Twilight Robbery (19 page)

Mosca had to clench her teeth shut. Why did everyone react to Beamabeth this way?

‘So . . . you will be seeing her again?’ The midwife’s brow cleared. ‘Sir, can I ask you to take a letter to her? It is a presumption, of course, for we only met once – the day I helped bring her into the world, and she will never have heard of me. But I always remembered her . . . and I believe I would like to send her a letter.’

Why? How had this otherwise sensible woman who had only met Beamabeth as a screaming purple blob fallen under her spell? Or had Beamabeth slipped immaculate into the world, petal-cheeked and smiling amidst gleaming golden curls?

‘I would be enchanted,’ said Clent. ‘But . . . ah . . . I would need to actually
reach
Toll-by-Day first. It might also help if I was alive when I did so.’

Mosca sat and chewed her knuckles as Clent negotiated with Mistress Leap. There was, it appeared, a mysterious
person
who could perhaps help them back into Toll-by-Day, though at considerable risk. Mosca and Clent were to go with this
person
and would not ask any questions. When Mosca and Clent had done what they needed to do to gain their reward, they would then leave a portion of it in an agreed place for the Leaps and this
person
. There was no guarantee that Mosca and Clent would be safe with the unnamed individual, but then the Leaps had no guarantee that they could trust Mosca and Clent to leave the money. It was a deal of mutual desperation.

Mosca’s eyes kept creeping to the crack-faced clock on the mantel, watching as it gnawed away the hours until dawn, a nibble at a time.

At last there came a strange rattle of raps at the door. The midwife opened it, and Mosca glimpsed a slight, youthful figure outside, dressed in a tunic, breeches and a tight cap.

‘Got parcels for me tonight, Mistress Leap?’ Only as the figure stepped forward to speak did two things become clear. First, the youth outside could not be more than sixteen years old. Second, the youth was in fact a girl. A girl with a boxer’s watchfulness and a pugnacious jaw, but a girl nonetheless.

‘Packages of a sort,’ was the midwife’s answer, as she held the door open and glanced at Mosca and Clent by way of explanation.

The new arrival seemed loath to step into the light of the room, but leaned forward a little to take her measure of the midwife’s guests.

‘So these are newborns, are they?’ Her voice was gruff, almost a rasp. ‘Somebody must ’ave big hips.’

‘They need passage to Toll-by-Day. There’s money in it – but they need to be in daylight to lay hands on the coin. Can you do it?’

‘If they’re not cacklers, and if they’re not maggot-pated, and if they can take orders and duck into a jague when I tell ’em . . . then ’tis possible. Risky as adder soup, but possible. If they prove slow or clatterfoot though, I’ll leave ’em in the streets to stew, mind.’

This was thieves’ cant. Mosca was a lover of words, and she had a sneaking liking for the grimy panache of cant, and those who wore it like a ragged red cloak.

The girl raised her left hand, and for the first time Mosca saw that there were long, curved metal hooks tied to the ends of her leather-gloved fingers. With one such hook she scratched very carefully at the jut of her chin. Her other hand was bare.

‘Now or never,’ she declared abruptly, and darted off into the night. Half a second passed before Mosca and Clent realized that she intended them to follow and leaped for the door.

Dawn was on the way. The eastern sky looked sickly, and here and there birds made restless enquiries of each other, asking the time. The biting cold of the air seared the skin of Mosca’s face and hands. The girl with the claws ran off down the street without looking back, and Mosca sprinted after her, hearing Clent huffing as he took up the rear.

A distant bugle sounded, and their nameless guide turned a corner and halted, her back flush with wall.

‘Hold here, and bleat if you see aught.’ The girl bent her knees and leaped, hooking her claws over the lintel of the nearest house, then found a hold with her unclawed hand, scrabbled her way up the brickwork with her feet and hauled herself on to the roof.

The minutes dragged like hours as the girl crouched on the tiles, her head turning this way and that like a weathercock in a storm, listening to the sounds of day rousing itself. In the growing light it was now possible to see the chilblains on her wrists, the two smallpox scars on her neck. She had a fierce face, and unknowingly ground her teeth as she listened.

