Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Goodman Parsley, Soother of Painful Mornings

There were no rooms spare for Clent and Mosca, of course, but the landlady let them lie on rugs by the hearth next to her scrawny, soppy-eyed dogs. A fire was a fire, and a roof was a roof, and a rug was closer to a bed than the bracken-and-hedgehog mattresses that Mosca had known of late, so she curled up and slept with Saracen on her chest.

When she was at last woken by a young ostler politely and carefully stepping on her head in his attempts to rake out the dead coals, she found that pale daylight was painting diamond shapes across the inn’s narrow, crowded room. Whatever night had brought, it had packed it up again and taken it away.

But night would be back, and as Mosca looked at her dark wood badge she felt the same chill she had experienced in the twilit streets the night before. She had been right all along. There was something wrong in Toll, something that nobody was willing to discuss, something more than the nervousness caused by an ordinary curfew. The landlady struggling to shut up her inn had been afraid of something more terrible than a fine or a night in the cells. And why should even the mayor be so afraid of his own curfew?

Hopefully she would never need to answer these questions. Perhaps at this very moment the mayor’s men were striding back from Lower Pambrick, dragging the Romantic Facilitator. Surely that would be enough proof for the mayor? She had to hope so.

It was half past eleven when Mosca and Clent once again found themselves outside the front door of the mayor’s house. They were shown into a dingy little side parlour instead of the main reception room, and immediately Mosca detected something sour in the situation, like a mouthful of bad milk.

They were left there in unexplained silence for fifteen minutes, and then the mayor strode in and subjected them to a dull, hot glare.

‘I am surprised,’ he growled, ‘that you had the impudence to return here this morning.’

This was not a promising start to any conversation. The fact that the greeting and the glare seemed to be reserved for Mosca alone did nothing to make her feel better.

‘My lord mayor-’ began Clent.

‘Cast her off, Mr Clent,’ the mayor interrupted without ceremony. ‘Wherever you found this…’ he waved a hand at Mosca, ‘this thistle-child, throw her aside before she stings you any more. She has taken advantage of your good humour and trust, sir, and wasted the time of honest fellows in my pay. Gravelip and his companions have just returned from Lower Pambrick, having encountered no sign of this so-called Romantic Facilitator.’

‘None at all?’ Clent looked surprised, crestfallen, then speculative. ‘My lord mayor… how exactly did your men lie in wait for the villain?’

‘There was precious little chance to lie in wait, for they only reached the marketplace at nine o’clock to the very second. I believe Gravelip stood before the stocks as described in the letter, while the others hid behind it. They waited for half an hour, and saw no sign of anybody with a Fainsnow lily.’

‘And small wonder, if three of them was hiding right behind the stocks!’ exclaimed Mosca hotly. ‘The Facilitator was no green shoot. I read his letter and he was sharp. He probably took one look at your boys playing peek-a-boo, then stuffed his lily back in his pocket and slipped away. I would have done, in his shoes.’

‘A glib answer.’ The mayor folded his arms. ‘Perhaps you will be as quick in explaining why the Committee of the Hours’ records show that Rabilan Skellow, citizen of nighttime Toll, was not at large in the vales two nights ago, and has not in fact left this town in the last two years?’

There was a silence during which Mosca gaped.

‘Apparently not,’ the mayor muttered with steely restraint. ‘Her river of invention appears to have run dry.’

‘Good sir!’ Clent recovered his composure before Mosca. ‘This is… most peculiar, I grant you… but I still have faith in this child’s story. One conspirator, alas, has had the good fortune to slip through our fingers, but the infamous Mr Skellow will be waiting at dusk tonight in Brotherslain Walk-’

‘Do you really expect me to risk honest men out on the streets at dusk – on nothing more than this girl’s word?’ snapped the mayor. ‘No! This is the end of the matter. Mr Clent, my daughter has been taken ill this morning, having spent the night sleepless with anxiety over this imaginary kidnap plot. Nonetheless she has asked that your girl should not be dragged into the Pyepowder Court for slander and fraud, and for her sake I shall leave you to punish your own secretary. Should I hear of my daughter being troubled by any further fictions from the same source, however, Mr Clent, I shall be a lot less lenient. Good day to you, sir – and may you have better fortune in choosing your servants in future.’

