‘Mother Midnight.’ The whetstone rasp of a voice came from directly behind them. ‘Beadle wants to see you.’ The voice’s owner was a lean man with bristling black hair and a sickle-shaped scar that tugged a kink in his upper lip. ‘Mother Midnight’ was an irreverent term for a midwife.
Mistress Leap jumped disproportionately and clasped her hands nervously.
‘Oh! Yes – I… I was just coming to see him, in fact…’ She placed a reassuring arm around Mosca’s shoulders, and they followed him across an obstacle course of plank and plinth, on a twisting route towards the pavilion.
At one point Mosca’s foot slithered on the worn and frosty planks and she almost toppled from a beam to the lawn below. The stranger caught at her arm and righted her at the last moment.
‘Stay off the grass!’ he hissed.
And of course that was what this whole wooden wonderland and its inhabitants were doing. Staying off the grass. The lawns that needed to be lush and pristine for the day-lighters, not trodden to mud by chilblained feet and battered boots. No doubt the nightowls were forbidden from chopping down trees for much the same reason.
The pavilion was transformed. The brazier’s light flushed it peach, and it hung in the smoke like a genie’s mirage. Bent sequins glittered on the cloths that shrouded its sides. Within it a broad-bellied man sat enthroned, lolling aloft like a sultan in his palanquin.
Adopting the meekest manner she could, Mosca followed Mistress Leap to stand before the pavilion. Her skin stung and tingled with the sudden warmth of the brazier, and though she kept her eyes lowered, the brilliant firelight seared orange through her lids.
The message proclaimed by the blazing, uncovered brazier was almost deafening. I am a man who can afford to be wonderfully, wastefully warm on this wretched winter night, it said. I am a man whose favour is worth winning.
‘Master Beadle.’ Mistress Leap’s voice was still brisk, but it was the voice of a brisk but asthmatic vole.
‘Ah, Mistress Leap.’ The man whose favour was worth winning had a voice that was half-whinny, half-gasp. A pair of bellows with a whistling hole. Mosca could not see his face. ‘Always a pleasure, isn’t it?’
Mistress Leap made an obliging, high-pitched noise that was not exactly a word.
‘That friend of yours, Mistress Leap. A problem. What’s to be done about it?’
Mosca stiffened and tightened her fists so that her arms and shoulders didn’t tremble. Friend. Is that me? Is he looking at me?
‘Yes, you know the one,’ the Beadle continued. ‘The mother whose kinchin went dayside. Blethemy Crace. Been acting the zany and making all manner of hubbub. Clinging to the wall of a daylighter’s house, saying she can hear her babe crying on the other side. Over in Spikepock’s parish. He wants to know what we plan to do about it.’
Mosca imagined a mother pressed against a cold stone wall, listening to the cries of a baby who did not understand that it was not supposed to exist at that hour. Poor little Gobbet.
‘I… I will speak to her about it,’ breathed Mistress Leap hurriedly.
‘Of course you will.’ A pause. ‘Now, what’s this shred of life clinging to your skirts?’
Mistress Leap’s arm tightened slightly around Mosca’s shoulders. ‘I was… just bringing her to you. To register. A little foreigner – from Seisia, we think. She’ll be staying with me – I’ve needed an apprentice for a long time and she seems a keen, hardworking sort of a child…’
‘Name?’ wheezed the Beadle.
‘We do not know,’ Mistress Leap said quickly. ‘I have tried to get sense out of her, but she does nothing except chatter like a chicken coop in her foreign tongue.’
‘Bring her to me.’
Guided forward by Mistress Leap, Mosca gingerly made her way past the brazier to the Beadle’s side, hoping against hope he would not see that her nationality was painted on. She tried to make her face as bland and mild as possible.
The Beadle’s face was pinkly discoloured and pitted like a crab shell. His eyes, peering sleepily between the folds of his lids, also put Mosca in mind of a crab. The mind behind them was a crusted, scuttling thing, used to thinking sideways.
‘You sure she’s not just simple?’ asked the Beadle. Mosca realized that in her attempts to look ‘wide-eyed and innocent’ she might have overshot and hit ‘half-witted’. The Beadle leaned forward and prodded her in the ribs with a fat finger.
‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘Jabber for us. What’s your name?’
Mosca licked her lips drily, and let fly a stream of babble. A few real words like ‘hobble’ and ‘wisteria’ got mixed in somehow, but she hoped nobody would notice.
‘Huh. Open wide, there.’ A thick finger tapped her on the chin. She opened her mouth and held as still as she could while the Beadle stared intently inside. ‘Yes – that’s a foreign tongue all right. Pale and blue and too pointy at the end. Nothing you can do about it.’ The meaty hand patted Mosca’s shoulder twice. ‘Keep her nose clean and her feet off the grass.’
Mosca was just turning to go, her stomach turbulent with relief, when the Beadle’s next words caught her attention.
‘Grib, how’s Appleton doing?’
The question was answered by the sickle-mouthed man.
‘Took a couple of blows to the costard, but he’s keeping his feet, Master Beadle.’
Mosca tried not to stare at them as Mistress Leap dragged her away.
‘Did you hear that?’ she hissed when they were out of earshot, moving her lips as little as she could. ‘Sounds like the Beadle knows where Brand Appleton is!’
‘I am quite sure he does,’ the midwife responded quietly, staring out into the centre of the arena. Mosca followed the line of Mistress Leap’s gaze to the two cudgellers on the precarious plankwalk. ‘And so do I, and so does everybody else here. You see the young fellow up there with the red hair?’
Peering, Mosca could see that one of the combatants did indeed have red hair. His motions were more reckless and clumsy than those of his opponent. He lunged where his enemy edged, and swung his cudgel wildly to find his enemy instead of hunching down to listen for his steps. Mosca thought he seemed younger than his opponent, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old.
‘He’s here every time they hold a Bludgeoncourt.’ Mistress Leap sighed. ‘All the folks in the boxes and big stands pay a trifle to come and watch, but the prize the contestants fight for isn’t money. It’s hard-to-come-bys, luxuries – a bottle of Vantian sherry, a roll of chocolate, spices – and tonight it’s candied violets. He enters the contest every time. I suppose he still has daylighter ways – maybe he’d sooner die than go without his silks and coffee.’ There was a cold edge of disdain in Mistress Leap’s usually kindly voice, and Mosca could hear the mutual distrust of Day and Night grinding together like a giant’s teeth.
‘I don’t think so,’ Mosca murmured. ‘Gifts for a lady, I think.’ She could picture Brand Appleton limping home each night with cinnamon and sweetmeats, like a disgraced dog dragging in a mangled gamebird and hoping to be loved for it. ‘Let’s get closer.’
Through time-honoured use of the elbow Mosca and Mistress Leap found standing room on a stage near the battle-bridge, and Mosca’s suspicions were confirmed – Appleton was not doing well. His opponent was a few inches shorter, but strongly, squatly built. Both were stripped to their shirts, but only Appleton’s was marred by dark splotches that Mosca guessed must be blood. Furthermore he did not seem to be a favourite of the crowd. Time and again a piece of fruit peel or a small stone pattered off his shoulder or clipped his ear.