Twilight Robbery

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘What?’ The mayor turned on him, and once again drew himself up into a quivering tower of annoyance.

  ‘The girl certainly heard Mr Clent’s plan with the rest of us yesterday afternoon, but unlike most of us,’ Sir Feldroll went on, ‘she never left the house to fetch weapons. I have checked with the servants – she was here all the time. And overnight she was locked up with the rest of us. She did not have a chance to tip off anyone. The one thing she did have the chance to do though, is run away, while we were all blundering around in the early morn, and if she was guilty I cannot see a reason why she would not have done so.’

  Bless your twitchy little features, Sir Feldroll, thought Mosca. You’re not as stupid as you look.

  ‘Sir Feldroll,’ simmered the mayor, ‘use your eyes. We are seeking a betrayer in our midst. Look at her.’

  ‘I am not vouching for the girl’s good character,’ answered Sir Feldroll, with the measured tones of one working hard to keep his own temper. ‘I very much doubt she has any. I am just saying that I do not think she can walk through walls.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it,’ the mayor declared, in tones as humorous as a gibbet. ‘Because I intend to surround her with the thickest, tallest, coldest walls we have.’

  Mosca had two sorts of flying dream. The best ones were flying-as-a-fly dreams, full of weaving and soaring and walking on ceilings, her wing-whirr deafening as a drum roll. The others were mote-on-the-wind dreams, where a fickle breeze swept her up and bore her hither and thither, in spite of all her attempts to swim back down to earth. Such nightmares left her sick with vertigo, rage and helplessness.

  The blur of her departure from the mayor’s house was very much like the second sort of dream. For one thing her feet did not touch the ground, and no amount of kicking and flailing served to give her a foothold. The half-dozen hands gripping her arms and shoulders might as well have been iron. She had had no choice but to leave Saracen in Clent’s care, so fearful was she that he would fall foul of someone’s pistol if he tried to protect her.

  The market girls setting up their stalls gawped as Mosca passed, but when their eyes settled on her badge their brows smoothed. Ah, that explains it. She wanted to spit in their bland, doughy faces. She wanted to pull loose for a second, long enough to frighten them. And she hated the tears that turned them into dark pillars of mist and reduced the courtyard green to a fuzzy gleam.

  Unfair, unfair, unfair. They’d done for her; this rotten town had done for her; Skellow, who should have been dragged off in irons, had done for her after all.

  ‘Where do we take her? The Pyepowder Court? Isn’t that where they take visitors when they catch them breaking the law?’

  Mosca wondered for a moment if daylight Toll even had a court to try its own citizens, or whether everyone just assumed that day crimes were only ever committed by night-folk passing through.

  ‘The Pyepowder Court? Are you mad?’ The voice of the mayor, a little behind Mosca. ‘This isn’t some dusty-foot vagrant, or a gypsy selling a cat as a piglet. Take her straight to the Clock Tower.’

  The peculiar procession continued through the twisting streets, followed by curious gazes and a gustful of autumn leaves.

  As she was carried to the Clock Tower, Mosca stopped struggling and let her feet droop limply. She was in a trap within a trap within a trap. There was nowhere to run. She let her head fall back and stared up at the china-blue autumn sky, speckled with birds, girded with the lean of buildings, striped by strands of her own loose hair. She filled her lungs with as much cold, searing air as she could, like a diver preparing, then she was pulled in through the heavy oak doors and the sky was taken away from her. This time, however, they did not take her through the side door into the Committee of the Hours building, but up a few stairs to a darkened antechamber.

  ‘What’s this?’ A man with a red leather patch over his eye looked up from oiling a set of branding irons. A bunch of heavy iron keys clustered at his belt. ‘One for the clink?’ His single grey eye took in Mosca in one guillotine flash.

  ‘Yes – for a conspiracy of the darkest dye.’ The mayor strode to the front, and the one-eyed man dropped a hasty bow. ‘The treacherous kidnapping of a young woman of birth and means. The kindest and most sweet-tempered girl in the whole . . .’ The mayor’s voice trembled and trailed off.

  ‘You don’t mean . . . ?’ The single slate-coloured eye flashed back to Mosca’s face, and the seamed face in which it was set puckered with disbelief and outrage. ‘Not Miss Beamabeth?’ Skin tingling, Mosca realized that she was about to become the most hated person in Toll.

