Nettleblack, page 8
I swallowed, snagged in their stares, dangling from Gertie’s fingers. “I – well – quite – ”
“Poor lamb.” Gertie squeezed my arm. “All the more reason to chase them down, that’s what I say. Seek a penalty fifty-fold for Henry Hyssop’s ringlets!”
She was singing again, the same tune as before, tugging me closer with a conspiratorial grin. “Now, Septimus may ask you if you can get us to give it a rest with the blessed G and S, but I’d better tell you straight out that it’s not going to happen. As long as we’ve got The Pirates of Penzance at the Dallyangle Theatre, comic opera shall be our presiding spirit!”
I tried for a dazed nod. Was jovial conversation with one’s colleagues naturally disposed to be this bizarre?
“There’s – erm – a theatre in Dallyangle?”
The whole room gaped at me.
“I – mean – of course – the theatre – in Dallyangle – ”
“Hard to miss,” Millicent smirked. “Don’t crash your cycle into it, though. Septimus still owes them some stucco.”
“What? I – what – crash my – what?”
Gertie twitched up a sandy eyebrow. This was a fairly appropriate reaction to the cadaverous pallor currently stiffening me from the eyes down.
“Bicycle. That’s what Septimus does her jobs on. And you’re good with a cycle too, right? That’s why the Director picked you to go with her?”
Marbled to the spot, it was a struggle even to shake my head. Everything was still now, too still, sepulchral-still, positively spectral in the dim light of the mirrored candles, stricken apprentices staring at me like so many gravestones.
“I – I – I don’t know how to – figs! – how to do anything of the sort!”
And in Gertie Skull’s answering expression, I saw my doom.
For all that I’d resolved not to antagonise Division Sergeant Septimus, this was an involuntary infuriation I’d not had the sense to envisage. The rational dress – the trousers – the split skirt – of course! I’d seen such outfits cartooned in Rosamond’s Punches, seen snide sharp engravings of women crashing bicycles and women tumbling off bicycles and women smoking cigars atop bicycle handlebars. A real bicycle (and herein lay my damnation) I’d never so much as glimpsed – for how could Edwina do otherwise than disapprove of them, and shake her tutting head over the derisive illustrations, and assure Rosamond and I that such hectic contraptions would never find their way under her roof? And Rosamond had sniggered, and drawled out ond dwi’n moyn dysgu seiclo or something else equally inflammatory – but for all her ironical professions of interest, she’d never disputed Edwina’s ruling. And now here I was, resoundingly ill-equipped for the purpose, trembling in the Division Sergeant’s path –
“Septimus’ll flay you,” Gertie whispered, hushed and awed and mystic as a monk, and it was all I could do not to burst into tears.
“What d’you mean, leave the bicycle?”
Humiliation at Girton barely twitched a candle to this.
Six-thirty in the reception-room, the clock sniggering for my despair, the gaslights and walls as horrendously bright as ever, the windows slowly shrugging off the dark to match them. The other three apprentices darting past to vanish through the double doors, pausing only to brush my shoulder, or pat my arm, or pinch my cheek – all as much as to say, you’re in for it now! Septimus, palpitating with rage before the desk, about to set another ceiling crumbling. The Director, staring her down from the top of the corridor, twisting a ring of silvery keys between her fingers – the keys, I guessed, to wherever they kept the bicycles. Presumably the idea was to stop Septimus simply bolting away with them. Whether or not that would work with her present pitch of anger, I didn’t dare speculate.
Where was I, in this ghastly scene? Still shivering, wretched encumbrance that I was, with the doors at my back and the sharp autumn breeze jabbing me in the shoulder-blades, heartily wishing one of the apprentices’ pitying farewells would be vigorous enough to knock me straight through the floor.
“Miss Hyssop can’t cycle,” the Director explained, the soul of ever-so-slightly-strained patience, her pacifying smile trembling. “And you can’t leave her behind.”
Septimus all but spat fire. “Why can’t she cycle? What’s she doing with me, if she can’t cycle?”
