Mosca thought of the tremulous, furious, purple-faced baby that was so soon to be motherless, just as she had once been.
‘Poor little gobbet,’ she muttered to herself.
Clent also looked crestfallen, but Mosca guessed that his mind was still busier with the dilemma of Eponymous Clent than the plight of the Gobbet. ‘Mistress Leap, I can see you have an escape for us in mind, and mean to charge us toll in the place of the Lock – ah, in the place of them. But truly, madam, you find us without funds. Plucked. Fleeced. Bare as midwinter trees.’
‘So how were you planning to pay your way out of Toll?’ The midwife folded her arms, her bird-like face a picture of scepticism.
‘Ah…’ Clent made tiny adjustments to his cravat. ‘We… ah… anticipate being of great service to a family of consequence, and receiving our just reward. The… the mayor’s family, in fact…’
‘Oh!’ The midwife’s face thawed instantly. ‘So you’ll have seen young Beamabeth! How is that little peach?’
Mosca heard her cup crack as her grip became vice-like.
‘Hale and well, fair and blithe,’ Clent answered quickly, ‘and courted by a little lord from another town, as I hear it. But she and her family face some… difficulties which they have called upon us to remedy…’
‘Courted by a fellow from another town, you say?’ Mistress Leap’s face had fallen, and suddenly she looked quite distraught. ‘You mean… she would be leaving us? Young Beamabeth Marlebourne would be leaving Toll?’
Mosca had to clench her teeth shut. Why did everyone react to Beamabeth this way?
‘So… you will be seeing her again?’ The midwife’s brow cleared. ‘Sir, can I ask you to take a letter to her? It is a presumption, of course, for we only met once – the day I helped bring her into the world, and she will never have heard of me. But I always remembered her… and I believe I would like to send her a letter.’
Why? How had this otherwise sensible woman who had only met Beamabeth as a screaming purple blob fallen under her spell? Or had Beamabeth slipped immaculate into the world, petal-cheeked and smiling amidst gleaming golden curls?
‘I would be enchanted,’ said Clent. ‘But… ah… I would need to actually reach Toll-by-Day first. It might also help if I was alive when I did so.’
Mosca sat and chewed her knuckles as Clent negotiated with Mistress Leap. There was, it appeared, a mysterious person who could perhaps help them back into Toll-by-Day, though at considerable risk. Mosca and Clent were to go with this person and would not ask any questions. When Mosca and Clent had done what they needed to do to gain their reward, they would then leave a portion of it in an agreed place for the Leaps and this person. There was no guarantee that Mosca and Clent would be safe with the unnamed individual, but then the Leaps had no guarantee that they could trust Mosca and Clent to leave the money. It was a deal of mutual desperation.
Mosca’s eyes kept creeping to the crack-faced clock on the mantel, watching as it gnawed away the hours until dawn, a nibble at a time.
At last there came a strange rattle of raps at the door. The midwife opened it, and Mosca glimpsed a slight, youthful figure outside, dressed in a tunic, breeches and a tight cap.
‘Got parcels for me tonight, Mistress Leap?’ Only as the figure stepped forward to speak did two things become clear. First, the youth outside could not be more than sixteen years old. Second, the youth was in fact a girl. A girl with a boxer’s watchfulness and a pugnacious jaw, but a girl nonetheless.
‘Packages of a sort,’ was the midwife’s answer, as she held the door open and glanced at Mosca and Clent by way of explanation.
The new arrival seemed loath to step into the light of the room, but leaned forward a little to take her measure of the midwife’s guests.
‘So these are newborns, are they?’ Her voice was gruff, almost a rasp. ‘Somebody must ’ave big hips.’
‘They need passage to Toll-by-Day. There’s money in it – but they need to be in daylight to lay hands on the coin. Can you do it?’
‘If they’re not cacklers, and if they’re not maggot-pated, and if they can take orders and duck into a jague when I tell ’em… then ’tis possible. Risky as adder soup, but possible. If they prove slow or clatterfoot though, I’ll leave ’em in the streets to stew, mind.’
This was thieves’ cant. Mosca was a lover of words, and she had a sneaking liking for the grimy panache of cant, and those who wore it like a ragged red cloak.
The girl raised her left hand, and for the first time Mosca saw that there were long, curved metal hooks tied to the ends of her leather-gloved fingers. With one such hook she scratched very carefully at the jut of her chin. Her other hand was bare.
‘Now or never,’ she declared abruptly, and darted off into the night. Half a second passed before Mosca and Clent realized that she intended them to follow and leaped for the door.
Dawn was on the way. The eastern sky looked sickly, and here and there birds made restless enquiries of each other, asking the time. The biting cold of the air seared the skin of Mosca’s face and hands. The girl with the claws ran off down the street without looking back, and Mosca sprinted after her, hearing Clent huffing as he took up the rear.
A distant bugle sounded, and their nameless guide turned a corner and halted, her back flush with wall.
‘Hold here, and bleat if you see aught.’ The girl bent her knees and leaped, hooking her claws over the lintel of the nearest house, then found a hold with her unclawed hand, scrabbled her way up the brickwork with her feet and hauled herself on to the roof.
The minutes dragged like hours as the girl crouched on the tiles, her head turning this way and that like a weathercock in a storm, listening to the sounds of day rousing itself. In the growing light it was now possible to see the chilblains on her wrists, the two smallpox scars on her neck. She had a fierce face, and unknowingly ground her teeth as she listened.
‘I hear ’em,’ she muttered at last. ‘Coming up Drake’s Dirge.’ She dropped from the roof and set off down the lane, beckoning with her taloned hand. ‘It’s just round – oh, ratscraps!’
Four figures had lurched from an alley, one of them hefting what Mosca recognized as a filch, a long stick with a hook usually used for stealing from high windows but now brandished like a weapon. It swung down in an attempt to catch the girl’s ankle, and she leaped it with inches to spare. The boots of a second man slithered on the icy cobbles, and he seemed to grab at Clent’s coat for support. Clent reared away reflexively to the sound of rending cloth, and a slim dagger fell to the stones with a clang.
Their guide lashed out at the nearest attacker with her clawed hand, and at the last moment he decided in favour of keeping his nose and leaped back, sprawling on the ground with one of his fellows under him.
‘Run!’ she yelled. ‘Scour!’
Mosca aimed a deft kick to the nearest kneecap and took off after the older girl. Clent, whose coat was now sporting a new knife slash, also needed no encouragement. Fortunately there was no sign of pursuit.
‘Jinglers,’ called the clawed girl over her shoulder as she slowed, by way of explanation. ‘Looking to catch late strays. Now, stay close – I know the path the Changeover Jinglers are taking. ’Tis just a matter of staying a step behind them half the time, and a step ahead the rest…’
A distant sound like sleighbells… or keys jangling at belts…
The girl broke into a sprint, again without the slightest warning. She really did not seem to care whether or not her charges kept up with her. Unnervingly she seemed to be running directly towards the jingling. It was with relief that they caught up with her on the second street and found she was not up to her neck in Jinglers. She did, however, appear to be doing something very strange. As she ran she was tugging cloth pouches from her belt with her unclawed hand, and hefting them as if ready to hurl.