Twilight Robbery

by Frances Hardinge

‘You still don’t look too well, Mistress Leap.’

  ‘Oh, no, no, it’s nothing serious.’ The midwife gave a slightly cross-eyed smile and dropped into her favourite chair. ‘Nothing that a little rest won’t hedgehog.’

  This answer was not as reassuring as it was clearly meant to be, and Mosca insisted in finding a cup of ‘kill-grief’ for her hostess before sitting down.

  ‘Mistress Leap,’ she began at last, ‘we’re in a lot of trouble. The men who were going to help us were snatched by the Locksmiths right by the Twilight Gate. So we got no money and no reinforcements . . . and I can’t get word to my dayside friends. We’re . . .’

  Plucked, stuffed and spitted, Palpitattle helpfully suggested in Mosca’s head.

  ‘We’re . . . going to have to think of something else,’ Mosca said instead. ‘Really, really fast.’

  Unfortunately, Mosca and the Leaps were not alone in their desperation. Everybody in Toll-by-Night had a wild and panicky look, as if they could hear the Clatterhorse snapping its dry teeth an inch behind their necks. Nobody was in the mood to give or lend. A few parents with newborns dug out coins for Mistress Leap through gratitude, but it was a tiny fraction of the amount needed.

  An hour later, therefore, Mosca and Welter Leap were shoving their way through the unusually crowded streets, loaded down with every rickety, moth-eaten stick of furniture that could be spared.

  An outing with the morose and quietly bitter Welter Leap was not a prospect that filled Mosca with joy, but carrying the furniture clearly required two people, and she was fairly certain that Mistress Leap should not be on her feet right now. In the end she had left Saracen behind to guard the midwife again.

  Mosca had a bad feeling about their odds of selling their furniture as soon as she noticed the throngs around the pawnbrokers, hefting everything from fire irons to mattresses. They pushed their way into the shop and found it in uproar. The woman at the front of the queue was gripping the counter, gasping as if she had been dowsed with water.

  ‘You cannot offer so little! A table like this one . . . no worm, good joinery . . .’

  ‘’Tis a buyer’s market this night, madam,’ the fat little man behind the counter told her, his jewel-glass bulging in his eye. ‘Everybody selling, nobody buying. I tell you, you will get no better for it in all Toll. Now take the money, or make way for those who will.’

  The woman’s face crumpled like a rose and her eyes brimmed, but she snatched up the paltry collection of coins on the countertop and shoved her way out to the street. Her place in the throng was filled instantly, fists thrust across the counter gripping bead necklaces, battered skillets, mats woven from grass, embroidered napkins.

  As the crowd surged forward Mosca was forced against the wall, nobody paying her the slightest heed as the antlers of someone’s mounted stag head scraped past her face. Her mind filled with rage, but it was not rage towards the frenzied crowd in danger of trampling her. It was anger at all the smug little men like the one behind the counter, who had reckoned the odds and realized that they could squeeze this panicking throng for everything they had. She could not blame the crowd’s desperation. She understood it too well.

  Desperation is a millstone. It wears away at the very soul, grinding away pity, kindness, humanity and courage. But sometimes it whets the mind to a sharpened point and creates moments of true brilliance. And standing there, nose tickled by the dusty hide of the stuffed deer head, such a moment visited Mosca Mye.

  With difficulty she fought her way out to the street, dragging Welter after her. He did not resist, but regarded her with the quiet loathing usually shown towards scabs or cold sores.

  ‘It’s hopeless,’ Mosca said when she had recovered her breath. ‘If they’re only payin’ half a sneeze for that table, then what we got here won’t raise more than a sniffle. Even if we sell it all, and our hair and teeth thrown in, we’ll never get enough on this night.’

  A gentle melancholy smile eased its way on to Welter Leap’s face. He seemed to be settling into despair like a particularly comfortable armchair.

  ‘But we’re not done yet,’ Mosca snarled under her breath. ‘How much money we got right now, Mr Leap? Hmm. Well, it’s not much – but it might do. That chubby little leech got it right – this is a night for buyers, not sellers. So we’re not going to sell. We’re going to buy.’

  Mistress Leap opened the door to them with a cold cloth clamped to her wounded temple. Her expression, initially a free-for-all skirmish between hope, apprehension and relief, froze slightly as she realized that Mosca and her husband had returned carrying, if anything, more than when they had left the house.

