agents must be everywhere, and two nights from now if we’re still here they’ll send me to Toll-by-Night, and I got nowhere to stay so I’ll be on the streets with no money on the night of Yacobray, and the Clatterhorse’ll get me…’
She paused, partly for breath, and partly through awareness that the latter part of her complaint had sounded a bit babyish.
‘Child… child… that sinister steed shall not have you. It shall not. Mosca, you have my sincerest and unstained oath on that. Have you ever known me break my word to you?’
Four icy seconds passed during which Mosca simply stared
at Clent, her tongue pushed into her cheek, one eyebrow raised, her eyes hard black incredulous beads. Clent chose to ignore the answer hovering in the air.
‘The matter is in my hands, child. The cogs of my mind whirl so fast they might start fires. Let us settle our thoughts and analyse. At present our only plan for leaving this town is to claim a reward from the Marlebournes, and to do so we must prove to them that the damsel in distress is indeed in danger. And we still have until tomorrow evening to do so, before we lose our visitor status. Two days and one night.’
Mosca said nothing. The word ‘damsel’ rankled with her. She suddenly thought of the clawed girl from the night before, jumping the filch on an icy street. Much the same age and build as Beamabeth, and far more beleaguered. What made a girl a ‘damsel in distress’? Were they not allowed claws? Mosca had a hunch that if all damsels had claws they would spend a lot less time ‘in distress’.
‘Fortunately,’ Clent continued crisply, ‘your employer is a genius. This man Skellow and his fellows will be coming to the castle courtyard this very night to receive my written orders, counting upon me to invent a plot to kidnap that poor girl come the dawn. And I shall indeed present them with a plan of uncommon daring and ingenuity, one that cannot fail… unless of course the damsel and her family are warned in advance, and the entire enterprise is a trap for our dastardly conspirators.’
‘I thought the mayor said he’d hang us like washing if we warned him any more?’
‘Ye-e-es, he might have implied as much. Which is why we must persuade his charming daughter to speak to him on
our behalf.’
‘And we do all this before tomorrow evening?’ ‘Inevitably. Inescapably. We concoct a plan today. We
recruit the inestimable mayor and his family. We prepare our
ambush. I leave a letter for our kidnappers and hook them
into our cheat. At dawn we spring our trap. In a word…
yes.’
‘Well, I’m glad we got a whole day to work out how to use
a mayor’s daughter as bait,’ growled Mosca. ‘Wouldn’t want
to go doing that slipshod.’
After seeing Toll-by-Night, it was impossible to look at Toll-by-Day the same way. As she walked down the street, Mosca could not help but glance this way and that, trying to work out how the whole town had transformed. Soon she found that there were clues once you knew where to look.
Most of the houses were faced with the same white plaster criss-crossed with black beams, some jutting further forward than others. Now she suspected that some of these fronts were false, mounted on a board and designed to swing or slide from one position to another. One position for daylight – and then at dusk they could be moved, covering one set of doors and windows and revealing another, or slid sideways to block off a passage, or flipped down to become a boardwalk or bridge. Discreet but sturdy padlocks held the whole in place.
And behind those locked boards, hundreds of human beings held their breath and sat in darkness, pretending not to exist. Hundreds who had obediently bolted and locked their doors from within, and let the Locksmiths secure and fasten their doors a second time from without, so that they could not escape even if they wished it.
She noticed other things as well as they passed through the daylit streets, and started to understand why Toll-by-Day had seemed unreal to her even at the start. The cobbles were free from litter and the walls and monuments from grime, and yet she saw nobody cleaning them. She saw no chimney sweeps, no street sweepers, no boys scooping horse dung out of the road. She remembered the shuffling hopelessness of the toil-gangs they had glimpsed in the nocturnal alley, and guessed when these lowly, unpleasant jobs were done.
Clent was scanning the town with the same eye of scrutiny, but Mosca guessed that he was riffling through ruses and sorting through stratagems, taking everything he saw as inspiration.
‘Can we get Saracen while we’re cogitating?’ asked Mosca. Leaving the goose to grow restless was a very poor plan, and likely to result in property damage.
As it turned out, Saracen had only chewed the felt off a tabletop and had not found the breakables which Mosca had moved to the closet, so relatively little damage had been done. He tried to eat Mosca’s badge by way of greeting, but she managed to fish it out of his beak before he could swallow it.
‘Not a pebble, Saracen.’ Mosca knew that like all geese Saracen needed to swallow small stones now and then, so that they could sit in his ‘crop’, the pouch in his gullet where food was ground down. However she had a feeling that the Committee of the Hours would not be amused if she had to explain that her badge was trapped inside a goose and likely to remain there forever.
On the way out, the sight of the tavern clock caused Clent to wince and chafe his brows.
‘Ten o’clock already! These short winter days work against us. Come – we must report to the Committee of the Hours, then go to speak with Miss Marlebourne and her father.’
They dutifully reported in at the Committee of the Hours building next to the Clock Tower, where the Raspberry appeared not to notice their haggard and dishevelled appearance, and then continued on to the castle. When they reached the ruined courtyard, Mosca could not suppress a shiver despite the winter sunshine as she remembered the flamelit castle of the night before, with its Locksmith banners.
Thankfully, as they approached the mayor’s house, Beamabeth Marlebourne could be glimpsed on the green outside, standing at an easel, a woollen cloak about her shoulders.
‘Mr Clent! I was so sure you would come back. Have you found out anything more?’ Beamabeth’s gaze swept over them like a soft-haired brush, snagging briefly on the leaves in Mosca’s bonnet and the large goose in her arms.
Clent tugged off his hat and nearly his wig in his enthusiasm.
‘Indeed. I have with my very own eyes seen the infamous Skellow and conversed with him…’
Beamabeth’s eyes widened as Clent gave his account of the evening’s excitement which, Mosca noticed, dwelt somewhat unduly upon the more heroic and cunning aspects of Clent’s behaviour, but was rather sketchy in its report of his desperate flight and intimidation of midwives.
‘So…’ A very faint crease appeared in Beamabeth’s brow as she tried to push back a breeze-tugged ringlet without smearing paint on her face. ‘So… you have… agreed to kidnap me?’
‘After a fashion, yes. It is a snare, a mantrap, a device, if you will. A gleaming silver hook.’
‘With you as the worm,’ Mosca could not help putting in.
Both Clent and Beamabeth flinched, the latter with shock.
‘Mr Clent, I – I am not sure I like the idea of being a worm…’
‘Only a mean and invidious mind would make the comparison.’ Clent gave Mosca a look of annoyance. ‘I would prefer to think of you as the honey for trapping some black and malignant insect – perhaps a fly.’
It was Mosca’s turn to wince. She gave a small snarl in her throat. Beamabeth, meanwhile, did not seem greatly reassured by the change in metaphor. However, as they headed inside, she seemed to warm by inches to the idea of Clent’s snare. Of one thing, however, she was entirely certain.
‘Father will never allow it. He would never let me near the tiniest teaspoonful of danger. He says that I am his treasure chest and hold all that is valuable in his world.’ It was strange that Beamabeth could say such things, with the seriousness of a young child, and somehow not sound vain. ‘And besides, there is no stirring him once he has decided something – and I am afraid he has decided that the whole kidnap plot is nothing but invention.’
‘But now it ain’t just my word,’ cut in Mosca. ‘Mr Clent talked to Mr Skellow too, and we