‘I hear ’em,’ she muttered at last. ‘Coming up Drake’s Dirge.’ She dropped from the roof and set off down the lane, beckoning with her taloned hand. ‘It’s just round – oh, ratscraps!’

Four figures had lurched from an alley, one of them hefting what Mosca recognized as a filch, a long stick with a hook usually used for stealing from high windows but now brandished like a weapon. It swung down in an attempt to catch the girl’s ankle, and she leaped it with inches to spare. The boots of a second man slithered on the icy cobbles, and he seemed to grab at Clent’s coat for support. Clent reared away reflexively to the sound of rending cloth, and a slim dagger fell to the stones with a clang.

Their guide lashed out at the nearest attacker with her clawed hand, and at the last moment he decided in favour of keeping his nose and leaped back, sprawling on the ground with one of his fellows under him.

‘Run!’ she yelled. ‘Scour!’

Mosca aimed a deft kick to the nearest kneecap and took off after the older girl. Clent, whose coat was now sporting a new knife slash, also needed no encouragement. Fortunately there was no sign of pursuit.

‘Jinglers,’ called the clawed girl over her shoulder as she slowed, by way of explanation. ‘Looking to catch late strays. Now, stay close – I know the path the Changeover Jinglers are taking. ’Tis just a matter of staying a step behind them half the time, and a step ahead the rest . . .’

A distant sound like sleighbells . . . or keys jangling at belts . . .

The girl broke into a sprint, again without the slightest warning. She really did not seem to care whether or not her charges kept up with her. Unnervingly she seemed to be running directly towards the jingling. It was with relief that they caught up with her on the second street and found she was not up to her neck in Jinglers. She did, however, appear to be doing something very strange. As she ran she was tugging cloth pouches from her belt with her unclawed hand, and hefting them as if ready to hurl.

As they passed before what looked like a boarded pub, a casement above suddenly opened half a foot. Without breaking stride the clawed girl deftly flung one pouch into the gap, which immediately closed behind it. Another pouch she wedged under a tree stump. A third she dropped into a hand extended through a hastily opened hatch.

At a corner where a large yew had decided to grow through the wall of an old brewhouse, she halted again. With her hooked hand she pulled back some of the dense, needle-filled foliage to show a narrow gap.

‘In.’

‘What?’ Clent was already wheezing with effort, and he stared at the hole with wild-eyed horror.

‘They already been past here, so they’ll have spiked this tree to look for skulkers. They might not do it again. Best chance you got. In.’ And the girl was gone again, pelting down the street without leaving any chance for protest.

However many centuries that ancient tree had stood there, it had probably never seen anything as graceless as Mosca and Clent trying to thrash their way into it at the same time. There is little give in a yew, for it has a mesh of small, fibrous branches and thousands of bristling needles, scrubbing-brush dense. Even when they stopped trying to struggle their way further in, it was impossible to tell whether they were invisible from the street.

‘Hush!’ whispered Clent. ‘Hold still!’

Mosca obeyed and realized that she could hear the sound of jingling nearing and slowing. There were steps on the cobbles, then a rasp of steel. Without warning, something dark and wickedly slender jabbed through the concealing foliage. Mosca heard it tear through the loose fabric of her sleeve, and briefly felt the kiss of cold against her forearm before the blade withdrew. She clenched her teeth and managed not to cry out at the shock of the contact.

What easier way to check for hiders than to jab a sword idly into a few places and see whether the tree screamed and bled? She held her breath, tingling all over in expectation of the next stab, even when the jingling sound passed.

At long last, the after-dawn bugle sounded. Somewhere in the sap-scented darkness, Mosca heard Clent give a protracted, ragged sigh of relief.

‘Madam, let us . . . dismount.’

Clent ‘dismounted’ fairly easily by falling out of the tree in disarray with a squawk of pain. Mosca however had to be dragged out by her ankles, the yew having worked itself into her hair, bonnet and gown.

