“Will you let me tell you what the name Birdcatcher means?” he continued. “A Birdcatcher knows that there is something higher and better in this world than the dirt and darkness which surrounds us. Not the Beloved, sitting in their little shrines like wooden shopkeepers, with everyone trying to buy their favors with gold and flowers and turnips. No, something else, something pure, something so bright that its light could enchant everything else, like sunlight through a stained-glass window. Now, are you going to shun someone just because they believe the world has meaning?”

Mosca shook her head slowly.

“Then can we please bring in the raft?” Kohlrabi still wore an expression of tender good humor.

Mosca shook her head again, and snuffled out a single word.

“I didn’t hear that.”

“Partridge,” she repeated, with muffled fierceness. “The barge captain. He was a crotchet an’ a bully an’ he left bruises on my shoulders, an’ he was stealin’ the Beloved out of their shrines, but . . . then someone stuck a knife in him ’fore I’d decided what I thought of him. An’ maybe there was a story to the way his wrist was broken, and the way his smile looked like he was suckin’ crab apples, an’ nobody will ever care enough to find out. But leastways, someone ought to care ’bout the last bit of his story, the bit where he died.

“It’s funny—I mean, everyone thought he got killed ’cause he was a Waterman spy, or ’cause he was blackmailing radicals, or ’cause he went after Mr. Clent wantin’ money. But it wasn’t really ’bout any of that stuff. He died ’cause of a goose. And . . . ’cause of me.

“All he wanted was his barge back, the one my goose Saracen sort of stole by mistake. An’ so when he saw me, he chased me ’cause he needed me and Mr. Clent to take Saracen away. An’ then, right in front of a coffeehouse, I disappeared an’ he couldn’t find me. So I ’spect he searched up and down, an’ then someone took his penny and said, ‘Yeah, we seen the ferrety-looking girl. Popped under a gentleman’s cloak, she did.’ So he got a description of the gent with the cloak, an’ started asking to find out where he’d gone.

“Sooner or later he tracked him to a ragman’s raft. Maybe he even spied the gent comin’ up out of the hatch. Then . . . I think I see how it went. He pushed his way past the gent and climbed down through the trapdoor, thinkin’ I was hidin’ below. But I wasn’t. An’ suddenly there Partridge was in the dark, and in front of him was the printing press an’ lots of pages of Madness and Mayhem drying on racks . . . and behind him there was you, Mr. Kohlrabi.”