I was, by my best reckoning, in the twenty-first or twenty-second year of my life when I first set eyes on that house in the snows which is called Gethin’s Hostelry, on those famous adventurers with whom I came to take up company, and on the Night Knife, which was the cause of so much of the trouble that followed after. I had taken a notion at that time that I should step out into the world, in search of wonders and things new, although my thoughts were more often of how I would return, face heavy with scars, pockets heavy with coin, and all the eyes of the city upon me. If my hopes should come to nothing I determined that I could yet write a True Account of my time in the wilds, and so make for myself a living from my pen, escaping once and for all from the hours of cold studiousness, from the scratching at Master Bullpen’s ledger, from the hard pallet in the scullery, and from Master Bullpen himself, his rotten teeth and his rotten flatulence.   

           For five years I watched the seasons change through the leaded glass, while customers came and went in Master Bullpen’s concern, bearing snow on their shoulders, rain in their hair and sunburn on their chaps. And then back to snow once more. The ink stained my finger-tips black and the calluses from the clerk’s high stool hardened up on my arse-cheeks. For two years I put aside every coin that came my way, dropping them into a pleated cloth purse. I hid the purse inside a crack in the wainscoting for safe-keeping. At the end of that time, when I judged that I had gathered sufficient for what I meant to do, I went out and these were the things that I bought:

           ~ one pair of castoff wilderness boots, knee high and of black leather, worn but of very fine quality, from Mistress Blaunt beneath the Blackthorn Bar;

           ~ one castoff travelling cloak, in dark burgundy, with rabbit fur at the collar albeit ragged and patched in places, from the same Mistress Blaunt;

           ~ one haversack, new and also of black leather, good and capacious and with a fine brass buckle, from no less than Speik and Son, Gentleman’s Outfitters, where old man Speik sneered down his nose at me until I showed him my coin which, needless to say, he was eager enough to count into his hand;

           ~ one oilskin, hooded, which I had not planned to purchase only that Speik reminded me of its necessity in rough weather and sold to me at a good price on account of my buying it together with the haversack;

           ~ three rounds of pemmican wrapped in muslin and one of sugar cake, from Mistress Stillkin at the Provender Market, and one thumb-sized phial of her Blue Tonic, against indigestion and for the easing of monthly pains;

           ~ a newly bound copy of Gascoigne’s Seasons of the Road, from the booksellers on Chancery Green, where I had first bought the same five years previous, at the time when I took up my position with Master Bullpen, but which I had read until the stitching was torn loose and which had come apart altogether when my Master kicked it across the floor, having caught me enthralled by it at my desk;

           ~ one thin, fine knife with bone handle and leather sheath, called a Boning Knife, about six inches in length,

           ~ one fire-steel, also from Speik, but not the elegant brass True North device, nor the rakish velvet cap, nor the canvas tent, nor any of the many additional things he pressed upon me. Needless to say, there were many occasions, in the times to come, when I much regretted the absence of one, other or all of those.

           And besides these I took with me also one last thing, which was already in my possession. This was a small wooden brooch in the shape of a kestrel in its hover, wings outspread and its head hooked forward. Its black eye was made of a speck of polished jet and its breast from a fleck of copper. It was the brooch which my father had given to me that day we shared the saltfish and honey together, not so very long before he died. I did not take it to wear, never having been one for adorning myself and knowing that I’d be sure to snag it on a bramble, a hedge or a fence-nail. But all the same I wrapped it in a piece of soft leather and stowed it in my inner pocket and bore it away with me, for remembrance sake.

           Last and best of all I purchased one ticket on the westbound mail, leaving the city the very next morning. Which it did, with me riding on the open seat beside the driver, and the rain streaming down from a grey, late summer sky, and him cursing the rutted turnpike, his passengers and his wayward team, while glory, glory was singing in my heart.

*****

By noon we were further out than I had ever been before, beyond the farms and market gardens that ringed the city, beyond their reek of nightsoil, beyond the outer toll-gate, into a country of green woods and low green hills. I squared my shoulders as best I could to the on-driving rain and tried not to think of the flurry of hooves and wheels beneath me.

