Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Goodlady Blatchett, Lifter of the Stone from the Toad

After this announcement, nobody was any use for about five minutes. A young maidservant running in with the requested laudanum had by chance overheard the mayor’s words, and promptly went into such violent hysterics that she had to be dosed with it herself. She seemed convinced that Toll was about to pitch off the cliff into the Langfeather, like a tilted hat with its crucial pin removed. Worse still, the mayor seemed much of the same opinion.

Maddeningly, everybody wanted to rush about so that Mosca could not keep track of them, and nobody wanted to stand where she could see them through her little peepholes.

‘Send that girl to bed, and close that door!’ shouted Sir Feldroll at last. ‘Nobody leaves this house! If the common people find out that the Luck is stolen, half the town will be thrown into fits!’

‘Oh, probably a good deal more than half,’ Clent opined helpfully, and was ignored. Sir Feldroll however was not, and after a while things got a lot quieter.

‘Steady yourself, my lord mayor,’ came Mistress Bessel’s warm, motherly tones. Evidently she had entered with the rest. ‘How in the world did somebody come to steal the Luck?’ Remembering that Mistress Bessel had had her own ill-fated plans for stealing the Luck, Mosca suspected that she

was probably a little aggrieved that somebody else had managed it.

‘Through the clock face!’ The mayor had the breathless, rasping tones of one who has just been punched in the stomach. The kidnap of his daughter had left him towering and wrathful, but the loss of the Luck had apparently broken him. ‘They took advantage of the repairs to come in through the clock face on the front of the tower! I did not even know that that was possible!’

Mosca realized that she at least should have guessed that it was possible. Paragon had told her that he was in charge of adding the little wooden Beloved figures to the clock mechanism as required. Therefore there must have been some way of accessing the clock’s works from his cell. Under cover of repairing the clock, the thieves must have stealthily removed the cogs until they found the hatch into his private chamber.

‘So… you are saying that the Luck of Toll is an actual object?’ Sir Feldroll was keeping the situation under control very well, but was clearly a few pages behind when it came to understanding it. ‘I always assumed it was a figure of speech!’

‘Not an object… a person,’ answered the mayor. ‘A… a boy. The Luck of Toll is the person born under a more auspicious Beloved than anybody else in town, and thus granted the best and most fortunate name. They are shut away from the world, close to the bridge so that their luck seeps into it and keeps it aloft… and holds the cliff steady under us…’

‘A boy? Locked up inside a clock… so that his luck…’ Sir Feldroll cut short his sentence, perhaps realizing that it could go nowhere tactful. ‘Well, as far as I am aware the town has not noticeably fallen into the river, so if everybody could please recover their senses -’

‘Not yet, but the power of the Luck only holds while he or she is within the walls of the town,’ intoned the mayor. ‘Should they ever stray outside, then Toll’s good fortune leaves with them once and forever, and all is calamity. Then we shall see agues and poxes sweeping through Toll, and the wells filling with poison, and foes storming our gates unopposed, and the ground crumbling beneath us…’ Somewhere on the far side of the room the youngest footman started to whimper.

‘My lord mayor, you are not helping!’ exploded Sir Feldroll. ‘This is mere superstition! And besides, if the Luck is the fellow born under the brightest Beloved and gifted with the best name, then surely it is a simple thing to replace him? Who has the second-best name?’ There was a long pause, during which everyone singularly failed to sound as cheered as Sir Feldroll had evidently expected.

‘The second-best name in Toll,’ explained the mayor coldly, ‘is possessed by my daughter Beamabeth. Whom you have told us is also in danger of being spirited out of Toll. And besides, the title of Luck only passes on to the next-best name when the current Luck dies. If the Luck is taken outside Toll while still alive, then disaster and catastophe-’

‘Yes, yes,’ Sir Feldroll interrupted hastily. ‘I believe I have grasped the point.’

Mosca wondered if she was the only person who remembered that Paragon was a person in his own right, regardless of whether he was ‘lucky’ or not, and right now possibly a frightened and ill-treated person. Then again, given that he had lived under lock and key for nearly all his life, perhaps his existence might actually have been improved by being kidnapped. It would certainly have made it less monotonous.

