Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (26 page)

    All the while, those blue eyes that knotted, misshapen skin

    The case had finally been thrown out through lack of what was it again? Lack of witnesses.

    Tantamount O’Bow.

    Since those strained hours in the Chancery rooms, Triumff had seen the monster on several other occasions. On each of these - at the Mermaid twice, once at the Rouncey Mare, and once again at the Spread Eagle - O’Bow had vividly demonstrated how a twenty-one-year-old, handsome midshipman might have been turned into a blackened mass of tenderised pulp.

    Triumff had always, always stayed well clear of such demonstrations. He couldn’t shake the memory of those blue eyes, that cratered, puffy face, or of Pyker’s cadaver on the mortuary slab.

    He had often wondered how O’Bow had come by that mass of scarring. It looked like someone had branded him full in the face with a white-hot skillet. Triumff had sometimes wanted to shake the brander by the hand, even though he felt sure that would mean shaking hands with a corpse.

    His eyes were used to the darkness of the early morning theatre, and he was no longer bumping into things. The poniard was comforting in his hand. He eyed his surroundings, confidently recognising this scenery flat, that rack of lanterns, this dangling pulley

    That enormous silhouette.

    The blow took him by surprise, and off his feet. With a gagging yelp, he smashed backwards through a plyboard section of the Castle Dunsinane, his chest hot with pain.

    He lay still for a moment, assuming he was dead.

    He wasn’t. He crawled through the splintered wood and settling dust, groping for his poniard. His chest hurt like nobody’s business.

    Except Tantamount O’Bow’s.

    “Frenchie looter,” hissed a voice that could only have issued from damaged, twisted lips.

    “What is this why?” Triumff managed, each breath, each word, an agony.

    Something massive lumbered through the wreckage closer to him.

“It’s a job,” said the voice, dismissively.

    A hand as big as a warship’s anchor took him by the collar, and hoisted him aloft. Swinging gently, Triumff found himself face to face with those blue, burning eyes. No face, no scars. It was still too dark. But the eyes burnt like sapphires in the gloom.

    “Is you” There was a long pause as O’Bow’s memory rattled and composed itself. “Is you Louis Cedarn?”

    “No,” said Rupert Triumff. Telling the real truth was much easier than lying.

    “Oh!” the formless monster said, pausing for some time. He stank of ale. “In that case, I apologise for committing my axe to a strike at yourn person. I’m most particulate about who I kill.”

    “Oh, good,” said Triumff. He was sure he could taste blood in his mouth.

    “I’m looking for a Louis Cedarn, who I mean to kill,” continued O’Bow, showing no signs of putting Triumff down. “You fit his prescription, so I exhumed you were he.”

    “I’m not,” said Triumff. He hit the floor hard, bouncing off unprepared knees and elbows.

    “So sorry,” said his attacker, moving away.

    Triumff sprawled on his hands and knees for a long moment as he struggled to recover his breath and fight off the pain. He clutched at his chest, feeling the sharp coils of the sprung wire exposed by the axe-blow. Kew’s reinforced doublet had saved him from the worst of the biting blade.

    “So where might he be?” rasped O’Bow, suddenly at his ear.

    “No idea,” said Triumff, freezing.

    “I might always finish you for being incooperative,” said the voice in his ear.

    “Why do you want to kill him? He seemed like a nice enough bloke to me,” said Triumff.

    “Probably is, probably is. However, I am prequired to kill him anyway.”

    “Oh dear,” sympathised Triumff. With a shaking thumb, he slowly drew back the hammer of the flintlock that was built into his poniard.

    “That is indeed the shame of it,” O’Bow went on. “Have you any eye dears where I might locale him?”

    “He’s right here, you ugly bastard!” screeched Triumff, stabbing the poniard around at O’Bow and pulling the trigger. There was a dry puff.

    “Oh shit,” exclaimed Sir Rupert Triumff, wrenching back the hammer for a second try. An avalanche seemed to be falling on him.

    An explosion, deafening in the confines of the space between their two, thrashing bodies, rang out like a salute.

    Triumff launched himself backwards out of the monster’s grasp, and began to run through the backstage confusion. He smacked his forehead on a swinging pulley, and barked his shin on a bull’s-eye lantern. Neither stopped him.

    He fled around behind the cyclorama, and hit the stairs into the gallery at a run. Something hit him rather faster.

    He went down, thrashing and struggling, aware that his efforts were futile. O’Bow weighed more than three hundred pounds. A fist caught his jaw and snapped his head back hard into the edge of a step. The massive axe-head buried itself an inch from his left ear. He stabbed out again with the poniard, remembering its diamond edge that could “cut through anything”. It cut through nothing but air. A paw like a bear’s snatched at his wrist, caught it, and slammed his hand into the stairs beside his head. Pain cut loose his hold on the poniard, and it skittered away.

    He looked up into the ruined face of the man about to kill him, and, with a last reserve of willpower, punched his hand up into the branded features. Most of his fingers accidentally went into O’Bow’s snarling mouth, and O’Bow’s mouth began quite deliberately to bite.

    There was a sudden explosion of splintering wood and distressed musical whimpers, as if a tea-chest full of chords had just detonated.

    Triumff found himself pinioned beneath three hundred pounds of dead weight.

    He pulled himself out from under O’Bow’s body, which lay like a downed titan across the stairs. Above him stood Doll, ashen-faced and frantic, and your humble servant Wllm Beaver, holding the remains of the Tavistock Lute-O-caster.

    “Needs must, I suppose,” I mumbled, shrugging while still holding the remains of the lute. Lost for words, Doll dragged Triumff to his feet and into her arms.

