‘So . . . what was it you last said to me?’ asked Mistress Bessel, carefully adjusting the cuffs of her gloves. ‘Was it not “Fie to your game, Mistress Bessel”? Just before you set that feathered hell-thing on me?’
And in a flash Mosca remembered their last conversation, and the game that she had cried ‘Fie’ to. Mistress Bessel’s plan. The one that required Mosca to be a prisoner in the jail of the Clock Tower. The one that involved her finding a way to slip out of her cell by night . . . and steal the Luck of Toll.
‘I think you’ll play my game now, my dumpling.’ Mistress Bessel’s tone was still sweet. ‘I think you’ll play it for your life.’
There was a long silence, then Mosca sniffed hard and rubbed at her nose with the back of one hand. ‘Those real muffins in your basket?’ she asked in a small, hard voice.
Mistress Bessel’s mouth tightened, then spread into her warmest smile as she recognized the unwilling consent in Mosca’s tone.
‘Brought up by wolves, you was, I think.’ The portly woman approached and crouched next to Mosca, then watched as the latter filled her mouth and apron with currant muffins. ‘All teeth and stomach, no manners.’
Mosca could not speak, but managed a few nonchalant, dry rasping noises as she munched, her cheeks and open mouth bulging with unswallowed cake.
‘Now, listen well. I have word that the Luck of Toll is hid in the room above this pretty chamber of yours. Seems you can reach that room by the stairway outside . . . but there’s great heavy doors barring the way, with more locks than a miser’s spoon chest, and with guards that stand outside night and day. So there’s no point trying that way.’ She nodded towards the entrance to the cell. ‘No – you’ll have to go up the chimney.’
Mosca managed to gust out a crumb-laden squeak of protest. The hearth was a miserable width, the flue likely to be more miserable still, and the Keeper’s darkly allusive tales had not increased her confidence.
‘Don’t be such a warbler – nobody will light a fire under you,’ Mistress Bessel continued without sympathy. ‘There are two chimneys out the top of this building. The one on the north side serves the guardsmen’s quarters, but the other on the south side serves nothing but this room and maybe the one above. And I say it
does
serve the one above, because there’s a trail of smoke comes out of it every day about supper time, and
this
cell has been empty all week. Which means the flue from this room joins the flue from the hearth in the room above. Which means you can climb up the one and down the other. We know there’s a grate at the top of the chimney to stop desperate snipes climbing out to freedom . . . but I’ll be surprised if they’ve guessed that prisoners in one cell might climb the chimney to break into another one and back again.’
Mosca covered her mouth and managed to swallow enough to speak.
‘Well, small surprise in that!’ she exploded. ‘Everybody who tries climbing this chimney ends up dead in the cinders! And you want me to climb
up
this chimney,
down
another . . . an’ all the way back again?’
‘Yes,’ said Mistress Bessel. And somehow, although there were a thousand protests Mosca could make, there was no real answer to that one stony word.
‘So – s’posing I even reached the other room, what if there’s a guard inside it, lookin’ after the Luck? If there’s smoke from the chimney, a fire must be lit for
somebody
.’
Mistress Bessel simply shrugged her motherly shoulders.
‘Then you had better hope that his sleep is heavy and your step is soft, my buttercup.’
‘But . . . what if I can’t work out what the Luck is? Or what if it’s locked away or chained to the wall?’
‘If you cannot use those long, thieving fingers of yours, use your eyes.’ Mistress Bessel stood, her empty basket in hand. ‘Tomorrow I will be back with more muffins and counsel for the poor wicked children who have fallen into sin and crime. If you have a Luck to give me, then that means coin for you and Eponymous, enough to pay your way out of Toll and see out the winter. If not . . . then you had better be able to tell me every inch of that other cell so I can come up with a better plan. Either way, if you’ve done your part, then you’ll walk out of prison with Jennifer Bessel.’
‘How?’ This still sounded too good to be true. ‘I got thrown in the Grovels on the mayor’s own orders. How you going to get me out when he’s brimmin’ with bile?’
‘Have a little faith. Jennifer is a name to conjure with in this town, and if I vouch for you the doors will fly back on their hinges so fast the breeze will leave you breathless. As for your mayor –’ a catlike smile crept across Mistress Bessel’s apple-broad face – ‘it will not be the first time I have talked a gentleman out of a temper.