‘Well,’ Sir Feldroll pronounced grimly, ‘surely everybody must now agree that things have gone far too far, and the strongest action is required. As I predicted, the ransom has been taken by the kidnappers, and Miss Marlebourne has not been returned to us. And now this further outrage! My lord mayor, surely you cannot still doubt the wisdom of striking at these radicals with all the might we can muster – striking at the very root and fountainhead!’

‘Ah…’ Clent’s cautious tones edged gingerly into the ensuing silence. ‘I hate to interrupt any eloquent and ardent speech… but do we have the slightest reason to believe that Miss Marlebourne and the Luck have been stolen away by the same party?’

‘The slightest reason?’ If Sir Feldroll had been an ordinary man, his tone might have been described as ‘shrill’. But he was a knight, so Mosca assumed he was probably just ‘impassioned’. ‘These blackguards Skellow and Appleton are kidnappers. They kidnap your girl Mye from Grabely, they kidnap Miss Marlebourne, and now, hey presto, we have another audacious kidnapping of a young and defenceless victim! The slightest reason? How stocky do you require your reasons to be, Mr Clent? Make no mistake, this is the handiwork of the same monsters. Appleton has undoubtedly fled with Miss Marlebourne, and now his men have taken the Luck to throw us into confusion, so that we lack the coordination to pursue Appleton and act against his radical allies.’

This was agony. Mosca had to bite down hard on her own knuckles to stop herself calling out. What Sir Feldroll had said made perfect sense, but he was so completely wrong! Brand Appleton had not left Toll, and neither had Beamabeth. Furthermore, from what Mosca had seen, Beamabeth Marlebourne’s kidnappers had been far too busy running around stabbing each other to kidnap anybody new.

‘Sir Feldroll is right,’ declared the mayor wearily. ‘I have given up as ransom a valuable item entrusted into my care as mayor… and all that has done is convince these villains that they might acquire anything they want through abduction. Sir Feldroll… I owe you an apology. You have been right all along, and I should have heeded you. You there – Pratewill! Run down to the Committee of the Hours and tell the Chief Clerk to come here immediately, with all the paperwork needed to grant a large number of men passage through Toll. A very large number of men. We strike – as you recommended from the start, Sir Feldroll – at the fountainhead! At Mandelion!’

What? mouthed Mosca in her nocturnal cellar.

Her mind was beset by a flurry of images as she remembered those she knew from the rebel government of Mandelion. A gentle-eyed idealist named Hopewood Pertellis, risking his life to run a secret school for the poorer children. A stiff-backed manageress named Miss Kitely, defending her floating coffeehouse from attack with the sangfroid of an admiral. A gruff-voiced highwayman named Captain Blythe, fighting a rooftop duel mid-river because it was the only way to save his people. And she remembered the city’s convulsions of happiness after the overthrow of the Duke, the festival flags, the carnival crowds…

‘My lord mayor,’ spluttered Clent, ‘good sir knight – are we not being a little hasty?’

‘No,’ Sir Feldroll replied promptly. ‘Appleton and his gang are radicals. None of these crimes would have occurred if they did not have the backing of Mandelion. I came to Toll two months ago with one purpose – to help the mayor see what we of the other cities had already seen – the necessity of marching upon this rebel city, arresting its so-called ‘government’ of felons and putting a respectable ruler in charge instead. Our armies are ready, sir – they have been ready since Mandelion’s revolution. All we need is your permission for them to pass through your town without paying a toll for every single footsoldier.’

Down below, Mosca yanked at fistfuls of her own hair, stifled a cry in her throat and jumped up and down in a fit of silent, impotent rage, nearly banging her head. You ninny! she snarled voicelessly at Sir Feldroll. You pudding-witted, pompous poltroon! Mandelion’s got nothing to do with any of this! Brand Appleton’s not even a real radical! And Mr Pertellis and the rest would never want anything to do with kidnapping or forcing people to marry people! You just want a reason to attack them!

Why don’t you say something, Mr Clent?

But of course he could not. There was still a snake in the grass, a spy in the inner circle, perhaps in that very room. Any plan he suggested in front of the spy would probably be doomed from the outset. Worse still, if Clent hinted at what he knew, people might want to know where his information came from, and those were questions he could not answer without endangering Mosca.

