There is no way of measuring time that is filled with nothing but darkness and knocks and cold and the rain’s unending drum roll. This might be the last thing I ever know, was the thought that went around and around Mosca’s head, stretching each heartbeat to an eternity as if her frightened spirit was trying to draw the marrow out of every painful moment and live as hard as it could while it still could. She could not even hope for the ordeal to end, for how could it end well? What was she now? A tool that had served its purpose. Worse still, a tool that could talk.
She felt a tickle against her fingers and reflexively clutched at the bracelet tangled in the cords binding her wrists. The three carved totems that dangled from it were images of the Little Goodkin, the skeletal children said to protect any child endangered and lost in the darkness. Another child would have been chanting Fenfenny, friends defend me, and finding comfort in the rhyme. But Mosca had emptied her darkness of comforting imagined faces, and such words were hollow to her. She clutched at the bracelet because it had been a gift from a coffeehouse mistress named Miss Kitely in a precarious moment and still warmed her with a memory of friendship, but even this was small consolation.
At last the horse slowed and she was dragged off its back. The sack was yanked from her face, and she found that the world had become a darker place than before. Mosca was set on her feet, and her clogless foot instantly sank into cold, wet mud.
Through the clinging mask of her wet hair she could just about see that the horses had been tethered outside a bleak-looking farmhouse set alone on the moorland. It was built from large rough-hewn stones and its arrow-slit windows were chips of darkness. There were two doors, one set at ground level, one ten feet above the earth with a wooden ladder leading up to it.
Mosca knew that this must be the ‘bastle house’ mentioned in Skellow’s letter. A bastle house was a farmhouse designed to be its own little bastion. It was always dangerous to live near a border, what with the risk of invading armies, or raiding parties sneaking across to steal cattle or whatever else they could get their hands upon. The problem with the Realm, of course, was that it was full of borders. Decades before, it had splintered into smaller allegiances, each proclaiming the rights of a different absent claimant to the throne. Nowadays there was less fear of invasion, but along the borders buildings like this remained, some now derelict, like knobs of scar tissue to show where the Realm had been sliced asunder. To judge by its lightless windows, this bastle house had been abandoned.
For the first time, her captors’ voices settled into a contented and relieved murmur.
‘I’m frozen. Let’s get in and light the fire.’
‘Some food wouldn’t kill me either.’
‘What do we do with the girl?’
Silence. Mosca’s black eyes flitted from face to face as the men exchanged glances.
‘Keep her in the vaults for now,’ answered Skellow.
The sturdy ground-floor door was heaved open, and with a snick and hishh of tinder a lantern was lit. Mosca found herself looking at a dungeon-like space broken up into long, vaulted tunnels with iron rings hammered here and there into the walls. Only the crusted grey discs of long-dry cowpats showed that this space had been set aside to defend livestock, not to hold prisoners.
Mosca was taken by the shoulder and guided into the nearest ‘vault’, hearing the antique cowpats give under her feet with a papery rustle. The loose ends of the cord tying her wrist were knotted around one of the iron rings set in the wall, with just enough slack so that she could sit on the ground if she chose. Mosca, who had slumped against the rugged wall with every sign of meek exhaustion, furtively watched from under wet and spiky lashes as Skellow tugged at the cord.
Only when Skellow left the vault, taking the lantern with him, did Mosca’s posture become less limp, less meek. Instead she bristled with attention, taking in every tiny sound from outside. The shunk of a bar being lowered across the door. The heavy grinding of an elderly key turning. Voices. The creak of footsteps on wooden rungs as Skellow and his friends climbed the ladder to the first floor. The shuddering slam of another door.
Mosca blinked hard, willing her eyes to make something of the darkness. It was not absolute, for even on this level there were arrow-slit windows, showing frayed ribbons of dull night sky.
Footsteps above, the scrape of a shifted chair. A wordless drone of voices. And then, at the far end of the vaulted tunnel, part of the ceiling opened with a clack, spilling candlelight on to the rutted floor. As Mosca watched a soft plume of grey ash puffed its way downwards, accompanied by a pattering of charcoal chips. Someone on the floor above had opened a hatch to sweep the debris from the fireplace into it.
Unbidden, there came into Mosca’s mind a long-forgotten image of her aunt peeling potatoes, the long spiral curling down and down from the tuber and then dropping into the waiting bucket of throwings and leavings. The thought that she had been casually cast down like a piece of rubbish filled Mosca with a wild surge of un-potato-like rage.
Now that the hatch was open, the voices above were much clearer.
‘Do you think maybe one of us should go down with some bread for that girl?’ It sounded like the man named ‘Ben’.
‘What’s the point?’ Skellow’s voice.
The distant amber aperture vanished with a slam, leaving Mosca in darkness once more.
What’s the point? Those three words had told Mosca everything she needed to know. There was no point in feeding her because they did not need to keep her alive – did not mean to keep her alive. In Skellow’s head she was dead already, and wasting bread on her would be like pushing food into the mouth of a stuffed deer head mounted on a wall.
Mosca could guess what had passed through Skellow’s mind. How much had she seen and heard of his business? Too much for Skellow’s liking and too little for her own. Perhaps he had never intended to let her walk away. He had, after all, asked her carefully chosen questions before concluding that she would never be missed, and that no hue and cry would come after him if one night the moors swallowed her like a grape pip.
Worst of all, Mosca reflected, he was probably right.
Goodlady Whenyouleast, Mistress of Reunions and Remebered Faces
Mosca had heard old stories of captives who were kept in oubliettes, cellars designed for prisoners that one intended to forget. These had no doors, and the prisoner was thrown down through a hatch in the high ceiling. There was no stairway or ladder leading back to the hatch, because it would never be needed.
Even though she had seen her prison, Mosca’s imagination started to crowd the darkness with the relics of such a dungeon. Perhaps she was not the first prisoner to be murdered there. Perhaps she had silent company, lying unseen in the shadows of the arches. Skulls yellow as piecrust under limp bonnets, stick-shins jutting into slack boots, tattered tunics over dulcimer ribcages…
Nah. I’d be able to smell ’em.
In the room above her, voices droned for a time, fire crackled, wood scraped on pewter and someone even scratched out a few ditties on a fiddle. Later there was the hiss of a doused fire, the shuffle of feet on flagstones, and then quiet.
Quiet, and more quiet. The rain slackened and stilled. Silence, but for the chill quavering of owls, and guttering drips hitting earth outside.
Mosca let out a slow breath. Stealthily her long, quick fingers and recently threatened thumbs twisted to pick at the
cords around her wrist. A painful process, for there seemed to be countless knots to bite into her every time she strained against the bonds. Only after five minutes of silently mouthed swear words did she realize that a particularly vicious knot caught between her wrists was in fact the small wooden head of one of the little skeletons attached to her bracelet.