“It shall go splendidly, Colonel Barnes. One more thing, before we are embroiled—?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Your superior wanted to convey some message to me?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Black-guard who accosted you on Tower Wharf this morning.”
“Ah yes,” Barnes said, and grinned. “Great big chap, dark and a bit gloomy, would’ve made a fine dragoon. Spoke in words I did not fully understand. Which was probably his intent. Wanted me to tell you that it was a lay.”
Daniel was frozen for a count of ten.
“You all right, Doctor?”
“This breeze off the sea is quite bracing.”
“I’ll get you a blanket.”
“No, stay…. Those…those were his words? ‘It’s a lay’?”
“That was the entire message. What’s it signify? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“It means we should all turn around and go back to London.”
Barnes laughed. “Why’d we want to do such a thing, Doctor?”
“Because this is a trap. No, don’t you see? They somehow—Jack somehow—knew.”
“Knew what, Doctor?”
“Everything. He led us on.”
Barnes took a moment to think it through. “What, you’re saying the Russian was planted?”
“Just so! Why else would he have divulged so much, so soon?”
“Because Charles White had his testicles in a vise?”
“No, no, no. I’m telling you, Colonel—”
“Too fanciful,” was the verdict of Barnes. “More likely, the Black-guard’s in the pay of Jack, and, in a last-ditch gambit to stop us from coming out here, tried to scare us off with words.”
There was no changing Barnes’s mind. Daniel had committed a grave error by instilling Barnes with Hope first, then trying to make him afraid. If a want of hope made men desperate, a surfeit of it made them stupid in a wholly other way. Hope was tricky business, it seemed, and ought to be managed by someone with more experience of it than Daniel.
They were accosted by a lone musket-shot from shore. The captain ordered his seamen to slacken the canvas until they were only just making head-way. A skiff had pushed off from the indistinct shore of the Isle of Grain. News of it rapidly penetrated the quarterdeck and brought Charles White and Sir Isaac Newton up to the poop.
In a few minutes the skiff came alongside them, carrying a lieutenant of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. It had been commandeered from a local fisherman and his boy, who did all the work. They were not so much put out by this turn of events, as incredulous.
The lieutenant brought a cargo of words, and unloaded it with no small pride on the poop deck. These words were accepted as valuable military intelligence by all present save Daniel, who construed them only as additional tricks put in their way by Jack the Coiner.
The gist of it was that a brilliant success had been achieved. The dragoons had galloped over the Yantlet Creek bridge half an hour ahead of schedule, and posted a platoon there to hold it. The rest of the company had made for that stretch of shore-line nearest Shive Tor, and posted a lookout on St. James’s Church. This was built on the nearest thing the Isle of Grain had to a hill, and looked straight out across the tide flats. There the command post had been established. Most of the company was now deployed below it, at the high tide line, ready either to intercept any counterfeiters fleeing from the Tor on foot, or to mount a charge across the flats and storm the building. All of which had been noted by the inmates of the Tor, who had burned a few documents (or so it could be guessed from interpreting smoke) and then tried to escape by water.
Moored on the seaward side of the Tor, in the dredged channel, had been a boat of perhaps sixty feet in length, built on the lines of a Dutch ocean-going fishing vessel called a hooker. As Daniel, son of a smuggler, knew, this would be an ideal sort of craft for illicit traffic across the North Sea. Drake had used boats with flatter bottoms, because he tended to unload in shallow coastal creeks, but since Jack had his own ship-channel, he could carry out a thriving trade with a deeper-draught vessel such as this hooker. The occupants of Shive Tor had hastily loaded some items onto the hooker, raised sail, and tried to take her down the channel to open water. But she had run aground almost immediately, no more than a bowshot from the Tor. They had flung out enough stuff to refloat her, then let the wind—which was abeam—push her to the side of the wee channel, where she had run aground for good. This had opened the channel again and enabled at least some of them to make their escape in a sort of whaling boat: not much bigger than a longboat, but equipped with a mast and a sail, which had been raised once it had been rowed free of the channel. The whaler’s flight was being watched from St. James’s Church. But not much longer; in another hour, darkness would fall.
Having concluded this narration, the lieutenant awaited orders. Now, Mr. Charles White, who was quite obviously the master of this expedition, had the good form to look expectantly at Barnes, giving him leave to utter the command.
