Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Goodlady Undlesoft, Dweller with Things Buried

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.

Funny place for a shrine, thought Mosca.

The ceiling was just low enough for Mosca to stand, so she did and pressed her eye to one of its holes. Directly above her she saw sky, but it was not the great cold sky that spread its wings over the world. Rather it was a smaller, more homely mimic of the heavens, and one that she had seen before. The inside of a deep blue dome, adorned with painted silver stars… yes! She was staring up at the chapel end of the reception room in which she had first seen Beamabeth Marlebourne. With a rush of excitement, she realized that she must be under the mayor’s house. So that was what the musician had meant when he said she could talk to Clent herself!

Far distant the second dawn bugle sounded to announce the start of day. Somewhere in the room above a door clicked shut, and overhead shoe leather slapped on tiles.

Voices.

‘Open the doors!’ It was Sir Feldroll in the room above, she was sure of it. ‘If the Beloved have heard our prayers, if the kidnappers have received the ransom, then Miss Marlebourne might be waiting outside even now! And if not… your master will be back from the counting house soon enough to give us word.’ The pitch of the knight’s voice was higher than usual, and Mosca thought of a harp-string drawn taut.

So the mayor had slept at the counting house. Mosca guessed that he had not wanted to trust the handling of the precious ransom gem to anybody else.

She heard footfalls moving to and along the hallway, followed by the muffled sounds of bolts being drawn and locks being turned. A door creaked, and the air flowing through the little hole on to Mosca’s cheek became very slightly colder.

‘Nobody there, sir,’ came the call from down the hall.

‘I feared as much,’ Sir Feldroll muttered. Pace, pace, pace. The little spots of light above Mosca winked one by one as somebody strode to and fro over her head. Then, more curtly, ‘How can you eat breakfast at a moment like this?’

‘My noble sir, I am gripped with anxiety and palpitation as you are; it simply takes me differently. You pace and give orders – I turn to toast for solace.’ The voice of Eponymous Clent, unmistakably Eponymous Clent. To judge by the faint crunching, Mosca thought he was probably just a few yards out of view, seated at the breakfast table.

‘Then I shall leave you to your “solace”, sir,’ muttered Sir Feldroll, through clenched teeth by the sound of it. ‘You fellows – come with me and we shall see whether Miss Marlebourne has been left in the grounds. It might be that she is too weak – that perhaps she has swooned – or if she has been left tied up…’

There was then a good deal of clipping and clopping around, and Mosca couldn’t keep track of all the steps. She thought Sir Feldroll had left through the front door with at least two people, but she could not be sure who was still in the room above. For a long time she remained at the hole, staring up at the penny’s worth of painted ceiling and listening to the steady crunch, crunch, crunch of Clent’s toast and the scrape of his cutlery.

If there really were spies in the mayor’s household, then she needed to speak with Clent alone. The last thing she wanted was a Locksmith spy knowing where she was and what she was doing. She very much doubted that the Locksmiths knew about this secret passage, for if they had they would surely have kept it locked to stop others wandering in.

Was anyone else with Clent in the room above? She could not tell. But she had to take a risk, before the mayor returned and threw the house into turmoil.

‘Hssst!’ she hissed. ‘Mr Clent! Over here!’

Somewhere above, a knife halted mid-squeak. A pause, and then a chair ground its feet against the tiles above. Slow careful steps. Silence.

‘Mr Clent!’

Some more steps, and then Mosca’s peephole went dark. She pulled out one of her hairpins, and poked it up through the hole to prod at the foot-sole resting on it.

‘Down here, Mr Clent! Under the floor!’

The foot-sole was twitched away with a noise of alarm, and Mosca withdrew the pin. Peering up, she could just about see Clent’s face gazing down, his chin made enormous by the strange angle.

‘Mosca?’ he whispered. A light powder of mortar and beetle-grit fell to dust her cheeks as he dropped to his knees and lowered his head to a few inches above her peephole. She could make out no more than a patch of face, one eye wide and startled, brow contracted as if in pain.

‘Yes, Mr Clent, it’s me! It’s me! Are you alone?’

‘Yes – yes, for the moment. But probably not for long. Child, are you…?’ He trailed off, and shook his head. It felt strange to see Eponymous Clent run out of words. ‘Little Mosca Mye,’ he said instead, inconsequentially, and laughed incredulously under his breath.

‘I got all my limbs,’ Mosca answered quickly. ‘I been knocked and scraped and chased about but my heart’s still beating inside my hide. And I’m hungry, Mr Clent, I’m hungry as a winter fox…’

Clent’s face vanished. Steps retreating. Steps returning. A crumb fell in Mosca’s eye, and then a crust was pushed down through the peephole, doused in honey, followed by another and another. She took them and crammed them into her mouth.

‘If only I could pull up this floor,’ muttered Clent, ‘but it seems we are divided by six good inches of timber and stone. What has happened to you, child?’