           ‘What,’ I shouted to the driver, ‘is the Chief Danger of this road? Might we meet with bandit gangs?’

           He glanced at me over his shoulder: ‘Chief danger? A hole in the way, a broken shaft and young women from the City tumbled in the bloody ditch,’ he said. And: ‘Chief bloody danger,’ once again.

           None the less I pulled my cloak about me and strained my ears for the sounds of brigand’s signals such as Gascoigne describes - by which I mean: unseasonal bird calls and untimely barks - and squinted left and right for glinting mirrors amidst the dark trees. Although, Gods’ truth, there was barely enough sun for any such winking and twinkling business. Girl of the city as I am, I should hardly have told a partridge’s call from a polecat’s.

           The coach, that first day, carried me as far as the town of Mersham’s White, a straggle of houses and inns along the road with little more than furrowed fields beyond and a lopsided, moss strewn statue of some ancient Lord in the Market Square. Much the same grey sky and much the same rain. At the roadhouse I paid for a cot in the communal room and porridge and honey the morning after. I was waiting in the cobbled yard for the onward coach, and reading my Gascoigne, when a man approached me.

           He asked: ‘You journey Westward?’

           Me: ‘I mean to, if there’s a ride to be had.’

           And he: ‘You are travelling alone?’

           Me: ‘I am travelling by coach.’

           Then he drew from the pocket of a grubby waistcoat, beneath a grubbier black greatcoat, a well-thumbed square of parchment. He unfolded the parchment slowly, stopping to lick his fingers and to shake loose a cockscomb of ribbons and seals.

           ‘I have the position of Company Road Agent hereabouts,’ he said, tapping the parchment: ‘you’ll require a licence for travel if you wish to journey further West.’

           Me: ‘And how much for this licence?’

           He: ‘Sixteen in silver.’

           Me: ‘Surely then. If I must I will purchase one licence just as you advise... and also, if you have such a thing about you, a necklace of mermaid’s toes.’

And I turned back to my Gascoigne and did not look up again.

           Well, I was born in the streets of the Long Common and although, Gods be thanked, I have learned to sum and I know my letters, there are things learned in the Long Common that are forgotten none too quickly, and one such is how to spot a cony-catching bastard and another is how to put him in his place. He wandered off with a scowl on his face and his tail between his legs.

           And so I travelled from Mersham’s White to Felson and from Felson to Aburik. The further West we passed, the worse tended were the roads, and the less busy, and the harder the driver urged on his horses between the staging posts. From Aburik to Canith, and then from Canith to Fan Syle, I was joined on the upper seat by a silent lump of a man who sat with a lump of a crossbow readied on his knees, and looked uneasily about him every time our passing set the birds barracking up and away from the treetops.

           And so, at last I arrived in Fan Syle, and there in Fan Syle I stuck. As fast, as Master Bullpen would say, as a Coin in a Cleft Rock. Fan Syle was as far West as the mail reached. Travelling further there were occasional caravans and wagon-trains, but they wanted only guards - which I was not - or paying passengers - which I could not, for most of my money was already spent. So there I wedged. The first two nights I slept in the coaching house, the two that followed in a bunkhouse close by the market square and after that I paid a farmer and his wife, who lived a mile outside the town, to let me make a poor bed of it in their hayloft, with blankets I had traded for the last quarter of sugar cake.

It was a different country sure, but not yet different enough. With the very last of my money I paid for a pen and an eighth of a ream of paper and a month’s lease on a bench in Fan Syle market. And there, for a few coins a time, I read out Company bills to spendthrift locals, letters home from daughters in service in far-flung towns and summonses to the assizes from local Justice Balestone and local Justice Hemlock. For a few pennies more I wrote appeals from merchants begging for the return of their impounded stuffs and long, dreary Letters of Love from barrowboys to their darlings and from their darlings back again. My beautiful traveller’s cloak was lifted from the bench and away one morning while my back was turned, the pemmican was soon gone, and I was left to oily soup and black bread once a day at the Hawkers’ Rest and Repast.