They were shown out rather firmly by two footmen, one of whom Mosca recognized as Gravelip. Curiously, he looked decidedly unwell, and seemed even more reluctant to meet Mosca’s eye than the rest. It was only when he opened the front door, and she noticed him wincing at the daylight, that she guessed at the reason for his greyish pallor and the unsteadiness of his gait. In an instant her temper went from simmering to seething.

Face carefully bland and meek, she stopped in the doorway just as Saracen was next to Gravelip’s feet and stooped to adjust her goose’s muzzle. She took enough time doing this that Gravelip became impatient and tried to nudge the goose off the threshold by gentle but firm application of his boot to Saracen’s white, waggling posterior.

After the screams had died down and Gravelip had been carried back into the house by his fellows, clasping a twisted ankle, Mosca looked up to find Clent regarding her with a long-suffering air.

‘Madam! In what way is our situation improved by setting your homicidal familiar on members of the mayor’s household?’

‘Well, it made me feel a dozen yards better!’ Mosca was aware that she was drawing stares from others in the castle-courtyard marketplace, but did not care. ‘Did you see that prancing, lug-eared ninny of a footman? Whey-faced, sick as a pig and smelling of the parsley he’s been chewing to make himself feel better. I know that look. I’ll bet my last button he was up all hours drinking last night – which is why he’s as queasy as a shoe full of eels today. You saw him! Can you imagine him leapin’ out of bed before dawn, or riding full gallop to Lower Pambrick without losing his breakfast or falling off his horse? I can’t. Do you know what I think? I think him and his friends staggered out of bed too late to make it to Lower Pambrick in time… but they all pretended they had so they wouldn’t get into trouble. No wonder he couldn’t look me in the eye!’

‘Ah.’ Clent appeared to reflect, then inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘You might have the right of it, child.’

‘And if I try to tell them, nobody will believe me! Not against Gravelip, with his Goodman Juniperry name!’ Mosca stamped and fumed like a muslin kettle.

‘Be it even so, now is the time for calm calculation… and not for sending your web-footed apocalypse on a one-goose rampage through the house of the mayor. Mosca, rein in that viperish temperament of yours, and we shall yet have the reward. It will simply take longer than we thought.’

‘It’s all right for you,’ snapped Mosca. ‘You can wait around for that reward long as you like. I got three days.’ Until yesterday Mosca had been trapped between two rivers, desperate to get out before winter arrived. Toll had looked like her only means of escape. Now, however, she wondered if she had traded one prison for another, a smaller prison with high walls. If she was not out of it before her allotted time as a visitor ended, then the mysterious night town with its twilight cacophony would claim her.

‘Have no fear – we will be out in three days, child,’ Clent murmured. ‘By hook or by crook.’

Probably by crook, thought Mosca, noting Clent’s narrowed gaze.

‘Something extremely peculiar is happening in this town,’ continued Clent, ‘and since we have a duty to call in at the Committee of the Hours in any case, let us begin our enquiries there. And… Mosca? I have a suggestion. Carry your demonfowl in your arms. It will cover your badge as we pass through the streets.’

As it turned out, this strategy was only partly successful. Wearing a dark wood badge earned one suspicious and hostile glares, but so did carrying around oversized, cantankerous waterfowl with a penchant for cheerfully pecking people in the eye. With Saracen in her arms, however, Mosca did find the crowd more likely to part before her, and thus she was able to look around and observe more of the town. Once again she was struck by the way Toll’s brightly painted wood and plaster contrasted with the grim, flint-ribbed cottages of the villages in the county she had just left.

Mosca was already disposed to regard Toll bitterly, and everywhere she looked she found reasons to compare it unfavourably with Mandelion. With her endless thirst for reading she looked for posters and found almost none. Bet nobody here can read without mouthing the words, she thought.

‘Interesting,’ Clent said after they had been walking for a little while. In answer to Mosca’s questioning look, he flicked a glance to the nearest hanging sign, which showed a row of painted candles. ‘A town is like a tapestry, Mosca, a story to be read from pictures. Look at the shop signs, and tell me what they tell you.’

They walked on in silence for a little longer, and Mosca obeyed, staring at the signs that swung over doors and along walkways. Some were tavern signs, some bore symbols of the various guilds of the Realm. The Stationers, the Wig-makers, the Playing-card Makers, the Watchmakers, the Goldsmiths – the powerful guilds that kept the splintered Realm from collapsing into anarchy, and who nonetheless spent their time circling one another, wary as winter wolves.

