Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

by Frances Hardinge

  Then he stood, blood from his injured ear soaking into his collar, his face locked in a grimace, and limped quietly after his oblivious enemy. At the last moment the shorter man seemed to hear him and whirled round, but the motion caused the board beneath him to creak, and Appleton swung his cudgel with all his ungainly force. The roar of the crowd drowned the sound of wood on skull, but the shorter man spun about, tilted his head vaguely as if looking for something, then dropped to his knees and sprawled softly to the boards.

  A bell rang, and Appleton pulled off his blindfold, wiped his face with it and hobbled to the end of the bridge, examining his wounded fingers. He clambered down a ladder to stage level and hobbled to the pavilion, where Mosca could see him nodding, bobbing small bows and accepting a bag, presumably of candied violets. There were new contestants climbing the trees to the battle-bridge now, and he was largely ignored as he reclaimed a bundle from one of the attendants and staggered away, his red hair just visible above shorter night-dwellers.

  ‘Well, there’s no chance of following him in this crowd,’ murmured Mistress Leap. ‘Perhaps we can talk to people later and find out where he went…’ She turned, and her sentence trailed away, hanging like smoke in the empty space that an instant before had been occupied by her greenish companion.

  It had been the work of a moment for Mosca to stoop and pretend to adjust her clog. The newest combatants were waving to the crowd, and suddenly all heads were up, all eyes on the bridge. Nobody noticed a mysterious foreigner with a bell-shaped basket for a hat ducking down in the crevice between two stages, dropping to the sacred, untouchable grass, then running crouched beneath the creaking, thundering structure.

  When she found Brand Appleton, he was sitting alone on a set of wooden steps built into the side of the stage, his back to her. His head had been clumsily bandaged with a long kerchief. Peering at a slight angle, Mosca could just make out the little bag of violets in his lap. With trembling, tender fingers he was trying to wipe a spot of blood from the linen of the bag.

  Some higher steps creaked above Mosca’s head.

  ‘You’re the radical, aren’t you?’ A voice like someone sandpapering a cello. Mosca tried to imagine its owner, and every time he came out seven feet tall with fists like melons. ‘Go on, say something radical.’

  Brand Appleton turned his head, allowing Mosca to see his split lip. He blinked, and Mosca could almost hear his temper clicking into readiness like a pistol hammer. But then his eyes fell to the bag in his lap, and his hands stealthily moved to cradle it against his stomach. When the man further up the stairs took another step towards him, he wrapped both arms protectively around the bag and ducked his head down.

  ‘Er… the…’ He shook himself to gather his battered wits. ‘The… An end to all kings and we… their crowns should be beaten into ploughs and… for every man that is born a… in the sheds and stables and fields as much as in the… er… have a right to, um, a right as sacred as the air or… or sunlight…’ He bowed his head and swallowed.

  A heavy boot placed itself gently but firmly between his shoulder blades and gave him a contemptuous shove. The creaks were apparently satisfied and took themselves away.

  Mosca watched Appleton’s shoulders shake with suppressed emotion and her own feelings were thrown into confusion. Was this the ruthless, crazed kidnapper she had been led to expect? This half-stunned man hugging a bag of sweets?

  Then Appleton turned his head to look about him, perhaps to make sure that his persecutors had gone, and Mosca saw his face properly, with its dark trails of blood down the left cheek and jawline. A young face, perhaps only a year or two older than Beamabeth. There was no disguise to his expression, and Mosca found herself flinching as if an oven door had been left open.

  In his wide eyes she saw pain, and mortification, and exhaustion, but also a fierce and haggard stillness. And behind that stillness a roar like a forest fire, a driving fervour that would eat all the air and shrivel whole trees with a hiss. His gaze seemed to burn through the world and every obstacle in his path to rest on something distant and desired, something that reflected in his eyes with a steady white light. This was a man who might do anything. He might not do it well, but he would do it until it worked.

  He turned back, gently placed the bag down by his side and busied himself with fastening a sword belt about him. Two pistols were dusted off and checked for powder, then tucked away. Apparently he had put aside his weapons for the fight.