  The mayor nodded, his face ashen. ‘I want this girl girded about with iron and stone,’ he said grimly. ‘And watch her – she’s a housefly, with a housefly’s swift and sneaking ways.’

  The Keeper nodded, giving Mosca a thunderous look. ‘I’ll have her shackled and tossed in the Grovels, sir.’

  ‘My lord mayor!’ Terror restored Mosca’s powers of speech. ‘I’m no enemy to you or your daughter! Let me go, an’ I’ll find her for you, I swear it on Palpitattle’s wings!’ It was the worst oath she could have made; she sensed it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Everyone looked at her and shuddered, as though she had sprouted antennae, or cleaned her hands with a long, insectile tongue.

  The Keeper whistled, and a pair of turnkeys came running. The vice-like hands on Mosca’s shoulders were traded in for other vice-like hands, and she was dragged to a nearby spiral stairway. As she had feared, she was led not up but down the darkened steps, her legs shaking with fear and the seeping chill of the old stones. She smelt her prison before she reached it, a reek of sickness and rotten straw and chamber-pot perfumes and a gagging aroma of broken meat. At the bottom of the stairs the Keeper opened a low arched door, and the smell became overwhelming.

  There were several figures in the low-ceilinged cell beyond, but as the door opened they retreated from the light to the shadows of the walls in a way that reminded Mosca of rats, except that rats do not usually give off a metallic jangle as they move.

  ‘Since you’re new, I’ll run through the charges. There’s a fee for rent o’ course, but the Grovels down here is easy on the purse – you don’t pay till you leave. And as a newcomer you pay a “garnish” – that’s a bit of courtesy to the other guests.’ The Keeper nodded towards the other figures in the cell. ‘Just enough to buy ’em each a tipple so they can drink your health. You’ll be wanting to pay that. If you don’t, the worst of ’em will take what they’re owed out of your hide. And o’ course, all luxuries is extra.’

  ‘Luxuries?’ Mosca stared at him. ‘I don’t want any luxuries!’

  ‘Yes, you do. Luxuries being, you see, things like food. And drink. And blankets. And not being clapped in irons.’

  ‘But . . . I ’aven’t got any money!’

  The Keeper stared at her, and something changed in his face, making his jaw heavier and his single eye hot and dull. Mosca noticed muscle meat in his arms, the cudgel at his belt, the scars around his hairline. Suddenly she felt like a doll of sticks.

  ‘Missy, I hear that every day.’ The Keeper grimaced and shook his head with long-suffering disgust. ‘And yet somehow people find they can come by the coin when their backs are up against the wall – and yours is against the wall, make no mistake. They beg, or borrow, or call on help from friends, or find things for me to sell. And those that can’t have no place coming here and trying to take advantage of a poor businessman.’

  The other ‘guests’ were not slow to claim their ‘garnish’. They closed on Mosca almost as soon as the door shut behind the Keeper, turned her upside down and shook her to see what fell out. One grimy hand snatched at Mistress Bessel’s handkerchief, another slyly snatched the Little Goodkin bracelet from her wrist.

  The woman who tried to grab at Mosca’s pipe, however, found herself with a fight on her hands. Another prisoner was sitting on Mosca’s legs so that she could not kick, but she scratched and bit and wrestl
ed until the would-be thief gave up. The others retreated to survey their finds, leaving Mosca curled in a ball around the pipe, her ribs and ears bruised from blows.

  Only when she was sure that her fellow ‘guests’ had lost interest in her did she dare to uncurl a little from her hedgehog pose. It was too dark for her to make out faces, but she could hear the murmur of thieves’ cant, the slang of the world’s underbelly. Nightowls, probably. As they talked, it became clear that most of them had once been visitors with ‘night names’, who had been arrested for one crime or another and had been languishing in the Grovels ever since.

  Prisons swallowed men like cherry pips, she knew that much. They were arrested for this or that, and then somebody lost the papers and it never came to trial and meanwhile they starved or sickened from rotten meat or had their heads stove in by their jailers. Prison was a pit, and once you’d fallen in you had a devil of a time climbing out again, unless you had money, a good name or powerful friends. Mosca had none of these.

