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  I shifted uncomfortably. “Oh, and something else,” I said. “Soldiers are searching for Coben. They’re turning out carriages leaving the town. A coachman’s just been grumbling at me about it.”

  Nick scraped the last of his soup from his bowl, and sucked his spoon clean.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “who Coben needs to hide from most. Those soldiers, or my Pa.” He looked at me significantly. There was silence. I could hear Tassie laughing. I couldn’t resist a quick glance down at the bundle at my feet.

  “What are we going to do with this, then?” I asked at length.

  Our shadows were long, stretching in front of us like stick puppets wherever the clustering of the houses gave way to the reddening sunlight. Every time someone rounded a corner unexpectedly, I jumped halfway out of my skin.

  “Calm down, can’t you?” Nick murmured. “You’ll give us away.”

  “How much further?” I asked. I was convinced it must be obvious to passersby what we were doing. That boy with the dog looks nervous, they’d be saying — ah, yes, of course, he’s taking a stolen camel to a hiding place in Aldgate.

  “Not far,” said Nick. He’d already told me he was deliberately going to take me by a very indirect route, so as to lead any possible spies off the scent, and consequently it was taking us twice as long to get to our destination.

  “Excuse me, now,” said a high-pitched voice from a dark corner. I was about to take to my heels and run for it, when Nick grabbed me by the shoulder. There was a dusty old man sitting up against a broken wall. Lash went over to sniff him and I called him back nervously.

  “Did ye hear it, now?” the man was rambling, tunefully. “A most remarkable thing, it was, to be sure.” He spoke in a lilting voice like a pennywhistle. “A mooo — ost remarkable thing.” His face suddenly disappeared into itself like a sponge, and flopped back out again. It took a while for us to realize that this was meant to be a smile. “Music!” he added, portentously. “The most remarkable music that ever was.”

  “Er — yes,” I said, pulling Nick away.

  “Music,” the tramp was continuing, “like I never heard before. Like a bagpipe … like a flute … like a violin … like nothing I ever heard before in me life. What music is it,” he lilted, “that sounds like all the snakes of the world rippling over one another? Why should music like that be heard, now? Music from far away.”

  Nick nudged me, to urge me on, and we left the tramp sitting there, laughing and softly singing to himself.

  “Isn’t that strange,” Nick said, “what he was saying about music like snakes?”

  “I suppose people like him imagine all kinds of music,” I said, “just like they imagine all kinds of sights. A drunk once told me he’d seen a woman with a horse’s mane and hooves going into a house. He swore all kinds of oaths he’d seen it.”

  “It must be quite fun in a way,” Nick said, “to imagine you see and hear things. No difference between things that are real and things that are a dream.”

  “Sounds like my life just now,” I muttered.

  We turned a corner into a wide street, still busy with coaches and barrows; and Nick stopped by a little shop-front, so shabby it almost looked uninhabited. Just above our heads, over a low front window, I could dimly make out the words

  SPINTWICE

  JEWELER & SILVERSMITH

  painted in smut-caked letters. I called Lash and took hold of his lead, and Nick knocked on the little door, which barely seemed high enough for us to get through, let alone a grown-up customer. After a few moments it opened and a child’s face peeped around it. When it saw Nick, the child pulled the door further open and disappeared inside. We followed him in.

  “This is Mog,” Nick said when the door was closed. “Mog, this is Mr. Spintwice, my good friend.”

  The person I had taken for a child was Mr. Spintwice himself. He was shorter than either of us, and his face, now that I could take in his appearance properly, was a strange mixture of infant and adult. He had rosy cheeks and a permanent broad grin, like a mischievous child of about five or six; but his eyes were quick and dark and, I suddenly thought, sadder than the rest of his face. He really looked most peculiar, and I took my cues nervously from Nick, watching his responses to the little man before deciding what I thought of him or how to behave.

  “Mog,” he said, in a piping voice. “How do you do, Mog?” He reached up for my hand, all the time smiling in his unchanging way, and I shook hands with him slightly stiffly. “And this is?”

