“What about Him?” asked the younger of the two.

“Him?”

“It’s no secret,” explained the older. “When he swung out and cut away the mooring ropes with his sword, Mr.-Woolnough-the-Physician’s-youngest-daughter-Tinda caught a sight of him, and couldn’t stop herself squealing out his name. The Duke’s men and everyone else heard her, and the constables started shouting that Black Captain Blythe was aboard, and if the Bower didn’t pull to they’d run to the Western Spire, drop a carcass in the cannon, and burn ’em to the waterline.” Mosca had read enough of piratical battles to know that a carcass was a can of oiled rags that could be used to set fire to buildings or ships. “Well, we couldn’t be having with that. Not a coward trick like that against brave Captain Blythe.”

“Brave and handsome Captain Blythe,” the younger added. “Is he as handsome as they say?”

“Three times as handsome,” Mosca answered without hesitation. “An’ . . . he got a commandin’ eye which makes him look six times as handsome.”

“What color are his eyes?”

Mosca paused. She had no idea what color Blythe’s eyes were.

“Well, they sort of change like the sky when the clouds are skittish. When he’s starin’ down a foe, all undomitable, they’re all silvery gray like stone in moonlight. And . . . when he smiles they go a merry sort of blue. And other times they’re all sorts of other colors.”

“But sometimes they’re green?”

Mosca could not mistake the note of hope in the younger gypsy’s voice.

“Oh yes. ’Course. Most of the time they’re green.”

“I knew it. Didn’t I say Captain Blythe would have green eyes?”

The musket-wielding deputies on the bank paid the little bumboat All Awry very little heed as it detached itself from the convoy surrounding the Laurel Bower and made for the bank. After all, there were only three gypsy girls aboard, and youthful ones at that. So what if one of them seemed a good deal paler than her companions? Her eyes were as black as theirs, if not blacker.

“The Telling Word is moored at Whitherwend Street until the next bell,” the eldest gypsy whispered as Mosca climbed out, ignored by the waterside throng.

The cathedral bell rang when Mosca was halfway down Whitherwend Street, and the Stationers’ coffeehouse was still distant. The Telling Word had, it seemed, been searched, along with the other coffeehouses, and outside its fantastical collage walls a number of bewigged and bespectacled gentlemen waited with patient belligerence, many still holding their coffee dishes. As the bell rang, however, they started to file back along the gangplank. The crew on the roof was readying the sails and preparing to cast off.