Printer's Devil (9780316167826) (6 page)

“Look, I’ve
got
to go,” I said, twisting and wriggling in a vain attempt to slip out of his grip.

The man pulled me close to him, violently now, and I caught a powerful hot scent of rum full in the face. Lash barked, but
the sailor showed the dog his teeth in a sudden grimace and Lash fell silent, astonished.

“Now you listen,” he said to me, gruffly and quietly. “Your Pa’s in a fine chafe over you, young snaffer, and if I wasn’t
so soft I’d run you into that tailshop and let him hang you by your kegs for all to glory over. Now you be warned, chimp,
and get yourself out while your molly’s still in one piece, and don’t say I letcha. Hook it!”

I stumbled away, with Lash at my heels, tripping on
the cobbles, not daring to look back at the tattooed sailor. What on earth had he been talking about? Furious, I looked up
and down the street, but of course the pair of thieves were now nowhere to be seen. Maybe the sailor had stopped me on purpose,
to slow me down and let the villains escape?

My eyes stung with sudden tears. Thrusting my hands deep into my pockets, letting Lash follow at his own pace now, I trudged
in the direction of home, getting more and more furious about the thieves and the chest I’d watched them taking. As I walked
along I realized how strongly I smelt of tar — but when I tried to rub the sticky stuff from my clothes it just made a worse
mess than before. I’d have to change when I got back to Clerkenwell.

Suddenly, as I walked past the low doorway of a courtyard, I caught a glimpse of something which made me stop in my tracks.
Was it …? I took a step backward and looked through the passageway again; and sure enough, standing against a wall, apparently
abandoned, was the cart with the chest on it. I could hardly believe my eyes. They’d just left it here! I whistled for Lash
and bent to take hold of his lead again. Keeping him close, I tiptoed up the passageway towards the cart. The nearer I got,
the more certain I was it was the same one: I recognized the dark tarpaulin and the shape of the chest beneath it. But surely
the
villains couldn’t be far away! I had no time to lose. I rushed up to the cart and looked around quickly to make sure no one
was watching — then took hold of the cover, and lifted it.

The disappointment was like a hammer blow. An old sideboard! A rotting old piece of useless furniture, with grimy green paint
flaking off all over it. This was the villains’ cart all right — but wherever they’d gone, they’d taken the chest with them,
and had probably left this here deliberately to throw people off their scent.

It was only then that I noticed a group of children, a bit younger than I was, watching me from a corner of the yard. They
had a battered-looking dog with them, which started to yelp when it saw us, and Lash snarled back. The dog looked ill, with
milky eyes and a mouth that hung open as though its jaw didn’t work properly. I didn’t want Lash to go near it.

“Did you see the three men who brought this cart?” I asked the children.

None of them said anything. They all just watched me.

“I need to know where they’ve gone,” I said, “the men who brought this. Did you see them? One of them had a bandage on.”

Still they stood, looking dumbstruck. Why weren’t they talking to me? One of them whispered something into the ear of another;
and I suddenly realized they
weren’t really looking at
me
, but at something above my head.

I turned too late. Above me there was a scraping sound and, as I looked up, I saw another boy poised on the top of the wall
in a crouching position. Just as I noticed the brick he was holding in his hands, he sent it tumbling down towards my upturned
face; I remember hearing Lash barking; and the boy’s wild, satisfied little smile was the last thing I saw before the sky
seemed to fill with brick, then blood, then darkness.

I woke up to find a pair of eyes about an inch from mine, and the stench of warm breath in my nostrils.

I came to with a jolt, and realized it was the skinny half of the villainous pair, peering down his snout-like nose at me.

“Ere, Coben,” he said suddenly, “ere, ’e’s comin’ to.”

“Who are you?” I asked indistinctly. As I moved, a sudden smarting in my forehead reminded me in a flash of the child on the
wall, and the brick which must have hit me.

