The shutters of the marriage house were fastened although it was midafternoon. Unlike Clent, Mosca had no key to the front door, and no one answered her quiet rat-a-tat. She threw pebbles up against the window of the Cakes’s room, and eventually one shutter opened just wide enough to let a couple of red ringlets fly free on the breeze.

“We’re all closed up today. Out of . . . respect for the solemn festival of Goodman Grenoble.”

“Cakes! It’s me! An’ besides, Grenoble’s the Goodman of Keeping Knots out of Moustachios . . .”

“I can’t let you in. Mr. Bockerby was in the Tattler’s Tale when the news carrier come by an’ told us everything.”

“It’s not true!” Mosca bit her lip. “Well . . . probably not. What color of everything?”

A thin slice of the Cakes’s face was visible through the shutter crack. She had the pale, miserable expression Mosca remembered from the days before the midnight marriage. “Mr. Bockerby, he says any friend of Mistress Bessel’s is a friend of his, an’ any friend of any friend of Mistress Bessel’s likewise, an’ Mr. Clent’s a friend of Mistress Bessel, but you ain’t any kind of a friend to Mr. Clent. We heard how you got Mr. Clent arrested, what with telling the constable that he’d been smuggling shrine statues into Mandelion hidden in dead partridges . . .”

“Oh—that really isn’t true . . .” With a warm flood of relief, Mosca at last let the whole truth spill out of her: the discovery of Clent with the body of Partridge, the unspeakable task of moving the body, and the final scene in the watch house. When she had finished, she looked up expectantly.

The Cakes opened the shutter a little farther. Her face was peaked and pale, and the corners of her mouth drooped as if something had disappointed her.

“So . . . it was you that shopped Mr. Pertellis to the Stationers and the Duke’s men?” There had been no easy way to leave this fact out of the story. “Mosca—it was you?”

Mosca’s mouth fell open. She did not feel ready to lie to the Cakes, but even if she had wanted to, she would have been too busy watching a series of memories parade across her vision. A picture of the Cakes carefully writing out each of the names in the marriage register. An image of the Cakes in the midnight chapel, her tearful face almost hidden under the white webwork of a shawl. A vision of a young girl crouching in an alleyway and noting down Pertellis’s words in her notebook, her hair hidden beneath a length of white lace . . . It had never occurred to Mosca to wonder where the Cakes had learned to write.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” the Cakes said sadly, and started to close the shutters.