Chapter Six
Copeland woke, once again in an unfamiliar room; but this time after a moment’s brief panic, he remembered that he had stayed at the Mermaid in the interests of furthering his acquaintance with Lord Westford. They had stayed up late talking, last night - or rather, Westford had talked and Copeland had greedily drunk in his stories of court life, visualising the splendours which went along with it and might be falling into Copeland’s hands in a few short months. The young lord had sipped his brandy and chattered on well into the early hours with no signs of flagging and in the end, Copeland had had to excuse himself and go to bed.
He yawned. It seemed that he had slept late again, though normally he woke well before dawn. He heaved himself out of the bed and threw the shutters open, blinking at the sudden sunlight as he dressed himself in his best suit. Going downstairs, he called for breakfast. Jem, the landlord, came out of the kitchen and as he took the order, Vansel appeared.
“Ah, Vansel,” Copeland greeted him jovially. “And how is his Lordship this morning?”
“Abed these two hours past, sir,” Vansel returned.
“I beg your pardon? He went to bed two hours ago?”
“Aye, he generally retires around dawn.”
“What time does he get up?” Copeland could not decide whether the valet was making fun of him or not.
“On the stroke of midday, sir.” Vansel regarded the little moneylender’s suspicion and added “In Mardon it isn’t done to breakfast before eleven at earliest, sir, but few gentlemen will leave their entertainments much before dawn. A couple of hours, maybe, but to return home before midnight would be terribly embarrassing for any but a schoolroom party. Country hours are a little earlier, but a gentleman would hardly retire before midnight even in the country.”
Copeland shook his head as Jem came back in with bread, butter and small-beer. Mardon was a very strange place.
“Will that be all, sir?” Vansel enquired. At Copeland’s dismissal he walked out of the room, catching Jem’s eye as he went. He waited in the taproom. Before long the landlord hurried in.
“Any news?” Jem asked.
“Nothing yet. I went to see if there was any sign last night, but there was none. Can you get in touch with them?”
“I’ll try, Captain. Don’t you worry about Alaric, though; the man’s got more lives than a cat and it won’t be the first time he’s had an entire regiment after him and still got away. He’s probably holed up somewhere waiting for the fuss to blow over, while we’re running about like headless chickens trying to find out what’s happened.”
“Oh, I know Alaric will be fine but he has a very special cargo with him this time, and one I’d rather keep out of the Colonel’s sight. He’s not a stupid man and he reacts predictably sometimes.”
“Colonel Lowry? Is he in charge again?” Jem was alarmed at this new information.
“I know, Jem, I know!” Vansel shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do about that except make sure we don’t get caught.”
“And the Lord Westford with you, too!” The landlord wrung his hands in worry.
“Yes, and that’s the devil in it. If anything happens to him - well, his sister would kill me if no-one had beaten her to it.” Vansel shook his head. “The young fool would stow away on my ship the one time when I’m smuggling something more perilous than brandy. I’ve sent the Susan on to finish her run but I couldn’t very well leave him here on his own. Still, I suppose it was just as well or it would have been another three days before we found out that Alaric had disappeared, or that Lowry was back in the game.”
“Nothing will happen to Lord Westford, Captain, you may take my word for that. I’ll engage to keep an eye on him if you need to go.”
“Thanks, Jem, but I can’t. I need to speak to Mickel. Jack probably won’t stir for a few hours yet. I should be back but if not, send him a pot of strong coffee up at midday. You have some in store?”
“Aye, that we have,” the landlord answered proudly. “At The Mermaid we’re not so behind the times as you might think, even in the matter of outlandish spices and such; leastways, not when there’s paying customers as wants them.”
Vansel laughed.
“Well, this customer in particular will want his coffee very badly and pay very well!”
“The best kind of customer.” Jem winked. “Well, we’d best not leave Mr Copeland to his own devices too long or he’ll think he’s being slighted.”
Mickel awoke to the sound of knocking on his door. He blinked sleepily, groaning as he realised just how stiff he was. He’d fallen asleep in the chair again, his joints were protesting and he could barely move. He climbed to his feet with some difficulty and splashed his face with water from the pitcher on the side. He was chilled through from sleeping without a blanket in the draughty room, though still fully dressed. Downstairs the knocking stopped and there was a jingle of keys. That would be Vansel then; no-one else knew where the spares were hidden.