‘But if I come back tomorrow, and you are sitting here with no word of the Luck . . . then there’s no more luck for you in this life, my little mulberry tree. Once you have given them your shoes and buttons to sell, the jailers here will watch you starve to death . . . and they won’t even carry out your corpse unless somebody pays them to do it.’
The little window was too narrow to let through much light or any hope of escape, but was just broad enough to allow in a dismal slither of a draught that chilled the whole cell. Mosca crouched and shivered on the wooden floor, wrapped in the Keeper’s scant blanket, warming her frozen nose tip in her apron.
If I am to do this, it had best be by night.
At night there was less likelihood of the Keeper dropping into Mosca’s cell to extort money from her. More hope that any guards around the Luck would be drowsy or asleep. A better chance that the ‘supper time’ fire in the upper room would have cooled so that she would not get burned or choke on the smoke.
Hours passed, and Mosca chewed her fingertips and thought of days passing and the Keeper becoming less courteous and the cudgel at his belt and nobody caring. Rat in a trap.
She heard the flues stealthily flute and boom with draughts, and smelt a faint trace of smoke.
She heard the bugle, and felt the taste of the air change as day became night.
She heard the second bugle.
And it was too big a decision to make, too terrifying a plan to consider. So while she was busy not considering it, Mosca carefully and silently slid off her clogs, pulled off her stockings and tied back her hair. Then she removed her dress to reveal her chemise and the wading breeches she still wore under her skirts, even though she had long since left the waterlogged village in which she had been brought up.
She crouched down in the hearth and very carefully straightened, with the upper part of her body inside the absolute darkness of the chimney. She felt panic tighten around her chest like a corset and reflexively ducked down again, banging her head. Then she made herself straighten once more and groped around with her hands, feeling the feathery tickle as her fingertips dislodged soot.
It was chokingly narrow, and if she braced herself badly she might stick at any moment. Climbing it would be ugly, unpleasant . . . and possible.
Grimacing, she raised one knee, found a toehold in the stonework with her bare foot and began to climb.
Soot, Mosca decided after she had climbed three yards, was powdered evil. She could not look up without it falling into her eyes and making them burn. She had no hands free to wipe her eyes, and chafing her face against her shoulder just made things worse. Soot was on every ledge, ermine soft, tickling and trickling into her sleeves and collar and ears and mouth, catching her throat and making her cough great soot storms into life.
But while well-born children might have been brought up with improving fables and histories, Mosca had gobbled every gallows chapbook and crime chronicle she could find. So when panic threatened to set her mind on a rat-scamper, she gritted her teeth and thought of every daring jailbreak she had ever read, of Drag Minkem descending from a roof on a rope of blankets, and ‘Swift’ Swathe Ferren swaggering into his favourite tavern still wearing his manacles.
Why is it that every time someone is needed to squeeze up somewhere or under somewhere or into somewhere it ends up being me? Just as well I’m half starved, or I’d stick like a pick.
Each time she moved, loose soot and fragments of hardened tar hissed down the chute and rattled in the hearth below. As Mosca climbed, the hiss took longer and the rattle became more indistinct. Mosca braced her elbows and feet against the encroaching walls, knees tucked close to her chest, all too aware that a missed footing could send her plummeting down in exactly the same way.
You’re on your own
. Blackness, narrowness, walls closing in, no sky. Mosca felt her child-heart calling out to the Beloved, begging for their company in the darkness. But instead she bit her lip almost to bleeding and stifled the prayers in her mind.
Then, just as she thought the flue would narrow and narrow until she was wedged like a cork in a bottle, it kinked slightly to climb at an angle. After a yard or so of this, her questing fingers discovered that a foot above her head the right-hand wall disappeared. She ascended by inches until her head was level with the gap.
A dim light was falling from above, and Mosca could see that her flue had joined another to form a larger square chute leading upwards. Hauling herself up to sit on the brick ledge at the top of the division, she could see a little square of dark silver sky above, criss-crossed by stark black. Mistress Bessel had been right, then. The two flues both fed into one chimney, which was blocked off with a grille so that no prisoners could escape that way.