  ‘What . . . ?’ It was the stuffed stag head in Mosca’s arms that finally seemed to fracture the midwife’s mind. Welter Leap, on the other hand, had a soft moony glow in his eyes, a tender eagerness as he carried his boxes of new acquisitions into his ‘workshop’.

  ‘I . . . What . . . Where did you get these?’

  ‘They was all going for a pittance, Mistress Leap.’

  ‘You . . . you went bargain-hunting?’ whispered the woman faintly as Mosca saw to the bolts. She sank into a seat, her eyes filling with tears, and regarded Mosca with a look of weary disappointment and betrayal. ‘You spent the few coins I managed to scrape together? Then . . .’ She shook her head, closed her eyes and let her head droop.

  ‘There was no help for it, Mistress Leap.’ Mosca felt a sting of compassion, but she had already cast the die for all three of them. ‘It’s the only chance we got. Listen! We could have run down every street with your goods on our backs, and got nothing for them but spit and a wink. All this –’ Mosca set down a box of ropes, dry bones and coils of wire – ‘is nothing now, but thanks to your husband’s making ways and cunning hands it’ll be a miracle by the next dusk bugle.’

  ‘A miracle. Yes, we will need a miracle.’ Mistress Leap sighed.

  ‘I’ll tell you what kind of miracle, as well,’ Mosca persisted, her eyes black and steady as a coalface. ‘A miracle that will get us our tithe, easy as yawning. Because tomorrow night all the money we need will be right there to be grabbed – just hanging outside everybody’s doors! So we go out and we take it. And nobody will stop us, because if they look out their windows they’ll see just what they expect to see. A Clatter-horse taking the vegetables from outside the houses. Your husband’s going to make us our own Clatterhorse, Mistress Leap.’

  ‘But . . .’ Mistress Leap sat bolt upright. ‘But . . . we cannot! The Locksmiths would—’

  ‘If we cannot find the chink in time, mistress, the Locksmiths will see us river-fodder anyway,’ Mosca pointed out.

  ‘But . . . if we take others’ tithes, then other households will suffer, other families, nobody deserves—’

  ‘Nobody? What if we take a tithe from outside a pawnbroker’s?’ There was grit and venom in Mosca’s grin. ‘Locksmiths might not trip over ’emselves to attack another guild. And even if those pot-bellied, blood-sucking leeches do end up being chased up and down a few streets by a horse made of bone, I won’t be weeping out my heart’s juice.’

  ‘If anybody sees us . . .’ Mistress Leap had her hands pressed to her temples as if her thoughts were trying to fight their way out. ‘If the Locksmiths ever found out . . . If anybody ever finds out . . .’

  ‘The urchin is right,’ called Welter from his workshop, over a rasp of earnest sawing. ‘It is our only chance, Leveretia.’

  ‘And not just ours,’ added Mosca. ‘In a few hours the mayor will look for a letter to say his daughter has been rescued. If it is not there, then come dusk he will hang the ransom outside his counting house. Then Skellow and Appleton and those other fine boys will dance out and snatch it. And by dawn they’ll be out of Toll and halfway to Mandelion, with Miss Marlebourne slung over one shoulder like a rug.

  ‘And the only way we can stop them is to prevent them getting the ransom. Gallop there ahead of them. Steal it first.’

  The sky paled relentlessly.
From black to charcoal, to a greasy grey, to apple-flesh white. Then the Jinglers swept the town, and the nightfolk were sealed away, with nothing more they could do to prepare for the tithe except tear up floorboards and shake furniture in search of stray coins. The day-doors opened, the colours came out to play, and the people of Toll-by-Day emerged to complain about the cold and the price of pepper.

  By mid-morning, unbeknown to the populace, a blazing row was taking place at the mayor’s house. Sir Feldroll was doing most of the blazing.

  Until now he had taken a good deal of care to be polite and deferential in the mayor’s house. However he was growing increasingly tired of pretending that he was not the heir to a full-blown and powerful city, visiting the petty official of a self-important provincial town. Toll’s power was its position, and its position was starting to drive him steadily insane.

