A click, click, fizz of a tinderbox, and Welter Leap’s nose and eyebrows appeared amid the gloom, spectrally lit from below. As Mosca’s eyes adjusted to the meagre radiance she realized that his shaky hand was holding a dim and slender rushlight. He blew on it, and it reluctantly flared. Behind her husband Mistress Leap became visible, determinedly clutching a pair of needlework scissors, evidently ready to trim and hem any assailant.
‘What . . . ?’ Mistress Leap seemed profoundly nonplussed at discovering her twelve-year-old intruder. ‘But . . . who is this? Welter, that young man! Where is he? Surely he is not still—’
‘Where’s Saracen?’ The room that met Mosca’s eye was chillingly gooseless. ‘Didn’t he come in with me?’
Before further questions could be asked or answered, a furious hubbub broke out beyond the bolted door. A scuffle, a sound of rending cloth, a flapping sound like wind-whipped washing and occasionally an unmistakable honking.
‘He’s outside! My goose is out there! You got to open the door!’
‘Welter, you must open it, that poor man, that young father-to-be . . .’
Welter Leap, however, hung on to the uppermost bolt, resistant to all his wife’s urgent tugging and to Mosca’s attempts to mountaineer up him using his knees and pockets as rungs.
Only when the sounds of scuffles ceased, running footsteps receded and silence settled did Welter relinquish his hold on the bolt and his position against the door. Mosca and the midwife pulled back the locks and flung the door open, so that a rush of cold air slapped at their faces.
The dark and narrow street was all but empty, except for one solitary figure two yards from the door, a figure that was only visible because of the gleaming whiteness of its plumage. It was unmistakably the pale outline of a goose, but Mosca’s stomach plummeted as she noticed that the gleaming outline appeared to have no head.
The next moment the apparition shook itself with a doleful rattle, and Mosca realized what she was looking at. It was not a headless goose, still eerily upright. It was a goose with its head stuck in the remains of a dark-lantern.
She stepped forward and stooped to pull off the lantern. Saracen seemed unconcerned by the removal of his new battle-helm and continued champing at a piece of cloth caught in his bill.
‘Oh . . . where is that young man?’ Mistress Leap was casting concerned glances up and down the street. ‘Something has happened to him, it must have done. His wife is in labour;
he came all the way from the other side of town to find me – where can he possibly have gone?’
Mosca pulled the piece of cloth from Saracen’s beak. It was brown, and looked uncomfortably like a piece of the sack cloak the young man had been wearing. Saracen – you didn’t eat him or anything, did you?
She hid the piece of cloth in her hand and glanced nervously up at the Leaps to see whether they had noticed. At that same time the midwife’s gaze fell on Mosca’s face and froze with recognition.
‘You! It’s you!’
Evidently the midwife had not recognized her in the half-light of the house, but now the moon was on Mosca’s face. All of Mosca’s instincts balled into a fist. When people recognized you at the top of their voice like that it usually meant beadles, bellowing or slammed doors. Right now the slammed door seemed like the worst possibility of the three.
The Leaps sprang aside in confusion as Mosca hurled herself past them into the house with her arms full of goose. She disappeared into the darkened room beyond with a melody made of thuds, bangs, clatters and scrapes, and finally a dull metallic clang.
The midwife and her husband picked their careful way over a fallen army of spoons, a tipped stool and an avalanche of potatoes to where their metal bath lay overturned like a turtle shell. A little muslin and a single bonnet ribbon trailed from under the bath’s brim. On top of it perched a large white goose, resplendent as a general surveying his troops from a convenient hill.
‘You can’t make me go!’ shouted the bath, its voice metallic and echoing. ‘You can’t throw me back on the streets! Don’t touch me! You can’t make me!’
Welter advanced, dropped to a squat and reached towards the bath. He gave it a few experimental rattles, then made a disconsolate noise and shuffled away from it again.
‘Leveretia,’ he called in notes of great solemnity, ‘I cannot throw this child out into the street.’
‘Well said, Walter,’ responded his wife, in tones of quiet pride.
‘No . . . I mean that I cannot. I would dearly like to, but whenever I try to grip the bath the goose pecks my ear and the child nips my fingers with our sugar-cutters.’
