“Mr. Clent . . . you could . . . you could leave me behind. You could . . . send a note to Lady Tamarind, sayin’ how you didn’t want a job from her after all and sayin’ . . . she should give me a place instead. I know you’d like it better that way.”

Clent stopped in his tracks, and stared down into her face with no expression at all. The rain was falling more heavily now, and a galaxy of droplets nestled furtively in his wig.

“No,” he said quietly at last. He loosed the bow of Mosca’s bonnet ribbon, which had been working its way sideways, and tied it again. “No, I do not think I could do that.”

The kennel ditch down the road quickly filled with rainwater which chased mess and market scraps toward the river. With them hurried Mosca and Clent.

At last they found the marriage-house sign swinging above them.

“Mosca, there is a little boat tied at the back of the shop. Bring it round to the ground-floor window—the one shaped like a scallop shell. Wait in the boat.”

Mosca nodded, her eyes and mind so full of rain that she could not speak or swallow. While Clent fitted his key into the lock and turned it carefully, wincing each time the works clicked, she slipped around the side of the marriage shop and clambered over the pile of kindling that doubled as a fence. A pair of sad, rust-colored chickens crouched under a rotten board and watched as, with Saracen clasped in her arms, she slithered awkwardly down a bank of mud and sodden grass to the water’s edge.

The boat was round, like an overgrown coracle, with a couple of splintered oars wedged inside. The mooring rope had been made fast, thoroughly but not expertly, and Mosca had a sudden mental image of the Cakes knotting it over and over for safety’s sake, while her red ringlets bobbed against her nose. Then Mosca imagined the Cakes standing aghast by the waterside in the morning with her scoop of chicken feed drooping from one hand, looking at the place where the boat should have been and starting to cry.

Doesn’t matter, Mosca told herself. She cries all the time anyway.

Mosca stepped into the boat, put Saracen down, and loosed the mooring. The oars were clammy and heavy, so she maneuvered the boat along the wall by grabbing handfuls of ivy and pulling. A stone face of St. Marpequet, the Warden against Early Frosts, had been carved into the stone sill of the ground-floor window. He stared upward as if his mouth were gaping to drink the rain. His impressive and aristocratic nose hooked just enough for Mosca to tie the rope to it.