Twilight Robbery (32 page)

Mosca could not help feeling that the ‘poor dear’ might have a point about the likelihood of disaster. Having tasted Toll-by-Night’s moonlit stew of murder, menace, treachery and pursuit, she had fallen wildly in love with the six shabby bolts that held the door shut and the danger out. Her new regalia did not make her feel any better about venturing out either. There was no help for it however. Time was not on their side, and unlike Mistress Leap she could at least recognize Skellow.

‘Tsk, nothing to worry about,’ Mistress Leap said vaguely as she put on her shawl. ‘Murderers get bored terribly easily, I hear, so I am sure the ones chasing us have run off to be murderous somewhere else now. Besides, if I worried about
that
kind of thing then I would never go out at all.’

‘My goose . . .’ Mosca hesitated at the door. ‘If I leave him here . . . nobody will sell ’im or eat ’im, will they?’

‘What, after he guarded our doorstep from cut-throats?’ Mistress Leap tutted. ‘Certainly not!’

Stars were now scattered across the sky, as if the white-faced moon had grown bored waiting for something to happen and started spitting gleaming fruit pips.

The streets no longer had the same desolate emptiness. Although the lanes did not throng the way they did by day, muffled figures could be seen hurrying about their business, some with baskets over their arms.

‘This is the busiest time of night,’ murmured Mistress Leap. The first hour or two after dusk are dangerous – most ordinary folks stay inside to avoid running into the Jinglers, or those who prey on newcomers. But now and for a couple of hours everybody scurries about their business quick as they can, before the worst of the cold sets in. Now, keep a tight hold on the knot of my apron with both hands – that way nobody can pluck you away without me knowing.’

This was more necessary than it sounded, for Mosca’s guide proved to be capable of a fearsomely brisk turn of speed. And, Mosca could not help noticing, people did seem to get out of Mistress Leap’s way. Furthermore, they seemed to do so ungrudgingly. A few even gave her a glance and a nod – a curt, quick nod like a sparrow pecking apart a cherry, but a nod nonetheless. The midwife appeared to be a recognized figure.

However, the crowds all the while maintained their mouse-tense hush, their air of urgency. Fear. There was a reek of it everywhere, Mosca realized, in every guarded glance or falsely friendly backslap. A clammy smell, like rotten leaves. And everybody went about their lives in spite of it, because fear was part of their lives.

Flying out behind the midwife like a set of coat tails, Mosca was dragged through slick, clenched alleys, then roofed passages where she briefly exchanged a black-and-silver world for one of rusty shadows and the murky, flickering gold of spitting rushlights and lanterns. At last they came to a halt in the street so suddenly that Mosca flattened her long nose on the midwife’s muslin-clad back, leaving a dark green smudge.

Ahead the street widened to make space for three bare trees, around the base of which were arranged makeshift tents, so that the trees looked like gangly, stiff-backed women with voluminous canvas skirts. Drawing closer, Mosca could see that the tent-cloths were a tattered patchwork of scraps and rags, sailcloth and burlap and leather and linen and blankets, many sporting watermarks and mould rosettes. In one tent she saw a rail of dead rooks, tethered upside down by their feet, in another drab heaps of Grabely wool.

It was a sort of market, and Mosca experienced a throb of relief at the sense of familiarity. Here at least the dreadful hush was less absolute, and there were even raised voices, cries of wares.

‘Owl soup!’ To one side a weedy fire bowed beneath the breeze as it struggled to do service to a dozen pots and cauldrons, which rattled their lids and chuckled steam. ‘Robin and beechnut!’

‘Moss!’ came another call. ‘Dry as a miser’s eye!’ And, yes, there did indeed seem to be a great heap of dried moss, brown and tousled like spaniel hair. More surprisingly, a small crowd had gathered around it. Others were paying to fill their bags and crocks with scoops of dead leaves from a great barrel. Only when she witnessed a scuffle over a meagre bundle of kindling did she guess the reason for the hushed, bright-eyed earnestness of the crowds.