  ‘My lord mayor, listen to me! No message has been left by the men I sent into the night. None! And no word from Clent’s girl. Nothing! My men are gone, and the girl is probably dead too. They have failed. Are you still determined to leave out that ransom?’

  ‘Would you have me do otherwise?’ flared the mayor. ‘What is a jewel compared to my daughter?’ The mayor had a groggy, punch-drunk air, though the only blows he had received were loss of his daughter, lack of sleep and the incessant battering ram of his guest’s conversation.

  ‘Then the kidnappers will flee with both the jewel and Miss Marlebourne as soon as they can. My lord mayor, you must allow me to bring troops through Toll this very day, so that they can be waiting to catch them on the western side! Appleton is a radical – where would he flee but to Mandelion?’

  ‘If I do this, without charging toll for your troops, then Toll will be declaring war on Mandelion! Your army will march on and lay siege to her, do not deny it! We have always, always, remained neutral –’

  ‘My lord mayor, with the greatest of respect, neutrality is a luxury you can no longer afford! Mandelion must be crushed, or other radicals like Appleton will be inflamed and inspired! Radicals cannot be wiped out if they have a whole city to flee to whenever they wish to escape the consequences of their crimes!’

  The mayor gazed out through his window towards the Clock Tower, now partly hidden by scaffolding for the repairs of the clock, and Sir Feldroll could guess all too well what was in his mind. It was the Luck, the infernal Luck of Toll. They all acted this way, the people of Toll, gazing like trusting children towards the Clock Tower where the Luck was held, knowing in their hearts that nothing too terrible could happen, because the Luck would not permit it.

  Sir Feldroll had no faith in the Luck’s ability to hold up the bridge, protect Toll from attack or extract Beamabeth Marlebourne from the clutches of her captors. In fact he was starting to wonder if the Clock Tower would have to be burned to the ground before he could get a sensible conversation out of anybody.

  ‘Sir Feldroll, no troops will pass through the town this day. But if with the next dawn my daughter is not returned to me in exchange for the ransom . . . I shall give permission for your men to march through Toll without payment.’

  An army of arguments massed in Sir Feldroll’s mind, but he held them back and bid them build camp until they were needed. The mayor’s promise would do. It would have to do.

  ‘Very well. I shall send orders for our troops to approach Toll, ready to pass through once we have your permission.’

  The sun slid lazily downwards, ignoring all those who prayed for it to stay longer in the sky. The low moon brightened, and the town went through its dusk ritual of shudder, rattle and shift.

  In the alcove below the clock face on the Clock Tower, the figure of a little Goodman receded joltily. With a mechanical clatter like tin hoofs a shape with a skeletal horse’s head replaced it. The Night of Saint Yacobray had arrived, and now nothing could prevent his deathly canter.

  The sight of a Clatterhorse should chill one to the bone. Sure enough, when Mosca surveyed the result of Welter Leap’s day of manic construction, she was struck dumb with a sense of acute dread and foreboding. However, this was not because it was an image of Death-in-a-bridle.

  ‘You sure it’ll even hold together?’ Mistress Leap prodded it doubtfully. Its jaw promptly fell open and then off, just to prove a point. The stuffed stag head had been painted in flour paste and charcoal to give it a skeletal look and its horns had been sawn away, but this had not been enough. It needed a jaw to snap, or nobody would mistake it for a Clatterhorse. So Welter had cunningly crafted hinged jaws of wood which clapped to when you pulled a string. Sadly, despite all his skill, it looked very little like a skeletal horse, and more like a deer that had got its head stuck in a xylophone. The bulging glass bottle-top eyes might have been a mistake as well, with hindsight.

  ‘It’ll look better in the moonlight,’ declared Mosca with more certainty than she felt. Welter gave his wife a baleful glare as he set about nailing the jaw back into place.

  The body of the horse was a series of curved frames over which was thrown a mass of coal-stained blankets sewn together by Mistress Leap and studded with dry chicken and mutton bones. There was just enough room for three people to hide inside the main section, in single file. The rearmost portion of the horse was a separate cavity, and within this a large sack hung from the frame, so that stolen goods and tools for hasty repairs could be carried in it.

  ‘And what if we meet the real . . . ?’ Mistress Leap could not muster the courage to complete the question.

