ELIZA MOUNTED HER HORSEand turned around. The wind off the sea was in her face now, like a fine mixture of ice and rock salt fired out of blunderbusses. She decided to cut inland to get out of the weather. Riding up over the crest of the dune was something of a project, for it had grown to a considerable height here.

In the scrubby plants of the beach-shrubs as tall as a man, with wine-colored leaves and red berries-spiders had spun their webs. But the mist had covered them with strings of gleaming pearls so that she could see them from a hundred feet away. So much for being stealthy. Though a stealthy human, crouching among those same shrubs to look down on the beach, would be perfectly invisible. Farther up the slopes grew wind-raked trees inhabited by raucous, irritable birds, who made it a point to announce, to all the world, that Eliza was passing through.

Finally she reached the crest. Not far away was an open sea of grass that would take her to the polders surrounding the Hague. To reach it, she’d have to pass through a forest of scrubby gnarled trees with silvery gray foliage, growing on the lee side of the dune. She stopped for a moment there to get her bearings. From here she could see the steeples of the Hague, Leiden, and Wassenaar, and dimly make out the etched rectangles of formal gardens in private compounds built in the countryside along the coast.

As she rode down into the woods the susurration of the waves was muted, and supplanted by the hissing of a light, misty rain against the leaves. But she did not enjoy the sudden peace for very long. A man in a hooded cloak rose up from behind one of those trees and clapped his hands in the horse’s face. The horse reared. Eliza, completely unready, fell off and landed harmlessly in soft sand. The cloaked man gave the horse a resounding slap on the haunches as it returned to all fours, and it galloped off in the direction of home.

This man stood with his back to Eliza for a moment, watching the horse run away, then looked up at the crest of the dune, and down the coast to that distant watch-tower, to see if anyone had seen the ambuscade. But the only witnesses were crows, flapping into the air and screaming as the horse charged through their sentry-lines.

Eliza had every reason to assume that something very bad was planned for her now. She had barely seen this fellow coming in the corner of her eye, but his movements had been brisk and forceful-those of a man accustomed to action, without the affected grace of a gentleman. This man had never taken lessons in dancing or fencing. He moved like a Janissary-like a soldier, she corrected herself. And that was rather bad news. A fair proportion of the murder, robbery, and rape committed in Europe was the work of soldiers who had been put out of work, and just now there were thousands of those around Holland.

Under the terms of an old treaty between England and Holland, six regiments of English and Scottish troops had long been stationed on Dutch soil, as a hedge against invasion from France (or, much less plausibly, the Spanish Netherlands). A few months earlier, when the Duke of Monmouth had sailed to England and mounted his rebellion, his intended victim, King James II, had sent word from London that those six regiments were urgently required at home. William of Orange-despite the fact that his sympathies lay more with Monmouth than with the King-had complied without delay, and shipped the regiments over. By the time they had arrived, the rebellion had been quashed, and there had been nothing for them to do. The King had been slow to send them back, for he did not trust his son-in-law (William of Orange) and suspected that those six regiments might one day return as the vanguard of a Dutch invasion. He had wanted to station them in France instead. But King Louis-who had plenty of his own regiments-had seen them as an unnecessary expense, and William had insisted that the treaty be observed. So the six regiments had come back to Holland.

Shortly thereafter, they had been disbanded. So now the Dutch countryside was infested with unpaid and unled foreign soldiers. Eliza guessed that this was one of them; and since he had not bothered to steal her horse, he must have other intentions.

She rolled onto her elbows and knees and gasped as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her. One arm was supporting her head, the other clutching at her abdomen. She was wearing a long cape that had spread over her like a tent. Propping her forehead against her wrist, she gazed upside-down into the hidden interior of that tent, where her right hand was busy in the damp folds of her waist-sash.

One of the interesting bits of knowledge she had picked up in the Topkapi Palace was that the most feared men in the Ottoman Empire were not the Janissaries with their big scimitars and muskets, but rather the hashishin: trained murderers who went unarmed except for a small dagger concealed in the waistband. Eliza did not have the skills of a hashishin, but she knew a good idea when she saw one, and she was never without the same kind of weapon. To whip it out now would be a mistake, though. She only made sure it was ready to hand.

Then she lifted her head, pushed herself up to a kneeling position, and gazed at her attacker. At the same moment, he turned to face her and threw back his hood to reveal the face of Jack Shaftoe.

ELIZA WAS PARALYZEDfor several moments.

Since Jack was almost certainly dead by now, it would be conventional to suppose that she was looking upon his ghost. But this was the reverse of the truth. A ghost ought to be paler than the original, a drawn shadow. But Jack-at least, the Jack she’d most recently seen-had been like the ghost of this man. This fellow was heavier, steadier, with better color and better teeth…

“Bob,” she said.

He looked slightly startled, then made a little bow. “Bob Shaftoe it is,” he said, “at your service, Miss Eliza.”

“You call knocking me off my horse being at my service?”

“You fell off your horse, begging your pardon. I apologize. But I did not wish that you would gallop away and summon the Guild.”

“What are you doing here? Was your regiment one of those that was disbanded?”

His brain worked. Now that Bob had begun talking, and reacting to things, his resemblance to Jack was diminishing quickly. The physical similarity was strong, but this body was animated by a different spirit altogether. “I see Jack told you something of me-but skipped the details. No. My regiment still exists, though it has a new name now. It’s guarding the King in London.”

“Then why’re you not with it?”

“John Churchill, the commander of my regiment, sends me on odd errands.”

“This one must be very odd indeed, to bring you to the wrong shore of the North Sea.”

“It is a sort of salvage mission. No one expected the regiments here to be disbanded. I am trying to track down certain sergeants and corporals who are well thought of, and recruit them into the service of my master before they get hanged in Dutch towns for stealing chickens, or press-ganged on India ships, or recruited by the Prince of Orange…”

“Do I looked like a grizzled sergeant to you, Bob Shaftoe?”

“I am laying that charge to one side for a few hours to speak to you about a private matter, Miss Eliza. The time it will take to walk back to the Hague should suffice.”

“Let’s walk, then, I am getting cold.”

I never justify’d cutting off the King’s Head, yet the Disasters that befel Kings when they begun to be Arbitrary, are not without their use, and are so many Beacons to their Successors to mark out the Sands which they are to avoid.

– The Mischiefs That Ought Justly to Be Apprehended from a Whig-Government, anonymous,attributed to Bernard Mandeville, 1714