Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Goodlady Sylphony, Queen of Butterflies

Names were important. You carried your name like a brand. You never lied about it, for fear of angering the god under which you were born.

In theory, there were no unlucky Beloved. All of them had their place in the world, and even those who munched head lice or inspired the artistry of spiders’ webs were useful and to be praised. However, the fact was that some Beloved were seen as luckier, brighter, more trustworthy, more generous, more worthy, and so were those born under them.

As a child of Palpitattle, Mosca was used to seeing noses wrinkle and gazes chill when she admitted to her name. Palpitattle’s job was to keep the flies in order and out of mischief, but this he could do because he was a fly, the emperor of flies. The thinly veiled loathing she was sensing now, however, was something new.

The more devoutly someone worshipped the Beloved, the more seriously they took the lore of names, and the more severe the reaction. Looking around at the Beloved faces carved into every timber beam, and the painted Beloved in the Clock Tower, Mosca could see that the people of Toll took the Beloved very seriously indeed.

‘Let’s go warn this plump heiress, grab the reward and get out of this spittle-kettle,’ she growled.

‘It is true, dispatch is of the essence,’ muttered Clent as he surveyed the crowds. ‘We are a few steps ahead of your friend Skellow for now, thanks to your ingenuity in sending his Romantic Facilitator astray. However… we have received repeated warnings to be off the streets by dusk. Let us strive to have our business finished by then.’

After finding an inn, and reserving a room by flourishing the documents given to them by the Committee of the Hours, Clent, Mosca and Saracen set off to track down the imperilled heiress. Fortunately this proved to be relatively easy. The mere mention of ‘the mayor’s daughter’ brought gleaming smiles to the faces of the guards at the Clock Tower.

‘Ah, you’ll mean his adopted daughter, Miss Beamabeth Marlebourne! Oh, we all know of her, thank you, sir. She’s the Peach of Toll, the Perfectest Peony. Mayor Marlebourne’s family live in old judge’s lodgings, up in the castle courtyard.’ A vague gesture to the north. ‘Ask anyone as you go, they’ll all know where to send you.’

And indeed they did.

‘Ah, you’re going to speak with Miss Marlebourne? Then I envy you, sir, for she is the finest sight within Toll’s walls. Seeing her, you’ll think the Beloved made a person out of honeysuckle…’

‘Miss Beamabeth Marlebourne? Sweetest creature on ten toes. Smile like a spring day. Yes, just take this alley to the end, and you’ll see the brocade curtains she’s hung at her windows, bless her…’

Toll, tucked tight within its walls, had solved the problem of room by building upwards, and cramming as much as it could into a tiny space. Shops were stacked above shops, each with little wooden boardwalks in front of them for wares to sprawl. Some of these walkways even bridged the narrow streets, creating covered alleyways. Mosca soon got used to the creak of clogged and booted feet overhead. There was a smell too, which came as a shock after the chill, clear air of the open meadows, the stifling reek of a lot of people living close together – unwashed clothes, ginslops, last week’s mutton, chamber-pot throwings.

Toll was a hill town, and all its streets knew it. They were a hodgepodge of cobbled ramps, upwards zigzags, sudden flights of brick steps and abrupt drops. By the time Clent and Mosca reached the central plaza, Mosca was out of breath again, and completely, utterly out of patience with the catalogue of Beamabeth Marlebourne’s charms.

The name itself was a bitter pill. Mosca had been born on the cusp between Beloveds, barely half an hour into the eve ruled by Palpitattle. It was an open secret that her nursemaid had suggested that her father pretend she was born a little earlier, under the deeply auspicious Goodman Boniface, He Who Sends the Sun’s Rays to Bless the Earth. And if her father had listened, if he had been an ordinary man instead of a meticulous monster with a mind like a guillotine, right now Mosca would not be Mosca. She would be a ‘child of the Sun’, with a name like Aurora, or Solina… or Beamabeth.

Every time Beamabeth’s name was mentioned, faces lit up as though reflecting some distant radiance. All this love could have been hers. And what had Mosca’s life been as a child of Palpitattle, but a long string of attempts by the world to swat her? Irrationally, Mosca began to feel that this Beamabeth had stolen her name.

