‘Shouldn’t I call for a doctor, after all?’ she asked, concern in her voice and in her eyes.
He shook his head. ‘Please, Mrs P. I’ve no time to argue.’ He crossed the room and pulled a clean shirt from amidst the scattered pieces of clothing Aylesford had strewn about in the course of ransacking his trunk. ‘There is more at stake here than one man’s health. At any rate, as I told you, I’m perfectly well.’ He turned away from her and drew the shirt over his head with a grimace, but schooled his expression to equanimity when he faced her again. ‘Now, if you will lead the way …’
‘Perfectly well, he says,’ Mrs Puddinge muttered as she preceded him out of the room, down the still-empty landing and up to the fourth floor. ‘With a hole in his back and a shoulder sliced open like a side of roast beef.’ She stopped before a door, produced her ring of keys from somewhere beneath her apron, and glared up at him. ‘You’re not a well man, Mr Quare. Deny it all you like, but the longer you do, the worse price you’ll pay. Heed your stomach, sir. It’s wiser than you are.’
‘The door, if you please, Mrs P.’
Scowling, she fitted the key to the lock. ‘Why, it’s unlocked!’ She pushed the door open. ‘Here you go, then, Mr Quare. I hope you find enough to hang—’
She broke off, and Quare pushed past her into the room, his hand on the pommel of his sword.
The room was empty, which was no more than he had expected. But it was not simply empty of Aylesford – it was empty of all trace of the man.
‘Why, his things … they’re gone!’ Mrs Puddinge said from just behind him.
‘What things?’ he asked, turning to her.
‘He had a small trunk that he carried in on his shoulder last evening,’ Mrs Puddinge said. ‘It was still here this morning – I’m sure of it. He … Oh, dear Lord in heaven!’ She looked as if she might faint, and Quare reached out to steady her. ‘There on the floor!’ She pointed with the hand that held the keys; they rattled with her shaking. ‘Blood, Mr Quare! He must’ve come back here after he fled your room! He must’ve come back here and waited until you had satisfied yourself that he was gone from the house! Then, when you returned to your room, he must have taken his trunk and crept out of here as quiet as a mouse!’
Quare felt close to fainting himself. Mrs Puddinge was right. The drops of blood on the wooden slats of the floor confirmed it. He’d assumed that Aylesford had escaped into the bustling streets, but instead he’d retired here, to this room, biding his time until Quare had given up the chase. Then – he could picture it as clearly in his mind as if he’d witnessed it himself – he’d hoisted his trunk onto his shoulder and left … along with any evidence that might incriminate him or shed light on his mission. Quare cursed – he had badly misplayed the situation. Master Magnus would not be pleased.
Master Magnus!
Aylesford had said the master was dead. Murdered in the night, like Mansfield and the rest. Quayle prayed to God that it was a lie, but he was forced to admit that everything Aylesford had told him this morning had thus far turned out to be true. He had to get to the guild hall.
Mrs Puddinge, meanwhile, was edging into hysterics. ‘Why, he could
have
slipped back into your room while you were searching the street outside and slit my throat! Or when I went to fetch bandages, I might have met him in the hall or on the stairs, and what then? Oh, Mr Quare, he might still be lurking about, waiting for the chance to finish me off!’
‘I’m sure he’s not,’ said Quare. ‘He’s gone to report back to his masters, just as I must do.’
‘No,’ she shrieked, grabbing hold of his arm. ‘You can’t leave me! He’ll kill me, he will! Just as he did those poor young men!’
‘Mrs Puddinge,’ Quare said as forcefully and yet calmly as he could, ‘Aylesford has no interest in harming you, I assure you.’
‘Oh, aye, like you assured me I would be perfectly safe when you went gallivanting off after him!’
Quare felt his cheeks flush. Damn it, the woman was right. He had left her in danger. Once again, as in his confrontation with Grimalkin, he was forced to admit that he was ill-prepared for this game in which he suddenly found himself immersed right up to his eyeballs. He knew that he was lucky to have survived this long. And, no thanks to him, so was Mrs Puddinge. Nevertheless, he felt certain that Aylesford was long gone, and that Mrs Puddinge was in no further danger. ‘It’s me that he’s after,’ he told her now. ‘But if it will set your mind at ease, I’ll look for other lodgings as soon as I’ve spoken to my masters.’
‘What, so that you can put some other innocent at risk? But even if you were to move out, Mr Quare, he still knows that I know he’s a French spy,’ Mrs Puddinge pointed out, not unreasonably. ‘He’ll still have cause enough to want me dead!’
