Mosca covered her mouth and managed to swallow enough to speak.
‘Well, small surprise in that!’ she exploded. ‘Everybody who tries climbing this chimney ends up dead in the cinders! And you want me to climb up this chimney, down another… an’ all the way back again?’
‘Yes,’ said Mistress Bessel. And somehow, although there were a thousand protests Mosca could make, there was no real answer to that one stony word.
‘So – s’posing I even reached the other room, what if there’s a guard inside it, lookin’ after the Luck? If there’s smoke from the chimney, a fire must be lit for somebody.’
Mistress Bessel simply shrugged her motherly shoulders.
‘Then you had better hope that his sleep is heavy and your step is soft, my buttercup.’
‘But… what if I can’t work out what the Luck is? Or what if it’s locked away or chained to the wall?’
‘If you cannot use those long, thieving fingers of yours, use your eyes.’ Mistress Bessel stood, her empty basket in hand. ‘Tomorrow I will be back with more muffins and counsel for the poor wicked children who have fallen into sin and crime. If you have a Luck to give me, then that means coin for you and Eponymous, enough to pay your way out of Toll and see out the winter. If not… then you had better be able to tell me every inch of that other cell so I can come up with a better plan. Either way, if you’ve done your part, then you’ll walk out of prison with Jennifer Bessel.’
‘How?’ This still sounded too good to be true. ‘I got thrown in the Grovels on the mayor’s own orders. How you going to get me out when he’s brimmin’ with bile?’
‘Have a little faith. Jennifer is a name to conjure with in this town, and if I vouch for you the doors will fly back on their hinges so fast the breeze will leave you breathless. As for your mayor -’ a catlike smile crept across Mistress Bessel’s apple-broad face – ‘it will not be the first time I have talked a gentleman out of a temper.
‘But if I come back tomorrow, and you are sitting here with no word of the Luck… then there’s no more luck for you in this life, my little mulberry tree. Once you have given them your shoes and buttons to sell, the jailers here will watch you starve to death… and they won’t even carry out your corpse unless somebody pays them to do it.’
The little window was too narrow to let through much light or any hope of escape, but was just broad enough to allow in a dismal slither of a draught that chilled the whole cell. Mosca crouched and shivered on the wooden floor, wrapped in the Keeper’s scant blanket, warming her frozen nose tip in her apron.
If I am to do this, it had best be by night.
At night there was less likelihood of the Keeper dropping into Mosca’s cell to extort money from her. More hope that any guards around the Luck would be drowsy or asleep. A better chance that the ‘supper time’ fire in the upper room would have cooled so that she would not get burned or choke on the smoke.
Hours passed, and Mosca chewed her fingertips and thought of days passing and the Keeper becoming less courteous and the cudgel at his belt and nobody caring. Rat in a trap.
She heard the flues stealthily flute and boom with draughts, and smelt a faint trace of smoke.
She heard the bugle, and felt the taste of the air change as day became night.
She heard the second bugle.
And it was too big a decision to make, too terrifying a plan to consider. So while she was busy not considering it, Mosca carefully and silently slid off her clogs, pulled off her stockings and tied back her hair. Then she removed her dress to reveal her chemise and the wading breeches she still wore under her skirts, even though she had long since left the waterlogged village in which she had been brought up.
She crouched down in the hearth and very carefully straightened, with the upper part of her body inside the absolute darkness of the chimney. She felt panic tighten around her chest like a corset and reflexively ducked down again, banging her head. Then she made herself straighten once more and groped around with her hands, feeling the feathery tickle as her fingertips dislodged soot.
It was chokingly narrow, and if she braced herself badly she might stick at any moment. Climbing it would be ugly, unpleasant… and possible.
Grimacing, she raised one knee, found a toehold in the stonework with her bare foot and began to climb.
Soot, Mosca decided after she had climbed three yards, was powdered evil. She could not look up without it falling into her eyes and making them burn. She had no hands free to wipe her eyes, and chafing her face against her shoulder just made things worse. Soot was on every ledge, ermine soft, tickling and trickling into her sleeves and collar and ears and mouth, catching her throat and making her cough great soot storms into life.
But while well-born children might have been brought up with improving fables and histories, Mosca had gobbled every gallows chapbook and crime chronicle she could find. So when panic threatened to set her mind on a rat-scamper, she gritted her teeth and thought of every daring jailbreak she had ever read, of Drag Minkem descending from a roof on a rope of blankets, and ‘Swift’ Swathe Ferren swaggering into his favourite tavern still wearing his manacles.
Why is it that every time someone is needed to squeeze up somewhere or under somewhere or into somewhere it ends up being me? Just as well I’m half starved, or I’d stick like a pick.
Each time she moved, loose soot and fragments of hardened tar hissed down the chute and rattled in the hearth below. As Mosca climbed, the hiss took longer and the rattle became more indistinct. Mosca braced her elbows and feet against the encroaching walls, knees tucked close to her chest, all too aware that a missed footing could send her plummeting down in exactly the same way.
You’re on your own. Blackness, narrowness, walls closing in, no sky. Mosca felt her child-heart calling out to the Beloved, begging for their company in the darkness. But instead she bit her lip almost to bleeding and stifled the prayers in her mind.
Then, just as she thought the flue would narrow and narrow until she was wedged like a cork in a bottle, it kinked slightly to climb at an angle. After a yard or so of this, her questing fingers discovered that a foot above her head the right-hand wall disappeared. She ascended by inches until her head was level with the gap.
A dim light was falling from above, and Mosca could see that her flue had joined another to form a larger square chute leading upwards. Hauling herself up to sit on the brick ledge at the top of the division, she could see a little square of dark silver sky above, criss-crossed by stark black. Mistress Bessel had been right, then. The two flues both fed into one chimney, which was blocked off with a grille so that no prisoners could escape that way.
Mosca felt her stomach sink, and realized that she had been hoping at the back of her mind that she might be able to make it out on to the roof. No, it seemed she would be playing things Mistress Bessel’s way, like it or no.
The descent of the other flue was far more difficult than the ascent of the first. A faint haze of smoke still hung within, making Mosca gag and sneeze in spite of her terror of being heard. The bricks held a strange animal warmth, and there were sparks and feathers of hot ash lurking in ambush.
Not far now. Then grab the Luck and go. What would it be? What had Clent said?
Often a glass chalice, or an ancestral skull, or a collection of breeding peacocks…
‘Well, I hope it’s not peacocks,’ Mosca muttered under her breath. ‘Don’t fancy climbing a red-hot chimney with half a dozen squawking birds under one arm.’