Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

scratches on Mosca’s arms, the marks on her wrists.

Mosca stared at the floor, shrugged and sniffed. ‘Got grabbed,’ she said gruffly.

‘Beadles?’ Clent asked very quietly.

‘No, just… just somebody with ugly business, who needed a reader. A reader who wouldn’t be missed after.’ She could not quite keep the bitterness from her tone.

There was a silence, during which Clent watched his quill spread a blot on the paper without seeming to see it.

‘You can hardly imagine that your disappearance would go unnoticed-’

‘Saracen’d notice,’ snapped Mosca, ‘but what’s he going to do, put out a reward? And if I hadn’t ever come back, you’d notice, but you’d just think I’d run off.’

Clent stared at her for a long moment. Then he let out a long sigh.

‘It is true.’ His tone was weary and more than a little rueful. ‘When you did not come back last night -’ he closed his eyes and shook his head – ‘I did think you had run away, Mosca.’

And, Mosca’s conscience reminded her, she had been planning to do exactly that.

‘This… individual with the “ugly business”.’ Something seemed to have occurred to Clent. ‘Is he likely to keep looking for you? Is there a chance that he will return to this town to find you?’

Mosca bit her lip and nodded.

‘Then you cannot possibly stay in Grabely,’ Clent said simply, and his eyes shone with faint astonishment at hearing his mouth speak so plainly. He recovered almost immediately, and busied his hands and eyes with the folding of his newly written papers. ‘Why I should have imagined that I would need a secretary now, while my papers are in the hands of the petty constable and I have no accounts to speak of-’

‘That’s what I came here to tell you,’ interrupted Mosca. ‘I am leaving.’

Clent’s hands ceased to move. He did not look up, his head remaining bowed over his letters.

‘So are you,’ Mosca added. ‘Get up, Mr Clent.’

‘What?’

‘I got the money. You’re free.’

‘But…’ Clent’s face was a picture of incredulity. ‘How in the world did you find the funds?’

‘Well -’ Mosca’s countenance took on a demureness that did not seem to reassure him – ‘I had to sell something. I mean, the only thing I had left.’

Clent’s expression went through a number of different changes. Suspicion, wonder, astonishment and at last hope chased one another across his face like successive sunrises lighting an opulent and rolling landscape.

‘You have finally sold the goose?’ he asked in hushed tones.

‘No! Course not!’ Mosca was shrill with indignation. ‘I couldn’t do that!’

‘Ah. No. Of course not.’ Clent sighed wearily.

‘No. I sold you.’

‘WHAT?’ Clent instantly recovered enough of his composure and health to leap to his feet. ‘Did a cushion maker stuff your head with feathers? To what purpose are you delivering me from prison if you hand me straight into slavery?’

‘It’s not slavery,’ Mosca hastened to reassure him. ‘It’s science. There’s a doctor who likes to saw people’s heads open to see if their brains are squirming about like oysters. And he was hoping to buy lots of dead bodies from a bodysnatcher, but the snatcher got himself nabbed. So this doctor had lots of money and nothing to saw. But he cheered up when I told him about my uncle in the debtors’ prison who was perilous close to death because of a funny bulge behind his ear as big as a snuff box. And apparently this doctor only gets to cut holes in living people’s skulls when they’re of unsound mind and their relations give permission. So when I told him that you were seeing ghosts in your soup and unable to speak anything but rhyme he was pleased as punch.’

‘Poetry as a disease,’ whispered Clent. ‘Then let me have no cure, let me die of it – before your barber-surgeon can sharpen his tools. Is he waiting outside?’

‘No, everything’s all right, Mr Clent. He’s settling himself down to the biggest haunch of mutton you ever saw. He’ll be at his lunch for an hour at least. Gave me a promis’ry note to say he owes the bearer the money – says he’ll pay it off when he’s seen you. Only I jus’ gave the magistrate the note to pay the debts.’

