Toll was a hill town, and all its streets knew it. They were a hodgepodge of cobbled ramps, upwards zigzags, sudden flights of brick steps and abrupt drops. By the time Clent and Mosca reached the central plaza, Mosca was out of breath again, and completely, utterly out of patience with the catalogue of Beamabeth Marlebourne’s charms.
The name itself was a bitter pill. Mosca had been born on the cusp between Beloveds, barely half an hour into the eve ruled by Palpitattle. It was an open secret that her nursemaid had suggested that her father pretend she was born a little earlier, under the deeply auspicious Goodman Boniface, He Who Sends the Sun’s Rays to Bless the Earth. And if her father had listened, if he had been an ordinary man instead of a meticulous monster with a mind like a guillotine, right now Mosca would not be Mosca. She would be a ‘child of the Sun’, with a name like Aurora, or Solina… or Beamabeth.
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.