Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (23 page)

    “Unless you’ve been talking rashly, no one but you and I know of the Play,” said Slee, his voice rising in anger.

    “No one but you, me and your circle of allies, you mean,” replied the visitor, veiled sarcasm in his words. “Can you trust them all?”

    Slee thought of a fat, farting, uncouth Wiltshireman, and let the notion simmer in his brain.

    “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.

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?”