by Dan Abnett
"Perhaps not," he said. "If the Play is compromised, we will all die on the scaffold. See to it that this espial is taken off, quickly, before he can bleat to Woolly, and do us harm. See to it."
"O'Bow, p'rhaps?" asked the visitor.
"I don't care how," said Slee. "In truth, I don't want to know. Just be away and do it."
"As you command," said Bonville de Tongfort, pulling his cloak up around his neck.
CHAPTER SIXTEENTH.
Which is set upon Friday night
& Saturdaye morning.
Cat's eyes watched the moonlit Swan. Cat's paws did up the fastenings of its doublet, and it walked slowly around to the rear door of the theatre.
Tide bells clanged in the darkness, and moorlines hummed away from the fo'c'sle spinners. The air smelled of rain, though it was temporarily between showers. A pewter moon made occasional appearances in the puffy blackness above, edging the scudding cumulonimbus with silver traces.
Giuseppe Giuseppo watched his cargo-trunks being winched away onto the quayside by hulking porters, who would, no doubt, take a fair chunk of his gold away with them for being roused this late.
"It's been an education," said Master Luccio frankly, his shoulders relaxed for the first time in three days.
"For me, too." said Giuseppe, smiling at Luccio, and shaking his moist hand. "Will you wait in port until I return?"
"I'd rather not," said the master. "No offence, signore. You've given me a sack of coin and tested my nerves to the limit. I'd best be off to do something safer. Shark fishing with my wedding tackle as bait, maybe. Perhaps making rude signs at the British Admiralty revenue cutters."
Giuseppe nodded with a smile.
"I understand," he said. "You've been brave enough for one lifetime."
"You, I sense, are going to have to be brave for several more," said Luccio. "God speed, sir."
"God, Master Luccio, has little to do with it," said Giuseppe.
On the quayside, he turned to wave once again to Master Luccio, but the man had gone below decks. The Battista Urbino rocked gently in the harbour swell, and rain began to fall again.
"England," Giuseppe said, smiling up into the drizzle spattering off his face.
It was just before one of the clock. Plymouth had collapsed in a drunken stupor an hour since.
An Admiralty man in mouse-beige velvet and an oilskin stumbled over to him with a clipboard held in still-dreaming hands.
"It's bloody late for this kind of show, signore. Couldn't you have dropped anchor in the bay and waited til dawn to come ashore?" he asked.
Giuseppe shook his head. He was wider awake than he'd ever been.
"Urgent business. What must I sign, how much do I owe, and where can I get a fast coach and a steady team?" he asked.
"At this time of night?" asked the official with a "youmust-be-sodding-joking" absence of usefulness that made the English despised the world over. "You must be sodding joking."
* * *
De Quincey had found that a stack of leather-bound statutes made a surprisingly comfy pillow for one in the furthest stages of fatigue, and was just beginning to drool on paragraph one hundred and thirty-five (The abatement of public fornication) when a thump at the door started him back to the painful reality of two-fifteen AM in New Hibernian Yard.
"Woff?" he slurred, his lips numb with sleep. He wiped the spittle off his slashed sleeve.
"Sorry to wake you, sir," began Serjeant Burnside, poking his head around the ward-room door.
"No, you're not, Burnside."
"Yes I am, sir," contradicted the thick-set huscarl. "It's just that we have a matter in interview room three that requires your attention."
"I'm coming," sighed de Quincey, rising and pulling his popinjay mandillion off the back of the bench. It was close to freezing in the stone hallways of the Yard, and de Quincey followed Burnside down the passageway, shivering. Low moans from seriously unhappy prisoners floated up through the brick.
"Quiet night?" de Quincey asked through a yawn.
"Until now," said Burnside. "Bob Lucky's team picked this one up in Drury Lane just forty minutes since. She was frying a pair of cutpurses."
"She?"
"Old girl from up east," said Burnside.
"Frying?" asked de Quincey.
"Magick, sir. All blue and crackly, Bob said."
"Great," heaved de Quincey, rubbing his eyes and fingercombing his bird's nest hairdo. "Have you informed Infernal Affairs or the Guild?"
"Not yet, sir," said Burnside. "After last night's little threeand-nine, I thought you'd want to talk to her first."
They had come to rest outside the riveted door of interview room three.
"Right," said de Quincey, taking a deep breath. "Give me her charge sheet."
"There, sir." said Burnside, handing the parchment over.
"Grundy, Mother No known priors. Nothing at all, in fact. She quiet?"
"She is now, sir," said Burnside.
"Go and get me a coffee, Burnside."
