‘I reckon I’ll keep these,’ Mosca answered grimly. ‘Sounds like I might need to do a lot of running.’
Welter listened to his wife’s account of their plan with the air of a man regarding a waiting gallows. ‘Remember later that I said it would all come to disaster,’ he muttered, and shambled off to his workshop.
‘Do not mind him,’ whispered his wife. ‘He has a fine mind, that is all, and needs challenges – being cooped up with me all day and most of the night was bound to wear out his temper. I did so hope that when they started mending the Tower Clock they would call on him, since he is the best clockworker in town, but the Locksmiths brought people in from outside instead, and the poor dear has been sulking ever since.’
Mosca could not help feeling that the ‘poor dear’ might have a point about the likelihood of disaster. Having tasted Toll-by-Night’s moonlit stew of murder, menace, treachery and pursuit, she had fallen wildly in love with the six shabby bolts that held the door shut and the danger out. Her new regalia did not make her feel any better about venturing out either. There was no help for it however. Time was not on their side, and unlike Mistress Leap she could at least recognize Skellow.
‘Tsk, nothing to worry about,’ Mistress Leap said vaguely as she put on her shawl. ‘Murderers get bored terribly easily, I hear, so I am sure the ones chasing us have run off to be murderous somewhere else now. Besides, if I worried about that kind of thing then I would never go out at all.’
‘My goose…’ Mosca hesitated at the door. ‘If I leave him here… nobody will sell ’im or eat ’im, will they?’
‘What, after he guarded our doorstep from cut-throats?’ Mistress Leap tutted. ‘Certainly not!’
Goodman Varple, Drinking Partner of the Thief and Vagabond
Stars were now scattered across the sky, as if the white-faced moon had grown bored waiting for something to happen and started spitting gleaming fruit pips.
The streets no longer had the same desolate emptiness. Although the lanes did not throng the way they did by day, muffled figures could be seen hurrying about their business, some with baskets over their arms.
‘This is the busiest time of night,’ murmured Mistress Leap. The first hour or two after dusk are dangerous – most ordinary folks stay inside to avoid running into the Jinglers, or those who prey on newcomers. But now and for a couple of hours everybody scurries about their business quick as they can, before the worst of the cold sets in. Now, keep a tight hold on the knot of my apron with both hands – that way nobody can pluck you away without me knowing.’
This was more necessary than it sounded, for Mosca’s guide proved to be capable of a fearsomely brisk turn of speed. And, Mosca could not help noticing, people did seem to get out of Mistress Leap’s way. Furthermore, they seemed to do so ungrudgingly. A few even gave her a glance and a nod – a curt, quick nod like a sparrow pecking apart a cherry, but a nod nonetheless. The midwife appeared to be a recognized figure.
However, the crowds all the while maintained their mouse-tense hush, their air of urgency. Fear. There was a reek of it everywhere, Mosca realized, in every guarded glance or falsely friendly backslap. A clammy smell, like rotten leaves. And everybody went about their lives in spite of it, because fear was part of their lives.
Flying out behind the midwife like a set of coat tails, Mosca was dragged through slick, clenched alleys, then roofed passages where she briefly exchanged a black-and-silver world for one of rusty shadows and the murky, flickering gold of spitting rushlights and lanterns. At last they came to a halt in the street so suddenly that Mosca flattened her long nose on the midwife’s muslin-clad back, leaving a dark green smudge.
Ahead the street widened to make space for three bare trees, around the base of which were arranged makeshift tents, so that the trees looked like gangly, stiff-backed women with voluminous canvas skirts. Drawing closer, Mosca could see that the tent-cloths were a tattered patchwork of scraps and rags, sailcloth and burlap and leather and linen and blankets, many sporting watermarks and mould rosettes. In one tent she saw a rail of dead rooks, tethered upside down by their feet, in another drab heaps of Grabely wool.
It was a sort of market, and Mosca experienced a throb of relief at the sense of familiarity. Here at least the dreadful hush was less absolute, and there were even raised voices, cries of wares.
‘Owl soup!’ To one side a weedy fire bowed beneath the breeze as it struggled to do service to a dozen pots and cauldrons, which rattled their lids and chuckled steam. ‘Robin and beechnut!’
‘Moss!’ came another call. ‘Dry as a miser’s eye!’ And, yes, there did indeed seem to be a great heap of dried moss, brown and tousled like spaniel hair. More surprisingly, a small crowd had gathered around it. Others were paying to fill their bags and crocks with scoops of dead leaves from a great barrel. Only when she witnessed a scuffle over a meagre bundle of kindling did she guess the reason for the hushed, bright-eyed earnestness of the crowds.
Toll-by-Night was readying itself for a long and bitter battle against a single enemy: winter. There was precious little timber to be seen, and so the busiest stalls sold gorse bundles, withered grass, twigs, kindling, biscuits of dry animal dung, anything that could be burned. Toll’s trees had not been chopped down for firewood however, and this told Mosca something else. For all its murky appearance of anarchy, Toll-by-Night clearly had rules, and one of those rules prohibited felling trees.
Several women gripped bouquets of meagre rushlights and were doing a roaring trade. Only one stall sold real candles, and its shrivelled-looking little owner was flanked on one side by a hulking, cudgel-wielding bear of a man who watched the inquisitive fingers of everyone who passed by as if the sticks were fashioned of white gold instead of tallow. On the other side stood a grey-haired man who made notes of every candle sold. The stallholder was clearly miserably afraid of him.
‘Taxman,’ whispered Mistress Leap with a meaningful glance towards him.
Mosca wondered what kind of person would introduce a candle tax for a people who lived in darkness. Somebody with a chatelaine of keys at his belt, she suspected.
But Mistress Leap was pushing on past the skirted trees to a set of weathered wooden steps which almost spanned the width of the strange thoroughfare. Mosca followed her up the steps and found herself looking into an arena.
The area was long and thin and flanked by two high brick walls. Makeshift box balconies hung from these walls by chains, each containing four or five figures, most leaning over the front of the box with avid attention. The space between was filled with a series of shabby wooden stages raised on narrow legs. The stages were stepped, and linked by various tilting planks and splintered bridges, as if a dozen carpenters had spontaneously gone insane. Every inch of the stages was thronged with people. Children crowded the very top of the walls themselves like starlings.
Two stubby plum trees pushed their way up between the stages and spread their leafless branches above the crowd. A stiff, slender bridge ran between them, each of its ends bound firmly to a bough. On the bridge stood two figures, each carrying a rough cudgel. Each time one swung his weapon at the other’s head there was a wave-crash roar from the crowd. The combatants’ swings were uncoordinated and drunken, their footwork stuttering and uncertain, and as she drew closer Mosca realized that both were wearing blindfolds.
Here and there between makeshift stages the moonlight fell on tousled grass. Nonetheless Mosca did not realize where she was until a brazier on the right-hand side caught her eye. By its light she could make out behind it a shape of splintered lattice with a white pointed roof. It was the pavilion where Mistress Bessel had confronted her not two days before. Somewhere beneath the shadowy scaffolding and ragged crowds of the Bludgeoncourt lay the prim rockeries and trimmed lawns of Toll-by-Day’s pleasure garden.