‘Fissure!’ barked the mayor, who seemed to have recovered a little of his grit and bristle. ‘Tend to Miss Mye next!’
Mosca watched numbly as the mayor’s physician came over and examined her bruises and scratches, and the reddened marks on her wrists left by her bonds during her imprisonment at the bastle-house days before. Beamabeth had managed to avoid all such marks – apparently the rich even got a better class of kidnapping.
The candlelight seemed very bright, and Mosca was too dazzled for a little while to realize that Eponymous Clent had quietly sat down next to her.
‘Hello, Mr Clent. We . . . did it, didn’t we?’
He nodded. ‘We shall be free to leave Toll tomorrow. It is done.’
Mosca drooped her head against Clent’s arm, suddenly exhausted.
‘Technically,’ Clent continued with a twinkle, ‘you will be under arrest when the sun rises, as a nightling trespassing in Toll-by-Day. But I have been assured that your “custody” will involve a good deal of actual custard – not to mention rabbit pie, dumplings and jugged pears. Tomorrow you can expect to be “evicted” from Toll, alongside myself, through a gate of our choice. In the meanwhile, however, you will be sentenced to a long deep sleep in a nice soft bed.’
Mosca did indeed wake up in a very comfortable bed.
She had only the dimmest recollection of nodding off against Clent’s arm, hearing the conversation around her dull to a drone. Somebody must had carried her to a bed, removed her remaining shoe, stockings and bonnet, and tucked her under cotton sheets and three soft woollen blankets that smelt of lavender. She opened her eyes, and saw peach-coloured curtains around her bed. She closed her eyes again, and there was a warm and weightless sense of comfort, and the cool of a clean pillow against her cheek.
It was after an hour of such drowsing that Mosca roused herself enough to sit up. She drew back the curtain and stood, squeezing at the chocolate-coloured rug with her toes. The shutters of the little bedroom had been thrown back, and through the window she could see the ice-pale sun in a sky of eggshell blue. Mosca’s eyes hurt, but she realized they were watering from more than the light. Until this moment, in the deep, cold roots of her being, she had not believed that she would see the sun again. Walking to the window, she discovered that it looked out upon the green castle courtyard and realized that she must be in the mayor’s house.
For a little while she sat in a small wicker chair, watching golden dust motes chase each other slowly and futilely in the shafts of sunlight, and the birds string themselves like beads along the roofs of Toll-by-Day. Then she looked at herself in the mirror on the dresser, noting the dirt and bruises she had not noticed in the netherworld of cut-price rushlights. She splashed water on her face, cleaning the last hints of green crusting from her cheeks and eyebrows. There was no doubt about it, she was paler than she had been before entering the town, and there was a touch of shadow under each eye. Four nights in Toll-by-Night had, in keeping with its name, taken its toll.
I’m going to get out. Her spirits lurched unsteadily into the air like a wounded pigeon. I’m going to get out of this wormpit of a town. And I will never, never come back here again.
As she found out before long, a lot of other people had similar plans.
Shortly after a maid had brought Mosca a tray with a bowl of hot rabbit soup and a golden-crusted loaf of fresh bread, Eponymous Clent arrived with news of the town.
‘Stories of Miss Beamabeth’s daring escape from her captors are all over town, of course, and the citizens of Toll-by-Day are itching to see Brand Appleton aloft on a gallows.’ Clent stood by the window, peering down into the castle grounds market, plump fingers tap-tapping impatiently at his waistcoat pocket. Evidently he was eager to shake the dust of Toll from his shoes and write something curt and cryptic about it in his little black book of never-come-back. ‘However, it would seem that word of the missing Luck has got out . . . and now a number of notables are also trying to get out. The Guilds, mostly.’
‘The Guilds?’ Mosca halted her attempts to cram as much bread into her mouth as possible without her cheeks exploding.
‘The Stationers left first thing this morning. All of them. The Playing-card Makers were half a step behind them, and I notice that all the Goldsmiths seem to have shut up shop.’
‘What? Surely the Guilds do not believe that Toll will fall in the river if the Luck is took from the town?’ Mosca boggled.
‘I am sure not all of them believe that . . . but they see the way the wind sits. I think there is little doubt now that Toll-by-Day will fall to the Locksmiths just as Toll-by-Night did before it. The mayor’s spirit is broken. He is terrified that if the Locksmiths are angered they will take the Luck away, and that Toll will suddenly fall off the cliff like a pie off a sill. And so he has taken on new advisors – Locksmith advisors. From this day forth, I do not think he will be seen without them.’
