Printer's Devil (9780316167826) (21 page)

And if “him” was the bosun …

“Lash,” I said to him, holding his ears up so he’d listen properly, “I think this might be important. Do you understand?”

He licked my nose. My heart was beating fast. I’d been tired a minute ago, but now I couldn’t have been more awake. I was
bursting to talk to somebody, but at this time of night, in an empty house, there was no one except Lash to talk to.

So I did what I always did when I had something on my mind which couldn’t wait until morning. I reached inside the treasure
box again, and pulled out Mog’s Book.

I’d had so many adventures since my last entry, it was hard to know where to begin.

Something amazing has happened
, I wrote. This seemed to be the way I was beginning every page these days.

The man from Calcutta is hiding out next door
, I continued.
I have found out where he keeps his snake. The house is full of peculiar music, like an enchanted house, and inside it is
all as if the fire had never happened. Now it seems like a dream, but I know it is all real because he has left me another
note. I think

I was stuck.

“What do I think, Lash?” I asked him.

He sneezed, then looked astonished, and his tongue came out to lick his nose.

“A great help you are,” I said.

I might have been wrong about him all along. Maybe he wants to help me. Instead I think it may be the bosun he is really after.
I have to watch him. He is so scary, yet it is as though I am being pulled toward him, wherever he goes
.

My eyes were hurting. I closed the book, pushed everything back into the tin, and put it back in the cupboard. Then I climbed
into bed.

But I didn’t stay there long. There was so much going on inside my head I could no more sleep than flap my arms and fly. “Must
watch the Three Friends,” the note had said. So why wasn’t I?

I made Lash stay in his basket and, as silently as a black cat, let myself out of the printing shop. It was completely dark
now, and some of the poorly lit parts of the city were frightening at this time of night. Almost immediately, I wished I’d
brought Lash with me, and very nearly went back to get him. Whispering voices met my ear every now and again, from doorways
or from basements beneath my feet. The faces of thieves and bosuns and men with baskets lurked in every shadow, even when
no one was really there. I hurried on.

I was still thinking hard about the man from Calcutta. He was obviously a very dangerous man; but was he in danger too? I
pictured his tall, alert frame
striding through the dark streets with his snake basket, his eyes darting at every sound, the brim of his hat bent secretively
over his face.

MUST SPEAK.

How was he intending to talk to me? Climb through the wall in the middle of the night? It was all making me feel very uncomfortable
indeed: but although I knew I was still profoundly afraid of him, part of me wanted to talk to him, too.

When I set off I had felt confident of where I was going: but in the darkness the narrow streets of this part of London all
seemed very much alike, and I very soon began to wish Nick were here to lead me confidently through the maze as though it
were broad daylight. There was a strong smell, and a general air of damp and disease. I’d also lost all sense of direction,
so I couldn’t tell whether I was going toward the river or away from it, toward the City or away from it. I was quite startled,
therefore, when I suddenly emerged from a particularly dilapidated old tenement to find myself on the corner by the Three
Friends Inn.

I sneaked across the street to get a better view. The inn stood at the end of a crooked row of tall houses,
which leaned toward it as though they were trying to elbow it down the hill and into the river. Opposite the inn was a soaring
old church with a small cemetery, and it was in through the cemetery gate I crept as I tried to find a hiding place. At one
point the cemetery wall was particularly low, and hidden in shadow. Gravestones stood palely in a mean little cluster, like
children refusing to talk to one another. Every now and again a rat would scatter loose earth or scrabble with its sharp feet
against a box beneath the soil. Turning my back on all this, I crouched to watch the inn.

Over the road people were loitering, sailors and workmen in their shapeless clothes. The occasional murmur drifted across
the road, which became a busy roar whenever the door was opened and smoky light fell over the cobbles. There were still hundreds
of people in there: people who probably wouldn’t go to bed until dawn broke, or until they fell into a drunken sleep wherever
they were sitting. A short distance away down a dark lane, the lights of ships glinted on the dirty water of the Thames. Every
now and again I cast a nervous glance behind me. Who might be lurking behind the tombstones? As I listened, I thought I heard
something resonate high above me — a faint, stifled
clang
.

But there was a sudden barrage of noise from the opposite direction as a group of men tumbled through the door of the Three
Friends to continue a drunken
brawl and pushing match for which there hadn’t been room inside. One of the men appeared to be being forcibly ejected by the
others. He was so hopelessly drunk that he kept falling against the wall as he tried to stagger off along the street. An upstairs
window rattled open as the crowd of men were pushing him away, and a woman’s voice screamed, “Serve you right, you filthy
pig! Come back when you can conductcherself! Pig!” More customers seemed to be gathering in the doorway to see him off, roaring
in amusement and looking up at the window above their heads as the woman slammed it shut. I was too far away to pick out the
faces of the men as they stood with the light from the inn falling across them, but as I watched I became more and more certain
I recognized one. He was currently laughing and pointing, but the last time I’d seen him he’d been slumped stupidly and silently
in one of Flethick’s chairs.

As the clamor died down, I thought I heard something moving behind me again, in the graveyard; but all I could see when I
turned was the silent little cemetery with the blank wall of the church behind. I surveyed the churchyard for a few moments,
watching it for movement, straining my eyes in the dark. And now something
did
move, over by the gate where I’d come in.

I watched a big uneasy figure lope out of the shadows into the road, and cross to the inn. My hands
tightened around the bricks of the low wall. He was glancing nervously to left and right, and rather than go inside the inn
he retreated into the shadow by the wall, to wait.

Coben.

