Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Goodman Varple, Drinking Partner of the Thief and Vagabond

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.

‘He’s here every time they hold a Bludgeoncourt.’ Mistress Leap sighed. ‘All the folks in the boxes and big stands pay a trifle to come and watch, but the prize the contestants fight for isn’t money. It’s hard-to-come-bys, luxuries – a bottle of Vantian sherry, a roll of chocolate, spices – and tonight it’s candied violets. He enters the contest every time. I suppose he still has daylighter ways – maybe he’d sooner die than go without his silks and coffee.’ There was a cold edge of disdain in Mistress Leap’s usually kindly voice, and Mosca could hear the mutual distrust of Day and Night grinding together like a giant’s teeth.

‘I don’t think so,’ Mosca murmured. ‘Gifts for a lady, I think.’ She could picture Brand Appleton limping home each night with cinnamon and sweetmeats, like a disgraced dog dragging in a mangled gamebird and hoping to be loved for it. ‘Let’s get closer.’

Through time-honoured use of the elbow Mosca and Mistress Leap found standing room on a stage near the battle-bridge, and Mosca’s suspicions were confirmed – Appleton was not doing well. His opponent was a few inches shorter, but strongly, squatly built. Both were stripped to their shirts, but only Appleton’s was marred by dark splotches that Mosca guessed must be blood. Furthermore he did not seem to be a favourite of the crowd. Time and again a piece of fruit peel or a small stone pattered off his shoulder or clipped his ear.

The shorter man darted a blow that fell short, but his foot slapped the boards loudly, and Appleton launched himself towards the sound with a wild, cranefly flailing of his limbs. Instead of retreating, his opponent stepped neatly forward and aimed a deft lateral lash that caught Appleton on the temple and unbalanced him. He slipped off the bridge, grabbing at its edge at the last moment and banging his chin and chest against the boards. There he hung winded, while his enemy edged cautiously towards him, one step, two… and then a third which rested the weight of his boot on the fingers of Appleton’s right hand.

The crowd dissolved into a maelstrom of noise. Some were clearly trying to shout to Appleton’s opponent, to tell him what it was that he was standing on, but their words were lost in the general cacophony. Appleton’s face was screwed tight, but he made no sound or motion for the ten long seconds it took for his enemy to move his boot, advance, and unwittingly step over Appleton’s other sprawled arm. The shorter man continued to advance, occasionally darting questing jabs with his cudgel in search of his foe, and Appleton was free to wriggle his way painfully back on to the bridge, his legs waggling froggishly until he could get a knee back on to the planks.

Then he stood, blood from his injured ear soaking into his collar, his face locked in a grimace, and limped quietly after his oblivious enemy. At the last moment the shorter man seemed to hear him and whirled round, but the motion caused the board beneath him to creak, and Appleton swung his cudgel with all his ungainly force. The roar of the crowd drowned the sound of wood on skull, but the shorter man spun about, tilted his head vaguely as if looking for something, then dropped to his knees and sprawled softly to the boards.

A bell rang, and Appleton pulled off his blindfold, wiped his face with it and hobbled to the end of the bridge, examining his wounded fingers. He clambered down a ladder to stage level and hobbled to the pavilion, where Mosca could see him nodding, bobbing small bows and accepting a bag, presumably of candied violets. There were new contestants climbing the trees to the battle-bridge now, and he was largely ignored as he reclaimed a bundle from one of the attendants and staggered away, his red hair just visible above shorter night-dwellers.

‘Well, there’s no chance of following him in this crowd,’ murmured Mistress Leap. ‘Perhaps we can talk to people later and find out where he went…’ She turned, and her sentence trailed away, hanging like smoke in the empty space that an instant before had been occupied by her greenish companion.

It had been the work of a moment for Mosca to stoop and pretend to adjust her clog. The newest combatants were waving to the crowd, and suddenly all heads were up, all eyes on the bridge. Nobody noticed a mysterious foreigner with a bell-shaped basket for a hat ducking down in the crevice between two stages, dropping to the sacred, untouchable grass, then running crouched beneath the creaking, thundering structure.

When she found Brand Appleton, he was sitting alone on a set of wooden steps built into the side of the stage, his back to her. His head had been clumsily bandaged with a long kerchief. Peering at a slight angle, Mosca could just make out the little bag of violets in his lap. With trembling, tender fingers he was trying to wipe a spot of blood from the linen of the bag.

Some higher steps creaked above Mosca’s head.

‘You’re the radical, aren’t you?’ A voice like someone sandpapering a cello. Mosca tried to imagine its owner, and every time he came out seven feet tall with fists like melons. ‘Go on, say something radical.’

Brand Appleton turned his head, allowing Mosca to see his split lip. He blinked, and Mosca could almost hear his temper clicking into readiness like a pistol hammer. But then his eyes fell to the bag in his lap, and his hands stealthily moved to cradle it against his stomach. When the man further up the stairs took another step towards him, he wrapped both arms protectively around the bag and ducked his head down.

‘Er… the…’ He shook himself to gather his battered wits. ‘The… An end to all kings and we… their crowns should be beaten into ploughs and… for every man that is born a… in the sheds and stables and fields as much as in the… er… have a right to, um, a right as sacred as the air or… or sunlight…’ He bowed his head and swallowed.