Mosca’s blood ran cold. Toll was now a sinking ship, and she could hardly blame the Guilds for their rat-like scamper away from it. The subdued urgency in Clent’s manner was starting to make more sense too.
‘How long we got, Mr Clent? B’fore the Locksmiths take over?’
‘I, ah, have no idea. None at all. It might not happen for a fortnight, or, ah, for all I know by dusk today . . .’
‘Today? ’
By now Aramai Goshawk would know that Beamabeth Marlebourne had been snatched from under his nose, and since Mistress Bessel was spying for him he might have a shrewd idea that Mosca and Clent were responsible. If they were still in Toll-by-Day when Goshawk took control of it, she had a feeling their future careers would be limited to a very long drop followed by a brief and lethal swim.
‘Precisely,’ answered Clent. ‘And since it is currently such fine weather for travelling, I, ah, thought I should drop by and find out how quickly you were recovering.’
Mosca jumped up. ‘I jus’ got a lot better. Where’s my blinkin’ bonnet? And where’s Saracen?’
Over the next ten minutes Mosca made short work of her lunch, scrambled into the lilac gown that had been laid out for her, then flung herself into hurried packing and goose-retrieval, after which Mosca and Clent were almost ready to make their hasty adieus.
‘Typical,’ muttered Mosca as she fitted Saracen’s muzzle. ‘After all the trouble we went to, rescuing Beamabeth from one Locksmith town, and now she’ll be trapped in another.’
‘I think not,’ Clent remarked wryly. ‘In all probability she will leave and marry Sir Feldroll – a gentleman that stormed out of Toll in the highest dudgeon this morning, by the way. The mayor, on the recommendation of his new “advisors” has said that even fewer people will be let in and out of the town from now on and all tolls will be raised from tomorrow. So poor Sir Feldroll will not be marching his army through Toll after all, it seems. Mandelion is safe from that quarter, at least.’ Clent regarded Mosca with a gleam of amusement. ‘Yes, I rather thought that would please you.’
Brave, jubilant Mandelion and its intrepid radical government were safe for now. Yes, that did make Mosca happy. So why did she still feel a strange uneasiness of spirit? Her steps slowed unwillingly and she halted by a window, biting her lip almost to bleeding point.
‘Child! More haste! We are done here. You have even avenged yourself upon the detestable Skellow, who was bent on your destruction – he is no more, I gather? Killed while on the brink of shooting Miss Beamabeth.’
‘Stabbing. But . . . yes.’ Mosca thought of the last breath hissing out of Skellow’s lean profile and felt queasy.
‘Stabbing, shooting, it is all the same.’ Clent gave a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Caught on the verge of committing dire damsel-icide. The point is, your nemesis is defeated. There is nothing more for us to do here.’ Clent was squinting eastwards, his mind already on the road.
But Mosca was no longer listening. Looking down through the window into the castle courtyard, she could see a young woman walking to and fro beside her vege
table stall, trying in vain to calm a squalling baby. There was something about its tremble-fisted frenzy that reminded her of Blethemy’s baby, the Gobbet. She thought of Mistress Leap with a hundred desperate mothers, all struggling to have their babies born in a lucky hour so that they could live a better life, all clutching at that one, gleaming strand of hope. That strand was about to snap. Soon Toll-by-Day would fall to the Locksmiths as Toll-by-Night had done before it, and the town would shut up like a clam. Nightfolk and dayfolk alike would be trapped under the fearful rule of the Locksmiths, and escape for either would become all but impossible.
‘Oh . . . oh, rat-pellets!’ exploded Mosca. ‘It’s their last chance! Wait here a few breaths, Mr Clent!’ She stamped away down the hall. ‘I have to talk to Miss Beamabeth. If anybody can make the mayor listen, it will be her! And she must listen to me, Mr Clent! Drizzle an’ dregs, I hauled her out of Toll-by-Night by her hair! That has to be worth more than spittle!’
Mosca found Beamabeth in the long reception room where they had first met a few interminable days and nights ago. The mayor’s adopted daughter was sitting at a sampler frame. From Mosca’s side she could only see the back of the design, a tangle of cream and fuschia threads. She was, Mosca noticed with relief, entirely alone.
‘How lovely to see you looking so well, Miss Mye!’ There it was again – the utterly disarming kitten smile. ‘That dress of mine becomes you very well. You must take it with you when you go. I can give you a shawl to match it.’ Beamabeth’s hair was back in ringlets, and their colour had come out like the sun. ‘You do not mind if I do not stand? My nerves are still so weak after everything that has happened.’
