The response of both Marlebournes was to look appraisingly at the clock, then at one another.
‘Perhaps there is time . . .’ The mayor’s face took on a grim and urgent resolution. ‘A pity that you did not come an hour ago – I might have been able to contact my High Constable before he locked up for the night. No matter. Have all the men come in here a moment!’ Half a dozen footmen crowded into the room. ‘Now –’ he deigned to glance Mosca’s way – ‘what manner of man is the Romantic Facilitator looking for? Did you give him a description in your altered letter?’
Mosca rubbed at her nose. She had indeed written a description of Skellow, though one that owed more to spleen than charity.
‘Told ’im to look out for a bony, ugly old bag o’ spindles with skin like sackcloth and a grin like a sick fox,’ she muttered.
‘Bony and ugly,’ the mayor murmured under this breath. ‘You there, Gravelip! You are the boniest and ugliest, I fancy. Smile for us – as unpleasantly as you can!’
Gravelip, a young, slight footman with a pocked nose and large ears, obediently gave a smile like toothache. He seemed less than delighted to have outpaced his friends in the ugliness race.
‘Where’s my secretary?’ called the mayor. ‘There you are. Draft a letter to the Committee of the Hours asking whether there exists such a person as Rabilan Skellow, and whether he left Toll recently. Gravelip, as soon as it is written I want you to take it to the committee’s office . . . and then set out immediately for Lower Pambrick.’
Gravelip boggled and went pale. His mouth made helpless fish shapes that wanted to be a ‘but’. His eye crept fearfully to the darkening window. Mosca could not help noticing that other servants were hurrying in and out of the room with soft-footed urgency, closing shutters, lighting candles and in some cases moving furniture.
‘Oh, Father!’ Beamabeth seemed to have noticed his plight, and her eyes were big limpid pools of sympathy. ‘Father, we cannot! At this hour?’
There it was again. Something unsaid, something too ominous to mention.
‘Oh . . . very well.’ The mayor’s tone was far gentler as he reached out to pat his adopted daughter’s shoulder. ‘Gravelip – delivering the letter will suffice, and you may hurry back here afterwards. You will have just enough time to reach Lower Pambrick if you set off immediately after bugle tomorrow morning, with three stout fellows at your back. Collar this Romantic Facilitator for us.’
Gravelip looked quite weak with relief, and after the mayor had signed the letter, took it and hurried out without further ado.
‘Now – Mr Clent – I am loath to ask you to leave, but –’
‘Let them stay just a little longer. Please.’ Beamabeth turned her face, and rested her cheek against the mayor’s sleeve like a younger child. ‘I want to hear more.’
‘All right.’ The mayor glanced at the clock again. ‘But quickly. We exist for only a little longer.’
‘My lord mayor –’ Clent sipped his wine – ‘you mentioned a name just now. Who is Brand Appleton?’
There was a pause during which father and adopted daughter exchanged glances, and something thawed and relented a little in the former’s gaze.
‘Brand Appleton was a friend of the family – about a year older than me.’ It was Beamabeth who spoke. ‘He was an apprentice to a physician, and well thought of, and would probably have become a full partner in a year or two. And . . .’ she turned a little pink, ‘well, it all seemed a little like we might be married. But then it happened.’
‘What happened?’ asked Clent.
‘Mandelion,’ Beamabeth answered simply. ‘Mandelion was taken over by radicals overnight. People have explained it to me.’ Her brow crinkled. ‘Radicals are terribly dangerous, and if you don’t flush them out of your town then they eat away at everything like woodworm and, next thing you know, everything falls apart, and respectable people are hanged from the ramparts, and nobody has any coffee or chocolate.’ She looked a little sadly into her cup of hot elderberry. ‘Of course we’re safer here in Toll, with the Luck to protect us, but still . . .’ It took a moment before Mosca remembered the bridge guard talking of the Luck of Toll, the town’s mysterious protection against all disaster.
‘Anyway,’ continued Beamabeth, ‘everybody agreed that the radicals were a terrible threat. So the Committee of the Hours had to go back to their book of the Beloved and decide which of them were radicalish. Because we couldn’t have people born under radical Beloved running around our Toll; nobody would be safe. And so lots of people were reclassified.’