‘Oh, Welter! Of course we cannot throw her out – did you not see who it was? That visitor girl who was locked out after dusk by accident! She came back! I told you they would not forget us! There must have been some trouble with the drop-point, that is all. And after this poor girl has risked coming back to the night town again just to keep her promise to us, you want to throw her out? Well, that would be fine thanks. I’ll talk to her, Welter. You be a sugar plum and keep watch at the door for that poor young father-to-be.’
Skulking in the darkness of the overturned bath, Mosca felt a weightlessness in the pit of her stomach. This conversation was unlikely to go well.
‘I think we still have some . . . yes, here we are.’ Step, step, the rustle of Mistress Leap’s skirts settling as she sat next to the bath. ‘Here we are – look! Nettle and blackberry cake.’
A damp, sweet foody smell reached Mosca’s pointed nose, and although she knew she was being tempted and tamed with food like a feral puppy, still she could not resist tipping up the edge of the bath until she could see Mistress Leap’s thin, worn hand waving what looked like a hunk of ancient mould. It smelt like food however, and once she had snatched it and pushed it into her mouth it tasted like food.
‘That’s better.’ There was another rustle, and Mosca could just see the edge of Mistress Leap’s face as the midwife laid her cheek against the floorboards and tried to peer under the bath. To judge by her frown, she could not see much. ‘You’re the girl who helped us deliver Blethemy’s boy, aren’t you?’
Cake was clinging to the roof of Mosca’s mouth, so she could only nod. Then, remembering that her head was invisible, she wobbled the bath in a nodding motion.
‘So. Do you have it?’ There was an undeniable edge of desperation in the midwife’s voice.
Have what? Oh. The reward money. The money we promised them.
Mosca drily swallowed her cake, then took the bath’s weight on her hands and very slowly waggled it to and fro in a head-shaking motion. The midwife’s face disappeared from her crack of vision, and there were more clothy noises as if she had sat back. A long moment of morgue-like silence followed.
Mosca’s stomach squirmed sideways. The Leaps clearly still had no other money to pay the Locksmiths’ tithe on the night of Saint Yacobray.
‘I believe I said she would be back without the money,’ murmured the midwife’s husband with a relentless and dolorous complacency. ‘Back with no money but wanting our help again. She will burst into our house, I said, and her goose will eat our furniture.’ There was a faint grinding sound as of a determined, roughened beak gnawing on a stool leg.
‘Well, that was very clever of you, wasn’t it, Welter?’ His wife’s tone was brisk, with no sarcasm and only the slightest tremble. Another long silence. ‘Well . . . it changes nothing. Come on out now, lass. Nobody is going to throw you on to the street.’
Gingerly Mosca tipped back the bath.
‘That’s better. Not so terrible out here, is it?’ Mosca bit her lip as she saw the midwife’s thin, pained resolute smile. ‘Not much in the way of hobs and cut-throats, is there? Nothing to worry about.’
‘Ahhm.’ After this rather cryptic pronouncement, Welter Leap returned from the door, his movements slow, his head bowed over an object he held in his hand. ‘Leveretia?’
He held it out, and the struggling rushlights gild
ed a blade edge, a leather-bound hilt. ‘On the doorstep,’ he explained.
‘That man in your doorway!’ exclaimed Mosca. ‘I think he dropped it when I run into him, same time as the lantern. I heard something metal go ping off the cobbles.’
‘So did I.’ The midwife reached up a trembling hand and took the dagger out of her husband’s hand. ‘He . . . He kept one hand tucked in his armpit all the time, as if his fingers were cold,’ she added numbly. ‘Oh, it’s one thing to carry a knife in your belt so you can defend yourself. But carrying one hidden in your hand means . . . something else. It means . . . that there was no waiting wife. No baby. Just an ambush in an alley so he could sell everything in my bundle.’ She gave an unsteady, wondering little laugh.
‘It should not surprise me. But it does. Every time.’ Mistress Leap shook herself. ‘I think we all require a little gin, would you not say?’
The beautiful sound of bolts being drawn and shutting out the night streets. The click of cups, and a bottle telling out a scale in glugs as it poured. And then, finally, the dreaded question.
‘So – what happened?’
