‘It’s done? We’re closed in? We’re tight?’
‘’Tis done. But that was closer than skin. Listen – here they come!’
Everyone in the tiny, cramped room hushed, and again Mosca heard the frosted metallic jingle, now much closer, gliding down the street like a sleigh bell. Then there were more ringing jingles, as if a whole company of sleighs had found a way to float down the snowless cobbles. All along the street an orchestra of strange noises began to call and answer one another. Grinding thuds. Fat clicks and thin clicks. Skreeks of metal on metal. Whumps and whams.
In spite of her terror, or perhaps because of it, Mosca knelt and put her eye to the inn’s keyhole. She saw only a blurred impression of twilit cobbles, of a dark figure dragging something across the front of the house opposite… and then suddenly there was a slamming noise, and something impenetrably black cut out her view of the street.
The strange cacophony seemed to move on further up the street, and then to the next street. Still the company in the cramped little inn remained hushed. At last another set of sounds became audible, and this time Mosca recognized them instantly.
The rhythmic clash of iron shoes on stone. The echoing rattle of wheels on cobbles. The huffing of horsebreath. Somehow in this teeter-top town of ups and downs, someone had brought a horse-drawn coach and was riding it through the crooked lanes half an hour after the signal to clear the streets.
Mosca looked at the set, tense faces around her, and asked no questions. There would be no answers here.
There was a heavy silence, and then a dull booming note, the distant sound of a bugle being blown a second time.
‘All right,’ the plump landlady said at last, ‘you can talk now if you do it quiet. No shouting, no banging, no existing. Changeover’s done. Night-time, gentlemen.’
Goodman Parsley, Soother of Painful Mornings
There were no rooms spare for Clent and Mosca, of course, but the landlady let them lie on rugs by the hearth next to her scrawny, soppy-eyed dogs. A fire was a fire, and a roof was a roof, and a rug was closer to a bed than the bracken-and-hedgehog mattresses that Mosca had known of late, so she curled up and slept with Saracen on her chest.
When she was at last woken by a young ostler politely and carefully stepping on her head in his attempts to rake out the dead coals, she found that pale daylight was painting diamond shapes across the inn’s narrow, crowded room. Whatever night had brought, it had packed it up again and taken it away.
But night would be back, and as Mosca looked at her dark wood badge she felt the same chill she had experienced in the twilit streets the night before. She had been right all along. There was something wrong in Toll, something that nobody was willing to discuss, something more than the nervousness caused by an ordinary curfew. The landlady struggling to shut up her inn had been afraid of something more terrible than a fine or a night in the cells. And why should even the mayor be so afraid of his own curfew?
Hopefully she would never need to answer these questions. Perhaps at this very moment the mayor’s men were striding back from Lower Pambrick, dragging the Romantic Facilitator. Surely that would be enough proof for the mayor? She had to hope so.
It was half past eleven when Mosca and Clent once again found themselves outside the front door of the mayor’s house. They were shown into a dingy little side parlour instead of the main reception room, and immediately Mosca detected something sour in the situation, like a mouthful of bad milk.
They were left there in unexplained silence for fifteen minutes, and then the mayor strode in and subjected them to a dull, hot glare.
‘I am surprised,’ he growled, ‘that you had the impudence to return here this morning.’
This was not a promising start to any conversation. The fact that the greeting and the glare seemed to be reserved for Mosca alone did nothing to make her feel better.
‘My lord mayor-’ began Clent.
‘Cast her off, Mr Clent,’ the mayor interrupted without ceremony. ‘Wherever you found this…’ he waved a hand at Mosca, ‘this thistle-child, throw her aside before she stings you any more. She has taken advantage of your good humour and trust, sir, and wasted the time of honest fellows in my pay. Gravelip and his companions have just returned from Lower Pambrick, having encountered no sign of this so-called Romantic Facilitator.’
‘None at all?’ Clent looked surprised, crestfallen, then speculative. ‘My lord mayor… how exactly did your men lie in wait for the villain?’
‘There was precious little chance to lie in wait, for they only reached the marketplace at nine o’clock to the very second. I believe Gravelip stood before the stocks as described in the letter, while the others hid behind it. They waited for half an hour, and saw no sign of anybody with a Fainsnow lily.’
‘And small wonder, if three of them was hiding right behind the stocks!’ exclaimed Mosca hotly. ‘The Facilitator was no green shoot. I read his letter and he was sharp. He probably took one look at your boys playing peek-a-boo, then stuffed his lily back in his pocket and slipped away. I would have done, in his shoes.’
‘A glib answer.’ The mayor folded his arms. ‘Perhaps you will be as quick in explaining why the Committee of the Hours’ records show that Rabilan Skellow, citizen of nighttime Toll, was not at large in the vales two nights ago, and has not in fact left this town in the last two years?’
There was a silence during which Mosca gaped.
‘Apparently not,’ the mayor muttered with steely restraint. ‘Her river of invention appears to have run dry.’
‘Good sir!’ Clent recovered his composure before Mosca. ‘This is… most peculiar, I grant you… but I still have faith in this child’s story. One conspirator, alas, has had the good fortune to slip through our fingers, but the infamous Mr Skellow will be waiting at dusk tonight in Brotherslain Walk-’
‘Do you really expect me to risk honest men out on the streets at dusk – on nothing more than this girl’s word?’ snapped the mayor. ‘No! This is the end of the matter. Mr Clent, my daughter has been taken ill this morning, having spent the night sleepless with anxiety over this imaginary kidnap plot. Nonetheless she has asked that your girl should not be dragged into the Pyepowder Court for slander and fraud, and for her sake I shall leave you to punish your own secretary. Should I hear of my daughter being troubled by any further fictions from the same source, however, Mr Clent, I shall be a lot less lenient. Good day to you, sir – and may you have better fortune in choosing your servants in future.’
They were shown out rather firmly by two footmen, one of whom Mosca recognized as Gravelip. Curiously, he looked decidedly unwell, and seemed even more reluctant to meet Mosca’s eye than the rest. It was only when he opened the front door, and she noticed him wincing at the daylight, that she guessed at the reason for his greyish pallor and the unsteadiness of his gait. In an instant her temper went from simmering to seething.
Face carefully bland and meek, she stopped in the doorway just as Saracen was next to Gravelip’s feet and stooped to adjust her goose’s muzzle. She took enough time doing this that Gravelip became impatient and tried to nudge the goose off the threshold by gentle but firm application of his boot to Saracen’s white, waggling posterior.
After the screams had died down and Gravelip had been carried back into the house by his fellows, clasping a twisted ankle, Mosca looked up to find Clent regarding her with a long-suffering air.