  Very slowly and carefully, Mosca drew out the little knife she had been given for self-defence. If she could only make a hole in the bag, perhaps when he left sugar and violets would trickle out to leave a trail for her and help her find his lair. But Appleton was maddeningly protective of his little prize. He kept reaching out to pat it, just when her knifepoint was an inch away, or moving it to the other side of him. Finally he shifted it back into his lap again, out of Mosca’s reach. Soon he would put it in a pocket, stand and walk away among the crowds.

  Mosca pulled back her knife-hand, a rash and terrible impulse gnawing away at her mind. The worst thing about Appleton’s gabbled radicalish was that he had clearly once heard a fragment of something. Some forbidden text hidden in cabbage barrows and badly copied and learned by rote and misremembered and half forgotten until it washed up in fragments on his tongue like so much meaningless shingle. Somewhere a book was screaming.

  She bit her tongue hard, but somehow the sentence slipped out anyway.

  ‘You got the words wrong, Mr Appleton.’

  He froze and turned his head a few degrees.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That radical speak of yours. You got the words wrong.’

  A long, long second of silence.

  ‘You know the right words to the Solace for the Thousands?’

  ‘No, but those weren’t them. I been to Mandelion. I know radicals. They make a load more sense than that.’

  Her words seemed to poke Appleton into alertness, and his posture noticeably straightened.

  ‘When I got here, I heard you were this terrible radical, so I come to find you.’ Mosca took a deep breath, then threw what was left of her caution to the winds like so much chaff. ‘And you know what? You’re more than terrible. You’re bleedin’ useless. Don’t turn round!’ This last was delivered in an urgent hiss since Appleton seemed in some danger of twisting about to remonstrate with the steps. She had gone too far. She must have gone too far.

  ‘Funnily enough,’ Appleton answered through clenched teeth, ‘my childhood tutors failed to ground me properly in the basics of revolutionary thought. And when I reached manhood I wasted my time studying books of anatomy in the mistaken impression that I would become a physician as planned. Back then, nobody told me I was a radical!’

  ‘Well, you don’t sound like much of one,’ muttered Mosca.

  ‘The Committee of the Hours are never wrong,’ intoned Appleton. The words rang hollowly as if he had recited them to himself too many times and worn the heart out of them. ‘If they say I am… then I am. I can… I can face that. But-’

  ‘But nobody told you how to be one – am I right?’ Above all, Mosca had to keep Appleton interested, inquisitive. ‘Could help you there, maybe. Might have some radical teachings off by heart. And words right from the mouths of the real radicals, in Mandelion.’

  Brand Appleton sat motionless, his head at a considering tilt. Mosca stared at the back of his neck and tried to guess his expression. A ‘brand’ was a fiery torch. She hoped that she was holding it by the right end. Either way, she was certainly playing with fire.

  ‘These teachings – are they wild and subversive?’ he whispered at last.

  ‘Frothing,’ Mosca reassured him quickly. ‘Mad as a melon cannon.’

  ‘And… you come from Mandelion? You know the place well? The people in power?’ He had the hesitant tone of one tiptoeing around a new plan for fear of smudging it.

  Somewhere the Tower Clock struck a tinny chime, and Appleton’s h
ead twitched.

  ‘I have to go. Listen, whoever you are – meet me at Harass and Quail’s tomorrow night at two of the clock. It’s in Cooper’s Dark – do you know it? Opposite the old stone trough.’

  ‘I’ll find it,’ hissed Mosca, marvelling at the success of her strange gambit, ‘and I’ll be there. Bring a notebook. We’ll have you lopping kings’ ’eads off before you can say fraternity.’

  At long last Appleton ventured a swift glance behind him, and then twitched his narrow head about, looking for his interlocutor. Mosca pulled back so the moonlight would not fall on her face.

  ‘Hey – are you under there? On the grass? ’

  ‘Just between you and me,’ Mosca whispered, ‘radicalism is all about walkin’ on the grass.’

  Goodlady Adwein, Wielder of the Pestle of Fate

  Watch him. He’s standing up. Walking away… after him! Now!