‘Well?’ Clent asked at last.

‘Pawnbrokers.’ For the sixth time, Mosca had caught sight of the triple hanging bauble of the Pawnbrokers’ Guild. ‘There’s lots of pawnbrokers.’

‘Indeed. No doubt many pay their way into Toll in the hope of earning or begging enough money to pay their way out again, and end up pawning everything they own. What else do you notice? What is missing?’

Mosca chewed her cheek for a moment, then inspiration struck her.

‘Coffeehouses! There are no coffeehouses!’

Back in Mandelion there had been half a dozen of them.

‘No coffeehouses,’ agreed Clent. ‘No chocolate houses either. No tobacco-sellers. None that are in business, anyway.’ He paused, dusted a grimy pane with his sleeve and looked in through a window into an abandoned shop where pipe racks were still visible under a fine fur of dust. ‘And look at the stalls – can you see any silks, any Laemark lace, any loaves of sugar, any spices?’

Mosca realized that she could not.

‘All the big cities and towns in the Realm, including Toll, have agreed that they will not trade with Mandelion,’ Clent murmured, ‘in the hope of starving her out. What none of them seems to have noticed is that Mandelion is a port. If she needs anything, she can send out ships and trade with other countries. Mandelion does not suffer greatly from the ban – but Toll does.

‘Mandelion is the only major port on this part of the coast. Toll needed Mandelion, needed the traders who came to and fro through this town, paying in silver and loaves of Salamand sugar, gold and Grenardile port.’

‘So… that’s why they put the tolls up, then? They’re running out of money here too?’

‘You have the beginnings of perspicacity. Now… what is not visible in these streets? What is there here that we cannot see?’

Mosca made a number of guesses. ‘A way out of town’ was apparently not the right answer. Neither was ‘any sign of that chirfugging reward’.

‘Think.’ Clent’s impatience was evidently being held at bay only by his pleasure in revealing his own cleverness an inch at a time. ‘What do you remember about these streets last night, just before we found sanctuary?’

‘You mean apart from all the doors fastened against us, and the great, big bolts, and the giant latches on the shutters, and the great, big shiny locks on the… oh.’

A penny descended with an inaudible plink. Mosca stood back and looked up and down the street. Nowhere did she see a sign with silver keys crossed on a black background.

‘There should be ’undreds of ’em,’ she muttered, instinctively lowering her voice. ‘Toll locks itself up like a chest every night – there must be guineas’ worth o’ good locks in every street.’

‘Indeed.’ Clent cast a nervous glance over each shoulder, despite the fact that neither had spoken the word that was in both minds.

Locksmiths.

‘So,’ whispered Mosca, ‘where are they? Why aren’t they here?’

‘Oh, they are here.’ Clent’s words slipped out through barely open lips. ‘We cannot see them, but they are here in Toll. Mark my words.’

They reached the Committee of the Hours just in time to avoid Clamouring Hour. All over the Realm, for one hour every other day, it was traditional for bells to be rung in worship of each and every Beloved, not only in the churches but in every house and public place. In towns and cities the sound was usually deafening, and it was a good idea to be indoors when it happened.

The Raspberry was still enthroned in full glory when they entered the office of the Committee of the Hours. As before he managed a nod of smileless courtesy towards Clent, and icily ignored Mosca. While young red-headed Kenning ran to claim their visitors’ badges and replaced them with ‘second-day’ badges bordered in yellow, Clent took pains to engage the Raspberry.

‘Good sir, I have been admiring your town’s, ah, curfew arrangements.’ Clent’s voice was careful. ‘An… intriguing system. And very logical.’ He flicked the briefest glance across at Mosca before moving companionably towards the Raspberry and adopting a confidential tone. ‘After all… if one knows who the bad apples will be from birth, then why mix them with the good?’

‘Precisely.’ The Raspberrry glowed with satisfaction. ‘It has served us well for eighteen years, ever since Governor Marlebourne established it. All through the Civil War and the Purges we held to it, sir, which is why Toll retained order even when the rest of the Realm gave in to butchery and brouhaha. And for the last two years our system has been nigh infallible, thanks to the new measures.’ He mimed turning a key in a lock.

‘It must present some ingenious problems, however.’ Clent frowned. ‘That is to say… is it not difficult for the day town to keep track of what happens at night? For example, how can your committee keep track of those who enter or leave the town during the hours of darkness?’

