Daniel lurked outside the cabin door until Mr. Baynes stopped sobbing and whimpering, then counted slowly to a hundred (for he himself needed to calm down a bit), then opened the hatch and went through, carrying a lit candle.

Mr. Baynes was on a bench with his hands fettered behind his back. Before him was a plank table. He had slumped forward so his head lay on it. Daniel was certain he had expired from a stroke, until he perceived the prisoner’s pinioned arms slowly rising and falling, as his lungs filled and emptied like the bellows of an Irish bagpipe.

Daniel wished he could fall asleep, too. For a few minutes he sat there nodding drowsily in the light of the candle-flame. But he could hear booted and spurred feet pacing round the deck overhead, and he knew perfectly well that he was not anchored in some placid cove, but only a few yards off Black Friars, London.

“Wake up.”

“Eh-?” Baynes pulled against his irons, then regretted it and sat up, his spine creaking and popping like an old mast taking a gust. His mouth was a dry hole, pushed in like a wound. He refused to meet Daniel’s eye.

“Will you talk to me?” Daniel asked.

Mr. Baynes considered it, but said nothing. Daniel rose to his feet. Mr. Baynes watched him sidelong. Daniel reached into his pocket. Baynes tensed, getting ready to suffer. Daniel drew his fist out, flipped it over, and opened it to display, on the palm of his hand, Mr. Baynes’s set of false teeth.

Baynes’s eyes got wide and he lunged like a cobra, yawning. Daniel fed the teeth to him and he sucked and gummed them in. Daniel stepped back, wiping his hand on his breeches, and Mr. Baynes sat up straight, having seemingly swapped a new and better skull for the faulty one he’d woken up with.

“You are a gentleman, sir, a gentleman. I marked you as such the moment I saw you-”

“In truth I am no gentleman, though I can be a gentle man. Mr. Charles White is a gentleman. He has already explained what he means to do to you. He means what he says; why, I’m surprised you still have both of your ears. Save thine ears, and the rest of thyself, by telling me where and when you are supposed to meet the one-armed foreigner.”

“You know that I shall be killed, of course.”

“Not if you serve your Queen as you ought.”

“Oh, but then I shall be killed by Jack the Coiner.”

“And if not by Jack, then by old age,” Daniel returned, “unless apoplexy or typhus take you first. If I knew of a way to avoid dying, I’d share it with you, and the whole world.”

“Sir Isaac knows of a way, or so ’tis rumored.”

“Spouting Alchemical rubbish is not a way to get in my good graces. Telling me the whereabouts of the one-armed foreigner is.”

“Your point is well taken, concerning mortality. In truth, ’tis not fear of mine own fate that stopped my tongue.”

“Whose then?”

“My daughter’s.”

“And where is your daughter?”

“Bridewell.”

“You fear that some revenge will be taken on her if you assist the Queen’s Messengers?”

“I do. For she is known to the Black-guard.”

“Surely Charles White has the power to get one girl sprung from Old Nass,” Daniel reflected. Then he stopped short, astounded to hear himself speaking like a criminal.

“Aye. Straight from there, to his bedchamber, to be his whore until he has worn her out, at which point he’ll no doubt give her a decent interment in Fleet Ditch!” Mr. Baynes was as upset to imagine this horror, as he would have been to witness it, and had gone all twitchy now; his wooden teeth were chattering together, and clear snot was streaming out of one nostril.

“And you phant’sy I am a decent sort?”

“I said it before, sir, you are a gentle man.”

“If I give you my word that I’ll go to the Spinning-Ken and look after your daughter-”

“Not so loud, I pray you! For I do not want Mr. White to so much as know that she exists!”

“I am no less wary of him than are you, Mr. Baynes.”

“Then-you give your word, Dr. Gatemouth?”

“I do.”

“Her name is Hannah Spates, and she pounds hemp in Mr. Wilson’s shop, for she’s a strong girl.”

“Done.”

“Prithee, send in the Queen’s Messengers.”

DANIEL’S REWARD FOR THIS makeshift act of grace was a free moon-light river-cruise to the Tower of London. This was strangely idyllic. The best part of it was that Charles White and his platoon of feral gentlemen were not present; for after a short conversation with Mr. Baynes, they had flocked on the deck like a murder of crows, clambered back into the row-boats, and set off for Black Friars Stairs.

Even the passage of London Bridge, which, on a smaller boat, was always a Near Death Experience-the sort of event gentlemen would go home and write down, in the expectation that people would want to read about it-was uneventful. They fired a swivel-gun to wake up the drawbridge-keeper in Nonsuch House, and raised a silver-greyhound banner. He stopped traffic on London Bridge, and raised the span for them, and the sloop’s master suffered the current to flush them through into the Pool.

Half an hour later they clambered by torch-light into the dank kerf of a Tower Wharf staircase. As Daniel ascended the stair, and his head rose through the plane of the Wharf, the whole Tower complex unfolded before and above him like a vast black book, writ on pages of jet in fire and smoke.

Almost directly ahead on the wharf stood a jumble of small buildings fenced about with a palisade. The wicket had been opened by one of the Wharf Guard standing the night watch. Daniel moved through it in a crowd, and entered one of the small buildings, troubled by the sense that he was invading someone’s dwelling. Indeed he was, as this Wharf-apartment seemed to be home for (at least) a porter, a sutler, a tavern-keeper, and diverse members of their families. But a few steps on, he felt timbers under his feet and sensed that they’d passed through into a different space: they were outdoors again, crossing over a wooden causeway that spanned a straight lead of quiet water. It must be the Tower moat, and this must be a drawbridge.

The planking led to a small opening in the sheer face of the Tower’s outer wall. On the right hand, a wedge-shaped bastion was thrust out from the same wall, but it offered no doorways: only embrasures and murder-holes from which defenders could shower fatal attentions upon people trying to get across this bridge. But tonight the drawbridge was down, the portcullis was up, no projectiles were spitting out of the orifices of the Tower. The group slowed down to file through a sort of postern gate into the base of Byward Tower.

To their left was a larger gate leading to the causeway that served as the Tower’s main land entrance, but it had been closed and locked for the night. And indeed, as soon as the last of their group had made it across the drawbridge, the postern gate was closed behind them, and locked by a middle-aged bloke in a night-cap and slippers. Daniel had enough Tower lore stored up in his brain to suspect that this would be the Gentleman Porter, and that he must live in one of the flats that abounded in this corner of the complex. So they were locked in for the night.

With the gates closed, the ground floor of Byward Tower was a tomb. Isaac and Daniel instinctively moved out from under it and into the open cross where Mint Street came together with Water Lane. There they tarried for a minute to watch Mr. Baynes being frog-marched off to a dungeon somewhere.

Anyone who entered the Tower of London as they just had, expecting to pass through a portal and find himself in an open bailey, would be disappointed. Byward Tower, through which they’d just passed, was the corner-stone of the outer defenses. All it afforded was entry to a narrow belt of land surrounding the inner defenses, which were much higher and more ancient.

But even an expert on medieval fortifications would be perplexed by what Daniel and Isaac could see from here, which in no way resembled a defensive system. They appeared, rather, to be standing in the intersection of two crowded streets in pre-Fire London. Somewhere behind the half-timbered fronts of the houses and taverns that lined those streets lay defensive works of stone and mortar that would make the Inner Ward impregnable to a pre-gunpowder army. But in order to see those medieval bastions, embrasures, et cetera, one would have to raze and scrape off everything that had been built atop and in front of them, a project akin to sacking a small English town.