The Locksmith spy! Who was the spy? Mosca gave the question one last angry kick, just as she might have kicked a recalcitrant old travel chest. To her surprise, however, the imaginary catch clicked and the lid swung wide. She knew – quite suddenly and without any doubt – who had been spying on them all this time. Hastily she rummaged for her pin and poked it up towards Clent’s bootsole to get his attention… just as he stepped forward and off the stage to join the crowd in the centre of the room. Mosca’s pin was left to waggle uselessly, unnoticed.

By the time the Chief Clerk of the Committee of the Hours arrived, Mistress Bessel had asked Clent three times whether he had a headache and commented that he seemed uncommonly pale. In short, he was finding discretion every bit as agonizing as Mosca was. Being unable to speak was bad. Being able to speak but unable to explain anything of importance was, if anything, worse.

The raspberry-faced Chief Clerk was even more rubicund than usual, puffing self-importantly under the weight of a huge valise of parchments. Little red-headed Kenning came after him, bent backwards under a writing slope and a stack of boxes. Within five minutes the papers within would bear the mayor’s signature and seal, and the die would be cast.

‘Discretion above all,’ the mayor insisted. ‘If anybody hears that the Luck is missing and people start to wonder if it has been taken outside Toll, then nobody will be willing to use that bridge. And I think that will include the men in your armies, Sir Feldroll, whatever you might think.’

It was at this point that a crisp knock sounded at the door. The footman opened it, then leaned forward to peer, then stepped outside altogether. After an interval he returned, a wax-sealed letter in his hand.

‘Nobody there, my lord mayor,’ he explained apologetically, ‘but this letter left on the step.’

The mayor eyed it with raised brows, then broke the seal. He read it with increasing palpitations of face and limb.

At last he looked up and wordlessly gestured all of his servants from the room. When his only companions were Eponymous Clent, Jennifer Bessel, Sir Feldroll, the Raspberry and Kenning, he lowered his eyes and read the letter aloud, in a voice that shook like a loose sail.

To grayning Marlebourne, Lord Mayor of Toll,

Lest you think you had been robbed in the night, I thought I should write and inform you that the Luck of Toll is quite safe. It came to our attention during the repair of the mechanism in the Clock Tower that the location used for the Luck’s protection was very far from secure, and I believe the ease with which it was removed proves our point admirably. Therefore, for the sake of the town that we both hold dear, we have moved it to a far safer sanctuary, and are more than happy to take over the duby of keeping it secure on behalf of Toll.

My next priority shall be the recovery of your adopted daughter. I believe I might claim jurisdiction here, and must ask you not to take any steps of your own in this matter. I am a little surprised at having learned of this affair through sources other than your lordship, hub I daresay thab your missive simply faded bo reach me. You and I both know all too well how easily letters can go astray and fall into unexpected hands.

Your respectful servant,

Aramai Goshawk

‘ What? ’ Sir Feldroll strode up and peered over the mayor’s shoulder, almost as though he suspected the other man had been inventing the contents. ‘The Locksmiths? The Locksmiths stole the Luck?’

‘This,’ the mayor said heavily, folding the letter, ‘changes everything. There is no question now of attacking Mandelion. The Locksmiths state explicitly that we must take no steps of our own, and the Locksmiths have the Luck. My friends – I fear we must leave the matter of my daughter in the Locksmiths’ hand -’

‘Pardon me,’ interrupted Sir Feldroll, his voice icy and his face scarlet, ‘but I do not see that at all!’ His veneer of deference had all but frayed away, and he could be seen clearly now as the lord of a large city nearly out of patience with the mayor of a country town – a country town, furthermore, that was standing in his way. A storm was evidently in the offing.

At long last Eponymous Clent managed to catch Mistress Bessel’s eye. ‘These gentlemen seem to have… ah… a great deal to discuss. Perhaps, my dear Jen, you would join me for a moment in the chapel to… pray for the rescue of poor Miss Beamabeth?’

Come back, Mr Clent, I need to talk to you. Come back over here, Mr Clent…

How could Mosca get his attention? Rustle? Honk like a goose? But she could hear steps – he was coming back! She ran from peephole to peephole and finally found a view of him. He was returning to the chapel, but not alone. Mistress Bessel was with him. They knelt side by side on the stage, Clent’s face in a pious pout, Mistress Bessel glancing narrowly at him from time to time.