I groaned, and let my head fall back onto the pile of old rags on which I was lying. I was in a very dim corner of some damp
little room, lit only by a candle flickering on a table nearby. Both of the villains I’d followed were here: the bandage-headed
one appeared now, beside the other, and they both looked down at me as I lay there.

“Andsome creeter,” murmured one, ironically.

“Soft-lookin’,” said the other, with a note of scorn. “Pelt like a wench.”

I tensed. Since I’d lived in the orphanage, several years ago now, I’d never forgotten one of the older children once saying
that when I was asleep, I looked like a girl. It didn’t matter much, because nobody usually saw me while I was asleep; but
these two hideous characters had caught me at my most vulnerable, and their sneering tone was making my skin crawl. I heaved
myself up onto my elbows to put myself at greater advantage.

“Lash,” I said suddenly, looking around me. There was no sign of him. “My dog — where’s my dog?”

“No ’arm will come to your dog,” said the bandaged one, “long as you do as you’re told.”

“Where is he?”
I insisted, beginning to panic.

“That’s for us to know,” he said sharply. “What was you doin’ stalkin’ us?”

“I don’t understand,” I lied, wincing from the pain in my forehead.

“You followed us with a dog,” the other, skinny one piped up. “What was you followin’ us for?”

“I wasn’t,” I lied again.

The man with the bandage pushed his way forward, bent over me, and took me just a little too firmly by the shoulders. “Now
then,” he said, squeezing with his huge grimy hands, “we knows your Pa put you
up to this, but he’ll regret it, we’ll make sure o’ that. You tell us what the bosun’s done with that camel.”

I stared at them blankly.
They
thought they knew my father too, just as the sailor outside the Galleon had! What on earth was going on? I was too astonished
to say a word.

“Come on, Master bosun’s lad,” said the skinny one, “stow makin’ it rough.”

“You’ll only mak’ it painful for yerself,” growled the bandaged man. “See if we can’t make you squeal. What’s the bosun about,
and where’s the camel?”

The pain in my forehead was making my head buzz and I couldn’t be sure I was hearing properly. For a while I thought these
two must have the same strange condition, whatever it was, that had made some of Flethick’s friends talk gibberish last night.
But it was starting to be obvious that people were mistaking me for someone else entirely. “Ask the bosun nicely,” a voice
intoned somewhere inside my head, “and he’ll cut your gizzard.” A churning feeling in my stomach told me I was in deep trouble.
If only Lash was here.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told them, “I don’t know no bosun.”

The bandaged one laughed shortly. “There’s plenty wish they didn’t,” he said, “his own brat among ’em, I warrant.” His face
turned dark. “You squeal,” he said, taking hold of my throat. “You been aboard that ship
from London to Calcutta and back again, and you seen every move that camel’s made, an it’s your own Pa’s what’s nailed it,
an’ we knows it!”

I couldn’t begin to understand what bandage-head was on about. Did he really say
camel?

“What camel?”

“Coben,” said the skinny one, “’e might’ve forgot. That brick might’ve knocked the sense out of ’im.”

“Don’t feel sorry for ’im, Jiggs,” said the one called Coben, “if you believe a word ’e says you’re an even bigger fool than
you look.” Jiggs opened his gormless mouth, but obviously thought better of arguing. Coben placed his massive, filthy hand
around my chin and asked me again, more threateningly this time,
“Where’s the camel?”

His clenched fingers were genuinely hurting my face, and out of instinct I brought both my hands up to try and wrench his
arm free. Fortunately I hadn’t cut my fingernails for about a fortnight and I managed to dig them into his oily skin and produce
about six deep satisfying crescent-shaped welts in which blood appeared as he stared down at me.

Slowly, he bared his filthy brown teeth in a snarl. “You’ve really asked for it now, you little ship’s rat,” he growled. “‘Elp
me, Jiggs.”

