Twilight Robbery (42 page)

As soon as the words were out, she could have bitten her tongue. Laylow gasped as if the air had been knocked out of her.

‘Mandelion? He is . . . leaving? Never told me – never told me he was
leaving
. . .’

Brand Appleton was stirring again, but Laylow seemed too stunned to notice, and Mosca scrambled to his side unhindered, glad to be out of reach of the claws.

‘Teacher!’ He took hold of her wrist with furtive urgency. ‘Talk quietly, don’t let her hear us – she has a heart of flint, that one, won’t let me leave. I think she spikes the possets to keep me dizzy –’

‘That’s no spiked posset, Mr Appleton,’ Mosca whispered, feeling a reluctant sting of pity. ‘Look at you, you’re all leaked away, limp as an empty wine-bladder. I could help you till my face turned blue, but I would never get you on your feet – not with you like that.’

Appleton sagged with disappointment and frustration, then his grip on her wrist tightened again.

‘
You
could go! You could go and see how she is, tell her . . . tell her that I will make all right and she shall be sorry for none of this in the end. And tell the others that if they hurt her, if they frighten her, then I’ll . . . I’ll . . . make their hearts into . . . purses. Or tell them I’ll go to the Jinglers and turn evidence. Tell them I am well and strong and the knife missed me.’ His eyes drifted to Laylow. ‘That scratch-cat! You see how she is – I cannot send her – she would not understand – she hates . . . but
you, you’ll
go.’ Large, eager blue eyes met hers, open as summer, mad as hare hopscotch.

Mosca took three deep breaths one after the other, like a diver preparing to plunge.

‘Yeah,’ she whispered softly. ‘I
will
go for you. For three shilling extra. Paid when you got the rest of the money.’ She could not afford to seem too eager. She would let him think that her face was brightening at the thought of money. ‘So . . . where do I go?’

Mosca had to stoop to hear the kidnapper’s whispered words, and straightened with her eyes full of black mischief and wonder and suppressed excitement. She hardly dared meet Laylow’s gaze as she edged back towards her.

‘Your friend there – he has a notion that he will start to mend if he drinks a posset made of . . . whey and thistle wine. I told him I would find some, and it settled him down. For now, anyway.’

‘Whey and thistle wine.’ Laylow’s brow creased again. ‘Will that help him?’

‘Maybe. It cannot hurt.’ The door was six feet away. All Mosca had to do was talk her way outside it. ‘I can find you thistle wine for him, and honey, and . . . and blood sausage to help his strength, but I’ll want paying for it when you find that chink of yours.’

Laylow rubbed the back of her head, the callouses rasping against the wiry, cropped fuzz of her hair.

‘Well, then – go! Come back when you have them – and tell nobody what you seen or heard here.’

‘Of course not! I’m not a . . .’ Mosca remembered one of Laylow’s own choice words for idiot. ‘I’m not a doddypoll.’

A lock turned. A door opened. And then Mosca was out on the frozen streets again, quivering with the shock and disbelief of a fisherman who has trailed his rod for a particular large and dangerous fish, only to see it unexpectedly leap into the belly of his boat.

At long last she knew where Beamabeth Marlebourne was being held prisoner.

Staring skywards, Mosca noticed some smudges of pallor to the east and heard the warbles of the first robins. The night was waning, and she gave a
tsk
of annoyance. She barely realized that she had already started to think of the night as the true day.

Mosca pulled out her pipe, gnawed on the stem and willed herself to think clearly.

Everything had changed. Brand Appleton, the so-called chief kidnapper, was desperate and pitiable and wrong-headed and possibly dying. She had felt scared of him . . . but she had felt
sorry
for him too. Beamabeth was no longer safe. Brand Appleton would do anything to protect her, but right now Brand Appleton was in no condition to protect even himself. The mayor’s daughter was at the mercy of Skellow, and Skellow was not well-supplied with mercy. Once he had the ransom or had to cover his tracks, Mosca would not give a bent pin for Beamabeth’s chances of survival. Mosca could only pray that neither of these circumstances had occurred yet, but it was only a matter of time.