  Mosca had made an appointment with Appleton for the morrow, but there might still be some small chance of following him. She clambered out from under the scaffolding, as unobtrusively as anybody with a basket on their head possibly could, and hastily climbed up on to one of the plank walkways so that nobody would know she had been on the grass. Unfortunately, much as she had suspected, Brand Appleton was gone by the time she had extricated herself.

  When she felt a light touch on her shoulder, she jumped a foot in the air and would have fallen off the walkway if Mistress Leap had not grabbed her arm.

  ‘Did you see him, Mistress Leap? Did you see where he went?’

  But the midwife had not witnessed Brand Appleton’s departure. The streets of Toll-by-Night had swallowed him once more.

  ‘My dear, we really should be heading home soon.’ Mistress Leap’s voice was muted but urgent. ‘There is a frost falling. Have you noticed?’ It was true, Mosca realized. The chill of the night was becoming more bitter, and there was a subdued sparkle to the cobbles. ‘It is getting cold, and from now on the night can only get… colder.’

  Mosca understood. Cold meant fewer people. It meant the people who were still on the streets had either nowhere to go or the wrong sort of reason to be out. Besides, this was not her last chance to track Appleton down. He had promised to meet her the following night.

  ‘All right, Mistress Leap. But before we go back to your house, I got one more place to go. I got a letter to write.’

  The route to the location where Mosca had agreed to leave letters for her daylight allies took Mosca and Mistress Leap past the bridge tower. Looking up at the clock, Mosca could see that the wooden Beloved sentry above the clock face had changed again. Paragon had clearly done his duty, and now it was Goodlady Adwein gazing forgivingly out across the town, her pestle and mortar in her hands.

  All this will pass, she seemed to say. Everything that seems so large and inescapable now I will grind down in my pestle, and in a century it will be a fine powder that nobody will notice. There is no crime you have committed, no pain you have felt, that I cannot grind to nothing so that the world forgets it, in the fullness of time.

  This was no comfort to Mosca at all. In fact, she reflected, she didn’t much like the idea of a fine, powdery world where nothing really mattered in the long run. She preferred her world painful, and lumpy, and full of chaff.

  One such human piece of chaff was clearly on clock-mending duty. A basket was suspended from the crane on the tower roof, and a man in overalls could be seen standing precariously inside it. The clock face had been levered open, and he was leaning over with some long-handled tool to tweak reverently at its metal innards. All the while Goodlady Adwein smiled and smiled, caring nothing for him.

  Mosca scuttled past the tower to the agreed place in the town wall. Out of her pocket she drew a letter written hastily by moonlight, dropped a single eyelash in among the folds and squeezed it into a crevice between two bricks as arranged. This was her lifeline, the only rope that might stop her plummeting to disaster. She had no choice but to cling to it, even if the other end was held by Eponymous Clent.

  After Mosca Mye had returned to the house of the Leaps, the night air took on a more determined chill.

  Eventually the sky paled, and nature began its own changing of the guard, the owls retreating to their crofts and rafters to huddle like tufted urns. Those rooks and crows who had not been grabbed overnight by hungry boys with catapults and bags took to the air, knowing by some instinct that a generous breakfast previously known as Havoc Gray was making his way towards the sea on the back of the Langfeather.

  And below them, Toll-by-Night set about folding itself away, like a stilt-legged monster into a closet. It inhabitants crept back into the unwanted places, the crannies and cellars and forgotten attics, and locked themselves in.

  A bugle blew. A silver jingling swept through the town, sealing away all bad reputations and bitter-tasting names.

  Another bugle sounded. And Day swept in like a landlord, not knowing that it was only a guest in Night’s town.

  Being locked away at night with the dayfolk had been claustrophobic, but at least there had been something familiar about it. After all, who had not seen an innkeeper drop a heavy bolt against the predations of the night?

  It was a very different matter sitting in the Leaps’ strange narrow room, lit only by a few rushlights, and hearing the dawn chorus offering tentative chips of sound outside. In spite of the darkness and chill of the room, one could tell it was day, one could feel it in one’s bones.