‘So . . .’ Clent’s throat was still a little rough from gasping hurried air into his lungs. ‘Altogether a very successful . . . ah . . . reconnaissance outing. Very . . . ah . . . educational . . .’

Haggard, sleep-deprived and bristling with yew needles, the pair wiped the soot from their badges and then limped down the street attempting amiable smiles at passers-by, some of whom recoiled from the prospect. As they passed the stump where the clawed girl had thrust her pouch, Clent looked about him and then stooped.

‘I am interested to know,’ he murmured in an undertone, ‘what
exactly
is so important that our brusque young friend was willing to brave the Jinglers in order to deliver it, and various decent citizens were willing to open their casements and hatches before bugle to receive it.’

He examined the pouch, then hesitantly lowered his head to sniff at it. His eyebrows climbed, and he passed the pouch to Mosca. She followed his lead, and raised it to her nose for a good sniff.

‘But, Mr Clent – this smells like . . .’ She stared at him.

‘Yes.’ Clent stooped to put the pouch back in its hiding place. ‘Chocolate.’

By the time that the pale winter sun had put in a lacklustre appearance, a slack flap of cloud smothering his face like a nightcap, Mosca and Clent had holed up in the little pleasure-garden pavilion they had found before. This provided exactly what they needed – a quiet and secluded spot for first-degree panicking.

‘We’re in a bleedin’ Locksmith town!’ Mosca had repeated this about a dozen times, but had not yet worn the edge off it. ‘We got Mistress Bessel after our hides, that gibbet-rat Skellow wants to skin me alive and we’re in a bleedin’ Locksmith town! The night town’s run by ’em, and I bet the day town will be as well, soon as salt, and their agents must be everywhere, and two nights from now if we’re still here they’ll send me to Toll-by-Night, and I got nowhere to stay so I’ll be on the streets with no money on the night of Yacobray, and the Clatterhorse’ll get me . . .’

She paused, partly for breath, and partly through awareness that the latter part of her complaint had sounded a bit babyish.

‘Child . . . child . . . that sinister steed shall not have you. It shall not. Mosca, you have my sincerest and unstained oath on that. Have you ever known me break my word to you?’

Four icy seconds passed during which Mosca simply stared

at Clent, her tongue pushed into her cheek, one eyebrow raised, her eyes hard black incredulous beads. Clent chose to ignore the answer hovering in the air.

‘The matter is in my hands, child. The cogs of my mind whirl so fast they might start fires. Let us settle our thoughts and analyse. At present our only plan for leaving this town is to claim a reward from the Marlebournes, and to do so we must prove to them that the damsel in distress is indeed in danger. And we still have until tomorrow evening to do so, before we lose our visitor status. Two days and one night.’

Mosca said nothing. The word ‘damsel’ rankled with her. She suddenly thought of the clawed girl from the night before, jumping the filch on an icy street. Much the same age and build as Beamabeth, and far more beleaguered. What made a girl a ‘damsel in distress’? Were they not allowed claws? Mosca had a hunch that if all damsels had claws they would spend a lot less time ‘in distress’.

‘Fortunately,’ Clent continued crisply, ‘your employer is a genius. This man Skellow and his fellows will be coming to the castle courtyard this very night to receive my written orders, counting upon me to invent a plot to kidnap that poor girl come the dawn. And I shall indeed present them with a plan of uncommon daring and ingenuity, one that cannot fail . . . unless of course the damsel and her family are warned in advance, and the entire enterprise is a trap for our dastardly conspirators.’

‘I thought the mayor said he’d hang us like washing if we warned him any more?’

‘Ye-e-es, he might have implied as much. Which is why we must persuade his charming daughter to speak to him on

our behalf.’

‘And we do all this before tomorrow evening?’ ‘Inevitably. Inescapably. We concoct a plan today. We

recruit the inestimable mayor and his family. We prepare our

ambush. I leave a letter for our kidnappers and hook them