Out in the hallway she found the conspiracy gathering dull-eyed, exchanging scant whispers and rubbing at stub-bled chins. Dawn was close, and they all knew it. All ears were strained for the bugle. Sir Feldroll was particularly jumpy.
And then at last it came, one long stifled note, and the conspiracy scampered to their stations, Beamabeth fleeing upstairs to her room. Mosca took a moment to lead Saracen to the stairway, where she tethered him to a banister.
‘We’ll protect the silly hen, won’t we?’ Mosca murmured as she smoothed his shoulder feathers and felt his cool beak slide against her cheek. ‘It’s revenge on Skellow we’re after, that’s why we’re doing this. That and the reward money to pay the toll. So I’ll do my bit, and you’ll stand guard – but if you got to bite her on the shin while you’re guardin’ her, I won’t cry.’
From outside came a dull thunder of running feet on turf, and the jingle of keys. Clack. Slam. Tinkle. Crack-crick-creak. Bang. Lost chinks of light reappeared, and draughts pierced the smoky closeness of the house. The jingling departed and was swallowed by a bellow of wind.
Clent held up a hand and frowned at the clock, face puckering as he counted out each second. Then he gave a rapid nod.
Remembering her role, Mosca scooped up a coil of rope and headed to a back pantry, where she levered open a little window. She was just about to loosen the shutters when there was a jarring jangle of metal on metal just beyond the wall. One of her fellows started so violently that he upset a stack of pans, which set the rest of her companions jumping and flinching like cat-watched starlings. Mosca’s hand shook on the shutter bar. If she had pulled it back a second or two sooner, she might have found herself staring into the faces of the Jinglers . . .
The merry sleighbell sounds seemed to make a circuit of the house and dawdle around the side amid creaks and thuds before racing away again. It was half a minute before Mosca clenched her teeth, fists and will, opened the shutters and poked out her head.
No Jinglers lurked grinning in the grey light. She clambered out and waited, hopping from one leg to another, while her five companions climbed out after her, Sir Feldroll first.
Running at a stoop, Mosca led them round the side of the house and then nimbly across the small space of the open ground to the cover of a low ruined wall. Her coterie followed her lead, but tended to run into each other’s backs whenever she stopped to look for danger, and then swear at each other until she hissed at them.
‘Bad as a string o’ ducklings,’ she muttered under her breath, and was almost certain that nobody but Sir Feldroll heard her.
Like a parade of hunchbacks they scuttled until their circuitous route brought them to the outer wall of the well courtyard and the shattered back of the keep. Mosca looped her coil of rope over her own head, hitched her skirts and started to climb, the cold of the stone making it almost too painful to grip. She reached the jagged place where the wall was breached, tethered her rope to the remains of a beam and tossed the loose end down to her fellows, who started to climb in their turn.
If Skellow, Brand Appleton and the rest were following Clent’s plan, they would be hiding down the well already, waiting to spring out when Beamabeth entered the courtyard. They would not wait forever, of course. They were probably counting out the seconds even now, braced to clamber out and run if their prey took too long to arrive . . . or if they heard strange and suspicious sounds from the direction of the keep.
The ambush posse in the keep took up position, ready to roar down the uneven steps at a moment’s notice. They heard the front door of the mayor’s house open and shut. A short pause, and then those waiting in the keep could see a solitary figure in a pale blue dress and grey winter cloak stumbling carefully into view, face drowned in a kerchief and hidden by a bonnet. They all knew that this was a serving lad who had made the mistake of resembling Beamabeth in height and build.
The figure came to a halt in the middle of the courtyard, where it visibly shook in a fashion that suggested fear as much as cold. Occasionally it rubbed one foot against the opposite calf in a less than ladylike way. Beyond sight, the rest of the conspirators would be moving into position, waiting to close the trap and pounce on the kidnappers . . .
The wind through the wall breach was bitterly cold, and Mosca saw her cohorts grimacing as their limbs cramped. At last one of them exploded a sudden sneeze of such violence that another conspirator nearly fell backwards out of the keep in shock, and Sir Feldroll came within a hair of shooting himself in the jaw. Rooks erupted from the trees and then took a circular saunter across the lightening sky, but no hordes of would-be kidnappers broke cover in affright. Mosca felt a throb of disappointment.
You’re not down there at all, are you, Mr Skellow? How did your long nose sniff out our trick?
Silence. The raw black complaints of the rooks. Then the sound of a bugle. Clent’s ‘window’ had closed.
‘Can . . . can I take these off now?’ asked ‘Beamabeth’ in a quavering tone.
‘Well, there is little point keeping them on now that you’ve wailed out in your own voice,’ snapped Sir Feldroll. ‘Come – we should at least search the well. There’s a chance we might find a rat or two trapped in there.’
The well did indeed seem to have a few rats, but only of the furred and whiskered sort. There were no kidnappers to be found skulking in the ruin of the round temple or in the remains of the castle buttery. When the nearby trees were shaken, night-dwellers singularly failed to tumble to the turf.
‘Let us report our fortunes to the lady,’ Sir Feldroll sighed, disarming his pistol with blue fingers, ‘and see if her people can rustle up a bowl of something hot.’
They entered to find a cluster of servants and overnight guests huddled at the base of the stairs with weapons gripped in their trembling fists. They were evidently planning an assault upon the stairway, where Saracen strutted with lordly confidence, head bobbing and ducking. To judge by the fresh bandages around several hands and one crown, this was not the first time they had tried.
‘Stop!’ Mosca pushed past them, thudded up the stairs and curled her arms around Saracen. ‘He’s just doin’ the job I left him to do, that’s all. I’ll find him a bite of something and he’ll be right as royalty.’
Sir Feldroll was the first to muster enough courage to edge past her, followed by a long train of young men who seemed determined to pretend that they had not all been held at bay by a walking roast dinner.
Loosing Saracen’s tether from the banister and prising a pair of pince-nez from the grip of his beak, Mosca could hear Sir Feldroll knocking quietly at an upstairs door and calling out in polite and gentle tones. There was a pause, and then some more knocking. Then louder and more sustained knocking.
There was a clatter of steps, and Sir Feldroll appeared at the head of the stairs. His features, which had never seemed particularly happy with each other, now seemed to have fallen out completely and were leaping and jerking in the most disturbing fashion.
‘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 i
nvolve 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.’