A lone Sentinel-a private soldier of the Black Torrent Guard-was stationed before the door of No. 4. Like No. 6, No. 4 was a Tudor sort of house that wouldn’t rate a second glance if it were dropped along a village green in Essex and its peculiar occupants replaced with a petty tradesman and his family.

When Dart drew close enough to make it obvious he was headed for No. 4, the Sentinel reached round behind himself and rapped on the front door. A moment later Yeoman Clooney thrust his head out an open window nearby and inquired, “Visitor for my lord?”

“Barber,” answered the Sentinel.

“Is he expected?”

Clooney always asked this. It was the most feeble of challenges. Even so, Dart had to stifle a momentary impulse to run away-or, worse, to break down and confess. But he could sense the Black-guard’s eyes prodding him in the back like a pistol-barrel. “Sir,” he gargled. He had to cough up some bloody phlegm and swallow it before he could continue: “I told my lord I would come this week, he is due.”

Clooney’s head drew back into the house. A brief exchange of murmurs could be heard through the open window. Then floor-boards cracked and door-locks snapped. Yeoman Clooney opened his front door and nodded in a confidence-inspiring way to the Sentinel. “His lordship will see you,” he proclaimed, in a trumpety heraldic tone that reminded Dart what an honor it was to mow an Earl’s scalp, and how unworthy Dart was of it. Dart hunched over, picked up his bag, and hustled into the house, tipping his hat at the Sentinel, then making a nod at Yeoman Clooney.

The house had a front parlour looking out on the Parade through the very window Clooney had been using to exchange words with the Sentinel. The light was good there, and so that was where Dart spread out his drop-cloth. He set a chair in the middle of it.

The Earl of Hollesley was spending the twilight of his life in this house because he had been entrusted with some of H. M. Government’s money during the War of the Spanish Succession, and had used it to put a new roof on his country house, instead of buying saltpeter in Amsterdam. He was near sixty, and as far as Dart knew, his entire life consisted of sitting in a chair and having his hair cut. Other prisoners strolled round the Liberty, killed themselves, or staged spectacular, improbable escapes; the Earl of Hollesley spent all his time in No. 4. Except for Dart, once a fortnight, he rarely entertained visitors. When he did they tended to be Catholic priests, for the Earl had gone Popish in his dotage. When he entered the room on Yeoman Clooney’s arm, Dart said to him, “M’lord,” which was all he was encouraged to say.

Yeoman Clooney had the easy, but unfathomably tedious job of keeping an eye on the Earl twenty-four hours a day. He took a chair in the corner while Dart got the Earl seated and tarped. “Sir,” said Dart in a kind of stage-whisper to the yeoman, “I’ll take the liberty of shutting the window, as the day’s a bit gusty, and I don’t want hair blowing round your tidy abode.”

Clooney feigned interest in the window for a few moments, then drifted off. Dart went to it, looked out across the Parade, and found Tom the Black-guard gazing back at him. Before pulling down the sash Dart drew his rag from his pocket, loudly and distinctly hacked into it, then spat on the ground.

It went without saying that the Earl of Hollesley wore a periwig. But he still had to be shorn every so often. He preferred to have his head shaved. It ruled out lice.

By the time Dart had got his brushes and razors organized, and taken up his tonsorial post beside the Earl, Tom the Black-guard was half-way across the Parade, and staring at him curiously through the window. Which was well. For otherwise Dart could never have done, nay, even contemplated it. An Earl, or even a Yeoman Warder, was so great, so potent, so terrible to an insect like Dart. But there was a cold power behind Tom the Black-guard that overbalanced even an Earl. Dart might evade a Justice of the Peace, but blokes like Tom could nose him out even if he ran all the way to Barbados. If Dart did not do as he’d been instructed, he’d forever be a rabbit, trapped in a warren, pursued by an army of ferrets. Which is what gave him the courage-if courage was the right word for it-to announce: “Yeoman Clooney, I say that I have a blade to my lord Hollesley’s throat.”

“Er-what?” Clooney had been very close to drowsing off.

“A blade to his throat.”

The Earl was reading The Examiner. He was hard of hearing.

“So, you are giving him a shave as well as a haircut?”

This was unexpected. Clooney was supposed to understand a blade to the throat of a Lord.

“I am giving him neither, sir. I am making a threat to kill my lord.”

The Earl stiffened, and rattled his Examiner. “The Whigs will be the death of this country!” he announced.

“What possible reason could you have for doing such a mad thing?” Clooney wanted to know from the corner.

“The Juncto!” the Earl went on. “Why don’t they come out and call it by its real name, a Cabal, a Conspiracy! They are trying to drive Her Majesty into her grave! It is assassination by another name.”

“I know naught of reasons. Reasons are for Tom. Tom is at the door,” Dart said.

“It’s all right here!” the Earl continued, and leaned forward suddenly, so that he’d have cut his own throat if Dart hadn’t reacted in time. “The Duke of Cambridge. What, his German title isn’t good enough for him? You’d think he was a proper Englishman, wouldn’t you?”

There came a knock at the door from the Sentinel. “Boot-black,” came the call.

“Admit him, sir,” Dart said, “and make no sign of distress to the Sentinel, for Tom shall be watching you avidly. Tom shall explain all.”

“No wonder Her Majesty is wroth! ’Tis a calculated insult-calculated by Ravenscar. Where Age and Ague have failed to bring down our Queen, he shall do it with Aggravation, may God forbid!”

Clooney left the parlour. Dart stood for a few moments with his blade-hand a-tremble, expecting that the Sentinel would appear in a moment to blow his head off with a pistol-shot. But the door opened and closed without any commotion, and Dart could now hear the slithering voice of Tom the Black-guard, speaking to Clooney in the entrance-hall.

“That Sophie is a circling vulture,” Lord Hollesley proclaimed. “Not content to wait for a dignified succession-she sends her grandson before her, like a kite to peck at our Sovereign’s withered cheeks!”

Dart was straining to hear the conversation between the Black-guard and the Yeoman, but the Earl’s fulminations and paper-rattling drowned out all but a few words: “Muscovite…Wakefield Tower…vertebrae…Jacobites…”

Then all of a sudden Tom thrust his head into the parlour and gave him a flat inspection, like a coroner viewing a corpse. “Stay here,” he said, “until it happens.”

“Until what happens?” Dart asked. But Tom was already on his way out the door, and Yeoman Clooney beside him.

Dart stood there, resting his tired blade-hand on the Earl’s collar-bone, and watched the two of them angling across the green toward Wakefield Tower-where, according to scuttle-butt, a one-armed Russian had been chained up the night before.

There was nothing else to do. So he began to soap the Earl’s head. Presently he began to hear the ardent tolling of several bells on the north side of Tower Hill. This was a fire-alarm. Somewhere beyond the moat, a building was burning. Normally Dart would’ve been one of the first on the scene, for he loved a good fire. But he had solemn obligations here.