The man I’d seen at Flethick’s had spotted Coben too, and after a couple of seconds I saw him venture over to the wall to
speak to him. I strained to hear what was being said; but it was drowned out by the clomping of hooves as, at that moment,
a carriage came gliding around the corner, made its way up the street, and stopped directly in front of the inn, blocking
my view of the villains. The sleek black horse snorted shortly, and shook its head with a jangle of brass. It seemed to be
looking down its nose at the poorly dressed people to-ing and fro-ing around the inn; and I noticed it had a long, shiny scar
along its flank.

The driver was leaning down and asking one of the men something. There was a murmur, and then a shout went up.

“His Lordship wants you!” someone called. “His Lordship wants to talk.”

The carriage stood there, black and silent. Nobody got out. But Coben emerged from behind it — looking very scared, I realized.
He stood at the carriage window and began talking in a low voice to whoever was inside. Normally a large, brutal man, he suddenly
seemed shrunken: diminished by his fear, and by the gleaming red-painted carriage wheel which was very nearly as high as he
was. He wasn’t a man accustomed to showing respect to anybody; but, to judge from his body language, this was as close as
he got. He kept casting nervous glances up and down the street and over at the cemetery where I was hiding. I shrank back,
convinced I’d been seen; but he’d turned again, and was talking to the man in the carriage.

“I don’t know!” I suddenly heard him say, in a loud voice. “I told you all I know!”

There was a pause while the man in the carriage said something. Coben’s reply, as so often, came in dense slang I couldn’t
understand.

“Spoked a spavy nose,” was what it sounded like; “the bosun’s ginch.”

Another comment I couldn’t hear, from the carriage window.

“Yeah, well it’ll serve Damyata right,” growled Coben, and banged once on the side of the carriage with the flat of his hand.
The driver gave a click and the haughty-looking horse moved off, leaving Coben standing in the road looking after the cab
with an expression which, even in the near darkness, I could tell was indescribably nasty.

I watched him stroll up the street a little way, rather aimlessly, as if wondering what to do next. He glanced
at the cemetery gate, and after a few seconds’ deliberation he moved off in completely the opposite direction, around the
dark corner behind the Three Friends. From the inn I could hear a great deal of laughter and song which kept bursting out
at odd moments; yet the noise seemed joyless, even pained, and the harder I listened the more the laughter began to sound
like wailing, as if the inn were crammed full of souls in torment. I watched the drab, flickering light of its windows and
suddenly felt cold.

Coben had completely disappeared. It seemed unlikely there’d be anything else much to see tonight. I gazed up at the high
decorated spire of the church, which had obviously been white when it was built, but in whose crevices years of soot had accumulated,
rather as shadows accumulate in the corners of people’s eyes when they haven’t had enough sleep. The words of a song seemed
to shimmer on the night air, coming from the Three Friends: voices raised in a slow, melancholy, bell-like tune, raucous and
wavering.

Ding, dong, ding, dong,

Here’s a sweet song:

Ding, dong, ding, dong

Ere long, life’s gone.

I felt my eyelids closing and I told myself that my bed at Cramplock’s would be much more comfortable than
the rough wall against which I was leaning. Watching carefully for observers, I crawled towards the cemetery gate and made
my way home, while behind me the tinny voices of the drunken singers seemed to echo down the street to the river, across the
black rooftops, through the smoky night air of the humming city and into the silent fields and marshes beyond.

I don’t have any idea what time it was when I arrived home that night. I had dragged myself back through the streets in an
exhausted trance, barely conscious; and when I unlocked the heavy door of the printing shop and crept inside in the darkness,
Lash greeted me with all the fervor of a dog who had convinced himself his owner was never coming back. I turned up a lamp
and took it upstairs, relieved to be home.

But I was still awake enough to be fretting about something which, before I went to bed, I just had to check. Tonight I’d
heard the name “Damyata.” It will serve Damyata right, Coben had growled. But I’d heard it before. I’d seen it on the document
in the captain’s cabin aboard the
Sun of Calcutta
. And I’d also seen it, I was certain, on one of the papers I’d taken from Jiggs’s cellar.

For the second time that night I reached for my little biscuit tin of treasures on its shelf in the cupboard. Sitting down
on the bed, I pried off the lid.

It was empty.

I must have forgotten to put the things back when I’d taken them out earlier. Had I put them on a different shelf in the cupboard?
No. Had they fallen under the bed? I hunted around the room, feeling increasingly sick as I realized my things were nowhere
to be found. The notes from the villains had all been taken. Mog’s Book had gone too, with my latest thoughts and secrets
in it; my peg doll was gone; and most importantly of all, my
bangle
.

I was trembling. I sat down on the bed, with Lash between my knees looking up at me, and tried to think. I was so tired I
couldn’t actually remember putting anything back in the tin; but there was no trace of the contents anywhere else in the room,
and I knew I hadn’t taken them with me. So where
were
they? There was only one possible explanation, I realized with a sick feeling. While I was out, for those short hours of
darkness, someone must have been in here and taken them.

Could Cramplock have been back while I was out? Had he let himself in late at night, found the place empty, been nosing around
my room and found the tin? Or perhaps he had come up to find me, been surprised to find Lash here alone, discovered the tin
quite by accident, and taken the contents out of curiosity?

It seemed unlikely. But there was another possibility, I thought, as I stared at the open cupboard before me. The man from
Calcutta could have been in here. Knowing I was out, he could have come in through the wall. He’d have seized straight away
upon the pieces of paper with the notes and lists of names: they’d be
exactly
what he was after. It was bad enough to lose those, but the bangle … my most precious thing, gone! He’d have seen it, and
known it was valuable, and possibly even recognized the engraved patterns, as I had.