           I walked back those first days, as late summer turned to autumn, counting the miserable stock of my situation: a mile to the barn and ten days by coach to the first person who knew my name, rain running down my neck and less than nothing of Great Adventure to be found, despite the Western mountains grinning on the horizon. Gods know I thought all but fondly of Master Bullpen and that pallet by the scullery wall. But it was not so long after that I met Shiny Bill and, although that was not what you might call a blessing, if I had not met him I don’t doubt but that I would be in Fan Syle yet, writing letters for apprentices and listening to the rats snickering and burring in their night time congregations about the barn.

*****

The tenant of the market-bench next to mine was a mage. There were others in the town, for sure, even in a ragged, end-of-the-road place like Fan Syle: Licensed Mages with their own premises, at the service of local grandees and the true Company Agents. My neighbour was not of their kind, though. He was the pettiest of Petty Mages, despite the high-flown sign: Artur Arturson! Magic Bespoke and Especial. Blessings, Findings, Mendings! 

           Lank black curtains and a spangled black awning made a dingy booth of his bench. There were three candles set in a tarnished brass sconce and a small pewter pepper-pot in which his magic was stored. Miserable stuff, it was, poor-man’s magic, all miry and sticky and strung with clots. It was forever dripping from his spoon and spattering the wood. I could smell it, fizzing away, catching the throat. It had got into one of his eyes, as well, poor Artur, had turned it as white as lard, and his hair was so thinned from the handling of it that he wore it shorn down to his pock-marked skull. Seen from behind, his head had much the same appearance as a hen’s mottled egg.

           I had been there for a week or so when we got to talking whilst we drummed our fingers and waited for custom. A few days after that we took our midday meal together, and then again the day after, and soon enough we were what you could rightly call Fast Friends. I was glad to have fallen in with him: he was open-faced and cheerful and he knew the town and its folk backwards. And so, a few weeks later still, it was to him that I turned and hissed: ‘Artur, who is that man?’

           Artur leant back from his curtained bench and looked and said: ‘Why, that is Shiny Bill himself and no other.’

           At that time I had worked already for two months in Fan Syle market and had paid down the money for a third month’s pitch that very morning. An early mist was gathering itself into thin drizzle and the man was sat across the way on an upturned water trough, outside the Hawker’s, spooning up soup from a steaming bowl. He was watching me, and sometimes Artur too, pretending otherwise, but I’m a Long Common girl and I could read him up, down and sideways. Occasionally he got up and stomped off through the puddles and the crumpled broadsides and the filthy straw with his shoulders down and his left leg held stiff, as if it had broken and knitted askew. A little later he was back again, first with a mug of ale, the next time working his jaws away on a wad of tobacco.

           Me: ‘Shiny Bill?’

           Artur: ‘He comes and goes. Out into the far West and back, and off again. All ways. An adventurer.’

           Well, I thought, so that’s Adventure? He looked like Adventure, true enough, if Adventure had stopped at every tavern from here to the dragon and back. He had blue eyes, and dirty blond hair that hung in matted, beaded ropes down past his shoulders; a handsomeness long since ruined by weather and drink and too many beatings. He could have been forty, or sixty, or anything between.

           Finally he got to his feet, just as the market was closing for the night, and walked over. He put both hands on the table edge and looked down at me. I could see where a string of yellow tobacco juice had dried on the underside of his jaw.

           He asked - beery breath, sooty teeth - ‘You know your letters? I mean: you could make up a writing for me if I paid for it?’

           That was just how he said it: ‘You could make up a writing?’ As if he were asking an apothecary whether she might make up a purgative, or a pie-maker, a pie. But I said nothing, of course, and just nodded: ‘Yes sir.’ Perhaps I should have given more thought to what it might have led to, my answering him at all. But, in truth, when I looked up and saw him in front of me what I saw was not this Shiny Bill, with his hard drinker’s face and his yellowed gums, but rather the glint of a way out of Fan Syle. I looked up and what I saw was: ‘Onwards.’

           ‘Then I’ve a proposition for you,’ says Shiny Bill, after a moment. ‘A proposition in that line of work. I’ve lodgings at the Yellow Resthouse. You’ll meet me there, once you’re finished your business here?’ And with that he turned on his heel, glanced once around the emptying market and clomped away.

