‘Come on,’ Laylow’s unclawed hand gripped Mosca’s arm with painful urgency, pulling her down the alley. ‘Brand’s a-waiting for you.’
‘He said he’d meet me here!’ squeaked the ‘Teacher’ as she found herself being propelled down the lane. ‘Him, and nobody else! I’m not a piglet to be dragged off by the nose!’
Without warning Laylow grabbed Mosca by the shoulders and shook her roughly.
‘You come with me.’ Only now that their faces were close could Mosca see the desperation and frustration contorting Laylow’s features. At the corner of her mouth a new cut was drying, and a swelling above her eyebrow had ambitions to become a bruise. ‘You hear me? No bleating. No running. No fun. Or I’ll hush you.’ Laylow was shaking, and Mosca could feel the hard points of the claws trembling against her shoulder blade, not quite piercing her clothes.
It was the bristling, dangerous desperation of a fox in a gin-trap, and Mosca knew better than to argue with it. She let herself be pulled like a mannequin down lane after lane, all the while watching her captor with hard black eyes, ready to pull free and run should the other girl’s grip slacken for a second. But Laylow’s grasp did not weaken, and before Mosca could form another plan Laylow was fumbling a key in a lock, then dragging her into a narrow, reeking room.
The air was clogged with fumes of different sorts: smoke from the dulling fire, spitting fat on the rushlights, vinegar and the acrid, stormy smell of injury. There were no windows, and the room was narrow enough that the straw mattress at the far end reached from wall to wall. The blankets draped over the figure on the bed were too short. They reached only halfway up his chest, and his feet and shins in their blotchy stockings jutted out below them. His pallid skin was now ghastly against his red hair.
Mosca did not need to be a physician to see that Brand Appleton was far from well. Indeed, if his eyelids had not kept up a feverish, moth-wing tremble she might have thought that he had escaped Toll-by-Night by leaving both the world and his body.
A dig in Mosca’s back. She turned to find Laylow staring past her at the prone kidnapper.
‘Can you . . . ?’ Laylow swallowed awkwardly and grimaced, as if her throat was dry, or the rising words knobbly. ‘Can you physick him, then?’
‘What, me?’ Mosca stared in horror at the greasy pallor of his face, and the hand clutching at the folds of blanket.
‘You’re from the spice islands. Seisian or something, he said . . .’ Laylow was breathing quickly, and her claw-tips were gingerly, furtively tracing lines across the calloused palm of her ungloved hand. ‘Can you not . . . put him right with spices? Nutmeg or the like? Or . . . or rub him with tiger spittle or unicorn powder – something to put the claret back in him?’
Drawing closer, Mosca could see that Brand Appleton’s ribs were clumsily wrapped in yellowing bandages through which something dark red was painting rosettes. They looked sodden, and Mosca guessed they were soaked in vinegar. She pulled back, clamping a hand against a sympathetic tingle in her own side as if she was the one that had been bleeding. Prickles flowed up her face, and her head felt light, the smells stifling and sickening her.
‘So what put that hole in him?’ she snapped, unable to keep a creak of fear from her voice. ‘Moths?’ Even as she spoke, however, she guessed the answer. She remembered the collision between the Sheep-Skull and the Horse-Man, and the Horse-Man driving his knives into the forequarters of the Sheep-Skull. So Brand Appleton must have been inside the Sheep-Skull horse, at the front. But that had been a two-man horse. Who had been his partner?
Another easy question. Mosca remembered the gloved hand that had lashed out as she scrambled over the fallen Sheep-Skull horse, a hand that had slashed three parallel grooves through blanket and cloth and skin. A glove with claws. For whatever reason, Laylow had been playing horse’s tail during the grim Clatterhorse gavotte.
‘He thought you would help,’ intoned Laylow numbly, watching Brand Appleton. His breaths were audible. They rose, fell and whistled to their own private rhythm. ‘Told me to fetch you. Thought you would help.’
‘You need a proper sawbones, you do.’ Mosca clenched her fists and stared at the wall. She had a sudden sick horror that the wounded man might shudder and die right in front of her. ‘What would you have me do? Slap on a cobweb and tell him to mend?’
Laylow shook her head. Her face was numbly crumpled as she stared at the patient, her lips in motion like a child struggling to read. Perhaps the Locksmiths kept track of all the doctors.