Mickel dried his face, stretched a little to work the kinks out of his muscles and went to check on Bet. Despite the chill of the morning, she was still flushed and sleeping uneasily. He let her be, and limped down the stairs to find his friend occupied in feeding the fire.
“It’s not like you to let the fire die, Mickel; you’re one of the most thin-blooded people I ever met.”
“Hmmmmm,” Mickel returned vaguely, and slumped on a chair.
Vansel shot a look at him but went on raking through the embers until the live coals glowed orange. Seeing Mickel had fallen asleep again, he went to the cupboard and, at ease in his surroundings, located the makings of breakfast and set the frying pan on to warm. The smell of frying bacon roused Mickel, but he was barely awake before Vansel set a plate beside him with bacon, eggs and a thick slice of coarse bread.
The two of them ate in silence. By the time they finished, the pan of coffee which Vansel had placed over the coals had boiled. Mickel poured it out for them both, strong and black. Vansel heaped wood onto the fire then sat back and regarded the other over his cup. Mickel sat gazing into the fire, apparently unaware of Vansel’s scrutiny.
“So how’s the girl?” Vansel asked when it became clear that Mickel was not going to volunteer any information.
“Bet? She’s feverish but she’ll live, I expect.”
“And the others?”
“When I left, the younger girl was sleeping. The older one - well, she’ll either die or wake up, and at this point I couldn’t tell you which.”
Vansel stood up abruptly and strode over to look out of the window. “Your orders were to observe only, Mickel, and here you are in the thick of things. Care to explain?”
“There was no-one else; and though I made the decision to help, there was no choice in it. That’s all the explanation I have and if you’re your father’s son, then it’ll be enough for you.” There was a silence. “What would you have had me do?”
Vansel turned impatiently and began to pace about the room. “Very well, I’ll admit there was no other choice, but to put everything we’ve worked for into jeopardy for this-”
“-is exactly what you would have done in my place, and you know it!”
Vansel glared at him for a moment, then threw himself into a chair. “As if I didn’t have enough to think about already!” he muttered, running his hands through his dark curly hair.
“What’s going on? You forget I haven’t seen you in the best part of six months. A lot can happen in half a year.”
“Where shall I start? Six months, let’s see... We came back from the mountains via Saragos, brought you the last lot of brandy and returned to Ravensburgh in a fairly roundabout manner. At Ravensburgh we met with one of our contacts, who introduced us to a potential client. At first he talked as if it was a consignment of goods which he didn’t wish to pay tax on. It seemed logical enough; few Shantars are rich enough to pay the war-levies the Mardonese still ch
arge, even if they were inclined to do so. But then he changed tack little by little, until it became clear that it wasn’t a consignment of goods he wanted bringing across, but a person.”
“A person?” Mickel was taken aback. “So what’s the catch? Why not just bring them?”
Vansel shrugged. “That’s what I asked, but you know the Shantari. All he said was ‘Because it is needful.’ I told him that I was willing to take any goods he could name, but not a person. And he commented that he’d hoped not to have to do this, and took a document from his pouch. It was my father’s handwriting, and it said that he owed them a debt of honour.”
Mickel’s eyebrows went up.
“Exactly. The Shantaro said he could not accept any payment except my bringing his mother over, so that was the end of it. After that, there was nothing to be done but arrange the details and nothing has come of it but trouble ever since. One little old woman, and you’d think she was the most important person in the world from the way we’ve been chased.”
“Chased? For his mother?” Mickel stopped, arrested by a thought. “Vansel, tell me it was the woman who gave birth to him rather than the Mother of the Shantari. Tell me you haven’t...”
“That was what I had understood him to mean,” Vansel sighed dryly, “but it appears that yes, we are in the middle of trying to smuggle the most wanted woman on the continent into the last place she should be trying to reach.”
Blakey awoke, groggy and with his head pounding. His memory was confused and blurry. It shouldn’t be this bad from alcohol. Had he – no, he wouldn’t have so soon. And then he saw the stray featherlight flakes clinging to his sleeve. Again! He had done it again! How could he have been so foolish?
