Mr Drake and My Lady Silver Read online

  ‘What was the price?’

  ‘Do I look like the type as wants a spangly flower?’

  ‘My good man, everyone wants Wodebean’s wares. That is the nature of the wretch. He has a way of making things… irresistible.’

  The man shrugged. ‘I resisted ‘em just fine.’

  ‘Intriguing.’ Ilsevel looked him over thoughtfully, but received no real clues as to his probable nature. He wore a long coat like Phineas’s, very nearly as threadbare, though this man’s was solid black. Stout boots covered his feet, and his dark hair was in a state of disorder. ‘Where did Wodebean go?’

  ‘No idea,’ said the man shortly.

  Ilsevel sighed in frustration, and turned away. ‘My thanks.’

  ‘If it’s that important to you, lady, there’s another shindig tonight. Mayhap he’ll be about again with his fancy nothings.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Ilsevel turned back, with a broad smile for the suddenly helpful fellow. ‘It is to be held here?’

  ‘Aye. And it’s market night.’

  ‘Market night?’

  She detected the faint glimmer of whitish teeth in the dim light: a grin. ‘There’s a market at times fer the sale of… unusual goods, shall we say? Ain’t usually frequented by the likes of you, o’ course. Always held at night, ‘cause that’s when the law-folk are least lively. And,’ he added clinically, ‘can most easily be bribed to stay indoors wi’ their fires.’

  ‘The perfect environment for Wodebean,’ Ilsevel declared. ‘What is your name, my good fellow? I am quite pleased with you.’

  But the man made no answer, being apparently distracted by the approach of Phineas. Who, she noted, was holding a second frosted rose. ‘Phineas Drake,’ said her new friend. ‘Yer father’ll not be pleased to hear of this.’

  ‘My father is rarely pleased,’ said Phineas. He gave the rose to Ilsevel. ‘I got this off a, er, lady as has spent the night by the water. Said she picked it up off the floor last night.’

  ‘And she just gave it to you?’

  Phineas said nothing. She could not quite tell in the darkness, but were his cheeks a trifle flushed?

  ‘No matter,’ she murmured.

  ‘Maybe you won’t tell my father, Gabriel,’ suggested Phineas.

  Ilsevel’s helpful new friend, Gabriel, eyed Phineas with some scepticism. ‘Happen I might not, provided you ain’t in trouble.’

  ‘No trouble, I promise.’

  Gabriel threw a meaning look in Ilsevel’s direction. ‘And this fancy article?’

  Phineas was definitely blushing now. ‘She is a respectable woman,’ he said firmly. ‘Whom I have chosen to help.’

  ‘That is the truth,’ put in Ilsevel helpfully. ‘On both points.’

  Gabriel grunted. He cast about in the street for a moment, and then stooped. When he straightened, he was carrying a dark, slightly dented hat, which he restored to his head. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said gravely, ‘I’ll take my leave.’ He made them a brief, slightly pained bow, judging from the grimacing twist to his lips, and walked away.

  ‘Does everyone know you, in these parts?’ said Ilsevel.

  Phineas sighed, though she could not imagine what troubled him. ‘My father,’ he said shortly.

  Abandoning the subject, she beamed at him. ‘Well, but Phineas! Our venture has borne fruit. There is another round of revelry taking place tonight, with a market for all manner of questionable things, and I shall attend! For surely Wodebean will be here.’

  ‘Ilsevel.’ Phineas took a step closer, his face very grave. ‘You cannot attend such an event.’

  ‘Whyever not?’

  ‘I… I think you do not precisely understand the nature of the entertainments.’

  ‘I understand them perfectly.’

  He looked helplessly at her. ‘Can I not persuade you? There must be some other occasion, some other way that Wodebean may be discovered.’

  ‘None have presented themselves, and I must talk to Wodebean, Phineas. It is of paramount importance.’

  Phineas gave a short sigh. ‘Very well,’ he conceded. ‘Come to the bakery at midnight. I shall be waiting for you, and we’ll go together.’

  ‘I need no guardian.’

  ‘Then I’ll come here alone, and find you here.’ He gave her the set-jaw look of a young man who will not be dissuaded from carrying out his absurd plan.

  She capitulated with a smile, for all things considered, he was a useful person to have around. Without his help, she might never have found this wonderful thieves’ market. ‘We will have a fine time,’ she promised.

