Free Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero by Dan Abnett

gutter’s sluice, cursed the night openly, and darted into the doorway of number five, Paternoster Lane, slamming the door behind her.
     
     
        The interior smelt of carrots and mutton, and a fire crackled in the grate. She shook off her cape, and tousled her ruined hairdo so that the fine chestnut locks slumped down loosely around her slender shoulders. Mistress Mary was embroidering by the fire with a bodkin so big she could have disembowelled a caribou with it. The dowdy old woman looked up with a short-sighted frown.
     
     
        “Doll?” she queried, narrowly avoiding her thumb with the stabbing spike.
     
     
        “Evening, Mary,” said Doll. “I’d say ‘good’ but it isn’t. Thank heavens for your fire.” Doll chafed her hands and sat for a moment on the stool opposite the old lady.
     
     
        “Have you heard the news today?” asked the elderly dam, impaling her work with ruthless stabs of the bodkin. “Some fellow went mad with a sword at the Dolphin Baths. Two dead. Eviscerated, they say.”
     
     
        “How nice,” grimaced Doll.
     
     
        The old lady chuckled to herself as if “eviscerated” meant “bopped on the head with an inflated sheep’s bladder” (which it does in the Welsh Marches, though the usage is offset by their understanding of the expression “bladdered”).
     
     
        “Are you walking out with that nice Master Rupert tonight?” added Mistress Mary, rethreading her barb.
     
     
        “Ohhh,” mused Doll, “I don’t think so. He’s busy, very probably.”
     
     
        “Such a nice young jackanapes,” babbled Mistress Mary, regardless.
     
     
        “Well, that’s one word for him,” said Doll, smiling sourly. She got to her feet. “I’m off now, Mary. I’m as tired as a baited bear at a ragged staff. I’ve got to get some sleep. It’s the Masque this Saturday.”
     
     
        “And I’m so excited,” replied Mistress Mary. “I do love a good firework.”
     
     
        “Indeed you do,” smiled Doll, remembering the last Great Masque Day, when they had been required to ouija for a twenty-four hour glazier because Mistress Mary’s Great Apollo Rocket had blown out all the back windows.
     
     
        Mary nodded, and continued to murder her embroidery, as Doll turned and stomped up the narrow stairs into the upper levels of the boarding house. On the first landing, the air stank of turpentine. She peered in through the open doorway of the rooms rented by Luigi, a struggling, bohemian artist from Italia.
     
     
        “How’s it going, bambino?” she called. The long-haired painter looked up from his canvas and smiled his beautiful Latin smile, all teeth and flecks of oil paint.
     
     
        “You tell me!” he invited, gesturing to his canvas, which was a fine but horsey portrait of a woman in a lettice cap and frangipani gloves. Portrait work like this helped him to earn his crust.
     
     
        “It’s not quite La Giaconda,” Doll remarked, ducking out of the doorway.
     
     
        “Ahh! What do you expect?” exclaimed Luigi in her wake, waving a mahl stick and a hog-bristle brush after her. “I can only work with what I have! The plain wives of coarse gentlemen who want a portrait for their fireplace! Ugly children who won’t stand still! Wedding couples where my skill must hide the bride’s bump better than her gown did! Horses! Horses and dogs!”
     
     
        “Yeah, it’s a hard life,” she replied, heading on towards her room.
     
     
        “But it could be so much better!” he protested. “Come back! I want to talk to you again, my lady, about you being my model! Dolce! The wonder of it! The sublime invocation of worldly beauty!”
     
     
        “Nice try,” Doll called back, as she clambered up the final flight to her rooms, “but you’ll have to wax a lot more lyrical if you expect me to get my kit off and pose for you with swans