He made his way heavily down to the kitchen, raked over the smouldering turves and put water on to boil. While he waited, he perched on the edge of the table.
Carefully he extracted a small oilcloth-wrapped bundle from an inside pocket and unrolled it to reveal a pretty snuffbox not much larger than his thumb; a gift given to him by an Earl in his days of glory, after that gentleman had won a generous amount of money betting on Blakey to win. He flicked the lid open with one thumb as the fine gentleman had shown him once upon a time. The lid sprang up to reveal the gap where there had once been a tiny golden spoon, now long lost. Instead of peppery grains of snuff, the box was half-filled with fine pale flakes, almost translucent; beautiful things like the ghosts of snowflakes, but deadly as plague... Angel Feathers.
Blakey looked into the box for a long moment, and then his hands began to shake and he shut the lid with a snap. “Half full? How can it be half full? It was full not two weeks ago. Must have dropped it, spilt it somewhere. Damn it! It’s too expensive for that!” But his cursing was half-hearted; he knew he had not spilt it.
The water boiled and he lifted the kettle off its hook and put it to one side. He stopped to build up the fire before going on to make a cup of the bitter coffee that Copeland kept all his haunts supplied with. Then he sat back at the table and tried to remember. To have taken so much Angel Feathers! What had he been thinking?
Of course, he took it the safest way, diluted into brandy. He wasn’t fool enough to indulge via the knife, as the real addicts did. He had seen them often, sometimes in the hell-holes they called Paradises where a few coins bought enough of the drug for a fix, a tiny bowl containing a teaspoonful of water in which to mix it and a sharp knife to open the skin and smear on the paste. He had seen the look on their faces, those strange faces which gradually all took on the same unearthly beauty as the addiction grew stronger and the drug altered their features. He had also seen - and smelt - the festering wounds which were left as the body slowly lost the ability to heal itself. Each new fix needed a new cut, making a new sore on a body which began to decompose as surely as if already dead.
He had seen a woman die of it once, many years ago, and had sworn never to go near the drug; just another one of those moments which seemed sadly ironic now. He hadn’t even known her name. She was just a beggar woman who used to sit at the mouth of the bridge that spanned the river. Every so often he would pass her as she dwindled from bedraggled woman to emaciated scarecrow. Sometimes he would give her food when no-one was about to see him do it, but even when he pressed bread into her hand she would simply gaze at it with a kind of vacant wonder and, often as not, let it fall into the mud beside her. As her body became thinner, her face had become transfigured, radiant almost. She seemed to see far beyond him, as if somewhere a part of her flew among the stars; on angel’s wings, he had thought at the time.
He began to walk via the bridge just to see her face, and every day he came away thinking it was more impossibly beautiful than the previous day, but every day the stench which hung about her grew worse, a miasma of rotting. At first he assumed that it was all the accumulated food which passers-by had given her and which she had let fall, but as it grew worse, he began to walk by on the other side of the road. One day he noticed that her gaze was different. It wasn’t until he got nearer that he could see why. Her eyes were blood-streaked; as he watched, the red streaks in her left eye were slowly widening and filling. He threw the bread into her lap and backed away before the stink of her made him retch.
The next day she was lying in the mud, still and cold, sprawled awkwardly as a discarded toy. Both eyes were blood-filled, bloody vomit pooling on the ground around her mouth. Lying down, the pitiful fragments of her dress revealed what, sitting, they had hidden; that the fetid smell was caused by the flesh rotting off her bones and, final indignity, her fall to the mud had marked the once-beautiful skin of her face with livid purple weals, in places tearing it as if it was paper. Blakey turned away in revulsion, to see an old man with a shovel approaching. The old man had paused for a moment to tie a rag across his nose and mouth to mask the stench before starting to dig a hole in the wet earth just under the bridge, burying the stinking flesh as quickly as possible.
“Angel Feathers, boy,” the man muttered grimly. “Don’t let it come to this.”
Now his words echoed in Blakey’s ears.
“Vansel, how do these things always happen to you?” Mickel demanded.
