William strode free of his sailer, shrugged his cape off into the sand, reached round himself, and drew his sword.

Fatio sailed into the line of dragoons, taking two of them, including their captain, from behind. But this was the end of his and Eliza’s sand-sailing career, for the vehicle planted its nose in the sand and tumbled over smartly. Eliza landed face-first in wet sand and sensed wreckage slamming down near her, but nothing touched her save a few snarled wet ropes. Still, these were an impediment to getting up. When she struggled to her feet, all water-logged, sand-covered, cold, and battered, she discovered that she’d lost the pistol; and by the time she’d pulled it up out of the sand, the action at this end of the beach was over-William’s sword, which had been bright a moment ago, was red now, and two dragoons were lying on sand clutching at their vitals. Another was being held at bay by Fatio with his musket, and the sixth member of the squad was running toward the longboat, waving his arms over his head and shouting.

The longboat was in the surf now, ready to convey the dragoons and their prisoner back out to Meteore. After a short discussion, four of the men who’d dragged it down the beach detached themselves and took off running towards the stopped sand-sailers while another stayed behind to mind the boat’s bow-rope. The sixth member of that contingent was still face-down in the sand with a wheel-track running over his back.

Eliza had not been noticed yet.

She crouched down behind the broken frame of the sand-sailer and devoted a few moments to examining the firing-mechanism of the pistol, trying to brush out the sand while leaving some powder in the pan.

Hearing a scream, she looked up to see that William had simply walked up to the captured dragoon and run him through with his sword. Then the prince took the musket from Fatio, dropped to one knee, took careful aim, and fired toward the five dragoons now running toward them.

Not a one of them seemed to take any notice.

Eliza lay down on her belly and began crawling south down the beach. In a moment the dragoons ran past her, about ten paces off to her left. As she’d hoped, none of them noticed her. They had eyes only for the two men, William and Fatio, who now stood, swords drawn, back to back, waiting.

Eliza clambered to her feet and shed her long heavy coat. Before boarding the sand-sailer at Scheveningen, she’d borrowed Fatio’s dagger and used it to slit the skirt of her nightgown and cut off the bottom few inches, freeing her legs. She sprinted toward the longboat. She was dreading the sound of pistols or muskets, which would mean that the dragoons had decided to drop William and Fatio on the spot. But she heard nothing except surf. The Frenchmen must have orders to bring the Prince back alive. Fatio was unknown to them and wholly expendable, but they could not shoot at him without hitting William of Orange.

The solitary dragoon holding the longboat’s bow-rope watched, dumbfounded, as Eliza ran towards him. Even if he hadn’t been dumbfounded there was nothing he could have done save stand there; if he dropped the rope, the boat would be lost, and he lacked the strength to beach it unaided. As Eliza drew closer she observed that this fellow had a pistol stuck in his waistband. But since the troughs of the waves were around his hips, and the crests wrapped themselves around his chest, the weapon was no cause for concern.

Eliza planted herself on the shore, took out the pistol, cocked the hammer, and took dead aim at the dragoon from perhaps ten paces. “This may fire or it may not,” she said in French. “You have until I count to ten to decide whether you’ll gamble your life and your immortal soul on it. One… two… three… did I mention I’m on the rag? Four…”

He lasted until seven. It was not the pistol that concerned him so much as her overall jaggedness, the look in her eye. He dropped the rope in the sea, raised his hands, and sidled up onto the beach, keeping well clear of Eliza, then turned and took off running toward the other group. ‘Twas not a bad play. If he’d stayed, the pistol might have fired, and he’d be dead and they’d lose the boat for certain. But there was a good chance that they could get it back from Eliza if he got help from the others.

Eliza let the hammer down gently, tossed the pistol into the longboat, waded out a few steps, reached up over her head to grip the boat’s transom, and hauled herself up. After a few kicks she was able to get an ankle hooked over the top of the transom, and then she brought herself up out of the water and rolled sideways over the stern and dropped into the bottom of the boat.

Her first view was of a caulked sea-chest. Pulling herself up on it, she saw that it was one of several massive lockers that rested on the deck. Presumably they contained weapons. But if it came to gunplay they were all lost.

The weapons she needed were oars, and these were lying out in plain sight on the boat’s simple plank benches. She tried to snatch one up and was dismayed to find it was twice as long as she was tall, too heavy and unwieldy to be snatched; but at any rate she heaved it up off the benches and rotated its blade down into the water. Standing in the stern, where the water under the keel was shallowest, she stabbed down through the surf and into the firm sand. The longboat was reluctant to move, and one who had not recently familiarized herself with the contents of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica might have given up. But the elemental precepts of that work were certain laws of motion that stated that, if she pushed on the oar, the boat had to move; at first it might move too slowly to be perceived, but it had to be moving. Eliza ignored the unreliable evidence of her senses, which were telling her that the boat was not moving at all, and pushed steadily with all her might. Finally she felt the oar’s angle change as the boat moved out from shore.

The moment she pulled the oar out, wind and surf began pushing her back, sapping the vis inertiae she had imparted to the longboat. She planted the oar a second time. The water seemed very little deeper than the first time around.

She wanted in the worst way to look up the beach, but looking would not do any good. Only getting the boat clear of the beach would serve their purposes. And so she waited until she had planted the oar half a dozen times, and doubled her distance from the surf-line, before she dared to look up.

Fatio was down. A dragoon was sitting on him, holding something near his head. William was at bay, sword still drawn, but surrounded by four dragoons who were leveling guns at him. One of these seemed, from his stance and his gestures, to be talking to the Prince-negotiating terms of surrender, Eliza guessed. The dragoon who had been left behind to hold the longboat’s bow-rope had finally reached the others and was gesticulating, trying to get their attention. The ones who surrounded William ignored him, but the one who was sitting on Fatio took notice, and looked at Eliza.

Eliza glanced toward shore and perceived that the surf had pushed her back in a few yards; the water below the longboat was only waist-deep. In a hurry now, she planted the oars in their locks, sat down, and began to row. Her first several strokes were useless, as the seas, summing and subtracting chaotically, exposed the blades of one or both oars so that they flailed and skittered across the surface. But the dragoons were re-deploying themselves with admirable coolness and she decided she’d better learn from their example. She half-stood and raised the oar-handles high, driving the blades deep, and fell back, thrusting with her legs and arching her body backwards, and felt the boat move. Then she did it again.

Fatio was unguarded and unmoving. William was bracketed between two dragoons who were leveling muskets at his head. The remaining four Frenchmen had run down the beach and were now staring at Eliza across perhaps fifty feet of rough water. One of them had already stripped off most of his clothes, and as Eliza stood up for another oar-stroke she saw him race out into the surf several paces and dive in. The remaining three knelt in the sand, aimed their muskets at the boat, and waited for Eliza to show herself again.