Guns of the Dawn (7 page)

‘My brother, he’s fighting in the war,’ she told him. ‘My brother-in-law, too. Why shouldn’t you do your part?’

She saw very clearly when something snapped inside him, and abruptly he was right in her face, her nose filled with the unwashed reek of him, his blade wavering at the edge of her vision.
‘I did my part!’ he snapped. ‘I was a year on the Couchant. I took my wound! Twice I took my wound! But they wouldn’t let me rest. They had to send me back, over and over.
You can’t know. You can’t tell me what it’s like.’

She kept herself very still. He had the stolen purse in one hand, close enough that she could have just taken it off him, had she dared move. The knife was an abstraction she did not go looking
for, in case breaking his gaze set it in motion. ‘Are you going to stab me, then?’

A great shuddering breath went out of him, and it took something with it, blunting the edge of his desperation. ‘I just want to go somewhere they won’t make me fight.’ His
thin, wretched voice snagged and caught as it came out of his throat. ‘I’ve got nothing, just . . .’

Alice will never forgive me.
She took a step back and to one side. She could not quantify what it was she felt: it was not pity exactly, and it was not fear either, for, throughout, she
had not felt any of the terror this encounter should have brought with it. Almost, she thought, it was duty that gripped her: as if she was writing a page into the text of how a daughter of
Grammaine should behave. Magnanimously, it seemed.

He stepped away from her, the knife still held between them, circling her as though she was the dangerous one who might attack him at any moment. If he had simply taken to his heels, then he
might have escaped. He wasted too much time, though, picking his away around her.

There was a shout from along the street, and she saw the flash of a red jacket.
Then
the deserter tried to make his exit, springing into motion away from her, away from that pursuit.
She turned to watch him put distance between them, and there was a sound like a sharp rap, nothing dramatic at all. Even as it registered in her ears he was already falling, his hands thrust
forward and up, as though he was offering both purse and knife to some higher power. Then he lay stretched out on the cobbles, weapon and bounty spilled from his grip.

Only then, after it was done, did Emily realize that she had seen a man die.

Alice hugged her fiercely when she arrived. ‘How could you be so stupid?’ she shouted, and similar sentiments. The two redjackets – Mr Northway’s own doormen, she
realized – examined the body, and one reloaded his musket lazily.

‘All right, miss.’ The guard not attending to his gun nodded to her. ‘Looks like we were just in time, eh? His nibs’ll be glad of that.’

‘I was in no danger,’ she told him fiercely. ‘You didn’t have to shoot him.’

He frowned at her apparent ingratitude. ‘Law and order, miss. It’s our job. Can’t have thieves running all over, can we?’

‘But you could have caught him and locked him up.’

His face admitted no comprehension. ‘Saved ourselves the cost of a hanging, is all.’ He exchanged a glance with his fellow, eyes rolling, eyebrows raised. Practically written on his
face was:
These Marshwic women.

‘I shall have words with your master, the mayor!’ she snapped at them, a threat without any teeth whatsoever. ‘I shall go to his office right now.’ Her voice sounded thin
and pathetic even in her own ears.

‘You’ll be waiting a while then, miss. His nibs is off somewhere on his own business. No idea when he’ll be back at his desk. Now, if that’s all, miss, we’d better
find someone to come and clean up this mess.’

She watched as they sauntered off, almost barging into Poldry as he came wheezing along. For a moment an absolutely incandescent rage gripped her, not at them so much as at a world that she
could not change or affect, strive as she might. ‘How could you, Alice?’ she hissed, knowing, as she spoke, that she was being bitterly unfair. ‘How could you go to
Northway’s men?’

‘How could you just run off after him? I thought you were going to get . . . I don’t
know
what could have happened to you!’ Alice retorted hotly. ‘Emily, he was
dangerous. He might have done anything.’

Anything
was just about the last thing the deserter might have done, Emily considered hollowly. His options had been stripped away from him by degrees, until this – this miserable
end – was all that was left for him.

She found that her heart was hammering away inside her, a belated response to all she had been through. She wanted to remonstrate with Alice some more, but she knew she would be in the wrong.
Somehow, this time, Alice was the sensible one, even when she insisted that Poldry go and recover her purse because she did not want to be near the corpse.

