As Emily climbed down from the buggy in the market square, she spotted a blind man begging there. He sat with his back to a wall, holding out a cap with a stolid, grim patience. He had a long coat wrapped about him, but within it, his shirt was a soldier’s issue. A leather band covered up his eyes.
‘Poldry, a coin.’
The old servant took out their purse, lighter than Emily would have liked, and found a penny for the man.
Alice tutted. ‘Emily, if we are to present ourselves to the King . . .’
‘You do not even know that he will come to Deerlings,’ Emily hissed at her, scandalized, for the girl had spoken quite loud enough for the beggar to hear her. ‘And this man is here now. He has fought for his country.’
‘And will you give away our funds to every supplicant until we have nothing?’ Alice retorted.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Emily told her. ‘Why must you always exaggerate . . . ?’ But, even as she said it, her eyes were roving the square. There were fewer market stalls than she remembered and, of those she saw, even fewer had the wares she might have expected. Little food, she noticed, and many vendors seemed to have simply brought in a jumbled haul of possessions in the hope that someone might desperately need old shoes, grimy clothes or battered furniture. And plenty of people in Chalcaster seemed suddenly to have lost all idea of what they really needed or wanted, instead staring at the detritus of other people’s lives as though it was impossible to know what preparation the future might require. They were mostly women, those who tried to sell, as well as those who picked over it all and did not buy. Women and old men, and in amongst them were the veterans.
These were the worst examples, she knew: men who would not die and could not be returned to the fighting. The new hospitals were ruthless in sending men back to the war, if they could serve in any way at all. Here were men who could not march, who could not hold a gun, who could not see the enemy. They passed through the thinning crowd with their awkward, arrhythmic gaits, each man moving to a different drummer. Alice’s expression was one of nervous revulsion. Mary would probably have been frightened if she were here, seeing in these men her husband or her brother. Emily herself was surprised to find that they made her angry. She seemed to have been angry a great deal recently, in a way that her tutors would once have beaten out of her. It was not becoming, they would have said. But it is what I am becoming. These men were the victims of the Denlanders. They were husbands and fathers and sons whose only crime had been to love their country and their king. They had gone to the war to defend all they held dear, and the war machine of the Denlanders had ground them up and spat them back, ruined them for all time with its guns and its knives.
She found the thought came close to overwhelming her, and she clutched at the side of the buggy for support, her knuckles turning white with the effort.
‘I know,’ Alice agreed, misreading her reaction. ‘Why doesn’t Northway do something about all this? If these men are in need of help, he could deal with it. Isn’t that what he’s for? Why have them all out in plain sight?’
Emily knew she should reproach Alice over that, but the girl had dangled some attractive bait before her. Why wasn’t Mr Northway providing aid to the veterans? The obvious answer was that it would cost money, and he surely coveted every penny the Crown gifted him with, and squirrelled as much of it away for his own use as he could. And so these brave, damaged men must hobble and beg. It was easy to look at them now and see his leering face condemning them.
And he was culpable, surely . . . but Emily found the thought ringing hollow for all that. Mr Northway was wicked but he was not the war.
Her eye was drawn then to the Mayor-Governor’s offices, which dominated one side of the market square. Another two of his soldiers were posted at the door, and they had guns now in place of the glaives. She had been hearing stories of how harshly they dealt with many petitioners.
She weighed her purse – light enough, given the tight hold Mary had kept on the family accounts. ‘Alice, why don’t you go and commence negotiations with Mrs Shevarler,’ she suggested, with a nod towards the dressmaker’s.
‘Please tell me you are not going to exhaust any more of our funds this way,’ Alice said crossly. ‘Mary will be furious.’
‘Mary says that the honour of our family is about looking after those that depend on us,’ Emily pointed out. She was not at all sure that Mary would quite see things her way, but she got the words out smoothly enough. ‘And it will only be a little.’ The words rang hollow as she looked across the market square.
