As they passed before what looked like a boarded pub, a casement above suddenly opened half a foot. Without breaking stride the clawed girl deftly flung one pouch into the gap, which immediately closed behind it. Another pouch she wedged under a tree stump. A third she dropped into a hand extended through a hastily opened hatch.
At a corner where a large yew had decided to grow through the wall of an old brewhouse, she halted again. With her hooked hand she pulled back some of the dense, needle-filled foliage to show a narrow gap.
‘In.’
‘What?’ Clent was already wheezing with effort, and he stared at the hole with wild-eyed horror.
‘They already been past here, so they’ll have spiked this tree to look for skulkers. They might not do it again. Best chance you got. In.’ And the girl was gone again, pelting down the street without leaving any chance for protest.
However many centuries that ancient tree had stood there, it had probably never seen anything as graceless as Mosca and Clent trying to thrash their way into it at the same time. There is little give in a yew, for it has a mesh of small, fibrous branches and thousands of bristling needles, scrubbing-brush dense. Even when they stopped trying to struggle their way further in, it was impossible to tell whether they were invisible from the street.
‘Hush!’ whispered Clent. ‘Hold still!’
Mosca obeyed and realized that she could hear the sound of jingling nearing and slowing. There were steps on the cobbles, then a rasp of steel. Without warning, something dark and wickedly slender jabbed through the concealing foliage. Mosca heard it tear through the loose fabric of her sleeve, and briefly felt the kiss of cold against her forearm before the blade withdrew. She clenched her teeth and managed not to cry out at the shock of the contact.
What easier way to check for hiders than to jab a sword idly into a few places and see whether the tree screamed and bled? She held her breath, tingling all over in expectation of the next stab, even when the jingling sound passed.
At long last, the after-dawn bugle sounded. Somewhere in the sap-scented darkness, Mosca heard Clent give a protracted, ragged sigh of relief.
‘Madam, let us… dismount.’
Clent ‘dismounted’ fairly easily by falling out of the tree in disarray with a squawk of pain. Mosca however had to be dragged out by her ankles, the yew having worked itself into her hair, bonnet and gown.
‘So…’ Clent’s throat was still a little rough from gasping hurried air into his lungs. ‘Altogether a very successful… ah… reconnaissance outing. Very… ah… educational…’
Haggard, sleep-deprived and bristling with yew needles, the pair wiped the soot from their badges and then limped down the street attempting amiable smiles at passers-by, some of whom recoiled from the prospect. As they passed the stump where the clawed girl had thrust her pouch, Clent looked about him and then stooped.
‘I am interested to know,’ he murmured in an undertone, ‘what exactly is so important that our brusque young friend was willing to brave the Jinglers in order to deliver it, and various decent citizens were willing to open their casements and hatches before bugle to receive it.’
He examined the pouch, then hesitantly lowered his head to sniff at it. His eyebrows climbed, and he passed the pouch to Mosca. She followed his lead, and raised it to her nose for a good sniff.
‘But, Mr Clent – this smells like…’ She stared at him.
‘Yes.’ Clent stooped to put the pouch back in its hiding place. ‘Chocolate.’
Goodman Trywhy, Master of Schemes, Sleights and Stratagems
By the time that the pale winter sun had put in a lacklustre appearance, a slack flap of cloud smothering his face like a nightcap, Mosca and Clent had holed up in the little pleasure-garden pavilion they had found before. This provided exactly what they needed – a quiet and secluded spot for first-degree panicking.
‘We’re in a bleedin’ Locksmith town!’ Mosca had repeated this about a dozen times, but had not yet worn the edge off it. ‘We got Mistress Bessel after our hides, that gibbet-rat Skellow wants to skin me alive and we’re in a bleedin’ Locksmith town! The night town’s run by ’em, and I bet the day town will be as well, soon as salt, and their agents must be everywhere, and two nights from now if we’re still here they’ll send me to Toll-by-Night, and I got nowhere to stay so I’ll be on the streets with no money on the night of Yacobray, and the Clatterhorse’ll get me…’
She paused, partly for breath, and partly through awareness that the latter part of her complaint had sounded a bit babyish.
‘Child… child… that sinister steed shall not have you. It shall not. Mosca, you have my sincerest and unstained oath on that. Have you ever known me break my word to you?’
Four icy seconds passed during which Mosca simply stared
at Clent, her tongue pushed into her cheek, one eyebrow raised, her eyes hard black incredulous beads. Clent chose to ignore the answer hovering in the air.
‘The matter is in my hands, child. The cogs of my mind whirl so fast they might start fires. Let us settle our thoughts and analyse. At present our only plan for leaving this town is to claim a reward from the Marlebournes, and to do so we must prove to them that the damsel in distress is indeed in danger. And we still have until tomorrow evening to do so, before we lose our visitor status. Two days and one night.’
Mosca said nothing. The word ‘damsel’ rankled with her. She suddenly thought of the clawed girl from the night before, jumping the filch on an icy street. Much the same age and build as Beamabeth, and far more beleaguered. What made a girl a ‘damsel in distress’? Were they not allowed claws? Mosca had a hunch that if all damsels had claws they would spend a lot less time ‘in distress’.
‘Fortunately,’ Clent continued crisply, ‘your employer is a genius. This man Skellow and his fellows will be coming to the castle courtyard this very night to receive my written orders, counting upon me to invent a plot to kidnap that poor girl come the dawn. And I shall indeed present them with a plan of uncommon daring and ingenuity, one that cannot fail… unless of course the damsel and her family are warned in advance, and the entire enterprise is a trap for our dastardly conspirators.’
‘I thought the mayor said he’d hang us like washing if we warned him any more?’
‘Ye-e-es, he might have implied as much. Which is why we must persuade his charming daughter to speak to him on
our behalf.’
‘And we do all this before tomorrow evening?’ ‘Inevitably. Inescapably. We concoct a plan today. We
recruit the inestimable mayor and his family. We prepare our
ambush. I leave a letter for our kidnappers and hook them
into our cheat. At dawn we spring our trap. In a word…
yes.’
‘Well, I’m glad we got a whole day to work out how to use
a mayor’s daughter as bait,’ growled Mosca. ‘Wouldn’t want
to go doing that slipshod.’
After seeing Toll-by-Night, it was impossible to look at Toll-by-Day the same way. As she walked down the street, Mosca could not help but glance this way and that, trying to work out how the whole town had transformed. Soon she found that there were clues once you knew where to look.
Most of the houses were faced with the same white plaster criss-crossed with black beams, some jutting further forward than others. Now she suspected that some of these fronts were false, mounted on a board and designed to swing or slide from one position to another. One position for daylight – and then at dusk they could be moved, covering one set of doors and windows and revealing another, or slid sideways to block off a passage, or flipped down to become a boardwalk or bridge. Discreet but sturdy padlocks held the whole in place.