Laylow gave Mosca another knuckle-nudge in the ribs, and drew her away from the bed to a distance where their whispers would not disturb the sleeper.
‘No doctors.’ Laylow’s eyes rested fully on Mosca’s face for the first time, and for an instant Mosca thought she saw a wrinkle of perplexity, a shade of recognition. But it passed. After all, how could a green foreigner possibly look slightly familiar? ‘There’s no trusting the doctors in this town. But once he’s outside Toll… Can you get him out, by magic or such? A sailor told me a story of a Seisian who had a flying carpet -’
Mosca groaned, and rubbed at her temples with her knuckles. ‘Look, miss – do you think I would still be here in this dreg-pot of a town if I could fly?’ She chewed her cheek, watching to gauge the older girl’s reaction. ‘Why don’t you pay his way out? He… he said there would be money.’
‘There will be!’ Laylow’s boxer-jaw jutted. ‘It’s just… not in our fambles yet.’
Fambles. Another word lodged in a grimy reach of Mosca’s mind, the part that had read every criminal chapbook and hangman’s history to fall into her hands. It was the part of her mind that she had long since given Palpitattle’s name and voice. As she remembered her thieves’ cant, it was Palpitattle’s rasping, sarcastic voice she seemed to hear.
Fambles is hands. Not in our hands yet, is what she is saying. So she and Appleton ain’t got the jewel, have they?
‘Listen!’ Laylow went on. ‘I do not know all the twists of it, but Brand come to me yester-eve and told me that he needed help with a lay. Said he was in deep with some parties, but did not trust them not to take the ribbin and run if they found it within their grasp. So tonight we was out to fetch the gilt, but a gang of scapegallows were waiting for us and set us about on all sides, and one of them stuck Brand through with a blade. They must have took the money – I went back after and searched half the streets in town, but it was gone. So somebody made a pair of calf-lollies out of us, but I will find them, and then Dark Gentleman take me if I do not beat the chink out of them.’
What she means, rasped Palpitattle helpfully, is that Brand was scared of a double-cross. So when he went to get the reward he didn’t trust the folks he was in league with, and asked this wildcat to come with him instead. And she don’t know what’s going on, but she thinks he was betrayed by his comrades, and that the parties what stabbed Mr Not-So-Radical Appleton took the money too. And she wants to get it back.
‘Did he mention any names?’ Mosca kept a sly watch on Laylow’s face. ‘Names of the folks in his gang he didn’t trust?’
Slow nod. ‘Said there was one fellow with a hang-gallows look and a snakish way about him. Name of Skellow.’
Had Brand been right? Had Skellow been waiting for a chance to double-cross him? Could Skellow have been the lean and capering Horse-Man who had stabbed Brand? He was tall and slight enough. Yes. It could have been him.
‘And now Brand wants to go back to his cronies, to their blasted lair!’ muttered Laylow, glancing across at Brand. ‘Cleft-pate gull! Walking in to let them finish their handiwork – that’s a plan and a half!’
‘He…’ Mosca hesitated, wondering if she dared go on. ‘He said something about a girl waiting there, one he had to protect-’
The effect was instantaneous and explosive.
‘Blight take her and every last ringlet! What right does she have – oh, that moping, cow-eyed, dunderheaded gull! I should throw him to the Jinglers! Like a bullock in love with the butcher’s knife! I will, I swear I will, that’ll be a lesson – I knew it, knew she was in Toll-by-Night somehow, knew it – kites and kettles, I’ll – why is the sun not enough for her? Well, plague on the pair of them! I do not care, do not need – but not even her scraps, her cast-offs – she never wanted – Why do you look at me like that.’
Mosca was goggling at her open-mouthed. ‘You’re in love with him!’ she exclaimed accusingly, as Laylow’s tirade ended. ‘You must be – you’ve stopped making any sense!’ Even thieves’ cant was more comprehensible than that.
‘Go kiss a cat,’ snarled Laylow. Which was not, Mosca reflected, exactly a ‘no’.
Mosca thought about trying to tell a hysterical, lovelorn, claw-handed renegade that her dear Brand had actually kidnapped another woman so as to force her to marry him, but she thought that might go down like a lead chaffinch.
‘I offered to go back there in his place – look to the lie of the land,’ Laylow went on. ‘But he would have none of it. Would not trust me. Or tell me where to find those blackguards’ stop-hole.’ She glared at Mosca with a sudden flare of suspicion. ‘So what did he want with you, if you’ve no medicine nor tricks to help him? What are you for?’
‘I – I’m a Teacher!’ squeaked Mosca quickly, eyes on her companion’s sharp claw tips. ‘Ask him yourself! Teaching him radical matters, telling him how to get to Mandelion -’
As soon as the words were out, she could have bitten her tongue. Laylow gasped as if the air had been knocked out of her.
‘Mandelion? He is… leaving? Never told me – never told me he was leaving…’
Brand Appleton was stirring again, but Laylow seemed too stunned to notice, and Mosca scrambled to his side unhindered, glad to be out of reach of the claws.
‘Teacher!’ He took hold of her wrist with furtive urgency. ‘Talk quietly, don’t let her hear us – she has a heart of flint, that one, won’t let me leave. I think she spikes the possets to keep me dizzy -’
‘That’s no spiked posset, Mr Appleton,’ Mosca whispered, feeling a reluctant sting of pity. ‘Look at you, you’re all leaked away, limp as an empty wine-bladder. I could help you till my face turned blue, but I would never get you on your feet – not with you like that.’
Appleton sagged with disappointment and frustration, then his grip on her wrist tightened again.
‘You could go! You could go and see how she is, tell her… tell her that I will make all right and she shall be sorry for none of this in the end. And tell the others that if they hurt her, if they frighten her, then I’ll… I’ll… make their hearts into… purses. Or tell them I’ll go to the Jinglers and turn evidence. Tell them I am well and strong and the knife missed me.’ His eyes drifted to Laylow. ‘That scratch-cat! You see how she is – I cannot send her – she would not understand – she hates… but you, you’ll go.’ Large, eager blue eyes met hers, open as summer, mad as hare hopscotch.
Mosca took three deep breaths one after the other, like a diver preparing to plunge.
‘Yeah,’ she whispered softly. ‘I will go for you. For three shilling extra. Paid when you got the rest of the money.’ She could not afford to seem too eager. She would let him think that her face was brightening at the thought of money. ‘So… where do I go?’
Mosca had to stoop to hear the kidnapper’s whispered words, and straightened with her eyes full of black mischief and wonder and suppressed excitement. She hardly dared meet Laylow’s gaze as she edged back towards her.
‘Your friend there – he has a notion that he will start to mend if he drinks a posset made of… whey and thistle wine. I told him I would find some, and it settled him down. For now, anyway.’
‘Whey and thistle wine.’ Laylow’s brow creased again. ‘Will that help him?’
‘Maybe. It cannot hurt.’ The door was six feet away. All Mosca had to do was talk her way outside it. ‘I can find you thistle wine for him, and honey, and… and blood sausage to help his strength, but I’ll want paying for it when you find that chink of yours.’