Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (30 page)

    De Tongfort looked him up and down, an expression of contempt flickering across his face.

    “There are two spare in the trunk behind the front stage,” he said. “Get one. Tune it. Get to your place. Or I’ll have your head on a stick.”

    Cedarn nodded and moved off. De Tongfort watched him go. No one saw the ugly puzzlement in his eyes.

    Once armed with a lute, Cedarn climbed around behind the stage area, and entered the makeshift tiring room, formed by the rear folds of the long pavilion. A chaos of jabbering, half-naked bodies met him. The air was dense with drifting face-powder. He found Doll, sewing up a torn gauze attifet.

    “Anything, love?” he asked.

    She grimaced and shrugged.

    “Nothing,” she replied. “I don’t even know what I’m meant to be looking for.”

    “We’ll know it when we see it,” said Cedarn. “You know the signal. I’ll be watching you. Keep watching me.”

    He kissed her.

    “And break a leg,” he added, with the most encouraging grin he could manage in the circumstances.

    He turned away, and then turned back and kissed her again. He hoped it wouldn’t be for the last time. On the Green outside the walls, the Bracket family - John Senior, John Junior and little John, wife Martha, sister Delia, Grandma Sweeney and tiny Nell - were in the middle of their damp nantwiches, their third flask of tepid musket and another round of “What a good spot we picked, right by the wall, thanks to me getting us off so early” self-congratulations, when John Junior, a six-foot-four blacksmith and head of the family, suddenly said, “Oy!” and got to his feet.

    He marched away from his bemused family, and approached the man who was in the middle of climbing the outside of the Palace wall, hand-over-hand, on the trailing ivy.

    “You can’t do that!” John Junior protested. “We was here first! You ain’t allowed to go in. Now be off! Get yourself another spot, and stop jumping the queue.”

    The man halfway up the wall turned his head and glowered down at John Junior.

    “Shove off or I’ll kill you without conjunction,” he said simply.

    It may have been the cold blue eyes, or the vivid scar tissue. Whatever, John Junior suddenly felt smaller and punier than a six-foot-four blacksmith should, and went back to his nantwiches meekly, though he didn’t eat many. O’Bow disappeared over the high wall.

    Your servant, me, Wllm Beaver, settled into my pew seat with relish, and consulted my gold-embossed programme. I found myself sitting next to the Countess of Hardwick’s party. They were all looking across at me as if I was something they had almost stepped in.

    “Afternoon!” I called, convivially. I looked back at my programme. Sire Clarence was due to be seated to my left. I sighed.

    The traffic on the road into the Shene was interminable, and stuck solid. Militia stewards were flagging carts off the road, and indicating overspill fields along the edge of the Richmond Wood, a good three miles short of the Palace.

    “We’ve got business at the Palace!” yelled Drew Bluett from the duckboard of his cart. The steward on the track beneath smiled, oblivious, and continued to wave them off the jammed road. Behind them, the traffic was urging them to get a bloody move on.

    “We’ll have to park here and go ahead on foot,” said Drew, steering them off into the field. Agnew nodded, and turned to rouse the slumbering Uptil in the back of the cart.

    “Are we there?” asked Uptil, rubbing his eyes.

    “Not even close,” muttered Agnew.

    The Private Guild Chapel of the Palace was as quiet as graves ought to be (but probably weren’t in these dire times). The incense and the smell of candle-smoke almost, but not quite, hid the syrupy smell rising from behind the vocational screen at the side of the pulpit.

    Jaspers sat back from his kneeling position in front of the small brazier, his hands almost translucent with Goetic shine. Slowly, with reverence, he took up the three small, grotesque icons that he had just blessed, and placed each one in a drawstring pouch. He hung the pouches around his neck, beneath his doublet.

    “What in the name of mercy-“

    Jaspers turned sharply, teeth bared in anger. He was still weak from the effort of his just-finished observances, and the intruder had taken him unawares.

    Cardinal Gaddi stood in the screen’s doorway, eyes wide, lips dry and quivering.

    “What are you doing in here, divine?” Gaddi asked, stepping forward. “I came down for preparatory prayer and smelled I couldn’t say what!”

    “Don’t you know, it’s rude to interrupt a man’s private devotions, cardinal?” Jaspers asked, getting to his feet.

    “Don’t give me that!” said Gaddi. He was a slight, nervous man normally, but some sense of utter wrong made him fluff with courage. “I know that smell that damned smell. You little bastard What have you done? What are you doing here?”

    Jaspers stood ready, but knew that his legs were weak and trembling. He’d hated having to conduct the final rite in the Palace, but there had been no other choice.

    “Get out of here. Leave me. Forget what you have seen.” Jaspers said, trying to use the Summarian Voice Of Command that had served him so well, so often. He was too hoarse, however, too drained, and he couldn’t fix the pitch or the timbre.

    “You dare to try novice Goetic tricks on a cardinal? You pathetic little traitor!” said Gaddi, in disgust. “I could do the Voice when I was nine, and I soon learned why I shouldn’t do it at all!” The cardinal stepped forward again, bunching his little hands into mean, resolute fists. “I’ll have the guards on you!” he exclaimed. “I’ll have you hanged and drawn! They’ll watch your twitching corpse roast in the banquet fires tonight! They’ll rejoice when they know that the source of the treasonous blight has been revealed!”

    “Leave me,” said Jaspers again. The cardinal’s outburst had given him just enough time to focus his waning energies.