  “Lash,” I said, hoping the tiny man wouldn’t be intimidated by a dog almost as tall as himself. But he had immediately recognized Lash’s trusting nature and was already reaching out the palms of his hands for exploratory licks. “Lash,” he said, “you are welcome.”

  We followed him through the carpeted hallway into a tiny sitting room. “Nick and I have known one another many years,” he said in his precise little voice; and it was perfectly plain that Nick was entirely comfortable in his presence and didn’t think he was peculiar at all, so I said nothing. “Please sit in here. I can see you can’t quite believe your eyes. Well! Nick was just as surprised as you, the first time he came here years ago. If you make yourselves comfortable, I’ll fetch some tea.”

  I looked around in wonder. There were armchairs, a mantelpiece, pictures hanging from a picture-rail, tables with plants in pots, a cabinet with glass doors revealing rows of books, and a warm welcoming fire blazing in the grate with neat fire tools and a coal scuttle beside it; but all of it was built to around half the normal size. This, and the presence of numerous clocks of various kinds ranged around the room, ticking and tinkling at several different pitches, made me feel as though we had stepped inside some extraordinary toy. Some of the clocks were so tiny, I marveled at how anyone could make a mechanism small enough to fit inside them. Others were quite big enough for Mr. Spintwice himself to climb in, next to the pendulum, and be hidden completely. When Nick and I sat down in the armchairs we filled them, finding them if anything a little tight. Even Lash looked around slightly bemused, as though afraid to wag his tail in case he knocked something off a shelf.

  “I love this place, don’t you?” Nick said. “Listen to all those clocks.” He had barely sat down before he’d slipped out of his chair again and gone to kneel by the bookshelves. Soon he was opening one of the cabinets and taking out a big crimson book almost the size of a flagstone. “This is one of my favorites.” He dragged it back to his chair.

  Something in my face must have betrayed my misgivings because, without my saying anything, he leaned close to whisper in my ear.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Spintwice is all right. I think we should tell him the whole story, and see what he says. He’s a jeweler, so he might be able to tell us a bit more about the camel. And he’ll hide it for us, I’m sure.”

  The longer I listened to the mechanical music of the clocks, the more it seemed to overwhelm us, lapping round us, spinning us into a web of sound.

  “Why don’t you stay here?” Nick whispered suddenly. “Don’t go back to Cramplock’s. The man from Calcutta’s too close.”

  I was unsure. I was genuinely afraid we might have been followed; and if I stayed here, there was every chance I’d just be putting the dwarf in unnecessary danger too. There was something about the familiarity of Cramplock’s that made me feel instinctively safer there; and, despite having Nick’s word for it, I still didn’t know Spintwice well enough to feel I could fully trust him.

  “I’m still not —“ I began; but Nick was immersed in the book again, oblivious now to sights and sounds around him, completely and instantly relaxed. His eyes were wide as he took in the rich decoration which spread across both pages: figures in red and purple, woven patterns in gold leaf along the pages’ edge, and a Moorish landscape with two figures clinging to a brightly colored flying carpet. He seemed a different person altogether from the watchful, edgy, suspicious boy I’d met at Lion’s Mane Court. I suddenly realized
how little I still knew about Nick. I wondered how he had ever encountered this strange little man, whose tiny house and wonderful bookshelves seemed such a world away from his violent home life. “He’s about the only grown-up who’s ever really been kind to me,” Nick had told me on the way here. My eyes wandered around the shelves of books, fascinated, enticed by the patterns and lettering on their spines. They looked impossibly rich and full of promise: no book ever printed at Cramplock’s had been as splendid as these, I felt sure. What on earth would Nick’s father say if he could see him sitting here, leafing through them?

  “Does your Pa know you come here?” I asked him.

  “There’s a lot my Pa don’t know,” he murmured, unconcerned.

  Mr. Spintwice came back with a tray of teacups, again miniaturized to match his size; and he had also brought a dish of water and bread for Lash, which he put down in front of the fire. It was at this point that I decided I liked him.

