Twilight Robbery (49 page)

‘No. Nothing
ever
touches you, does it?’ Mosca whispered. ‘Look at you – not a scratch, not a bruise. Not even marks on your wrists where they were tied.’ She rubbed at the bruise-lines round her own wrists. ‘If you struggled – the way
I
struggled when they tied me – there
would
have been some. Why weren’t your wrists marked when we rescued you?’

Some instinct stilled Mosca’s tongue, but her last sentences hung in the air like smoke, curling and forming misty shapes.

Beamabeth’s hands had been tied behind her back when Skellow had held her hostage to cover his escape. As the image danced before Mosca’s eye again, she recalled what Clent had said about Skellow.

. . . killed while on the brink of shooting Miss Beamabeth . . . Stabbing, shooting, it is all the same
.

But stabbing and shooting were
not
the same. Skellow had been holding Beamabeth at pistol point, but then when surprised in the hidden passage he had been holding a knife. For some reason, mid-flight, he had tucked his pistol away and pulled out a blade, despite knowing that his pursuers were armed with pistols. A knife was certainly quieter if he had murder in mind . . . but why
had
he decided to kill Beamabeth right there and then?

Mosca shook her head slowly. ‘Makes no sense,’ she whispered. ‘Skellow was a viperous, flint-hearted old villain, but he weren’t
stupid
. You were the only thing keepin’ him alive! Why would he try to kill you before he got to safety?’

Two pairs of eyes remained locked in a stare, one pair black as gunpowder, the other as blue as a summer morning. And yet it was in the black eyes that there came a dawn of realization and fear.

We got it all wrong
, thought Mosca.
We got it all topsy-turvy
.

‘No marks on your wrists,’ Mosca said slowly, ‘because . . . before we got there to rescue you . . .
your hands weren’t tied
.’

Nothing. Not a flinch, nor a flutter of lashes. Just wide, blue eyes, as warm and pitiless as a drought.

‘But Skellow heard a cry from downstairs in the cooper shop, so quick as stitch he must have slipped a rope round your wrists and given it a quick knot. Then
we
burst in, so he held you hostage and pulled you through a secret door. And then he got his knife out.’ Mosca swallowed. ‘But not to kill you.
To cut through your ropes
. So the pair of you could run faster.

‘But you didn’t run. You waited till he had a knife in his hand, then you dropped to your knees and screamed – so we’d come burstin’ in through the wall and find him like that, looking like he was about to cut your throat. So that we’d shoot him down like a dog before he could get a word out. So that he’d never have the chance to tell any of us the truth. “Little witch” – that’s what he said as he died. And maybe he said it to me. But he wasn’t talkin’
about
me, was he?’

Mosca was breathing quickly now. Her anger was returning, filling her ears with a furnace roar. She could not hold back the rush of words.

‘Money. Everything’s all about money in Toll, ain’t it? Everyone thinks about it all the time – most of them because they want to get out of the town, or pay their tithes, or eat this week. But maybe
some
people decide they need more money because they’re runnin’ out of chocolate and tea and silk handkerchiefs, and they can’t imagine the world without them, and getting things like that on the black market costs a
lot
.

‘And you could have just married in the first place and gone off to be Lady Feldroll, but in Waymakem you might not be everybody’s golden girl, everybody’s special angel. No, why would you do that when you could stay here, with Sir Feldroll and everyone else courtin’ you and lettin’ you string ’em along? You wanted to keep your cake and eat it . . . and eat everybody else’s too.

‘And I bet it was easy, setting up your own kidnap, what with Brand Appleton being half mad in love with you. I bet he was pleased as a pig in slurry when you told him you wanted to elope with him using the money from the ransom. Bringing Skellow into the plan must have been your idea too – Appleton never liked him, never trusted him. Who was Skellow, then? Your black-market man? You must have been thick as thieves with him all along, plottin’ to double-cross Appleton when he’d served your turn and take the ransom for yourselves, so you’d be rich for the rest of your lives. But they were both nightside, weren’t they? You needed somebody dayside to make the kidnap
happen
. So you gave Skellow some money for tolls, and sent him out to hire the Romantic Facilitator at the Pawnbrokers’ Auction. Only . . . what you got instead was us.