‘Oh, that is really quite straightforward,’ the red-faced clerk assured him. ‘The Night Steward’s office passes our committee all details of those who are born, who die, who leave and who arrive in the night town so that we can enter them into the town’s records.’

‘I suppose -’ Clent hesitated – ‘that the Night Steward’s Office never makes… mistakes. Have they ever left names off the records they give you?’

The Raspberry managed to redden about the neck and blanch across the cheeks at the same time. He cast a fearful glance towards his papers as though they might suddenly rebel against him.

‘That,’ he whispered, ‘is unthinkable.’ In Mosca’s experience, such statements generally meant that a thing was perfectly thinkable, but that the speaker did not want to think it.

‘But, my good sir,’ Clent followed up his advantage, ‘how exactly are the reliable clerks and forces of law chosen for the night town? Surely any appointed constables must have trustworthy names, so if everybody with a trustworthy name is a day-dweller…’

Clent let the sentence trail. The Raspberry did not pick it up. It lay there on the desk between them like a stunned weasel.

‘So,’ Clent tried again, ‘the Night Steward and his men control the town at night? Might I ask what manner of men can have names bad enough to be barred from daylight, yet names good enough to be placed in charge of law and order after dark?’

‘There are certain kinds of cur,’ the Raspberry said after a long pause, ‘whom you would never let in the house, but which are good enough to guard the yard. Biters and barkers, but suited to the task once you have them on a leash.’

It was clear that the bristling clerk would not be further drawn, so Clent sighed and changed the subject. The Raspberry appeared all too happy to seize upon a new topic of conversation.

‘… ah yes, of course I remember that scapegrace Brand Appleton.’ Gradually the Raspberry was thawing again, his colour mellowing to a gentle raspberry wine. ‘Reclassified as a nightling just a few months after his engagement to Miss Beamabeth Marlebourne. Nothing to be done about it, of course. Young Appleton made a fuss and talked of appealing or rattling our heads until our ears fell off, but what do you expect from someone born under Sparkentress? Showing his true colours at last, that is all. Miss Marlebourne had a lucky escape there. And of course her father is considering a far better match for her now – you have heard of Sir Feldroll, I trust? The young governor of Waymakem.’

So the mayor planned to marry his daughter to some young noble from another city. Mosca filed the detail away for later. Waymakem was a small thriving city on the far side of Toll, the side that she and Clent so urgently wanted to reach.

‘Of course, some say that it is partly a political marriage,’ the Raspberry added in a lower tone. ‘Waymakem and other cities to the east have been raising an army, hoping to march on Mandelion – the radical city – and put a respectable government in charge. But they are all on the wrong side of the Langfeather. The best and nearest bridge is ours, and they do not want to be setting about a long march with winter setting in. And they cannot pass through Toll without paying tithes for every soldier, unless they win our mayor around, so Sir Feldroll came to Toll to do just that.’

Mosca pricked up her ears again. It was not so surprising to hear that other cities wanted to crush Mandelion. After all, what powerful lord would want his lowly populace hearing of this radical city with its wild notions of equality, and getting ideas?

What was perhaps more surprising was the way Mosca’s spirits surged to the defence of the rebel city, despite the fact that it had brought her nothing but trouble. It was too late to stop her Getting Ideas. Not only had she seen the fiercely joyful Mandelion reborn, she had been a tiny part of making it what it was. When its name was spoken she felt more than affection, she felt a pride so powerful it hurt.

Fortunately it sounded as if for the moment most of Mandelion’s enemies could do nothing but shake their fists from across the Langfeather.

‘So… where is Appleton now? Is anything more known of him?’ Clent had a manner of polite and engaging interest.

‘Nightbound. Probably not dead – there would have been a report. Of course we regularly review all the borderline Beloved in case they need to be reclassified, but Sparkentress?’ He shook his head. ‘Nightbound, and unlikely to change. Still, a small price to pay for a safe town.’

Safe, is it? Mosca gave a small snuffle of bitter mirth. Funny how nervous people get around dusk, then, isn’t it?

Taking advantage of this pause in the conversation, Kenning darted up like a dragonfly, and dipped his head to whisper in the Raspberry’s ear.

‘Indeed? I see. Mr Clent, it seems that a message has been left here for you. Apparently a lady wishes to speak with you.’