    Gaddi trembled and took a hurried step back. He felt his guts tighten. He had never heard the Voice used with such power and authority before, not even when his old collegiate masters had used it to demonstrate the curse of Goety to frightened novices in Elementary Arte Science classes. He suddenly realised that he wasn’t dealing with a misguided dabbler at all.

    “Guards! Guards!” he began, and then choked, because no sound was coming from his throat, except for a hollow gurgling. De la Vega slid his rapier out of the back of Gaddi’s neck, and the little man pitched forward onto the chapel flagstones. Blood splattered up from the impact.

    “Thank you,” said Jaspers, relaxing.

    De la Vega stepped into the gloomy side chapel, and closed the screen door.

    “Such business is regrettable so close to the appointed time,” he remarked, wiping his sword and sheathing it. “I take it he caught you unawares?”

    “I had just finished the rite. I was weakened, unprepared,” replied Jaspers.

    “It is a good thing Slee asked me to check on you,” said de la Vega. “He and Salisbury are in position. Slee requires your presence.”

    Jaspers stepped over to Gaddi’s corpse.

    “I must dispose of this,” he said. “A dead cardinal is hardly the thing to be found in the middle of tonight’s affairs.”

    De la Vega nodded, and looked away, as Jaspers uncorked a phial of alchemical liquid he had concealed in his pocket. There was a sharp hissing and a foul, saprogenic odour filled the room.

    It hung there, staining the air, long after the two men had slipped silently away.

* * *

There were big rats in the Palace attic spaces, big juicy rats the size of cats. But not this cat. Eight feet from nose to tailend, it padded along the darkened rafters like a ghost. Big as they were, the rats scurried out of its way. They may have been rats, but they weren’t stupid.

St Cunegund’s struck five o’clock. The strokes rang across the Sward, but went unnoticed by the townsfolk of Smardescliffe, who were in the middle of the biggest and best coronation revelry they had ever staged. The Verger was holding audience by the village pump, retelling, for the upteenth time, how he alone had alerted the militia to the demon on the cart.

    The Butcher was explaining, to anyone prepared to listen, the finer points of running a demon through with anything from a meat-hook to a sharpened thistle. In his opinion, those who lived by the Sward, died by the Sward. People were taking notes and fetching him drinks.

    The Baker, a confirmed bachelor for all of his thirty-nine years, was busily copping off with the youngest daughter of the village weaver, in the hayrick behind the bakery. She had never, it turned out, done it with a “real hero” before.

    The Mayor was showing off his bruises to the members of the Women’s Institute. For all the “oooohhhing” and “aaaaahhhing” going on, he might as well have been letting off fireworks.

    “How’s the prisoner faring?” asked the Mayor of the Butcher as the latter stumbled past, looking for somewhere to throw up.

    “Sent the Landlord of the Cat and Stoop to check on him a while back,” answered the Butcher, swallowing hard, and drifting off into the hedges to the left.

    “Ladies! I will return!” announced the Mayor, stepping down from the seating podium, negotiating the bunting, and marching off towards the village tithe barn.

    “Oooooohhhhh!” they all said, to a woman.

    “They say the Landlord was the real hero of the hour,” one said as the Mayor disappeared.

    “With an apple on a string!” said another.

    “Exotic technique taught to him by his long-lost greatuncle,” explained the Landlord’s wife.

    They all looked at her in wonder.

    The Mayor pushed open the great doors of the tithe barn, and stepped inside. Hens clucked around his ankles, and the dark, sun-shafted interior was heady with the smell of drying corn.

    “Landlord?” called the Mayor, softly.

    He called again.

    This time, there was an answer, a muffled “Mmmmggfff” from behind the bale stacks. The Mayor sought it out.

    The Landlord of the Cat and Stoop was lying face down in the straw, trussed to a pitchfork handle. He looked like one of the butcher’s roast swine with the apple in his mouth.

    The Mayor of Smardescliffe pulled the apple out of the struggling man’s jaws like a cork.

    “Sneaky devil gave me the slip,” coughed the Landlord of the Cat and Stoop.

    “Oh bollocks,” the Mayor informed him.

    One mile downstream, Giuseppe Giuseppo pulled himself out of the River Smarde, and spat out a hollow reed and a lungful of brackish water.

    He crawled up the bank, hacking and sneezing. The late afternoon sun beat down on him, weakly.

    Giuseppe rolled onto his back, and pulled the Most Important Book In The World out of his doublet pocket. It was sodden, the pages were stuck together, the ink had begun to run, and London was still twenty miles away, across the long, slow fields of the Downs.

De Quincey had never seen so many people in one place. It made his head spin, as if it wasn’t spinning enough already. He’d always thought of himself as a solid, two-by-four sort of fellow. It came as a rude shock to discover that he was actually as riddled through and through by the woodworm of perturbation as the next mortal.

    “Keep up, de Quincey!” Gull barked, snapping the forensic scientist’s attention back to the moment. He scampered a little to catch up with Gull and Mother Grundy, who were striding up the Richmond Royal Stairs, a narrow defile of sixty-seven steps that linked the Palace with the Queen’s private landing stage on the Thames. At river level, they were flanked in by stone walls, the jetty and the enclosed scent of the river. Now, they took the stairs up, and gained a view over the northern reaches of the Palace grounds, thick with surging crowds.

    So many people

    De Quincey had affected to spend the previous Coronation Day, the Great Masque, with his mother in the comparative quiet of Wanstead. They’d clinked a few glasses of tawny port in honour of the day, and spent the rest of the afternoon ministering to the needs of the rose-bed behind her cottage. The suburban quiet suited him well. He’d been told all about the crowds and the hubbub, and the confusions of the occasion, but it had been a distant thing that had passed him by.