“If you ever find out, I’d like to know,” Vansel replied, half humorous, half despairing. “We made the arrangements, and set off back for the mountains. We found our guide, trekked halfway along the damn range and found the Mother at their winter home. She’s old and travelling was taking too long so I went back to fetch the Susan from Mardon. I left Alaric behind with four or five of the others to see she got down to the shore at Seagift in one piece so we could take her on from there by ship.”
“And?”
“In Mardon, it was my infernal bad luck to meet up with Jack, who was more than a little drunk and rebellious. His sister had been nagging him again, about it being time he got married and provided the family with an heir.”
Mickel groaned. “I think she thinks it’ll calm him down and stop him getting up to all his tricks, but I can’t help but notice that it tends to be after she’s been lecturing him that he misbehaves.”
“Exactly! I thought I was lucky to get away from him without getting embroiled in his latest scheme. Then three days’ sail from Mardon I go down into the hold to check we’re all in shape in case Customs decide to drop by and damn me if I don’t find him there asleep on a bale of silk, having drunk half a keg of my finest brandy!”
Mickel had to laugh. “The boy’s a damn nuisance but you have to hand it to him; he has style!”
“Maybe he has at that, but now see what a fix I’m in! Here’s Jack and I, fallen into the middle of some situation here that wasn’t of my making; he’s on speaking terms with Copeland and you’ve taken sides - quite understandably-” Mickel made a sharp gesture of protest.
“I should be two days’ sail down the coast at Seagift to pick up the old woman and, on top of all that, there’s been trouble at the border.”
“What kind of trouble?” Mickel asked, concerned.
“All kinds, from what I can gather. They seem to have got down the mountains in time and stopped at a town near the border where someone recognised the old woman and called the Guards. There was some sort of fire, three Shantari died and somewhere in the confusion of keeping the Guards busy Alaric and the old woman disappeared along with her servant. Since then, we’ve heard no word of them.”
“‘Don’t let it come to that?’ It won’t come to that. I’m careful. I don’t take it like she did. There aren’t any cuts for it to get into in my gullet.” But Blakey knew it was not true. All it needed was one little spill, one scratch… He stretched out his hands. The knuckles on the right were still not entirely healed since the basement of the Black Cat. A shiver ran down his spine. He wrapped the snuffbox in its waterproof covering with trembling hands and climbed back into his room to shove it under the mattress on his bed. It would be dangerous now, actually dangerous to have any more of the drug; certainly until his knuckles were properly healed. After that, well, not until he really needed it; not until he was desperate.
“ ‘When the ship comes in everyone salutes the Captain!’ Not that I knew what that meant then. Not that I knew what it was they were putting into that rum that made it so effective, but they knew, damn them!”
He remembered it suddenly. He had walked into the grimy little inn a few miles outside Mardon, injured and afraid that the mob would find him again, exhausted because he had not slept in two weeks with the pain of his shoulder, and dizzy with the chaotic collapse of his carefully rebuilt life.
Recognising him as the famous boxer on whom he had wagered and won a lot of money, a man called Hatchet had befriended Blakey, introducing him to the drink they called ‘Captain’s Despair’. Hatchet told him it was rum “and a little bit of magic”. It had proved surprisingly effective at dulling the pain from his shoulder so Blakey had drunk it most nights until he discovered that the ‘magic’ was Angel Feathers. Horrified and already well on the way to addiction, he had fled, only to end up in the employ of Copeland in the very town where they harvested and processed the Sea Angel jellyfish, from which the drug came.
…The memory faded, and Blakey shook his head. By now Hatchet would be long gone, and his good friend Benjamin Blakey, the Strongest Man in Mardon, had spent seven years making his living in a way that he could not have been able to bear for six months together without the occasional help of the contents of the little snuffbox. Perhaps it was true, then. Perhaps he should finally admit it to himself.
“Alaric’s no fool. He’ll have gone to earth,” Mickel commented. “In fact he’s probably holed up with one of his women. You know him - in a week and a half he’ll turn up safe, unharmed and with a grin as wide as a melon.”
“It’s the most likely explanation but if it’s true his timing is terrible. In the meantime, word’s been sent to Mardon and Colonel Lowry’s on his way. He’ll be here by tomorrow at latest.” Vansel was not happy and Mickel could quite understand why.
“Colonel Lowry? Wouldn’t that just make his day, to catch the Mother and Alaric and you and Jack, all mixed up together?”
