
9 Lady Scritti of Trabant, after the first night of Titus Androgynous.
10 Cyril Scrope Esq., after three bottles of sack.
11 I honestly do not know, but he sounds like the most tremendous twat.
THE FIFTEENTH CHAPTER.
More of what happened on Friday
(which includeth a great, great SECRET).
At roughly the same moment, as the disjointed strokes of noon began to peal out across the City from an unnecessary number of clock-towers, another sedan came to rest in Oxstalls Lane, Deptford, and the fare climbed out and awarded his chair-men a handsome tip.
"Suck a peppermint comfit after eating garlicked sirloin, and you might pick a few more fares," he said.
The fare was dressed all in black, with a high, goffered collar, and a felt cap scrunched low on his head. It was turning into quite a warm day, and the clothes were heavy and hot, but Louis Cedarn preferred their stuffy weight to the possibilities of discovery, followed by death and several other unpleasantnesses that he could amply imagine.
Returning to Deptford, thriving little boom-town Deptford, was like coming home for the man Cedarn used to be.
He stood for a long moment on the cobbles of Oxstalls Lane, and watched the bustle all around. Since the first days of the United Fleet, it had been a place of chandlers, caulkers, hemp-dressers, joiners, and all the associated industries of sail. Just now, as clocks and hollow bellies announced lunchtime, a legion of such artisans scurried to and fro, mixing with, and through, knots of sailors on furlough. Loud and raucous, the seamen caroused rather more aimlessly down the busy street, with the eager intention of replacing the grim shipboard regimen of burgoo, botargo and banyan days with boiled brisket, floured hobs and frothy porter. Cedarn could hear a hurdy-gurdy wailing out the song about the Guinea Coast from a tavern by the Creek-Bridge.
Kentish matrons in straw hats and broad, white aprons, like galleons asail, tacked down through the market stalls with baskets of fish, cherries and marrows on their arms. Less dowdy ladies, the powdered bawds, rested their décolleté bosoms on the sills of tap-room windows and stew balconies, and winked or called cheerfully to the passing mariners. Ragged wharf-brats ran tops and hoops through the alleys between the riverside rents. A tame monkey gibbered and chirruped from the awning of a knife-sharpener's shop. Rising up behind the Deptford streets, to the west of the Creek, stood the merchants' Private Dock, the Royal Dock shipyards, the warehouses and excise barns, and a vast, gently rocking forest of masts and stays.
Cedarn's nose breathed in the smells of sea-breeze and estuary mud, timber shavings and pitch, and his ears soaked up the multi-lingual chatter of the cosmopolitan thoroughfare. It all made him feel rather homesick for distant places, even though he hadn't actually ever been to some of them.
Reluctantly, he broke his reverie and strode down the street onto Butt Lane, which ran through to the main London Road. On either side were wide market gardens, ripe with manure, trim orchards, herbal plots of madder and woad, and the wide tenter-yards where cloth was stretchered. A twin-gabled victualling house stood at a bend in the land with a walled garden to the rear. By its sign, it promised "Fine foods and suppage in the Roman Mannere". Cedarn stooped in under the low door and took a seat at an empty table. The restaurant was filling up with a noisy throng of merchants and gentlemen traders, dining on spiced faggots, spaghetti, olive bread and gnocchi. A young girl in a long smock brought him a menu slate and a bowl of pitted olives.
"Is the padrone in?" Cedarn asked her. She studied him suspiciously for a moment, and then replied that she would fetch him.
Cedarn sat back and studied the menu. It was inscribed with the house name - The Go-Betweene - at the head, under which was the scrolled legend: "The Pasta is a ForeignCountrye; they chew things differently there."
A plump, balding Italian in a gooseturd-green doublet wandered over to the table, wiping his chunky hands on a dish cloth.
"Signore? You ask-a for me?"
Cedarn looked up and returned the man's curious stare with a soft smile.
"Drew Bluett. Since when did you become Italian?"
"You make-a the mistake, signore. I am-a Guido Severino, host of this-a-"
"Drew, pull up a chair and lose that ridiculous accent," hissed Cedarn.
The man obliged, quickly, sitting across the table from Cedarn, and keeping his head and his voice low as he scrutinised him with angry bemusement.
"What's your bloody game, mate? Do I know you from somewhere?"
Cedarn nodded, still smiling, and said, "From Aleppo, and Gravelines, and an evening in Monte Cabiarca when the Prussian flag caught fire a little."
The man's eyes widened in slow realisation. He gawped, blinked and then began to chuckle in wonderment.
"Rupert-"
Cedarn hushed him.
"Call me Louis," he said. "Like you, I have found it expedient to be re-christened. Is there somewhere we can talk?"
To the back of the Go-Betweene, the walled garden held trellised vines and plum trees en espalier. Kitchen smells mingled with the garden scents, and almost-warm sunshine bathed the grass. Drew Bluett latched the back-door behind them, and then whooped and howled and hugged his guest.
