As he approached the northern elbow he found himself among soldiers, and thought he’d somehow wandered astray; but after getting round the turn he began to see, again, Mint dwellings on the left and milling shops on the right. So ’twould seem the conversion of military casemates to monetary workhouses was a work still in progress.

There was another sharp right turn, pinched between the bastion where they kept the Crown Jewels and another defensive mount, like Legge’s, in the outer wall. This brought him round to the eastern limb of the Mint, which ran straight south to Water Lane. A few strangely pleasant houses with gardens soon gave way to more of a smoky, glowing, banging character: probably the Irish Mint, which appeared to run all the way to the end.

By all rights he ought to’ve been tired. But the noise and vigor of the Mint infected his blood, and he ended up walking the entire length of it several times before he began to feel the effects of his long day.

The chapel bell tolled midnight from the Inner Ward as Daniel was rounding the northwest corner, near Legge’s Mount, for the third time. Daniel took it as a signal to duck into a little court along the outer wall, a gap between casemates, which had been beckoning to him. It appeared to belong to one of the Mint officials, who kept a wee casemate-house just next to it, as cozy as a dwelling made from a last-ditch fortress defense could ever be. At any rate, the court had a bench in it. Daniel sat down on that bench and fell asleep suddenly.

His watch claimed it was two o’clock in the morning when he, and all the workers who dwelt along Mint Street, were awakened by a sort of Roman Triumph making its way up from Byward Tower. Or at least it sounded as loud and proud as that. But when Daniel finally got up from his bench, dry and stiff as a cadaver, and tottered out to look, he thought it bore the aspect of a funeral-procession.

Charles White was riding atop the black wagon, which was surrounded by cloaked out-riders-mounted Messengers-and followed by a troop of soldiers on foot: two platoons of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards, who garrisoned the Tower, and who (or so Daniel gathered) were in the unenviable position of being at the beck and call of Charles White, whenever he wanted reinforcements. The black wagon itself was now padlocked from the outside.

A strange parade it was. Yet much better suited to this horseshoe-town than any of your sunlit, gay, flower-strewing, music-playing parades. Daniel could not help but fall in step with it as the wagon came abreast of him.

“So!” Daniel exclaimed, “ ’twould appear that the information provided by our guest was correct.”

He could feel White’s glare on his face like sunburn. “All I’ll allow is that our hen squawked, and laid an egg, whose savour is not yet proved. More eggs had better follow, and they had best be full of excellent meat, or else that hen shall furnish Jack Ketch with a dish of wings and drumsticks.”

White’s hen/egg gambit drew light applause. “How’ll you try this egg we have just gathered, sir?” asked one of the foot-soldiers.

“Why, crack its shell first,” he returned, “and then ’tis a choice, whether to fry it on the griddle, boil it ’til hard, scramble it-or eat it raw!”

Another round of laughter for this witticism. Daniel regretted having exposed himself in Mint Street. But they were now making the turn at the elbow, bringing new buildings and bastions in view, and White had lost interest.

“We have him!” White proclaimed, seemingly talking to the moon. But following White’s gaze, Daniel was able to make out Isaac’s silhouette against a narrow archway on the right side, backlit by several torches; or was that the false dawn of furnace-light?

They’d worked their way round to the best district of the whole Mint: the northeast, where the Master and Warden had their private houses and courts on the left. But Isaac was on the right. The arch in which he stood was some kind of sally-port of the Inner Keep.

“He fought like Hercules,” White continued, “despite being one-armed. And we could not clap him in manacles for the same reason!” Everyone laughed. “This holds him very well, though!” He rapped on the roof of the wagon.

The procession drew to a halt there, under the embrasures of the bastion called Brick Tower. Daniel now perceived that Brick Tower had been conceived as a mustering-place where the very bravest, drunkest, or stupidest knights in the Tower of London would gather in preparation for a sally. When they were ready, they would charge down a stone stair that ran along the front of the inner wall, make a sharp left, and continue down a second flight, erupting from the door where Isaac was standing, into the ditch, where God knows what would transpire between them and any foe-men who’d penetrated that far, and survived the fire from the casemates.

All of which was of primarily historical interest tonight. Save that this sally-stair held, in the crook of its arm as it were, a large storehouse, and next to it a stable, belonging to the Mint. These buildings obscured the lower half of Brick Tower, and for all Daniel knew, might be connected with it through passageways-squinting at old sooty out-buildings in the dark at two in the morning left plenty of lee-way for the imagination.

At any rate, the horses drawing the black wagon were obviously of the view that they were home, and the night’s work finished. It was into those dark buildings that the wagon was now conducted. The Messengers remained within, the Guards emerged and dispersed to their barracks, some of which were all of fifty paces away.

This left Daniel alone in the street. Or so he phant’sied, for a few moments, until he noticed a red coal bobbing up and down in a moon-shadow across the way, and realized that someone was lurking there, smoking a pipe, and observing him.

“Did you participate, Sergeant Shaftoe?”

He was only making an educated guess. But the pipe-coal emerged from the shadows, and the form of Bob coalesced in moon-light.

“I dodged that detail, I do confess, Guv.”

“Such errands are not to your liking?”

“Let some youngster take the glory. Opportunities for action are scarce of late, now that the war is in recess.”

“At the other end of town,” said Daniel, “they do not say ’tis in recess, but finished.”

“What other end of town would that be, then?” demanded Bob, feigning elderly daftness. “Would you be speaking of Westminster?” He said that in a very good accent. But then he reverted to mudlark Cockney. “You can’t mean the Kit-Cat Clubb.”

“Nay, e’en at the Kit-Cat Clubb they say the same.”

“To Doctors they say it, I think. To soldiers they say different things. The discourse of the Whigs is cloven like a devil’s hoof.”

An ugly commotion now arose within the stable at the foot of Brick Tower, which, while Doctor Waterhouse and Sergeant Shaftoe had been conversing, had been lit up with torches. The doors of the wagon had been unlocked, and men were shouting in a way Daniel hadn’t heard since he’d gone to the bear-baiting in Rotherhithe. From where they were standing, it was not loud. But something in the tenor of it made it out of the question for Daniel and Bob to continue their talk. Suddenly it rose to such a pitch that Daniel shrank away, thinking that the prisoner might be about to escape altogether. There was a tattoo of thumps, and a scream or two; then momentary silence, broken by a man calling out in a language of bent vowels and outlandish syllables.

“I have heard curses in many tongues, but this one is new to me,” Bob remarked. “Where’s the prisoner from?”

“He is from Muscovy,” Daniel decided, after listening for a few more moments, “and he is not cursing, but praying.”

“If that is how Muscovites sound when they talk to God, I’d hate to hear their blaspheming.”