But then, suddenly, they were in a dimly lit room, alone, and Turk wasn’t running anymore. Nervous and irritable to be sure, though. Jack cautiously wiggled his left foot. Turk startled, then looked at him.

“Surprised to see me? I’ve been with you the whole way-loyal friend that I am,” Jack announced. He got his boot out of that stirrup and stood. But there was no time for additional banter. They were in a pantry. Squealing noises heralded the approach of the rats. Pounding of boots was not far behind, and where there were boots, there’d be swords. There was a locked door set into the wall, opposite to where they had come in, and Turk had gone over to sniff at it curiously.

If this was not a way out, Jack was dead-so he went over and pounded on it with the pommel of his sword, while looking significantly at Turk. It was a stout door. Curiously, the crevices between planks had been sealed with oakum, just like a ship’s planking, and rags had been stuffed into the gaps round the edges.

Turk wheeled around to face away from it. Jack hopped out of the way. The war-horse’s hindquarters heaved up as he put all weight on his forelegs, and then both of his rear hooves smashed into the door with the force of cannonballs. The door was half caved in, and torn most of the way loose from its upper hinge. Turk gave it a few more, and it disappeared.

Jack had sunk to his knees by that point, though, and wrapped a manure-plastered sleeve up against his nose and mouth, and was trying not to throw up. The stench that had begun to leak from the room beyond, after the first blow, had nearly felled him. It nearly drove Turk away, too. Jack just had the presence of mind to slam the other door and prevent the horse’s fleeing into the hallway.

Jack grabbed the candle that was the pantry’s only illumination, and stepped through, expecting to find a sepulchre filled with ripe corpses. But instead it was just another small kitchen, as tidy a place as Jack had ever seen.

There was a butcher’s block in the center of the room with a fish stretched out on it. The fish was so rotten it was bubbling.

At the other end of this room was a small door. Jack opened it and discovered a typical Parisian back-alley. But what he saw in his mind’s eye was the moment, just a few minutes ago, when he had ridden right past the duc d’Arcachon while carrying an unsheathed sword. One twitch of the wrist, and the man who (as he now knew) had taken Eliza and her mother off into slavery would be dead. He could run back into the house now, and have a go at it. But he knew he’d lost the moment.

Turk planted his head in Jack’s back and shoved him out the door, desperate to reach the comparative freshness of a Paris alley choked with rotting kitchen-waste and human excrement. Back inside, Jack could hear men battering at the pantry door.

Turk was eyeing him as if to say, Shall we? Jack mounted him and Turk began to gallop down the alley without being told to. The alarm had gone up. So as Jack thundered out into the Place Royale, sparks flying from his mount’s new shoes, the wind blowing his cape out behind him-in other words, cutting just the silhouette he’d intended-he turned round and pointed back into the alley with his sword and shouted: “Les Vagabonds! Les Vagabonds anglaises!” And then, catching sight of the bulwark of the Bastille rising above some rooftops, under a half-moon, and reckoning that this would be a good place to pretend to summon reinforcements-not to mention a way out of town-he got Turk pointed in that direction, and gave him free rein.

Must businesse thee from hence remove?

Oh, that’s the worst disease of love,

The poore, the foule, the false, love can

Admit, but not the busied man.

He which hath businesse, and makes love, doth doe

Such wrong, as when a maryed man doth wooe.

–JOHNDONNE, “Breake of Day”

“WHO IS YOUR GREAT BIGtall, bearded, ill-dressed, unmannerly, harpoon-brandishing, er-?” asked Eliza, and ran out of adjectives. She was peering out the windows of the Maiden coffee-house at a loitering Nimrod who was blotting out the sun with an immense, motley fur coat. The management had been reluctant to let even Jack come into the place, but they had drawn the line at the glaring wild man with the harping-iron.

“Oh, him?” Jack asked, innocently-as if there were more than one such person who owned that description. “That’s Yevgeny the Raskolnik.”

“What’s a Raskolnik?”

“Beats me-all I know is they’re all getting out of Russia as fast as they can.”

“Well, then… how did you meet him?”

“I’ve no idea. Woke up in the Bomb amp; Grapnel-there he was, snuggled up against me-his beard thrown over my neck like a muffler.”

Eliza shuddered exquisitely. “But the Bomb amp; Grapnel’s in Dunkirk…”

“Yes?”

“How’d you get there from Paris? Weren’t there adventures, chases, duels-?”

“Presumably. I’ve no idea.”

“What of the leg wound?”

“I was fortunate to engage the services of a fine, lusty crew of maggots along the way-they kept it clean. It healed without incident.”

“But how can you simply forget about a whole week’s journey?”

“It’s how my mind works now. As in a play, where only the most dramatic parts of the story are shown to the audience, and the tedious bits assumed to happen offstage. So: I gallop out of the Place Royale; the curtain falls, there is a sort of intermission; the curtain rises again, and I’m in Dunkirk, in Mr. Foot’s finest bedchamber, upstairs of the Bomb amp; Grapnel, and I’m with Yevgeny, and stacked around us on the floor are all of his furs and skins and amber.”

“He’s some sort of commodities trader, then?” Eliza asked.

“No need to be waspish, lass.”

“I’m simply trying to work out how he found his way into the drama.”

“I’ve no idea-he doesn’t speak a word of anything. I went down stairs and asked the same question of Mr. Foot, the proprietor, a man of parts, former privateer-”

“You’ve told me, and told me, and told me, about Mr. Foot.”

“He said that just a week or two earlier, Yevgeny had rowed a longboat into the little cove where the Bomb amp; Grapnel sits.”

“You mean-rowed ashore from some ship that had dropped anchor off Dunkirk.”

“No-that’s just it-he came from over the horizon. Rode a swell up onto the beach-dragged the longboat up as far as it would go-collapsed on the threshold of the nearest dwelling, which happened to be the old Bomb. Now, Mr. Foot has been lacking for customers these last few years-so, instead of throwing him back like a fish, as he might’ve done in the B amp; G’s heyday, and discovering, furthermore, that the longboat was filled to the gunwales with Arctic valuables, he toted it all upstairs. Finally he rolled Yevgeny himself onto a cargo net, and hoisted him up through the window with a block and tackle-thinking that when he woke up, he might know how to obtain more of the same goods.”

“Yes, I can see his business strategy very clearly.”

“There you go again. If you’d let me finish, you wouldn’t judge of Mr. Foot so harshly. At the cost of many hours’ backbreaking labor, he gave a more or less Christian burial to the remains-”

“ Which?There has been no discussion of remains. ”

“I may’ve forgotten to mention that Yevgeny was sharing the longboat with several comrades who’d all succumbed to the elements-”

“-or possibly Yevgeny.”

“The same occurred to me. But then, as the Good Lord endowed me with more brains, and less bile, than some, I reckoned that if this had been the case, the Raskolnik would’ve thrown the victims overboard-especially after they waxed gruesome. Mr. Foot-and I only tell you this, lass, in order to clear Yevgeny’s name-said that the meatier parts of these corpses had been picked clean to the bone by seagulls.”