           ‘I’ll meet you there,’ I called after him. It was only once he had taken the corner that I remembered that I had never heard of any such place as the Yellow Resthouse.

*****

Once I saw that Shiny Bill had gone and that I knew not where, I turned to ask Artur if he might show me the way. Between-times, though, a customer had stepped up to his booth, so I was obliged to wait. I saw him glance over at me, raising his eyebrows as if to ask: ‘What did he want then?’

           His customer was the fishwife from the far end of the lane. She brought with her a great honk of fish-guts and a knife, which she drew from the waist of a gory apron for Artur to bless. I watched him at his work. He took the knife, also bloody, cleaned it on his cloth and then he set both upon the table. This done he carefully measured out a half-spoon of magic from the pewter pot - as best he could, because the stuff was tacky and clung to the rim like silver snot. He let the magic drip down onto the knife blade and then, as it began to fume, closed the cloth around it and started to sing, rubbing it as he did with deft and intricate movements of his hands.

           Such a fine voice he had, Artur. It was nothing like his speaking voice, which was often shy and a little mumblesome; when he sang, he became someone altogether different. I had heard many other mages in the city, of course, rich enough many of them, and more than a few in the employ of the Company. All of them had great brassy booming voices, like horns. Artur was none of that kind: he was just the loveliest singer of magic.

           All the while, as he sang his Song of Cleansing, the stuff smoked away and smoked away until the song was done and then he unwrapped the knife and there the blade lay, renewed: rust gone, stains gone and the edge sharp enough to cut bone. The fishwife turned it over, warily.

           ‘A season’s use I’ll want out of this. Can you promise me that, a season’s hard use?’

           Artur spread his hands: ‘So, if it’s less than that it’ll be because you’ve gutted more fish, Florin. Magic’s no cure for good business.’

           Florin was not for sweet-talking: ‘When I was a girl, my mother hardly took her knives to the mage more than once a year.’

           Artur gave a half smile: ‘Look at the magic’ - he tapped the pot - ‘dregs. No better than shoddy. I do the best work I can with what I lay my hands on.’ (He said this last part all hushed, as people will when they talk of something that touches upon the doings of the Company).

           The fishwife was ready to say something more but just as she began to speak Artur silenced her by reaching suddenly across the bench. From the hem of her sleeve he picked a tiny, glittering something - a single fishscale - which he flicked with his forefinger onto the cloth. He gathered it up in one fist and blew on it until the last of the smoke came billowing through the weave. Then he sang one low snatch of tune, wove his fingers above it and shook it loose. A silver coin clinked onto the wood and lay there amidst the beads of rain. Artur reached over, picked it up, and passed it across to the woman. She took it, looking suspicious.

           He said: ‘It won’t keep that shape for long. A few days at best. It’s a trick, nothing more.’

           ‘Aye. That’s all you mages are good for,’ the woman said, ‘tricks.’

But, sure enough, she slipped the fishscale coin into her pocket, and then she paid Artur what he was due. As he took the payment Artur said: ‘Be sure not to pass it on, mistress. Or they’ll have me in shackles and you’ll have no one to brighten your knives for you the next time they’re dull.’

He said it lightly enough, but in some earnest too, since no one wishes to be caught passing Glimmer Coin. All the same Artur was proud of how he had carried off his little flourish. I could see the grin on his face as he packed away his gear.

           So, that was how, after two months washed up in Fan Syle, I found myself walking through the quietening streets with Artur, who chatted away as we went, pointing to this place and that place where things had happened to him when he was young, while a late evening sun broke through the clouds, lit the wet earth and I felt, all of a sudden, warm and hopeful and Full of Vim, as Master Bullpen would have said had he been there. Which he was not. Thank the Gods.

