Printer's Devil (9780316167826) (17 page)

Nick grimaced to himself. “So let me get this straight,” he muttered. “You’re being watched by the man from Calcutta, who’s
got a deadly snake as a pet, and who lives next door. Someone’s been sending you notes threatening to show you death. And
Cramplock’s mixed up in it too, for good measure. This is too close for comfort, Mog. Seems to me you’d be better off staying
away from there altogether.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Oh, and something else,” I said. “Soldiers are searching for Coben. They’re turning out carriages
leaving the town. A coachman’s just been grumbling at me about it.”

Nick scraped the last of his soup from his bowl, and sucked his spoon clean.

“I don’t know,” he said, “who Coben needs to hide from most. Those soldiers, or my Pa.” He looked at me significantly. There
was silence. I could hear Tassie laughing. I couldn’t resist a quick glance down at the bundle at my feet.

“What are we going to do with this, then?” I asked at length.

Our shadows were long, stretching in front of us like stick puppets wherever the clustering of the houses gave way to the
reddening sunlight. Every time someone rounded a corner unexpectedly, I jumped halfway out of my skin.

“Calm down, can’t you?” Nick murmured. “You’ll give us away.”

“How much further?” I asked. I was convinced it must be obvious to passersby what we were doing. That boy with the dog looks
nervous, they’d be saying — ah, yes, of course, he’s taking a stolen camel to a hiding place in Aldgate.

“Not far,” said Nick. He’d already told me he was deliberately going to take me by a very indirect route, so as to lead any
possible spies off the scent, and consequently it was taking us twice as long to get to our destination.

“Excuse me, now,” said a high-pitched voice from a dark corner. I was about to take to my heels and run
for it, when Nick grabbed me by the shoulder. There was a dusty old man sitting up against a broken wall. Lash went over to
sniff him and I called him back nervously.

“Did ye hear it, now?” the man was rambling, tunefully. “A most remarkable thing, it was, to be sure.” He spoke in a lilting
voice like a pennywhistle. “A mooo — ost remarkable thing.” His face suddenly disappeared into itself like a sponge, and flopped
back out again. It took a while for us to realize that this was meant to be a smile. “Music!” he added, portentously. “The
most remarkable music that ever was.”

“Er — yes,” I said, pulling Nick away.

“Music,” the tramp was continuing, “like I never heard before. Like a bagpipe … like a flute … like a violin … like nothing
I ever heard before in me life. What music is it,” he lilted, “that sounds like all the snakes of the world rippling over
one another? Why should music like that be heard, now? Music from far away.”

Nick nudged me, to urge me on, and we left the tramp sitting there, laughing and softly singing to himself.

“Isn’t that strange,” Nick said, “what he was saying about music like snakes?”

“I suppose people like him imagine all kinds of music,” I said, “just like they imagine all kinds of sights. A drunk once
told me he’d seen a woman with
a horse’s mane and hooves going into a house. He swore all kinds of oaths he’d seen it.”

“It must be quite fun in a way,” Nick said, “to imagine you see and hear things. No difference between things that are real
and things that are a dream.”

“Sounds like my life just now,” I muttered.

We turned a corner into a wide street, still busy with coaches and barrows; and Nick stopped by a little shop-front, so shabby
it almost looked uninhabited. Just above our heads, over a low front window, I could dimly make out the words

SPINTWICE

JEWELER & SILVERSMITH

painted in smut-caked letters. I called Lash and took hold of his lead, and Nick knocked on the little door, which barely
seemed high enough for us to get through, let alone a grown-up customer. After a few moments it opened and a child’s face
peeped around it. When it saw Nick, the child pulled the door further open and disappeared inside. We followed him in.

“This is Mog,” Nick said when the door was closed. “Mog, this is Mr. Spintwice, my good friend.”

