Twilight Robbery (43 page)

Funny place for a shrine
, thought Mosca.

The ceiling was just low enough for Mosca to stand, so she did and pressed her eye to one of its holes. Directly above her she saw sky, but it was not the great cold sky that spread its wings over the world. Rather it was a smaller, more homely mimic of the heavens, and one that she had seen before. The inside of a deep blue dome, adorned with painted silver stars . . . yes! She was staring up at the chapel end of the reception room in which she had first seen Beamabeth Marlebourne. With a rush of excitement, she realized that she must be under the mayor’s house. So
that
was what the musician had meant when he said she could talk to Clent herself!

Far distant the second dawn bugle sounded to announce the start of day. Somewhere in the room above a door clicked shut, and overhead shoe leather slapped on tiles.

Voices.

‘Open the doors!’ It was Sir Feldroll in the room above, she was sure of it. ‘If the Beloved have heard our prayers, if the kidnappers have received the ransom, then Miss Marlebourne might be waiting outside even now! And if not . . . your master will be back from the counting house soon enough to give us word.’ The pitch of the knight’s voice was higher than usual, and Mosca thought of a harp-string drawn taut.

So the mayor had slept at the counting house. Mosca guessed that he had not wanted to trust the handling of the precious ransom gem to anybody else.

She heard footfalls moving to and along the hallway, followed by the muffled sounds of bolts being drawn and locks being turned. A door creaked, and the air flowing through the little hole on to Mosca’s cheek became very slightly colder.

‘Nobody there, sir,’ came the call from down the hall.

‘I feared as much,’ Sir Feldroll muttered. Pace, pace, pace. The little spots of light above Mosca winked one by one as somebody strode to and fro over her head. Then, more curtly, ‘How can you eat breakfast at a moment like this?’

‘My noble sir, I am gripped with anxiety and palpitation as you are; it simply takes me differently. You pace and give orders – I turn to toast for solace.’ The voice of Eponymous Clent, unmistakably Eponymous Clent. To judge by the faint crunching, Mosca thought he was probably just a few yards out of view, seated at the breakfast table.

‘Then I shall leave you to your “solace”, sir,’ muttered Sir Feldroll, through clenched teeth by the sound of it. ‘You fellows – come with me and we shall see whether Miss Marlebourne has been left in the grounds. It might be that she is too weak – that perhaps she has swooned – or if she has been left tied up . . .’

There was then a good deal of clipping and clopping around, and Mosca couldn’t keep track of all the steps. She thought Sir Feldroll had left through the front door with at least two people, but she could not be sure who was still in the room above. For a long time she remained at the hole, staring up at the penny’s worth of painted ceiling and listening to the steady
crunch
,
crunch
,
crunch
of Clent’s toast and the scrape of his cutlery.

If there really were spies in the mayor’s household, then she needed to speak with Clent alone. The last thing she wanted was a Locksmith spy knowing where she was and what she was doing. She very much doubted that the Locksmiths knew about this secret passage, for if they had they would surely have kept it locked to stop others wandering in.

Was anyone else with Clent in the room above? She could not tell. But she had to take a risk, before the mayor returned and threw the house into turmoil.

‘Hssst!’ she hissed. ‘Mr Clent! Over here!’

Somewhere above, a knife halted mid-squeak. A pause, and then a chair ground its feet against the tiles above. Slow careful steps. Silence.

‘Mr Clent!’

Some more steps, and then Mosca’s peephole went dark. She pulled out one of her hairpins, and poked it up through the hole to prod at the foot-sole resting on it.

‘Down
here
, Mr Clent! Under the floor!’

The foot-sole was twitched away with a noise of alarm, and Mosca withdrew the pin. Peering up, she could just about see Clent’s face gazing down, his chin made enormous by the strange angle.

‘Mosca?’ he whispered. A light powder of mortar and beetle-grit fell to dust her cheeks as he dropped to his knees and lowered his head to a few inches above her peephole. She could make out no more than a patch of face, one eye wide and startled, brow contracted as if in pain.

