Frances Hardinge - Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Nah. I’d be able to smell ’em.

In the room above her, voices droned for a time, fire crackled, wood scraped on pewter and someone even scratched out a few ditties on a fiddle. Later there was the hiss of a doused fire, the shuffle of feet on flagstones, and then quiet.

Quiet, and more quiet. The rain slackened and stilled. Silence, but for the chill quavering of owls, and guttering drips hitting earth outside.

Mosca let out a slow breath. Stealthily her long, quick fingers and recently threatened thumbs twisted to pick at the

cords around her wrist. A painful process, for there seemed to be countless knots to bite into her every time she strained against the bonds. Only after five minutes of silently mouthed swear words did she realize that a particularly vicious knot caught between her wrists was in fact the small wooden head of one of the little skeletons attached to her bracelet.

Perhaps the Little Goodkin could be of some service to Mosca after all.

With painful care she managed to squirm the little wooden figure out from between her wrists. Now there was a tiny amount of slack in the bonds, just enough for two lean and eager hands to writhe free.

In the silence Mosca shook her hands like dishcloths until the blood prickled back into them. She had heard the key turn in the lock of the door, and the arrow slits were clearly too narrow for her to squeeze through, so she crept to the end of the vault, where ash heaped with greying chicken bones, and stared up at the ceiling. The light from the arrow slits was just strong enough for her to make out the dark square of the trapdoor, inches from the end wall.

Mosca kicked off her remaining clog. She had been thrown down and forgotten, but she was not in an oubliette. This was a stronghold of sorts, but it was meant to keep people out and cattle in . And cattle, unlike Mosca, could not climb.

The rough-hewn face of the wall was Mosca’s friend, even though the jagged edges were not kind to her cold fingers and bit into her knees and elbows at every opportunity. There were footholds and handholds aplenty, but they had to be groped for in the dark, and Mosca could feel her wet feet slithering against their perches. She tried not to look down or up, even to satisfy the nagging need to know how high she was. High enough to hurt if I fall , whispered the tingle in her bones. And then, after a while, High enough to break my ankle. And finally, High enough to smash me like an egg.

At last the wood of the hatch met her fingers. She locked her face in a wince and pushed at the trapdoor, praying that nobody had bolted it. It lifted.

The trapdoor opened a crack, letting in the light of a dulling fire and an orchestra of snores. A bubbling snore like a bee dying in treacle. A rasping, lizard-hiss snore. A rhythmic grindstone rumble.

Hardly daring to breathe, Mosca eased the trapdoor back so that it was resting on the stone flagstones and looked about her. A cooling soot-bellied kettle hung over the glum red embers that lurked in the fireplace, furred with ash. A pack of Pincaster playing cards laid out on the floor for a game of Duchy’s Favour. A row of dominoes set up on their ends along the floor. Two figures stretched beneath their own cloaks beside their muddy boots, an ear poking out here, a company of toes there.

Mosca pulled herself halfway out of the hatch on to her belly and wriggled her way forward until she could bring her legs up on to level floor. She rose to her hands and knees, and froze.

Against the door rested a time-ravaged basket chair, strands of its broken wicker splayed like spokes. In the chair lay Skellow, his mouth so wide open he seemed to be silently singing. From somewhere behind his cravat came the lizard-hiss snore.

Although nowadays Mosca did her best to avoid praying to the Beloved, at least until they provided her with decent evidence of their existence, she still reserved the right to mutter silent imprecations against them when her path was scattered with more thorns than she considered reasonable.

There was no escape through the door. Mosca picked her way carefully across the room, skirts hitched so that she would not knock over the line of yellow bone dominoes or set the wooden bowls rolling.

There – a small shuttered window set high in one wall. Narrow, but wide enough to allow a Mosca through.

She climbed gingerly on to a stool, worked the shutter bolt free and opened the shutters. Then she heaved the upper part of her body on to the windowsill and started wriggling through the gap, the night air rushing in past her so icily that it made her ears ache. There was sky ahead with stars drowned in it, black trees waving as if trying to mime a warning…

Behind her there was a faint clack-clack-clack-clack like a skeleton impatiently drumming his fingers. In her mind’s eye, Mosca could almost see the first domino teetering in the breeze, then falling to trigger the others. The lizard-hiss snore stopped abruptly, and then there was a hoarse cry, enough to tell Mosca that Skellow had woken, looked up, and seen that the nearest window was full of wet petticoat and frantically kicking legs.

There are times for caution and carefully planned descents. And there are times for hurling oneself out of a window willy-nilly and trusting to luck.

As it happened, luck decided to break Mosca’s fall with a blackberry hedge. A few seconds were spent in bewildered flailing before she worked out why the sky was covered in dead leaves and why the ground had stars in it. Dozens of tiny thorns set in her clothes as she struggled to right herself. Only the sound of a door cracking back on its hinges gave her the panicky strength to yank herself free, leaving her bonnet to the brambles’ embrace.

Which way to run? Anywhere. Anywhere not here.

‘Get a lantern! Get a lantern!’ Voices from the bastle house.

But it takes time to find a lantern in the dark, long enough for two quick legs to sprint away into the heaving labyrinth of gorse. It takes time too for sleep-fumbled hands to strike tinder and nursemaid the trembling flame to the wick, long enough for small, cunning hands to snap off a fern-fan the right size to shield a black-haired head from sight. And by the time three men stood at the door of the bastle house surveying the night, there was no sign of the fugitive, and no sound but for the restless wind, and the disappointed fluting of owls skimming unseen over the mouseless moor.

There is nothing more miserable than being cold, wet, exhausted and hungry without any likelihood of becoming less cold, wet, exhausted and hungry. If the future does not hold that comforting promise of shelter and dry clothes, and a bowl of hot soup, then the damp and cold is free to sink into one’s very marrow because there is no hope to keep it out. Eventually, however, the dim starlight showed Mosca the twin grooves left by uncounted cartwheels, and she realized she had found a rough road. Following it, she at last discovered a clutch of slate-rooved, rugged-faced cottages huddling in the heather like eggs. Bonnetless and bedraggled, she limped into the village. It was silent, every window shuttered.

Mosca ran her numb fingers through her hair and tried to tame it into something less like a rookery, then knocked on the nearest door. There was no response, but on a second knock she heard a shuffling step and took a pace back, in time to look unthreatening as the door opened a crack to show a neat slice of nightcap, suspicious elderly face, linen bedgown and fire iron.

‘Please, sir – I been robbed.’ It was important to say this first. If she had had her money taken from her, she had some chance of being considered respectable. If she admitted that she’d never had any money in the first place, it was much more likely that she would be cast out and distrusted. Respectable people were funny like that. And after all, Skellow had promised Mosca money and not given it to her. What was that but robbery?