Clent glanced at Mosca. She guessed that he had reached the same conclusion as herself. The only lady in Toll who might have a reason to speak to them was Beamabeth Marlebourne. Her father had described her languishing in her sickbed, but perhaps his daughter was capable of acting on her own behalf. Perhaps she was even capable of secretly slipping out of her father’s house, if she had something important enough to say. Beamabeth would know that all visitors had to report to the committee each day. It was the best and easiest way to get word to them.

‘And, ah… did she say how I might find her?’

‘She said that she would be in the pleasure gardens by the Dovespit Playhouse until one of the clock, Mr Clent.’

‘Then we shall thank you kindly, and make our farewells. A lady should not be kept waiting.’ Perhaps it was Mosca’s imagination, but she thought the Raspberry seemed somewhat relieved to see them go. Then again, perhaps that was just because of Saracen’s muzzled but persistent attempts to eat Kenning’s inkwell.

As they left, they passed a crowd of people half dragging, half carrying a small bespectacled man to the Clock Tower like a trophy.

‘… no badge…’ she could hear them explaining animatedly to the guards. Sure enough, there was no wooden badge pinned to his jacket.

‘I can explain!’ he squeaked as he was manhandled inside. ‘I lost it! It… it must have fallen off my coat on to the grass! I tell you I am a visitor! A visitor!’ The door closed behind him and his captors, cutting short his wails of dismay.

Glancing up at the Tower Clock again, Mosca noted with a grim satisfaction that it was showing the wrong time. Good-lady Sylphony, who should have held dominion only over yesterday’s afternoon and evening, was still smiling in the arch instead of having been replaced by Goodman Parsley, the lord of this particular day, from dawn until teatime. Up on the roof of the tower itself she could see a shabby wooden crane from which a rope was dangling to trail across the clock’s face. Presumably it had been used to lower some unlucky artisan to work on the clock.

That clock’s a lot like the town, she decided. Looks good, sounds great, pretends to be some sort of masterpiece. But it’s broken. It’s rotten and broken right down inside where its heart’s cogs meet. That’s Toll.

The Dovespit pleasure garden, like everything else in Toll but the castle, had clearly suffered from lack of space. It was a clenched-looking ribbon of green between two stepped slopes, each studded with shrubberies, tiny grottoes and dwarf trees. In the doorway of a peeling pavilion littered with dead elder leaves they saw a single white parasol leaning against the jamb.

‘Look brisk, madam.’ Clent took the lead. ‘And this time try not to throw your gaze like a spear. The girl is gentle. Frightened. Well brought up. Thwark.’

The last word was delivered in the same calm undertone as the rest, possibly because his brain had not caught up with the fact that a snow-white parasol had just hit him in the face.

‘Thwark!’ he repeated as it hit him again, this time managing to deliver the word with the right tone of pain and surprise.

Beamabeth had changed, Mosca decided dizzily as she gazed up at the white-clad figure in the pavilion doorway. Changed… into Mistress Jennifer Bessel. Mistress Jennifer Bessel in a white muslin gown and grey shawl and kid gloves, showing no particular sign of being locked out of Toll.

Clent gave a squawk, which he somehow managed to turn into a pleased gasp of surprise, though his feet were still tending towards a rapid backwards gavotte.

‘My good gay Jen!’ He reached to firmly grasp both her hands, thus saving himself a parasol swipe to the midriff. ‘How very… ingenious of you to surprise us like this! Naturally we expected you to find some way into Toll, but you have surpassed yourself!’

‘I’ll run for a constable!’ squeaked Mosca. Mistress Bessel’s broad right hand snatched out, taking a firm grasp on Mosca’s forearm and pulling her off balance. The next moment, quite unexpectedly, Mistress Bessel released her hold with an oath. Mosca, who had been straining against her grip with all her might, promptly fell bewildered to the ground, losing her grasp on Saracen.

Mosca had no time to wonder at her sudden release, however. As her flank hit the turf there was a snapping sound, and then an ominous silence. She lay winded for a moment, then gingerly pushed her bonnet back from where it had fallen over her eyes. She froze, belly pressed to the ground.

Somehow during her fall, the frame of Saracen’s muzzle had become cracked. She was just in time to see him shake it from his face. His wings were half raised and his neck extended before him. Something had bumped and bruised him, and he was trying to work out what it was.

