Twilight Robbery (23 page)

‘Keys!’ he snapped. ‘Keys to the lady’s room! Something is amiss!’

A steward hastened up the stairs, performing an elegant pirouette to avoid a lazy jab from Saracen’s beak, and found the right key on his chatelaine. The lord seized it and marched away, dragging the hapless steward behind him by his keychain.

An ominous sensation clutching at her stomach, Mosca followed with Saracen in her arms and was present when the door was opened.

A ghost of a flame quivered above the splattered wreck of a fallen candle on the dresser. One green satin shoe lay abandoned in the centre of the room. The red pincushion had been knocked to the floor, its scattered pins glittering in the pale light from the open and unshuttered window.

Beamabeth was nowhere to be seen.

Sir Feldroll leaped across the room to lean out through the window and then gave a muffled neep’ of pain and stooped to pick the pins out of his shoes. Other conspirators followed him into the chamber and performed a search. This generally seemed to involve flinging open clothes chests, going slightly purple at the first glimpse of female lace and hurriedly dropping the lids again.

‘What’s going on?’ A shout from downstairs.

‘She’s not here!’ Mosca yelled back. ‘Looks like somebody dragged her out the window! All her baubles are thrown about!’

‘What?’

Murmurs of confusion down in the hall, and then an outcry.

‘Look – look there! Stop him!’

‘Don’t let him get away!’

Mosca left the chamber at a run and clattered down the stairs with Sir Feldroll and the others at her heels. When she arrived in the hall, the crowd parted before her armful of goose to show her Clent struggling in the grip of a footman and two guests, his hand still tight around the front-door handle.

‘He was trying to slip out, through the door, my lord!’ chirped one of his captors. ‘We scarce collared him in time!’

‘Sweet singing stars, have you wits?’ bellowed Clent, as one of his waistcoat buttons burst under the strain. ‘I was not trying to escape! I was stepping out to examine the scene outside the lady’s window and discover how the abduction was managed – surely you can all see that is the next logical action?’

It was a plausible story, but Mosca doubted it was true. Everybody else’s mind had been busy with the obvious questions:
What has happened?Why? How?
Clent’s mind, however, had skipped ahead to the more important question:
When people have recovered from shock, who will be blamed?
Evidently he had not liked the answer.

‘Let us go and look outside as he suggests,’ instructed Sir Feldroll. ‘But keep a hand on the man’s collar – and an eye on that girl of his.’

Outside, the frustrated conspirators surveyed the wall, looking for handholds in the rough stone.

‘You – girl –’ a member of the keep ambush party glanced Mosca’s way – ‘You’re good at climbing, aren’t you? You could have climbed up to that window.’

‘Not at the same time as standing in a pantry with you and your friends, you pudding-faced dolt!’ Mosca snapped back, her temper fraying.

‘Nobody climbed the wall.’ Clent straightened from a stoop and with one toe pushed back the grass to reveal two deep identical ruts in the earth, about a foot apart. ‘These, my friends, are the imprints of a ladder.’

‘Steward!’ The steward started fearfully in response to Sir Feldroll’s bark. ‘Does your household own a ladder?’

‘Yes, my lord – but it is usually in the orchard.’

It was not in the orchard. After a brief search it was found behind the house.

‘So.’ Sir Feldroll scowled. ‘Am I to understand that a gaggle of villains ran through half the courtyard with a ladder, dodging Jinglers as they went, set it against the wall, forced their way in through the window, overwhelmed Miss Marlebourne, carried her down, then ran away with her, all without us seeing or hearing
anything
?’

A moan of the utmost melancholy emerged from Eponymous Clent.

‘Alas, my unhappy comrades, we
did
hear them. We heard them circle the house, come to a halt by the window, move their ladder and do their business. But we were too busy cowering in terror, because
they were jingling.
The second set of so-called “Jinglers”, that ran past the house a minute after the first – that must have been our kidnappers. By the time we dared to emerge and lay our own trap, the lady had been tweaked from under our noses.’

