Mosca shuddered, and her hands twitched to her shoulders and hair, eager to brush off any traces of the dead Magpackin, while the other prisoners laughed again at her discomfort.
It was during this hilarity that bolts scraped back and the door opened to show the Keeper’s Cyclops face, illuminated by the lantern in his hand.
‘Visitor for the new girl.’
Mosca’s heart leaped as the Keeper stepped aside. Clearly Clent the word-wizard had somehow waltzed into the stronghold in spite of the mayor’s instruction…
… or perhaps not. Not unless he had decided to infiltrate the prison by donning a white muslin dress, a lace cap and a pair of good kid gloves.
‘You poor child,’ declared Mistress Bessel in viper-blood tones, her sturdy figure filling most of the doorway. ‘I’ve come to bring you a little comfort.’
Goodman Asheneye, Protector of the Hearth
Mosca responded to these sweet sentiments with the short sharp scream of one who has just sat on a kettle.
‘Dear good sir,’ continued Mistress Bessel, holding Mosca’s gaze with a world of meaning in her ice-blue eyes, you see what a shrinking, timid little thing she is? Now you understand why I want a room where I can speak to her alone.’
The Keeper frowned, his patch-strap making diagonal creases across his brow
‘Well, mistress, we do have some private cells, but they are generally put aside for special visitors. Those who can pay for the privilege -’
‘Do it,’ Mistress Bessel interrupted crisply. ‘I’ll buy her a new cell – the one they call Hell’s Eyrie. And I want half an hour alone with her.’
The prospect of being locked up with an enraged Mistress Bessel scattered Mosca’s other fears like a housecat pouncing amidst a congregation of pigeons. However her second squeal of panic only seemed to convince the Keeper that the visitor was right about her shy and quivering nature. He smiled indulgently at Mistress Bessel, smiled indulgently at the coins she placed in his hand and then smiled indulgently at Mosca, somewhat to her confusion and alarm.
‘This way then, ladies.’ Somehow the Keeper’s tone had become that of an obliging host showing affluent guests to the better quarters of an inn. He loosed Mosca’s leg irons, and then led her from the room while the other Grovellers muttered and hissed resentfully.
The stairs coiled upwards past a series of other cells, each just visible through the hatch in the door, none quite as grim as the Grovels. They passed a crammed debtors’ cell where families huddled and lone figures moped and smoked, a female cell where drab-faced girls coughed into their aprons, and an all but lightless male cell full of fury and half-seen movement like a box of ferrets.
‘Here’s your chambers.’ The Keeper halted outside a small oak door, dulled by years to the colour of gunmetal. The stairs, Mosca noticed, had not ended, but continued upwards. The Keeper pulled back an alarming series of bolts, many of which had all but rusted into place through disuse, wrenched a couple of great keys in the splinter-edged locks and heaved the door open.
It was a tapering room shaped like a wedge of cake, one small barred window set in the rounded wall. Near it was a narrow hearth, which curiously appeared to have been cleaned with care. No furniture, no bed. A slack iron chain, one end fixed to a ring set low on the wall, the other to a set of leg irons.
‘Best room in the house.’ The Keeper’s tone was one of real pride. ‘That little window’ll give you a view as far as the sea on a clear day. You can even pick out the spires of Penchant’s Mell. That there is the very corner slept in by Hadray Delampley, the rebel earl of Mazewood, during the Civil War.’
Unlike the other cells, this one did not stink of rot and the chamber-pot. Indeed, the only sign that anyone had been in the cell of late was the recently scrubbed hearth. The Keeper noticed her looking at it.
‘Keep ideas of that sort out of your costard,’ he rumbled in her ear. ‘You’re not the first to have thought of leaving by the chimney. Not a week ago some folks showed charity to a young lad who had been caught miching, and paid for him to stay in this cell. Quick as tricks, up the chimney he goes… and finds there’s a cast iron grate blocking the flue. And while he’s trying to shake it loose he takes a tumble, dashes out his wits. Same thing happened three weeks ago as well. Young girl. Same luck. I get full weary of mopping that hearth…’
Mosca swallowed and gave this information due consideration while Mistress Bessel bargained with the Keeper for ‘luxuries’. Yes, Mistress Bessel would pay to see Mosca free from leg irons. No, she would not pay for her meals. Yes, she would hire a blanket for her. No, she would not buy faggots for the hearth.
‘Well, I will leave you ladies to talk.’ In spite of the entreaty in Mosca’s face, the Keeper withdrew.
‘You poor suffering dear,’ Mistress Bessel said as the door closed behind him, in tones of icy and eternal enmity. ‘See, I have brought you muffins.’The door clicked to, and Mosca backed to the furthest extent of the cell.
‘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.’