“It would certainly pay back the score he owes Lord Faramond.”
“Lord Faramond?”
“Jack’s great-uncle. He was one of the King’s Counsels during the war and they kept Lowry on a very tight rein. He’s a good man, Faramond,” Vansel mused, “but Lowry’s never forgiven him for it. He thinks he could have broken the Shantar if he’d been allowed to really put pressure on them. And as Faramond’s pretty much unassailable, Lowry’s been trying to get at him through anyone else he can find. First it was Jack’s sister Kathleen, when she was about to get married, and now Jack. And this time Jack’s pretty much stepped up to the gallows and put his head in the noose.”
“Not if he doesn’t get caught...”
“With the way my luck’s been running over the past six months, Lowry will probably stop at Scarlock on the way past! Ah well. I should be getting back. Hopefully Alaric will have left a message and even if he hasn’t, I need to keep an eye on Jack.”
“And the situation here?”
“The girls?” Vansel shrugged. “Do as you see fit; but as you love me, don’t spark off civil war until Lowry’s out of the picture and I have time to deal with it. I swore to kill Copeland and I will, but not in the middle of all this and definitely not with Jack mixed up in it. See what you can do for them and let me know how it’s going every so often. For now, I’ve got to go.”
Mickel stood to see Vansel to the door and then returned to the hearth. The fire was beginning to throw out a little heat now and he put a new pan of water on to heat. Bet’s bandages needed changing, there were many things he had to do and he’d just been given a lot to think about.
Addict Blakey might be, he thought as he walked across his room, but surely if anyone had earned the right to take the drug once in a while, if anyone needed to not care about their situation, it was he. Stuck here, not even sure this was where he was supposed to be, inflicting all sorts of pain – and for what reason? Because his people believed that he was the only one who could do what must be done. His own family believed it enough to send him away. As for killing Daukh, that was unfortunate. It had been partly self-defence and partly accident, but now here he was, in this muddy hole of a town at the tail end of the world, subject to the whims of a vicious little bastard of a moneylender and with absolutely no chance of doing what they expected of him.
“Clever, that!” He stared out of the window bitterly. “‘Leave everything you love, go somewhere else, not sure where and find some woman. We don’t know who, but you’ll know her when you see her. Oh, and don’t come back until you can tell us where she is.’ Why not just tell me to never come back?” he cried savagely, and was taken aback by the grief in his voice. He sunk his head in his hands and gave way to it then, as he had not in years.
His father was long dead; perhaps his mother too. His sister would be almost a grown woman now, maybe even with children, and what would they ever know of him? That he had killed a man? That he had failed in his task? That he had died a drug-rotted corpse, in a town whose inhabitants would be overjoyed that he was dead?
“No; not that. At least, not that. It all went wrong somewhere. It’s gone too far. How can I ever make it right again? How can I make it right?” He thought desperately for some time, then looked down to find the little snuffbox in his hand. He shuddered. He had not got as far as the mattress and he had taken it out again without even realising. It needed to be further away. He rewrapped it and took it to the small bare patch of earth at the back of the house, where he buried it, quickly walking away, heading towards the harbour before his resolution gave way. He was a man, not a puppet to be ruled by this addiction. If he wanted to see the people he loved ever again, if he wanted his sister and her children to know him as anything other than what he was now, he would have to take charge of his own life and find a way to achieve the task that they had set him.
Copeland watched with interest as Blakey came out of the house. There was no point hanging about The Mermaid all morning when Lord Westford was unlikely to surface till midday, so he had headed back to the office to spend the morning about his own business; but something about Blakey’s manner had made Copeland step hastily into the shelter of a doorway, out of sight. Now he let the man disappear from view before emerging from his hiding place.
He took Blakey’s spade to the newly-turned earth and found the wrapping and the snuffbox it contained, his mouth pursing in a soundless whistle at its apparent costliness. He opened the little box, saw the flakes inside; broke off the tiniest piece to touch it to his tongue, then spat two or three times to clear the taste from his mouth before he rewrapped the bundle and put it back. He went inside the house, poured himself a coffee and went up to his office to drink it while his head cleared
. Even so little of the drug was blurring his thoughts, and Blakey’s habit was something he ought to think about.