And as I kicked and struggled, the hideous twosome took my legs and arms and carried me across the room
where, for the first time, I noticed the ornate chest they’d brought from the
Sun of Calcutta
. The golden decoration on its lid sparkled in the candlelight: patterns like peacocks with their tails fanned out, liquid
shapes like falling teardrops of gold. But I didn’t have much time to appreciate it — at least, not from the outside. Before
I knew what was happening Coben had opened the lid and I was being bundled inside! I shouted, enraged, letting out all the
foul words I knew, which probably weren’t half as many as I’d have known if I really
had
been a bosun’s boy. Kicking wildly, I managed to land a resonant blow with my heel to the one called Jiggs, at a point on
the front of his trousers which made him let go of me abruptly and turn away, clutching himself in alarm. But Coben was quite
strong enough for two; and I might just as well have been a baby, wailing and feebly kicking, as he stuffed me into the chest
and banged the lid down on me.

It was a couple of minutes before I could think straight. The low voices of Coben and Jiggs filtered through into the darkness
of the chest as I lay cramped up inside. I strained to make out what they were saying, but their words were muffled by the
solid wood, and they were speaking to one another in a strange slang I couldn’t really understand.

“You better sound out the three friends,” I heard Coben say.

There were some indistinct murmurs from Jiggs, some of which sounded like, “That chavy wants drowning.” His tone of voice
suggested he was still in pain.

“Not yet,” said Coben, “we can get more out of ’im.” Another indistinct murmur from Jiggs, then Coben said: “We ain’t got
long. My name’s out.”

Again Jiggs said something I couldn’t make out. How irritating he was! “The man from Calcutta knows,” came Coben’s voice again.
“But there’s something I don’t like. It’s a trick, Jiggs. Fact is, I need a boat.”

There was a clattering. It sounded as though they might be preparing to leave. I listened as their footsteps creaked up the
hollow stairs. Somewhere above, a door was slammed, and a key turned.

Silence. They’d gone.

I began to feel around the inside of the chest to see if there was any way of opening it. But no amount of pushing at the
lid would make it yield. I was locked in, bent almost double, with my knees in my face and several hard lumpy objects underneath
me. Fumbling with my fingers around the floor of my prison, I scraped them against a sharp edge, like a large knife. But it
was wedged tightly under my weight, and try as I might I couldn’t move it.

I could see absolutely nothing. I just hoped there was some crack in the chest somewhere where air
could get in, or else I’d suffocate. As the reality of the situation sank in I began to panic, and started shouting and kicking
at the sides of the chest; but there was so little room to move that I could make no appreciable sound at all. I was just
exhausting myself. I gave up, my eyes filling with tears of frustration. Where was Lash? What had they done with him? In the
darkness I could clearly picture the nasty boy’s face, and I wondered how much Coben and Jiggs had paid him to throw the brick
at me.

Faces spun around my head: the man with the mustache and the wily crow’s face he had taken on in my dream; the sneering Coben
and Jiggs, the customs official laughing as they handed him money. The air in this chest was making me dizzy. It was heavy
with an alien smell which reminded me of the foul air in Flethick’s sluggish den. A strange music seemed to be reaching my
ears, fading in and out: music which sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, rising and falling and seeming to avoid all
the familiar notes. The events of the last two days mingled in my head, out of sequence, running riot. I was printing posters
with the face of a dog on them. Bob Smitchin was talking about camels, with three other people gathered around him. “Mog,”
he said, “how rude of me not to introduce you. These are the three friends.” They turned to look at me, and I realized in
horror
that they all had the face of the escaped convict. Looking down at myself, I noticed my clothes rapidly blackening with tar,
which was seeping all over my body. “Ink!” I shouted at the three convicts, “Indian ink from Calcutta!” They glared at me,
their heads getting bigger and bigger on their shoulders, until suddenly one of them picked up a brick and it came spinning
towards me, revolving in the air, infinitely slowly.