  Phineas muttered something inaudible.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Chapter Five

  At midnight upon the following evening, Phineas escorted Ilsevel back to the waterfront — only to find that the night’s entertainments were not to be held in quite the same spot. There were few people present, but an inviting route had been marked out on the ground in paint that shimmered oddly in the moonlight.

  Phineas eyed the coiling arrows with misgiving. ‘Why do they shine like that?’

  Ilsevel did not hesitate, but followed the arrow-path with sprightly step and, apparently, high good humour. ‘This is most interesting!’ she called back to Phineas. ‘I had no notion that the thieves of England and Aylfenhame were so closely associated.’

  ‘The what? You cannot mean— Ilsevel, please, consider a moment—’

  Ilsevel did not pause to consider, but turned the corner around a looming warehouse. When Phineas caught up, she was nowhere in sight.

  ‘Ilsevel?’ He took a hesitant step forward, and another— and, with a strangled cry, fell into empty space.

  The tumbling sensation lasted only for a second or two. Then he was upright again, his feet braced upon solid ground, only the dark silence of the waterfront was gone. He stood instead in a mossy glade alive with music and merriment. The dark boughs of shadowy trees hung overhead, liberally decked with holly and mistletoe and pale hellebores, and the thick moss underfoot felt like the most luxurious carpet. He smelled spices and wine and roasting meat. Clear lights danced among the leaves, and there were people everywhere.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ came a deep, disapproving voice, and Gabriel appeared out of the crowd.

  ‘Is my father here?’ said Phineas.

  ‘Ain’t seen him.’ Gabriel had a meat pie in one hand and a clay tankard in the other. He handed the latter to Phineas. ‘May as well have some of that, since yer here. But keep yer eyes open. Anything can happen at a gathering like this.’

  Phineas hastily handed back the tankard, though it did smell enticingly of apples. ‘I had better keep my wits about me, hadn’t I? Have you seen Ilsevel?’

  ‘Yer ladyfriend? Went thataways.’ Gabriel pointed.

  Following his pointing finger, Phineas thanked him distractedly and plunged into the crowd.

  He found Ilsevel intent upon an array of stalls set up at the rear of the clearing. They were thickly clustered about with all manner of paraphernalia, for which Phineas scarcely spared a glance. ‘Ilsevel, we shouldn’t linger.’

  Ilsevel scooped up something from a stall with a green awning, and gave a glad cry. ‘Lady Galdrin’s shoe-buckle!’ she proclaimed, and then swooped upon something else. ‘And a Herald’s Harp! I would know them anywhere.’

  The proprietor, a short fellow with a dark cap over his shock of pale hair and a bright cloak around his shoulders, smiled proudly at Ilsevel. ‘From Mirramay itself, the harp.’

  ‘The palace,’ said Ilsevel, and stuffed the harp into Phineas’s hands. It was smaller than he might have expected, and pure gold. He received the shoe-buckle next, a frothy object that looked made from sea-spray and dew. ‘Keep those safe, Phineas,’ she directed him. ‘They are not for the likes of this fellow.’

  The proprietor’s eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, are they not?’

  ‘What do you want for them?’ said Ilsevel crisply, unmoved.


  The stallholder turned crafty, and pointed a thin finger at Ilsevel’s left shoulder. ‘That pretty brooch would be a fine price.’

  ‘Outrageous,’ Ilsevel snapped, laying one involuntary hand over the shimmering pearlescent brooch she wore pinned into her bodice. ‘For stolen property? I shan’t pay you anything of the kind!’

  Phineas rather lost track of the conversation after that, for upon attempting to fit the shoe-rose and the tiny Harp into his pocket without damaging them he discovered something else at the bottom: a sapphire ring, which sparked with an odd fire under the moonlight. He’d seen Ilsevel wearing it the day before.

  He thought briefly of Gabriel. To be sure, the man was more in favour of highway robbery than petty pilfering, but how had the ring come to be in Phineas’s own pocket if someone hadn’t first taken it from Ilsevel’s finger? And who else might have done that, if not Gabriel? Perhaps he had robbed her, and then thought better of it once he understood her to be in Phineas’s care.

  But that made little real sense. Perhaps it was simply an accident.