Toll-by-Night was readying itself for a long and bitter battle against a single enemy: winter. There was precious little timber to be seen, and so the busiest stalls sold gorse bundles, withered grass, twigs, kindling, biscuits of dry animal dung, anything that could be burned. Toll’s trees had not been chopped down for firewood however, and this told Mosca something else. For all its murky appearance of anarchy, Toll-by-Night clearly had rules, and one of those rules prohibited felling trees.

Several women gripped bouquets of meagre rushlights and were doing a roaring trade. Only one stall sold real candles, and its shrivelled-looking little owner was flanked on one side by a hulking, cudgel-wielding bear of a man who watched the inquisitive fingers of everyone who passed by as if the sticks were fashioned of white gold instead of tallow. On the other side stood a grey-haired man who made notes of every candle sold. The stallholder was clearly miserably afraid of him.

‘Taxman,’ whispered Mistress Leap with a meaningful glance towards him.

Mosca wondered what kind of person would introduce a candle tax for a people who lived in darkness. Somebody with a chatelaine of keys at his belt, she suspected.

But Mistress Leap was pushing on past the skirted trees to a set of weathered wooden steps which almost spanned the width of the strange thoroughfare. Mosca followed her up the steps and found herself looking into an arena.

The area was long and thin and flanked by two high brick walls. Makeshift box balconies hung from these walls by chains, each containing four or five figures, most leaning over the front of the box with avid attention. The space between was filled with a series of shabby wooden stages raised on narrow legs. The stages were stepped, and linked by various tilting planks and splintered bridges, as if a dozen carpenters had spontaneously gone insane. Every inch of the stages was thronged with people. Children crowded the very top of the walls themselves like starlings.

Two stubby plum trees pushed their way up between the stages and spread their leafless branches above the crowd. A stiff, slender bridge ran between them, each of its ends bound firmly to a bough. On the bridge stood two figures, each carrying a rough cudgel. Each time one swung his weapon at the other’s head there was a wave-crash roar from the crowd. The combatants’ swings were uncoordinated and drunken, their footwork stuttering and uncertain, and as she drew closer Mosca realized that both were wearing blindfolds.

Here and there between makeshift stages the moonlight fell on tousled grass. Nonetheless Mosca did not realize where she was until a brazier on the right-hand side caught her eye. By its light she could make out behind it a shape of splintered lattice with a white pointed roof. It was the pavilion where Mistress Bessel had confronted her not two days before. Somewhere beneath the shadowy scaffolding and ragged crowds of the Bludgeoncourt lay the prim rockeries and trimmed lawns of Toll-by-Day’s pleasure garden.

‘Mother Midnight.’ The whetstone rasp of a voice came from directly behind them. ‘Beadle wants to see you.’ The voice’s owner was a lean man with bristling black hair and a sickle-shaped scar that tugged a kink in his upper lip. ‘Mother Midnight’ was an irreverent term for a midwife.

Mistress Leap jumped disproportionately and clasped her hands nervously.

‘Oh! Yes – I . . . I was just coming to see him, in fact . . .’ She placed a reassuring arm around Mosca’s shoulders, and they followed him across an obstacle course of plank and plinth, on a twisting route towards the pavilion.

At one point Mosca’s foot slithered on the worn and frosty planks and she almost toppled from a beam to the lawn below. The stranger caught at her arm and righted her at the last moment.

‘Stay off the grass!’ he hissed.

And of course that was what this whole wooden wonderland and its inhabitants were doing. Staying off the grass. The lawns that needed to be lush and pristine for the day-lighters, not trodden to mud by chilblained feet and battered boots. No doubt the nightowls were forbidden from chopping down trees for much the same reason.

The pavilion was transformed. The brazier’s light flushed it peach, and it hung in the smoke like a genie’s mirage. Bent sequins glittered on the cloths that shrouded its sides. Within it a broad-bellied man sat enthroned, lolling aloft like a sultan in his palanquin.

Adopting the meekest manner she could, Mosca followed Mistress Leap to stand before the pavilion. Her skin stung and tingled with the sudden warmth of the brazier, and though she kept her eyes lowered, the brilliant firelight seared orange through her lids.

The message proclaimed by the blazing, uncovered brazier was almost deafening.
I am a man who can afford to be wonderfully, wastefully warm on this wretched winter night
, it said.
I am a man whose favour is worth winning
.