  Then came footsteps, sounding recklessly clear after all the hushed bustle of the night, criers calling the hour, hawkers bold with their wares. Mosca realized that she had been thinking of Toll-by-Day as impossibly remote from her, and it was weird to realize that the barrier between them was less than a hand’s span thick.

  Her back was to the door, and she nearly leaped out of her skin when a rubbery bang reverberated just behind her. Only when it occurred again did she realize that it was the sound of a ball being bounced against the door, or more likely against a panel concealing the door. Her hand tightened into a fist, and it was all she could do not to knock out a response. But she restrained herself. She was a phantom in a house that did not exist.

  The days were shortening, so Mosca made herself a nest of rugs by the cooling hearth, knowing that she would need all the sleep she could get. But the raucous sounds and raw alertness of day seemed to seep in under the door and down the chimney, and stung her mind awake. The Leaps were no help at all either. They appeared to have no interest in sleeping. Again and again she was jolted by the creak of a spinning wheel, or a flip-flip-flip of pages turning, or the groan of furniture and boxes as the Leaps clambered over them with balletic ease, or clicks and squeaks as Welter fiddled with some contraption in his workshop.

  They barely spoke, but every few minutes Mistress Leap would knock a double-tap on the nearest piece of furniture in order to get her husband’s attention and then perform a series of rapid mimes that completely baffled Mosca’s eye. Welter responded to these silent gambits by jumping at each rap-rap as if stung, turning a gaze of icy weariness upon his wife, then looking away with the bleak countenance of a long-term prisoner.

  Saracen did not help either, since he was in a mood to clamber damply across Mosca’s face. He was restless, very wet and, Mosca was concerned to notice, green. Evidently the dye-bath had not been thrown out after Mosca’s dip, and Saracen had made delighted use of his new miniature pond.

  Mosca’s conversation with Brand Appleton spun around and around in her head like a carriage wheel, jolting into the potholes of her surmises and fears. Tomorrow she would see him again, and this time there would be no way to stop him seeing her. What if he brought Skellow with him? Was her disguise good enough? Would the promised reinforcements from Sir Feldroll be sufficient for an ambush?

  And as her mind crowded with night-worries, night-plans, she ceased to hear the rumble of barrows and hand-clap songs outside. It was background music, nothing more. Already the day world was starting t
o seem just a little less real.

  Although most did not know it, little pieces of night were abroad in Toll-by-Day. Who would suspect them? They all had good names. And in such a cold month, who would remark upon the fact that they all wore gloves, or guess that the right-hand glove of each hid a key-shaped brand? Even now the gloves were abroad, all busy in the same cause.

  One pair quietly closing the door to the mayor’s study, then picking delicately through his letters. Ah, a letter from the mayor of Waymakem. That looked interesting. The left glove held the letter prisoner while the right prised away the seal. ‘Honoured Sir, We call upon you once again to join us in Cutting Out the Malign Growth that is Radical Enthusiasm and allowing our Troops Passage through your Town so that we might Drive these Usurpers out of Man-delion.’ Fascinating. The letter was returned deftly to its envelope, the sealing wax softened in a flame and pressed back into place.

  In the Committee of the Hours, another pair of gloves dropped a few coins into the waiting hand of young Kenning, who obligingly found something very important to do in a back room while the gloves turned the pages of a book of admissions to the daylight town, a forefinger running down the column of names and coming to a halt on a pair of entries.

  A third set of gloves tap-a-tapped a table in an inn, a table that offered an excellent view of a particular stretch of town wall. The tap-a-tapping only faltered when a certain plump poet known to his friends, admirers, enemies and creditors as Eponymous Clent strolled into view and came to a halt against exactly that portion of wall. His hands were behind him as if to cushion his back, while he gazed with apparent poetic rapture at the porridgey massing of the clouds above. His reverie over, Clent was on the move again, tucking something into his waistcoat pocket.

  The gloves threw a coin down on to the table, then off they went in pursuit, the left glove slapping a hat on to a balding head, the right swinging a cane jauntily in time with the stride of a couple of well-brushed shoes. Nobody could suspect that anybody who walked so boldly and breezily could be a spy following a mark.