Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (28 page)

    Then, a sudden shout was heard in the lane, and they all looked around. The Verger was sprinting down the bank from the high road, the hem of his robe gathered up in his hands, his hairy white calves scissoring frantically.

    “D!” yelled the Verger as he approached across the Sward, sweat dripping from his nose.

    “D!” he added as he fell against the gate, panting.

    “D what?” asked the Mayor, reaching for his pitchfork.

    Regaining his composure, the Verger turned to look at them. His face was blanched white with terror. The Mayor took a step back. The Butcher curled his lips into a snarl. The Baker almost dropped his shear. The Landlord of the Cat and Stoop slapped his apple.

    “DEMON!” completed the Verger, and fainted. As he hit the ground, he extended a telling finger helpfully towards the north road into the village.

    “Slap him,” suggested the Butcher, “repeatedly.”

    But the Baker caught his arm and turned his attention to the road. The cart thundering down the track had no horse, but the gentle slope could not explain its accelerated progress.

    “By Our Lady,” said the Mayor, gawping.

    The Butcher, the Baker, the Mayor and the Landlord of the Cat and Stoop took up their weapons and blocked its path.

    “Stand ready now,” hissed the Butcher through fused-together teeth.

    “I’m ready for anything,” said the Baker, who wasn’t.

    The Landlord of the Cat and Stoop spun his apple in slow, hypnotic arcs.

    Giuseppe Giuseppo halted his careering wagon before the four armed men. It skidded up five feet from them. The harness, which had been mysteriously suspended in mid-air in front of the cart, flopped to the earth. The air was heavy with a syrupy aroma. The Mayor, the Landlord, the Baker and the Butcher all distinctly heard the snort of horse-breath. The Baker sensed that his bladder control was about to knock off for the weekend. He held out his shear, crossed his legs, and hoped that he retained some vestige of macho posing. He didn’t, but, no one noticed.

    They were all too busy looking at the foreigner on the horse-less wagon.

    “Good day,” said Giuseppe Giuseppo with a warm smile, rising from his seat. “I am Giuseppe Giuseppo, late of La Spezia. I must apologise for my unseemly mode of transport, but I am in haste, and must be in your fair City of London with all despatch. Is this the road?”

    “What business have you in London?” asked the Mayor, coldly, the pitchfork shaking in his hands.

    “Nothing less, in truth, than the life of Her Majesty, your Queen.”

    “Get the bastard!” squeaked the Mayor.

    The Baker pitched forward, overbalanced by the weight of the shear. The Butcher pretended to trip, and accidentally drop his pig stick, and cursed profusely. The Mayor lunged at Giuseppe, who ducked. The pitchfork smacked smartly into the side of the wagon.

    “Demon!” declared the Mayor, running out of breath and pitchfork handle at precisely the same moment, and therefore hitting the side of the cart with stunning force.

    “Are you all right, sir?” asked Giuseppe Giuseppo in concern.

    Then a cooking apple on a piece of string struck him soundly in the face.

    Dazed, Giuseppe fell backwards off the cart, his head glancing off the edge of the off-side front wheel. By the time he hit the ground, he was unconscious.

    The Baker helped the Mayor to his feet. The Butcher looked at the Landlord, who shot him a wide, cocksure grin that quite belied his astonishment.

    “Very impressive,” said the Butcher.

    It bloody was, wasn’t it? thought the Landlord of the Cat and Stoop, but he didn’t say anything.

Bells had started ringing across the City. As it had been decreed that all the belfries of London should mark the festival at six in the evening, the cacophony was a little premature. The most likely explanation seemed to be that parish bellringers in north London had decided to get in a little last-minute practice, and their peals had set the whole place off in a frenzy of not-to-be-outdone ringing. Even the Sisters of the Justified Madonna had got out their tambourines. Under a table in the Rouncey Mare, Boy Simon awoke, and couldn’t believe how loud his hangover was.

    On Thames Street, de Quincey led Mother Grundy through the seething crowd and the campanological onslaught. According to a clerk at New Hibernian Yard, Lord Gull was due to inspect the Militia watching the bridge.

    En route, de Quincey and Mother Grundy had been forced to abandon their carriage at Wafer Lane due to the congested traffic, and they hurried along on foot, pushing their way through the press, ignoring the hundreds of attempts to sell them flowers, flags or fireworks.

    “Not today!” de Quincey told the umpteenth hawker with a sprig of nettles. Up ahead, he could see the Militia post. There were six men there, each holding a halberd and a sprig of nettles. As they saw de Quincey approach, they tried to hide the sprigs in embarrassment.

    “Where’s Lord Gull?” snapped de Quincey as he made it through the crowd.

    The men shrugged.

    “Where is he?” de Quincey repeated with more urgency.

    “He’s gone,” said one of the pikemen. “He was here, but he went, not five minutes ago.”

    “He took a wherry down Richmond,” said another, kicking his sprig out of sight discreetly behind a box of firecrackers on the kerb, “for the Masque.”

    De Quincey spun around, lost for words.

    “Then what now?” asked Mother Grundy with astonishing calm.

    “Richmond,” replied de Quincey.

    There wasn’t a waterman in sight on Three Cranes Pier. A queue of hopeful passengers stood on the boards, having their names taken by a young girl, who occasionally turned and wailed “Oars!” futilely at the empty river.

    “Oy!” they said as de Quincey pushed past.