Mosca needed reinforcements to rescue Beamabeth before the worst could happen. However if her dayside allies heard nothing from Mosca or Sir Feldroll’s men, they were hardly likely to send more. She needed to get word to Toll-by-Day.

But even her daylight allies could not be trusted. The more she chewed at her pipe and thought, the more it seemed that there must be
two
spies among them. One spy for the kidnappers, who had warned them about the ambush and helped them capture Beamabeth. One spy for the Locksmiths, who had betrayed the location of the letter drop and arrival of Sir Feldroll’s men. Of one thing Mosca was now fairly sure: the kidnappers and the Locksmiths were not working together.

No, Mosca needed to get word to the person in Toll that she knew best and trusted most, and the sorry truth was that that individual was Eponymous Clent. Contacting him in the ways they had arranged was impossible, but he had managed to send word to
her
, and that would do as a start. She had to track down the man who had given her warning in the alleyway, and she had only one clue to work on. It was a single word that he had uttered before disappearing.

Recital.

As the dawn chorus was engaging in its ancient but uncoordinated musical efforts, another more elegantly trained group of musicians were making their way back through the streets to their lodgings. It had been a long night, and now their nerves were as threadbare as their carefully patched gowns and waistcoats.

Performing for the Locksmiths at the castle was never calming, but since the former were willing to accept such performances instead of a Yacobray tithe, the three musicians were inclined to bear it with a good grace.

The grace was becoming less good though, as they struggled their way home from their ruined venue, sensing the approach of the dangerous dawn, hampered at every step by the barrow which carried their group’s harp case. The wheel had been carefully wrapped in rags to soften its progress, but even so occasional jolts stirred a musical thrum of protest from hidden strings, and the guardian of the cart insisted on choosing each cobble with care, more like a mother afraid of waking a sleeping infant than a barrowman.

‘Oh, Quince, for Peachbucket’s sake!’ A tall woman carrying a flute case turned and twitched, the flaws and blots in her face powder starting to show in the unforgiving predawn light. ‘My nerves are in flakes! Will you try to keep pace! Is it not enough that I have to hear that infernal instrument without having to die for it?’

The harp’s attendant seemed not a jot discomposed. ‘My sweet, given that you yourself have no art worth dying for, you should be grateful to me for letting you perish in the name of something worthwhile.’

‘Er . . . friends?’ The group’s gangly, grey-haired violinist was peering down the alley. ‘Does anybody know anyone really short . . . and oddly apparelled . . . and . . . green? It is just that, er, there seems to be one such creature watching us from the corner. And, er, waving a little green hand.’

Quince lowered the handles of his barrow.

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘Recital’ had meant music. Asking around, Mosca had learned that there was only one orchestra in Toll-by-Night, and that on this night it would be entertaining at the Castle. So she had set out to intercept the musicians as they returned.

Mosca had no trouble recognizing Quince as the man who had warned her away from the letter drop so mysteriously, and she was not entirely surprised to see him with a harp in his custody, though she was a little taken aback to see that the cloth enclosing it was of decidedly better quality than that he had used to clothe himself.

‘Is
that
what you were risking your neck to rescue, Quince?’ The tall woman surveyed Mosca from head to foot through lorgnettes that did not appear to contain any actual glass. ‘It looks like a ferret in jester’s weeds!’

‘Ignore the silly besom,’ Quince advised Mosca crisply. ‘Listen, my dear, it is delightful to see you intact, but if you will excuse us –’

‘Wait!’ Mosca caught hold of his sleeve. ‘You’re in contact with Mr Clent! Please, you got to get a message to him. He’s staying in the mayor’s house. Tell him . . .’ She hesitated, gaped guppy-like for the right words, and found herself shaking. ‘Tell him the old plan’s turned to slush. That someone was waitin’ for the reinforcements, and now everything’s gone to the devil in a battered old basket . . . and the radish is lost, and Brand Appleton ain’t got it . . . but I know where to find the lady –’

‘Slow, slow! Look, I
do
hate to interrupt while you are being so splendidly cryptic, but this will have to wait –’

‘It cannot!’ Mosca almost screamed. ‘If I cannot get word to him
now
, then the lady’s as good as dead . . .’