Mosca felt her stomach sink, and realized that she had been hoping at the back of her mind that she might be able to make it out on to the roof. No, it seemed she would be playing things Mistress Bessel’s way, like it or no.
The descent of the other flue was far more difficult than the ascent of the first. A faint haze of smoke still hung within, making Mosca gag and sneeze in spite of her terror of being heard. The bricks held a strange animal warmth, and there were sparks and feathers of hot ash lurking in ambush.
Not far now. Then grab the Luck and go. What would it be? What had Clent said?
Often a glass chalice, or an ancestral skull, or a collection of breeding peacocks . . .
‘Well, I hope it’s not peacocks,’ Mosca muttered under her breath. ‘Don’t fancy climbing a red-hot chimney with half a dozen squawking birds under one arm.’
Even as she gave words to this thought, her bare sole settled on a ledge that turned out to be harbouring a family of ember-hot cinders. She swore and jerked her foot away, then dragged desperately at the sooty walls with hooked fingers as her other foot lost its grip. She tumbled down the rest of the flue, buffeted by the back wall, the air filling with soot clouds, and then a stone floor struck her in the bottom, bringing her to a halt with an agonizing jolt. For a few seconds she could only lie there, winded and mewling in pain, her legs in the air. Then she opened her eyes again, and froze.
She was in a room twice as large as the one she had just left, the walls draped with rich but faded tapestries. The floor was choked with dusty russet-coloured rugs and cluttered with wooden images of the Beloved, some of whom had been arranged in lines like troops. In a corner stood a small four-poster with a chipped chamber pot beside it. A cluster of candlesticks was glued to the top of a low table by their own wax, one candle still lit and casting a slanted radiance over the whole room.
Standing directly over Mosca herself was a youth of about fifteen years, his jaw slack, his eyes popping with surprise.
His pallor reminded Mosca of the bluish wanness of the inhabitants of Toll-by-Night. His clothes, on the other hand, were lavish, although apparently designed for someone a few years younger. The sleeves of his green velvet frock coat ended several inches short of his bony wrists. His waistcoat was elaborately embroidered, but many threads had been pulled loose. No effort had been made to tie back his long dark hair. Fuzzy dark brows met over his nose.
For a moment or two Mosca was paralysed. The stranger, however, did not call for help or move to the door, but seemed if anything more flabbergasted and terrified by her sudden apparition than she was.
Mosca put her finger to lips and gave an intimidating hiss, that turned into more of an intimidating splutter as soot caught in her throat. She struggled to her feet, soot-stained and inexplicable.
‘Who . . . ?’ The boy’s voice was a squeak.
‘I am a . . . a Figure of Calamity!’ hissed Mosca. ‘Sent by the Beloved to . . . to punish them that . . . do not pray enough.’
There was a short pause in which the stranger’s pale gaze wavered down Mosca’s scraped and blackened form and back to her face again.
‘What kind of calamity?’ he whispered.
‘Fire,’ answered Mosca promptly, her heart beating a tattoo. ‘And . . . hunger. And crime. And really bad moods. Now, keep your ugly trap shut, or I’ll blight you.’
The youth stared at her, then extended one trembling hand towards Mosca’s face, and with great care and deliberation poked her in the eye.
She gave a short yelp and slapped his hand away. He spent a few moments staring at his sooty fingertip, and then broke into a long loud laugh. It was an embarrassing laugh, the sort of unformed, yodelling noise that Mosca would have expected to hear from a toddler or a village simpleton. Mosca crouched back towards the fireplace and glanced nervously at the door, but the braying laughter summoned nobody.
‘You are not a calamity,’ he said. ‘Your cheek is squashy.’
There was something odd about his speech, at once childlike and formal. It reminded Mosca of a very small child reading lines for a play. He had other infantile tricks of manner too, the way he let his jaw hang open, and breathed loudly through it, the way he fumbled at his own buttons, and scratched himself in ways most people didn’t when anyone was watching.
So. Someone
had
been left to watch the Luck. The idiot son of some high-ranking daylighter, to judge by appearances. And if he was an idiot . . . then perhaps all was not lost. Perhaps he would be too addle-pated to give a good account of her, if she crept back up the chimney to her own cell. Perhaps he would not even notice her scooping up the Luck . . .