  There’s Mr Clent.

  Hah. He’s too fond of his own neck to stick it out for me.

  For a while she buried her face in her apron and shook, until the muslin was damp and her breaths were ragged.

  Oh, stop snivelling, she told herself at last. Saracen would come for you, if he was a man – he’d come with three brace of pistols at his belt. But he’s a goose, and that’s all there is to that. You’re on your own.

  Mosca felt as if she was sharing a cave with a pack of wolves, all snarling at each other in the darkness. As runt of the pack, she guessed that her best chance of survival was to attract as little attention as possible. This, however, did not turn out to be easy.

  ‘Oi.’ Somebody poked her with a shackled foot. ‘You don’t want to lie there. You’re in Magpackin’s spot.’

  Mosca rolled away, and pulled herself up into a tight little bundle with her back to a wall.

  ‘All right, all-bleedin’-right! Take your spot!’ she shrilled.

  There was a roar of laughter.

  ‘Magpackin won’t be taking it back just yet,’ said the largest of the men. ‘He’s wormfood. But that was his lying-spot three good weeks before the Keeper took him away. No release fee paid for him, you see.’

  Mosca shuddered, and her hands twitched to her shoulders and hair, eager to brush off any traces of the dead Magpackin, while the other prisoners laughed again at her discomfort.

  It was during this hilarity that bolts scraped back and the door opened to show the Keeper’s Cyclops face, illuminated by the lantern in his hand.

  ‘Visitor for the new girl.’

  Mosca’s heart leaped as the Keeper stepped aside. Clearly Clent the word-wizard had somehow waltzed into the stronghold in spite of the mayor’s instruction . . .

  . . . or perhaps not. Not unless he had decided to infiltrate the prison by donning a white muslin dress, a lace cap and a pair of good kid gloves.

  ‘You poor child,’ declared Mistress Bessel in viper-blood tones, her sturdy figure filling most of the doorway. ‘I’ve come to bring you a little comfort.’

  Mosca responded to these sweet sentiments with the short sharp scream of one who has just sat on a kettle.

  ‘Dear good sir,’ continued Mistress Bessel, holding Mosca’s gaze with a world of meaning in her ice-blue eyes, you see what a shrinking, timid little thing she is? Now you understand why I want a room where I can speak to her alone.’

  The Keeper frowned, his patch-strap making diagonal creases across his brow

  ‘Well, mistress, we do have some private cells, but they are generally put aside for special visitors. Those who can pay for the privilege –’

  ‘Do it,’ Mistress Bessel interrupted crisply. ‘I’ll buy her a new cell – the one they call Hell’s Eyrie. And I want half an hour alone with her.’

  The prospect of being locked up with an enraged Mistress Bessel scattered Mosca’s other fears like a housecat pouncing amidst a congregation of pigeons. However her second squeal of panic only seemed to convince the Keeper that the visitor was right about her shy and quivering nature. He smiled indulgently at Mistress Bessel, smiled indulgently at the coins she placed in his hand and then smiled indulgently at Mosca, somewhat to her confusion and alarm.

  ‘This way then, ladies.’ Somehow the Keeper’s tone had become that of an obliging host showing affluent guests to the better quarters of an inn. He loosed Mosca’s leg irons, and then led her from the room while the other Grovellers muttered and hissed resentfully.

  The stairs coiled upwards past a series of other cells, each just visible through the hatch in the door, none quite as grim as the Grovels. They passed a crammed debtors’ cell where families huddled and lone figures moped and smoked, a female cell where drab-faced girls coughed into their aprons, and an all but lightless male cell full of fury and half-seen movement like a box of ferrets.

  ‘Here’s your chambers.’ The Keeper halted outside a small oak door, dulled by years to the colour of gunmetal. The stairs, Mosca noticed, had not ended, but continued upwards. The Keeper pulled back an alarming series of bolts, many of which had all but rusted into place through disuse, wrenched a couple of great keys in the splinter-edged locks and heaved the door open.

  It was a tapering room shaped like a wedge of cake, one small barred window set in the rounded wall. Near it was a narrow hearth, which curiously appeared to have been cleaned with care. No furniture, no bed. A slack iron chain, one end fixed to a ring set low on the wall, the other to a set of leg irons.