    “Police business,” de Quincey growled back. He reached the girl. “How long?”

    “Name?” asked the girl, her pencil poised above her fares book.

    “How bloody long?” screamed de Quincey.

    “Twenty minutes, at the very least,” she said, “It’s a busy day. It’s Masque Saturday.”

    De Quincey took off his cap, then jumped up and down on it.

    “No need to be like that, I’m sure,” said the girl, moving on.

    “De Quincey!” His name rang out across the pier. De Quincey stopped jumping and looked. Mother Grundy stood beside a battered old dorey, which was up-turned on the pier like an exhausted turtle, an exhausted turtle with holes in its shell. “Give me a hand with this,” she ordered. Her words were as sharp as a rapier thrust, and just as chilly.

    De Quincey left his trampled cap, and hurried over. “What good’s this?” he whimpered. “It’s got holes in it, and there are no oars.”

    Mother Grundy fixed him with a look that had driven three generations of Ormsvile Nesbit children to school, no matter how brilliant their acting.

    “Do you always go to pieces in a crisis, Mr de Quincey?” she asked.

    “I don’t know. I haven’t been in many.”

    “Help me with the boat.”

    “But-“

    “It’s got holes in it, and there are no oars. I know. Complain in the rain and you just wet your head.”

    “I’m sorry?” asked de Quincey.

    “It’s a saying,” Mother Grundy explained, “and not a popular one in this City, I’ll be bound. Perhaps this one will be easier to understand: find a way, not a fault.”

    De Quincey looked down at the dorey, and almost grizzled for the first time since his sixth birthday, when a horse had eaten his new kite.

    “My mother used to say that,” he admitted. “I never knew what it meant.”

    “Then learn, Mr de Quincey,” said Mother Grundy.

    Together, they overturned the dorey and slid it down into the water. It began to sink, quickly.

    “Get in and bail,” Mother Grundy instructed.

    “Okay,” said de Quincey, meekly.

    “Hey!” cried the girl on the pier.

    “Is for horses,” Mother Grundy told her. The girl frowned and looked around at the queue, who all shrugged.

    “My feet are getting wet,” said de Quincey, bailing for all he was worth.

    “Then bail harder,” Mother Grundy hissed, climbing in beside him. The dorey went down another three inches.

    “Oh God,” said de Quincey, soaked by the spray he was making. “If I’m bailing, I can’t row, and I can’t row anyway because there aren’t any oars!”

    Mother Grundy just stood in the stern. She said something quiet and complicated. The boat sank a little more.

    “Hmph,” said Mother Grundy, “it works all right on the millpond back home. Perhaps the spirits of the Thames are a little hard of hearing.”

    She said whatever it was again, louder.

    De Quincey fell over as the dorey suddenly began to move. It shot away from the slip like a skimming pebble, bouncing off and through every wave of the river. A foamy wake sprayed out behind them.

    “Uh uh” said de Quincey, struggling up in the violently shaking boat, but he was too wet to do any better.

    “That’s more like it,” smiled Mother Grundy.

    “By Our Lady,” breathed the girl on the pier. The queue all nodded in agreement.

    Upstream, in mid-Thames, Gull consulted his notebook itinerary. Facing him, the two watermen heaved on the wherry’s oars.

    “Fast as you like,” said Gull. “I have many things to attend to.”

    Both watermen felt like exchanging rude remarks, but their fare was a big man, and he wore his sword like he knew how to use it. They nodded instead, but there was deep and multiple meaning in the nods.

    “Begging your pardon, sir,” said one of them, suddenly catching sight of something astern.

    Gull raised himself from the bench seat and followed the waterman’s gaze. Three hundred yards behind them, de Quincey was approaching the wherry in an oar-less dorey with only a thin, grinning old lady for company. De Quincey wore an expression that was part child’s glee and part complete bemusement. There was no obvious motive power for the dorey, but it was coming at them as if it had been shot from a cannon, skipping the water like a porpoise.

    “Easy oar,” said Gull in astonishment, getting to his feet. Both watermen had already forgotten they were meant to be rowing anyway.

    The dorey hove alongside and stopped abruptly, causing de Quincey to sit down again hard. Its sudden lack of forward motion was met by a resumed downward motion.

    “Permission to come aboard,” said de Quincey, a glazed, inane look on his face.

    Gull and the watermen helped de Quincey and the old lady to hop across onto the rocking wherry.

    The dorey sank.

    “Mr de Quincey. Please explain everything,” said Gull sternly.

    “Mother Grundy can do that,” said de Quincey, flopping into Gull’s seat, and emptying his boots over the rail. “Mother Grundy can do anything. Lord Gull, Mother Grundy.”

    Gull turned to the old lady, but she waved him back, peering intently after the bubbles that marked the dorey’s departure from active life.

    “In a moment, Laird of Ben Phie,” she said, before sprinkling the water with a handful of flowers from her purse. “Father Thames, I thank you for your aid. Flow softly on in peace.”

    “What are you doing?” asked Gull.

    “Being polite,” she replied.

    “You won’t get a straight answer out of her, chief,” said de Quincey. “I haven’t yet, and I’ve been with her for hours. Careful now, or she’ll issue you with a saying.”

    Gull wasn’t listening.

    “When you’ve finished being polite to this body of water, try being polite to me,” he said.

    “There isn’t time,” said Mother Grundy, turning to the Captain of the Royal Guard. “We have a nation to save.”