The person I had taken for a child was Mr. Spintwice himself. He was shorter than either of us, and his face, now that I could
take in his appearance properly, was a
strange mixture of infant and adult. He had rosy cheeks and a permanent broad grin, like a mischievous child of about five
or six; but his eyes were quick and dark and, I suddenly thought, sadder than the rest of his face. He really looked most
peculiar, and I took my cues nervously from Nick, watching his responses to the little man before deciding what I thought
of him or how to behave.

“Mog,” he said, in a piping voice. “How do you do, Mog?” He reached up for my hand, all the time smiling in his unchanging
way, and I shook hands with him slightly stiffly. “And this is?”

“Lash,” I said, hoping the tiny man wouldn’t be intimidated by a dog almost as tall as himself. But he had immediately recognized
Lash’s trusting nature and was already reaching out the palms of his hands for exploratory licks. “Lash,” he said, “you are
welcome.”

We followed him through the carpeted hallway into a tiny sitting room. “Nick and I have known one another many years,” he
said in his precise little voice; and it was perfectly plain that Nick was entirely comfortable in his presence and didn’t
think he was peculiar at all, so I said nothing. “Please sit in here. I can see you can’t quite believe your eyes. Well! Nick
was just as surprised as you, the first time he came here years ago. If you make yourselves comfortable, I’ll fetch some tea.”

I looked around in wonder. There were armchairs, a mantelpiece, pictures hanging from a picture-rail,
tables with plants in pots, a cabinet with glass doors revealing rows of books, and a warm welcoming fire blazing in the grate
with neat fire tools and a coal scuttle beside it; but all of it was built to around half the normal size. This, and the presence
of numerous clocks of various kinds ranged around the room, ticking and tinkling at several different pitches, made me feel
as though we had stepped inside some extraordinary toy. Some of the clocks were so tiny, I marveled at how anyone could make
a mechanism small enough to fit inside them. Others were quite big enough for Mr. Spintwice himself to climb in, next to the
pendulum, and be hidden completely. When Nick and I sat down in the armchairs we filled them, finding them if anything a little
tight. Even Lash looked around slightly bemused, as though afraid to wag his tail in case he knocked something off a shelf.

“I love this place, don’t you?” Nick said. “Listen to all those clocks.” He had barely sat down before he’d slipped out of
his chair again and gone to kneel by the bookshelves. Soon he was opening one of the cabinets and taking out a big crimson
book almost the size of a flagstone. “This is one of my favorites.” He dragged it back to his chair.

Something in my face must have betrayed my misgivings because, without my saying anything, he leaned close to whisper in my
ear.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Spintwice is all right. I think we should tell him the whole story, and see what he says. He’s a
jeweler, so he might be able to tell us a bit more about the camel. And he’ll hide it for us, I’m sure.”

The longer I listened to the mechanical music of the clocks, the more it seemed to overwhelm us, lapping round us, spinning
us into a web of sound.

“Why don’t you stay here?” Nick whispered suddenly. “Don’t go back to Cramplock’s. The man from Calcutta’s too close.”

I was unsure. I was genuinely afraid we might have been followed; and if I stayed here, there was every chance I’d just be
putting the dwarf in unnecessary danger too. There was something about the familiarity of Cramplock’s that made me feel instinctively
safer there; and, despite having Nick’s word for it, I still didn’t know Spintwice well enough to feel I could fully trust
him.

“I’m still not —“ I began; but Nick was immersed in the book again, oblivious now to sights and sounds around him, completely
and instantly relaxed. His eyes were wide as he took in the rich decoration which spread across both pages: figures in red
and purple, woven patterns in gold leaf along the pages’ edge, and a Moorish landscape with two figures clinging to a brightly
colored flying carpet. He seemed a different person altogether from the watchful, edgy, suspicious boy I’d met at Lion’s Mane
Court. I suddenly
realized how little I still knew about Nick. I wondered how he had ever encountered this strange little man, whose tiny house
and wonderful bookshelves seemed such a world away from his violent home life. “He’s about the only grown-up who’s ever really
been kind to me,” Nick had told me on the way here. My eyes wandered around the shelves of books, fascinated, enticed by the
patterns and lettering on their spines. They looked impossibly rich and full of promise: no book ever printed at Cramplock’s
had been as splendid as these, I felt sure. What on earth would Nick’s father say if he could see him sitting here, leafing
through them?