‘Miss Beamabeth . . . I wanted to talk to you about Toll. About the things the Locksmiths want the mayor to do. You got your father’s ear –’
‘Oh dear.’ Beamabeth made a pained little moue. ‘Sir Feldroll was talking to me about that sort of thing this morning, and I really cannot bear to hear any more right now. It gives me a horrible headache.’
‘But . . . your town is running out of time! When your father signs papers with the Locksmiths, then everything goes into the night! Toll-by-Night, but all night and all day! Listen – there is still time to let people out first so they don’t get trapped inside the town! The mayor could do it – he could let folks out without paying toll—’
‘But Father already is making sure the important people can leave. I am certain he said so.’
‘But it’s not just important people here! There’s . . . there’s the nightfolks. He could save some of them. Reclassify lots of ’em really fast, bring ’em into the day and let them out too before it’s too late.’
‘And have all the nightlings running around loose?’ Beamabeth looked appalled and astonished.
Mosca swallowed her annoyance with difficulty. ‘Toll is a sinkin’ ship, miss, and those left in her will drown.’
‘Yes, it is very sad.’ Beamabeth’s brow puckered as she pushed her needle into the web of threads. ‘That is why Sir Feldroll says we should live at his estates in Waymakem when we marry, instead of Toll.’ She gave a long, heartfelt sigh. ‘It really is very difficult to leave somewhere though, when you have lived there all your life. But it has been getting harder and harder here over the last two months, thanks to the loss of Mandelion trade, and we have been running out of all the essentials one by one – chocolate, coffee, sugar, tea, nutmeg. Of course such things are scarce in Waymakem too, but at least there are not so many rules—’
‘Hard for you to leave, is it?’ interrupted Mosca, forgetting her determination to match Beamabeth’s courteous manners. ‘’Tis a bleedin’ sight harder for those as cannot leave for lack of coin! Toll-by-Day might be running out of nutmeg, but Toll-by-Night is even running out of rats! They been putting owls and robins in the cooking pots!’
Beamabeth pulled her face back, small crinkles appearing in her perfect nose. Now she was a kitten that had smelt something distasteful, or burned itself on something hot. It was a signal to Mosca that she had gone too far and should change her tone and the subject. But she had gone too far indeed, too far to stop.
‘Everybody loves you – everybody’s been risking their lives for you! And now you want to abandon them all to Goshawk’s crew and waltz off to Waymakem with Sir Fidgety-Face Feldroll so you can keep your tea caddy full?’
‘They will all be happy as long as I am happy,’ Beamabeth said simply. And smiled, as if she was saying something self-evident. ‘The town wants me to be safe. I shall be doing it for them as much as myself.’
Mosca’s mouth fell open. The surge of bitterness she had felt when she first met Beamabeth was back, and now there was no damming it.
‘You spoilt, selfish, soft-headed hoity! I thought you were supposed to be some kind of angel! Just because everybody talks to you like you’re the most precious thing in Toll, that doesn’t mean it’s true ! You’re not the only person who bleeds when they’re cut, or bruises when they’re struck. But nothing ever does bruise you, does it?’
Outside the birds hushed, and the market noises seemed to recede. Toll itself seemed to have halted in shock. The impossible had happened. Something more incredible than horses of bone or green-skinned foreigners. Somebody had shouted at Beamabeth Marlebourne.
Beamabeth’s face froze, and she lost a little of her sunny rosiness. For a moment Mosca thought that the older girl might faint outright, but there was no tremor in her small pink mouth. Instead, Beamabeth’s big blue eyes just stared and stared between their dark gold lashes, not even seeming to blink. At last she spoke, still in the same gentle, lilting tone.
‘You really are a horrible little thing, do you know that? The way you look, the way you talk . . . No wonder you disgust everybody. You have no place here. The sooner you are gone the better.’
Mosca stood there stupidly in her borrowed dress, stunned and winded. She had been ready for tears or flight, perhaps outrage, an attack of nerves or a call for assistance, but not this strange calm venom – not from the girl she had rescued from Toll-by-Night by the skin of her teeth.
Mosca had been so busy working the oars of her little plan that she had failed to see the iceberg upon which it was doomed to founder. And now here it was in front of her, a towering glacial mountain of selfishness, and she could not understand how she could have missed it. How vast was it? How far beneath the surface did it go?
‘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 a
nd 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.