    “I hope you weren’t too fond of it,” I added, laying the smashed instrument to rest on the face-down bulk of Tantamount O’Bow.

    “Not as fond as I am of staying alive,” Triumff managed, cuddling Doll. He looked down at his hands, wrapped as they were around Doll Taresheet, counting the fingers. All ten were there. The capstone of his signet ring rattled loosely on its hinge.

    “Good grief,” Triumff mumbled. “He swallowed my arsenic.”

    I frowned down at the ring. “So I didn’t actually with the lute, I mean you would’ve that is”

    “Thank you,” said Triumff, “I have no doubt your intervention helped enormously.”

    I looked at the hugging couple for a moment, a satisfied look on my face. Then it changed to one that was part realisation and part confusion.

    “She called you Rupert,” I said.

“When?” asked Triumff over Doll’s shoulder.

“Back then, before”

“I mean” I added.

“But that” I interrupted myself.

“Surely” I stammered.

“Don’t tell me you’re”

    I fell silent, and stared at Rupert and Doll until they broke from their embrace and looked back at me.

    “You’re Sir Rupert Triumff, aren’t you?” I asked, a journalistic hunting instinct brightening my previously bleary eyes.

    “Yes,” said Sir Rupert Triumff, honestly.

Saturday unfurled itself.

    Absent that special morning were the usual breakfast-time comments such as “This tea tastes like dish-water”, “Where’s my bacon?” and “Just a few more minutes”. Instead, curious remarks crossed London’s breakfast tables, remarks like, “Is this the fly edge or the hoist edge?”, “Have you seen my best ruff?” and “Get that taper away from the bloody Catherine wheels!”

    It was Masque Saturday, and the City was preparing to have an Extremely Good Time, which was fine provided your concept of an Extremely Good Time involved flags, patriotic songs and a potentially lethal combination of fireworks and alcohol.

    The morning poured itself across the City, robust and fullbodied. Apart from a few determined individuals, who were resolutely intent on properly finishing off Friday (most of these were to be found in the Rouncey Mare), London was up, and busily getting on with Saturday, which was going to be fun with a capital eff.

    Sometime around dawn, the City streets had begun to extrude bunting: bright, flapping, tricolour bunting that apparently had been pulled from the shadows of each street corner the way stage conjurers produce coloured hankies from the mouths, ears or armpits of surprised volunteers from the audience. Suddenly clad in miles of bunting it had not known it contained, the City could do little more than applaud the trick with a mystified expression on its face.

    After the bunting came the flags, thousands of them, hung, tied, wrapped or otherwise suspended from every available surface above the streets. Pennants and streamers swam like eels in the breeze, banners and gonfalons swung like veils from gutter-lines and eaves, burgees and swallowtails snapped like whips from chimneys and wash-ropes, Guild and Union emblems hung resplendent in the morning light.

    Every household seemed to have found a flag, pulled it out of an attic box, darned it, and hoisted it to the roof. Anything fitted the bill: jubilee jacks, crosses, ensigns, pennoncels declaring “Happy Birthday” or “Merry Christmas”, oriflames, quarantine burgees, and clubhouse guidons. The winds crossing London found themselves unexpectedly detained by new acres of bagging, furling cloth. The noted wit and bon viveur, Sir Thomas Decretz, declared that the City-folk had suddenly become damnably vexillopathic, but rather underscored this quip by making it while he was rummaging through an ottoman for his Uncle Albert’s regimental banderole.

    Apart from the very real danger that the entire City might take off if there was an unnecessarily strong gust of wind, there were threats from other quarters. Caches of unexploded fireworks mined the City more thoroughly than any bombardier could have planned. It would be a miracle, particularly given the anticipated alcohol consumption, if they all went off as intended.

    Members of the City fire brigades sat around in their stations, grimly sipping coffee, and preparing to intercede when the merrymaking in the streets turned from “Ooohh!”-ing and “Aaahhh!”-ing to “Er, wasn’t that your house?”-ing.

    Detachments of Militia routinely stopped platoons of troops hauling artillery into the streets.

    “Isn’t that an excessive number of guns for a salute?” the Militia men would ask, resignedly, but there was no gainsaying the enthusiastic troops.

    “Of course we haven’t been authorised,” they’d say, “but it’s the Masque Holiday, innit?”

    “Aim for the sky,” they were told.

    “Of course we will,” was the response, as the soldiers handed round rum for the umpteenth time, continued down the street, came back for the cannons which they had left behind and smiled, completely unreassuringly, at the Militia.

    A profusion of floral sprays decorated every surface not occupied by a ratty flag or a box of festive explosives. Somewhere, vast meadows, glades and dells must have been denuded of flowering undergrowth. The demand for bouquets was so great that by the time the florists got to Denmark Hill, they were putting up nettle nosegays, which frankly lacked in everything except effort.

    Triumff led Doll and me, your reliable servant, Wllm Beaver, from the Swan to a tea shop called the Conifer in Skitter Lane. Since before six, it had been doing a roaring trade in sweet tea and filled cobs with all those up early on flag-hoisting, spray-nailing or firework-priming expeditions, which was nearly everybody.

    Behind its leaded, sooty windows lay a modest chamber where even the air seemed to have been stained brown with tannin. A rich mix of camomile and lavender filled the room, oozing out of the steamy clouds that billowed from the hearth kettles. Two dozen or more patrons sat in the dim booths, smoking, draining china cups of hot brown fluid, and discussing such things as the subtleties of halyard tugging, the bannerol versus the pencel as a patriotic statement, and whether a privy would offer sufficient protection in the unlikely event of, hypothetically let’s say, all twelve Grand Combustive Number Four Sky Rockets being ignited simultaneously.