The Director sighed. “Septimus, I explained this last night – ”
“You didn’t tell me this! She’s got no idea what she’s doing – what if she gets hurt? And how’m I meant to do my job? This ain’t an honour, it’s more like a punishment!”
The Director’s smile finally shrivelled. “Don’t presume to know my mind, Division Sergeant. She won’t get hurt if you look after her. And I had been meaning to trial you without the bicycle – there have been complaints about your cycling of late. You know as well as I do that the Division can’t have complaints.”
A smart of ruddy colour under Septimus’s eyes. “What – who – ?”
“Glad you asked, Javert!”
It was Cassandra, sauntering in through the double doors. She had a ledger, leather-bound and fat, tucked under one arm, which she tossed onto the desk with thump enough to dust some plaster from the walls. We could only watch – the Director coldly admonishing, Septimus boiling over, my hands scraping each other to pieces with panic – as she thwacked the book open, the spine audibly cracking in the sudden quiet.
Cassandra’s bony finger slid into place like a bookmark. “Cycling chaos, appendix the hundredth! September eighth, fresh-returned from her suspension – sorry, unpaid leave – Javert’s interesting decision not to apply the brakes took out half a hearse and two funeral mutes, for which we still owe the Fitzdegus five pounds. She claims she was chasing the Sweetings, but was her desire to out-race her previous speed record also present in her mind? Who can tell! Then we have – September twenty-fifth, when Lady Miltonwaters was narrowly persuaded not to shoot at our illustrious Division Sergeant after her overzealous signalling made the lady’s gig bolt. And on October sixteenth, the sevenfold genius chased Pip Property into the side of the Dallyangle Theatre – ”
“You’ve only got Property’s word for that!”
Cassandra flicked up an eyebrow. “Did you not cause the bicycle-sized welt in the side of the Dallyangle Theatre?”
“I – but – look – they were the one not being a sensible pedestrian – !”
The Director cleared her throat, slicing through the pair of them. “Thank you, Cassandra, you have made your point. Septimus – you have accomplished great things in the field – ”
“And caused utter disasters,” Cassandra muttered.
“ – but your skills are making you reckless – with your own safety, as well as that of others. I cannot let you become a public menace. Not when your every misstep only gives our detractors more ammunition, and certainly not with so much at stake. Not after what you – well. I am sure I hardly need to finish that sentence.”
Crimson to her hairline, Septimus visibly swallowed a snarl of retorts. She was still angry – horribly, obviously so – but something in the Director’s words had yanked the anger out at the root, left it flailing in midair with nothing to ground it.
“Work on foot for the rest of the week, and take a little more care.” The Director was gentler now, hooking the keys to the loop in her belt. “Then I might consider reopening the shed.”
Pointed as she could manage, Cassandra slapped the ledger shut.
This was plainly the last straw. Septimus lashed about on her heel, all without dislodging a single strand of the impeccable chignon, and stalked out into the chilly morning, so swiftly I had to sprint to get through the doors before they slammed. Ahead, there was gloomy sunless sky and steaming breath and cold. At my back, cut off by the closing doors, the Director was staring intently after us, and Cassandra sat smirking behind the desk.
I wanted – but, of course, I didn’t dare – to snatch Septimus by her excellent elbows, collapse to my knees and implore her to forgive me for inadvertently destroying her peace of existence. Septimus, as was only to be expected, didn’t give me the chance. She set a fast pace, straight into the heart of the market square that bustled up its awnings before us. The furious set of her shoulders ahead of me, taut and broad in the brown-and-red jacket, was warning enough for me to stay quiet.
The market square was a seed-bed in the process of sprouting. It was framed on all sides by a peculiar assortment of buildings: the squat small-windowed sprawl of the Division, a glittering broad-paned shop with – figs – Nettleblack’s Tinctures stacked up in the window-display, an empty tavern with a swinging chequerboard sign, a formidable butcher’s with enquire within for pies plastered on the door, and something crape-draped and grim with the morose look of an undertaker’s. Between these disparate bastions, the venders were preparing their stalls – sliding bright slabs of fruit-boxes into place, clattering the lids off pots of jellied eels, scratching chalky prices onto slate slabs, jostling us relentlessly in the doing of every task. The flicker of the street-lanterns, still lit against the miserable grey sky, dragged all the colours to the surface and made them smart – the gleaming red and green of the apples, the gaudy stripes on the awnings, the silver-gold sheen of the eels in their jelly.