  ‘Best room in the house.’ The Keeper’s tone was one of real pride. ‘That little window’ll give you a view as far as the sea on a clear day. You can even pick out the spires of Penchant’s Mell. That there is the very corner slept in by Hadray Delampley, the rebel earl of Mazewood, during the Civil War.’

  Unlike the other cells, this one did not stink of rot and the chamber-pot. Indeed, the only sign that anyone had been in the cell of late was the recently scrubbed hearth. The Keeper noticed her looking at it.

  ‘Keep ideas of that sort out of your costard,’ he rumbled in her ear. ‘You’re not the first to have thought of leaving by the chimney. Not a week ago some folks showed charity to a young lad who had been caught miching, and paid for him to stay in this cell. Quick as tricks, up the chimney he goes . . . and finds there’s a cast iron grate blocking the flue. And while he’s trying to shake it loose he takes a tumble, dashes out his wits. Same thing happened three weeks ago as well. Young girl. Same luck. I get full weary of mopping that hearth . . .’

  Mosca swallowed and gave this information due consideration while Mistress Bessel bargained with the Keeper for ‘luxuries’. Yes, Mistress Bessel would pay to see Mosca free from leg irons. No, she would not pay for her meals. Yes, she would hire a blanket for her. No, she would not buy faggots for the hearth.

  ‘Well, I will leave you ladies to talk.’ In spite of the entreaty in Mosca’s face, the Keeper withdrew.

  ‘You poor suffering dear,’ Mistress Bessel said as the door closed behind him, in tones of icy and eternal enmity. ‘See, I have brought you muffins.’The door clicked to, and Mosca backed to the furthest extent of the cell.

  ‘So . . . what was it you last said to me?’ asked Mistress Bessel, carefully adjusting the cuffs of her gloves. ‘Was it not “Fie to your game, Mistress Bessel”? Just before you set that feathered hell-thing on me?’

  And in a flash Mosca remembered their last conversation, and the game that she had cried ‘Fie’ to. Mistress Bessel’s plan. The one that required Mosca to be a prisoner in the jail of the Clock Tower. The one that involved her finding a way to slip out of her cell by night . . . and steal the Luck of Toll.

  ‘I think you’ll play my game now, my dumpling.’ Mistress Bessel’s tone was still sweet. ‘I think you’ll play it for your life.’

  There was a long silence, then Mosca sniffed hard and rubbed at her nose with the back of one hand. ‘Those real muffins in your basket?’ she asked in a small,
hard voice.

  Mistress Bessel’s mouth tightened, then spread into her warmest smile as she recognized the unwilling consent in Mosca’s tone.

  ‘Brought up by wolves, you was, I think.’ The portly woman approached and crouched next to Mosca, then watched as the latter filled her mouth and apron with currant muffins. ‘All teeth and stomach, no manners.’

  Mosca could not speak, but managed a few nonchalant, dry rasping noises as she munched, her cheeks and open mouth bulging with unswallowed cake.

  ‘Now, listen well. I have word that the Luck of Toll is hid in the room above this pretty chamber of yours. Seems you can reach that room by the stairway outside . . . but there’s great heavy doors barring the way, with more locks than a miser’s spoon chest, and with guards that stand outside night and day. So there’s no point trying that way.’ She nodded towards the entrance to the cell. ‘No – you’ll have to go up the chimney.’

  Mosca managed to gust out a crumb-laden squeak of protest. The hearth was a miserable width, the flue likely to be more miserable still, and the Keeper’s darkly allusive tales had not increased her confidence.

  ‘Don’t be such a warbler – nobody will light a fire under you,’ Mistress Bessel continued without sympathy. ‘There are two chimneys out the top of this building. The one on the north side serves the guardsmen’s quarters, but the other on the south side serves nothing but this room and maybe the one above. And I say it does serve the one above, because there’s a trail of smoke comes out of it every day about supper time, and this cell has been empty all week. Which means the flue from this room joins the flue from the hearth in the room above. Which means you can climb up the one and down the other. We know there’s a grate at the top of the chimney to stop desperate snipes climbing out to freedom . . . but I’ll be surprised if they’ve guessed that prisoners in one cell might climb the chimney to break into another one and back again.’

  Mosca covered her mouth and managed to swallow enough to speak.