A second passed in which Mosca, Clent and Mistress Bessel stared at him wordlessly, then they all moved as one. Or rather, they moved as three – three each individually bent on self-preservation. Clent swiftly slipped in through the pavilion door and climbed on to a wicker chair, the seat of which promptly gave out under his weight, leaving his legs trapped within the frame. Mistress Bessel displayed remarkable agility, not to mention a pair of chocolate-and-cream striped stockings, as she hoisted her skirts and clambered into a nearby nymph-bedecked fountain. Mosca settled for wrapping both arms over her bonneted head and staying as flat and low as she could.

All were acquainted with the full destructive might of a Saracen enraged.

‘Might I ask,’ Clent ventured at last, his tone no louder nor angrier than a summer breeze, ‘what has brought you down upon us like a thunderbolt?’

‘That girl,’ murmured Mistress Bessel, her voice mellow as a cooing dove, ‘has ate my stew, milled my handkerchiefs, cheated the good doctor before he could buy me dinner and forked my money. And I’ll dance coin that she did so on your orders.’

‘You was going to leave us to rot in Grabely,’ was Mosca’s muffled offering. She paused to spit out a mouthful of dandelion clock. ‘Anyways, got in, didn’t you?’

‘How does that help me?’ Mistress Bessel’s tone sharpened, and then as Saracen swung his head to look at her, it once again became carefully buttery. ‘I did have enough money to get me through Toll and out the other side, before you stole from me. Now I’m scoured out.’ She examined Mosca and Clent keenly. ‘And you’re no better, are you, my sweetmeats? We’re all high and dry, flapping our gills and praying for rain.’

‘My most inestimable madam -’ Clent’s eyes slid from side to side, following Saracen’s patrol march – ‘you have not brought the constables down on our heads, so I must surmise that either you have your own reasons for not wanting them involved, or that you need us for something. Or… perhaps both?’

‘Not too tardy, my sugarplum, not bad at all.’ Mistress Bessel’s teeth were starting to chatter, due to the fountain water soaking into her stockings and petticoats. ‘If you will sing to my pipe, I think I have a scheme that will garner enough for you to pay what you owe me – stolen money, shop and all – and all three of us will still have enough to leave town.’

‘Sounds like your end of the bargain tastes sweeter than ours,’ muttered Mosca.

‘Don’t scorn to grab a thorn bush when you’re drowning,’ snapped Mistress Bessel. ‘After all, my spring pea, you’re born under Palpitattle. Nightbound as owl pellets. In three days you’ll be banished to darkness.’

‘My dear Jenny-wren, you do have a portion of a point.’ Clent dared to extricate one of his feet from the wicker chair. ‘You have our attention.’

‘Then listen well.’ The breeze obediently hushed, and even the lapping of the water around Mistress Bessel’s legs seemed to grow quieter. ‘There’s one thing in this town worth more than an elephant’s weight of silver.’

‘And that would be…’ Clent’s grey eyes had taken on a shine that was not fear. Jackdaw eyes, Mosca thought suddenly. Steel and avarice and pin-sharp wits.

‘The Luck,’ said Mistress Bessel.

‘The… Do you mean the Luck of Toll?’ Clent’s eyes widened.

‘Mr Clent -’ Mosca dared to tip back her hat brim a little to peer at him – ‘thought you said the Luck was like to be tuppence worth of glass pot? Nuffink said ’bout silver…’

‘Child, a thing is worth what people will pay for it. If the people of Toll believe that the Luck is the only thing keeping them from falling into the Langfeather, then it is worth more than a cataract of diamonds.’

‘So if they was to lose track of it…’ Mosca voiced the unspoken thought.

‘… and somebody was kind enough to tell them where it might be found…’ continued Clent.

‘… then there might be a good deal of gratitude of the jingling sort,’ finished Mistress Bessel.

‘So – the Luck – what is it, then?’ asked Mosca. There was an unpromising silence. ‘Do you even know?’

The large woman’s countenance suddenly become cloudy, cautious and inscrutable. ‘I have had a muckle of trouble getting folks here to talk about it,’ she murmered, ‘but a town’s Luck is commonly something small. A chalice, or a skull, or the withered core of an apple ate by a saint.’

‘If it’s so small, what do you need us for?’ Suspicion gave Mosca’s neck hairs a storm-weather tingle. ‘It won’t be too heavy for you to manage by yourself. Mr Clent, I’ll wager the only thing she wants us to carry is the blame. She’s looking for someone to go to prison for her.’