"Yes, sir," said Burnside. "I've laid on some nantwiches, sir."
"Don't expect me to eat them, then. And Burnside"
"Yes, sir?"
"It's two-and-eight, not three-and-nine," said de Quincey.
"Yes, sir," said Burnside.
With what must have been his hundredth weary sigh of the week, de Quincey opened the heavy door and stepped into the room.
It was as cold as some place de Quincey had no intention of going in the next life. Present in the starkly blank chamber was a duty guardsman in full breast and gorget with a horrendously bladed lugged partisan, the stenographer at his portable lectern, and Serjeant Lucky, sitting across the table from a pinched, elderly lady who had all the physical presence of a gardening implement.
Lucky looked up.
"Let the record state, Chief Investigator de Quincey entered the room at" He glanced at the hourglass on the desk. "Two nineteen." There was some scribbling from the lectern.
"Carry on, Lucky," de Quincey nodded, closing the door, and standing back for a while to get the measure of the suspect.
"So, tell me again, missus, what were you doing to those chuffing foisters in the lane?"
"I'm not your missus," replied the old woman.
"No, indeed! My missus has got a bit more meat on her, if you takes my meaning. Not that I don't admire the more willowy figure, you understand, but, well, my missus is built for comfort, not acceleration"
Lucky tailed off. It had been a long night for him, de Quincey could tell. He hardly possessed the keenest investigative mind at the best of times, and these were not them. De Quincey hazarded that Lucky's mental state was currently as marshalled and organised as a Bacchanalia with St Vitus Dance.
"Where was I?" murmured Lucky, largely to himself.
"At the end of your tether?" suggested the stenog.
Mother Grundy seemed to smirk, though she rapped twigfingers on the tabletop with impatience. Lucky looked around at de Quincey, his expression of the imploring variety.
De Quincey sat down in the chair that Lucky had vacated.
"Let the record state: de Quincey takes over interview at two-twenty. Delete that garbage about Lucky's wife, please, stenog," said Lucky, relieved.
There was some hasty scratching.
"Changing the police records now, eh?" asked Mother Grundy in a voice that sounded like an un-oiled weathervane squeaking around in the wind.
"No. Just trying to save time and get to the real point. You're being evasive, ma'am," said de Quincey.
"Am I?" she asked.
"Yes you are. Just then in fact. Now I haven't yet been fully acquainted with the affray that led to your detention. Would you like to tell me what happened in your own words?" asked de Quincey.
Mother Grundy pattered her fingers on the tabletop again, and said, "This is wasting precious time."
"Let it waste. Either you tell me, or you wait while I read off the stenog's report," said de Quincey.
>
"Very well. I was going down this street-"
"Drury Lane, sir," put in Lucky, his notebook open.
"And these two imbeciles leapt out and said I think it was 'Give us yorn purse, old hag'"
"Why do you say they were imbeciles?" asked de Quincey.
Mother Grundy looked affronted. "Because any but a fool knows it is wrong to tangle with me."
"Where are you from, Mother Grundy?" asked de Quincey.
"Ormsvile Nesbit, Suffolkshire."
"Where you are justly famous, I'm sure."
"You can be sure of it, sir," said Mother Grundy.
"But perhaps your fame has not yet spread to the City, ma'am?"
"Perhaps not. Perhaps that would explain why there were so many fools on the road to London," she agreed.
De Quincey nodded, and said, "Undoubtedly, ma'am. So what did you do to these imbeciles then?"
"I wrapped them in a sheath of phlogestonic flame," said Mother Grundy proudly.
"All blue and crackly it were," put in Lucky over de Quincey's shoulder.
"Thank you, serjeant."
"And their flesh was burned like old steak and their eyes did melt-"
"Yes, yes. Shut up now, Lucky," said de Quincey.
"Shutting up, sir."
"So you admit to using bedevilment to spurn your attackers?"
"Indeed. I am a warlitch," the old hag admitted.
"I beg pardon?" asked de Quincey.
Mother Grundy looked across at him witheringly. "I know full well that warlocks and witches are forbidden. I am a warlitch. It's a loophole," she said.
"Of course."
"Why are you smiling behind your hand, Mister de Quincey?"
De Quincey hadn't been aware that he was, but he was.
"No reason," de Quincey said. "Tell me now, what were you doing in Drury Lane?"
"Apart from frying imbeciles?" she asked.
"Apart from that."
"I have a great urgency. There is a grave matter in this noisome City that I must attend to."
"And that is?" asked de Quincey.
There was a long pause.
"Someone is using the Arte necromantically to destroy the Bonds That Should Be Unbroken," said Mother Grundy.