‘Dear Jen,’ whispered Clent eventually, his lips scarcely moving, ‘there is something you must know and – aaaargh! Prattle and pique, would you maim me?’

Mosca’s frantic thrusts with her pin had evidently made contact at last.

‘Eponymous! What means this yowling and writhing!’ demanded Mistress Bessel.

In the darkness below the stage, Mosca breathed hard and clenched both her fists, willing Clent to read her mind. The army of her thoughts was marching and her heart was its battle-drum.

‘A spasm of… spiritual anguish,’ answered Clent through his teeth. Mosca could just make out his fingers clutching at his newly injured knee. ‘Would you excuse me for a moment of… private prayer?’

An impatient sigh, and soft steps withdrew.

‘Your explanation will doubtless astonish and delight me,’ Clent hissed down towards Mosca’s chink.

‘You were going to tell her about me being here!’ hissed Mosca. ‘She hates me! She’ll betray me in a second!’

‘Child, if I ask the mayor to send reinforcements to Toll-by-Night without explanation, he will glare me to dust. But Mistress Bessel has a way with him. We need her in our strategems, child.’

Mosca held still a few moments, breathing great lungfuls of the musty air, her thoughts whirring as fiercely as spiked chariot wheels. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You are right, we do need her help. Listen, Mr Clent! I think I know who the spy is! And Mistress Bessel can help us uncover ’em. But before you tell her about me being here, first you got to make her promise not to tell anyone. Make her promise properly, the way the farmers trade oaths in the marketplace. You got to clasp her right hand, firm as you can, look her in the eye, and make her swear by the Beloved. Just like that, Mr Clent. Please.’

‘Oh… fates have mercy. Very well.’ Clent’s face disappeared again as he rose to his feet again. ‘Jen,’ he called aloud, ‘will you humour an old friend? If I might take you by the -’

His words were cut short by a screech that sounded more like a scalded vixen than any human sound. All other conversation in the room was killed in an instant. There was a shocked silence, then feet thundered from the room and down the passage to the front door, which banged open. A patter of steps receded into the drowsy noises of the winter morning.

‘Clent!’ bellowed the mayor. Mosca had the feeling that he had leaped to his feet. ‘What did you do to her, you devil!’

‘I… took her by the hand,’ faltered Clent, sounding stunned and incredulous. ‘All I did was… take her by the hand.’

‘But that scream! And the way she looked at you before she ran – as if you were something venomous!’

A long pause, then a soft but drawn-out sigh.

‘Jen.’ There was no obvious emotion in the word, and if Mosca had known Clent less well it might almost have sounded offhand. ‘Oh, Jen.’ Mosca found a peephole through which she could see the back of his head. He was still staring at the door by which his oldest friend had departed with so little warning.

Yes, Mr Clent. You understand it now. She leaped away and looked poison at you because you gripped her right hand. The hand she’s been protecting since the night of the Pawnbrokers’ Auction, where she sold her services for good and all. It’s why she couldn’t carry her own bags and boxes, why she couldn’t grab hold of me properly that day in the pleasure garden. It’s her palm, Mr Clent; it hasn’t had time to heal since the Locksmiths put their brand on it.

She’s a Locksmith, Mr Clent. It’s how she got into Toll after I stole her money. It’s why she changed her lace gloves for kid, so nobody could see the brand. It’s the reason she asked me to go after the Luck – the Luck that the Locksmiths wanted. She probably knew the Luck was a person and that I couldn’t steal it; all she really wanted was a description of the room so she knew if there was a way in… and I told her everything the Locksmiths needed to know.

‘I would not bother going after her,’ Clent remarked, as calmly as if he was recommending trout over tripe. ‘They will have given her very specific orders, you see, concerning where she is to run if she is, ah, unmasked. Preparations will have been made. By now she is gone, and I do not think we shall be seeing the lady again. She will be sent elsewhere – wherever the Locksmiths need her next.’

‘The Locksm- what? Impossible!’ The mayor sounded as if he might explode.

‘Far from impossible, I fear.’ Clent sighed. ‘Has anybody here seen her take off her gloves, even when sewing indoors?’ Silence. ‘My lord mayor, cast your mind back to your conversations with her. Did you, by any chance, confide in her the location of Mosca’s letter drop, or the imminent arrival of Sir Feldroll’s men the night before last?’