Leaving Poldry at the buggy, she set out, facing the impossible task of deciding who was in greatest need, and where her charity might benefit most. The more she looked, the more need there seemed to be: injured soldiers who had marched out whole and come back only in part; thin, grimy women who had no living and nobody left to support them – and their children, all too often. Emily slowed to a halt, feeling something harden inside her. She had so little to give: could she find even a penny for them all? And what would a penny buy them? She could feel a thought hovering over her, waiting for its moment: Surely they cannot all really be in need. Surely some are faking, are taking advantage of the kindness of others. And if some are, then why not most of them? Or all? Despite the evidence of her senses, how convenient it would be if she could adopt that thought: what a salve that would be for her conscience.
This must be how Mr Northway teaches himself to think.
All eyes, she was sure, were fixed upon her. The honour of her family was at stake. Closing her ears to Alice’s mutterings, she got her purse out and began distributing small coins almost at random, passing down the row of stalls trying to distinguish, via some hitherto unguessed-at sense, the truly desperate from the merely needy. The pennies fell from her fingers into the cupped hands, the bowls, the threadbare hats of her targets. She felt as if she was pouring them into a hole, into a bottomless darkness. Increasingly, she felt very much that Alice was right. She found herself with that thought in her head, as she was brought up short before another man with a band of cloth covering his eyes. She felt as though she was waking from a dream, only to find herself trapped in another one.
One more coin and then I go, but something was staying her hand, some odd intuition. The man before her had a palm out hopefully, but there was something amiss about his posture, a tension here that she could not account for.
‘Emily!’ Alice had finally reached the end of her fraying tether. ‘We’re here to be measured! You promised.’ And she was pushing forward, forcing Emily to step back. The blind beggar’s head shifted sideways, that sightless gaze fixing on Alice.
Everything happened so rapidly that she barely registered the events as they unfolded, only pieced them together in retrospect. As Alice remonstrated with her, the beggar lurched up, barged into her, then was off down a side street and away from the market. Alice let out a gasp of utter outrage, mouth open to deliver some acid comment, but then she let out a wail of dismay.
‘My purse!’
Emily had sometimes called her a thoughtless girl – and applied that label silently in her head far more often – but she herself did not stop to think at all. In an instant, her feet took her in pursuit of the thief, leaving her mind to catch up. She was still getting past the thought, He wasn’t really blind, when the fugitive turned another corner ahead of her. When she followed him round it, she had got as far as, Thank God I wore good shoes! Catching sight of him making another turn – his face a pale flash as he glanced over his shoulder – Emily pushed herself onwards determinedly. She was full of indignation that this man should come to her town and steal from her sister. The very fact of it was a slight against her family. What is Mr Northway doing that he cannot keep order on the streets?
And then she had him: the last turn he had chosen was a blind alley, and she almost ran straight into him as he tried to make it out ahead of her. Abruptly she was standing between him and his escape route. Only then did she
finally reach the thought: What if this wasn’t a good idea?
They were both breathing heavily: she was not used to running, and he was a thin-limbed, half-starved specimen of a man. The blindfold had been pushed back up his forehead, revealing wild mad-looking eyes.
‘Get out of my way!’ he spat at her.
‘Give me my sister’s purse.’ The words had fallen into place during the chase. Now, confronting him, she was not at all sure they were wise, but they came out anyway.
He bared his teeth and, with an ugly jerking motion, he had a blade in his hand – just an old kitchen knife, marbled with rust. ‘Just leave it,’ he hissed. His voice quivered, and she thought there were tears in his eyes. ‘Just get out of the way.’
‘You’re a deserter.’ Again, not the most diplomatic remark to level at a man with a knife, but her mind was still rattling after the chase. She was very aware that this was not a part of town she had ever frequented.
‘What if I am?’ He made an abortive gesture towards her with the knife, perhaps hoping that she would leap back and give him enough space to slip by, but she seemed to be nailed to the spot.