And Mr Northway will hear all about this from his men, no doubt, when he’s back from whatever seedy dealings he’s engaged in.
She could picture his amusement all too
clearly.

By then, Alice was practically tugging at her sleeve, wanting to leave the body behind, wanting to leave this mean, poor neighbourhood. Wanting, most of all and of course, to commission a new
dress. The entire interlude had been nothing to her but a minor obstacle, now circumvented.

The seamstress was lean, dark Mrs Shevarler, and in days of recent memory she had been somewhat aloof whenever Alice was about. The girl demanded the sort of attention due a
princess, and the Marshwic money was frequently insufficient to actually purchase anything. Left to her own devices, Alice could waste the best part of a day with fruitless measurements and viewing
swatches of fabric. Emily was almost hoping for that brusque manner but this time Mrs Shevarler seemed delighted to see the pair of them. She clucked and fussed over Alice, bustling around her shop
with desperate cheer as if to make up for the staff that she was lacking. Alice, for her part, took the chance to turn the tables, making a great play of how dusty it all was, how small, how mean.
Emily rolled her eyes. And yet the shop
did
have an uncared-for air about it, and she reckoned that business here had probably been worse than poor for a long time. Most of Mrs
Shevarler’s clientele had eschewed their local estates, and for those who remained, fine tailoring was not a priority.

Alice’s standoffishness did not survive the first bolt of cloth, and Emily was soon trying hard to share her sister’s enthusiasm. She felt that Alice had the right idea, somehow, to
simply take joy wherever she could, no matter how shallow it seemed. The mills of Emily’s mind continued inexorably, though, grinding over and over what had happened at the market, and all
the frustrations of life.

Poldry had gone off to buy provisions, or at least to try. Even with money in hand, there was no guarantee of that, these days. The demands of the war and the feeding of the army took a toll of
the harvests, while there were fewer hands to bring those harvests in. Emily felt a terrible sense of strain, a pressure as great as the sky. She felt the iron hands of Denland prying and pushing,
just a thin line of red being all that was holding the enemy back.

And so she let Alice chatter on because that way at least someone was happy, if just for a while. Emily’s own thoughts wallowed and struggled, emerging from the dark only when she was
asked a question. When Mrs Shevarler raised the subject of money, for example – or at least made hints about just how grand these dresses were going to be – she stirred herself to begin
some veiled negotiations. Alice, of course, wanted everything, and Emily knew how little they could afford to spend. And yet it seemed that Alice would get her own way, for once, because abruptly
Mrs Shevarler was letting it all go for a fraction of the value, almost throwing her finest wares at them. For a moment Emily assumed it was because she was a crafts-woman, recently lacking the
chance to truly exercise her skills. Then she realized that the dressmaker must simply be desperate for money, with useless unsold stock cluttering her storerooms. It was a buyer’s
market.

And, despite all that, Mrs Shevarler chattered on, doing her best to pretend that nothing whatsoever was wrong. She was a proud woman and, though she offered more and more value to entice just a
few more coins from the Marshwic purse, there was still no suggestion in her voice or her bearing that she was seeking charity.

Then Poldry came by, long-faced and confessing that he had found almost nothing at market for them, and Mrs Shevarler changed entirely. In a voice far sharper and quicker, she was soon
instructing Poldry on just where in Chalcaster he should go – where the locals themselves went for food. And, she added, while he was there, might he save her the journey . . . ? And,
although she would never normally ask for a down payment from her most
esteemed
customers – and here she had changed register again, adopting her superior voice for her superior
clientele – she wondered if perhaps, if just perhaps . . . ?

And Emily spared her from saying it, and asked Poldry to buy for Mrs Shevarler as well, in lieu of receiving money on account, and the awkward moment passed.

By then, Alice had decided on cut and cloth, and it was Emily’s turn. True to form, Alice found no great pleasure in watching her sister become the centre of attention, and she took the
first chance to wander out of the shop and stand by the waiting buggy.