As if her gaze had grazed his skin, Appleton’s breath briefly halted in its murmuring meander, and his eyes opened a straw’s breadth. His exposed hand stirred on the blanket, then the fingers curled and twitched in a feeble, clutching beckon. With some trepidation, Mosca drew closer and crouched beside the invalid’s bed, lowering her ear to hear his whispering.
‘Need . . . get me out of here . . . that girl over there . . . damned harridan . . . keeping me locked up here . . .’ His eyes were cloudy and unfocused, but there was still that blazing, bewildered stubbornness, like firelight behind a misted pane. Mosca could not stop her hand flinching away when his trembling fingers moved to grasp it. His breath smelt of some searing back-room brandy brewed from beetles and dregs. ‘I must get back . . . nobody to protect her . . . cannot leave her in their hands if I am not there . . .’
He was trying to sit up. Laylow sprang forward and shoved him back roughly.
‘Doddypoll!’ she spat, sounding almost tearful. ‘Ninny! What are your wits worth? Lie down and stay there, or I’ll break your pate!’ Mosca could not help feeling that Laylow’s bedside manner lacked a little polish. Appleton fell back with a thump, and a groan of pain and frustration.
‘Witch-kitten!’ Appleton sounded not far from tears himself. ‘You infernal haglet! If you had an ounce of heart . . .’ His eyelids drooped shut again, and his breath returned to its feverish murmuring.
Laylow gave Mosca another knuckle-nudge in the ribs, and drew her away from the bed to a distance where their whispers would not disturb the sleeper.
‘No doctors.’ Laylow’s eyes rested fully on Mosca’s face for the first time, and for an instant Mosca thought she saw a wrinkle of perplexity, a shade of recognition. But it passed. After all, how could a green foreigner possibly look slightly familiar? ‘There’s no trusting the doctors in this town. But once he’s outside Toll . . . Can you get him out, by magic or such? A sailor told me a story of a Seisian who had a flying carpet –’
Mosca groaned, and rubbed at her temples with her knuckles. ‘Look, miss – do you think I would still be here in this dreg-pot of a town if I could fly?’ She chewed her cheek, watching to gauge the older girl’s reaction. ‘Why don’t you pay his way out? He . . . he said there would be money.’
‘There will be!’ Laylow’s boxer-jaw jutted. ‘It’s just . . . not in our fambles yet.’
Fambles. Another word lodged in a grimy reach of Mosca’s mind, the part that had read every criminal chapbook and hangman’s history to fall into her hands. It was the part of her mind that she had long since given Palpitattle’s name and voice. As she remembered her thieves’ cant, it was Palpitattle’s rasping, sarcastic voice she seemed to hear.
Fambles is hands. Not in our hands yet, is what she is saying. So she and Appleton ain’t got the jewel, have they?
‘Listen!’ Laylow went on. ‘I do not know all the twists of it, but Brand come to me yester-eve and told me that he needed help with a lay. Said he was in deep with some parties, but did not trust them not to take the ribbin and run if they found it within their grasp. So tonight we was out to fetch the gilt, but a gang of scapegallows were waiting for us and set us about on all sides, and one of them stuck Brand through with a blade. They must have took the money – I went back after and searched half the streets in town, but it was gone. So somebody made a pair of calf-lollies out of us, but I will find them, and then Dark Gentleman take me if I do not beat the chink out of them.’
What she means, rasped Palpitattle helpfully, is that Brand was scared of a double-cross. So when he went to get the reward he didn’t trust the folks he was in league with, and asked this wildcat to come with him instead. And she don’t know what’s going on, but she thinks he was betrayed by his comrades, and that the parties what stabbed Mr Not-So-Radical Appleton took the money too. And she wants to get it back.
‘Did he mention any names?’ Mosca kept a sly watch on Laylow’s face. ‘Names of the folks in his gang he didn’t trust?’
Slow nod. ‘Said there was one fellow with a hang-gallows look and a snakish way about him. Name of Skellow.’
Had Brand been right? Had Skellow been waiting for a chance to double-cross him? Could Skellow have been the lean and capering Horse-Man who had stabbed Brand? He was tall and slight enough. Yes. It could have been him.