In the distance sounded the unmistakable sound of a bugle. The other two musicians stiffened like hares. But Mosca did not release the harpist’s sleeve. Her eyes were mad and adamant.

Quince seemed to spend a brief second weighing his chances of pushing a harp at high speed down the road with a twelve-year-old clinging to his arm, then came to a decision.

‘Your friend is living in the mayor’s house? Then you can speak to him yourself. This way!’ To Mosca’s bewilderment he abandoned his barrow, and tugged her back towards the Castle grounds. Just outside the perimeter walls he stooped, reached deep into a mass of ivy, and knocked against something that resounded like wood.

‘There!’ Before Mosca could protest, he had taken off down the street after his friends. ‘Pull the frog!’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Mind the drop! Follow the smells! And not a word to anyone!’

Mosca stared at the ivy-covered wall, then pulled back the curtain of creeper and stared at the little door hidden behind it. The door itself was carved to resemble the surface of a pond, complete with ripples, the snout of a surfacing fish and a lily pad with a chipped and blackened frog crouching upon it. Even as she stared at it, her ear caught the sound of a faint but approaching musical jingle.

‘Pull the frog,’ whispered Mosca, mouth dry, and curled her fingers around the frog’s lilypad. She tugged, then heaved in growing panic, and the hidden door swung wide, offering an inviting darkness. As the Jinglers drew close to her street, Mosca flung herself forward into the waiting tunnel, only to find that she had thrown herself full length on to something that was not exactly a floor.

Mind the drop
.

Swearing and wincing at the bottom of a three-foot shaft, Mosca decided that she minded the drop quite a lot. Even as she was gingerly sitting up and twisting round to examine what remained of her bruised knees, her small, painful, oblong slice of world abruptly darkened. Through the ivy-fringed arch above her, where the secret door had opened, she could see a pair of boots. Then the little vista vanished, leaving her in pitch blackness, and she could hear the
crang
and
clink
of bolts and locks being fastened.

Her immediate response was unreasoning panic. She had been tricked into a trap by the harpist – she would never see the light of the moon again let alone the sun – she would perish alone, and centuries would pass before anyone found a diminutive skeleton with a basket perched on its skull. If she had been less winded, she might even have screamed for help.

Fortunately she recovered her common sense before her breath. The man who had darkened her door had been a Jingler about his dawnly duties, locking away the nightbound areas and unlocking the daybound. In fact, he had probably just moved a piece of wooden wall facing and fastened it without even noticing the tiny, ivy-shrouded doorway he was sealing into darkness. At worst, she would be trapped until dusk when the Jinglers came past again. At best, there might actually be some meaning in the harpist’s cryptic instructions.

Pull the frog. Mind the drop. Follow the smells. And not a word to anyone
.

Mosca was not entirely alone, she realized. Besides the dank, mouldering oubliette reeks there were comforting living smells. Baking-bread fragrance, warm as a hug. The vinegary aroma of jugged meat. The sooty scent of cracked peppercorns.

She had not fallen into a sealed cell, then. This shaft must lead to somewhere, somewhere with cooking. Her groping hands told her that to either side the walls were close, but ahead her fingers met no brickwork. Tentatively she started to crawl away from the door and towards the beckoning smells.

She appeared to be crawling through a low and rough-cut tunnel, the roof of which had apparently been carved so as to jab into the shoulders and back of an intruder as painfully as possible. Only the dark gold smell of buttered toast kept her going.

At last the tunnel started to brighten just a little, and then opened out into a musty little fox-den of a cellar. There was no other exit from the cellar, but it was dimly lit by little holes that polka-dotted its ceiling and let in slanting fingers of light. The stone floor was strewn with malodorous rugs. The sooty gauze of ancient cobwebs adorned the walls, draping like veils before a set of little apertures in the grimy brickwork, each filled with a tiny wooden Beloved idol.