‘Pull the frog,’ whispered Mosca, mouth dry, and curled her fingers around the frog’s lilypad. She tugged, then heaved in growing panic, and the hidden door swung wide, offering an inviting darkness. As the Jinglers drew close to her street, Mosca flung herself forward into the waiting tunnel, only to find that she had thrown herself full length on to something that was not exactly a floor.
Mind the drop.
Swearing and wincing at the bottom of a three-foot shaft, Mosca decided that she minded the drop quite a lot. Even as she was gingerly sitting up and twisting round to examine what remained of her bruised knees, her small, painful, oblong slice of world abruptly darkened. Through the ivy-fringed arch above her, where the secret door had opened, she could see a pair of boots. Then the little vista vanished, leaving her in pitch blackness, and she could hear the crang and clink of bolts and locks being fastened.
Her immediate response was unreasoning panic. She had been tricked into a trap by the harpist – she would never see the light of the moon again let alone the sun – she would perish alone, and centuries would pass before anyone found a diminutive skeleton with a basket perched on its skull. If she had been less winded, she might even have screamed for help.
Fortunately she recovered her common sense before her breath. The man who had darkened her door had been a Jingler about his dawnly duties, locking away the nightbound areas and unlocking the daybound. In fact, he had probably just moved a piece of wooden wall facing and fastened it without even noticing the tiny, ivy-shrouded doorway he was sealing into darkness. At worst, she would be trapped until dusk when the Jinglers came past again. At best, there might actually be some meaning in the harpist’s cryptic instructions.
Pull the frog. Mind the drop. Follow the smells. And not a word to anyone.
Mosca was not entirely alone, she realized. Besides the dank, mouldering oubliette reeks there were comforting living smells. Baking-bread fragrance, warm as a hug. The vinegary aroma of jugged meat. The sooty scent of cracked peppercorns.
She had not fallen into a sealed cell, then. This shaft must lead to somewhere, somewhere with cooking. Her groping hands told her that to either side the walls were close, but ahead her fingers met no brickwork. Tentatively she started to crawl away from the door and towards the beckoning smells.
She appeared to be crawling through a low and rough-cut tunnel, the roof of which had apparently been carved so as to jab into the shoulders and back of an intruder as painfully as possible. Only the dark gold smell of buttered toast kept her going.
At last the tunnel started to brighten just a little, and then opened out into a musty little fox-den of a cellar. There was no other exit from the cellar, but it was dimly lit by little holes that polka-dotted its ceiling and let in slanting fingers of light. The stone floor was strewn with malodorous rugs. The sooty gauze of ancient cobwebs adorned the walls, draping like veils before a set of little apertures in the grimy brickwork, each filled with a tiny wooden Beloved idol.
Funny place for a shrine, thought Mosca.
The ceiling was just low enough for Mosca to stand, so she did and pressed her eye to one of its holes. Directly above her she saw sky, but it was not the great cold sky that spread its wings over the world. Rather it was a smaller, more homely mimic of the heavens, and one that she had seen before. The inside of a deep blue dome, adorned with painted silver stars… yes! She was staring up at the chapel end of the reception room in which she had first seen Beamabeth Marlebourne. With a rush of excitement, she realized that she must be under the mayor’s house. So that was what the musician had meant when he said she could talk to Clent herself!
Far distant the second dawn bugle sounded to announce the start of day. Somewhere in the room above a door clicked shut, and overhead shoe leather slapped on tiles.
Voices.
‘Open the doors!’ It was Sir Feldroll in the room above, she was sure of it. ‘If the Beloved have heard our prayers, if the kidnappers have received the ransom, then Miss Marlebourne might be waiting outside even now! And if not… your master will be back from the counting house soon enough to give us word.’ The pitch of the knight’s voice was higher than usual, and Mosca thought of a harp-string drawn taut.
So the mayor had slept at the counting house. Mosca guessed that he had not wanted to trust the handling of the precious ransom gem to anybody else.
She heard footfalls moving to and along the hallway, followed by the muffled sounds of bolts being drawn and locks being turned. A door creaked, and the air flowing through the little hole on to Mosca’s cheek became very slightly colder.
‘Nobody there, sir,’ came the call from down the hall.
‘I feared as much,’ Sir Feldroll muttered. Pace, pace, pace. The little spots of light above Mosca winked one by one as somebody strode to and fro over her head. Then, more curtly, ‘How can you eat breakfast at a moment like this?’
‘My noble sir, I am gripped with anxiety and palpitation as you are; it simply takes me differently. You pace and give orders – I turn to toast for solace.’ The voice of Eponymous Clent, unmistakably Eponymous Clent. To judge by the faint crunching, Mosca thought he was probably just a few yards out of view, seated at the breakfast table.
‘Then I shall leave you to your “solace”, sir,’ muttered Sir Feldroll, through clenched teeth by the sound of it. ‘You fellows – come with me and we shall see whether Miss Marlebourne has been left in the grounds. It might be that she is too weak – that perhaps she has swooned – or if she has been left tied up…’
There was then a good deal of clipping and clopping around, and Mosca couldn’t keep track of all the steps. She thought Sir Feldroll had left through the front door with at least two people, but she could not be sure who was still in the room above. For a long time she remained at the hole, staring up at the penny’s worth of painted ceiling and listening to the steady crunch, crunch, crunch of Clent’s toast and the scrape of his cutlery.
If there really were spies in the mayor’s household, then she needed to speak with Clent alone. The last thing she wanted was a Locksmith spy knowing where she was and what she was doing. She very much doubted that the Locksmiths knew about this secret passage, for if they had they would surely have kept it locked to stop others wandering in.
Was anyone else with Clent in the room above? She could not tell. But she had to take a risk, before the mayor returned and threw the house into turmoil.
‘Hssst!’ she hissed. ‘Mr Clent! Over here!’
Somewhere above, a knife halted mid-squeak. A pause, and then a chair ground its feet against the tiles above. Slow careful steps. Silence.
‘Mr Clent!’
Some more steps, and then Mosca’s peephole went dark. She pulled out one of her hairpins, and poked it up through the hole to prod at the foot-sole resting on it.
‘Down here, Mr Clent! Under the floor!’
The foot-sole was twitched away with a noise of alarm, and Mosca withdrew the pin. Peering up, she could just about see Clent’s face gazing down, his chin made enormous by the strange angle.
‘Mosca?’ he whispered. A light powder of mortar and beetle-grit fell to dust her cheeks as he dropped to his knees and lowered his head to a few inches above her peephole. She could make out no more than a patch of face, one eye wide and startled, brow contracted as if in pain.
‘Yes, Mr Clent, it’s me! It’s me! Are you alone?’
‘Yes – yes, for the moment. But probably not for long. Child, are you…?’ He trailed off, and shook his head. It felt strange to see Eponymous Clent run out of words. ‘Little Mosca Mye,’ he said instead, inconsequentially, and laughed incredulously under his breath.