‘Now, this promenade has been charming and exhilarating, but I fear I must go and practise for a recital tomorrow night. So I shall make my adieus. Steady – steady – can I recommend that you try breathing?’ He patted her arm, then squinted down the street, where one of the shadows had briefly showed signs of movement. ‘A-a-and perhaps running. Yes, my dear. Definitely time for some running.’
Sprinting for ten minutes did nothing to help Mosca recover her breath. She continued running even when she realized that her new guide was no longer at her side. She ran until her legs seemed to become butter and gave out under her, leaving her gulping and shaking against a wall, the feathers on her basket-hat a-quiver. Then Mosca’s mind, which had held together while she needed to remember how to put one foot in front of another, set about unravelling.
The disaster was absolute. The invisible silver lifeline that had linked her to the bright, safe world of day had snapped. The ambush she had planned for Brand Appleton later that night was impossible, for she had no reinforcements. There was nobody to compel him to reveal the kidnappers’ lair. And, she realized with a lurch of the heart, there was no money to pay the tithe for the night of Saint Yacobray.
The very next night there would be nothing to stop the kidnappers from claiming the ransom, and Brand Appleton would spirit his unwilling bride-to-be out of Toll. Then the dreaded Clatterhorse would ride through the streets, and the Leaps would not be ready for it… and so Mosca and the Leaps would be lost.
And she could tell none of this to her day allies because the letter drop was compromised. Did that mean that Clent and his friends were also in danger? Desperately she tried to remember what she had put in her own letter. Had she been cryptic enough? She hoped so.
Mosca closed her eyes, and swallowed, and set about gathering her wits. Reinforcements vanished like smoke. Probably taken by Locksmiths. Probably dead. She muttered a prayer for them under her breath, but could not muster much real feeling. To her the lost men were as faceless as eggs, and there was nothing she could do about that. The crushing sense of dread and panic pushed out everything else. She tried to think of Beamabeth’s kitten-faced plight, but could not help feeling that her own situation was probably worse than that of the mayor’s daughter.
For one thing, Beamabeth was the last person in the world that Brand Appleton would ever hurt. Mosca Mye on the other hand had no such guarantee, and had an appointment with him that she would have to keep alone.
Cooper’s Dark, where Mosca had promised to meet Appleton, turned out to be a nightling version of Cooper’s Lane. A series of second-floor facings had folded down to form a new walkway that ‘roofed’ the street and turned it into a tunnel. The upper walkway was Cooper’s Perch; the lane below, Cooper’s Dark. Fortunately a couple of cloaked figures were being led into the darkness by a lantern-wielding linkboy, and Mosca was able to follow a few paces behind them in less than total pitch.
Appleton had told her to meet him at Harass and Quail’s, opposite the stone trough. Mosca was unsurprised to discover that it was a gin-shop.
Mosca’s hands were shaking, but she could not pause, even to calm her breathing. Hesitation was weakness, fox blood on the heather that hounds would smell out in an instant.
All right, Mosca Mye, we’re going to play a game, she told herself. A game where Sir Feldroll’s reinforcements came through safe and everything’s fine and there’s six men just waiting in the dark by the wall for your signal. Six men all pistolled up to the teeth, with shoulders broad as a barn. Walk like you got an army in your pocket.
She pushed open the door. Within, like most of the night-side buildings, the gin-shop was narrow and clenched, stools of varying heights clustering throughout like a mushroom epidemic. Given her preposterous appearance, she was glad to see that the lanterns were dim and low-placed, making a great deal of the customers’ chins and nose hair and pouches beneath their eyes, but a lot less of their brows and upper cheeks.
Brand Appleton was seated by a wall, beneath a mildewed tapestry of a cavalry charge from the Civil War. Even in the murk, Mosca could see that Appleton’s bruises had reached their full plummy glory. He had taken off his gloves and was busy twisting and torturing them in a fit of frowning impatience. To her relief, he appeared to be alone.
She cleared her throat, and he released the gloves, looking up at her suspicously. She recalled that he had never seen her face before.
‘Mr Appleton,’ she said, and watched recognition, realization, surprise and eagerness canter across his features. Usually it made Mosca feel safer when she met somebody whose expression she could read so easily, but somehow with Appleton it was different. The very helplessness with which his emotions escaped him made her feel uneasy. He was open, like a lion-cage door. He was unguarded, like a pistol at full cock.
‘Sit down,’ he said, and winced as the spread of his smile reopened a cut on his lower lip. ‘I thought you sounded young.’ He looked her strange ‘Seisian’ regalia up and down, and suspicion came out on a black hobby horse to join the caper of other emotions. ‘So… you say you’re from Mandelion?’
‘Not from.’ Mosca scrambled up on a tall stool that left her clogs dangling. ‘I said I been there. The ship I was on had to land somewhere, didn’t it?’ Mandelion was the area’s biggest port, and it seemed the best explanation for the presence of a mysterious foreigner in the town.
‘Ship from where?’ Suspicion’s canter seemed to have slowed to a trot, but Appleton’s brows were still furrowed.
Mosca wet her lips, tempted for a second to fling open the sluice gates of her invention and flood Appleton with tales of an exotic eastern past. But she was not Eponymous Clent, so she gave a mental grimace and pushed the images away.
‘Not somewhere I’ll ever be returning,’ she muttered sourly. ‘Not somewhere I’m in a hurry to think about neither. So don’t go dwelling on that. Mandelion is all you need to know about.’ A grim little mystery was better than a tall tale. Less likely to fall on its face, anyway.
She could read Appleton’s countenance like an open diary. He had been ready to bargain with some urchin who knew Mandelion, but strange green foreignness had confused everything. He was comparing her outlandish dress with her commonplace accent. He was wondering whether she was an impostor. And the possibility that she might actually be a heathen from the distant east had sent his small-town mind hunkering down in its kennel and growling suspiciously.
Mosca chewed her cheek, testing the edge of the situation with her mind, and then took a gamble. She let herself down from her stool.
‘I see how it is,’ she snapped. ‘You’re no different from all the others. One glimpse of a green face, and you’re climbing up the curtains like there’s a tiger in the room. Well, worry not, the tiger is leaving. You can stew in your own juice, Mr Not-so-radical Appleton.’
She made a small and hopefully Seisian-looking gesture with the entwined middle fingers of her right hand and then strode sulkily towards the door. Push something in someone’s face, and they will shove it away reflexively. Threaten to snatch it away from them, and sometimes they become convinced that it is what they want.
But Appleton had not called her back. She reached the door. Her fingers brushed the handle.
‘Er, no – wait! Wait!’
Without turning, the mysterious foreigner allowed herself a small green smile.
‘Come back – come, sit down. No more questions about your homeland. I promise.’
Mosca had to wrestle the grin off her face before she could turn round. In the end she managed this by reminding herself that, yes, she had persuaded the fish to bite down on the hook, but that she was armed with a small and fragile rod, and faced by a large, dangerous and unpredictable catch. With a grudging air she trailed back to the table and seated herself with all the regality of a shrunken empress.