‘My brother, he’s fighting in the war,’ she told him. ‘My brother-in-law, too. Why shouldn’t you do your part?’
She saw very clearly when something snapped inside him, and abruptly he was right in her face, her nose filled with the unwashed reek of him, his blade wavering at the edge of her vision. ‘I did my part!’ he snapped. ‘I was a year on the Couchant. I took my wound! Twice I took my wound! But they wouldn’t let me rest. They had to send me back, over and over. You can’t know. You can’t tell me what it’s like.’
She kept herself very still. He had the stolen purse in one hand, close enough that she could have just taken it off him, had she dared move. The knife was an abstraction she did not go looking for, in case breaking his gaze set it in motion. ‘Are you going to stab me, then?’
A great shuddering breath went out of him, and it took something with it, blunting the edge of his desperation. ‘I just want to go somewhere they won’t make me fight.’ His thin, wretched voice snagged and caught as it came out of his throat. ‘I’ve got nothing, just . . .’
Alice will never forgive me. She took a step back and to one side. She could not quantify what it was she felt: it was not pity exactly, and it was not fear either, for, throughout, she had not felt any of the terror this encounter should have brought with it. Almost, she thought, it was duty that gripped her: as if she was writing a page into the text of how a daughter of Grammaine should behave. Magnanimously, it seemed.
He stepped away from her, the knife still held between them, circling her as though she was the dangerous one who might attack him at any moment. If he had simply taken to his heels, then he might have escaped. He wasted too much time, though, picking his away around her.
There was a shout from along the street, and she saw the flash of a red jacket. Then the deserter tried to make his exit, springing into motion away from her, away from that pursuit. She turned to watch him put distance between them, and there was a sound like a sharp rap, nothing dramatic at all. Even as it registered in her ears he was already falling, his hands thrust forward and up, as though he was offering both purse and knife to some higher power. Then he lay stretched out on the cobbles, weapon and bounty spilled from his grip.
Only then, after it was done, did Emily realize that she had seen a man die.
Alice hugged her fiercely when she arrived. ‘How could you be so stupid?’ she shouted, and similar sentiments. The two redjackets – Mr Northway’s own doormen, she realized – examined the body, and one reloaded his musket lazily.
‘All right, miss.’ The guard not attending to his gun nodded to her. ‘Looks like we were just in time, eh? His nibs’ll be glad of that.’
‘I was in no danger,’ she told him fiercely. ‘You didn’t have to shoot him.’
He frowned at her apparent ingratitude. ‘Law and order, miss. It’s our job. Can’t have thieves running all over, can we?’
‘But you could have caught him and locked him up.’
His face admitted no comprehension. ‘Saved ourselves the cost of a hanging, is all.’ He exchanged a glance with his fellow, eyes rolling, eyebrows raised. Practically written on his face was: These Marshwic women.
‘I shall have words with your master, the mayor!’ she snapped at them, a threat without any teeth whatsoever. ‘I shall go to his office right now.’ Her voice sounded thin and pathetic even in her own ears.
‘You’ll be waiting a while then, miss. His nibs is off somewhere on his own business. No idea when he’ll be back at his desk. Now, if that’s all, miss, we’d better find someone to come and clean up this mess.’
She watched as they sauntered off, almost barging into Poldry as he came wheezing along. For a moment an absolutely incandescent rage gripped her, not at them so much as at a world that she could not change or affect, strive as she might. ‘How could you, Alice?’ she hissed, knowing, as she spoke, that she was being bitterly unfair. ‘How could you go to Northway’s men?’
‘How could you just run off after him? I thought you were going to get . . . I don’t know what could have happened to you!’ Alice retorted hotly. ‘Emily, he was dangerous. He might have done anything.’
Anything was just about the last thing the deserter might have done, Emily considered hollowly. His options had been stripped away from him by degrees, until this – this miserable end – was all that was left for him.
