“Hey! You up there!” The woman was using the hoarse, hushed call of one who is trying to rouse the house without waking the neighbors. “You does marriages, right? We wants to get married. Don’t we?”

“Bwuzzug,” her friend agreed, and smiled at the bottle in his hand.

A little farther along the wall, another window opened and a head of wild red hair appeared.

“You need a marriage done quick?” The voice was young and as sharp as a thorn. “You got three shillings, and sixpence for the late hour?”

“Right here in me purse.” The strain of holding her fiancé upright was starting to show in the color of the plump woman’s face.

“I’ll come down and let you in, then,” declared the red-haired girl. “You’ll have to guide his hand when you’re signing the register, though, looks like.”

Somewhere in the house, a tinder scratched and heavy soles flapped on wooden boards. Then the front door opened and swallowed the woman and her drunken friend.

Five minutes or so later, the other window swung wide again. The red hair had been pushed roughly under a mobcap, and there was a wise, pale face the color of uncooked pastry beneath it. The face’s owner scanned the windows until she spotted Mosca.

“Sorry for you bein’ woken, ma’am. I hope you an’ your husband will have no more trouble.” Mosca could only assume that the other girl could not see her face properly. It was strange to be called “ma’am” by someone who looked two years older than her.

“I’m not here for marriage—we’re just stayin’ here, that’s all.”

“Oh.” The red-haired girl relaxed and grinned. “What are you here for, then? I’m The Cakes.”

“What?”

“I does the cakes. For after the nuptials. What you here for?”

“I’m a secretary.”

“Oh.” The Cakes’s face fell as if she did not think she had been told the truth, and then she shrugged as if to show that that was Mosca’s business. “See you at breakfast, then.”

While the sky silvered behind the distant spires, Mosca tried to patch the tatters of her plans. The slumber-bewitched conversation with Lady Tamarind had changed everything. Had it really taken place?

Thinking of Lady Tamarind, Mosca felt her stomach twist. It was excitement—but excitement of a not entirely pleasant sort. Rather, it was a sudden awareness of something she lacked, something she had sensed in the rich otherness of the lady in the coach. The lack ached, like a hole in a tooth.