‘Once I’ve exposed him, the whole guild will know – and my masters will see that the news reaches the ear of Mr Pitt himself. Will Aylesford kill us all, then? Don’t you see, Mrs P? The more people who know, the safer we are. Your surest protection lies in my getting to the guild hall!’
She pondered this for a moment, then nodded, a look of steely determination on her face, where, just a moment ago, he had seen only terror. ‘I’m going, too, Mr Quare.’ And, before he could object: ‘I won’t sit here all alone, waiting patiently for my throat to be cut. Say what you will, but you can’t know for certain that he’s not lurking about somewhere close by, watching and waiting like a cat at a mouse hole. As long as he sees that we’re together, he’ll not dare to strike. And if he sees us
both
go to the guild hall, he’ll know the jig is up, and that it will avail him nothing to creep back here in the dead of night and silence me.’
Quare could not fault the woman’s logic. ‘Very well, but we must make haste. Give me a moment to clean myself up and finish dressing, and we’ll go together.’
‘I’m not letting you out of my sight,’ she declared.
In the end, he prevailed upon her to allow him a modicum of privacy, standing with her arms crossed and her back to him just outside his cracked-open door. After dumping the bloody water out of the window and refilling the wash basin with the last of the fresh water from the pitcher, he undressed and hurriedly wiped the worst of the blood, grime, and sweat from his skin, shivering all the while. Then he dressed more quickly still, pulling fresh linen and clothes from the floor. He drew his hair back in a tight queue. His coat, if it were even salvageable, which he doubted, required more time and attention than he could spare just now, and so he wore only a waistcoat, once blue but now so threadbare and faded that it merely aspired to that colour. He tucked his spare hat, a battered tricorn, under one arm.
‘Well?’ he demanded of Mrs Puddinge at last. ‘How do I look?’ He did not want to draw unnecessary attention on the streets.
She opened the door fully and regarded him with a critical eye. ‘I shouldn’t care to present you to His Majesty,’ she said at last, ‘but I suppose it could be worse. Have you no spare coat?’
‘Such luxuries are beyond a journeyman’s purse, Mrs P.’
‘Why, ’tis no luxury! Here, now, I’ve still got my husband’s second-best coat – I buried him in his best, God bless his bones. I believe it will fit you very well indeed. Come along while I fetch it.’
So saying, she started off down the landing; her own rooms were on the ground floor of the house. Quare closed and locked the door to his room and followed her. At the top of the stairs, she paused and waited for him to catch up. ‘I’ll feel safer if you go first, Mr Quare.’
He nodded and slipped past her, descending with caution, his hand on the pommel of his sword. But, as before, he encountered no one. Mrs Puddinge unlocked the door to her private chambers, and again Quare preceded her inside, checking to make sure Aylesford was not hiding there. Only when he had searched every inch, including under
the
bed, did she deign to enter. Then, brisk about her business, she bustled to a trunk, threw it open, rummaged inside and drew forth a drab brownish grey monstrosity of a coat. This relic of a bygone age she unfolded and let hang from one hand while beating the dust from it with the other. Quare found it difficult to believe this garment had been anyone’s second-best anything. He would have been embarrassed to see another person wearing it, let alone himself. It seemed to have been stitched together from the skins of dried mushrooms. He sneezed, then sneezed again more violently, as an odour reached him, redolent of the ground if not the grave.
‘Here you go, Mr Quare,’ said Mrs Puddinge, advancing towards him with the mouldering coat extended before her like a weapon. ‘Not the height of fashion, I know, but sufficient unto the day, eh?’
He eyed the thing with something like horror. ‘Er, I can see how much the coat means to you, Mrs P. As a keepsake of your late husband, that is. I couldn’t possibly take it.’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ she insisted. ‘I won’t have one of my young men walking about the streets without a coat. What will people think?’ She pressed it upon him again, and, after setting his tricorn upon his head, he reluctantly took it.
‘Got a bit of a smell,’ he suggested, holding his breath.
‘Beggars can’t be choosers, Mr Quare,’ she responded, as if offended by his observation.
Quare bowed to the inevitable with a sigh. He advanced his arms through the sleeves, half expecting to encounter a mouse or spider. Perhaps a colony of moths. The coat proved to be a trifle large, even roomy. It settled heavily across his shoulders, and the stench of it was like a further weight. He didn’t think he could bear it. Yet before he could say another word, there came a sharp rapping at the front door of the house.
Mrs Puddinge shot him a fearful look.
