herself!
Far distant the second dawn bugle sounded to announce the start of day. Somewhere in the room above a door clicked shut, and overhead shoe leather slapped on tiles.
Voices.
‘Open the doors!’ It was Sir Feldroll in the room above, she was sure of it. ‘If the Beloved have heard our prayers, if the kidnappers have received the ransom, then Miss Marlebourne might be waiting outside even now! And if not… your master will be back from the counting house soon enough to give us word.’ The pitch of the knight’s voice was higher than usual, and Mosca thought of a harp-string drawn taut.
So the mayor had slept at the counting house. Mosca guessed that he had not wanted to trust the handling of the precious ransom gem to anybody else.
She heard footfalls moving to and along the hallway, followed by the muffled sounds of bolts being drawn and locks being turned. A door creaked, and the air flowing through the little hole on to Mosca’s cheek became very slightly colder.
‘Nobody there, sir,’ came the call from down the hall.
‘I feared as much,’ Sir Feldroll muttered. Pace, pace, pace. The little spots of light above Mosca winked one by one as somebody strode to and fro over her head. Then, more curtly, ‘How can you eat breakfast at a moment like this?’
‘My noble sir, I am gripped with anxiety and palpitation as you are; it simply takes me differently. You pace and give orders – I turn to toast for solace.’ The voice of Eponymous Clent, unmistakably Eponymous Clent. To judge by the faint crunching, Mosca thought he was probably just a few yards out of view, seated at the breakfast table.
‘Then I shall leave you to your “solace”, sir,’ muttered Sir Feldroll, through clenched teeth by the sound of it. ‘You fellows – come with me and we shall see whether Miss Marlebourne has been left in the grounds. It might be that she is too weak – that perhaps she has swooned – or if she has been left tied up…’
There was then a good deal of clipping and clopping around, and Mosca couldn’t keep track of all the steps. She thought Sir Feldroll had left through the front door with at least two people, but she could not be sure who was still in the room above. For a long time she remained at the hole, staring up at the penny’s worth of painted ceiling and listening to the steady
If there really were spies in the mayor’s household, then she needed to speak with Clent alone. The last thing she wanted was a Locksmith spy knowing where she was and what she was doing. She very much doubted that the Locksmiths knew about this secret passage, for if they had they would surely have kept it locked to stop others wandering in.
Was anyone else with Clent in the room above? She could not tell. But she had to take a risk, before the mayor returned and threw the house into turmoil.
‘Hssst!’ she hissed. ‘Mr Clent! Over here!’
Somewhere above, a knife halted mid-squeak. A pause, and then a chair ground its feet against the tiles above. Slow careful steps. Silence.
‘Mr Clent!’
Some more steps, and then Mosca’s peephole went dark. She pulled out one of her hairpins, and poked it up through the hole to prod at the foot-sole resting on it.
‘Down
The foot-sole was twitched away with a noise of alarm, and Mosca withdrew the pin. Peering up, she could just about see Clent’s face gazing down, his chin made enormous by the strange angle.
‘Mosca?’ he whispered. A light powder of mortar and beetle-grit fell to dust her cheeks as he dropped to his knees and lowered his head to a few inches above her peephole. She could make out no more than a patch of face, one eye wide and startled, brow contracted as if in pain.
‘Yes, Mr Clent, it’s me! It’s me! Are you alone?’
‘Yes – yes, for the moment. But probably not for long. Child, are you…?’ He trailed off, and shook his head. It felt strange to see Eponymous Clent run out of words. ‘Little Mosca Mye,’ he said instead, inconsequentially, and laughed incredulously under his breath.
‘I got all my limbs,’ Mosca answered quickly. ‘I been knocked and scraped and chased about but my heart’s still beating inside my hide. And I’m hungry, Mr Clent, I’m hungry as a winter fox…’
Clent’s face vanished. Steps retreating. Steps returning. A crumb fell in Mosca’s eye, and then a crust was pushed down through the peephole, doused in honey, followed by another and another. She took them and crammed them into her mouth.
‘If only I could pull up this floor,’ muttered Clent, ‘but it seems we are divided by six good inches of timber and stone. What has happened to you, child?’
‘E’ryfing wen’ wrog,’ Mosca explained through a mouthful of crusts, then swallowed. ‘There was folks waitin’ to ambush Sir Feldroll’s men outside the Twilight Gate, Locksmiths like as not, but the kidnappers ain’t working with the Locksmiths, and I think Skellow betrayed Brand Appleton and stuck him with a knife so he could grab the ransom, and the radish bounced off halfway cross the town with everyone chasing it and strike me blind if I know who’s got it now. Brand Appleton ain’t got it, and he ain’t got Beamabeth neither; all he got is a fever and a hole in his side the size of your pocket. But
‘You found her? How? No – tell me later. Where is she?’
‘Top floor of a cooper’s shop in the Chutes, right near the holes where they drop the coffins into the Langfeather. Jus’ opposite a broken-down old stew called the Owl’s Head. But there’s no windows to Beamabeth’s room, and no way in but through the front door and five bravos. Sir Feldroll needs to send more men, because this is fist-and-cudgel work if I know it. So I come here to tell you.’ As Clent listened, Mosca poured out the tale of the many Clatterhorses and her last strange interview with Brand Appleton.
Clent exhaled slowly as he absorbed the news, eyes closed. ‘But… but how did you get here? Are you daylight side, child?’
‘No – I don’t exist! The musicians – they told me where to find the secret way in. I’m in some kind of cellar, with rugs, an’ little Beloved figures all set up like a shrine-’
‘A salvation hole!’ interrupted Clent. ‘I knew it! I had heard of such things – many rich houses had them built during the Civil War, to hide relatives or servants in danger of arrest. Under the chapel, no doubt, so that the unfortunates concealed could listen in on services and prayer. That answers the mystery of the orchestra! Two dayside musicians playing on the stage, and the rest making up the melody down in the salvation hole. Quite ingenious…’ Clent faltered and blinked hard. ‘Songs of the celestial, child, are you saying that you came into that hole
‘Nothing, unless they’re uncommon portly or fond of the skin of their knees,’ growled Mosca. ‘Any nightling who knows where to find the door could wander right in.’
‘So…’ Clent released his words carefully and slowly, as if they were pebbles to be dropped without rippling his thoughts. ‘All the while we were engaged in our secret conference in this room, plotting the manner in which we would lay an ambush for our kidnappers…’
‘… one of ’em could have been skulking down here, hearing every word!’ It gave Mosca a chill to think of it. ‘So they never needed a spy in the household after all!’
‘No wonder our ambush failed so abysmally,’ rejoined Clent, ‘if they knew all our plans, and had a hiding place ready so close at hand. I suppose they were hidden in the passage before dawn, emerged to abduct the young lady and then retreated back underground.’
Mosca felt a reluctant sting of compassion as she imagined Beamabeth, bound and gagged in the salvation hole for a whole day, able to hear her desperate would-be rescuers searching for her but unable to call out to them…
‘Well,’ murmured Clent, ‘I think now we know why secrets leak out of this house with such ease.’
Mosca frowned. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘That ain’t it – not all of it, anyways. Maybe this creep-hole tells us how Skellow’s boys dodged our ambush and whisked away Beamabeth Marlebourne, but it don’t explain how the Locksmiths found our letter drop, or were ready and waiting for Sir Feldroll’s men. We did not plan