‘Yes, Mr Clent, it’s me! It’s me! Are you alone?’

‘Yes – yes, for the moment. But probably not for long. Child, are you . . . ?’ He trailed off, and shook his head. It felt strange to see Eponymous Clent run out of words. ‘Little Mosca Mye,’ he said instead, inconsequentially, and laughed incredulously under his breath.

‘I got all my limbs,’ Mosca answered quickly. ‘I been knocked and scraped and chased about but my heart’s still beating inside my hide. And I’m hungry, Mr Clent, I’m hungry as a winter fox . . .’

Clent’s face vanished. Steps retreating. Steps returning. A crumb fell in Mosca’s eye, and then a crust was pushed down through the peephole, doused in honey, followed by another and another. She took them and crammed them into her mouth.

‘If only I could pull up this floor,’ muttered Clent, ‘but it seems we are divided by six good inches of timber and stone. What has happened to you, child?’

‘E’ryfing wen’ wrog,’ Mosca explained through a mouthful of crusts, then swallowed. ‘There was folks waitin’ to ambush Sir Feldroll’s men outside the Twilight Gate, Locksmiths like as not, but the kidnappers ain’t working with the Locksmiths, and I think Skellow betrayed Brand Appleton and stuck him with a knife so he could grab the ransom, and the radish bounced off halfway cross the town with everyone chasing it and strike me blind if I know who’s got it now. Brand Appleton ain’t got it, and he ain’t got Beamabeth neither; all he got is a fever and a hole in his side the size of your pocket. But
I did it
, Mr Clent! I found out where the mayor’s daughter is being held! I did it!’

‘You found her? How? No – tell me later. Where is she?’

‘Top floor of a cooper’s shop in the Chutes, right near the holes where they drop the coffins into the Langfeather. Jus’ opposite a broken-down old stew called the Owl’s Head. But there’s no windows to Beamabeth’s room, and no way in but through the front door and five bravos. Sir Feldroll needs to send more men, because this is fist-and-cudgel work if I know it. So I come here to tell you.’ As Clent listened, Mosca poured out the tale of the many Clatterhorses and her last strange interview with Brand Appleton.

Clent exhaled slowly as he absorbed the news, eyes closed. ‘But . . . but how did you get here? Are you daylight side, child?’

‘No – I don’t exist! The musicians – they told me where to find the secret way in. I’m in some kind of cellar, with rugs, an’ little Beloved figures all set up like a shrine—’

‘A salvation hole!’ interrupted Clent. ‘I knew it! I had heard of such things – many rich houses had them built during the Civil War, to hide relatives or servants in danger of arrest. Under the chapel, no doubt, so that the unfortunates concealed could listen in on services and prayer. That answers the mystery of the orchestra! Two dayside musicians playing on the stage, and the rest making up the melody down in the salvation hole. Quite ingenious . . .’ Clent faltered and blinked hard. ‘Songs of the celestial, child, are you saying that you came into that hole
unhindered
? That there is a nightside entrance to this very house, and there is nothing to stop anyone
simply wandering in
?’

‘Nothing, unless they’re uncommon portly or fond of the skin of their knees,’ growled Mosca. ‘Any nightling who knows where to find the door could wander right in.’

‘So . . .’ Clent released his words carefully and slowly, as if they were pebbles to be dropped without rippling his thoughts. ‘All the while we were engaged in our secret conference in this room, plotting the manner in which we would lay an ambush for our kidnappers . . .’

‘. . . one of ’em could have been skulking down here, hearing every word!’ It gave Mosca a chill to think of it. ‘So they never needed a spy in the household after all!’

‘No wonder our ambush failed so abysmally,’ rejoined Clent, ‘if they knew all our plans, and had a hiding place ready so close at hand. I suppose they were hidden in the passage before dawn, emerged to abduct the young lady and then retreated back underground.’

Mosca felt a reluctant sting of compassion as she imagined Beamabeth, bound and gagged in the salvation hole for a whole day, able to hear her desperate would-be rescuers searching for her but unable to call out to them . . .

‘Well,’ murmured Clent, ‘I think now we know why secrets leak out of this house with such ease.’