           The Yellow Resthouse was at the very far side of the town, lying close by the West Gate. There was an inn at one end and running alongside the town wall was a low building divided into single rooms. Outside the inn two men were grappling, each with their arms clasped about the neck of the other, clothes sodden with mud, barely moving, almost as if they had fallen asleep as they fought. Round about them other men were standing, clapping or making growls and barks of encouragement. We asked inside, at the bar, and were pointed towards one of the rooms furthest off. When we came out - barely a moment after - one of the wrestlers was standing pissing in the gully that ran around the back of the tavern in a cloud of steam. Men were standing beside him, laughing and slapping him on the back while a tout passed through the crowd settling bets. The other man and his supporters were nowhere to be seen. There were deep red freckles of blood all about the circle where the wrestlers’ feet had churned up the street. Artur stopped talking and, Gods’ truth, I felt a little less Full of Vim at seeing that, but steeled myself by thinking ‘here’s a chance to be grasped so grasp it.’ Onwards, Onwards and Out of Fan Syle.

           ~ ‘In all of your encounters,’ writes Gascoigne - this in his Chapter Six, On Undertakings - ‘you must fix and hold your plan before you in your mind. If you should have no plan, then you must learn the Pretending of the Thing. He who gives himself over to the direction of fortune will find himself only an easy prey to Rogues and False Men, of which they are many to be met upon the open road.’

           Well, Gascoigne will say ‘he’ and ‘himself’ as if Adventure were only a fit thing for a man, but I paid that no attention and read it out in my head again: ‘She must have a plan.’ And what plan was it that I had in my mind as we knocked on that wooden door, knowing that the wrestler and his friends had fallen silent, knowing that he was watching us as he hoisted and tied his breeches? My plan was to strike a deal, to write whatever this Shiny Bill might require but to refuse from him any payment save a solemn promise that he would secure my passage on a wagon train heading West. A true Man of the Wilds must know how to manage that business, I thought. That was my plan as I stepped forward, hoping that I had indeed the Pretending of the Thing, and rapped a second time on the guesthouse door.

*****

Close to, Shiny Bill was not much as I had imagined he would be. For a first surprise, when we entered his room, he was squatting over a wooden bucket scrubbing a shirt and sloshing water onto the flagstones, and the beads in his hair were clicking and rattling with the great vigour he was putting into his work. Well, I thought, that is something of which Gascoigne has not a word to say.

Shiny Bill looked up and said: ‘So, you came.’

He nodded for us to sit down. It was not clear where that should be. The room was no bigger than a cattle stall and he had turned the wooden bed frame upright upon its end and pushed it into the corner. In the space where it had lain he had set down a pile of blankets with another blanket rolled up for a bolster and a fur over all. The threadbare blankets and the greasy fur looked so that you might not much wish to sit on them, but we did. The room was tiny and without windows and it smelt just as you can imagine. Aside from the bedding, his boots and pack and scabbard were set out tidily in the corner, and aside from that there was only his wet clothing - under-shirts and over-shirts, stockings and drawers - which hung, dripping, from two lines of cord that he had strung crosswise, corner to corner. Considered altogether it gave the room a crowded and mournful air, as if it had been overrun by a shipwreck’s worth of ghosts.

           For a second surprise, Shiny Bill was naked. Or as near as I ever wanted to see him so, at least. He had a blanket round his shoulders and under that, around his middle, was a kind of undergarment of which I don’t know the name: a sort of a cloth wrapped around and about. What I surely do know is that the cloth was not the colour it had been when Shiny Bill first came into possession of it. It reminded me of nothing so much as old, yellowed parchment. I forced myself to look at the floor and not at Artur, fearing that we would both laugh. One other thing he was wearing: a linen bandage on that gammy left leg, wound all the way from ankle to knee. Whatever injury it covered must have been an old one because the bandage was just about as dingy and woebegone as his undergarment. It was also yet to heal, at least to judge by the rash of angry red whorls which spread out from under the bandage, over his knee and a fair part of his thigh. I looked away again.

           Not that Shiny Bill seemed in anyways abashed about parading around in front of us with his pale paunch hanging out and his drinker’s dugs and his horrible leg. He walked right outside like that, grimacing as he rose, emptied the bucket of mucky water by the roadside and came back in, whereupon he turned the bucket upside down and set himself upon it, looking at us both.

           ‘Why are you here?’ he said, not to me, but to Artur.

           ‘I, I,’ said Artur, ‘I mean, she didn’t know the way. She’s not long in Fan Syle.’

