Twilight Robbery (30 page)

‘I’m ready.’ Jade stood.

‘No connections, you said.’ The new arrival was examining Mosca speculatively. ‘This girl with you?’

Jade shook her head without looking Mosca’s way. ‘Who’s with anyone?’ she snapped, with a bitterness that was almost despair. Mosca could only watch stunned as the last of her new allies walked away without a backwards look.

Mosca remained frozen in her seat, cold beads tracing their way down her back. She did not look round to see who was noticing her, a flimsily built young girl with a tasty-looking goose, sitting alone and undefended. But there would be eyes on her, she knew it.

The minutes dragged. Time and again she tried to chafe her cold wits and muster the spark of a plan, but every time she saw Havoc spreadeagled in the dark cellar, and the bleak and horrible glare of hatred in Jade’s eyes.

Got to get out of here
, buzzed Palpitattle in Mosca’s head.
Now. Right now
. Gingerly Mosca got to her feet, wincing as her stool scraped and the table rattled.

She stooped and gathered Saracen in her arms. A big, hearty-looking goose, white plumage gleaming in the murk. A succulent roast dinner on webbed feet. A poster inviting every cut-throat to waylay her in an alleyway.

Mosca stroked a trembling hand over Saracen’s furled wing feathers, feeling their strange rough softness. ‘Me and you,’ she whispered against his neck. ‘Me and you ’gainst ’em all, right?’

Legs shaking, she edged through the crowd, squeezing past seated forms. Her neck prickled as behind her there was a stealthy, deliberate scrape of wood on wood as somebody else pushed back a chair. She pretended not to notice and made her way towards the exit, both arms around Saracen, hearing faint sounds of disturbance behind her as if another figure was pushing their way along the same route.

She reached the edge of the tables and set off as calmly as she could across the cellar floor. Her instincts screamed that she was being followed – she could smell the menace, feel it like the dry crackle before a storm. She reached the base of the steps that led up from the cellar . . . then raced up them like a kicked cat.

By the time she reached the street, gasping icy night air, there was a clattering of steps behind her that was not an echo. With a gasp of effort, she kicked one of the carved-face barrel-lanterns on to its side before the archway, then booted it down the steps. Off it rolled and bounded, spitting wax and dropping candles, and Mosca heard it recede with a bangitty-bangitty-bangitty-bangitty-YEEEAARGH-thubbitty-bangitty-bangitty-WAAAH-bangitty-roll . . .

She did not wait for Messrs Yeeeaargh or Waaah, since she doubted they were in a mood to talk. Even if they had not intended her any harm before, they probably would now. So instead she set about showing the Whip and Masty a set of heels. Not clean ones, perhaps, but certainly very rapid.

There was only one place in Toll-by-Night that might be a sanctuary: the house of the midwife and her husband. And it looked as if Mosca would be searching for it at high speed, with murder half a step behind her.

At a corner Mosca stopped, and hopped, and hooked off her clogs, then ran again. The cobbles bruised her feet, but did so silently. Behind her, she could hear other footsteps ring out, then muffle as they headed down the wrong street.

Her only hope of finding the Leaps’ house was to reach the town wall and follow it until she saw somewhere she recognized. As she ran, her quick black eyes caught one scene after another.

A line of skinny men and women mending the town wall, a long chain linking their leg irons, perhaps one of the ‘toil-gangs’ Jade had mentioned. Two youths squatting either side of a prone and motionless man and wiping something dark off his pocket watch. A ragged little alley unexpectedly full of a surging throng wrestling one another for meagre bundles of firewood.

Everywhere Mosca went, she felt more spider-thread gazes adhere to her, as quickly as she could throw off the old. There were footsteps behind her again now. Perhaps they were Yeeeaargh and Waaah, perhaps not. It did not matter.

There! She recognized the Leaps’ narrow house, the scribble of creepers against the wall. The door was half open, Mistress Leap emerging from it cautiously with her bundle on her back. She was speaking in furtive, urgent whispers to a young

man who held a dark-lantern in one hand and kept the other tucked under his armpit out of the cold, all the while shifting with nervous impatience from one foot to the other.

‘. . . Nearly ready to burst with the baby . . .’ A few of his murmured words were just audible.

‘Mistress Leap!’ screamed Mosca, hearing pursuing steps gaining behind her. The two figures at the door froze, and Mistress Leap took a startled pace backwards through the still-open door, pulling the young man after her. Horrified, Mosca realized that she was in danger of finding herself pounding on a closed and bolted door.

She put on a fresh spurt, the cobbles biting into her soles. The door was not shut yet, she might be able to hurl herself in at the same time as the young man, by ducking low and squeaking past his legs . . .

This plan might have worked perfectly if the young man had not turned in the doorway to stare out into the darkness with bemusement. As she streaked into his pool of lantern light, Mosca saw his thin, pocked face grow taut with surprise and apprehension. She almost fancied that she could see herself and Saracen reflected in miniature in each of his widening eyes.

‘Tway!’ she screamed. It was a lot shorter than ‘out of the way’ but unfortunately was not a real word, and so the young man did not step to one side, or backwards, or anything useful. Thus when Mosca doubled up and dived forward she did not slide past him. Instead, she planted her head firmly in the middle of his stomach with great force.

He made a
thyuck!
noise, and there was a tinkle as something metallic fell to the ground. The lantern smashed on the cobblestones at the same time, plunging the street into darkness. Saracen exploded from Mosca’s arms in a lather of wings, and she tumbled headlong past the stranger and in through the door. There were more muffled noises as other people collided in the dark outside and sounded surprised about it. Somebody standing just inside the threshold made two or three panic-stricken attempts to close the door on Mosca’s ankles. She pulled in her feet, and the door slammed shut, completing the darkness. There followed the guillotine
thunk thunk thunk
of bolt after bolt being driven home.

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.