‘Nothing to identify him,’ Cora said, moving away from the body. ‘I suspect that was part of the instructions.’
‘How can Tennworth make people do these things?’ Jenkins said. ‘It can’t just be because she’s a Chambers. That doesn’t mean she can force people to kill themselves!’
‘Which means that her power over this man had to be something specific,’ Cora said, ‘something personal. Debts. Family. It’s leverage that makes a person do this to themselves. Leverage we’re unlikely to learn now.’
‘But why has he done this here?’ Jenkins said. ‘So close to his crime?’
‘No one to meet him coming home smelling of something strange, to wonder at his absence. To ask questions.’
‘We’re asking questions though, aren’t we?’ Jenkins said.
‘If I’m right and Tennworth told this man to kill Finnuc and the others, then to kill himself, Tennworth wants us to ask those questions. Finnuc’s death, the feathers – it’s another message. We’ve got to get back to Fenest.’
Four
As they rode away, Cora felt the pain in her foot return. In the last few weeks it had been getting worse, though the Zealous Stitcher knew there was little sense in that, given that she’d had the injury since she was a child. Surely the pain should lessen over time? The pain had returned because she’d seen Ruth.
Her sister was the reason glass got into her foot in the first place, all those years ago, on the night Ruth had left their home, and left the city. Where she’d gone, Cora had never learned. Her sister vanished. Until now, because Ruth was back in Fenest. Wasn’t she? Cora had had a glimpse of a woman who may or may not have been Ruth, but she hadn’t had time for such thinking: there was too much going on. Just as she’d solved one murder by arresting Finnuc, more bodies had arrived. The Audience loved stories with patterns. Cora tried to ignore the pain throbbing in her foot.
Jenkins, too, looked uncomfortable, but that was more to do with the aches of the journey to Perlanse. The constable was perched awkwardly, gripping her saddle’s front bit – Cora had never learned the names of horse gear, never had need to. Jenkins’ knees were locked, her toes pointed down, and her face was grey.
‘Neither of us would make a convincing Wayward,’ Cora said, thinking of the realm defined by their wandering, their moving of horses across great tracts of land.
Jenkins could only nod in agreement. It had become clear as soon as they’d left Bernswick station that the constable hadn’t had much to do with horses in all her young years in Fenest, other than catching gigs. Cora wasn’t much more experienced as a rider, but compared to Jenkins, she was doing well.
It had been Sergeant Hearst’s idea to ride to the inn. Quicker, he’d said. That might have been true, but how long would it take Cora and Jenkins to stand straight again? There wouldn’t be much time to rest when they got back to Fenest. The election was well underway and there was no stopping it. Two stories told – those of the Caskers and the Seeders – and four more to go, including that of the Wayward whose storyteller Finnuc had killed. The pennysheets had been rife with speculation about the replacement storyteller following Nicholas Ento’s murder, but there’d been no official announcement yet from the Commission. Perhaps by the time she and Jenkins got back to the station that news would be shouted from street corners. If it wasn’t, Cora knew a certain pennysheet seller who would keep her up to date with developments.
The road was a busy one, being the main route to and from Fenest, and the traffic was mostly going one way. Riders on horseback like themselves, carts and wagons, plenty of coaches, all heading to the capital of the Union.
‘The spoked wheel turns and draws us all,’ Cora found herself saying. ‘Would you do the same, Jenkins, if you lived here, in the glorious Duchy of East Perlanse?’
‘Do what, Detective?’
‘Go to the capital for the election. Because that’s what they’re doing, mark my words, even if they haven’t a hope of hearing the stories. Every election there’s more people who want to listen.’
Jenkins yawned, her large teeth seeming to grow even larger in her mouth. Cora rubbed her eyes. She must be more tired than she’d realised.
‘Never had to think about it,’ Jenkins said, and shrugged. ‘My mother’s job meant I always got to listen to election stories.’
‘President of Election Offices, wasn’t it?’
‘Director of Electoral Affairs.’
‘How could I forget that most important of Commission departments?’ But Cora’s mocking tone seemed to pass Jenkins by.
‘My mother took me to every election until she retired because she knew it was important to hear the stories, to understand what it might mean for each realm to win. Just like all these people do.’ The constable gestured towards the line of slow-moving carts in front of them.
‘There’s one story that someone doesn’t want told,’ Cora said. She tried to take her bindleleaf tin from her coat pocket but it was too difficult to manage with the reins. Her old horse looked docile enough but who was to say the animal wouldn’t take off if it had a mind to? A smoke would have to wait. She tried to push the tin further into the pocket of her coat, but the pocket was too shallow.
This coat was new, or new to her, at least. Her old one had seen her through many a case: long, red and carrying the grime of Fenest in its seams, with pockets deep enough for plenty of rolled smokes, betting slips, and pennies for the ’sheet sellers. She missed it, but after coming too close to plague victims at Burlington Palace, the old coat had to go. Her new one was shorter, the hem against her hips, and cut of deep black cloth. A whore had taken pity on Cora when, waking together one morning, they found the spring air had turned cold again, just as it was meant to start warming up. He made Cora take his coat, telling her he had plenty. A tailor came regularly to his bed and liked to dress him. The lad had more clothes stuffed under the bed than Cora had owned in all her forty-something years.
‘I’m sorry, detective,’ Jenkins said.
Cora looked over. ‘For what?’
‘That the Casker… that he’s dead.’
Was Jenkins sorry for the case, or for Cora? After all, the constable had stood guard outside Finnuc’s cell while Cora questioned him, back at Bernswick. How much had Jenkins overheard of the more ‘personal’ nature of Cora and Finnuc’s relationship? The fact they’d spent more than a few afternoons together, talking about the election, talking about their lives? That they’d ripped each other’s clothes off when alone on the Hook barge? Cora decided to ignore the possibility Jenkins knew about any of that. No need to encourage that kind of talk.
‘A dead end is a dead end,’ she said, urging her horse into a trot. ‘Let’s get ahead of these bumpkins.’
By the time they’d cleared the run of carts and Jenkins had recovered from the jerks of the faster pace, Cora had recovered her own sense of balance. And she’d also decided something else: she wouldn’t tell Jenkins about Ruth. What was the need, when her sister’s return was so unlikely? Cora had been mistaken in the winery carriageway; Ruth couldn’t have been the woman with Finnuc. At the time Cora had thought she’d finally put all the pieces together. Well, some of the pieces. Enough, at any rate, to arrest Finnuc and learn the reason behind the killing of the Wayward storyteller, Nicholas Ento: that the south was falling apart. That the Wayward story Tennworth was trying to supress was one of change.