‘Hush, child, that is hardly a courteous-’

‘Actually, she is right in a way,’ cut in Mistress Bessel.

‘What?’

‘Never you mind what the Luck is,’ said Mistress Bessel, pushing away an inquisitive duck with the point of her parasol, ‘but I’ll tell you where I think it is. The mayor has it tucked away in the one place with more locks than any other – the top floor of the town jail. It’s up in the Clock Tower by the bridge.’

‘So…’

‘So some ferret-faced little scrap of mischief,’ Mistress Bessel gave Mosca a pointed look, ‘gets hauled to the Pye-powder Court for a spot of purse-plucking, and thrown into the jail overnight. There this little canary-bird flies out of her cell by some certain secret means. She finds the Luck, hides it in her apron and walks out next morn when her kind friends come to clear her name and pay her fine.’

‘If it’s so easy,’ snapped Mosca, ‘why don’t you do that?’

‘There’s a spot of wriggle-work involved, needs to be a child. And anyway,’ Mistress Bessel added quickly, ‘my name’s too good. Jennifer – it’s a bundle of good meanings, fair and smooth and bonny and white. Nobody would believe ill enough of me to throw me in the roundhouse.’

‘Bet they’d change their minds if you took yer gloves off!’ hissed Mosca.

Mistress Bessel went deathly white. Mosca held her eye, but felt a prickle in her stomach that told her she might have gone too far.

‘We play things my way, my buttercups,’ the stout woman said at last, very quietly and evenly, ‘or we do not play at all.’

‘Then I say fie to your game, Mistress Bessel!’ Mosca leaped up. ‘Find yourself some other playmates!’

Saracen, who had been swaggering to and fro in some uncertainty, was delighted to see Mosca on her feet and screaming at somebody. At last he knew how to choose his enemy. There was a froth of white wings and a splash as he joined Mistress Bessel in the fountain.

For a few seconds Mistress Bessel and Saracen disappeared amid a mash of foam, muslin, feathers and flying lily pads. Then something in a sodden bonnet scrambled out of the stone basin and made good use of a pair of stripy-stockinged legs, leaving a broken parasol floating in the fountain. After a few seconds Saracen hopped nonchalantly on to the lip of the basin, water droplets gleaming on his white plumage.

‘You know -’ Clent carefully emerged from the pavilion and watched the stout woman’s surprisingly athletic departure – ‘Mistress Jennifer Bessel can be a very dangerous woman to cross.’

‘I reckon you’re right, Mr Clent,’ agreed Mosca cheerfully, plucking grass seeds from her hair. ‘But I’d still hazard a shilling on Saracen if he and she was matched in the pit.’

‘I wonder how she paid her way into Toll after you relieved her of her money?’ mused Clent. ‘Ah, but I should not speculate thus about a lady… particularly one who, in her day, had the most cunning fingers in the “profession”.’ The ‘profession’ was, of course, the one that had left Mistress Bessel with a ‘T’ for ‘thief’ branded on each hand. ‘Alas, Jen.’ He sighed. ‘Mosca, I fear that you have the right of it. Whatever her plan was, it would probably have left the two of us in irons, your feathered friend in a cooking pot and Jen herself plump in the pocket and on her way to Chanderind. What a work is womankind!’

He sighed again while Mosca picked up the pieces of the muzzle, knotted them into something that might hold and persuaded Saracen to don them again.

‘We are no further on,’ he muttered. ‘We have of course utterly confounded Mr Skellow’s attempts to meet with the Romantic Facilitator, who by now has almost certainly decided the whole business was a trap and fled the county. Yes, Mosca, we can congratulate ourselves on having done our duty and thrown these kidnappers into confusion… but self-congratulation will not pay our way past the toll gate.

‘As it is, I see only one resort left to us. Madam, we are working alone… and we have a street to find before dusk: Brotherslain Walk.’

‘But…’ Mosca felt herself dowsed on the instant by a host of midnight sensations. The memory of rain, cold steel, jagged stone and fear. ‘But that’s where Skellow’s going to be… this evening!’

‘Yes.’ Clent had a starry look. He seemed half terrified, but it was plain that some silvery idea had hooked him like a perch. He had a plan so radiant, so beautiful, that he could not resist it. ‘Yes, he will. He will be waiting to meet the Romantic Facilitator for the first time, tell him about his mission and perhaps pay him some more of his fee. And it would not do for Mr Skellow to wait in vain.’