Well, I could have hit Artur for saying so and for making me sound all hapless and unknowing, but it was out before I had the chance to stop him.

           ‘Ah? A gentleman,’ nodded Bill. It didn’t seem as if it were all that much of a matter to him. He turned away, took a sip from a flask which lay beside him on the floor and then he said: ‘This world is closing up. You won’t understand me when I say that, two young townsfolk such as yourselves, why should you? I doubt you’ve slept a night without a roof between you and the wide open. But this is Shiny Bill talking, I’ve seen it happen.’ He raised and tightened his fist to show something having the life choked out of it.

           Well, that was a third surprise, sure enough, because Shiny Bill was quite the talker, quite poetical even, although that doubtless had something to do with the hooch in the flask. However it was, he sat silent for a while as if getting his thoughts all lined up in his head and then began.

           ‘I left my home for the first time when I was sixteen. Thirty years before either of you ever saw the light of the world I figure. I can tell you: I was young and fast and eager and just about strong as a bullock. I got myself taken on as a guard with a trapping team - six months the trip - far, far off into the Northern Wilds. Colder than anything I’d ever known. So cold that one night I came upon a bird frozen to a stump, frozen right there where it had set down. There was another night, I woke up in the camp and there are stars in the darkness beyond the firelight. Dozens of them, bright blue stars shifting about in the forest. “What in the blazes,” says young Shiny Bill, out loud because he’s so surprised, “what in the blazes are those lights?” Black Gurney is sitting next to the fire - that was his name, Black Gurney, for reasons to which I was never privy - he looks around and he says: “hush up now you daft bastard, them’s wolf eyes, waiting for the fire to burn down.” So. Can you imagine that, young townsfolk? A circle of fire light, and just beyond it cold enough to split the trees and wolves, prowling and prowling and waiting for the cold to do their killing for them. How did he feel, young Bill, do you think? Did he feel terror? Did he regret leaving the hearth he’d known since he was a babe in swaddling? No such thing, I tell you: he was fit to burst with joy at the great almighty openness of the world, and him being out in it and, everything still to happen.’

           Shiny Bill stopped talking for a moment and rummaged in his pack for something that proved to be his chewing tobacco. I glanced across at Artur while his back was turned, and he shrugged and gave a grin that one might call uneasy. When he had settled into his chewing Shiny Bill went on:

‘Last year I signed up for a trip with the Company. Swore I never would do that, but I was at the lowest ebb, silver gone, no prospect of more in sight. It looked nothing much, just brawn work, guarding a pack-train headed for the Southlands. The end of our second day on the tramp and I’m sent forward to this tent where there’s a white faced clerk sitting behind a desk with his papers and his wax and his whiskers and his pomade telling me I’ve to put my mark on this paper and put my mark on that paper and all the rest of it: when to work and where and how. And I thought to myself: so this is how the world has turned about, is it? Rules and ledgers and words and more words and an effing “Secretary” for a Master.’

           Shiny Bill, you can be sure, did not concern himself with saying ‘effing’, but Long Common Girl or not I have learnt the meaning of the word Decorum and I mean to keep it that way. In any case, Shiny Bill continued on in that fashion for a long while, and the more he sipped from his flask, the more he got back to ‘effing’ and ‘damn secretaries’ and the world being Trussed up Like a Rabbit, and the more it seemed that there was nothing here that promised a way out of Fan Syle, only a lonesome old drunk looking for someone to listen to him talk his heart out. He had some fine stories, sure enough, as good as anything in Gascoigne, and I enjoyed hearing them, but finally, when he paused for another sip, I said:

           ‘Shiny Bill, about the business for which we came?’

           He: ‘The Business. Yes. Spoken like a true Secretary.’

           Me, making to rise: ‘We should take our leave, then.’

           He: ‘Sit down, sit down. You mistake me. A Secretary is just the thing that I need. Just the very, very thing. Someone who knows how to do a bit of Trussing for me.’

*****

Shiny Bill sat quiet for a while and then he shook his shoulders, much as if he were a waking dog driving off sleep, and hunkered forward towards Artur and I.