  ‘Yours, I think,’ said Phineas, offering her the ring.

  She gave it only the briefest of glances. ‘Once mine, now yours.’

  ‘You put it in my pocket?’

  ‘How else would it have got there?’

  Phineas had little to say to that, and Ilsevel returned to her argument.

  ‘I cannot let you give me your jewellery,’ said Phineas awkwardly to her back.

  Ilsevel snatched up the ring and all but hurled it at the stallholder. ‘Then he may have it, and we shall take the shoe-rose and the Harp.’ So saying, she turned her back upon the stall and marched away, leaving Phineas to hasten after her.

  Thankfully, the market-man did not seem disposed to pursue them, or to argue about the price. ‘Why should the shoe-rose and the Harp matter so much to you?’ asked Phineas.

  ‘Lady Galdrin was a friend.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And the Harp has sentimental value.’

  ‘I see.’ Phineas did not at all see, but he chose not to pursue it.

  ‘Since you will not accept jewellery, you may keep the Harp,’ Ilsevel decided next. ‘Those pawnbrokers of yours will find it highly interesting, I have no doubt.’

  ‘But the sentimental value…?’

  ‘I will get over it.’

  ‘Ilsevel, I am not in need.’

  ‘Oh!’ she stopped walking, and looked at him in surprise. ‘But you have been selling things to the pawnbrokers recently, have you not?’

  Phineas began to feel a headache forming. ‘Yes, but that was for a specific purpose—’

  ‘Then you keep the Harp.’ She dismissed the matter from her notice on the spot, and launched after a gaggle of household brownies who were wandering from stall to stall, stuffing pies into their mouths. ‘You!’ she called. ‘Stop!’

  Phineas did not at all understand what had attracted her notice — until they stopped and turned, and he realised that the glitter in their hair came from bunches of violets all aglow with frost. ‘Milady?’ said one of the brownies.

  ‘Wodebean made those,’ she said, levelling a finger at the flowers. ‘Did he not?’

  To Phineas’s surprise, all of the brownies dissolved into laughter. ‘Never met Wodebean, have you?’ said one, choking on mirth.

  Ilsevel’s eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, I know him all right. And it is not his style, to be sure. But he had such a thing recently; I’d swear to that.’

  ‘Then he’s been at the thieves’ market afore now. Hardly surprising, is it?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Why, he’s the one as runs it. ‘Tis his market, and nobody sells here without his say-so.’

  ‘So he’s here!’

  The talkative brownie shrugged. ‘Might be. Might not be.’ Visibly giving up on Ilsevel and her questions, the brownies drifted away. Ilsevel let them. She seemed lost in thought, though her bright eyes scanned the crowd with an eagerness Phineas found vaguely disturbing.

  ‘Ilsevel?’ he said, after a moment.

  She transferred her piercing gaze to his face, which did little to restore his comfort, and raised one brow.

  ‘Um. Why are you so eager to talk to Wodebean?’

  He thought she might not answer. Nor did she, in any fashion he might have expected. Her lips twisted in a wry, perhaps bitter smile, and she tore off the bonnet that covered her hair and threw it carelessly into the moss. Then she turned on the spot in a smooth circle, and to Phineas’s amazement rose swiftly into the air.

  When she spoke, her voice was impossibly amplified, and boomed across the glade.

  ‘I seek Wodebean!’ she proclaimed. ‘That filthy, swindling cheat tricked me some years ago, and he shall answer to me for it! A Queen’s ransom to anyone who finds him!’

  Her announcement halted the revelry at once, and the music cut off with a squawk. The thieves of England and Aylfenhame stared in awe at the vision of Ilsevel floating some way above their heads, her pale hair drifting upon an unfelt breeze and a glimmer of magic and rage wreathing her velvet-clad form.

  ‘It is a matter of some moment to me,’ she added in a somewhat softened tone. ‘For if I can just get my hands on him, much harm may be mended.’

  Neither this entreaty, nor her handsome bribe, drew the desired response from her audience. One by one they turned away, muttering excuses. The music struck up again — Phineas could not, now he came to think of it, see any kind of an orchestra anywhere; the music seemed to emanate from the great oak trees themselves. Brownies and hobs, trows and goblins, Ayliri and humans alike returned to their eating and drinking, their dancing and laughing, leaving Ilsevel in solitary and disappointed splendour.

