Mosca pushed open the closet door. There was a candle on the floor, so near the door that for a moment she could see nothing but the brightness of its flame. Without even thinking, she stooped, picked it up, and held it at arm’s length to illuminate the closet. Only then did she stare into the room in front of her and see that everything had changed.

Clent was half stooping over the heavy oaken clothes chest by the wall. His face was flushed with effort, and his knuckles white with the strain of lifting what looked like a great bolt of cloth. Peeping above the edge of the trunk was a wig that Mosca had not seen before, a mass of unpowdered brown curls. Then Clent saw her and slowly stood, and the candlelight softly traced the outline of a tanned cheek beyond the wig, and Mosca knew it was not a wig at all.

An arm was hanging over the side of the chest, she now realized, dangling quite casually like a day-tripper trailing his hand over the side of a pleasure boat. There was something terribly wrong with the skin of that hand. It was pale, not an aristocratic powder pale, not a scholarly shun-the-sun pale. It had an underground pallor, like ripped-up roots, or the eyeless things that children of Chough were told lived in the mountain caverns. The color seemed shocked as well as shocking, and Mosca knew that the owner of the hand was dead.

The wrist was slightly crooked, as if it had broken once and never quite healed.

“I thought . . .” Clent said, handling each word carefully as if testing its edge for sharpness, “I thought I told you to wait in the boat.”

“I come in out of the rain,” she said in a voice so small that she hardly recognized it.

“Do you have anything you want to say?” There was something frightening about Clent when he used short words.

Mosca shook her head.

“We will discuss all this later, but for now we must make the best of the situation. Come here and help me with this.”

Mosca hesitated, wondering if she could drop the candle and run.

“Listen, girl, have you any comprehension of the predicament we would find ourselves in if we were discovered fixed in this tableau?”

Well, you wanted something on ’im, the rasping voice of Palpitattle whispered laconically in Mosca’s imagination. And now, the voice added as she took a few steps toward the chest, now you’re goin’ to be an accomplice an’ he’ll have something on you too.

Partridge’s eyes were closed, at least. He was crammed awkwardly into the chest, as if he had mistaken it for a trundle bed and was determined to sleep there despite all discomfort.

If I run, Mr. Clent’ll know I’m going to raise the house, and he’ll catch me and kill me . . .