  ‘We won’t.’ Mosca hoped she was right. ‘We’ll only be out on the streets a little while. B’sides, the Clatterhorse clatters as it goes, don’t it? We hear it coming, we skedaddle.’ The midwife seemed a good deal recovered but was still a little pale and fragile, so Mosca thought it best to sound as cheerful as possible.

  As the first bugle sounded Mosca looked for Saracen to wish him farewell – a temporary farewell, she hoped. But during the night he had vanished into the furthest recesses of the room in search of new and inconvenient places to sleep, and despite a tug at her heart she knew there was no time to make a thorough search for him.

  ‘Hssst!’ Welter grimaced them all into silence. There came a silver jingle outside, then the slam and click of the false house facing being swung away and locked into its night-time position. All three of them held their breath, frozen into the hunch-shouldered, guilty posture reserved exclusively for those who are about to launch into forbidden streets with a fake spectral horse.

  The jingling faded, and Mosca unlocked and unbolted the door, and opened it just enough to peer up and down the street.

  Now! she mouthed. Her accomplices ducked into the horse through special flaps in the cloth cover, and Mosca threw the door wide. The newborn Clatterhorse shuddered, lifted slightly, whispered to itself furiously, then wobbled forward two feet and headbutted the door jamb.

  ‘Oh, pig on a spit! Left a bit! No, left! Here – this way!’ The dread Clatterhorse was guided out into the brilliantly moonlit street through tugs to the muzzle, then its green stable girl locked the front door behind it and crept inside its belly.

  Even somebody watching the Clatterhorse’s jolting progress would not have guessed at the full extent of the confusion inside it. Welter had had the foresight to cut eyeholes in the cloth covering, but they were scattered at odd heights and let in very little light. Mistress Leap was foremost, holding up the front of the horse’s body frame, while her husband supported the back, so that the whole thing was raised from the ground and could be carried around. Mosca, in the middle, was on ‘clattering’ duty. She turned a wooden handle that somehow created a clicketing noise not completely unlike the galloping of bone hoofs. Mistress Leap quickly proved a somewhat skittish horse head, given to stopping or veering sideways without warning. In short, they were all trapped in a darkness full of trodden toes, sudden elbows, squawks, whispers and the smell of mouldy blanket.

  Clicket-a-clicket-a-clicket. The rattle dinted the icy, motionless air. At the sound,
householders who had stepped outside to tie up their tithe-vegetables scurried back inside again. Doors were slammed and shutters fastened by the time the Clatterhorse jogged unsteadily into view, deer head gently bobbing, glass goggle-eyes little mirrors of the perfect moon overhead.

  It came to an uneasy halt just in front of a pawnbroker’s. Two small green hands emerged from a slit in its side just long enough to yank a hanging turnip from its string. The horse then wheeled about and lurched off back the way it came.

  ‘Here it is . . . stop . . . Ow! Stop!’ The horse halted by committee, and the green hands emerged again, this time to tie the turnip outside the Leaps’ front door. ‘Now – the counting house!’

  Clicket-a-clicket-a-clicket. Every street was aglitter, sugared with frost as if some master chef had fashioned an entire candied town for the Clatterhorse’s snapping jaws. From the porticoes and icicle-fanged eaves hung beets and potatoes, cabbages and carrots. The Clatterhorse was evidently in two minds about these juicy trophies, and kept veering towards them, only to lurch away again.

  Within the dread beast’s flanks, an ardent but whispered argument was taking place

  ‘No!’ The horse’s head was adamant. ‘We cannot steal our neighbours’ vegetables! It would be no better than murder!’

  ‘I think we can,’ murmured the animal’s rear. ‘I am almost certain it would be quite possible.’

  ‘Hush!’ hissed the horse’s stomach. ‘Listen! You hear that?’ She halted her handle-cranking, and for the first time the sound that had been drowned by their own clattering and whispering became audible to all of them.

  Clacket-a-clack. Clacket-a-clack. A sound like Death drumming his fingers.

  ‘Oh no,’ breathed Mistress Leap. ‘It’s the real Clatterhorse! The Locksmiths!’

  ‘Quick!’ growled Welter. ‘Down that alley!’ The deer-headed Clatterhorse hoisted its skirts and sprinted. It reached the darkness of the alley with mere seconds to spare before another apparition turned the corner.