‘Reclassified? You mean . . . they got their daylight took away from them?’ asked Mosca.
‘Yes – the ones with radicalish names. And that’s when it all came out. Brand was born under Goodlady Sparkentress, She Who Helps Burn the Stubble to Ready the Earth for New Growth. And all these years we’d believed she was a lucky sort of Beloved – a bit hot-tempered perhaps, but very loving and courageous. But that day we found out that Sparkentress had been reclassified. All these years we’d known him, Brand must have been a radical underneath. It was a great shock to all of us. He seemed quite surprised too.’
‘I bet he did,’ muttered Mosca. It had been bad enough walking into Toll and having everyone treat her even more like vermin than usual. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like waking up one morning to discover you had gone from golden boy to public enemy without having done anything to deserve it.
‘Obviously I broke off his engagement to Beamabeth.’ The mayor took over the story. ‘The mere idea of some radical nightowl marrying a girl with the best name in Toll . . .’
‘Not quite the best,’ Beamabeth corrected him with a modest little moue.
‘No matter. It is a golden name, and you, my dear, are better loved than anyone else in this town. But rather than accept my decision Brand Appleton went utterly berserk and tried to fell me with a bust of Goodlady Syropia. My men had to roll him in a carpet before they could carry him from my house. And even now, despite being unable to walk in daylight, he has hounded my daughter by leaving gifts for her in the courtyards and gardens. He nearly blocked the western chimney by dropping rocks down it with poems wrapped around them.’
From outside there came the faint sound of a bugle.
‘My dear – the hour. We can delay no longer. These people must leave to seek their accommodation immediately.’ There was no denying an edge of alarm in the mayor’s voice.
‘Yes . . . yes, I see they must.’ Beamabeth stood, walked over to Clent and held out her hands for him to take. Her smile was very simple and very sweet. ‘Thank you, Mr Clent. Thank you for coming to warn me. I would be much more afraid if you were not here, if I did not know that you were investigating this to keep me safe.’
‘I . . .’ Clent looked about him with the trapped gaze of a spider sinking into honey. ‘The pleasure and honour is mine, my dear Miss Marlebourne. Rest assured, I shall discover more and keep you informed. Farewell for now, and good fortune to you.’
Mosca kept her tongue pushed into her cheek where it could do no damage until she, Clent and Saracen had been shown out of the house and were back on the sunset courtyard.
‘So,’ she began when she could hold in her words no longer, ‘this reward, then.’
‘Will be ours, child, will be ours. When the mayor has his proof. But first we have a duty to that poor girl –’
‘Rich girl.’
‘. . . to that brave little sylph to discover more about the shadowy threat—’
Something bitter that had been welling in Mosca’s stomach exploded out of her.
‘We did our duty! We warned her! And she’s got footmen and guardians and the mayor and half the town looking out for her! And she just poured us a dribble of hot punch each and then packed us off to do more danger-work for her! And don’t tell me we offered, Mr Clent, because we didn’t. She accepted the offer we didn’t make.’
‘Mosca –’ Clent stopped walking for a moment – ‘I seem
to remember that coming to Toll, scotching Mr Skellow and warning Miss Marlebourne was your idea?’
‘Yeah.’ Mosca swallowed hard. ‘But that was b’fore I met ’er.’
Clent stared at her. ‘Mosca, whenever I think I have the measure of your malice I chance upon some hidden pocket of ill temper I had not suspected. In this case it is frankly incomprehensible. If you must choose a target for your bile, why choose her? A girl who already has unseen enemies, who has treated you with nothing but kindness and civility, who is making the best of hard times. Who even let you share in her shrinking stock of elderberry wine.’
‘Yeah, she did,’ Mosca answered through her teeth. ‘And, Mr Clent? If I hear any more ’bout how wonderful she is, that elderberry wine’ll be back to see the light of day. I just want to be sure that once we’ve got that reward we leap out of Toll like fleas off a hot rock and don’t hang about investigatin’.’