By the time they reached the castle grounds, the sun was dipping towards the horizon. Mosca, who had never seen a real castle before, felt some disappointment as she surveyed the ragged line of its perimeter wall and its roofless, lightless towers. The castle was certainly very large, and must have been magnificent many centuries before, but it had been bested by time. The sky had found a thousand ways in, and the turrets had traded their pennants for pigeons.

In the castle’s inner courtyard a market was breaking up with some dispatch, hawkers stacking teetering barrows with bow-headed urgency. One young chicken escaped its crate and, to Mosca’s surprise, its owner stared after for the only the merest moment of indecision before deciding to rattle her goods away instead of chasing it.

The judge’s house was attached to the inside of the castle’s perimeter wall and built of the same bristling grey flint. This was a much younger building, with high gables, perhaps a century old, and here at least the wink of firelight was visible through its stained-glass panes.

‘At last.’ Clent halted at the oaken door and pulled down the frayed hem of his waistcoat. ‘Now, child, let us bring warning to this poor-’

‘Rich,’ corrected Mosca.

‘To this affluent but imperilled girl,’ finished Clent. ‘And do try not to scowl as if you have lemon juice running through your veins, child.’

Mosca settled for stony instead of bitter as Clent rapped the knocker. A few moments later the door opened to reveal two footmen in mustard-coloured livery. Both footmen subtly craned their necks to read the designs on Clent’s name brooch before deciding how stiffly and respectfully to hold themselves. Mosca and the impatiently champing Saracen merited only the briefest, most disdainful slither of a glance.

‘I am Eponymous Clent,’ Clent declared with aplomb, ‘and I need to speak with Miss Beamabeth Marlebourne or her father on a Matter of the Gravest Urgency and Gravity.’

Mosca ground her teeth as both footmen went quite crosseyed with adoration at the mention of Beamabeth, and then one of them ran inside with the message. In a few moments he returned, surprise lifting his eyebrows so high that they were lost in his wig.

‘Miss Beamabeth will see you, sir.’

It’s just the name they’re all in love with, said the bitter, stinging voice in Mosca’s head. But it’ll be all right. You’ll see her, and she’ll have a squint, marks from the smallpox and a voice like a peeled gull.

The guard led them along a short hall into a comfortable-looking reception room, its tiled floor dapple-lit by stained-glass windows along one wall, the stone walls concealed beneath oak panelling and cloth hangings. A young woman in a green silk dress rose from her spinet as they entered.

Beamabeth Marlebourne was about sixteen, Mosca realized. Somehow, despite the mention of suitors, she had been half expecting to see someone younger, a girl her own age, a creature that had somehow crept into her birth-room and stolen her nameday. Beamabeth had honey-coloured hair which had been trained into a shimmering mass of ringlets, but managed to look natural rather than tortured. Her skin was creamy pale, with two pretty little coffee-coloured freckles just at the corner of one of her dark gold eyebrows. Her blue eyes were large and well spaced, her brow high, her nose small and her chin daintily pointed in a fashion that made her look a bit like a kitten. She smiled, and her eyebrows rose as if the pleasure of seeing them was almost painful. Her expression was as open as a flower.

It was hopeless. She was flawless. She was a sunbeam. Mosca gave up and got on with hating her.

A moment later Mosca realized that a man in his fifties was seated in a red damask armchair near the hearth. She had not noticed him at first, because unlike Beamabeth he had not bothered to stand. A gold chain of office winked on his chest, but the eyes beneath his thick brows had the watchfulness of a hard-biting old guard dog. This then was Graywing Marlebourne, the mayor of Toll.

‘Well, you would let them in,’ he told the fire irons with a slate-cold flatness. ‘So hear them, and have them out of here before the bugle.’

‘It is very late for visitors,’ said Beamabeth, as she looked the new arrivals up and down, her voice soft and carrying more of the local accent than Mosca had expected from anyone in a silk dress. Her tone made her words sound more like an apology than a criticism. ‘Usually Father likes to have the house locked up from an hour before dusk till an hour after dawn.’

‘Rest assured, ma’am, when you understand the urgency -’

‘Would you like to sit down?’ Beamabeth interrupted Clent without apparently realizing that she was doing so. Clent and Mosca obediently sat, Mosca keeping a tight hold on Saracen’s leash in case anything in this elegant room appeared edible.

‘Miss Marlebourne, I must come to the point, and I hope you will forgive me if my tidings distress you. You are, I fear, the target of an odious and felonious scheme. In short, there is a plan afoot to kidnap you and force you into marriage.’

