Mistress Bessel had her lips pursed to show that she was following his words with acute interest, but Mosca could not help noticing that her blue eyes looked a little glazed. She was wielding her porridge spoon in a way that struck Mosca as clumsy, though she could not pin down why.
‘My own hypothesis -’ the stranger clasped his long, bony hands in his lap – ‘is that the miasmatic theory can explain the sightings of ghosts. They are often seen in places where many people have died, yes? I believe that a special sort of noxious vapour is left by a corpse at the moment of death, tainting an area and poisoning the air. Everyone who lives in that area breathes the miasma each day without knowing it, allowing the tiny fragments to enter their system and attack the brain. The brain bulges and buckles inside the skull like an oyster in a shell too tight for it, and out of it come visions, hallucinations, waking dreams – in short the so-called ghosts.’
‘Why, that is quite marvellous, Doctor Glottis!’ exclaimed Mistress Bessel. ‘Queer how it all makes sense when you explain it. So the brains of gravediggers and hangmen must be full to the squeak with masmias and ghosts, then?’
‘Ah yes!’ The doctor looked dreamy for a moment. ‘How I would love to look inside the skull of a hangman! But one simply cannot get the bodies – according to the law only executed criminals can be taken for study, and only a set number of those, and the Guild of Barber-Surgeons claims most of them.’ He sighed. ‘But at least here on the borders, a region that has always been rich in war and death, at least here I can wander and look at the inhabitants and satisfy myself whether…’ he glanced towards the distant landlord and lowered his voice, ‘whether their skulls are bulging.’
Mad as a midday moon, thought Mosca.
Mistress Bessel finally seemed to notice Mosca. ‘Ah, there’s my girl. Mye, Doctor Glottis is travelling to Grabely this morning on… business, and has agreed to give us a ride there. Run upstairs and pack our things, will you?’ Clearly Mistress Bessel had decided to make the most of her unexpected ‘servant girl’. ‘And, Mye…’
Mosca halted on the stair, her tongue pushed into her cheek.
‘Pack carefully.’ Mistress Bessel smiled, but there was a gleam of meaning in her eye. ‘I wouldn’t want to find something missing this evening, would I?’
Slightly to Mosca’s surprise, Dr Glottis proved to be the proud possessor of a rather large cart, already heavily laden. Seeing the outline of bulky boxes under a mantle of sacking, Mosca’s first thought was that Dr Glottis must have been kicked out of his hometown for prodding people’s heads in search of lumps, and was now wandering adrift with the greater part of his furniture.
‘What’s under the cloth?’ she asked Mistress Bessel, as they were waiting for the landlord’s son to lead the doctor’s horses out of the stable.
‘That,’ murmured Mistress Bessel while smiling at the distant doctor and giving him a little wave, ‘is not something a nice girl asks the day after a Pawnbrokers’ Auction. I didn’t hear his door close till an hour after we were abed. He’s too much of a gentleman to ask why either of us are here – so keep your smile sweet and your tongue knotted, blossom.’
Predictably, Mistress Bessel was given the comfortable seat between Dr Glottis and his driver, and Mosca found herself bouncing along on the pile of swathed boxes. Her curiosity was too much for her, and she tweaked back a corner of the sacking. To her bemusement, she discovered that she was perched upon a stack of loosely tethered grandfather clocks, some of them showing advanced signs of age and many with chipped faces or missing hands. Could the doctor really have gone to the Pawnbrokers’ Auction in the dead of night to buy a cartload of broken clocks?
Mad as a belfry full of bats.
The kind-hearted landlady at the inn had insisted that Mosca take a pair of rough clogs and a battered old bonnet ‘so you won’t catch a chill or make people wonder at you’. With hindsight, Mosca was glad that her stew had been paid for by Mistress Bessel, and that the wren-like little woman had not been cheated of the money for it. Mosca clutched the bonnet to her head as the cart jolted and jarred its way across the moor, the road before it little more than a conspiracy of stones.
The moor was less ominous in daylight, but Mosca still caught herself flinching each time a parchment-coloured leaf spiralled down from a tree, or when a change in the wind splayed the dry grass that sprouted from the walls of stacked stones. Some trees were so knobbed and crooked that they seemed to be made up of elbows and knees. Skellow trees, with thorns for eyes, watching her pass.
After hours of this, it was with relief that at last she saw in the distance the slate roofs of Grabely and the kinked spire of the town’s little church. However, as the cart entered the town Mosca became aware that the atmosphere there had changed. There was a subdued hum that did not come from the dozens of spinning wheels that the townswomen worked in the morning sun. Something had happened, something to cause a murmur of sombre but excited gossip.
‘… took him to the Assizes at Notwithstanding…’ Mosca overheard, and her blood turned to ice. She pricked up her ears.
‘… the worst kind of thief, as it turns out, infamous for this kind of thing… won’t be seeing the light until his gibbeting day…’
Horror hit Mosca like a flash flood, drenching her in cold and taking away her breath. They were talking about Clent, it had to be Clent; she had run off and left him trapped like a rat with a poster right 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 she had betrayed and deserted him, and now he had been taken away to be tried and gibbeted and eaten by crows, and…
‘… 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.
A dozen decent dead folks… Mosca’s eyes dropped to the uncomfortable seating arrangement beneath her and silently counted a dozen clocks. It occurred to her rather forcibly that she herself would fit quite neatly inside the clock she was currently sprawled across. She shuddered and drew up her knees, trying to touch their wood as little as possible.