  “It’s a very nice surprise to have visitors, I must say,” he said, after taking a sip or two. “And at such an unexpected hour!”

  “I’m sorry if we —“ I began, but he cut me off.

  “Not at all! A pleasure, a sheer pleasure, Mog,” he said, “an unexpected hour is the very best hour for visitors! It would be boring always to have guests turn up when you expect them.”

  Lash had made himself completely at home, curling up in front of the fire as though he’d lived there all his life. My suspicions were beginning to melt away, and I found myself thinking about what Nick had said and being very tempted to stay here, cocooned in this warm music-filled little sitting room, reading book after book. I was flooded with a strange sense of safety and wellbeing, a feeling so unfamiliar it gave me goose bumps.

  “We really called to ask a favor,” said Nick, rather apprehensively, putting down the book.

  “Of course! Anything I can do for two such handsome fellows.”

  Nick looked at me. “It’s quite a long story,” he said. “Maybe you’d better tell it, Mog, since it’s really yours.”

  I put down my teacup. “I’m not really sure where to start,” I said.

  I told him the whole thing, more or less. As I told it, I began to feel a lot better, and Mr. Spintwice listened with complete attention. When I got to the bit about the camel, I pulled it out of its wrapping and passed it across to him. He spent the rest of the story examining it, turning it over and over in his hands, with a mystified expression on his little old face.

  “It sounds,” he said, “as if you two are getting into deep waters. And over what? Over this?” He held up the camel by one of its legs. Lash, looking up from his cozy spot by the fire, got to his feet and trotted over to the dwarf’s chair, where he began sniffing at the camel much as he had done the night before.

  “We wondered,” said Nick, “if you might tell us anything about it.”

  “It’s brass,” Mr. Spintwice said simply. “Cheap. Tarnished. Made in a mold which must have made hundreds like it. The sort of trinket that comes from the Indies every time a ship puts in. As far as I can see it’s worth nothing at all: it doesn’t even have jewels for eyes, or anything like that. It’s a complete mystery why anyone would want it.” He began lifting it up and down, holding Lash’s head away with his other hand. “The only thing is,” he said, “its weight is all wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, intrigued.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s obviously not solid brass because it’s not heavy enough. So it must be hollow. But somehow …” he lifted it up and down a few more times, just to be sure, “it’s not light enough to be hollow, either.”

  Nick stared at him, and then at me. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “It’s hollow!” He took the camel from the dwarf, and waved it. “What a pair of idiots we are!”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, still mystified.

  “Don’t you understand? Look, we’ve been wondering for days why anyone would want to steal it, let alone threaten to kill for it. But it isn’t this they want. It’s something hidden inside it.” He shook it, but it didn’t rattle. “There must be something valuable inside,” he said, “and that’s why it feels too heavy to be hollow.”

  The little jeweler began laughing and his eyes twinkled. “What a clever lad,” he chuckled, “he’s right, he’s quite right.”

  Nick was turning the camel over and over furiously, looking for a way to get at whatever was inside. He pulled at the legs, scratched at it, tried twisting it around its hump. Suddenly he gave a cry. “The head comes off! Look!”

  Grasping the drowsy-looking head in his grubby fist, he twisted it and it began to unscrew, squeaking, and sending little grains of powder trickling to the floor out of the grooves. Lash gave an excited bark.

  “Well, I never,” said the dwarf, intrigued.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” I exclaimed to Lash, remembering how he had tried to gnaw at its neck last night. Why hadn’t it occurred to me then?

  “What on earth’s all this?” said Nick, “chalk?” He lifted off the head and blew. Powder flew up into his face, and he sneezed. “Or is it snuff?” He held it out to me. Lash was fussing around it, and I had to stand up so I could get a proper look without him pushing his nose inside.

  The camel was full to the brim with an off-white powder, like flour and ashes.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, “this powder can’t be valuable either. Let’s empty it, and see if there’s anything else in here.”

  “All the powder,” put in the dwarf, “might just be there to stop the jewel, or whatever it is, from rattling about and getting scratched.” He passed me an old porcelain jar. “Empty it into here,” he said.