Sweet plums, but need I even specify it was at that instant I realised I hadn’t had breakfast?
A wiry chap in a patched apron darted backwards to survey his stall, jammed his heel down on my toe. The moment he spotted me, one could visibly trace the courtesy tumble off his lips, and the gap-toothed scorn flare up in its place.
“And we’ve got the Dallyangle Do-gooders! Another day of being useless, is it, ladies?”
I had barely a moment to gape at him – and at his colleagues, twisting about to investigate his sudden spleen – before Septimus snatched my arm, wrenched me away past the eel-sellers. “Come on. Ignore ’em.”
Figs.
In the man’s sneering remark, and the sneers of his compatriots, and Septimus’s alarmingly plural glower, the full extent of my stupidity in choosing my disguise had become horrendously apparent. The Dallyangle Division – the unconventional organisation, puzzling out its status and its purpose – why I ever thought joining it would provide a place for me to hide – ! Everything of me was now horribly distinctive, and acknowledged for as much by every squinting pedestrian we passed. The sharp lines of the uniform, the short-cut split skirt, the burgundy cuffs and collar, the broad hat with its splaying brim – all of it striking as a theatrical costume, and bizarre as a Punch illustration! After that first group, there were more shoves, and more smirks, and more snide cries from behind the stalls. Septimus, storming ahead with her hat under one arm, could just about scowl the attention away, but I could hardly be expected to manage anything like the same indifference!
“Halloa, you poacher-pestering vision!”
I started fit to dislodge my hat for this new greeting, gasped the hoarse dregs of a bedevilled scream – but Septimus didn’t look daunted in the least. A gorsebush-haired young man was tottering towards us through the nearest straggle of stalls, shaky-armed under the weight of an enormous wicker shopping-basket, wild grin pale in a nut-brown face. He seemed here to buy, early as it was, flinting off the freezing wind with a tangle of moth-eaten scarf, his rust-coloured greatcoat bunching at the elbows where the basket pulled at the sleeves, his trousers far stripier than the maddest of the market’s awnings.
“Not on the cycle today?” he beamed, once he was close enough to notch his voice down from a shout. “Makes a change! And not the only change, I see – this a new friend of yours? Very rodent of you!”
Septimus struck up that sharp-toothed smile I’d glimpsed the night before, dipped her head to him. “Morning to you too, Nick. Need help with your basket?”
Now, I confess, I found myself frowning at him. Lemons – of course I knew I hardly had any right to do so – but I couldn’t iron it off my forehead. I may have known Division Sergeant Septimus and her strange abrupt ways for all of one night, but – but – even so! I’d grown used, in that one night, to the state of affairs at the Division: that everyone else either pitied or despised her, and that I was, in a peculiar terrified way, the only one wishing her well, admiring her hair, and so forth. This was something new. This stripy-legged man with his grin and his basket – he was the first individual in Dallyangle that I’d seen address her with real joviality – and the warmth didn’t seem unwelcome to her. The discovery was sour in my teeth, though I couldn’t for the life of me fathom out why. All that she’d said to me last night, all that confusion over Mordred and sweethearts – was this cheerful basket-wielder her sweetheart? And – I – well – he looked pleasant enough, probably – and why shouldn’t Septimus have a sweetheart, odd and solitary and angry as she is? – but –
“Don’t you worry, it’s only rodent food.”
This sentiment was bizarre enough to tug me out of my head. Nick rolled his eyes, dropped to a conspiratorial mutter at her shoulder (he was shorter than her, but he still had a few inches on me), holding her gaze with his glinting hazel eyes. His hushed tones were a stage-whisper through the market’s clattering, spiky and excitable in a voice that streaked the Dallyangle drawl alongside something else I couldn’t place.