She found that her heart was hammering away inside her, a belated response to all she had been through. She wanted to remonstrate with Alice some more, but she knew she would be in the wrong. Somehow, this time, Alice was the sensible one, even when she insisted that Poldry go and recover her purse because she did not want to be near the corpse.
And Mr Northway will hear all about this from his men, no doubt, when he’s back from whatever seedy dealings he’s engaged in. She could picture his amusement all too clearly.
By then, Alice was practically tugging at her sleeve, wanting to leave the body behind, wanting to leave this mean, poor neighbourhood. Wanting, most of all and of course, to commission a new dress. The entire interlude had been nothing to her but a minor obstacle, now circumvented.
The seamstress was lean, dark Mrs Shevarler, and in days of recent memory she had been somewhat aloof whenever Alice was about. The girl demanded the sort of attention due a princess, and the Marshwic money was frequently insufficient to actually purchase anything. Left to her own devices, Alice could waste the best part of a day with fruitless measurements and viewing swatches of fabric. Emily was almost hoping for that brusque manner but this time Mrs Shevarler seemed delighted to see the pair of them. She clucked and fussed over Alice, bustling around her shop with desperate cheer as if to make up for the staff that she was lacking. Alice, for her part, took the chance to turn the tables, making a great play of how dusty it all was, how small, how mean. Emily rolled her eyes. And yet the shop did have an uncared-for air about it, and she reckoned that business here had probably been worse than poor for a long time. Most of Mrs Shevarler’s clientele had eschewed their local estates, and for those who remained, fine tailoring was not a priority.
Alice’s standoffishness did not survive the first bolt of cloth, and Emily was soon trying hard to share her sister’s enthusiasm. She felt that Alice had the right idea, somehow, to simply take joy wherever she could, no matter how shallow it seemed. The mills of Emily’s mind continued inexorably, though, grinding over and over what had happened at the market, and all the frustrations of life.
Poldry had gone off to buy provisions, or at least to try. Even with money in hand, there was no guarantee of that, these days. The demands of the war and the feeding of the army took a toll of the harvests, while there were fewer hands to bring those harvests in. Emily felt a terrible sense of strain, a pressure as great as the sky. She felt the iron hands of Denland prying and pushing, just a thin line o
f red being all that was holding the enemy back.
And so she let Alice chatter on because that way at least someone was happy, if just for a while. Emily’s own thoughts wallowed and struggled, emerging from the dark only when she was asked a question. When Mrs Shevarler raised the subject of money, for example – or at least made hints about just how grand these dresses were going to be – she stirred herself to begin some veiled negotiations. Alice, of course, wanted everything, and Emily knew how little they could afford to spend. And yet it seemed that Alice would get her own way, for once, because abruptly Mrs Shevarler was letting it all go for a fraction of the value, almost throwing her finest wares at them. For a moment Emily assumed it was because she was a crafts-woman, recently lacking the chance to truly exercise her skills. Then she realized that the dressmaker must simply be desperate for money, with useless unsold stock cluttering her storerooms. It was a buyer’s market.
And, despite all that, Mrs Shevarler chattered on, doing her best to pretend that nothing whatsoever was wrong. She was a proud woman and, though she offered more and more value to entice just a few more coins from the Marshwic purse, there was still no suggestion in her voice or her bearing that she was seeking charity.
Then Poldry came by, long-faced and confessing that he had found almost nothing at market for them, and Mrs Shevarler changed entirely. In a voice far sharper and quicker, she was soon instructing Poldry on just where in Chalcaster he should go – where the locals themselves went for food. And, she added, while he was there, might he save her the journey . . . ? And, although she would never normally ask for a down payment from her most esteemed customers – and here she had changed register again, adopting her superior voice for her superior clientele – she wondered if perhaps, if just perhaps . . . ?
Guns of the Dawn Page 5