Beamabeth’s eyes became pools of utter surprise.

‘What? But… I don’t understand.’ Her eyes flew to her adopted father, who had at last raised his eyes from the fire and was staring at Clent with an aggressively interrogative eye. ‘I… that is horrible. Somebody wants to do that… to me?’ The incomprehension in her face left no room for fear. It was the look of a kitten that has never been kicked, and merely stares at the boot speeding towards its small pink nose.

‘Brand Appleton,’ growled the mayor. He stood, caught up the poker and drove it into the heart of the clustered embers as if impaling a foe. ‘It has to be Appleton.’

‘Father, it might not be…’ Beamabeth looked dazzled, distraught. ‘I cannot believe that of Brand, even now.’

‘All right – let’s hear these people out.’ The mayor folded his arms, leaned against the high back of Beamabeth’s chair and subjected Mosca, Clent and Saracen to a withering glare. Marlebourne had over six foot of mayor-ness at his disposal and apparently knew how to use it to the best effect.

The tale of Skellow’s conspiracy was swiftly told, though in a rather piecemeal fashion, since neither Mosca nor Clent was in any great hurry to mention debtors’ prisons, counterfeit ghosts, cheated doctors or stolen handkerchiefs. There were occasional ragged holes of silence where such things were torn out of the story, but by the end Mosca was fairly sure they had patched it up well enough. As the story continued the mayor’s eyes narrowed, and Mosca found her mouth drying under his parching gaze.

At last he turned to Clent, his face smoothing to a more civil expression. ‘Sir, I believe that you have acted in good faith here… but before I send half the parish’s constables scurrying after this plot I need to be sure that you have not been practised upon. This girl says she learned of this conspiracy at an auction of the Guild of Pawnbrokers (the location of which she cannot give us) and through letters (which she does not have) and now she wishes to warn us of this Romantic Facilitator (whose name and face she does not know). Do you in fact have any evidence that is not dependent upon the word of this girl?’ His gaze dropped meaningfully to Mosca’s Palpitattle badge and he raised his eyebrows. ‘Children of Palpitattle are notorious liars, and this smacks of a taradiddle concocted in order to claim a reward.’

‘A taradiddle!’ Mosca jerked out of her seat to land on her feet, the sheer injustice of his words stabbing into her like a spur. ‘What about this, then?’ She held up her wrists to show the reddened marks where she had wrestled against the bonds. ‘Tied myself, did I? What about these?’ She showed the scratches on her arms, neck and face. ‘Do you think I jumped head first into a blackberry bush for fun?’

Beamabeth raised trembling fingers to cover her mouth, and the mayor’s face took on a slow, seething heat.

‘You might have been seized and bound by a beadle for some petty theft.’ The mayor’s tones were as pleasant and convivial as a boot full of ice water. ‘You might have tangled with a bramble bush while making your escape.’

Mosca could hardly breathe for rage and matched the mayor glare for glare.

‘Ah…’ Clent fluttered his plump fingers soothingly. ‘My young secretary is merely overwrought… a terrible ordeal… many apologies. Your Excellency, I grant that this girl cannot brandish signed confessions from the brigands in question, though were she the accomplished fraud you suggest she might well have had a few ready. Granted, we have accumulated little solid evidence, but we sped here pell-mell-’

‘Cos we thought the lady might want to know she was going to get grabbed before it happened instead of after,’ cut in Mosca sharply.

‘And granted,’ Clent snatched back the conversation once more, ‘this girl is a housefly, the merest and meanest of two-legged creatures, a virtuoso in the more trivial forms of vice. However, in this case I truly do believe her to be in earnest.’

All was silent for a second but for the sound of Mosca’s teeth grinding.

Beamabeth gestured shakily, and a servant brought in a tray with a steaming chocolate pot and several tall chocolate cups. Mosca was disappointed to discover, however, that the steam was tangy, and that the pot contained not chocolate but only hot elderberry wine.

‘Nonetheless,’ continued Clent, ‘if you want proof, my lord mayor, it is easily acquired. You now have the names of two conspirators. Can you not send some bold fellows to round them up, bundle them to the county jail and rattle a few truths out of them?’