“Mr. Vernon Vibbrit, that agricultural cavy-photographing nitwit, thought he’d scupper me yesterday when he bought the town out of timothy hay for his guinea pigs, but I’ve got him now! And I woke up at five-thirty to do it! Since when’ve fancy rats, I ask you, ever needed anything half so lar-di-da as timothy hay?”
Septimus, much to my bewilderment, appeared to be nodding along.
“So Vernon Vibbrit’ll be in for a shock when he deigns his way down to the market today. Rats don’t need timothy hay, but d’you know what those pampered cavies do need if they’re to last the winter?”
She actually smirked. Pineapples, he was definitely her sweetheart.
“Food!” Nick cried triumphantly. “And I’ve just bought all the food! All the food! Which he can now buy off me, once he’s publicly recanted his rat slander! So much for your almighty guinea pigs, Vernon Vibbrit!”
By now, I was simply gaping at them both. Nick glanced past Septimus to snag my eye, burst out laughing when he saw my expression. “Hallo! This little fieldmouse knows her fancy rat from her rattus rattus!”
“Right! Introductions!” Septimus declared suddenly, awkwardness stiffening back into the set of her shoulders. “Nick, this is Henry, a new apprentice. I’m training her – Director’s orders – and that’s the only reason I ain’t got the cycle. Henry – ”
“Henry!”
I jumped. Quite understandably, I wasn’t used to my name booming across the market square. “I – erm – rather – ”
“Lovely, that is! And I’ve got a rat called Henry, too! Well – I’ve got a rat called pretty much everything, any name you like. I can get you a Pirate King rat, and a Frederic and Ruth to go with him!”
He threw down his basket – figs, but the cobblestones nearly burst it – and grabbed my hand between his, pounded it until my finger-bones rattled. “I’m Nick. Nick Fitzdegu. Not an undertaker like the rest of them, but – you might’ve twigged – a rat-breeder extraordinaire. D’you like rats, Henry?”
To have professed otherwise, with my hand still fettered in his, would have been reckless in the extreme. “Oh – quite – ”
“Then we can be friends!” He tugged me close, closer than I’d expected, until I could gasp in the twang of tobacco on his breath. “D’you fancy buying some fancy rats, Henry?”
He was grinning at me like a lunatic – and I was quite about to combust for lack of a polite excuse!
“I – erm – ”
“Not now, Nick!” Septimus snapped. He pinched her a mock-pout, squeezed my hand as he set it free, flicked me a cheery twitch of a wink. “And she couldn’t even if she wanted to. You know how the Director is about rats.”
He smirked, conceding. “Fine. No, I know – Henry could have the noblest of intentions, and your Director’d still think you were making her buy them to throw at Property. Reckon a rat could make a good spy, if you set them to it.”
Septimus swept his basket up from the floor – only a sharp jolt of her eyebrows admitted its weight – and dumped it into his arms, decidedly less jovial than she’d been a moment ago. He’d evidently done something to displease her, though I’d not the faintest which part of his madness it was. “Right! Get on with you, Fitzdegu, I’ve work to do.”
He scoffed, softened to a smile. “See you at Matty’s, eh?”
“’Course you will,” she agreed brusquely, already striding away. Nick held the smile for me the way you’d hold a door, a little distractedly, until she yelled my name back over her shoulder – and then I was gone, or he was gone, and Septimus was waiting for me at the next row of stalls.
“That ain’t what I meant,” she muttered, the moment I reached her, with that odd inward scowl of our first encounter. “I ain’t throwing rats at Property – and I never spied on ’em! They’ve just got more help to give than they’re – ”
“Division Sergeant?”
Peaches. It was a risk, but I had to query. This was the umpteenth enigmatic reference to the cravat designer in so many hours. Perhaps it was that – or, figs, perhaps the revelation that I wasn’t the only person in Dallyangle inclined to hold a pleasant conversation with her had spurred me on to up my game, however terrifying I would inevitably find her response.
“I – I was just – wondering – could you possibly – I mean – who is – erm – Property?”
I’d expected another of her bone-shrivelling glowers, but got a pinch of scrutiny instead, a frown both hopeful and perturbingly sceptical. “You don’t know ’em? Pip Property – the cravat designer? Shop on Angle Drag?”