‘E’ryfing wen’ wrog,’ Mosca explained through a mouthful of crusts, then swallowed. ‘There was folks waitin’ to ambush Sir Feldroll’s men outside the Twilight Gate, Locksmiths like as not, but the kidnappers ain’t working with the Locksmiths, and I think Skellow betrayed Brand Appleton and stuck him with a knife so he could grab the ransom, and the radish bounced off halfway cross the town with everyone chasing it and strike me blind if I know who’s got it now. Brand Appleton ain’t got it, and he ain’t got Beamabeth neither; all he got is a fever and a hole in his side the size of your pocket. But I did it, Mr Clent! I found out where the mayor’s daughter is being held! I did it!’

‘You found her? How? No – tell me later. Where is she?’

‘Top floor of a cooper’s shop in the Chutes, right near the holes where they drop the coffins into the Langfeather. Jus’ opposite a broken-down old stew called the Owl’s Head. But there’s no windows to Beamabeth’s room, and no way in but through the front door and five bravos. Sir Feldroll needs to send more men, because this is fist-and-cudgel work if I know it. So I come here to tell you.’ As Clent listened, Mosca poured out the tale of the many Clatterhorses and her last strange interview with Brand Appleton.

Clent exhaled slowly as he absorbed the news, eyes closed. ‘But… but how did you get here? Are you daylight side, child?’

‘No – I don’t exist! The musicians – they told me where to find the secret way in. I’m in some kind of cellar, with rugs, an’ little Beloved figures all set up like a shrine-’

‘A salvation hole!’ interrupted Clent. ‘I knew it! I had heard of such things – many rich houses had them built during the Civil War, to hide relatives or servants in danger of arrest. Under the chapel, no doubt, so that the unfortunates concealed could listen in on services and prayer. That answers the mystery of the orchestra! Two dayside musicians playing on the stage, and the rest making up the melody down in the salvation hole. Quite ingenious…’ Clent faltered and blinked hard. ‘Songs of the celestial, child, are you saying that you came into that hole unhindered? That there is a nightside entrance to this very house, and there is nothing to stop anyone simply wandering in?’

‘Nothing, unless they’re uncommon portly or fond of the skin of their knees,’ growled Mosca. ‘Any nightling who knows where to find the door could wander right in.’

‘So…’ Clent released his words carefully and slowly, as if they were pebbles to be dropped without rippling his thoughts. ‘All the while we were engaged in our secret conference in this room, plotting the manner in which we would lay an ambush for our kidnappers…’

‘… one of ’em could have been skulking down here, hearing every word!’ It gave Mosca a chill to think of it. ‘So they never needed a spy in the household after all!’

‘No wonder our ambush failed so abysmally,’ rejoined Clent, ‘if they knew all our plans, and had a hiding place ready so close at hand. I suppose they were hidden in the passage before dawn, emerged to abduct the young lady and then retreated back underground.’

Mosca felt a reluctant sting of compassion as she imagined Beamabeth, bound and gagged in the salvation hole for a whole day, able to hear her desperate would-be rescuers searching for her but unable to call out to them…

‘Well,’ murmured Clent, ‘I think now we know why secrets leak out of this house with such ease.’

Mosca frowned. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘That ain’t it – not all of it, anyways. Maybe this creep-hole tells us how Skellow’s boys dodged our ambush and whisked away Beamabeth Marlebourne, but it don’t explain how the Locksmiths found our letter drop, or were ready and waiting for Sir Feldroll’s men. We did not plan everything in this room, Mr Clent! Weave it how you will, there’s a Locksmith spy in among us.’

‘I fear you are right. In fact, I fear the mayor has trusted too many people with our secrets already. His steward, the Chief Clerk of the Committee of the Hours and the High Constable are all in his confidence. Worse still, I am not. I would be quite in the dark if I had not persuaded Mistress Bessel to look into it. She might show an unladylike ferocity of temper at times,’ Clent continued, in tones of quiet admiration, ‘but when it comes to finding things out, that woman is sharper than lemon. And, thank the Beloved, she has managed to win the mayor’s trust where I have failed. Just yesterday evening he remarked that she was the finest-’

But Mosca was not to learn what Mistress Bessel was the finest example of, for at this moment the front door crashed open. Through her tiny scope Mosca saw Clent scramble on to his knees, so that he seemed to kneel in prayer in the little chapel. However, it soon became clear that the new arrivals had no attention to spare for Eponymous Clent.

‘Help him – help him!’ Sir Feldroll was shouting. ‘And close the doors behind us, man – we do not want the whole world agog! My lord mayor, will you sit? Fetch him a chair!’

Confusion ensued, with a lot of people running around to show that they were eager and concerned.

‘Send for a physician!’ shouted Sir Feldroll. ‘Tell him his lordship has received a great shock and is suffering palsies of the limbs. Mistress Bessel – call for laudanum!’

‘A shock?’ Clent had risen to his feet again. ‘Simpering stars, has there been ill news of Miss Marlebourne?’

A terrible croak of a voice interrupted. It was hardly recognizable as that of the mayor. ‘No – worse! Worse!’

‘Worse?’ Sir Feldroll sounded outraged. ‘How can anything be worse?’

There was a sound of coughing and ragged breaths before the mayor spoke again.

‘The Luck… the Luck! The Luck of Toll has been stolen!’