  The glow faded from her, and she gave a great sigh, sinking a few feet towards the ground in the process. So grieved did she appear that Phineas’s heart gave a wrench. Queen’s ransom or no, he would have presented Wodebean to her in an instant had he that power.

  ‘My Lady?’ said a tentative voice, and Ilsevel’s head whipped round.

  A pixie stood nearby, almost concealed behind the broad trunk of an ancient oak. She wore a crumpled leaf for a hat, and a necklace of cobwebs strung with dew hung around her thin neck. ‘I know you,’ she whispered. ‘You are—’

  ‘Ilsevel,’ interrupted she. ‘That is how I am known.’

  Cautiously, the pixie emerged from behind the tree. To Phineas’s surprise, she made Ilsevel so deep a curtsey it was almost obeisance. ‘As you wish,’ she said, barely audible. She glanced around rather fearfully, and inched closer to Ilsevel. ‘None know where to find Wodebean,’ she said. ‘He is grown ever more aloof, and none now know where he dwells. But he was here, two nights ago, seeking flowers like that one you wear.’ She pointed one tiny finger at the rose in Ilsevel’s hair. How it had got there from her discarded bonnet, Phineas could not have said.

  ‘Seeking them?’ said Ilsevel in surprise, lightly touching the petals of her rose. ‘He was not selling them, or giving them out?’

  The pixie shook her head. ‘He took up a great armful of them, one at least of every variety. He was angry. I thought perhaps they were being sold without his permission.’

  ‘And then what did he do?’

  The pixie shrugged. ‘He vanished. I do not think anyone knows where he went.’

  ‘Vanished.’ Ilsevel thought.

  Phineas experienced a flash of insight. ‘You were following Wodebean, weren’t you?’ he said to Ilsevel. ‘When I first saw you. There was someone— he disappeared—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Ilsevel with a sigh. ‘He has an irritating way of vanishing, quite without warning, and I do not know how it is achieved.’

  Coming from the woman who had just raised herself some eight feet in the air with no apparent difficulty, and who still hovered some way off the ground, this was a remarkable comment.

  ‘But you vanished, too,’ said Phineas in confusion.

  ‘Oh, no! I merely returne
d into Aylfenhame, but he was not there when I arrived. He vanished into someplace else, and it is getting quite tiresome.’ To the pixie she said, ‘Have you further information for me? Where were those flowers coming from, if not from Wodebean?’

  ‘There was a woman handing them about. She asked nothing for them, not a single coin.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Golden hair, blue eyes…’ The pixie made a helpless gesture, as though further description was beyond her. ‘She was a great beauty.’

  Ilsevel, for some reason, froze, her eyes widening. ‘A statuesque sort of person, improbably perfect, with an air of determination and an irritating penchant for coquetry?’

  The pixie blinked. ‘Well, yes—’

  ‘You did not catch her name, I suppose?’

  ‘No, Lady.’

  Dismissing the pixie, Ilsevel plucked the rose from her hair and examined it thoughtfully.

  ‘What is it?’ Phineas said. ‘I don’t understand. First we hear that Wodebean is the source of the flowers, and then he is not?’

  ‘I think both are true,’ said Ilsevel. ‘This one comes from Wodebean, which means it is both special and rather dangerous. The ones being passed around here were counterfeits. Sticks, most likely, glamoured to resemble blossoms.’

  Phineas saw many examples of just such flowers, adorning the hair and the clothes of the revellers around him. Sticks? ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘Because my sister made them, and she never did have a scrap of talent at crafting. Glamour, on the other hand…’ Ilsevel shrugged.

  ‘Your sist— never mind,’ sighed Phineas, abandoning all hope of understanding her.

  ‘It appears that she is trying to get Wodebean’s attention, too,’ Ilsevel mused. ‘I wonder if she has had any luck?’

  Chapter Six

  I’d been askin’ around about Wodebean. Used to be, his name was a byword fer hard-to-get goods, mayhap veerin’ in the illegal direction. But that was years ago. Seein’ as I hadn’t heard a word o’ news about him in such a long time, imagine my surprise to find he was still about — an’ not far from my own Tilby, either! Keeps hisself to hisself, that’s fer sure. What brought him out o’ hidin’ all on a sudden, that’s what I wanted to know.