Twilight Robbery (11 page)

Every time Beamabeth’s name was mentioned, faces lit up as though reflecting some distant radiance. All this love could have been
hers.
And what had Mosca’s life been as a child of Palpitattle, but a long string of attempts by the world to swat her? Irrationally, Mosca began to feel that this Beamabeth had stolen her name.

By the time they reached the castle grounds, the sun was dipping towards the horizon. Mosca, who had never seen a real castle before, felt some disappointment as she surveyed the ragged line of its perimeter wall and its roofless, lightless towers. The castle was certainly very large, and must have been magnificent many centuries before, but it had been bested by time. The sky had found a thousand ways in, and the turrets had traded their pennants for pigeons.

In the castle’s inner courtyard a market was breaking up with some dispatch, hawkers stacking teetering barrows with bow-headed urgency. One young chicken escaped its crate and, to Mosca’s surprise, its owner stared after for the only the merest moment of indecision before deciding to rattle her goods away instead of chasing it.

The judge’s house was attached to the inside of the castle’s perimeter wall and built of the same bristling grey flint. This was a much younger building, with high gables, perhaps a century old, and here at least the wink of firelight was visible through its stained-glass panes.

‘At last.’ Clent halted at the oaken door and pulled down the frayed hem of his waistcoat. ‘Now, child, let us bring warning to this poor—’

‘Rich,’ corrected Mosca.

‘To this affluent but imperilled girl,’ finished Clent. ‘And do try not to scowl as if you have lemon juice running through your veins, child.’

Mosca settled for stony instead of bitter as Clent rapped the knocker. A few moments later the door opened to reveal two footmen in mustard-coloured livery. Both footmen subtly craned their necks to read the designs on Clent’s name brooch before deciding how stiffly and respectfully to hold themselves. Mosca and the impatiently champing Saracen merited only the briefest, most disdainful slither of a glance.

‘I am Eponymous Clent,’ Clent declared with aplomb, ‘and I need to speak with Miss Beamabeth Marlebourne or her father on a Matter of the Gravest Urgency and Gravity.’

Mosca ground her teeth as both footmen went quite crosseyed with adoration at the mention of Beamabeth, and then one of them ran inside with the message. In a few moments he returned, surprise lifting his eyebrows so high that they were lost in his wig.

‘Miss Beamabeth will see you, sir.’

It’s just the name they’re all in love with
, said the bitter, stinging voice in Mosca’s head.
But it’ll be all right. You’ll see her, and she’ll have a squint, marks from the smallpox and a voice like a peeled gull.

The guard led them along a short hall into a comfortable-looking reception room, its tiled floor dapple-lit by stained-glass windows along one wall, the stone walls concealed beneath oak panelling and cloth hangings. A young woman in a green silk dress rose from her spinet as they entered.

Beamabeth Marlebourne was about sixteen, Mosca realized. Somehow, despite the mention of suitors, she had been half expecting to see someone younger, a girl her own age, a creature that had somehow crept into her birth-room and stolen
her
nameday. Beamabeth had honey-coloured hair which had been trained into a shimmering mass of ringlets, but managed to look natural rather than tortured. Her skin was creamy pale, with two pretty little coffee-coloured freckles just at the corner of one of her dark gold eyebrows. Her blue eyes were large and well spaced, her brow high, her nose small and her chin daintily pointed in a fashion that made her look a bit like a kitten. She smiled, and her eyebrows rose as if the pleasure of seeing them was almost painful. Her expression was as open as a flower.

It was hopeless. She was flawless. She was a sunbeam. Mosca gave up and got on with hating her.

A moment later Mosca realized that a man in his fifties was seated in a red damask armchair near the hearth. She had not noticed him at first, because unlike Beamabeth he had not bothered to stand. A gold chain of office winked on his chest, but the eyes beneath his thick brows had the watchfulness of a hard-biting old guard dog. This then was Graywing Marlebourne, the mayor of Toll.

‘Well, you would let them in,’ he told the fire irons with a slate-cold flatness. ‘So hear them, and have them out of here before the bugle.’

‘It is
very
late for visitors,’ said Beamabeth, as she looked the new arrivals up and down, her voice soft and carrying more of the local accent than Mosca had expected from anyone in a silk dress. Her tone made her words sound more like an apology than a criticism. ‘Usually Father likes to have the house locked up from an hour before dusk till an hour after dawn.’