A heavy boot placed itself gently but firmly between his shoulder blades and gave him a contemptuous shove. The creaks were apparently satisfied and took themselves away.

Mosca watched Appleton’s shoulders shake with suppressed emotion and her own feelings were thrown into confusion. Was this the ruthless, crazed kidnapper she had been led to expect? This half-stunned man hugging a bag of sweets?

Then Appleton turned his head to look about him, perhaps to make sure that his persecutors had gone, and Mosca saw his face properly, with its dark trails of blood down the left cheek and jawline. A young face, perhaps only a year or two older than Beamabeth. There was no disguise to his expression, and Mosca found herself flinching as if an oven door had been left open.

In his wide eyes she saw pain, and mortification, and exhaustion, but also a fierce and haggard stillness. And behind that stillness a roar like a forest fire, a driving fervour that would eat all the air and shrivel whole trees with a hiss. His gaze seemed to burn through the world and every obstacle in his path to rest on something distant and desired, something that reflected in his eyes with a steady white light. This was a man who might do anything. He might not do it well, but he would do it until it worked.

He turned back, gently placed the bag down by his side and busied himself with fastening a sword belt about him. Two pistols were dusted off and checked for powder, then tucked away. Apparently he had put aside his weapons for the fight.

Very slowly and carefully, Mosca drew out the little knife she had been given for self-defence. If she could only make a hole in the bag, perhaps when he left sugar and violets would trickle out to leave a trail for her and help her find his lair. But Appleton was maddeningly protective of his little prize. He kept reaching out to pat it, just when her knifepoint was an inch away, or moving it to the other side of him. Finally he shifted it back into his lap again, out of Mosca’s reach. Soon he would put it in a pocket, stand and walk away among the crowds.

Mosca pulled back her knife-hand, a rash and terrible impulse gnawing away at her mind. The worst thing about Appleton’s gabbled radicalish was that he had clearly once heard a fragment of something. Some forbidden text hidden in cabbage barrows and badly copied and learned by rote and misremembered and half forgotten until it washed up in fragments on his tongue like so much meaningless shingle. Somewhere a book was screaming.

She bit her tongue hard, but somehow the sentence slipped out anyway.

‘You got the words wrong, Mr Appleton.’

He froze and turned his head a few degrees.

‘What?’

‘That radical speak of yours. You got the words wrong.’

A long, long second of silence.

‘You know the right words to the Solace for the Thousands?’

‘No, but those weren’t them. I been to Mandelion. I know radicals. They make a load more sense than that.’

Her words seemed to poke Appleton into alertness, and his posture noticeably straightened.

‘When I got here, I heard you were this terrible radical, so I come to find you.’ Mosca took a deep breath, then threw what was left of her caution to the winds like so much chaff. ‘And you know what? You’re more than terrible. You’re bleedin’ useless. Don’t turn round!’ This last was delivered in an urgent hiss since Appleton seemed in some danger of twisting about to remonstrate with the steps. She had gone too far. She must have gone too far.

‘Funnily enough,’ Appleton answered through clenched teeth, ‘my childhood tutors failed to ground me properly in the basics of revolutionary thought. And when I reached manhood I wasted my time studying books of anatomy in the mistaken impression that I would become a physician as planned. Back then, nobody told me I was a radical!’

‘Well, you don’t sound like much of one,’ muttered Mosca.

‘The Committee of the Hours are never wrong,’ intoned Appleton. The words rang hollowly as if he had recited them to himself too many times and worn the heart out of them. ‘If they say I am… then I am. I can… I can face that. But-’

‘But nobody told you how to be one – am I right?’ Above all, Mosca had to keep Appleton interested, inquisitive. ‘Could help you there, maybe. Might have some radical teachings off by heart. And words right from the mouths of the real radicals, in Mandelion.’

Brand Appleton sat motionless, his head at a considering tilt. Mosca stared at the back of his neck and tried to guess his expression. A ‘brand’ was a fiery torch. She hoped that she was holding it by the right end. Either way, she was certainly playing with fire.

‘These teachings – are they wild and subversive?’ he whispered at last.

‘Frothing,’ Mosca reassured him quickly. ‘Mad as a melon cannon.’

‘And… you come from Mandelion? You know the place well? The people in power?’ He had the hesitant tone of one tiptoeing around a new plan for fear of smudging it.

Somewhere the Tower Clock struck a tinny chime, and Appleton’s head twitched.

‘I have to go. Listen, whoever you are – meet me at Harass and Quail’s tomorrow night at two of the clock. It’s in Cooper’s Dark – do you know it? Opposite the old stone trough.’

‘I’ll find it,’ hissed Mosca, marvelling at the success of her strange gambit, ‘and I’ll be there. Bring a notebook. We’ll have you lopping kings’ ’eads off before you can say fraternity.’

At long last Appleton ventured a swift glance behind him, and then twitched his narrow head about, looking for his interlocutor. Mosca pulled back so the moonlight would not fall on her face.

‘Hey – are you under there? On the grass? ’

‘Just between you and me,’ Mosca whispered, ‘radicalism is all about walkin’ on the grass.’