There was the question of who he should place in charge of the Sea Angel processing sheds now that Old Emma was – his thought shied away from it – dead. Something about that was significant. If he could just remember, there was a connection to be made. He was sure there was some reason why the hold he’d gain over Blakey was more important than the losses he’d incur by putting an addict in charge of the process of making the drug he craved. He couldn’t remember why he’d want to run the risk of losing Blakey’s protection though. On the other hand, someone needed to oversee the workers and it might as well be Blakey until he found someone else. He’d think about it later, anyway. There was no immediate hurry. He was tired from an uncommonly late night and he was content to sit in his creaky old chair, watching the people passing to and fro.
Later in the day, Madam made her way to the warehouse to see how Bet was getting on. Walking along the seafront, she was accosted respectfully from time to time. This happened as a matter of course, not only because in a town like Scarlock, men both poor and rich knew the value of staying on the right side of the woman in charge of the brothel, but also because Madam had her own subtle powerbase and was canny enough to cultivate it without Copeland’s knowledge. Sometimes when Copeland was due his next payment, the debtor would, in direst need, go to see Madam; and once in a while it might happen that they had something that she could use. Perhaps the damp wind from the sea would abruptly make every door in the Black Cat stick a little, and the carpenter would be paid in advance for the job of fixing them; or after a visit from a fisherman, the inhabitants of the brothel would suddenly develop such a taste for fish that they would buy his whole catch two or three days in a row and, with no intermediary to haggle the price down, would pay nearly double what they should have. Besides, it was moderately common for the poorer townswomen to cook, clean, darn or help with dress-making for Madam and her women and so earn a meal or a few coins towards one. Inconspicuously, her network had developed until nearly every family in the town was silently obliged to her to some extent.
Walking down the street now, she sensed a change in the tone of the enquiries from the merely respectful to the slightly fearful. Everyone started with small-talk – how she was, what a storm it had been, what a mercy none of the fishing fleet had been lost – and then came the hesitation; the quick glance around and the lowered voice as they mentioned how they’d heard the rumours about those two girls…?
The last to stop her was Niccolo, the young fisherman who had offered to bury Emma’s corpse. He asked after Bet and the girls and she told him as much as seemed prudent.
“Thank you Madam,” the boy stammered. “I... It’s too late now, but if I had known I would never have said anything, never!” His face had a haunted look about it, the sort of look she had hoped to have seen the last of a long time ago. She took his chin and forced him to meet her eyes; and just for a moment she dropped her guard and spoke directly to him.
“Don’t blame yourself for this, boy. Life moves in ways that we can never understand. Sometimes bad things have to happen so that good things are possible, and we can never see the links between them until afterwards. It may be that without this incident, some great good would not be able to happen or that some greater evil would have taken place.”
“But how can I tell?”
“You can’t.” She smiled regretfully. “Just trust in Life. Life knows the way; it is drawn to light and love and warmth and it grows towards them as inevitably as a seed does to the sun. All we have to do is trust it. Can you do that?”
“I will try,” the boy replied slowly.
“A good answer. Now run away, boy. I have things to do.”
“Yes, Madam. Thank you Madam,” Niccolo replied, doing as he was told. The words hit Madam like a dash of cold water. She turned and strode off in the direction of Mickel’s warehouse, her thoughts in turmoil.
For a moment there, the boy had looked so like Pren in those last days before the cease-fire that for that split second she had forgotten where she was. Ten years had dropped away like leaves in autumn and she had spoken to Niccolo as if they were standing in the camp by the muddied battleground outside Tobelst, rather than the salt-scoured streets of Scarlock. She paused for a moment outside Mickel’s door to regain her equilibrium, and threw a last glance up at the troubled sky. There was no time now. Events were beginning to hurry close upon one another in the way which she had come to recognise as the precursor to something important; but Madam stored the memory of that face to one side. There would be time at some point in the still of the night, or the quiet clear-water light of dawn, to treasure that memory, bittersweet as it was; but that time was yet to come.
She took a deep breath and arrayed the past ten years about her like armour before opening the door. Then she stepped out of the past and into the warehouse.
On Dark Shores
2: The Other Nereia