Despite herself, Mosca’s voice faltered a little as she looked around the castle courtyard, which seemed to have become larger now that the shadows were longer. The busy market had been stripped away, leaving an ominous space where rutted grass was the only hint of barrows, stalls and hobnailed boots.
The disquieting atmosphere stung a new haste into the steps of Mosca and Clent, and they first strode, then jogged back to the main streets of Toll, only to find them largely empty.
Mosca remembered the words of the ‘Raspberry’.
There will be another bugle call at sunset – this will be a signal that you have no more than a quarter of an hour to get back to your appointed residence. You must – must – make sure that you do so.
It had been ten minutes since the bugle sounded, and suddenly these words did not seem quite so comical any more.
‘Mr Clent . . .’
‘I know, madam, I know . . .’ Clent’s voice had the levelness of ice-touched panic.
Door after barred door. Shuttered window after shuttered window. Wooden ladders pulled up on to boardwalks. Wells covered. Slate roofs dulling from jackdaw blue to rook black as the sun melted into the horizon . . .
In the silence the sudden bang of a shutter rang like a gunshot. Both Mosca and Clent reflexively broke into a run towards the sound. Turning the corner they found a small inn whose door was still ajar. Outside it a plump and perspiring woman was struggling to close a pair of stiff and rusty shutters, wide-eyed as a rabbit with a fox upwind.
‘Help me!’ she squeaked when she saw them, and they threw their weight against the shutters and forced them closed. Then the woman jerked upright and raised a hand for silence.
A few streets away chimed a faint, metallic sound. A rattling, musical jingle-jangle.
‘In!’ she snapped huskily, seizing Mosca’s collar and Clent’s arm. ‘What you waiting for? In! In!’
Her terror was contagious, and in an instant they gave up all thought of the inn where they had booked rooms. Instead, they let themselves be bundled in through the open door, which was immediately slammed to behind them. Looking around, Mosca could see that quite a mob had been hovering by the door waiting to throw the latches to. The same suppressed terror was obvious in every face, in the tone of the whispered exchanges.
‘It’s done? We’re closed in? We’re tight?’
‘’Tis done. But that was closer than skin. Listen – here they come!’
Everyone in the tiny, cramped room hushed, and again Mosca heard the frosted metallic jingle, now much closer, gliding down the street like a sleigh bell. Then there were more ringing jingles, as if a whole company of sleighs had found a way to float down the snowless cobbles. All along the street an orchestra of strange noises began to call and answer one another. Grinding thuds. Fat clicks and thin clicks. Skreeks of metal on metal. Whumps and whams.
In spite of her terror, or perhaps because of it, Mosca knelt and put her eye to the inn’s keyhole. She saw only a blurred impression of twilit cobbles, of a dark figure dragging something across the front of the house opposite . . . and then suddenly there was a slamming noise, and something impenetrably black cut out her view of the street.
The strange cacophony seemed to move on further up the street, and then to the next street. Still the company in the cramped little inn remained hushed. At last another set of sounds became audible, and this time Mosca recognized them instantly.
The rhythmic clash of iron shoes on stone. The echoing rattle of wheels on cobbles. The huffing of horsebreath. Somehow in this teeter-top town of ups and downs, someone had brought a horse-drawn coach and was riding it through the crooked lanes half an hour after the signal to clear the streets.
Mosca looked at the set, tense faces around her, and asked no questions. There would be no answers here.
There was a heavy silence, and then a dull booming note, the distant sound of a bugle being blown a second time.
‘All right,’ the plump landlady said at last, ‘you can talk now if you do it quiet. No shouting, no banging, no existing. Changeover’s done. Night-time, gentlemen.’
There were no rooms spare for Clent and Mosca, of course, but the landlady let them lie on rugs by the hearth next to her scrawny, soppy-eyed dogs. A fire was a fire, and a roof was a roof, and a rug was closer to a bed than the bracken-and-hedgehog mattresses that Mosca had known of late, so she curled up and slept with Saracen on her chest.
When she was at last woken by a young ostler politely and carefully stepping on her head in his attempts to rake out the dead coals, she found that pale daylight was painting diamond shapes across the inn’s narrow, crowded room. Whatever night had brought, it had packed it up again and taken it away.
