She followed Clent up the ivy with Saracen. Obeying Clent’s silent signals, she helped him carry the chest back to their rooms. Although it was now empty, her legs trembled, and twice she almost dropped it. When they reached their rooms, they found the candle low in a mess of tallow.
‘Why’ve we come back, Mr Clent?’
Clent gave a bitter little shrug, and dusted off his lapels with a shadow of his usual manner.
‘That fellow will be found. If we vanish the same night, the hue and cry would be after us. I fancy we have little choice but to brazen the matter out.’ He pulled off his wig and stretched himself out upon the bed without bothering to remove his boots. His lids drooped for a moment with an air of utter exhaustion, and then flicked open once more. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I…’ Mosca had taken a few steps towards the door without even thinking. ‘I got to see to Saracen. The civet hurt him, an’ I got to rub the place with brandy. The Cakes got some.’
‘Very well. But do not go far, and be sure not to wake me when you return.’
Mosca took up Saracen’s leash in one slack hand, and led him away.
The Cakes opened the door to Mosca’s knock. She was wearing a knitted nightcap, and her red ringlets hung to her shoulder. She had been looking pinker and happier since the midnight marriage, Mosca noticed.
‘Come in! Are you hungry?’ The Cakes seemed pleased and surprised at her nocturnal visitor, although her smile crumpled a little as Mosca pushed through the open door, dropped to a squat, and tucked her knees to her chin. ‘What is it?’
Mosca buried her nose between her knees, and stared up at the other girl with big, black, helpless, hostile eyes.
‘Mosca… what is it?’ The Cakes’ face started to take on that drooping, beaky look it always had when she was about to cry. ‘You’re scaring me. Has someone hurt you?’
Mosca shook her head.
‘Is it a bad dream? I know how it can be with dreams. You can stay here for a bit if you like.’ The Cakes went back to her bed and sat down on it, sensible and big-sisterish. She pulled off her nightcap, and combed her fingers through the ringlet-wrangle on her head. ‘There’s some pieces of cake there on the dish, if you’re hungry; they’re a bit stale but still good enough. A couple we had earlier went straight to bed without eating a thing – the bride was so far in her altitudes she couldn’t hardly stand.’
The Cakes floated before Mosca’s eyes in her halo of candlelight. It seemed to Mosca that she was looking up at the other girl from the bottom of a well so dark that she could not see her own hands, and that the Cakes’ world was a tiny, bright bubble drifting almost beyond reach. Mosca wanted to reach out to that world, but it seemed to her that if she did she might burst it, and then she would be left alone in an infinite blackness.
‘Was it a dream?’ The Cakes wrinkled her nose as a stray hair tickled it.
‘Yes,’ said Mosca huskily. ‘It was just a dream.’
N is for Not Proven
Just a bad dream…
Mosca lay in her truckle bed, wondering why it was so dark and why she could hear water clicking against the wood like a great tongue. Her questioning fingers discovered that the bed had a lid, locked shut, half a foot above her face. The air was becoming warm and unbreathable. She beat against the lid until the lock splintered.
The lid swung back, and the white face of the moon stared down at Mosca through the lace curtain of the mist. She sat up, and found that she was sitting in the oaken clothes chest, which was floating past the pillar of Goodman Sussuratch.
Close by, a slender galleon gleamed like mother-of-pearl. High up on the deck sat Lady Tamarind upon an ivory throne. The threads that sang from her white spinning wheel stretched away through the mists to every unseen corner of the city. Other threads intertwined with them and linked them, until Mosca started to fancy that they formed a pattern like a great spider’s web.
‘I’m trying to get to the Eastern Spire!’ called Mosca. ‘I don’t want to drown in this black water!’
‘Catch this thread, and my boat will pull you to the spire.’ Lady Tamarind pulled loose a slender thread from the wheel and threw it in Mosca’s direction. It touched the open lid of the box and clung there, as if it sparkled with some sugary, sticky essence. Mosca reached for it, then she hesitated and took a moment to pull her sleeve down over her hand. She did so partly because the line seemed too bright to touch with her grimy fingers, and partly because it frightened her with its ground-glass glitter. While she hesitated, the thread peeled loose, fell into the water, and snaked away from her grasp.
‘I didn’t catch it!’ she called out, distraught. ‘Please, can you throw it to me again?’
‘There is only ever one chance,’ answered Lady Tamarind and, above her, white lace sails swelled despite the stillness. The web-threads swung softly over their reflections as the pearl-galleon slid away through the mist. ‘Someone wishes to speak with you.’
The wake of the galleon was a ruffled ribbon of white lace, and in its throes bobbed a sodden shape, face down, its hair floating like weed and its wet shirt ballooning on its back. It drifted towards Mosca in spite of the tug of the current and the drag of the galleon’s wake.
There were splintered sculls in her hands, so in terror she started to row. The marriage house floated up to greet her, without bothering to bring the shore with it. She clambered in through the scallop-shaped window, and stumbled from room to room. Behind her she heard a dripping and a dragging and the flabby slapping of dead, wet feet against floorboards. She ran into her room and hid in her truckle bed, knowing that Goodman Postrophe could not stop the dead coming home, because she and Clent had eaten all his mellow-berries.
And it was in her bed that she awoke, wondering why it was so light, and why she could hear only the lap of the water, and the screech of the gulls, and the sound of a town crier bellowing his news in the street.
‘… Body found Stabbed through the Vitals with Brutal Force… Body found Tangling in the Trout Nets by Whickerback Point…’
Mosca clenched her eyes shut, and pushed her fingers into her ears.
Perhaps Clent had taken flight in the night? Mosca sat up carefully and peered hopefully towards the larger bed. But no, there he was, his great stomach swelling and falling in slumber, his nostrils widening and narrowing as he breathed steadily.
Saracen’s tiny wounds had faded from live-poppy-red to dead-poppy-red, and he was demonstrating his hearty good health by trying to eat the spluttered mess of candlewax. He looked up at Mosca as she swung a leg out of the truckle bed, and if he saw her as a murderer’s helpmeet there was no hint of it in his coal-chip eyes. Mosca knew that she could have laid waste to whole cities without losing his regard, and she felt a throb of comfort.
‘Mr Clent!’ A token knock at the door was followed by the sudden entrance of the Cakes, her pointed face pink and excited. ‘The constable has come for to ask everyone some questions an’ can you come down to the breakfast room please?’
Clent sat up with impressive if graceless promptness, snatched his wig from a bedknob, and slammed it on his head back to front. Only then did he go about the business of actually waking.
‘I beg a multitude of pardons… a constable?’
The Cakes nodded, pleased and self-important.
‘He says I’m a sharp young thing,’ she announced happily, ‘on account this morning I noticed our coracle was tied under the window not to the tree how it always is. And I run down to report it to the beadle, and they says it might have something to do with a body they found this morning. An’ the constable thinks maybe it’s a gang of wandering cut-throats and robbers, who might have tried to get into our house to steal from the shrines and kill us in our beds…’
Clent and Mosca had remembered to return the clothes chest to its place. They had forgotten about the