‘Master Beadle.’ Mistress Leap’s voice was still brisk, but it was the voice of a brisk but asthmatic vole.

‘Ah, Mistress Leap.’ The man whose favour was worth winning had a voice that was half-whinny, half-gasp. A pair of bellows with a whistling hole. Mosca could not see his face. ‘Always a pleasure, isn’t it?’

Mistress Leap made an obliging, high-pitched noise that was not exactly a word.

‘That friend of yours, Mistress Leap. A problem. What’s to be done about it?’

Mosca stiffened and tightened her fists so that her arms and shoulders didn’t tremble.
Friend. Is that me? Is he looking at me?

‘Yes, you know the one,’ the Beadle continued. ‘The mother whose kinchin went dayside. Blethemy Crace. Been acting the zany and making all manner of hubbub. Clinging to the wall of a daylighter’s house, saying she can hear her babe crying on the other side. Over in Spikepock’s parish. He wants to know what we plan to do about it.’

Mosca imagined a mother pressed against a cold stone wall, listening to the cries of a baby who did not understand that it was not supposed to exist at that hour.
Poor little Gobbet
.

‘I . . . I will speak to her about it,’ breathed Mistress Leap hurriedly.

‘Of course you will.’ A pause. ‘Now, what’s this shred of life clinging to your skirts?’

Mistress Leap’s arm tightened slightly around Mosca’s shoulders. ‘I was . . . just bringing her to you. To register. A little foreigner – from Seisia, we think. She’ll be staying with me – I’ve needed an apprentice for a long time and she seems a keen, hardworking sort of a child . . .’

‘Name?’ wheezed the Beadle.

‘We do not know,’ Mistress Leap said quickly. ‘I have tried to get sense out of her, but she does nothing except chatter like a chicken coop in her foreign tongue.’

‘Bring her to me.’

Guided forward by Mistress Leap, Mosca gingerly made her way past the brazier to the Beadle’s side, hoping against hope he would not see that her nationality was painted on. She tried to make her face as bland and mild as possible.

The Beadle’s face was pinkly discoloured and pitted like a crab shell. His eyes, peering sleepily between the folds of his lids, also put Mosca in mind of a crab. The mind behind them was a crusted, scuttling thing, used to thinking sideways.

‘You sure she’s not just simple?’ asked the Beadle. Mosca realized that in her attempts to look ‘wide-eyed and innocent’ she might have overshot and hit ‘half-witted’. The Beadle leaned forward and prodded her in the ribs with a fat finger.

‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘Jabber for us. What’s your name?’

Mosca licked her lips drily, and let fly a stream of babble. A few real words like ‘hobble’ and ‘wisteria’ got mixed in somehow, but she hoped nobody would notice.

‘Huh. Open wide, there.’ A thick finger tapped her on the chin. She opened her mouth and held as still as she could while the Beadle stared intently inside. ‘Yes – that’s a foreign tongue all right. Pale and blue and too pointy at the end. Nothing you can do about it.’ The meaty hand patted Mosca’s shoulder twice. ‘Keep her nose clean and her feet off the grass.’

Mosca was just turning to go, her stomach turbulent with relief, when the Beadle’s next words caught her attention.

‘Grib, how’s Appleton doing?’

The question was answered by the sickle-mouthed man.

‘Took a couple of blows to the costard, but he’s keeping his feet, Master Beadle.’

Mosca tried not to stare at them as Mistress Leap dragged her away.

‘Did you hear that?’ she hissed when they were out of earshot, moving her lips as little as she could. ‘Sounds like the Beadle knows where Brand Appleton is!’

‘I am quite sure he does,’ the midwife responded quietly, staring out into the centre of the arena. Mosca followed the line of Mistress Leap’s gaze to the two cudgellers on the precarious plankwalk. ‘And so do I, and so does everybody else here. You see the young fellow up there with the red hair?’

Peering, Mosca could see that one of the combatants did indeed have red hair. His motions were more reckless and clumsy than those of his opponent. He lunged where his enemy edged, and swung his cudgel wildly to find his enemy instead of hunching down to listen for his steps. Mosca thought he seemed younger than his opponent, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old.