Jones abruptly shut his eyes, upper lip folded under his lower teeth in a way that reminded Grey of his cousin Olivia’s bulldog, Alfred. It was an amiable animal, but remarkably stubborn.

The chiming clock on the mantelpiece struck the hour: two o’clock. The captain was likely telling the truth about searching everywhere else before coming to Grey’s door.

Jones at length opened his eyes—they were bloodshot, enhancing the resemblance to Alfred—though the teeth remained fixed in his lip. At last he shook his head in resignation and sighed.

“I’ll have to trust you, I suppose,” he said.

“I am distinctly honored,” Grey said, with an edge. “Thank you, Tom.”

Byrd had reappeared with a tray hastily furnished with two cups of tea. The tea was stewed and black, undoubtedly from the urn kept for the night watch, but served in Grey’s decent vine-patterned china. He took a cup gratefully, adding a substantial dollop of brandy from the decanter.

Jones stared at the cup of tea in his own hand, as though wondering where it had come from, but essayed a cautious sip, then coughed and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth.

“The cannon. Herbert said he thought you knew nothing about the process of gun-founding; is that true?”

“Nothing more than he told me himself.” The hot tea and brandy were both comfort and stimulant; Grey began to feel more alert. “Why?”

Jones blew out his breath, making a small cloud of steam; the air in the sitting room was still chilly.

“Without describing the entire process to you—you doknow that the bronze of a cannon is an alloy, produced by—”

“Yes, I do know that.” Grey was sufficiently awake by now as to be annoyed. “What does that—”

“I am sure that the burst cannon—all of them—had been cast from an inferior alloy, one lacking the proper proportion of copper.” He stared meaningfully at Grey, obviously expecting him to drop his tea, clutch his head, or otherwise exhibit signs of horrified comprehension.

“Oh?” Grey said, and reached for the brandy again.

Jones heaved a sigh that went all the way to his feet, and put out a hand for the decanter in turn.

“Not to put too fine a point upon the matter, Major,” he said, eyes on the amber stream splashing into his tea, “I am a spy.”

Grey narrowly prevented himself saying, “Oh?” again, and instead said, “For the French? Or the Austrians?” Tom Byrd, who had been loitering respectfully in the background, stiffened, then bent casually to pick up the poker from the hearth.

“Neither, for God’s sake,” Jones said crossly. “I am in the employ of His Majesty’s government.”

“Well, who the bloody hell are you spying on,then?” Grey said, losing patience.

“The Arsenal,” Jones replied, looking surprised, as though this should be obvious. “Or rather, the foundry.”

There ensued a tedious ten minutes of extraction which brought Grey to the point of wishing to gnash his own teeth. At the end of it, though, he had managed to get Jones to admit—with extreme reluctance—that he was not in fact employed by the Arsenal, as Grey had assumed. He wasa genuine captain in the Royal Artillery Regiment, though, and as such had been sent to nose unofficially about the Arsenal and see what he could discover regarding the matter of the exploding cannons—the Royal Artillery having an interest, as Grey might suppose.

“Couldn’t be official, d’ye see,” Jones said, becoming more confidential. “The Royal Commission had already been appointed, and it’s their show, so to speak.”

Grey nodded, curious. Twelvetrees, who was a member of the Commission of Inquiry, belonged to the Royal Artillery; why ought the regiment be sending Jones to do surreptitiously what Twelvetrees was doing so overtly? Unless…unless someone suspected Twelvetrees of something?

“To whom do you report your findings?” Grey asked. Jones began again to look shifty, and a small premonitory prickle ran suddenly down Grey’s spine.

Jones’s lips worked in and out in indecision, but at last he bit the bullet and blurted, “A man named Bowles.”

As though cued by an invisible prompter, the teacup began to rattle gently in its saucer. Grey felt a monstrous sense of irritation; was he never going to be allowed to drink a full cup of tea in peace, for God’s sake? Very carefully, he set down the cup and saucer, and wiped his hands upon the skirts of his dressing gown.

“Oh, you know him, do you?” Jones’s red-rimmed eyes fixed on Grey, suddenly alert.

“I know of him.” Grey did not wish to admit to his relations with Bowles, let alone discuss them. He had met the mysterious Mr. Bowles once, and had no wish to repeat the experience.

“So you had no official standing at the laboratory?”

“No, that’s why I needed Gormley.”

Herbert Gormley had no great authority within the hierarchy of the Ordnance Office, but he had the necessary knowledge to locate the remains of the exploded cannon, and sufficient administrative skill to have them quietly brought to the guns’ graveyard near the proving grounds and sequestered there for autopsy.

“There are hundreds of broken guns there; they should have been safe!” Jones’s teeth were clenched in frustration; in hopes of preventing further damage to the man’s molars, Grey poured more brandy into his empty cup.

Jones gulped it and set down the cup, eyes watering.

“But they weren’t,” he said hoarsely. “They’re gone. There were eight of them under my investigation—all gone. But onlythose eight—the ones Gormley found for me. Everything else is still there. And now Gormley’s gone, too. You can’t tell me that’s coincidence, Major!”

Grey had no intention of doing so.

“You do not suppose that Gormless—Gormley—had anything to do with the removal of the exploded cannon?”

Jones shook his head violently.

“Not a chance. No, he’s onto me. Has to be.”

“He? Whom do you mean?”

“I don’t fucking know!” Jones’s hands clenched together in an unconscious pantomime of neck-wringing. “Not for sure. But I’ll get him,” he added, giving Grey a fierce look, with a glimpse of clenched, bared fang. “If he’s harmed poor little Herbert, I’ll—I’ll—”

The man would be toothless before he was forty, Grey thought.

“We will find Mr. Gormley,” he said firmly. “But wherever he is, I doubt that we can discover him before daylight. Compose yourself, Captain, if you please—and then tell me the goddamn truth about what’s going on at the Arsenal.”

The truth, once extracted and divested of its encrustations of laborious speculation and deductive dead ends, was relatively simple: Gormley and Jones had concluded, on the basis of close examination, that someone at the foundry was abstracting a good part of the copper meant to be used in the alloy for casting. Result being that while new cannon cast with this alloy looked quite as usual, the metal was more brittle than it should be, thus liable to sudden failure under sustained fire.

“Those marks you noticed on Tom Pilchard,” Jones said, describing a series of semicircles in the air with a blunt forefinger. “Those are the marks where holes left in the casting have been plugged later, then sanded flat and burnished over. You might get a hole or two in any casting—completely normal—but if the alloy’s wanting, you’ll get a lot more.”

“And a much higher chance of the metal’s fracturing where you have several holes together, such as those I saw. Quite.”

He did. He saw himself and four other men, standing no more than a foot away from a cannon riddled like a cheese with invisible holes, each charge rammed down its smoking barrel one more throw of crooked dice. Grey was beginning to have a metallic taste in the back of his mouth. Rather than lift the cup and saucer again, he simply picked up the decanter and drank from it, holding it round the neck.

“Whoever is taking the copper—they’re selling it, of course?” Copper was largely imported, and valuable.