Emily was thus left trying to keep up a conversation with Mrs Shevarler, both of them clutching for the ragged ends of the life they remembered, and trying to work them into whole cloth. How was
Mary? How was little Francis? How he must have grown by now! And as for Tubal, had they heard . . . ? But no, they had not heard recently. He had proved to be abysmal at writing letters home from
the front. And Rodric? Yes, he must be at the Levant even now along with his new comrades-in-arms. And what of Mr Shevarler? The dressmaker busied herself with the measurements, then went back over
questions of colour and pattern and weave. Only then did Emily remember that Mr Shevarler had been killed in the fighting. He had signed up at around the same time as Tubal, and had gone off to the
Couchant: the western front, which was where the great bulk of the fighting was taking place. His name had subsequently been sent back to his home town on the casualty lists. But Mrs Shevarler
would never openly correct a customer, of course, and nor would she show weakness. And so she and Emily were bound together in that lie, that pretence, going on with their business as though there
had never been any such man as Mr Shevarler. The absence of him seemed to grow and grow, until the dead man took up all the space in the shop, becoming impossibly conflated with the luckless
deserter that Northway’s men had shot down just a few streets away. Emily began to feel claustrophobic and ill, and knew that she must leave immediately.

And yet if she just bolted from the shop, as she dearly wanted to, then she would expose their joint charade for what it was. And so Emily stood her ground and had herself measured, and agreed
with whatever was suggested, and then she left.

When she finally got outside into the open air, there was a man talking to Alice, beside the buggy. It was a familiar enough sight, and proof that not everything had changed in this world.

‘Why, Alice, who’s this?’

‘Em, this nice man was just telling me some fascinating rumours.’

I thought the only rumours these days were war rumours.
Emily looked at the man Alice was talking to, who was peering back at her, shading his eyes. He was lean and broad-shouldered,
dressed in a long leather greatcoat stained and worn by both travel and time. His face had a few scars that could have come from fighting, one of them dividing an eyebrow in two. His moustache and
beard were cut neatly short.

‘Perhaps you would care to introduce us,’ she prompted Alice.

‘The name’s Griff, ma’am,’ said the man. He was well-spoken enough, but seemed the sort of careworn character that Alice would not have deigned to look at before the war.
Now she was starved of attention, and apparently anyone would do.

‘I hope my sister has not been annoying you with her talk, Mr Griff.’

‘Not at all, ma’am. She’s been kind to spend a few words on a poor traveller.’

‘I wonder that you have not taken the Red, under the King’s orders, Mr Griff,’ Emily said. ‘I’m sure a man like you would be a valuable asset to the war
effort.’ Certainly this Griff seemed to have more intact limbs than most of the other men within sight, always excepting Mr Northway’s robust henchmen.

Griff tapped his nose conspiratorially ‘We all serve in our own ways,’ he told her, with a smile that invited her to smile back.

All he got from Emily was a frown. She leant towards her sister and murmured, ‘Alice, would you explain to me what is going on? I’ve seen you cross the street to avoid men less
shabby than this.’

Her sister made an exasperated expression. ‘Oh, you’re so shallow, Emily!’

‘Me?
I
am shallow?’

‘Well, really. Mr Griff, I hope you won’t mind me saying: I saw him eyeing the buggy, and I thought he was watching us, and so I did my duty and went out to ask him what business it
was of his. Only, we fell to talking, and . . . may I tell my sister what you were saying?’

‘So long as it goes no further, miss,’ Griff agreed in a low voice.

‘Mr Griff has told me he is a servant of the King,’ Alice explained to Emily in an excited whisper. ‘Not in the way that all of us are, but a
real
one, travelling the
kingdom as His Majesty’s eyes and ears. We must invite him home with us.’

Emily blinked. ‘We must
not
.’

‘
Em
, he’s met the King,’ Alice insisted.

Emily closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the events of the day suddenly building like a pressure in her skull. ‘Forgive us, Mr Griff, but we shall be leaving very shortly.’ And,
true enough, she could see Poldry along the street, doddering along with a laden basket.

Griff gave that easy smile again. ‘Not at all, Miss Marshwic. It’s about time I was on my way, myself.’