‘That must be the watch or, worse, the redbreasts,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Quick, Mrs P – you delay them, and I’ll go out through the window. You can stay here; you’ll be safe with these men.’
‘I’ll do no such thing!’ Even as she spoke, she was crossing the room to a casement window looking out on the same alley as the window in
his
room above. She quickly threw it open, then turned to him as another round of hammering began at the front door. ‘We’ve no time to argue, Mr Quare. Are you coming or not?’
Again he seemed to have no choice but to accede. Beneath her matronly exterior, Mrs Puddinge was a force to be reckoned with. Quare helped her over the sill and out of the window, then followed, pushing the glass-paned wings closed again behind him.
It was a chill, grey day, with more than a taste of encroaching autumn. Despite the lateness of the hour – nearly eleven by his watch – tendrils of fog snaked through the air, obscuring the sun and congealing in pockets along the cobbled pavement of the alley.
‘What now, Mr Quare?’ Mrs Puddinge asked, eyes shining beneath her bonnet, for all the world like a girl swept up in a childhood game.
‘Now we make for the guild hall,’ he said in a low voice. ‘We’ll go this way, up the alley, away from your house. Once we reach Cheapside, we’ll blend in with the flow. Just act naturally, Mrs P. Don’t hurry or do anything that might draw unwanted attention.’
‘I confess I am rather enjoying this,’ she confided as they walked up the alley side by side, avoiding as best they could the night’s detritus thrown from upper storeys. The stench was enough to make him glad of the second-best coat, whose dank odour, however unpleasant, was preferable to that of offal and excrement. ‘Why, it’s as if it were five years ago, and Mr Puddinge still among the living! Many the morning I would walk him to the guild hall, he wearing the very coat you have on now, the two of us talking of everything and of nothing, happy as two peas in a pod!’ As they reached the end of the alley and turned into the bustling thoroughfare beyond, she slipped her arm through his, giving him a warm smile, which he could not help but return.
But his own thoughts were far from dwelling on happier days of yore. Instead, they were all on what news he would find at the guild hall. Was Master Magnus really dead? He could not imagine a world without that outsized personality and quicksilver mind trapped in its stunted, misshapen body. As an orphan with no memory of his parents, Quare had been raised in a Dorchester workhouse, and from there, to his great good fortune, had gone in an apprenticeship to Robert Halsted, who had initiated him into the clockmaker’s art … and whose
wife
, some years later, had initiated him into other, equally pleasurable arts. The couple had been kind to him, and generous, but he had at no point thought of them as substitutes for the parents he had never known yet often fantasized about, especially at night, when he lay abed unable to sleep, his fellow apprentice, Jim Grimsby, snoring and snuffling beside him like a hibernating bear. Then he would feel his loneliness most keenly and imagine himself surrounded by a loving family, or, in his more melancholic moments, as having been stolen away from his parents, a lord and his lady who had never ceased to search for him and would one day sweep him up in their arms and return him to his rightful place as heir to a title and the fortune that went with it.
Quare had given up such fancies long ago. He knew that no such life would be restored to him, even if he had once briefly possessed it – which, of course, he hadn’t. He had long since come to accept that the only life he would have was what he made for himself, fashioned from the materials at hand with what skills he could master, assembling it piece by piece as if it were a kind of clock, one that would take an entire lifetime to finish. And in that respect, it was Master Magnus who stood in the nearest approximation of a father to him. Or, not quite a paternal influence, but an avuncular one. It was Master Magnus, not some mythical knight or lordship in shining armour, who had rescued him from Dorchester: a journeyman passing through town had brought the master a report of his horological skills, the master had come himself to inspect his work, and afterwards, Halsted had released Quare into his care. Master Magnus had struck him at the time as both frightening and comic, like a figure out of a fairy tale, Tom Tit Tot sprung to life. He hadn’t realized then what a singular occurrence it was for Master Magnus to travel out of London to fetch a new apprentice, nor had he appreciated the agony the master had endured in the simple act of travelling the hundred-odd miles between London and Dorchester in a carriage that rattled his bones like dice in a cup. That Master Magnus was an orphan – to Quare’s way of thinking, kissing-cousin to bastardy – constituted another bond between them. This was never talked about; indeed, sometimes months would pass in which he did not catch a glimpse of the man, much less exchange a word with
him
– even longer once he had attained the rank of journeyman. Yet Quare was always somehow aware that Master Magnus was keeping an eye on him and had his future in mind – as proved to be the case when, just over a year ago, the master had recruited him into the ranks of the regulators.