‘But how?’ exploded Sir Feldroll. ‘How, without a scream or sounds of a struggle? The lady must have unfastened her window to open her shutters so that she could keep an eye upon events – but how could those dogs be sure of catching her before she fastened the windows again? There is more to this. There must be. These villains must have had an accomplice within the house.’ He glanced around himself fiercely. ‘Are we missing anybody from the mayor’s household?’

Clent’s eyes had been flickering out towards the town from time to time, perhaps in search of an escape route. Now his gaze seemed to lodge on something, and he deflated like a puff pie taken from the oven.

‘Oh, pestilential fates,’ he murmured. ‘No, I believe we shall soon have the establishment in its entirety.’

Following the line of his gaze, Mosca saw the mayor striding with rapid, purposeful steps in their direction, huffing out angry white breaths into the crisp and wintry air.

He came to a halt outside the house, and his arched white brows rose as he surveyed the rueful, tongue-tied congregation. Sir Feldroll was the first to find his courage, and stepped forward, knotting his fingers together.

‘My lord mayor . . . I hardly know how to . . . I have the worst of all possible news. The trap laid last night was not successful. And worse than that – worst of all – my lord mayor, I must ask you to brace yourself—’

‘What trap?’ demanded the mayor, his head turning to examine one person after another in sharp, hostile motions.

‘What?’ Sir Feldroll’s jaw dropped, and it took several seconds for him to crank it back up again. He rounded on Clent, his face a picture of disbelief. ‘Am I to understand that all of this night’s stratagems took place
without the mayor’s knowledge or permission
?’

‘Ah.’ Clent moved a hand to adjust his cravat, but was brought up short by the tightening grip of his captors’ hands on his arms. ‘Ah. Well . . . that is . . . ah.’

The ensuing explanation ordeal that took place in the reception room bore an unpleasant resemblance to a court in session. The mayor was incandescent, and strode to and fro in plum-faced fury until his boots threatened to chafe the rug into flames. He would probably have ordered everybody there to be clapped in irons, were it not for the practical difficulties of having the entire company arrest itself.

They were all imbeciles. And those that were not imbeciles were traitors. And thieves and criminals and murderers. And there was not a punishment in Toll’s oldest books of litigation that the guilty parties would escape. But that would be nothing compared to what they would suffer if any harm came to his darling Beamabeth.

Interjection did not seem very wise, so nobody said anything for a long while, even when the mayor ran out of threats and strode to and fro in silence, his right fist clenched in his left hand.

‘Well?’ He stopped abruptly and turned upon Clent. Clent’s shoulders jumped nervously, and his eyes glassed over.

‘This is all your handiwork, sir,’ declared the magistrate. ‘As far as I can tell, your stratagems guaranteed that at the most dangerous time of the day I would be absent, my doors would be unlocked and all the friends and servants that might have protected my daughter would be chasing will o’ wisps across the castle green. Is there anything you can say to convince me that this was not your intention all the time? That you are not, in fact, the Romantic Facilitator of which you pretended to warn me?’

A mottling of gasps. Self-congratulatory murmurs from the men who had ‘caught’ Clent at the doorway.

‘Hail and hellweather!’ Some of Clent’s colour had returned to his face. ‘My good and gracious lord mayor, do you imagine that if I had
intended
to kidnap that child I would have done so in such a preposterous way? There are a thousand easier ways to manage the business, without hazarding my own safety and good name in this fashion.’

‘Oh yes?’ The mayor folded his arms, his face a picture of incredulity. ‘Such as . . . ?’

‘Well . . .’ Clent spread his plump fingers and frowned at them. ‘I could of course have used the clock trick on her, instead of your good self, and arranged some secret conference with her near the end of the day in another part of town. All I would need would be a well-muffled room in which she would not hear the bugle, and then I could have sent her on her way at dusk, not realizing that the first bugle had blown and that there was a gaggle of nightowls waiting outside to ambush her.