‘But you put us to good use, didn’t you?’ Mosca could feel all the parts of the truth tumbling into place one after another like dominoes. ‘We got your father out of the way for you, and afterwards, that night, you went off to pray in the chapel – I remember. So when Skellow crept into the salvation hole to report in to you, you was kneeling ready to talk to him. It was
you
who told him we were imposters,
you
who told him about the trap we were laying.

‘
You
threw your trinkets and pins around your room, so it looked like there had been a struggle. Then you just climbed out your window and down Skellow’s ladder and away. And when we found your window open and you gone that morning, we all guessed there must have been a traitor in the mix . . . but none of us thought it might be
you
.’

All was quiet, but for the tutting of the clock and a scattering of bird notes like china splinters.
One of the two of us
, thought Mosca,
is in a lot of trouble right now. I wonder which of us it is? She isn’t turning pale or plucking at her handkerchief. Oh draggles, I think it’s me
.

‘Some people get a mad sickness from reading,’ Beamabeth said at last, her voice still calm. ‘If I say that your reading has driven you mad, everybody will believe me. If I say that you were in league with my kidnappers all along, everybody will believe me. If I say you came and threatened me just now, everybody will believe me.’ It was true. Mosca could feel it in her bones. Everyone would succumb to Beamabeth’s charm like beetles drowning in marmalade. At long last Beamabeth lowered her eyes and returned her gaze to her sewing. ‘Now I want you out of my sight. And by dusk I want you out of my town.’

‘You’re nothing but a name!’ Mosca clenched her fists. She knew everything, and it was unbearable to know that her knowledge was useless. ‘Without it, you would be nothing! All they love is your name!’

‘Oh?’ Up went the dark gold eyebrows. Out came the dimples and dainty little teeth. ‘And do you imagine that if you had
my
name you could ever be like me?’

‘No,’ snarled Mosca, tingling from toe to crown. ‘Not in a hundred thousand years.’ The cups on the breakfast table rattled as Mosca stamped out of the room and slammed the door.

‘Mr Clent! We been hoodwinked! By a shuffling, wheedle-cutting, shurk of a—’

‘Child, child!’ Clent raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Four nights in Toll-by-Night, and thus she returns to me,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Mosca, I wish sometimes that you did not pick up words
quite
so swiftly.’

However, as Clent listened to Mosca’s high-volume explanation she saw his expression pass through indulgence, incredulity, astonishment and outrage, making its final stop at a greyish shade of mauve.

‘Gambling Fates . . . and we have been risking gizzard and gullet for this precocious piece of perfidy and perniciousness!’

‘That’s exactly what I said at the time!’ agreed Mosca eagerly. ‘Only . . . with not quite the same words.’

‘Such treachery behind such a sweet . . . er, one moment. Did you say “said”? You have
spoken
of this? To whom? Not to
her
?’

Mosca looked mulish. ‘There are words I can swallow, and words I cannot, Mr Clent! Not without them turning to poison in my belly. ’Twas all I could do not to take her nose between my knuckles and twist it till the freckles turned blue ow OW! Mr Clent, you are pulling off my arm!’

‘Madam, we are leaving!’ Clent had, with the dexterity of custom, snatched up his coat, Mosca’s arm and a bowl of dried fruit, taking only a moment to empty said bowl into his pockets. ‘May I point out that the last person to pose a threat to Miss Beamabeth’s secrets took a bullet through the vitals last night? For the moment she will be taken aback and out of step, but it will not be long before she realizes that the best way to blunt your blade is to blacken our names before we can tarnish hers. If we are to leave this accursed town, it must be NOW, before the wind changes and we find ourselves under the hatches again.’

‘But . . . that smirking spit-gobbet! She will get away with it all! We must show everyone what she is—’

‘Child, our credit still stands on the shakiest ground – nobody will believe us!
Nobody
. Yes, yes, by all means expose her – but perhaps by letter?’ Clent, gripped by his new momentum, had already dragged Mosca halfway across the room, and it was all she could do to pull free and run to collect Saracen. ‘Once we have put some town walls and several leagues between us? Revenge is a dish best served unexpectedly and from a distance – like a thrown trifle. Come!’

