After that, all movements inside the stable were accompanied by the clanking of irons. “They put a collar on him,” Bob said learnedly. The sounds receded, then vanished all of a sudden. “He’s in the Tower now,” Bob announced. “God have mercy on him.” He sighed, and gazed down the length of the street in the direction of the full moon, which was swinging low over London. “I had better rest,” he said, “and so had you-if you intend to come.”

“Come where?” Daniel asked.

“Wherever we are directed by the Russian.”

It took a moment for Daniel to work through all that was implied by this. “You think that they will torture him-and he will break-and lead us to-?”

“It is only a matter of time, once Charles White has him in the Tower. Come, I’ll get you a proper billet, away from the noise.”

“What noise?” Daniel asked, because the Mint had been extraordinarily quiet these last few minutes. But as he followed Bob Shaftoe back up the street, he began to hear, through one of the open embrasures in Brick Tower, the sound of a man screaming.

“IN THE END THE MUSCOVITE spoke willingly,” Isaac announced.

He and Daniel were on the poop deck of Charles White’s sloop Atalanta. Twelve hours had passed since the Muscovite had been brought into the Tower.

Daniel had spent one of those hours attempting to sleep in the officers’ quarters of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards. Then the whole Tower had been roused by a call to arms. Or so it had seemed, from the perspective of one savagely irritable old man who desperately wanted to sleep. In truth, only the First Company of the Guards was rousted. To the other denizens of the Tower it was the most delicious sort of nocturnal alarm: one that gave occasion only to roll over and go back to sleep.

After some few minutes of fuss and bother, which he scarcely remembered since he’d been asleep on his feet, Daniel had been sent out of the Tower of London the way he’d come in, and ushered aboard Atalanta. He had repaired to a small cabin and seized the first thing that looked like a bunk. Some time later he had been awakened by sunlight, and peered out a window to discover that they had moved all of a quarter of a mile from Tower Wharf. Situation Normal: some foul-up had brought the proceeding (whatever it was) to a stand; they had Hurried Up only to Wait. He had pulled a blanket over his face and gone back to sleep.

When he’d finally woken up, not long ago, and dragged himself, stiff and foul and squinty-eyed, abovedecks to piss over the rail, he’d been startled to find open country around them, and the river’s width swollen to a mile. He guessed they were nearing the end of Long Reach, between Erith and Greenhithe, which would put them about halfway from London to the sea.

To get to the rail, he had to “beg your pardon” through many dragoons. The entire First Company-more than a hundred men-had been crammed aboard. Even when half of them were packed in belowdecks, this made the upperdeck so crowded that men could not sit down. Rather than trying to walk upon the deck, the sloop’s able seamen scampered like spiders through rigging overhead. Fortunately, as was the practice on all well-run ships, the aft or poop was reserved for officers; and Fellows of the Royal Society were given honorary status as such. Once he’d dragged himself up the stairs to the poop, Daniel found elbow room to spare, and plenty of space along the rail to get fresh air, to urinate, and to spit out the cottony stuff that had grown in his mouth while he’d been sleeping. A cabin-boy, perhaps alarmed by the volume of fluid this already-shriveled gager was discharging into the Thames, even brought him a ladle of water.

And at some point Sir Isaac appeared at his elbow, making his day complete.

“He spoke willingly,” Daniel repeated, trying not to sound aghast.

“Indeed, for a choice was laid before him: endure confinement and interrogation in the Tower to the end of his days, or tell what he knew, and be returned to Russia. He chose Russia.”

“Well if you put it that way, anyone who speaks under torture does so willingly,” Daniel pointed out. Normally he would have been slower to jab at Isaac, but he was in a wretched state, and moreover, had performed a great boon for Isaac during the previous day.

Isaac retorted, “I saw the Muscovite returning to his cell on his own two feet when it was over. Whatever was done to him was less violent-though it may have been more excruciating-than the beatings that are given to yon soldiers, every day, for trifling offenses. Mr. White knows ways of securing the cooperation of prisoners without inflicting permanent injury.”

“He’ll go back to Muscovy with both of his ears, then?”

“His ears, his eyes, his beard, and all the limbs he came in with.”

Daniel had not yet turned to look Isaac in the face. Instead he was facing abaft, looking at a pair of flat-bottomed river boats that followed in their wake. These were laden mostly with horses, and all the clutter that went with them, viz. saddles, tack, and grooms. No wonder they’d been slow to get underway.

While he’d been conversing with Isaac, the sloop had been negotiating a zigzag in the river, and widening its lead over the horse-barges; now they were swinging wide round a large, marshy lobe in the south bank, and coming in view of a place, a couple of miles downstream, where bright green downs and white chalk-hills crowded the right bank, and gave purchase for a river-side settlement. There, he knew, would be Gravesend. The seamen who were manning the sloop-scattered very thin over the crowd of Guards-became more alert. The laconic, incomprehensible commands of the sloop’s captain came more frequently. They were going to put in there. Indeed, they had few other choices, as once they got below Gravesend there’d be nothing but ooze all the way to the North Sea; and what was the point of barging a lot of horses down the river to drown ’em?

“What do you imagine a Russian was doing here, in business with Jack the Coiner?” Daniel asked.

“Jack enjoys the lavish support of some foreign potentate, most likely the King of France,” Isaac answered. “For make no mistake, the commerce of England is envied by all the world. Those Kings who cannot raise their own realms to our level, phant’sy that they can bring us down to theirs, by polluting our coinage. If the King of France may harbor such ambitions, why, so may the Tsar of all the Russias.”

“You think the Muscovite is a Tsarish agent?”

“That is the most creditable explanation.”

“You said he had a beard?”

“Indeed, a long luxuriant one.”

“How many years’ growth, would you say?”

“Soaked and stretched, it would extend below his navel.”

“He sounds like a Raskolnik to me,” Daniel said.

“What’s a Raskolnik?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. But they hate the Tsar. And one of the reasons they hate him is that he has decreed that they must shave off their long luxuriant beards.”

This silenced Isaac for a while, by forcing him to carry out immense recalculations. Daniel took unfair advantage of it to add: “Not long ago a new warship being built for the Tsar in Rotherhithe was burned by an Infernal Device, secreted in the recesses of the hull during the night-time. It used clock-work to shatter a phial containing white phosphorus, which, when the air touched it, burst into flame. Or so I have inferred from smelling its smoke, and sifting through the residue.”

Isaac was too fascinated by the news to wonder how Daniel had come by it. “That is the same mechanism as was used to set off the explosion in Crane Court!”

“Been looking into it, have you?”

“I did not ignore the warning you sent me.”