outside his cell listing his crimes, and somebody had come along who could read it, and after all the years of fast- talking and whisker-close escapes the noose had finally closed around him, because
‘… they say his conscience sent him screaming to the law…’
Mosca’s headlong panic missed its step, faltered and slowed. She could imagine Clent doing a great many things, but hurling himself into the hands of justice in a fit of conscience was not one of them.
‘Mistress?’ The doctor had ordered his driver to slow, and now leaned to speak to the nearest of the spinning women. ‘Pray tell me – did you just say that a criminal had been taken to the Notwithstanding Assizes?’
‘Yes, and I hope he hangs in chains! A good-for-naught grave-robber. He had a dozen decent dead folks newly dug up from the villages round about, all wearing sacking instead of shrouds, piled in the old chapel out by the stream. But in the middle of last night he ran into the village screaming that a ghost was after him and collapsed on the courthouse steps. So they sent men back to the chapel and found the bodies. He’d have got off with a few nights in the cells, but one of the dead women was still wearing a silver ring, so that makes it theft, and a different kettle of worms.’
‘Imagine if he hadn’t been caught!’ added another spinning woman for good measure. ‘I’d never have felt safe on my deathbed again.’
Mosca felt her own face go slack with relief. It was not Clent. Whoever they were talking about, it was not Clent. She glanced quickly at her companions to be sure that her reaction had not been noticed, and found that Dr Glottis was staring at the townswoman with a look of stunned horror not very different from the one Mosca had probably been wearing a moment before.
She now had a shrewd idea what the zealous doctor had actually paid for at the auction. Everyone else might be aghast by the thought of a grave-robber roaming the countryside, but if she was right the doctor was horrified that the man had been caught before he could deliver the dozen bodies he had promised so that they could be hidden in the clocks. He seemed to have quite forgotten that he had passengers, and gave them not even a glance as they dismounted.
‘Just take my things to the tavern, will you, blossom?’ Mistress Bessel gave Mosca a purposeful little pat on the arm. ‘And I’ll call in on dear Eponymous and give him my respects.’
As her mistress sailed off in search of the debtors’ prison, Mosca sighed and set about dragging Mistress Bessel’s travel trunk across the market square to the tavern. By the time she re-emerged from the inn, Mistress Bessel had vanished, and the doctor was in feverish discussion with a red-nosed young man in a pie-shaped hat.
‘But… is there no chance of looking around the chapel? Just a brief glance?’ The doctor seemed quite frantic.
‘It’s haunted.’ The pie-hatted man spoke with the slow, deferential tone of one telling his social better something for the seventh time. ‘A wild and restless ghost, the vexed spirit of one of those pour souls dug up by that ghoul they took to the Assizes. Nobody can go in without it attacking them and trying to drag them to hell with it. Nothing to be done but give Goodman Postrophe as many mellowberries as we can and leave it to him.’ Goodman Postrophe was the Beloved responsible for squirting mellowberry juice into the eyes of any dead that tried to return to their erstwhile homes, so that they were blinded and could not find their way.
The doctor hesitated, then his eyes took on a pitiable glimmer of hope.
‘You say… a ghost? And you – you have seen this ghost?’
‘Oh, I saw it and more, sir!’ The pie-hatted man straightened proudly. ‘It would have had me if I hadn’t fought it off. It was just after the, um, the quiet folks in the sacks had been taken off to be buried again, and I was alone in the chapel, when I heard this dreadful flutterin’ like grave clothes in a wind, and then I looked round and it flew at me, this horrible white shape trailing its grave-shift. And I could tell it was trying to speak to me, but all that came out was this horrible garglin’. Then again, what would you expect, sir? Anyone buried decent has that band o’ cloth tied under its chin to keep its cap on. How could the poor creature open its mouth to make itself understood?’
‘Did you see its face?’ The doctor was craning his head to one side, perhaps in an attempt to see whether the pie-hatted man’s head was bulging strangely.
‘There was no time for that, sir. One minute it was swooping at me, then it grabbed hold of me and tried to drag me to hell with the might of a hurricane.’
‘You actually felt it?’ The doctor seemed fascinated.
‘Well, yes, sir. You don’t think my nose is this colour naturally, do you?’ The feature in question did indeed seem to be unusually raw-looking.
‘It… tried to drag you to hell… by your nose?’
‘Yes, but I struggled with all my might and mettle, all the time flaring my nostrils as hard as I could to shake it off, and at last the wight let go with this ghostly, despairing… honking noise.’
Mosca froze, and stared hypnotized at the proud ghost-fighter’s nose. There was a series of dents and marks near the bridge of the nose that looked rather familiar, a little but not quite like teeth-marks. She had never heard of a ghost honking or biting its victims on the nose, but she could think of one creature who would do so at the drop of a feather. She needed to act quickly, before anybody else came to the same conclusion.
‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I’d better go and pray so that my nose don’t turn black and fall off.’ The younger man deferentially touched his knuckle to his forehead and trotted away, dragging his ghostly adventure behind him like a rich but invisible cape.
The doctor stared after his retreating form.
‘Confound the fool,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Why hide all his eggs in one basket? I suppose they did find
And to Mosca’s consternation, he turned and started reading the posters on the side of the courthouse. Until this moment it had not occurred to her that with the arrival of Mistress Bessel and the doctor, Mosca was now no longer the only person who could read the poster advertising Epony-mous’s crimes.
Mosca felt once again as if she was tiptoeing between dominoes, but this time the dominoes were house-high and could press her like a flower if she let them fall on her. And topple they would, in the slightest breeze. Catastrophe was inevitable, as soon as someone linked Clent to the poster outside his cell, or investigated the ghost properly… or as soon as it occurred to Skellow to look for his intended murder victim in the town where he had first kidnapped her.
It seemed to Mosca that Grabely was swiftly becoming an excellent place to contemplate from a great distance.
‘Eponymous…’ murmured the doctor to himself as he frowned at the poster. ‘Now, where have I heard that name before?’
It was absolutely essential that Mosca say something, anything, to distract the doctor from his current train of thought, so that he would not remember Mistress Bessel speaking of visiting her ‘dear Eponymous.’ And then, quite suddenly, Mosca knew exactly what to say.
It was about half an hour later that Mosca entered the debtors’ prison and was shown into Clent’s cell. Slightly to her surprise, she noticed that he had apparently come by paper, quill and ink, and was scribbling away with every sign of bad temper.
She settled down cross-legged on the ground beside him.
‘… That woman is dead to all sense of loyalty,’ he muttered, ‘a rosy apple with pips of the purest poison. You would think that tender recollections might have caused her to pity my plight, but no – she was stone-hearted enough to tell me that if I would not write her some respectable-sounding references in a variety of different hands, she would bring a suit against me for the damage which your infernal goose did to her shop, and double my debts. Of course I asked if she could spare the pennies for ink or whether she wished me to write them in my own heart’s blood…’
He glanced up from his paper, and then, as he took in Mosca’s dishevelled and battle-scarred appearance, the expression of outrage melted from his face, to be replaced by something less readable. His gaze moved over the