De Quincey felt a chill in the small of his back.
"What makes you say that?" he asked.
"I have felt it. I know it. Bad things are going on. I have seen the signs. I must be allowed to stop them before they get out of hand," she said.
De Quincey looked around at the others present. The guardsman was impassive, the stenographer busy. Lucky had his eyes closed and clearly wanted to be elsewhere.
"Another question, ma'am," said de Quincey. "If things really need your attention as you say, why didn't you fry the officers that tried to detain you? Why didn't you just blast past them and carry on to stop these grave matters?"
"Because I'm no murderess. Stupid they may be, but these boys are not villains. They are officials of the State. I am bound by the rule of law," said Mother Grundy. "Do you think I would still be sitting here if it was simply a matter of toasting my captors and leaving? I may be a warlitch, but I'm not a monster. As soon as you have finished all this nonsense, I will be about my business. And you will thank me for it."
"Well," said de Quincey, and then stopped, a thought having occurred to him. "What signs have you seen, Mother Grundy?"
"Corn weave, ash-tree bark, skylark song, mole burrows, flocks of sheep, furling clouds things you wouldn't read or understand," she said.
"So how do you know what you're looking for?"
"Because of dreams."
"Dreams?" asked de Quincey.
"Burning dreams that come even when I'm awake," she replied, "dreams from the sinistral side of the mind. A sunfire, a raining cloud, a blameless son, a false face, a swan, a king with a dagger, a clown with a bow. And a name One name. A stone. A jasper."
De Quincey sucked in his breath. He was suddenly profoundly aware of his heart, beating in his chest, thumping like a marching-drum.
"Get out. Get out of here now," he hissed at Lucky, the stenog and the guard. Nonplussed, they obeyed, clunking the door shut behind them.
"Tell me more about the jasper, ma'am," said de Quincey.
Tantamount O'Bow took to criticism like a duck to lava. In the opinion of Boy Simon, and the other regular topers in the Rouncey Mare, there was a particular word that described the comments on O'Bow's singing, made by two yeomen visiting the hostelry that night. The word was "inadvisable". At the time when its use was most apposite, Boy Simon and his cronies were too busy hiding behind furniture to bring it to mind, but they remembered it several days later, and had a drink to celebrate its recovery.
O'Bow had been busily doh-reh-me-ing his way through a spirited, if tortured, solfeggio when one of the yeomen had been heard to remark, "Truly, the fellow is blessed over-much with the favours of the Terpsichorean Muse." His companion had sniggered.
Silence had fallen on the Rouncey Mare, the kind of silence that usually came between the stubbing-out of a last cigarette and the chorus of hammer-clicks from a line of waiting matchlocks. Charged bumpers halted inches from open mouths. The innkeeper slowly sank down to a crouch behind the oak bar.
"Turpsy Korean?" asked O'Bow. His head twitched to the side, though his eyes never left the yeoman pair. O'Bow never looked angry. It was rumoured (generally at a distance from O'Bow measured in leagues) that he was too stupid to appreciate the concept of anger. His face always had a perky yet vacant glaze that hinted at homicidal idiocy and invited spontaneous, unrepentant apology from the world at large. It was the kind of expression that Vesuvius might have worn just prior to engulfing Pompeii, if it had had a face.
O'Bow invited the yeomen to explain the meaning of the words. They did so, haltingly, with reference to the employment of irony and sarcasm.
"Czar chasm?" asked O'Bow.
At that point, the braver of the two yeomen decided that laughter was the best medicine, and explained that, in their opinion, O'Bow's singing was - ha ha ha! - a pustular chancre on the cloaca of London's cognoscenti. He said this with an expansive laugh to all around, which begged for good-humoured support so that they could all joke it off and get on with remaining alive.
"Conk-nosed scenty?" asked O'Bow in the deathly quiet. "Who are you calling a conk-nosed scenty?"
This was, O'Bow explained, fighting talk where he came from. No one disagreed. No one was actually sure where O'Bow had come from, though they were all fairly certain that, wherever it was, it must have been happy to see him go. As most of the mother tongue, even the politer bits, seemed to be fighting talk to Tantamount O'Bow, the occupants of the Rouncey Mare had no doubt that "conk-nosed scenty" was actually heavily-armed-and-insultingly-provocative talk in O'Bow's book. "Conk-nosed scenty" was suicide by mouth. "Conk-nosed scenty" was indisputably inadvisable. To a man, the regulars dropped to the saw-dust-covered floor, leaving the yeomen marooned in a sea of quivering tables.