‘Do you mean to say that all this while she has been…? That duplicitous adventuress!’

‘No, no.’ Clent’s tone was wistful and gentle. ‘Just a sorry autumn soul. The tide of one’s years and fortunes goes out, and one is left on the shingle to scramble for a living as best one can. And the things one resolved never to do are suddenly a way of surviving long enough to see next year’s snowdrops. Ah, poor Jenny-wren.’

The mayor made a squashed noise. ‘Wren? No, vixen! Harpy! Yes, she tricked me into speaking of the letter drop and Sir Feldroll’s men! And all this last night, when she and I and my steward were locked in the counting house, her crocodile sympathy… coaxing me to tell her more of my daughter’s kidnap! The names of the kidnappers – the circumstances of her disappearance – the nature of the ransom itself!’

‘And… how much did you tell her?’

Silence.

Everything, thought Mosca. You told the old tabby-cat everything.

‘Ah. I see. But this does at least mean, gentlemen,’ Clent went on, ‘that I can at last unbind my tongue. For the last two days I have suspected that we had a spy in our midst, and could not speak freely without danger. But now… I believe that it is about time I told you all a story. A tale of a radish, a midnight horse race and a ferret-featured child with the devil’s own wits.’

And a tale he told of Mosca Mye, with much flash and flourish, a tale that took all dangers and made them magnificent as djinn, a tale that gilded each sickening gamble with a dashing nonchalance. A pair of coal-black eyes watched him from the dank cellar below, widening as their grubby, battered owner heard herself become a heroine for the span of his story. A story which ended triumphantly with an account of that daring heroine’s infiltration of the salvation hole.

‘But…’ The mayor seemed to be piecing things together. ‘Does that not mean that right now the child is…’

‘Over ’ere under the floor, yer lordship!’ Mosca called out. There was a host of small scuffles and thuds, suggesting that several people had jumped out of their skins.

‘Precisely.’ Clent sounded a little smug. ‘Forgive us our reticence, but it did not seem prudent to mention Miss Mye’s masterful intrusion before the Locksmith spy had been driven from our midst.’

‘My lord mayor – can the floor not be raised?’ asked Sir Feldroll.

The mayor gave orders, and tools were brought by mystified servants, but a few experiments with pick and saw quickly revealed that under the chapel’s tiles lay solid stone slabs on timber beams, sealed into place with mortar. There was no way to break through to Mosca’s cell and haul her up into the day.

Clent waited until the servants had left once more before continuing.

‘Gentlemen, thanks to our intrepid miniature agent below, we know where Miss Beamabeth is, and the Locksmiths at present do not – but, mark my words, if they mean to find her then they will. And when they have her what are they likely to do? To hand her back to her friends with a doff of the cap? Or will they perhaps tell you, my lord mayor, that they are better able to arrange her safety than yourself, just as they did with the Luck? Will they perhaps choose keep her in Night, like the old folktale about the Princess of Butterflies who married the Lord of the Dead? Or will they ask a second ransom, one that you can ill afford now that the first is gone?

‘If we wish to recover her, then it must be done with the greatest of haste. Rescuing her from the scurrilous Skellow and his coterie of cut-throats is likely to be hazardous… but I would not give half a fig for our chances of snatching her from the clutches of the Locksmiths once they have her. And if the nefarious Skellow does have the ransom it might, I fear, bode badly for the lady’s future unless we can slip in before, shall we say, the fall of the blade.’

‘The Locksmiths’ letter… the Luck… my hands are tied.’ Such a short time ago the mayor had seemed like a cliff of granite, towering, harsh and capable of weathering anything. But the recent succession of shocks seemed to have broken him apart. Now others could scoop him up by the handful like gravel, and the Locksmiths currently had the largest scoop.

‘Yes, my lord mayor,’ Clent hastened to agree. ‘Yes… your hands are tied.’ There was the tiniest hint of stress on the word ‘your’.

‘But mine are not,’ responded Sir Feldroll promptly. ‘And you, my lord mayor, are not responsible for anything I do. Perhaps, Mr Clent, you would be so good as to tell us what you have in mind?’