‘And now Brand wants to go back to his cronies, to their blasted lair!’ muttered Laylow, glancing across at Brand. ‘Cleft-pate gull! Walking in to let them finish their handiwork – that’s a plan and a half!’
‘He . . .’ Mosca hesitated, wondering if she dared go on. ‘He said something about a girl waiting there, one he had to protect—’
The effect was instantaneous and explosive.
‘Blight take her and every last ringlet! What right does she have – oh, that moping, cow-eyed, dunderheaded gull! I should throw him to the Jinglers! Like a bullock in love with the butcher’s knife! I will, I swear I will, that’ll be a lesson – I knew it, knew she was in Toll-by-Night somehow, knew it – kites and kettles, I’ll – why is the sun not enough for her? Well, plague on the pair of them! I do not care, do not need – but not even her scraps, her cast-offs – she never wanted – Why do you look at me like that.’
Mosca was goggling at her open-mouthed. ‘You’re in love with him!’ she exclaimed accusingly, as Laylow’s tirade ended. ‘You must be – you’ve stopped making any sense!’ Even thieves’ cant was more comprehensible than that.
‘Go kiss a cat,’ snarled Laylow. Which was not, Mosca reflected, exactly a ‘no’.
Mosca thought about trying to tell a hysterical, lovelorn, claw-handed renegade that her dear Brand had actually kidnapped another woman so as to force her to marry him, but she thought that might go down like a lead chaffinch.
‘I offered to go back there in his place – look to the lie of the land,’ Laylow went on. ‘But he would have none of it. Would not trust me. Or tell me where to find those blackguards’ stop-hole.’ She glared at Mosca with a sudden flare of suspicion. ‘So what did he want with you, if you’ve no medicine nor tricks to help him? What are you for?’
‘I – I’m a Teacher!’ squeaked Mosca quickly, eyes on her companion’s sharp claw tips. ‘Ask him yourself! Teaching him radical matters, telling him how to get to Mandelion –’
As soon as the words were out, she could have bitten her tongue. Laylow gasped as if the air had been knocked out of her.
‘Mandelion? He is . . . leaving? Never told me – never told me he was leaving . . .’
Brand Appleton was stirring again, but Laylow seemed too stunned to notice, and Mosca scrambled to his side unhindered, glad to be out of reach of the claws.
‘Teacher!’ He took hold of her wrist with furtive urgency. ‘Talk quietly, don’t let her hear us – she has a heart of flint, that one, won’t let me leave. I think she spikes the possets to keep me dizzy –’
‘That’s no spiked posset, Mr Appleton,’ Mosca whispered, feeling a reluctant sting of pity. ‘Look at you, you’re all leaked away, limp as an empty wine-bladder. I could help you till my face turned blue, but I would never get you on your feet – not with you like that.’
Appleton sagged with disappointment and frustration, then his grip on her wrist tightened again.
‘You could go! You could go and see how she is, tell her . . . tell her that I will make all right and she shall be sorry for none of this in the end. And tell the others that if they hurt her, if they frighten her, then I’ll . . . I’ll . . . make their hearts into . . . purses. Or tell them I’ll go to the Jinglers and turn evidence. Tell them I am well and strong and the knife missed me.’ His eyes drifted to Laylow. ‘That scratch-cat! You see how she is – I cannot send her – she would not understand – she hates . . . but you, you’ll go.’ Large, eager blue eyes met hers, open as summer, mad as hare hopscotch.
Mosca took three deep breaths one after the other, like a diver preparing to plunge.
‘Yeah,’ she whispered softly. ‘I will go for you. For three shilling extra. Paid when you got the rest of the money.’ She could not afford to seem too eager. She would let him think that her face was brightening at the thought of money. ‘So . . . where do I go?’
Mosca had to stoop to hear the kidnapper’s whispered words, and straightened with her eyes full of black mischief and wonder and suppressed excitement. She hardly dared meet Laylow’s gaze as she edged back towards her.
‘Your friend there – he has a notion that he will start to mend if he drinks a posset made of . . . whey and thistle wine. I told him I would find some, and it settled him down. For now, anyway.’
‘Whey and thistle wine.’ Laylow’s brow creased again. ‘Will that help him?’