If anything, the mayor’s frown deepened, and when he spoke his voice was heavy and hesitant. ‘Brand Appleton is a night-dweller, and to judge by his name so is this Skellow. They will be… under the jurisdiction of Thrope Foely, the Night Steward. I… would have to write to him and request his cooperation.’

Request? That seemed like a funny word to use. Surely if you were mayor you just ordered people to do things? Why should talk of arresting men at night suddenly make the mayor look so cloudy and mulish? After all, he must be in charge of the constables on duty at night as well as those on duty by day… surely?

Mosca’s sharp ears twitched. Yes, there it was, the unmistakable sound of something not being said.

‘No matter, there is a better option.’ Clent adjusted his badge. ‘Thanks to the ingenious mendacity of Miss Mye, Mr Skellow and his Romantic Facilitator will soon be waiting in vain for each other at different meeting places… and we know exactly when and where. Both can be intercepted if we are wily.’

The mayor’s eyes took on a fierce and glimmering interest, like embers glowing in a hoary log.

‘Go on,’ he growled.

‘This Romantic Facilitator believes he will be meeting Mr Skellow in Lower Pambrick at nine of the clock tomorrow morning,’ Clent explained crisply. ‘Send a few men out first thing tomorrow – or better still tonight – and have them seize a man waiting by the stocks wearing a Fainsnow lily.’

The response of both Marlebournes was to look appraisingly at the clock, then at one another.

‘Perhaps there is time…’ The mayor’s face took on a grim and urgent resolution. ‘A pity that you did not come an hour ago – I might have been able to contact my High Constable before he locked up for the night. No matter. Have all the men come in here a moment!’ Half a dozen footmen crowded into the room. ‘Now -’ he deigned to glance Mosca’s way – ‘what manner of man is the Romantic Facilitator looking for? Did you give him a description in your altered letter?’

Mosca rubbed at her nose. She had indeed written a description of Skellow, though one that owed more to spleen than charity.

‘Told ’im to look out for a bony, ugly old bag o’ spindles with skin like sackcloth and a grin like a sick fox,’ she muttered.

‘Bony and ugly,’ the mayor murmured under this breath. ‘You there, Gravelip! You are the boniest and ugliest, I fancy. Smile for us – as unpleasantly as you can!’

Gravelip, a young, slight footman with a pocked nose and large ears, obediently gave a smile like toothache. He seemed less than delighted to have outpaced his friends in the ugliness race.

‘Where’s my secretary?’ called the mayor. ‘There you are. Draft a letter to the Committee of the Hours asking whether there exists such a person as Rabilan Skellow, and whether he left Toll recently. Gravelip, as soon as it is written I want you to take it to the committee’s office… and then set out immediately for Lower Pambrick.’

Gravelip boggled and went pale. His mouth made helpless fish shapes that wanted to be a ‘but’. His eye crept fearfully to the darkening window. Mosca could not help noticing that other servants were hurrying in and out of the room with soft-footed urgency, closing shutters, lighting candles and in some cases moving furniture.

‘Oh, Father!’ Beamabeth seemed to have noticed his plight, and her eyes were big limpid pools of sympathy. ‘Father, we cannot! At this hour?’

There it was again. Something unsaid, something too ominous to mention.

‘Oh… very well.’ The mayor’s tone was far gentler as he reached out to pat his adopted daughter’s shoulder. ‘Gravelip – delivering the letter will suffice, and you may hurry back here afterwards. You will have just enough time to reach Lower Pambrick if you set off immediately after bugle tomorrow morning, with three stout fellows at your back. Collar this Romantic Facilitator for us.’

Gravelip looked quite weak with relief, and after the mayor had signed the letter, took it and hurried out without further ado.

‘Now – Mr Clent – I am loath to ask you to leave, but -’

‘Let them stay just a little longer. Please.’ Beamabeth turned her face, and rested her cheek against the mayor’s sleeve like a younger child. ‘I want to hear more.’

‘All right.’ The mayor glanced at the clock again. ‘But quickly. We exist for only a little longer.’

‘My lord mayor -’ Clent sipped his wine – ‘you mentioned a name just now. Who is Brand Appleton?’

There was a pause during which father and adopted daughter exchanged glances, and something thawed and relented a little in the former’s gaze.

‘Brand Appleton was a friend of the family – about a year older than me.’ It was Beamabeth who spoke. ‘He was an apprentice to a physician, and well thought of, and would probably have become a full partner in a year or two. And…’ she turned a little pink, ‘well, it all seemed a little like we might be married. But then it happened.’