  I stuffed the open neck into the jar and shook the camel. Clouds of powder rose as it all poured through. Lash, his ears erect, was transfixed, and kept giving short excited yelps as the stuff trickled out. We all watched eagerly for something else to fall into the jar — but no, just a steady stream of powder was all there was, until the camel was empty and the jar nearly full.

  “Well,” said Spintwice, disappointed.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” said Nick. “Are you sure there’s nothing else in there? Nothing’s stuck?”

  I shook it, and pressed my eye to the open neck, but could see nothing.

  “Let’s have some more tea,” Spintwice said, getting up.

  But I was sitting with my nose in the neck of the jar. I sniffed.

  “What are you doing?” Nick asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I think I’ve smelt this before.” I breathed in again.

  Suddenly I felt very, very peculiar.

  The jar was growing, swelling, like something about to give birth. I held it until it was too big for my hands and then I let it fall, which it did very slowly, as if it were falling through endless space. When I looked up, Nick and Mr. Spintwice had receded, the room suddenly expanding until it was the size of a cornfield: there they were, in their armchairs, miles away, moving their arms like insects, completely silent. Lash’s wet nose, shining in the glow of the fire, had become a disembodied ball of light, like a star. All I could hear was the ticking of the clocks, which became louder and louder until it was more like a rush of crashing echoes; the room began to spin and I clutched the arms of the chair in desperation as, lashing like a snake, the world flipped right over and threw me into a blaze of meaningless color, like the pinkest, bluest, blackest sunset that ever smeared its way across the smoky London sky.

  8

  ENCHANTED MUSIC

  As we left Spintwice’s I still felt rather strange; though at least the world was no longer expanding and contracting like a concertina. Nick and the dwarf had picked me up and sat me firmly in a chair, where they’d given me tea to drink, and then, as a further measure, brandy. Again I’d declined the offer of a bed for the night, partly out of a desire to protect Spintwice and partly because I had an aching feeling that, the more time I spent in his extraordinary and beguiling ho
use, the less I’d ever want to go back to Cramplock’s at all, to work or to sleep. Bravely, Nick had agreed to come with me.

  “Are you feeling better?” he asked as we walked up the street in the dark.

  “I think so,” I said, hesitantly. “Nick, we can trust Spintwice, can’t we?”

  “’Course we can,” he said quickly. “I tell him everything, Mog. I always have. He won’t say anything to anyone.”

  The dwarf had been tremendously excited by the whole affair, and thought it was fun to join in our adventure; but I was worried. The tiny man wouldn’t present much of an obstacle if a murderous criminal should pay him a visit, determined to get at the camel or its contents. The more I thought about it, the less sure I was that we had done the right thing. I just hoped we’d hidden them well enough, and had been careful enough not to let anyone see us as we came and went.

  “We’d better not hang around,” I said as we came to the corner where our routes home diverged.

  Nick looked up at the dark sky. “I hope Pa’s still out,” he said, “and Ma Muggerage, too, for that matter. Then I can get back in without being clobbered. Look, I might come back here tomorrow and make sure Spintwice is all right.”

  “Well, I shan’t come,” I said, “if you-know-who’s watching me, the further away I stay the better.” And as I hurried between the unfriendly walls towards home, every face which melted into the shadows at my approach made me stop in my tracks; every cough from a doorway, every murmur from a lighted window, even the rustle as Lash chased a rat into the shadows near my ankles, sent shivers up my spine; and by the time we got back I was running so fast I was completely out of breath.

  “Busy today, Mog,” Cramplock told me next morning, “invitation cards for Lord Malmsey’s daughter’s wedding. I want you to cut the card while I engrave this coat of arms.” He was peering through his half-glasses at the design he’d been given to work from: a big shield-like coat of arms, featuring banners unfurled, and a motto in Latin I couldn’t understand. The emblems on the shield were three white flowers and a lion with a particularly blank expression on its face, as though its brain had been removed.