‘Maybe. It cannot hurt.’ The door was six feet away. All Mosca had to do was talk her way outside it. ‘I can find you thistle wine for him, and honey, and . . . and blood sausage to help his strength, but I’ll want paying for it when you find that chink of yours.’
Laylow rubbed the back of her head, the callouses rasping against the wiry, cropped fuzz of her hair.
‘Well, then – go! Come back when you have them – and tell nobody what you seen or heard here.’
‘Of course not! I’m not a . . .’ Mosca remembered one of Laylow’s own choice words for idiot. ‘I’m not a doddypoll.’
A lock turned. A door opened. And then Mosca was out on the frozen streets again, quivering with the shock and disbelief of a fisherman who has trailed his rod for a particular large and dangerous fish, only to see it unexpectedly leap into the belly of his boat.
At long last she knew where Beamabeth Marlebourne was being held prisoner.
Staring skywards, Mosca noticed some smudges of pallor to the east and heard the warbles of the first robins. The night was waning, and she gave a tsk of annoyance. She barely realized that she had already started to think of the night as the true day.
Mosca pulled out her pipe, gnawed on the stem and willed herself to think clearly.
Everything had changed. Brand Appleton, the so-called chief kidnapper, was desperate and pitiable and wrong-headed and possibly dying. She had felt scared of him . . . but she had felt sorry for him too. Beamabeth was no longer safe. Brand Appleton would do anything to protect her, but right now Brand Appleton was in no condition to protect even himself. The mayor’s daughter was at the mercy of Skellow, and Skellow was not well-supplied with mercy. Once he had the ransom or had to cover his tracks, Mosca would not give a bent pin for Beamabeth’s chances of survival. Mosca could only pray that neither of these circumstances had occurred yet, but it was only a matter of time.
Mosca needed reinforcements to rescue Beamabeth before the worst could happen. However if her dayside allies heard nothing from Mosca or Sir Feldroll’s men, they were hardly likely to send more. She needed to get word to Toll-by-Day.
But even her daylight allies could not be trusted. The more she chewed at her pipe and thought, the more it seemed that there must be two spies among them. One spy for the kidnappers, who had warned them about the ambush and helped them capture Beamabeth. One spy for the Locksmiths, who had betrayed the location of the letter drop and arrival of Sir Feldroll’s men. Of one thing Mosca was now fairly sure: the kidnappers and the Locksmiths were not working together.
No, Mosca needed to get word to the person in Toll that she knew best and trusted most, and the sorry truth was that that individual was Eponymous Clent. Contacting him in the ways they had arranged was im
possible, but he had managed to send word to her, and that would do as a start. She had to track down the man who had given her warning in the alleyway, and she had only one clue to work on. It was a single word that he had uttered before disappearing.
Recital.
As the dawn chorus was engaging in its ancient but uncoordinated musical efforts, another more elegantly trained group of musicians were making their way back through the streets to their lodgings. It had been a long night, and now their nerves were as threadbare as their carefully patched gowns and waistcoats.
Performing for the Locksmiths at the castle was never calming, but since the former were willing to accept such performances instead of a Yacobray tithe, the three musicians were inclined to bear it with a good grace.
The grace was becoming less good though, as they struggled their way home from their ruined venue, sensing the approach of the dangerous dawn, hampered at every step by the barrow which carried their group’s harp case. The wheel had been carefully wrapped in rags to soften its progress, but even so occasional jolts stirred a musical thrum of protest from hidden strings, and the guardian of the cart insisted on choosing each cobble with care, more like a mother afraid of waking a sleeping infant than a barrowman.
‘Oh, Quince, for Peachbucket’s sake!’ A tall woman carrying a flute case turned and twitched, the flaws and blots in her face powder starting to show in the unforgiving predawn light. ‘My nerves are in flakes! Will you try to keep pace! Is it not enough that I have to hear that infernal instrument without having to die for it?’
The harp’s attendant seemed not a jot discomposed. ‘My sweet, given that you yourself have no art worth dying for, you should be grateful to me for letting you perish in the name of something worthwhile.’
‘Er . . . friends?’ The group’s gangly, grey-haired violinist was peering down the alley. ‘Does anybody know anyone really short . . . and oddly apparelled . . . and . . . green? It is just that, er, there seems to be one such creature watching us from the corner. And, er, waving a little green hand.’