But night would be back, and as Mosca looked at her dark wood badge she felt the same chill she had experienced in the twilit streets the night before. She had been right all along. There was something wrong in Toll, something that nobody was willing to discuss, something more than the nervousness caused by an ordinary curfew. The landlady struggling to shut up her inn had been afraid of something more terrible than a fine or a night in the cells. And why should even the mayor be so afraid of his own curfew?
Hopefully she would never need to answer these questions. Perhaps at this very moment the mayor’s men were striding back from Lower Pambrick, dragging the Romantic Facilitator. Surely that would be enough proof for the mayor? She had to hope so.
It was half past eleven when Mosca and Clent once again found themselves outside the front door of the mayor’s house. They were shown into a dingy little side parlour instead of the main reception room, and immediately Mosca detected something sour in the situation, like a mouthful of bad milk.
They were left there in unexplained silence for fifteen minutes, and then the mayor strode in and subjected them to a dull, hot glare.
‘I am surprised,’ he growled, ‘that you had the impudence to return here this morning.’
This was not a promising start to any conversation. The fact that the greeting and the glare seemed to be reserved for Mosca alone did nothing to make her feel better.
‘My lord mayor—’ began Clent.
‘Cast her off, Mr Clent,’ the mayor interrupted without ceremony. ‘Wherever you found this . . .’ he waved a hand at Mosca, ‘this thistle-child, throw her aside before she stings you any more. She has taken advantage of your good humour and trust, sir, and wasted the time of honest fellows in my pay. Gravelip and his companions have just returned from Lower Pambrick, having encountered no sign of this so-called Romantic Facilitator.’
‘None at all?’ Clent looked surprised, crestfallen, then speculative. ‘My lord mayor . . . how exactly did your men lie in wait for the villain?’
‘There was precious little chance to lie in wait, for they only reached the marketplace at nine o’clock to the very second. I believe Gravelip stood before the stocks as described in the letter, while the others hid behind it. They waited for half an hour, and saw no sign of anybody with a Fainsnow lily.’
‘And small wonder, if three of them was hidin
g right behind the stocks!’ exclaimed Mosca hotly. ‘The Facilitator was no green shoot. I read his letter and he was sharp. He probably took one look at your boys playing peek-a-boo, then stuffed his lily back in his pocket and slipped away. I would have done, in his shoes.’
‘A glib answer.’ The mayor folded his arms. ‘Perhaps you will be as quick in explaining why the Committee of the Hours’ records show that Rabilan Skellow, citizen of nighttime Toll, was not at large in the vales two nights ago, and has not in fact left this town in the last two years?’
There was a silence during which Mosca gaped.
‘Apparently not,’ the mayor muttered with steely restraint. ‘Her river of invention appears to have run dry.’
‘Good sir!’ Clent recovered his composure before Mosca. ‘This is . . . most peculiar, I grant you . . . but I still have faith in this child’s story. One conspirator, alas, has had the good fortune to slip through our fingers, but the infamous Mr Skellow will be waiting at dusk tonight in Brotherslain Walk—’
‘Do you really expect me to risk honest men out on the streets at dusk – on nothing more than this girl’s word?’ snapped the mayor. ‘No! This is the end of the matter. Mr Clent, my daughter has been taken ill this morning, having spent the night sleepless with anxiety over this imaginary kidnap plot. Nonetheless she has asked that your girl should not be dragged into the Pyepowder Court for slander and fraud, and for her sake I shall leave you to punish your own secretary. Should I hear of my daughter being troubled by any further fictions from the same source, however, Mr Clent, I shall be a lot less lenient. Good day to you, sir – and may you have better fortune in choosing your servants in future.’
They were shown out rather firmly by two footmen, one of whom Mosca recognized as Gravelip. Curiously, he looked decidedly unwell, and seemed even more reluctant to meet Mosca’s eye than the rest. It was only when he opened the front door, and she noticed him wincing at the daylight, that she guessed at the reason for his greyish pallor and the unsteadiness of his gait. In an instant her temper went from simmering to seething.
Twilight Robbery Page 9
