Of that number, a quarter of them-one platoon-would normally be concentrated along the Wharf, which was by far the most vulnerable face of the complex in that anyone in the world could come up to it on a boat. The other three platoons would be scattered round the complex at a plethora of sentry-posts and guard-houses: at the gates, causeways, and drawbridges, of course, but also before the doors of the Yeoman Warders’ houses, in front of the Jewell Tower, and at diverse other check-points.

There were also about two score Yeoman Warders. These were, in a somewhat technical sense, soldiers-The Yeomen of the Guard of Our Lady the Queen, “the Queen’s Spears,” the vestiges of a sort of Praetorian Guard that Henry VII had organized after Bosworth Field. But MacIan was rather less concerned with them, for they were scattered amongst their cottages looking after prisoners, they were not well armed, and they were not really run after the fashion of a military unit.

Normally Charles White and a few of the Queen’s Messengers-who actually were rather dangerous lads-would be hanging around the place. But they were off on a river cruise today.

At least in theory there was a Militia of the Tower Hamlets. But to muster these would take days, and to get their firelocks in working order would take longer. Most of them dwelt on the wrong side of the Moat anyway.

There was a Master Gunner, and under him four Gunners. By this time of day the Master Gunner could be counted on to be dead drunk. Only two of the Gunners would be on duty. And this meant sitting in a dungeon taking inventory of cannonballs-not manning the battlements ready to put fire to a loaded Piece. To actually load and fire the cannons and mortars on the Wharf and along the parapets of the walls required quite a few more bodies than that, and so it was a duty for the Guard. When the guns were fired on the Queen’s Birthday or for the arrival of an ambassador, much of the regiment was kept busy looking after them.

So the task at hand was to account for the some fifty-four guards who were not presently on the Wharf, and put them out of action.

What Rufus MacIan wanted to hear, he heard now: the drummer on the Wharf hammering out a tattoo that meant Alarm, Alarm! He could hear it clearly through this window, indeed could’ve thrown a stone over the low outer wall and hit the drummer-boy on the head. But it booted nothing for him to hear it. The question was, could it be heard by the Guards sprinkled round the Mint and the Inner Ward over the alarms of the fire that was burning in the hamlets, north of the Moat?

There was no better vantage-point from which to answer such questions than the building he was in now: the Lieutenant’s Lodging. MacIan turned his back on the window and strode north, exiting the room and stepping across a corridor. This brought him, for a moment, in view of a staircase. Angusina, the big red-headed lass, was coming up with a fistful of skirt in one hand and a loaded pistol in the other. Her face was flushed beneath the freckles as if someone had been flirting with her. “The Centinells ir flichtered!” she proclaimed, “weengin away like a flocht o muir-cocks at the buller o’ the guns.”

“The guns, aye, but can they hear the tuck o the drum?” MacIan wondered, and ducked into a small room under the gables. A long stride brought him to a mullioned window that framed a view of the Parade. What he saw was to his satisfaction: “A see reid,” he announced. “ ’Tis a beginning.”

As MacIan knew from having watched their interminable drills through the window of his prison, when an alarm sounded, the company on guard was supposed to form up at their barracks and march as quickly as possible to the Parade. This was more or less what he was seeing now, albeit from a different window. One platoon was there, wanting a few men, and enough privates had strayed in from other platoons to assemble a couple of additional squads.

The fact that Rufus MacIan had just stabbed the Lieutenant of the Tower to death in his own dining-room had no effect at all, and would not have made a difference even if these men had been aware of it. They were carrying out standing orders, which was exactly what was wanted at this stage of the Plan. If the Lieutenant (Throwley) had been alive, or if the Colonel of the regiment (Barnes) or even its Master Sergeant (Shaftoe) had been present, any of them might have countermanded those standing orders, and dashed the whole enterprise. As matters stood, none of them was in a position to put his superior intelligence to use here. Besides them, only three other personages stood in the chain of command: the Constable of the Tower (the late Ewell Throwley’s superior) and the Deputy Lieutenant and the Major (Throwley’s subordinates). The Constable was presently taking the waters in the country, trying to rid his system of three dozen faulty oysters he’d tucked into yesterday afternoon. The other two had been drawn away for the afternoon on some pretext. And so the Tower guard, like a killed chicken dashing around the farm-yard, was aping the remembered commands of a head that had already been thrown to the dogs.

The ranking sergeant was in the middle of the Parade, screaming a bit of tender abuse at each solitary lobsterback who came running in. Squads were schooling like fish on the green. It put Rufus MacIan in mind of the War: of the glorious carnage of Blenheim, piercing the French lines at Brabant, crossing the morass on the right end of the line at Ramillies, breaking the French cavalry before Oudenaarde. A thousand tales of gallantry that had become mere stuff between veterans’ deaf ears. Part of him wanted to stride across that green Parade, rally those troops-for excellent troops they were-and lead them to the Wharf. But his status as condemned traitor and sworn enemy would be an impediment there. To settle his mind on the task at hand was easy enough-he need only turn around and look at that red-headed girl, and remember the day when he had picked her up from the cold blue breast of her dead mother and wrapped her in bloody bed-clothes and borne her up screaming into the crags above Glen Coe.

The ranking sergeant had turned his purple face to the south. For a moment MacIan was wary of being spied in the lieutenant’s window. But the sergeant was not looking his way; his gaze was directed, rather, towards Cold Harbour-no, towards Bloody Tower, the chief portal to Water Lane from where he stood. MacIan could not see what the sergeant was looking at, but he could discern from the man’s silence, and his posture, that he was soaking up commands. It must be the officer in command of this company. That would fit. The lieutenant, on hearing the guns on the river, and the alarm from the Wharf, would run to investigate. Seeing the improbable, the unthinkable, but not-to-be-denied sight of a party of French Marines bearing down on the Wharf and blazing away with swivel-guns, he would dash back across Water Lane and get in view of the Parade the quickest possible way, which was through the stalwart arch in the base of Bloody Tower, and order all available units to “follow me!”

The sergeant on the green answered the only way he knew how: methodically. With a deliberation that was as agonizing to Rufus MacIan as it must have been to the wild-eyed lieutenant on the threshold of Bloody Tower, he drew and raised his sword, bellowed a catechism of marching orders that caused the one company and the three squads to stiffen, shoulder arms, wheel to the south, and-finally, bringing the sword down-forward march. And once some momentum had been established he even went to the extreme of telling them to double-time it.

MacIan went back to the bedchamber on the south side and found that Angusina had already applied herself to the task of pulling in the grapnels and making rope-ends fast to the frame of the lieutenant’s massive bed. Her imposing pelvis was framed in a window like an egg in a snuff-box as she hand-over-handed some burden up on a rope. Rufus MacIan thrust his head out another window and looked off to the left down Water Lane just in time to see the head of the column of redcoats sally from the base of Bloody Tower. A jog to the left then took them across the lane and into the base of St. Thomas’s tower, which they could use as a bridge to the Wharf.