Barnes considered it for a long time—to the shock, then irritation, of Charles White and Isaac Newton both. Finally he shrugged and gave orders. This lieutenant was to be rowed back to shore, where he was to order an advance across the tidal flats to Shive Tor. Atalanta was to raise sail and pursue the fleeing whaler, pausing only to drop its longboat at the mouth of the Tor’s dredged channel so that an advance party could reach the Tor, arrest anyone who hadn’t made it onto the whaler’s passenger list, and salvage the grounded hooker before the resurgent tide floated it off.
These orders produced intense activity from all except Charles White, who responded with a sigh of mock relief and a roll of the eyes: what had taken Colonel Barnes so long? Precious seconds had been wasted as he pondered what was obvious!
Barnes had turned his back on White immediately after giving the command. He thumped over to Daniel.
“You’re correct,” Barnes said. “It’s—what did your friend call it? A lay.”
“What brings this change of mind, Colonel Barnes?”
“The fact that I had no decision to make. An imbecile could have given those orders.” He glanced over at White. “And one almost did.”
“Is it your intention to remain aboard, or to go to the Tor in the longboat?”
“A peg-leg’s no use in muck,” Barnes said.
“Daniel, I should benefit from your assistance at the Tor,” announced Sir Isaac Newton, breaking in on their conversation from behind Barnes. He was shrugging on a coat, and had brought up a wooden case that, from the way that he glared at anyone who came near it, Daniel assumed must contain Natural-Philosophick or Alchemical instruments.
Barnes pondered for a moment.
“On the other hand,” he said, “I could always hop about on one foot.”
Lieutenant’s Lodging, the Tower of London
LATE AFTERNOON
BY THE TIME HE GOT up to the late lieutenant’s bedchamber, no fewer than four grappling-irons were already lodged in the sills of its open windows. As he approached, a fifth erupted through a sash, and flying glass nearly accounted for his remaining eye. He spun away, backed to the window, thrust his hand out into the breeze, and skated it back and forth until he heard an answering cheer from below.
Sixteen months ago, MacIan had been arrested for a violation of the Stabbing Act. The stabbee had been an Englishman: a Whig who had mocked him in a coffee-house, pretending that he could not understand a word the Scotsman was saying. The Prosecutor had been the Whig’s widow: a more formidable opponent. By dint of various connivings and intrigues, she managed to trump up a few moments’ impulsive dirk-work into an act of High Treason. Exploiting the fact that her late husband had been a Member of Parliament, she had convinced a magistrate that the imbroglio had, in truth, been an act of international espionage carried out by a Scottish Jacobite Tory against an important member of Her Majesty’s Government. So MacIan had been committed to the Tower instead of N
ewgate Prison. He had not set foot beyond the Inner Wall since then. Now, though, he staged half of an escape by thrusting his head and shoulders out the window.
It was a different world out here. The only thing he had an eye for at first was doings on the river: not the easiest page for a one-eyed man to read, given the number and variety of ships strewn over the Pool. As a boy he had thought ships wonders. As a veteran he saw them differently, each vessel a coagulated Motive, a frozen Deed.
His eye soon picked out the triangular sails of a sloop, and a blue French naval banner, and, below them on the deck, an assembly of blue-coated soldiers. In case this were not a clear enough message, the sloop now fired a spotty barrage from its collection of swivel-guns. That, MacIan knew, served two ends: it let the Wharf Guard know that these invaders were not a mirage. But it was also a cue to the other actors in the play, letting them know that MacIan had hit his mark, and appeared in a certain window.
Within the Moat and on the Wharf, at this moment, should be seventy-two private soldiers, four corporals, four sergeants, two drums and a single lieutenant, that being a single Company, and the minimum complement deemed necessary to guard the place.
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.
He was distracted by a clanging noise nearby, and glanced down to see a Claymore bashing against the stone wall as Angusina hauled it up on a rope. The blade was almost naked, clad only in a sort of thong used for hanging it on the back. Scabbards for Claymores did not exist; such weapons were to be used, not worn. This particular blade had suffered worse, and MacIan was not troubled by its sparking collisions with the wall.
The lot below numbered a round dozen. They were ordinary London tavern rabble by their looks. Or to be precise, ordinary post-war London tavern rabble. For the Mobility had suddenly become a lot younger and rougher in the last twelvemonth, when much of Her Majesty’s army had been disbanded. Some of the veterans had gone off to be pirates or soldiers of fortune. But these happy few had been making themselves common, unremarkable features of a couple of drinking establishments spackled to the plinth of Bell Tower and the adjoining stretch of wall—directly beneath the very windows that Angusina and Rufus were presently looking out of.
The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle Page 35