Mosca, Clent and Saracen took no leave of the mayor, for that would only have caused delays. Instead they strode purposefully through the curiously quiet and nervous town to the eastern gate, Clent with his best veneer of dapper confidence, Mosca with her arms full of goose, taking only one footman to show that Mosca was in ‘custody’, and the paperwork to show that she was being ‘evicted’.

The daylit streets looked peculiar to Mosca now. She kept glancing around for shortcuts she had learned over the last four nights, or seeing half-familiar corners gilded with sunlight. Could that gentle road full of glovers really be where she had seen the Clatterhorses clash? Could that homely lane full of drapers really lead into the Chutes? And could Toll-by-Day really turn on Mosca and Clent a second time, after all they had done?

Yes, probably.

At the eastern gate they requested passage out, and presented the toll they had taken so many risks to acquire. The guards were clearly suspicious of Mosca’s badge and the pair’s air of dishevelled urgency, and made a point of examining their papers thoroughly and counting the money with care. The presence of a footman in the mayor’s livery, however, seemed to be a point in the favour of the would-be travellers.

The guards brought out a ponderous ring of keys and unlocked a small door set in one of the gates. A rush of cold, moor-scented air hit Mosca in the face, and she almost panicked. She had grown so used to Toll’s reek of closeness, its trapped animal smell, that she had forgotten how the air of freedom tasted. It was too good, it was too close, it would be taken away from her. The door opened to show a craggy rise shivering with weather-bleached grass . . .

‘Hey! You!’ One of the guards caught her by the arm as she was stepping through the door. Saracen’s neck rose into an ominous curve. ‘Hand it over!’

Mosca stared at the guard in incomprehension, until she realized where he was glaring. With an incredulous snort she pulled off her badge and dropped it in his hand.

‘This? Did you think I was planning to
steal
it? Do you think I ever want to see that – or your stinkin’ old pit of a town – again?’ She pulled loose from his grasp, staggered out through the gate and then broke into a run. She ran into the very throat of the wind, so her bonnet ribbons whipped against her ears and deafened her, and her lilac skirts were blown back against her legs.

She gave a banshee shriek of sheer glee and whirled about, Saracen erupting from her arms, wings spread for his own little victory glide. There they were, the high walls of Toll, dull and rugged as stale cake, and she was
outside
them.

Ignoring Clent’s look of entreaty, Mosca caught up a small rock and threw it at Toll with all her might. It rebounded off the stonework above the gate with a ‘pick’ noise, startling a family of jackdaws above.

‘Goodbye, Toll, you old maggot barrel! Hope you fall off yer perch!’ The town’s arrow slits seemed to stretch in astonishment as they peered down at her tiny impudence. She scampered a little further away, snatched up another stone and flung it after the first. ‘Hope all your chimneys clog!’ Thrown stone. ‘And your clock falls off!’ Thrown stone. ‘And your . . .’ Her voice trailed away.

Her pursuit of better stones to throw had led her in a backwards scramble up the rise. Now, twisting around to stoop for yet another missile, she at last saw what lay beyond the rise.

Looking down across the declining plain of wind-whipped moss she could see a long road twisting between the gorsestrewn shoulders of the crags, all the way down into the levelling moors. Up this road, in the direction of Toll, surged a river of people. Hundreds of men, trudging in columns with pikes along their shoulders. Great wagons, laden with sacks and barrels. The stubby black muzzles of mortars, twitching as they were hauled up the uneven path. And behind them a few full-blown cannons, dragged by teams of horses. To judge by the different standards fluttering in the breeze, the three nearest cities had massed their forces to march on Mandelion after all, and it seemed the march had already started, even without Toll’s permission.

Perhaps, like Mosca, Sir Feldroll had lost patience with Toll and decided to throw stones at its walls. However, it looked as if his stones were bigger than hers.