Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (24 page)

    “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.

    With one meaty paw, Tantamount O’Bow lifted the twenty-pound bain-marie off the carvery hearth, emptied its scalding contents over one of the yeomen, and then swung it like a tennis racket at the other, who took its cast-bottom full in the face and chest, and cleared three tables and a spitted calf. Then, for good measure, O’Bow thumped the pan down twice on the head of the whimpering, blistered man at his feet. The bain-marie was not quite the same shape when he returned it to the hearth.

    There was a spontaneous round of applause, and the regulars emerged from under the tables. They’d seen the same sort of show a hundred times before, but it was always a good idea to clap. There was such a thing as escalation.

    There was a whip-round, and congratulatory drinks were bought for O’Bow. They covered a table top. O’Bow was just getting into his stride and dealing with them when a tall, slender man entered the tavern and approached him directly.

    “Dung Tongue-Fork,” nodded O’Bow, pledging the newcomer with a raised cannikin.

    “De Tongfort,” corrected the incomer, eyeing suspiciously the two astonishingly broken men being stretchered out of the Rouncey Mare. “How goes it with you, my friend?”

    “Fair to mandolin, and please you,” replied the humanoid leviathan with a twitch. “Why comes you to the Rouncey this eve, my lesbian friend?”

    “Thespian,” said de Tongfort, sitting down opposite O’Bow. “I have employment for you, but I’d rather not discuss it in such populated environs.”

    “There bain’t be nothing wrong with these envy irons,” replied O’Bow, mid-quaff. “They won’t be a-listening to the likes of us. We’re bein’ dusk Crete.” As if to prove his point, O’Bow looked up and twitched a glance at the tavern around them. The tavern quickly found other things to look at.

    De Tongfort leaned closer, as close as the stench of O’Bow’s breath would allow.

    “There is a fellow at the Swan,” he said, “a Frenchie called Louis Cedarn. He came to us a lutenist.”

    “And you’d be wanting this nist back then?”

    “Which nist?”

    “The one the Frenchie came a-looting?”

    “Well” said de Tongfort, struggling but inspired, ” we’ve given up the nist as lost, but we could do with having him punished. In the finite sense.”

    “Fie night, eh? My pleasure. But it’ll cost,” said O’Bow.

    “There’s a dozen sovereigns in it for you,” said de Tongfort.

    “In what?”

    “In this purse,” said de Tongfort, producing it. O’Bow took it, weighed it in his hand and nodded.

    “How will I knows him?” he asked.

    “Blond, cocky, foppish clothes. He has taken to living in the Swan’s cupola. You know what a cupola is, do you?”

    O’Bow looked at him wearily.

    “I’m not stupid,” he said. “I know full well what both of them is.”

Dawn came up over London town, a mackerel sky smoked to kipperhood by the rising sun. Yawning, Agnew nudged Uptil awake.

    “What? What bloody what?” gurgled Uptil, his eyes still closed. He’d only sat down on the slatted bench a moment before, but his head was so heavy he would have fallen asleep on a bed of nails. Under a bed of nails even.

    “Shhh!” warned Agnew. The Thames ferry, Gogmagog, was approaching the south shore, and they shared it with a gaggle of up-with-the-dawn drovers and late-back-for-barracks sailors. No one was paying them much heed. Pinkish light filtered down across the estuary, and rudely loud gulls mobbed in the wind above the ferry. There was a chalybeate taste of spindrift in the air, borne down from the coast.

    “Sorry,” whispered Uptil, pulling his cloak tighter around his bare muscles. “I forgot where I was.”

    “Try not to,” warned Agnew. “The last thing we want is the Ploy to get as lost as Sir Rupert.”

    The ferry edged up close to the landing strip. Reluctant longshoremen waited for the out-flung ropes. There was a rocking to and fro that only their kinaesthetic sense registered, and then, with a bump, they moored. The drovers and sailors and stop-outs flocked down the duckboard ramps.

    “Come on,” tugged Agnew, and Uptil trailed along in his wake.

    “When you said we’d trawl London until we found him, I didn’t think you meant it literally,” Uptil murmured as they plodded down the gangplank.

    “You wanted to find him,” replied Agnew.

    “I assumed there would be intervals for sleeping and eating. You may be able to survive on a flask of tea, but I need refuelling and a stationary pillow,” said Uptil.

    Agnew turned and gave Uptil his most long-suffering stare. Uptil just soaked it up, oblivious. The quayside was cold and unforgiving, and he ached so much he wanted to die. That was before he even considered the entreaties of his rumbling belly.

    “I admit,” said Agnew, sagging a little, “that we have achieved the square root of bugger all in our search so far. I fear I am running out of ideas of where to look for our misbegotten master.”

    “Good. I’m running out of consciousness. Let’s go home,” said Uptil.

    “I really thought we’d got somewhere at the Star. And Mr de Vries at Grey’s Inn seemed a hopeful lead. But now I’m really down to the last of my knowledge of Sir Rupert’s life and doings,” Agnew said, rubbing his reddened nose on his hanky.

    “So let’s go home and sleep on it. I’ll wager Rupe is tucked up in his Amen Street four-poster right now,” said Uptil.

    “There is one last place - that’s why we’re here,” Agnew replied.

    Uptil wilted further, looking around for a bollard to sit on. Agnew led him over to a pile of lobster baskets, and they slumped together into its damp, wicker clutches. The elderly manservant reached into the folds of his cloak and produced a stoppered costrel. He took a long swig, flinched, and offered it to Uptil.

    “What is it?” asked the Beachovite.

    “Just take a sip”

    Uptil did. He swallowed, and then shuddered for some time. When he had finished shuddering, he was aware that his toes were still clenched.

   “That’s not tea,” he commented accurately.

    “Elixir vitae, concentrated,” said Agnew as his breath returned properly. “It hits the spot when all else fails. When tea fails, anyway. So now one last hunt?”

    Uptil stretched and stood up.

    “Okay,” he said, “one last hunt and then home to beddyboos. Where are we?”

    “Deptford,” said Agnew.

    “Uh, why?”

    “Last possible lead, my titanic friend. Our last chance. If this fails, we say ‘oh well’, and forget Sir Rupert entirely.”

    Agnew led the cloak-swathed autochthon down the quay and into the empty streets of Deptford. Oxstalls Lane was devoid of everything except a water-butt and a slumbering sailor who’d missed his bunk by about three hundred yards.

    “Come on,” whispered Agnew. “Down this way.”

    Down this way, Oxstalls snaked around into a rutted track, marked
Butt Lane
. Uptil plodded along in the mud after Agnew, grimacing at the dawn-chorus. If life with Rupert Triumff had taught him anything, it was that dawn and its accompanying ornithological cheeping was the sign of a good night overdone. For many, the daybreak song of birds was a symbol of rebirth and reawakening. For Uptil, birdsong and the encroachment of light were symbols of a jug too far.

    “Where and why are we going?” Uptil asked, squelching through the Butt Lane mud.

    “There,” pointed Agnew. The building ahead was a nondescript walled affair with a placard out front. The shutters were closed, the gates shut, and the building seemed to be breathing the deep breath of slumber.

    “Who lives here?” asked Uptil.

    “With luck,” said Agnew, “if my information is correct, an old and secret friend of Sir Rupert’s. I propose we reconnoitre the place first.”

    They left the wet mud of the road for the wet mud and wetter grass of the paddock adjacent to the walled property. The air was ripe with the smell of damp herbs.