Mosca frowned. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘That ain’t it – not all of it, anyways. Maybe this creep-hole tells us how Skellow’s boys dodged our ambush and whisked away Beamabeth Marlebourne, but it don’t explain how the Locksmiths found our letter drop, or were ready and waiting for Sir Feldroll’s men. We did not plan
everything
in this room, Mr Clent! Weave it how you will, there’s a Locksmith spy in among us.’

‘I fear you are right. In fact, I fear the mayor has trusted too many people with our secrets already. His steward, the Chief Clerk of the Committee of the Hours and the High Constable are all in his confidence. Worse still,
I
am not. I would be quite in the dark if I had not persuaded Mistress Bessel to look into it. She might show an unladylike ferocity of temper at times,’ Clent continued, in tones of quiet admiration, ‘but when it comes to finding things out, that woman is sharper than lemon. And, thank the Beloved, she has managed to win the mayor’s trust where I have failed. Just yesterday evening he remarked that she was the finest—’

But Mosca was not to learn what Mistress Bessel was the finest example of, for at this moment the front door crashed open. Through her tiny scope Mosca saw Clent scramble on to his knees, so that he seemed to kneel in prayer in the little chapel. However, it soon became clear that the new arrivals had no attention to spare for Eponymous Clent.

‘Help him – help him!’ Sir Feldroll was shouting. ‘And close the doors behind us, man – we do not want the whole world agog! My lord mayor, will you sit? Fetch him a chair!’

Confusion ensued, with a lot of people running around to show that they were eager and concerned.

‘Send for a physician!’ shouted Sir Feldroll. ‘Tell him his lordship has received a great shock and is suffering palsies of the limbs. Mistress Bessel – call for laudanum!’

‘A shock?’ Clent had risen to his feet again. ‘Simpering stars, has there been ill news of Miss Marlebourne?’

A terrible croak of a voice interrupted. It was hardly recognizable as that of the mayor. ‘No – worse! Worse!’

‘Worse?’ Sir Feldroll sounded outraged. ‘How can anything be worse?’

There was a sound of coughing and ragged breaths before the mayor spoke again.

‘The Luck . . . the Luck! The Luck of Toll has been stolen!’

After this announcement, nobody was any use for about five minutes. A young maidservant running in with the requested laudanum had by chance overheard the mayor’s words, and promptly went into such violent hysterics that she had to be dosed with it herself. She seemed convinced that Toll was about to pitch off the cliff into the Langfeather, like a tilted hat with its crucial pin removed. Worse still, the mayor seemed much of the same opinion.

Maddeningly, everybody wanted to rush about so that Mosca could not keep track of them, and nobody wanted to stand where she could see them through her little peepholes.

‘Send that girl to bed, and close that door!’ shouted Sir Feldroll at last. ‘Nobody leaves this house! If the common people find out that the Luck is stolen, half the town will be thrown into fits!’

‘Oh, probably a good deal more than
half
,’ Clent opined helpfully, and was ignored. Sir Feldroll however was not, and after a while things got a lot quieter.

‘Steady yourself, my lord mayor,’ came Mistress Bessel’s warm, motherly tones. Evidently she had entered with the rest. ‘How in the world did somebody come to steal the Luck?’ Remembering that Mistress Bessel had had her own ill-fated plans for stealing the Luck, Mosca suspected that she

was probably a little aggrieved that somebody else had managed it.

‘Through the clock face!’ The mayor had the breathless, rasping tones of one who has just been punched in the stomach. The kidnap of his daughter had left him towering and wrathful, but the loss of the Luck had apparently broken him. ‘They took advantage of the repairs to come in through the clock face on the front of the tower! I did not even know that that was possible!’

Mosca realized that she at least
should
have guessed that it was possible. Paragon had told her that he was in charge of adding the little wooden Beloved figures to the clock mechanism as required. Therefore there must have been some way of accessing the clock’s works from his cell. Under cover of repairing the clock, the thieves must have stealthily removed the cogs until they found the hatch into his private chamber.