Everywhere Mosca went, she felt more spider-thread gazes adhere to her, as quickly as she could throw off the old. There were footsteps behind her again now. Perhaps they were Yeeeaargh and Waaah, perhaps not. It did not matter.
There! She recognized the Leaps’ narrow house, the scribble of creepers against the wall. The door was half open, Mistress Leap emerging from it cautiously with her bundle on her back. She was speaking in furtive, urgent whispers to a young
man who held a dark-lantern in one hand and kept the other tucked under his armpit out of the cold, all the while shifting with nervous impatience from one foot to the other.
‘… Nearly ready to burst with the baby…’ A few of his murmured words were just audible.
‘Mistress Leap!’ screamed Mosca, hearing pursuing steps gaining behind her. The two figures at the door froze, and Mistress Leap took a startled pace backwards through the still-open door, pulling the young man after her. Horrified, Mosca realized that she was in danger of finding herself pounding on a closed and bolted door.
She put on a fresh spurt, the cobbles biting into her soles. The door was not shut yet, she might be able to hurl herself in at the same time as the young man, by ducking low and squeaking past his legs…
This plan might have worked perfectly if the young man had not turned in the doorway to stare out into the darkness with bemusement. As she streaked into his pool of lantern light, Mosca saw his thin, pocked face grow taut with surprise and apprehension. She almost fancied that she could see herself and Saracen reflected in miniature in each of his widening eyes.
‘Tway!’ she screamed. It was a lot shorter than ‘out of the way’ but unfortunately was not a real word, and so the young man did not step to one side, or backwards, or anything useful. Thus when Mosca doubled up and dived forward she did not slide past him. Instead, she planted her head firmly in the middle of his stomach with great force.
He made a thyuck! noise, and there was a tinkle as something metallic fell to the ground. The lantern smashed on the cobblestones at the same time, plunging the street into darkness. Saracen exploded from Mosca’s arms in a lather of wings, and she tumbled headlong past the stranger and in through the door. There were more muffled noises as other people collided in the dark outside and sounded surprised about it. Somebody standing just inside the threshold made two or three panic-stricken attempts to close the door on Mosca’s ankles. She pulled in her feet, and the door slammed shut, completing the darkness. There followed the guillotine thunk thunk thunk of bolt after bolt being driven home.
A click, click, fizz of a tinderbox, and Welter Leap’s nose and eyebrows appeared amid the gloom, spectrally lit from below. As Mosca’s eyes adjusted to the meagre radiance she realized that his shaky hand was holding a dim and slender rushlight. He blew on it, and it reluctantly flared. Behind her husband Mistress Leap became visible, determinedly clutching a pair of needlework scissors, evidently ready to trim and hem any assailant.
‘What…?’ Mistress Leap seemed profoundly nonplussed at discovering her twelve-year-old intruder. ‘But… who is this? Welter, that young man! Where is he? Surely he is not still-’
‘Where’s Saracen?’ The room that met Mosca’s eye was chillingly gooseless. ‘Didn’t he come in with me?’
Before further questions could be asked or answered, a furious hubbub broke out beyond the bolted door. A scuffle, a sound of rending cloth, a flapping sound like wind-whipped washing and occasionally an unmistakable honking.
‘He’s outside! My goose is out there! You got to open the door!’
‘Welter, you must open it, that poor man, that young father-to-be…’
Welter Leap, however, hung on to the uppermost bolt, resistant to all his wife’s urgent tugging and to Mosca’s attempts to mountaineer up him using his knees and pockets as rungs.
Only when the sounds of scuffles ceased, running footsteps receded and silence settled did Welter relinquish his hold on the bolt and his position against the door. Mosca and the midwife pulled back the locks and flung the door open, so that a rush of cold air slapped at their faces.
The dark and narrow street was all but empty, except for one solitary figure two yards from the door, a figure that was only visible because of the gleaming whiteness of its plumage. It was unmistakably the pale outline of a goose, but Mosca’s stomach plummeted as she noticed that the gleaming outline appeared to have no head.
The next moment the apparition shook itself with a doleful rattle, and Mosca realized what she was looking at. It was not a headless goose, still eerily upright. It was a goose with its head stuck in the remains of a dark-lantern.
She stepped forward and stooped to pull off the lantern. Saracen seemed unconcerned by the removal of his new battle-helm and continued champing at a piece of cloth caught in his bill.
‘Oh… where is that young man?’ Mistress Leap was casting concerned glances up and down the street. ‘Something has happened to him, it must have done. His wife is in labour;
he came all the way from the other side of town to find me – where can he possibly have gone?’
Mosca pulled the piece of cloth from Saracen’s beak. It was brown, and looked uncomfortably like a piece of the sack cloak the young man had been wearing. Saracen – you didn’t eat him or anything, did you?
She hid the piece of cloth in her hand and glanced nervously up at the Leaps to see whether they had noticed. At that same time the midwife’s gaze fell on Mosca’s face and froze with recognition.
‘You! It’s you!’
Evidently the midwife had not recognized her in the half-light of the house, but now the moon was on Mosca’s face. All of Mosca’s instincts balled into a fist. When people recognized you at the top of their voice like that it usually meant beadles, bellowing or slammed doors. Right now the slammed door seemed like the worst possibility of the three.
The Leaps sprang aside in confusion as Mosca hurled herself past them into the house with her arms full of goose. She disappeared into the darkened room beyond with a melody made of thuds, bangs, clatters and scrapes, and finally a dull metallic clang.
The midwife and her husband picked their careful way over a fallen army of spoons, a tipped stool and an avalanche of potatoes to where their metal bath lay overturned like a turtle shell. A little muslin and a single bonnet ribbon trailed from under the bath’s brim. On top of it perched a large white goose, resplendent as a general surveying his troops from a convenient hill.
‘You can’t make me go!’ shouted the bath, its voice metallic and echoing. ‘You can’t throw me back on the streets! Don’t touch me! You can’t make me!’
Welter advanced, dropped to a squat and reached towards the bath. He gave it a few experimental rattles, then made a disconsolate noise and shuffled away from it again.
‘Leveretia,’ he called in notes of great solemnity, ‘I cannot throw this child out into the street.’
‘Well said, Walter,’ responded his wife, in tones of quiet pride.
‘No… I mean that I cannot. I would dearly like to, but whenever I try to grip the bath the goose pecks my ear and the child nips my fingers with our sugar-cutters.’
‘Oh, Welter! Of course we cannot throw her out – did you not see who it was? That visitor girl who was locked out after dusk by accident! She came back! I told you they would not forget us! There must have been some trouble with the drop-point, that is all. And after this poor girl has risked coming back to the night town again just to keep her promise to us, you want to throw her out? Well, that would be fine thanks. I’ll talk to her, Welter. You be a sugar plum and keep watch at the door for that poor young father-to-be.’