‘Let us report our fortunes to the lady,’ Sir Feldroll sighed, disarming his pistol with blue fingers, ‘and see if her people can rustle up a bowl of something hot.’
They entered to find a cluster of servants and overnight guests huddled at the base of the stairs with weapons gripped in their trembling fists. They were evidently planning an assault upon the stairway, where Saracen strutted with lordly confidence, head bobbing and ducking. To judge by the fresh bandages around several hands and one crown, this was not the first time they had tried.
‘Stop!’ Mosca pushed past them, thudded up the stairs and curled her arms around Saracen. ‘He’s just doin’ the job I left him to do, that’s all. I’ll find him a bite of something and he’ll be right as royalty.’
Sir Feldroll was the first to muster enough courage to edge past her, followed by a long train of young men who seemed determined to pretend that they had not all been held at bay by a walking roast dinner.
Loosing Saracen’s tether from the banister and prising a pair of pince-nez from the grip of his beak, Mosca could hear Sir Feldroll knocking quietly at an upstairs door and calling out in polite and gentle tones. There was a pause, and then some more knocking. Then louder and more sustained knocking.
There was a clatter of steps, and Sir Feldroll appeared at the head of the stairs. His features, which had never seemed particularly happy with each other, now seemed to have fallen out completely and were leaping and jerking in the most disturbing fashion.
‘Keys!’ he snapped. ‘Keys to the lady’s room! Something is amiss!’
A steward hastened up the stairs, performing an elegant pirouette to avoid a lazy jab from Saracen’s beak, and found the right key on his chatelaine. The lord seized it and marched away, dragging the hapless steward behind him by his keychain.
An ominous sensation clutching at her stomach, Mosca followed with Saracen in her arms and was present when the door was opened.
A ghost of a flame quivered above the splattered wreck of a fallen candle on the dresser. One green satin shoe lay abandoned in the centre of the room. The red pincushion had been knocked to the floor, its scattered pins glittering in the pale light from the open and unshuttered window.
Beamabeth was nowhere to be seen.
Goodlady Battlemap, Recorder of Unmitigated Disasters
Sir Feldroll leaped across the room to lean out through the window and then gave a muffled neep’ of pain and stooped to pick the pins out of his shoes. Other conspirators followed him into the chamber and performed a search. This generally seemed to involve flinging open clothes chests, going slightly purple at the first glimpse of female lace and hurriedly dropping the lids again.
‘What’s going on?’ A shout from downstairs.
‘She’s not here!’ Mosca yelled back. ‘Looks like somebody dragged her out the window! All her baubles are thrown about!’
‘What?’
Murmurs of confusion down in the hall, and then an outcry.
‘Look – look there! Stop him!’
‘Don’t let him get away!’
Mosca left the chamber at a run and clattered down the stairs with Sir Feldroll and the others at her heels. When she arrived in the hall, the crowd parted before her armful of goose to show her Clent struggling in the grip of a footman and two guests, his hand still tight around the front-door handle.
‘He was trying to slip out, through the door, my lord!’ chirped one of his captors. ‘We scarce collared him in time!’
‘Sweet singing stars, have you wits?’ bellowed Clent, as one of his waistcoat buttons burst under the strain. ‘I was not trying to escape! I was stepping out to examine the scene outside the lady’s window and discover how the abduction was managed – surely you can all see that is the next logical action?’
It was a plausible story, but Mosca doubted it was true. Everybody else’s mind had been busy with the obvious questions: What has happened?Why? How? Clent’s mind, however, had skipped ahead to the more important question: When people have recovered from shock, who will be blamed? Evidently he had not liked the answer.
‘Let us go and look outside as he suggests,’ instructed Sir Feldroll. ‘But keep a hand on the man’s collar – and an eye on that girl of his.’
Outside, the frustrated conspirators surveyed the wall, looking for handholds in the rough stone.
‘You – girl -’ a member of the keep ambush party glanced Mosca’s way – ‘You’re good at climbing, aren’t you? You could have climbed up to that window.’
‘Not at the same time as standing in a pantry with you and your friends, you pudding-faced dolt!’ Mosca snapped back, her temper fraying.
‘Nobody climbed the wall.’ Clent straightened from a stoop and with one toe pushed back the grass to reveal two deep identical ruts in the earth, about a foot apart. ‘These, my friends, are the imprints of a ladder.’
‘Steward!’ The steward started fearfully in response to Sir Feldroll’s bark. ‘Does your household own a ladder?’
‘Yes, my lord – but it is usually in the orchard.’
It was not in the orchard. After a brief search it was found behind the house.
‘So.’ Sir Feldroll scowled. ‘Am I to understand that a gaggle of villains ran through half the courtyard with a ladder, dodging Jinglers as they went, set it against the wall, forced their way in through the window, overwhelmed Miss Marlebourne, carried her down, then ran away with her, all without us seeing or hearing anything?’
A moan of the utmost melancholy emerged from Eponymous Clent.
‘Alas, my unhappy comrades, we did hear them. We heard them circle the house, come to a halt by the window, move their ladder and do their business. But we were too busy cowering in terror, because they were jingling. The second set of so-called “Jinglers”, that ran past the house a minute after the first – that must have been our kidnappers. By the time we dared to emerge and lay our own trap, the lady had been tweaked from under our noses.’
‘But how?’ exploded Sir Feldroll. ‘How, without a scream or sounds of a struggle? The lady must have unfastened her window to open her shutters so that she could keep an eye upon events – but how could those dogs be sure of catching her before she fastened the windows again? There is more to this. There must be. These villains must have had an accomplice within the house.’ He glanced around himself fiercely. ‘Are we missing anybody from the mayor’s household?’
Clent’s eyes had been flickering out towards the town from time to time, perhaps in search of an escape route. Now his gaze seemed to lodge on something, and he deflated like a puff pie taken from the oven.
‘Oh, pestilential fates,’ he murmured. ‘No, I believe we shall soon have the establishment in its entirety.’
Following the line of his gaze, Mosca saw the mayor striding with rapid, purposeful steps in their direction, huffing out angry white breaths into the crisp and wintry air.
He came to a halt outside the house, and his arched white brows rose as he surveyed the rueful, tongue-tied congregation. Sir Feldroll was the first to find his courage, and stepped forward, knotting his fingers together.
‘My lord mayor… I hardly know how to… I have the worst of all possible news. The trap laid last night was not successful. And worse than that – worst of all – my lord mayor, I must ask you to brace yourself-’
‘What trap?’ demanded the mayor, his head turning to examine one person after another in sharp, hostile motions.