“Where are the pistols?” White demanded.

If his opponent, and his opponent’s second, had been gentlemen, he might have greeted them first. But these were Vagabonds of the sea and so that was how he said hello.

“Pistols? What pistols?” asked Dappa.

“You stated in your letter that you would supply a matched set of pistols,” White said, suspecting tomfoolery.

“Firearms are what I said I would supply,” said Dappa, “and I said I’d let you choose. If you will now follow me and Captain van Hoek, please, I’ll show you the first of ’em.” And Dappa strode into the fog. Van Hoek stepped out of the way to let White and his second-a young gent name of Woodruff-follow. They were leery of being followed by van Hoek and so after an awkward few seconds’ feinting and after-youing, they all fell into step abreast of one another and out of mutual stabbing-range.

“Where is it?” Charles White demanded.

“Less than a hundred paces from here,” Dappa returned.

The ground reared up under their feet. They had come to the base of a brief but stiff rise in the Hill, which traditionally was employed as a natural viewing-stand for Londoners eager to see Lords being hanged. Rather than attempting to scale this slope, Dappa deflected to the right and walked along its base, following fresh wheel-ruts that scarred the ground.

He led them to an artillery-piece, mounted on a two-wheeled carriage, and turned round so that the earth rose up behind it. Directions were not easy to keep track of in this dim light, but it seemed to be aimed generally toward the bank of the river. Resting on the ground beside the piece were a powder-keg, a pyramidal stack of five balls, and relevant tools, viz. scoop, ramrod, amp;c.

Before White could fully take this in, Dappa had made an about-face and begun goose-stepping toward the Thames, counting paces: “One, two, three…”

They were approaching the base of another rise in the ground: this one part of the earthen rampart that surrounded the Bulwark. The sky had brightened, and the fog dissolved, to the point where they could see that he was leading them toward another field-piece, arrayed in the same manner as, and aimed back towards, the first; which loomed down on them from its shelf halfway up Tower Hill.

The hundred paces had given White time to grow accustomed to the idea-even to see humor in it. “Where did you get these guns?” he wanted to know.

“It is a passably entertaining story,” Dappa answered, “but if you are about to die, there’s no point in relating it to you. And if I am, then one of the ways I mean to spite you is by leaving you in the dark. Technically, by the way, they are called Hobbits, or Haubitzes,” said Dappa. “Not guns. A gun has a longer barrel, and is much heavier; it throws heavy balls at great speed, to batter down walls. A Haubitz is like a horizontal mortar: it uses a smaller powder-charge. I judged it a more suitable weapon, for a duel. Cannon-shot would carry in to the city, if we mis-aimed. Haubitz-balls, being lighter, will fall to the ground nearby.”

“How can they be lighter if they are made of the same stuff?” asked Woodruff, who had apparently been studying his Natural Philosophy.

“They are hollow, you see,” said Dappa, picking one of them up with only modest effort, even though it was a good six inches in diameter. He spun it over between his hands to reveal a drilled orifice, and a spray of gray strings, radiating outwards, like meridians, to cover one hemisphere of its surface. “Hollow, so that they may be packed with powder. Otherwise, we’d be here all day trying to hit each other with a lucky shot. These shells will burst and kill anything within a few yards.”

“I see. It is quite practical,” said Woodruff, though he seemed a bit preoccupied by the implications of that for him. Van Hoek was eyeing him with amusement.

“Please take as much time as you will to inspect these bombs, the Haubitzes, and anything else you please; I assure you they are quite identical.”

“No need,” said White, “and little time. Quite obviously the most advantageous position is the one on high.” He nodded up toward the first Haubitz. “For that reason, you’d look to me to choose it, and if one of the Haubitzes were deficient, that’s where you’d place it. And so I choose this; you may have the high ground.”

“Very well,” said Dappa, “shall we to the midway-point then?”

They stood back-to-back on the field, each staring in to the muzzle of the gun he’d soon be loading. Their seconds stood off to the side, watching to be sure that all of the rules and formalities were observed.

“It is perfect,” White reflected. “Over yonder I have had victory over Newton, and the Whigs; for make no mistake, he will fail the Trial of the Pyx a week hence. Here I shall have victory over you, or else die; either way I could hardly have expected better.”

“One,” said Dappa, and took a pace away from him-as much to shut the man up as anything else.

“Very well. One,” said White, and took a pace. Thence they counted, and paced, in unison; and round about the time they reached forty (for they were taking very long paces) they dropped all pretense of dignity and fell to work upon the Haubitzes.

White was aided, in this, by his second. Dappa wasn’t. Van Hoek stood with his back to the Haubitz, as if he were an early-morning perambulator pausing to take in the view of Tower Hill’s lower reaches and the Pool. When Dappa gave him a dirty look, van Hoek licked his hook and held it up in the air as if to test the wind.

Dappa cuffed him on the back. “Stop it!”

“Look at them scurrying around down there,” said van Hoek. “They have no idea what they are doing.”

“That’s what concerns me.”

“In Cairo you were much cooler,” van Hoek reminded him, “and it was I who looked on irritably.”

“In Cairo I had nothing to lose!” Dappa reminded him. He had rolled the powder-keg to a safer distance from the Haubitz, and was prying the bung out with a dagger. “Did White and Woodruff move their keg?”

“Ah, you see? Now you ask for the knowledge that I have been collecting.”

“You could have collected it, and done something else useful, at the same time.”

“Oh, very well,” said van Hoek, and ambled round to the butt of the Haubitz. He sighted down the barrel, then changed focus to the target. “Yes. They moved their keg. But not as far as they ought to’ve.” He picked up a stone and used it as a mallet to whack the quoin under the weapon’s butt, depressing its muzzle slightly. “Do you think we need to allow for the rotation of the Earth?”

Dappa studiously ignored this baiting. He had filled a long-handled scoop with powder, and now introduced it to the muzzle. The scoop’s diameter was markedly smaller than the weapon’s bore. “This is the part they are likely to get wrong,” Dappa reflected, as he prodded away, trying to get the scoop into a narrower chamber concealed in the butt. “I hope they’ll charge it full bore, and blow themselves up!”

“That would not be sporting,” van Hoek chided him, and used his hook to scrape away some chymical encrustation surrounding the touch-hole. Because of his disability, he could not very easily pick up a shell, and so this duty fell to Dappa, who stuffed in a ball, then set to beating it down the barrel with a ramrod, while gazing attentively down-hill.

“This is what you get for your slowness!” he pointed out. For both he and van Hoek had noticed that White, with a grin, was putting fire to the touch-hole of a fully loaded and ready-to-go Haubitz.

A cloud of flame the size of a parish church appeared between them and their opponents, then winked out and was smoke.

“And that is what they get for their lubberly haste,” said van Hoek.

As both van Hoek and Dappa understood, White and Woodruff had over-charged the weapon. The force of the fire had crushed the shell inside the barrel, causing it to vomit forth a cloud of gunpowder, most of which (fortunately for them) had burned in the open air.