Frances Hardinge - Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Paragon nodded again.

‘Hah,’ he gasped. Pale sunbeams sat on his lashes for the first time since he was three, and his world was full of floating angel haloes.

By the time Brand Appleton reached the castle grounds, he had acquired a significant crowd. Never in the history of Toll had one man needed so many people to arrest him. The mayor looked up to find a quarter of the town surging out into the castle courtyard before his house, the grinning ‘radical’ lolling in their midst.

There was a tumult of noise, declarations of Brand’s crimes and suggestions for immediate punishments, most of which seemed to involve a length of good stout rope and the nearest tree.

‘No! NO!’ The mayor stalked forward. ‘We are not animals! He shall be arrested, questioned, tried and executed according to the law! There will be no lynching on my lawn!’ He drew closer and his features took on a granite-like angularity as he started to decipher some of shouts from the crowd.

He rounded on Brand. ‘Is this true? Have you dared to harm the Luck of Toll?’

The crowd hushed, all eyes on Brand. His gaze flitted over the pale, downcast features of Beamabeth, the grey stone face of the mayor’s house. I was invited to supper here not so long ago, he thought. She played the spinet.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘This is a lie,’ declared one of the mayor’s new Locksmith

advisors, a greying, distinguished-looking gentleman who wore his chatelaine visibly. ‘The Luck is safe and well-’

‘Prove it,’ demanded Brand. ‘You cannot. The Luck is dead.’

‘I do not believe you!’ stormed the mayor.

‘No? Perhaps I killed the wrong person, then. About so tall, dark hair, fifteen years old, brows meeting in the middle? Green velvet frock coat too small for him? Gangly clumsy ways of moving? Does that sound like your Luck?’ Brand saw the mayor go waxen with horror. The Locksmith advisor looked somewhat uncertain as well. Neither could know that Brand was using Mosca’s hasty description of Paragon.

‘It is true. Beloved above – it is true!’ The mayor turned on his Locksmith advisor. ‘You lied to me! You all lied to me!’ He stared wildly about him, seeing his panic reflected in every face, and then turned his head slowly to regard his daughter. A strange mixture of emotions fought across his features – conflict, regret, pride, relief, anguish and resolution.

‘Silence!’ The mayor’s cry hushed the crowd, which had started to seethe with hysterical and panicky murmurings. ‘Listen, everybody! All is not lost. A cruel and terrible blasphemy has been committed, but there is still a Luck within Toll. This radical cur is just trying to stir us into unthinking panic, with his talk of flames unchecked. But you all know as well as I do that the Luck is the person with the best and most virtuous name in Toll – and when one Luck dies, the person with the next finest name succeeds them as Luck. Only taking the Luck outside the town bounds removes their protection. Behold! The new Luck! My own daughter… Beamabeth!’

Beamabeth’s eyes were wide dinner plates of blue terror. All the colour had blanched from her face, and the little freckles at the corner of her eye started from her skin with unusual vividness. Like a trapped animal she gazed around her for rescue, and saw only rapt faces basking in her presence as if she was the newly risen sun. Usually she used the adoration of others to escape her problems, but here their adoration was the problem.

Clent, however, suppressed any sense of pity without the slightest difficulty. His brain was busy with the icy clockwork of calculation. If only this young woman’s fears were justified! Beamabeth Marlebourne would be unlikely to threaten anybody, locked away inside the Luck’s cell for the rest of her life. Such a fate had a tempting poetry to it too, given that she really was the Luck of Toll, and had been all her life.

However, if Mosca was to be believed, Brand was lying. He had been prone in a fever since before the Luck was kidnapped, and would have had no chance to kill anyone. Clent was not certain why Brand had told an untruth that would set everybody against him. He could only assume that the young man had decided that, since a noose was awaiting his neck anyway, he might as well cause as much panic and chaos as he could in the meanwhile. In any case, Brand’s claims would be shown as false as soon as the Locksmiths could haul forth Paragon Collymoddle, and Beamabeth would be safe again. But perhaps something could be achieved before this happened.

‘Ah… actually, my lord mayor, I am rather afraid that you are mistaken about the identity of the Luck.’

Everybody stared at Clent – Beamabeth with the stunned hope and terror of a drowning swimmer who finds herself being rescued by a shark.

‘I fear I have a peculiar story to tell, but Miss Beamabeth… if I may still call her that… will be able to verify it. I have of late become acquainted with a certain midwife, who confessed to me that on one occasion she took pity on a small and sickly child, and pretended that it had been born at a slightly different time so as to give it a daylight name…’ And so he told the tale of Paragon’s birth, choosing his words very carefully so as not to mention the name or the sex of the baby.

‘Miss Beamabeth,’ he said at the end, ‘you have known this story for a while. Why do you not tell everyone the identity of that little child?’

The mayor’s daughter gaped at him, hardly believing that he was offering her an escape route, a lie that would save her from the cell of the Luck. But Clent had not actually crossed the line between truth and falsehood, he had simply opened the door for her to do so and made it plain that he would back her up.

‘I… yes.’ A trapped animal will always scrabble for the chink of light. ‘Yes – it was myself. I… was not really born under the Goodman Boniface.’

A murmur of surprise and consternation swept through the crowd.

‘So you must have been born under…?’ Clent prompted helpfully.

Beamabeth’s kitten face furrowed as she tried to remember which Beloved followed Boniface in the calendar, and she could not suppress a shudder of distaste as she remembered.

‘Palpitattle,’ she whispered.

Perhaps she really believed that such news would not affect her standing among the people of Toll. Perhaps she thought her charm was such that nobody could think the less of her, nobody could imagine sending her away to the night town. If that was her belief, then a moment’s glance around the listening crowd would have been enough to disabuse her of this delusion.

A slow ripple of recoil was passing through the crowd as the townspeople seemed to waken from a dream and regarded Beamabeth with newly sharpened and hostile eyes. She was no longer sacred to them. She was a fly-child, and so everything about her must smack of trickery and lies.

A shocked silence like this was far too good to waste.

‘Well,’ Clent rubbed his hands, ‘since we are telling stories, I think I might tell another. It is a curious tale of a kidnapping – or should I say an elopement – or should I say a betrayal… You shall make up your own minds, gentle friends. Really Mr Brand Appleton should be telling it, since he has been the most cruelly abused in this affair, but I suspect that he is gagged by chivalry. I, however, appear to have woken in a lamentably unchivalrous mood this morning, so…’

By the time a messenger panted his way into the castle courtyard to inform the mayor that Paragon Collymoddle was alive, well and being held at claw-point on the Toll bridge, Clent had finished telling the story of Beamabeth’s villainy, and several score of the Toll townfolk were staring at the mayor’s adopted daughter as if they had seen her bite a kitten in two.