Well, it’s like this, Mistress Leap. We had this brilliant plan to stop a gang of would-be kidnappers from snatching Beamabeth Marlebourne by catching them in the attempt, so that we could claim a reward from her father. Only our brilliant trap didn’t work. In fact it got her kidnapped. So now we have no money and everybody in the day town hates us and Beamabeth is trapped in Toll-by-Night somewhere and so am I . . .
There are no good ways to tell a story like that, and Mosca’s tremors and stammering did not make it any better.
The midwife listened with admirable self-restraint, sipping her gin with the composure of a queen and the aplomb of a veteran. She had blinked herself brisk again, and lost the bewildered, exhausted look that had afflicted her after the discovery of the dagger. Her replacement smile was a bit too brisk, and made her look a little mad.
And in answer to her questions Mosca found herself recounting the whole haggard tale of her encounters with the would-be kidnappers, the mysterious notes exchanged at the Pawnbrokers’ Auction, the journey to Toll, the twilit interview with Skellow, the failed trap laid by Eponymous Clent, and her own adventures in the night town. She skimmed over those times when she or Clent had broken or twisted the laws, of course – and she could not bring herself to speak of the discovery of Havoc’s body. The back of her neck still tingled with the memory of the calm voice that told her never to speak of it. She did, however, tell the Leaps of the gem ransom, and Sir Feldroll’s fears that Beamabeth would not be returned if it was paid.
‘Oh dear,’ Mistress Leap said at last when the tale was done. ‘Beloved above, poor Miss Marlebourne!’ The midwife raised her hands to her mouth and looked first pensive then resolute. ‘That cannot be allowed. Oh dear. Oh dear – there is no help for it. We must report this to . . . to them. Once they have hunted down these kidnappers—’
‘No!’ It was exactly the response Mosca had feared. ‘No, please . . . please, Mistress Leap, we cannot go to the Locksmiths!’
The midwife’s calm, generous face underwent something of a transformation. Suddenly she looked wan and evasive.
‘You have to understand,’ she said, her tone rather weary, ‘that the Locksmiths really are the best people to deal with this kind of mischief . . . and they do not take kindly to people hiding things from them. If it ever came out that we had held back something like this—’
‘Mistress Leap, if any of this comes out any which way, we’re done up like partridges for a pie! For all we know, the Locksmiths are part of this whole plot! That Skellow showed up to the Pawnbrokers’ Auction with a fat old purse – fatter than the likes of ’im should’ve had. Maybe the money came from Brand Appleton, but it don’t seem likely. And Skellow left Toll without it showing in the records. Maybe it’s like you said and they jus’ leave out names sometimes and pocket the toll – or maybe the Locksmiths covered up for him.’
‘Perhaps . . .’ The midwife looked uncertain, but Mosca’s words had clearly penetrated.
‘An’ supposing this kidnap isn’t a Locksmith lay?’ continued Mosca. ‘Then we’d be telling ’em where to find a gem worth more than a wagonful of pearls, and the most precious heiress in Toll to boot. Which means that there will be a ransom paid, right enough, and a reward too, I’ll bet, but they won’t come nowhere near us. And like as not the Locksmiths would have to shut us up permanent so nobody knows it was them that grabbed the ransom. Mistress Leap . . . we can’t tell the Locksmiths. Or we’re supper for the Langfeather, whatever happens.’
The midwife’s face was still creased with conflict. Mosca suspected that the Locksmiths probably rewarded those who turned informant, as well as punishing those who did not.
‘Oh dear . . . no, I fear that does make a good deal of sense.’ Mistress Leap bit her lip. ‘But then . . . what are we to do?’ She glanced at Mosca, then gave a warm sigh and reached out to swab at Mosca’s grime-and-perspiration-stained cheeks with her handkerchief. ‘Well . . . do not fret about any of this tonight. I suppose none of it can be helped. You and your goose will have to stay here for now, and . . .’ The midwife let out a breath and shook her head. ‘Oh . . . between us we will come up with something.’
‘We’ was such a comforting word. ‘We’ meant weathering things together. Camaraderie. Safety in numbers. All the things that Havoc and Jade and Perch had talked about. And yet Mosca had seen all these things collapse within an hour of the dusk bugle.
This was Toll-by-Night, and here alliances were bridges made of eggshell. Mistress Leap seemed kind – was kind – but kindness could be eaten away by fear, desperation and soul-weariness just like everything else.
Who’s with anyone? Jade had snarled.