‘What happened?’ asked Clent.

‘Mandelion,’ Beamabeth answered simply. ‘Mandelion was taken over by radicals overnight. People have explained it to me.’ Her brow crinkled. ‘Radicals are terribly dangerous, and if you don’t flush them out of your town then they eat away at everything like woodworm and, next thing you know, everything falls apart, and respectable people are hanged from the ramparts, and nobody has any coffee or chocolate.’ She looked a little sadly into her cup of hot elderberry. ‘Of course we’re safer here in Toll, with the Luck to protect us, but still…’ It took a moment before Mosca remembered the bridge guard talking of the Luck of Toll, the town’s mysterious protection against all disaster.

‘Anyway,’ continued Beamabeth, ‘everybody agreed that the radicals were a terrible threat. So the Committee of the Hours had to go back to their book of the Beloved and decide which of them were radicalish. Because we couldn’t have people born under radical Beloved running around our Toll; nobody would be safe. And so lots of people were reclassified.’

‘Reclassified? You mean… they got their daylight took away from them?’ asked Mosca.

‘Yes – the ones with radicalish names. And that’s when it all came out. Brand was born under Goodlady Sparkentress, She Who Helps Burn the Stubble to Ready the Earth for New Growth. And all these years we’d believed she was a lucky sort of Beloved – a bit hot-tempered perhaps, but very loving and courageous. But that day we found out that Sparkentress had been reclassified. All these years we’d known him, Brand must have been a radical underneath. It was a great shock to all of us. He seemed quite surprised too.’

‘I bet he did,’ muttered Mosca. It had been bad enough walking into Toll and having everyone treat her even more like vermin than usual. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like waking up one morning to discover you had gone from golden boy to public enemy without having done anything to deserve it.

‘Obviously I broke off his engagement to Beamabeth.’ The mayor took over the story. ‘The mere idea of some radical nightowl marrying a girl with the best name in Toll…’

‘Not quite the best,’ Beamabeth corrected him with a modest little moue.

‘No matter. It is a golden name, and you, my dear, are better loved than anyone else in this town. But rather than accept my decision Brand Appleton went utterly berserk and tried to fell me with a bust of Goodlady Syropia. My men had to roll him in a carpet before they could carry him from my house. And even now, despite being unable to walk in daylight, he has hounded my daughter by leaving gifts for her in the courtyards and gardens. He nearly blocked the western chimney by dropping rocks down it with poems wrapped around them.’

From outside there came the faint sound of a bugle.

‘My dear – the hour. We can delay no longer. These people must leave to seek their accommodation immediately.’ There was no denying an edge of alarm in the mayor’s voice.

‘Yes… yes, I see they must.’ Beamabeth stood, walked over to Clent and held out her hands for him to take. Her smile was very simple and very sweet. ‘Thank you, Mr Clent. Thank you for coming to warn me. I would be much more afraid if you were not here, if I did not know that you were investigating this to keep me safe.’

‘I…’ Clent looked about him with the trapped gaze of a spider sinking into honey. ‘The pleasure and honour is mine, my dear Miss Marlebourne. Rest assured, I shall discover more and keep you informed. Farewell for now, and good fortune to you.’

Mosca kept her tongue pushed into her cheek where it could do no damage until she, Clent and Saracen had been shown out of the house and were back on the sunset courtyard.

‘So,’ she began when she could hold in her words no longer, ‘this reward, then.’

‘Will be ours, child, will be ours. When the mayor has his proof. But first we have a duty to that poor girl -’

‘Rich girl.’

‘… to that brave little sylph to discover more about the shadowy threat-’

Something bitter that had been welling in Mosca’s stomach exploded out of her.

‘We did our duty! We warned her! And she’s got footmen and guardians and the mayor and half the town looking out for her! And she just poured us a dribble of hot punch each and then packed us off to do more danger-work for her! And don’t tell me we offered, Mr Clent, because we didn’t. She accepted the offer we didn’t make.’

‘Mosca -’ Clent stopped walking for a moment – ‘I seem to remember that coming to Toll, scotching Mr Skellow and warning Miss Marlebourne was your idea?’

‘Yeah.’ Mosca swallowed hard. ‘But that was b’fore I met ’er.’