Clent collapsed back on to his rough mattress with a thud.

‘An hour left,’ he murmured weakly. ‘The prime of my life treacherously sold by a little minx who probably didn’t even haggle. And what, pray, are your plans for me between now and the end of the mutton haunch? Have you auctioned my last hour to a press gang or a road-building crew?’

‘Actually, Mr Clent,’ Mosca suggested quietly, ‘I was thinking we could spend the time running away a lot.’

One last stop was required, however, before Mosca and Clent could shake the dust of Grabely from their feet.

The chapel stood a quarter of a mile from the town. Like many of the Grabely houses, it had tall, ragged slate walls, the lower jutting slates tufted with plumes of fleece left by passing sheep. Its windows were fist-sized holes stuffed with bottle-top-sized rounds of coloured glass, held in place by wire, all except for the biggest and highest window, a crude-edged, glassless opening in the rough shape of a heart.

‘Bet he got in through there,’ whispered Mosca to Clent.

The chapel now had a sentry, the red-nosed ghost-fighter she had encountered before.

‘Nobody can go in.’ He straightened and gripped his crook as if it was a halberd. ‘Vicious ghosts.’

‘Ah, but my friend -’ Clent took him companionably by the arm – ‘you overlook the power of Innocence to overcome the Unholy, the favour of the Beloved which falls upon every unthinking child so that no Sprite or Shadbaggle may…’

Mosca took advantage of the distraction to duck past the sentry, ignoring his cries of protest as she ran into the chapel. As she had hoped, his valour in the face of ghostly attack did not extend as far as risking a second encounter.

There was an odd smell in the chapel. Damp, Mosca told herself. Damp and rat accidents. She tried not to think of Dr Glottis’s ‘miasma’ or of lumpish shapes laid out on the stone slabs in blotched sacks. They were all gone now, anyway. Carried out to be buried.

No ghost could be seen among the low wooden benches that served for pews, just splintered wood and shards of porcelain. No ghost behind the statue of Goodlady Halepricket, She Who Keeps the Heads of Sheep from Getting Caught in Bushes, though it seemed that the Goodlady had recently lost a leg. No ghost behind the door, just a collection of shears, hooks and crooks, now flung into disarray.

‘Hey!’ Mosca risked a loud whisper. ‘It’s all right! It’s me!’

A fluttering, like the rippling of grave clothes in a breeze, and then a long, stealthy dragging sound. A white shape emerged from a hatch that Mosca assumed led down to a crypt. The plastered walls threw back an echo of the gargling, glugging noise it made in its throat as it approached, its outline shapeless and rumpled.

Mosca knelt down and pulled off the white cambric altarpiece that covered the figure. This instantly revealed a long, white, python-thick neck, a bulging bully-brow and a beak the colour of pumpkin peel. With a sense of relief that warmed her more than a dozen suppers, Mosca reached out and took the ‘ghost’ into her arms.

When she gingerly emerged from the chapel, the sentry’s reaction was less friendly.

‘What… it…’ He waved a disbelieving finger at Saracen. ‘It… it was that cadgebaggoting goose all along! Do you know how much damage-’

‘Calm yourself.’ Clent’s tone suddenly had a deep and rich resonance as if he was declaring prophecy. ‘In mere moments we will be gone, taking Grabely’s ghost away with us forever, and leaving you to choose your path. Sir, you stand on the threshold of two alternative futures. In one I see you the toast of every tavern as the slayer of a ten-foot-tall, tiger-toothed Titan of terror. In the other you will be forever remembered as the man bested by a young girl’s pet.’

They left the slayer of the Titan of terror rubbing at the tender place on his nose, and clearly well on the way to deciding that discretion was the better part of candour.

Five minutes later the air of liberty had blown Clent into fine fettle in spite of the cold, and he greeted a cooper’s cart with such magnanimous good humour that its driver seemed half convinced that Clent was doing him a favour in agreeing to accept a lift.