Oh, scallops to it, thought Mosca.
‘Mistress Leap?’ Mosca beckoned. The midwife drew near, and Mosca continued in a whisper. ‘There’s a thread o’ hope. It’s not enough to stitch a sail, but it’s all we have – you, me, Mr Clent, the mayor’s daughter, any of us. Beamabeth Marlebourne’s here in the night town somewhere, and I know the names of some of the men who snatched her. And there’s a reward for them that can rescue her. A big enough reward to pay your tithes, and our toll out of Toll.
‘There’s help coming to Toll-by-Night tomorrow night. Friends of Beamabeth, all set to rescue her. But it won’t do a spot of good if they don’t know where she is. That’s why I am here ahead of them, Mistress Leap. I need your help and you need mine, and the mayor’s daughter needs both of us.
‘We got till the night of Saint Yacobray to find out where Beamabeth Marlebourne is being held.’
There were, Mistress Leap informed Mosca, a good number of problems.
‘The first is that I know exactly the person to bring into our plans. Somebody who knows everybody, and has eyes and ears so sharp you’d fancy her mother was a hare. And yet we absolutely cannot involve her, or even have her know what we are about.’
‘What? Who? Why?’
‘Laylow. Do you recall Laylow? The girl who helped you escape the night town last time?’ There was no danger of Mosca forgetting the clawed girl who had led them at a devil’s pace through the dawn town. ‘She would be the perfect person to help us find these villains . . . if she were not a friend of Brand Appleton. Oh yes, I have heard of him. Quite the most dreadful radical, so they say, spreading all sorts of barn-burning ideas. But for some reason Laylow has struck up a friendship with him.’
‘You think she’s one of ’em? The kidnappers?’
‘Probably not . . . but she is a difficult creature to read. And sharp as a bodkin. Best keep you out of her sight, or there will be a world of awkward questions to answer.’
Mosca thought of the claw-handed girl with a sting of admiration and apprehension. She would have liked to have her as an ally, she admitted to herself, and did not much fancy the idea of being her opponent.
‘Sometimes I fancy that they are just lo
oking for the right moment to recruit her,’ Mistress Leap added, giving ‘they’ the hushed tone she always used when talking about the Locksmiths. ‘They have never yet caught her on one of her “dawn runs”, but I suspect they know about them. A trickle of black-market goods like chocolate come through Toll-by-Night on their way east, you see – with “custom fees” paid to them. Hardly anybody nightside can afford them, but there are some folk in Toll-by-Day who will pay high prices. Most of the dayside black marketeers are in league with them, and charge the very earth, I hear. Only Laylow is bold enough to take the risk of making her own deliveries.’
Mosca bit her lip. If the young chocolate-smuggler had already gained the attention of the Locksmiths, then avoiding her sounded like an even better idea.
‘But you know of Brand Appleton?’ she asked. ‘You know where we can find him?’
‘I have a notion. They say he is found at the Bludgeoncourt whenever it is held. But if we go there to look for him . . . we strike against the second problem. The court is run by the local Beadles – if I take you there, I shall have to bring you before them to let them know that you are staying with me, and in their “parish”.’
‘The . . . Beadles?’ Mosca was a little surprised to hear that the ominous neighbourhood had law enforcers other than the Locksmiths.
‘Yes. The Sapler’s Yard Beadles, to be precise. They look after this part of town, from Dreg Lane to Muller’s Square. On behalf of . . . them. They . . . well, they keep the streets “clean” and collect . . . donations for them. They’re in charge of the census as well.’
‘There’s them ’mongst the Locksmiths might recognize my name if it was given to ’em,’ Mosca muttered a little grimly, thinking of Goshawk. Would he remember her name? Would the King of the Ghosts really recall a thin and weaselly twelve-year-old girl of no account? But she had looked him in the face, and Aramai Goshawk had unforgetting eyes. ‘I’m not so keen to be handing my name out to their pets – and I can scarce give ’em a false one, can I?’
‘No, that is rather what I thought.’ The midwife busied herself pulling down boxes from her highest shelves. ‘The third problem is that your dreadful Mr Skellow knows you by sight. We need to disguise you. Fortunately –’ she smiled – ‘I think I have a ruse which will solve all three problems.’
Twilight Robbery Page 23
