He held his breath until he felt his ears ring and his vision gray, then essayed the slightest breath, found it possible, and slowly relaxed, the nightmare feeling of suffocation vanishing as his lungs expanded without further incident.

“Are you quite all right, John?” Edgar was surveying him with an expression of worried concern that moved him.

“Yes, fine.” He straightened himself, and gave Edgar a quick grimace of reassurance. “Nothing. Just…taken queer for a moment.”

Edgar gave him a sharp look that reminded him for an unsettling instant of their mother.

“Taken queer,” he repeated, eyes passing up and down Grey’s body as though inspecting him for damage, like a horse that had come up suddenly lame. “Melton’s wife wrote to Maude that you’d been injured in Germany; she didn’t say it was serious.”

“It isn’t.” Grey spoke lightly, feeling pleasantly giddy at the realization that he wasn’t going to die just this minute.

Edgar eyed him for a moment longer, but then nodded, patted him awkwardly and surprisingly on the arm, and turned toward the river.

“Never could understand why you went to the army,” Edgar said, shaking his head in disapproval. “Hal…well, of course. But surely there was no need for youto take up soldiering.”

“What else should I do?”

Grey wasn’t offended. He felt suffused with a great lightness of being. The stubbled fields and clouded sky embraced him, immeasurably beautiful. Even Edgar seemed tolerable.

Oddly enough, Edgar seemed to be considering his question.

“You’ve money of your own,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “You could go into politics. Buy a pocket borough, stand for election.”

Just in time, Grey recalled his mother mentioning that Edgar himself had stood for Parliament in the last by-election, and refrained from saying that personally, he would prefer to be shot outright than to have anything to do with politics.

“It’s a thought,” he said agreeably, and they spoke no more, until the powder mill came in sight.

It was a brick building, a converted grain mill, and outwardly tranquil, its big waterwheel turning slowly.

“That’s for the coarse grinding,” Edgar said, nodding at the wheel. “We use a horse-drawn edge runner for the finer bits; more control.”

“Oh, to be sure,” Grey replied, having no idea what an edge runner might be. “A very aromatic process, I collect?”

A gust of wind had brought them an eye-watering wave of feculent stink, and Edgar coughed, pulling a handkerchief from his coat and putting it over his nose in a practiced manner.

“Oh, that. That’s just the jakesmen.”

“The what?” Grey hastily applied his own handkerchief in imitation.

“Saltpeter,” Edgar explained, taking obvious satisfaction in knowing something that his clever-arse younger brother did not. “One requires brimstone—sulfur, you know—charcoal, and saltpeter for gunpowder, of course—”

“I did know that, yes.”

“—We can produce the charcoal here, of course, and sulfur is reasonably cheap; well, saltpeter is not so expensive, either, but most of it is imported from India these days—used to get it from France, but now—Well, so, the more of it we can obtain locally—”

“You’re digging it out of your tenants’ manure piles?” Grey felt a strong inclination to laugh.

“And the privies. It forms in large nuggets, down at the bottom,” Edgar replied seriously, then smiled. “You know there’s a law, written in Good Queen Bess’s time, but still on the books, that allows agents of the Crown to come round and dig out the jakes of any citizen, in time of war? A local lawyer found it for me; most useful.”

“I should think your tenants might find having their privies excavated to be a positive benefit,” Grey observed, laughing openly.

“Well, that part’s all right,” Edgar admitted, looking modestly pleased with all this evidence of his business acumen. “They’re less delighted at our messing about their manure piles, but they do put up with it—and it lowers the cost amazingly.”

He waved briefly as they passed within sight of the jakesmen, two muffled figures unhitching a morose-looking horse from a wagon piled high with irregular chunks of reddish-brown, but kept his handkerchief pressed firmly to his nose until they had moved upwind.

“Anyway, it all goes there”—he pointed at a small brick shed—“to be melted and cleaned. Then there, to the mixing shed”—another brick building, somewhat larger—“and then to one of the milling sheds, for the grinding and corning. Oh, but here’s Hoskins; I’ll leave you to him. Hoskins!”

Bill Hoskins proved to be a ruddy, healthy-looking man of thirty or so—young for an overseer, Grey thought. He bowed most respectfully when introduced, but had no hesitation in meeting Grey’s eyes. Hoskins’s own were a striking blue-gray, the irises rimmed with black; Grey noticed, then felt an odd clench in the pit of his stomach at the realization that he hadnoticed.

In the course of the next hour, he learned a great many things, among them what an edge runner was—this being a great slab of stone that could be drawn by horses over a flat trough of gunpowder—what raw sulfur smelled like—rotten eggs, as digested by Satan; “the devil’s farts,” as Hoskins put it, with a smile—how gunpowder was shipped—by barge down the river—and that Bill Hoskins was a noticeably well-built man, with large, clean, remarkably steady hands.

Trying to ignore this irrelevant observation, he asked whether powder of different grades was produced.

Hoskins frowned, considering.

“Well, can be, of course. That’s what the corning’s for—” He nodded at one of the flimsily built wooden sheds. “The finer the powder’s ground and corned into grains, the more explosive it is. But then, the finer it’s corned, the riskier it is to handle. That’s why the milling sheds are built like that”—he nodded at one—“roofs and walls nobbut sheets of wood, cobbled together, loose-like. If one should go up, why, then, it’s easy to pick up the bits and put them back together.”

“Indeed. What about anyone who might have been working in the shed when it…went up?” Grey asked, feeling his mouth dry a little at the thought.

Hoskins smiled briefly, eyes creasing.

“Not so easy. What you asked, though—in practice, we make only the one grade of powder at this mill, as it’s all sold to the Ordnance Office for artillery. Hard enough to pass their tests; we do better than most mills, and even so, a good quarter of some batches turns out dud when they test it at Woolwich. Not that any o’ that is ourfault, mind. Some others is mebbe not so careful, naming no names.”

Grey recalled the incessant thuds from the proving grounds.

“Oh, pray do,” he said. “Name names, I mean.”

Hoskins laughed. He was missing a tooth, far back on one side, but for the most part, his teeth were still good.

“Well, there’s the three owners in the consortium—”

“Wait—what consortium is this?”

Hoskins looked surprised.

“Mr. DeVane didn’t tell you? There’s him, and Mr. Trevorson, what owns Mayapple Farm, downriver—” He lifted his chin, pointing. “And then Mr. Fanshawe, beyond; Mudlington, his place is called. They went in together to bid the contracts for powder with the government, so as to be able to hold their own with the bigger powder mills like Waltham. So the powder’s kegged and shipped all as one, marked with the consortium’s name, but it’s made separate at the three mills. And as I say, not everyone’s as careful as what we are here.”

He looked over the assemblage of buildings with a modest pride, but Grey paid no attention.

“Marked with the consortium’s name,” he repeated, his heart beating faster. “What name is that?”

“Oh. Just DeVane,as your brother’s the principal owner.”

“Indeed,” Grey said. “How interesting.”