"What is it? Five years?" he asked, laughing.
"Yes, but it feels like less somehow," said Triumff. Bluett punched him playfully on the arm.
"What about this Frenchie crap? This cutesie blond bob?"
"And this Roman nonsense? 'I ask-a you, signore' Honestly!" said Cedarn.
"A man has to survive. Italian food is the very fashion now, not that I expect you to know that. You always were miserably behind the times. This is a trattoria, in the Roman style all prosciutto, saltimbocca and chintz table-cloths. The punters expect the accent. It's all part of the ambience."
"Do tell."
"So why are you here? Catching up on old times at last?" asked Bluett.
Triumff shook his head.
"I need help, Drew," he said. "I'm trying to stay alive, and you were always good at that."
Drew Bluett had served the Unity with distinction for twelve celebrated years. That is to say, Drew Bluett hadn't done so much as Tom Dabyns, Truffock Roundeslay, Joachim Brukk, Geriant Malpowys, Steffan Droigt, Baldesar Boccho Triumff forgot the rest. Bluett's talent was espial, that so-called second oldest of professions (the first, of course, being cave realtor), and in the guise of three dozen or more fictions, had plied his art of intelligence across the courts of the European Unity. They had met in Venice in ninety-six, and their paths had crossed many times since. Twice, Rupert Triumff had run Bluett's coded letters of espial down the Channel in a fast sloop, and delivered them to anonymous spymasters and case-officers at nervous midnight trysts. Once, with only a rapier, a burning artillery linstock and a leaking dorey, he had pulled Bluett from the clutches of a torturer of the Prussian navy, and rowed his comatose form to safety across the Monte Cabiarca Sound, while two Prussian galleasses burnt and foundered at their moorings. This had been during the six-month Prussian Uprising, when the Blameless had been blockaded in Gramercy Harbour, and Triumff had had nothing better to do.
Since such glory days, times had changed. The Privy Council - with Lord Slee its chief mover - had become alarmed at the autonomous power of the intelligence community, and had cooked up ways of curtailing its powers, or turning them in ways the Council could control. Then came the infamous "Sedangate" affair, when Lord Effingham, Her Majesty's Comptroller of Espial, had been disgraced and banished.
This was a shameful matter, blown up into lurid myth by the pamphleteers and tabloiders. Effingham had been caught kerb-crawling in his sedan chair off Holborn, propositioning gigolos in cipher. In the wake of the scandal, Effingham had died in exile, a broken man (when a harpsichord mysteriously fell on him), and his espial "Circus" had been dismantled. In a house-cleaning purge authorised by Effingham's Council-sponsored replacement, Lord Blindingham, the Circus's many brave agents were deemed untrustworthy, and either hounded from the country, or suffered long, fabricated treason-trials and came to sticky ends, thanks to Lord Slee's newly imposed capital punishment of hanging, drawing and syruping.
A few, a very few, turned to their hard-learned skills, and melted into the fabric of British life as different men. In the power vacuum that followed, the previously impotent CIA rose to dominance as the new Secret Service. Many at Court believed it wouldn't be long before they too found themselves on the business end of a "treason-purge" from the Privy Council. In his present circumstances, Rupert Triumff found that last concept fundamentally reassuring.
Drew Bluett had been one of those who had survived it all. Quiet hearsay, from one confidante to another, had allowed Triumff to learn of Bluett's new station in life, running a victualling house cheekily named after his old profession. Triumff had remained, dutifully, out of contact. He had reasoned that Bluett would ill-favour a visit from his past life, and the potential damage that it might do.
But now, Triumff had a reason.
"You're in a pretty fix, by all accounts," mused Bluett, sitting on a bench under the plum arbour and uncorking a bottle of cassis. "All London is a-chatter with your 'treason', Rupert. They say you've made a pact with Beelzebub and plan to threaten the Queen's person. They say you're specially trained in fiendishness. They say you've brought back new Magicks from your new continent."
"Do they?" asked Triumff, all but growling. It wasn't a question. He took the glass of liquor that Bluett offered, and downed most of it in one gulp.
"Let me tell you, Drew, of some secret things," he began.
So it was, in that walled garden in Deptford, that Rupert Triumff unfolded his deepest confidences to Drew Bluett, confidences that, until then, had been known only to Triumff, Agnew and Doll, and Uptil, of course. Only one other great secret in the Unity was known by so few personages, and that was the secret conspiracy of Slee, Jaspers, Salisbury and de la Vega.
In this momentous hour, a close-kept secret grew a little larger. A cloud passed in front of the sun and the garden grew chill. Triumff shuddered, and felt as if all London was hushed and listening. He waited for a moment as the hubbub of Deptford around about filled his ears and reassured him, and then he drank another glass and began.