           He says: ‘Listen up now. A thing has fallen in my path. You could rightly call it a treasure, only a perilous one. And I mean to make it my own, but it’s not a matter that’s easily managed because the thing is fiercely guarded. To claim it will take aid. I mean: associates, and dependable ones at that.’

           Seeing the question in our eyes, Shiny Bill shook his finger at us and said: ‘I shan’t tell you what it is. Don’t ask me for I shan’t tell you. Not yet. The nub of the matter is that Shiny Bill himself is not enough. He needs others to help him claim the thing.’

           Well, that made little enough sense, and I still could see no reason why he might need me or any kind of help that I might have to offer. Outside there was the sound of the men jockeying and laughing by the inn. I said: ‘What of them, those men out there by the gate, they seem fierce enough. Would they not serve?’

           Shiny Bill gave a snort and shook his head: ‘That rabble of dog-arses? I’ve seen men of that cast too often to count - all boast and bullying inside the city walls, and then two days out, soiling their breeches at the first clap of thunder and begging for a hat to keep off the rain and losing their boots in the mire. No, I know just the very company I need, and I know where they’ll be too, at this season of the year: gathered together in the Snug at Gethin’s Hostelry. They’ll be there, one and all, before the winter snows arrive.’

           He took another drink from his flask and wagged one finger in the air again: ‘Those are the only associates that will serve in this business, the only ones who can get it done for sure.’

           Artur and I glanced at each other once more. He looked just about as confused as I felt: ‘Sir,’ I said, in some frustration: ‘what part do you wish me to play in this? What need might you have of my pen?’

           Shiny Bill stood up and started to pinch the corners of his shirts to see if they had dried to his satisfaction. He hauled the first two from where they hung, and proceeded, with a delicacy that was quite unexpected, to fold them into neat squares, laying one on the other beside his pack.

           ‘I would trust them to see the business through,’ he said, ‘that company which I have in mind. They are of the wilderness wild, sure enough. But what I keep asking myself: can I trust them with the secret of the thing? How can I be sure that one of them should not sell me out, take the secret to another? You see: I need the words, I need an agreement all laid out in a writing, something to put a halter on them.’

He stopped his tidying and shrugged one of his washed shirts over his shoulders, tightened the drawstrings, and looked at me and said: ‘Are you up to a work like that?’

           I said: ‘Surely. If you can tell me where to find this Gethin’s place I will meet you there tomorrow and draw up whatever you wish. A contract of some kind it would be? I can do it tomorrow. Or whichever day serves best.’

           But Shiny Bill shook his head. He ran his hand back and forth against his cheek. It made something like the sound of a person carding wool.

‘It’s not so easy as that. Gethin’s Hostelry isn’t some alderman’s dining club nor nowhere near. Head out the West Gate and walk hard for seven days and you wouldn’t yet have come in sight of it. It’s another full day’s trek up the shoulder of The Nail, an overwinter house for every vagabond and voyageur in the Western ranges.’

           A horse whinnied as it passed by outside. Shiny Bill says: ‘what I want is a secretary of my own, one who will accompany me and when we get there, write it all down, spick and span, get them to set their marks to it. Make sure the whole damn business is tied up. I want someone who will travel with me and see it done right.’

           I thought about Gascoigne and ‘On Undertakings’. I thought: do not seem too eager for Gods’ sake. So I said, as slowly as I could manage, with as much suspicion in my voice as I could muster:

           ‘You wish me to come with you?’

           ‘Yes,’ said Shiny Bill, and then, quick as quick can be: ‘but I will see you well rewarded for it.’

           Me (still suspicious): ‘You wish me to come with you?’

           ‘Hear me out first, hear what I will offer.’

           ‘To the Western mountains? Up this “Nail”?’

           ‘That way, yes.’

           ‘Through the snows, to this Gethin’s Hostelry?’

           ‘That is my proposition, yes.’

           I paused as long as I dared. I shook my head as if disbelieving. I sighed and finally, trying as best I could to sound hard-pressed and reluctant: ‘I’m willing to make the journey, so long as the payment is fair.’

           I could barely hear my voice for the sound of my own heart, triumphant, clattering in its boney box.