So who was the name-changing bridegroom, the man in the silk stock collar? The murderer, almost certainly. What could such a man be like? He must have had blood like ice water to walk through a public street with his arm around the man he had killed. He must have had nerves of iron to go through a whole wedding ceremony, never knowing if someone might glimpse a male face under the bonnet, or touch the bride’s hand and find it suspiciously cold. He must have had a strange, playful, twisted mind even to think of such a plan in the first place.

One further thing Mosca knew about this man without the slightest doubt: he could not possibly be Eponymous Clent. Clent had been at the Gray Mastiff all evening, and besides, the Cakes would have recognized him immediately.

Until today, Mosca had been haunted by images of Clent coming after her with revenge in mind. Now she was troubled by visions of him being chased over cold fields by men with muskets, trying to hide his plump and trembling bulk in hedges and under barrows. He was probably guilty of a hundred hanging offenses, thefts and cheats and lays and lies, so perhaps it did not matter if he was hanged for one crime he had not committed. And yet it did matter. Mosca knew that she had to save him, and the only way to do so was to find the real murderer.

The ragmen’s decks were not so much laden as littered, scraps and frills and whole garments locked in multicolored mêlée. Most of the vessels were simple, square rafts, but there were a couple of small barges with fringed awnings like those on tilt boats, to keep the dew off the rags. Servant girls, seamstresses, and housewives scrambled over the mounds, tugging at this and that like gulls picking at scraps.

“’Scuse me.”

Two elderly women on one of the rag barges stopped their stitching and lifted their heads as Mosca raised her voice. They both wore a strangely stitched patchwork of snippets and sequins. “My uncle got a lift with a ragman a week ago, an’ he never come home . . . I was trying to find out where he was heading.”

“You’re mistaken, my butterfly,” said the thinner of the two women. Her nose was so crooked that it seemed to have a knuckle in the middle. “Ragmen don’t give lifts—Watermen’s rules. That’s right, isn’t it, Butterbara?”

“That’s right,” agreed her plumper friend. “Isn’t that right, Tare?” A younger man looked up from his little raft and nodded vigorously, but insisted on calling his brother Sorrel to back him up, who in turn called upon his friend Dregly to agree with him. The word passed around all the ragmen, who agreed unanimously that no ragman could possibly have offered anyone a lift.

“Perhaps it was just a scruffy-looking wherry,” Butterbara suggested helpfully.