Clent stared at her. ‘Mosca, whenever I think I have the measure of your malice I chance upon some hidden pocket of ill temper I had not suspected. In this case it is frankly incomprehensible. If you must choose a target for your bile, why choose her? A girl who already has unseen enemies, who has treated you with nothing but kindness and civility, who is making the best of hard times. Who even let you share in her shrinking stock of elderberry wine.’

‘Yeah, she did,’ Mosca answered through her teeth. ‘And, Mr Clent? If I hear any more ’bout how wonderful she is, that elderberry wine’ll be back to see the light of day. I just want to be sure that once we’ve got that reward we leap out of Toll like fleas off a hot rock and don’t hang about investigatin’.’

Despite herself, Mosca’s voice faltered a little as she looked around the castle courtyard, which seemed to have become larger now that the shadows were longer. The busy market had been stripped away, leaving an ominous space where rutted grass was the only hint of barrows, stalls and hobnailed boots.

The disquieting atmosphere stung a new haste into the steps of Mosca and Clent, and they first strode, then jogged back to the main streets of Toll, only to find them largely empty.

Mosca remembered the words of the ‘Raspberry’.

There will be another bugle call at sunset – this will be a signal that you have no more than a quarter of an hour to get back to your appointed residence. You must – must – make sure that you do so.

It had been ten minutes since the bugle sounded, and suddenly these words did not seem quite so comical any more.

‘Mr Clent…’

‘I know, madam, I know…’ Clent’s voice had the levelness of ice-touched panic.

Door after barred door. Shuttered window after shuttered window. Wooden ladders pulled up on to boardwalks. Wells covered. Slate roofs dulling from jackdaw blue to rook black as the sun melted into the horizon…

In the silence the sudden bang of a shutter rang like a gunshot. Both Mosca and Clent reflexively broke into a run towards the sound. Turning the corner they found a small inn whose door was still ajar. Outside it a plump and perspiring woman was struggling to close a pair of stiff and rusty shutters, wide-eyed as a rabbit with a fox upwind.

‘Help me!’ she squeaked when she saw them, and they threw their weight against the shutters and forced them closed. Then the woman jerked upright and raised a hand for silence.

A few streets away chimed a faint, metallic sound. A rattling, musical jingle-jangle.

‘In!’ she snapped huskily, seizing Mosca’s collar and Clent’s arm. ‘What you waiting for? In! In!’

Her terror was contagious, and in an instant they gave up all thought of the inn where they had booked rooms. Instead, they let themselves be bundled in through the open door, which was immediately slammed to behind them. Looking around, Mosca could see that quite a mob had been hovering by the door waiting to throw the latches to. The same suppressed terror was obvious in every face, in the tone of the whispered exchanges.

‘It’s done? We’re closed in? We’re tight?’

‘’Tis done. But that was closer than skin. Listen – here they come!’

Everyone in the tiny, cramped room hushed, and again Mosca heard the frosted metallic jingle, now much closer, gliding down the street like a sleigh bell. Then there were more ringing jingles, as if a whole company of sleighs had found a way to float down the snowless cobbles. All along the street an orchestra of strange noises began to call and answer one another. Grinding thuds. Fat clicks and thin clicks. Skreeks of metal on metal. Whumps and whams.

In spite of her terror, or perhaps because of it, Mosca knelt and put her eye to the inn’s keyhole. She saw only a blurred impression of twilit cobbles, of a dark figure dragging something across the front of the house opposite… and then suddenly there was a slamming noise, and something impenetrably black cut out her view of the street.

The strange cacophony seemed to move on further up the street, and then to the next street. Still the company in the cramped little inn remained hushed. At last another set of sounds became audible, and this time Mosca recognized them instantly.

The rhythmic clash of iron shoes on stone. The echoing rattle of wheels on cobbles. The huffing of horsebreath. Somehow in this teeter-top town of ups and downs, someone had brought a horse-drawn coach and was riding it through the crooked lanes half an hour after the signal to clear the streets.

Mosca looked at the set, tense faces around her, and asked no questions. There would be no answers here.

There was a heavy silence, and then a dull booming note, the distant sound of a bugle being blown a second time.

‘All right,’ the plump landlady said at last, ‘you can talk now if you do it quiet. No shouting, no banging, no existing. Changeover’s done. Night-time, gentlemen.’