‘Rest assured, ma’am, when you understand the urgency –’

‘Would you like to sit down?’ Beamabeth interrupted Clent without apparently realizing that she was doing so. Clent and Mosca obediently sat, Mosca keeping a tight hold on Saracen’s leash in case anything in this elegant room appeared edible.

‘Miss Marlebourne, I must come to the point, and I hope you will forgive me if my tidings distress you. You are, I fear, the target of an odious and felonious scheme. In short, there is a plan afoot to kidnap you and force you into marriage.’

Beamabeth’s eyes became pools of utter surprise.

‘What? But . . . I don’t understand.’ Her eyes flew to her adopted father, who had at last raised his eyes from the fire and was staring at Clent with an aggressively interrogative eye. ‘I . . . that is horrible. Somebody wants to do that . . . to me?’ The incomprehension in her face left no room for fear. It was the look of a kitten that has never been kicked, and merely stares at the boot speeding towards its small pink nose.

‘Brand Appleton,’ growled the mayor. He stood, caught up the poker and drove it into the heart of the clustered embers as if impaling a foe. ‘It
has
to be Appleton.’

‘Father, it might not be . . .’ Beamabeth looked dazzled, distraught. ‘I cannot believe that of Brand, even now.’

‘All right – let’s hear these people out.’ The mayor folded his arms, leaned against the high back of Beamabeth’s chair and subjected Mosca, Clent and Saracen to a withering glare. Marlebourne had over six foot of mayor-ness at his disposal and apparently knew how to use it to the best effect.

The tale of Skellow’s conspiracy was swiftly told, though in a rather piecemeal fashion, since neither Mosca nor Clent was in any great hurry to mention debtors’ prisons, counterfeit ghosts, cheated doctors or stolen handkerchiefs. There were occasional ragged holes of silence where such things were torn out of the story, but by the end Mosca was fairly sure they had patched it up well enough. As the story continued the mayor’s eyes narrowed, and Mosca found her mouth drying under his parching gaze.

At last he turned to Clent, his face smoothing to a more civil expression. ‘Sir, I believe that
you
have acted in good faith here . . . but before I send half the parish’s constables scurrying after this plot I need to be sure that you have not been practised upon. This girl says she learned of this conspiracy at an auction of the Guild of Pawnbrokers (the location of which she cannot give us) and through letters (which she does not have) and now she wishes to warn us of this Romantic Facilitator (whose name and face she does not know). Do you in fact have any evidence that is not dependent upon the word of this girl?’ His gaze dropped meaningfully to Mosca’s Palpitattle badge and he raised his eyebrows. ‘Children of Palpitattle are notorious liars, and this smacks of a taradiddle concocted in order to claim a reward.’

‘A taradiddle!’ Mosca jerked out of her seat to land on her feet, the sheer injustice of his words stabbing into her like a spur. ‘What about this, then?’ She held up her wrists to show the reddened marks where she had wrestled against the bonds. ‘Tied myself, did I? What about these?’ She showed the scratches on her arms, neck and face. ‘Do you think I jumped head first into a blackberry bush for
fun
?’

Beamabeth raised trembling fingers to cover her mouth, and the mayor’s face took on a slow, seething heat.

‘You might have been seized and bound by a beadle for some petty theft.’ The mayor’s tones were as pleasant and convivial as a boot full of ice water. ‘You might have tangled with a bramble bush while making your escape.’

Mosca could hardly breathe for rage and matched the mayor glare for glare.

‘Ah . . .’ Clent fluttered his plump fingers soothingly. ‘My young secretary is merely overwrought . . . a terrible ordeal . . . many apologies. Your Excellency, I grant that this girl cannot brandish signed confessions from the brigands in question, though were she the accomplished fraud you suggest she might well have had a few ready. Granted, we have accumulated little solid evidence, but we sped here pell-mell—’

‘Cos we thought the lady might want to know she was going to get grabbed
before
it happened instead of
after
,’ cut in Mosca sharply.

‘And granted,’ Clent snatched back the conversation once more, ‘this girl is a housefly, the merest and meanest of two-legged creatures, a virtuoso in the more trivial forms of vice. However, in this case I truly do believe her to be in earnest.’

All was silent for a second but for the sound of Mosca’s teeth grinding.

