“Ah, your taking ways. So how much did you take before they caught you?”

“I was not caught,” Clent declared in an affronted tone. “I fancy I was betrayed—I know that a stranger stayed in Chough with the magistrate last night. And . . . ah, perhaps I am growing old and fearful, but I have been feeling a shadow at my back since I left the Capital.”

“The gallows casts a long shadow,” murmured Mistress Bessel, “and sometimes it cuts out the sun. I got tired of feeling the chill of it on the back of my neck, which is why I turned respectable. That, and these.” She held up her hands. There were dark shapes on their backs, faintly visible through her light gloves, each in the shape of a “T.” Felon’s brands, thought Mosca. “T” for thief.

“It is not the fear of the gallows, my inestimable Jen. My shadow is flesh and bone and walks on two legs. Jen . . . I cannot linger here. It will not be long before the rabble of Chough work out where I have gone.”

“Eponymous”—Mistress Bessel sounded quite serious—“what devilish soup have you got yourself into? We were in fellowship once, and now you will not even tell me who you have been working for so secretively these last two years.”

There was a long silence. Clent chased a chapbook around the tabletop with a fingertip. Finally Jen gave a short, bitter sigh. “Your girl’s been gone a long time,” she remarked. “She’s got long fingers, I noticed that. If I miss anything from upstairs, you’ll be floating away downriver, but not in a boat.”

Mosca decided that this was a good moment to reappear.

Mistress Bessel turned a motherly smile upon her as she pushed open the door. “Ah, now, that’s better, my blossom.”

“Mosca,” Clent interrupted quickly, “we will need a few things from the west bank.” Mosca was quick enough to catch the purse tossed at her head. “A loaf of bread, some cheese—and an apple or two, if it will not ruin us. And, child”—Mosca halted in the doorway—“we have yet to find a way of disguising the goose.”

Reluctantly Mosca relinquished Saracen, and ventured on to the Kempe Teetering thoroughfare. She was well aware that Clent might be looking for a chance to abandon her, but it seemed less likely that he would decamp without his purse.

On the far bank, Mosca glimpsed a soft slate-blue dome, and felt something cold slither across her heart like a toad across a stone. She halted, and was butted in the calves by a wheelbarrow of whelks.

Unsteadily, half willingly, she turned her steps toward the church. If she was likely to be hanged for arson, then this was as good a time as any to scrub at her stained soul.