‘Or I could have drugged her food or drink, put her in a box and hoisted her up into one of the taller trees, high enough that the Jinglers would not be looking for hiders there, and my accomplices could claim her come night.

‘Or . . . well, quite simply, my good sir, I could have tried to negotiate a deal with the Locksmiths. A gamble, of course – but if it worked then all other perils would disappear.’

Clent shrugged very slightly as the mayor stared at him, his fist twitching.

‘Of course, these are merely the plans that instantaneously occurred to my mind,’ he continued. ‘There are many other ways I could have contrived it. Miss Marlebourne had given me her trust, and under those circumstances kidnapping her without trace would have been childishly easy. Coming up with a plan that we could sabotage to catch these foxes with their noses in the coop –
that
was the hard part.’

The mayor was still bristling, but thoughtfulness was doing battle with rage behind his eyes, and clearly Clent’s words had not been lost on him.

‘So what do you claim went wrong?’ he asked in a biting but more moderate tone.

‘Sir Feldroll, I believe, has the matter in a nutshell,’ Clent responded. ‘There was a worm in the peach, a thistle amongst the good grain, a weasel in the dovecote. In short, we were betrayed.’

‘A fly in the ointment?’ suggested the mayor, his eyes resting on Mosca with cold, hard meaning. Mosca flushed as she became aware that she was now the focus of nearly every gaze in the room.

‘Don’t be lookin’ at me that way! I never done it!’ Once again she had the feeling that she was standing in her own private patch of ice. Now she felt as if the ice beneath her feet was cracking, threatening to drop her into something infinitely worse.

‘She was the only nightling involved in this plan.’ The mayor’s tones were steely, and Mosca felt hot pins and needles flood her skin and stomach. ‘
She
was the one that started stories of this kidnap in the first place and brought all of this to pass. She could easily tip off her nightling accomplices when the need arose.’

Mosca could hardly breathe. Her badge was a leaden weight against her chest.

‘With the greatest of respect,’ Sir Feldroll broke in politely, ‘that makes absolutely no sense at all.’

‘What?’ The mayor turned on him, and once again drew himself up into a quivering tower of annoyance.

‘The girl certainly heard Mr Clent’s plan with the rest of us yesterday afternoon, but unlike most of us,’ Sir Feldroll went on, ‘she never left the house to fetch weapons. I have checked with the servants – she was here all the time. And overnight she was locked up with the rest of us. She did not have a
chance
to tip off anyone. The one thing she
did
have the chance to do though, is run away, while we were all blundering around in the early morn, and if she was guilty I cannot see a reason why she would not have done so.’

Bless your twitchy little features, Sir Feldroll
, thought Mosca.
You’re not as stupid as you look.

‘Sir Feldroll,’ simmered the mayor, ‘use your eyes. We are seeking a betrayer in our midst.
Look
at her.’

‘I am not vouching for the girl’s good character,’ answered Sir Feldroll, with the measured tones of one working hard to keep his own temper. ‘I very much doubt she has any. I am just saying that I do not think she can walk through walls.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ the mayor declared, in tones as humorous as a gibbet. ‘Because I intend to surround her with the thickest, tallest, coldest walls we have.’

Mosca had two sorts of flying dream. The best ones were flying-as-a-fly dreams, full of weaving and soaring and walking on ceilings, her wing-whirr deafening as a drum roll. The others were mote-on-the-wind dreams, where a fickle breeze swept her up and bore her hither and thither, in spite of all her attempts to swim back down to earth. Such nightmares left her sick with vertigo, rage and helplessness.

The blur of her departure from the mayor’s house was very much like the second sort of dream. For one thing her feet did not touch the ground, and no amount of kicking and flailing served to give her a foothold. The half-dozen hands gripping her arms and shoulders might as well have been iron. She had had no choice but to leave Saracen in Clent’s care, so fearful was she that he would fall foul of someone’s pistol if he tried to protect her.