Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

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 and 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.

‘And you could have just married in the first place and gone off to be Lady Feldroll, but in Waymakem you might not be everybody’s golden girl, everybody’s special angel. No, why would you do that when you could stay here, with Sir Feldroll and everyone else courtin’ you and lettin’ you string ’em along? You wanted to keep your cake and eat it… and eat everybody else’s too.

‘And I bet it was easy, setting up your own kidnap, what with Brand Appleton being half mad in love with you. I bet he was pleased as a pig in slurry when you told him you wanted to elope with him using the money from the ransom. Bringing Skellow into the plan must have been your idea too – Appleton never liked him, never trusted him. Who was Skellow, then? Your black-market man? You must have been thick as thieves with him all along, plottin’ to