Beamabeth gestured shakily, and a servant brought in a tray with a steaming chocolate pot and several tall chocolate cups. Mosca was disappointed to discover, however, that the steam was tangy, and that the pot contained not chocolate but only hot elderberry wine.

‘Nonetheless,’ continued Clent, ‘if you want proof, my lord mayor, it is easily acquired. You now have the names of two conspirators. Can you not send some bold fellows to round them up, bundle them to the county jail and rattle a few truths out of them?’

If anything, the mayor’s frown deepened, and when he spoke his voice was heavy and hesitant. ‘Brand Appleton is a night-dweller, and to judge by his name so is this Skellow. They will be . . . under the jurisdiction of Thrope Foely, the Night Steward. I . . . would have to write to him and request his cooperation.’

Request? That seemed like a funny word to use. Surely if you were mayor you just ordered people to do things? Why should talk of arresting men at night suddenly make the mayor look so cloudy and mulish? After all, he must be in charge of the constables on duty at night as well as those on duty by day . . . surely?

Mosca’s sharp ears twitched. Yes, there it was, the unmistakable sound of something not being said.

‘No matter, there is a better option.’ Clent adjusted his badge. ‘Thanks to the ingenious mendacity of Miss Mye, Mr Skellow and his Romantic Facilitator will soon be waiting in vain for each other at different meeting places . . . and we know exactly when and where. Both can be intercepted if we are wily.’

The mayor’s eyes took on a fierce and glimmering interest, like embers glowing in a hoary log.

‘Go on,’ he growled.

‘This Romantic Facilitator believes he will be meeting Mr Skellow in Lower Pambrick at nine of the clock tomorrow morning,’ Clent explained crisply. ‘Send a few men out first thing tomorrow – or better still tonight – and have them seize a man waiting by the stocks wearing a Fainsnow lily.’

The response of both Marlebournes was to look appraisingly at the clock, then at one another.

‘Perhaps there is time . . .’ The mayor’s face took on a grim and urgent resolution. ‘A pity that you did not come an hour ago – I might have been able to contact my High Constable before he locked up for the night. No matter. Have all the men come in here a moment!’ Half a dozen footmen crowded into the room. ‘Now –’ he deigned to glance Mosca’s way – ‘what manner of man is the Romantic Facilitator looking for? Did you give him a description in your altered letter?’

Mosca rubbed at her nose. She had indeed written a description of Skellow, though one that owed more to spleen than charity.

‘Told ’im to look out for a bony, ugly old bag o’ spindles with skin like sackcloth and a grin like a sick fox,’ she muttered.

‘Bony and ugly,’ the mayor murmured under this breath. ‘You there, Gravelip! You are the boniest and ugliest, I fancy. Smile for us – as unpleasantly as you can!’

Gravelip, a young, slight footman with a pocked nose and large ears, obediently gave a smile like toothache. He seemed less than delighted to have outpaced his friends in the ugliness race.

‘Where’s my secretary?’ called the mayor. ‘There you are. Draft a letter to the Committee of the Hours asking whether there exists such a person as Rabilan Skellow, and whether he left Toll recently. Gravelip, as soon as it is written I want you to take it to the committee’s office . . . and then set out immediately for Lower Pambrick.’

Gravelip boggled and went pale. His mouth made helpless fish shapes that wanted to be a ‘but’. His eye crept fearfully to the darkening window. Mosca could not help noticing that other servants were hurrying in and out of the room with soft-footed urgency, closing shutters, lighting candles and in some cases moving furniture.

‘Oh, Father!’ Beamabeth seemed to have noticed his plight, and her eyes were big limpid pools of sympathy. ‘Father, we cannot! At
this
hour?’

There it was again. Something unsaid, something too ominous to mention.

‘Oh . . . very well.’ The mayor’s tone was far gentler as he reached out to pat his adopted daughter’s shoulder. ‘Gravelip – delivering the letter will suffice, and you may hurry back here afterwards. You will have just enough time to reach Lower Pambrick if you set off immediately after bugle tomorrow morning, with three stout fellows at your back. Collar this Romantic Facilitator for us.’

Gravelip looked quite weak with relief, and after the mayor had signed the letter, took it and hurried out without further ado.

‘Now – Mr Clent – I am loath to ask you to leave, but –’

‘Let them stay just a little longer. Please.’ Beamabeth turned her face, and rested her cheek against the mayor’s sleeve like a younger child. ‘I want to hear more.’