“Does your Pa know you come here?” I asked him.

“There’s a lot my Pa don’t know,” he murmured, unconcerned.

Mr. Spintwice came back with a tray of teacups, again miniaturized to match his size; and he had also brought a dish of water
and bread for Lash, which he put down in front of the fire. It was at this point that I decided I liked him.

“It’s a very nice surprise to have visitors, I must say,” he said, after taking a sip or two. “And at such an unexpected hour!”

“I’m sorry if we —“ I began, but he cut me off.

“Not at all! A pleasure, a sheer pleasure, Mog,” he said, “an unexpected hour is the very best hour for
visitors! It would be boring always to have guests turn up when you expect them.”

Lash had made himself completely at home, curling up in front of the fire as though he’d lived there all his life. My suspicions
were beginning to melt away, and I found myself thinking about what Nick had said and being very tempted to stay here, cocooned
in this warm music-filled little sitting room, reading book after book. I was flooded with a strange sense of safety and wellbeing,
a feeling so unfamiliar it gave me goose bumps.

“We really called to ask a favor,” said Nick, rather apprehensively, putting down the book.

“Of course! Anything I can do for two such handsome fellows.”

Nick looked at me. “It’s quite a long story,” he said. “Maybe you’d better tell it, Mog, since it’s really yours.”

I put down my teacup. “I’m not really sure where to start,” I said.

I told him the whole thing, more or less. As I told it, I began to feel a lot better, and Mr. Spintwice listened with complete
attention. When I got to the bit about the camel, I pulled it out of its wrapping and passed it across to him. He spent the
rest of the story examining it, turning it over and over in his hands, with a mystified expression on his little old face.

“It sounds,” he said, “as if you two are getting into deep waters. And over what? Over
this?
” He held up
the camel by one of its legs. Lash, looking up from his cozy spot by the fire, got to his feet and trotted over to the dwarf’s
chair, where he began sniffing at the camel much as he had done the night before.

“We wondered,” said Nick, “if you might tell us anything about it.”

“It’s brass,” Mr. Spintwice said simply. “Cheap. Tarnished. Made in a mold which must have made hundreds like it. The sort
of trinket that comes from the Indies every time a ship puts in. As far as I can see it’s worth nothing at all: it doesn’t
even have jewels for eyes, or anything like that. It’s a complete mystery why anyone would want it.” He began lifting it up
and down, holding Lash’s head away with his other hand. “The only thing is,” he said, “its weight is all wrong.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, intrigued.

“Well,” he said, “it’s obviously not solid brass because it’s not heavy enough. So it must be hollow. But somehow …” he lifted
it up and down a few more times, just to be sure, “it’s not light enough to be hollow, either.”

Nick stared at him, and then at me. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “It’s hollow!” He took the camel from the dwarf, and waved
it. “What a pair of idiots we are!”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, still mystified.

“Don’t you understand? Look, we’ve been wondering
for days why anyone would want to steal it, let alone threaten to
kill
for it. But it isn’t
this
they want. It’s something hidden
inside
it.” He shook it, but it didn’t rattle. “There must be something valuable inside,” he said, “and that’s why it feels too
heavy to be hollow.”

The little jeweler began laughing and his eyes twinkled. “What a clever lad,” he chuckled, “he’s right, he’s quite right.”

Nick was turning the camel over and over furiously, looking for a way to get at whatever was inside. He pulled at the legs,
scratched at it, tried twisting it around its hump. Suddenly he gave a cry. “The head comes off! Look!”