“Oh, aye. Don't suit ye, less it be one o' them inquisitor monks what used to burn folks. Mine's Archie McLeish. Ye'd better come wi' me. I've a boat a few paces along. Not much, cold and wet, but it'll get us across.” And he turned and ambled off, walking on the sides of his feet with a sway as if the dockside were moving.

Monk caught up with him. “The inquisitors burned peo- ple for their beliefs,” he said waspishly. “I don't give a sod what people believe, only what they do to each other.”

“Ye have the face o' a man who cares,” Archie replied without looking at him. “I wouldn'a want ye after me. I'd as soon have the de'il himself.” He stopped at the top of a narrow flight of steps leading down to the water where a very small boat was rising gently as the tide rose. “It's a hard thing to care,” he added.

Monk was about to deny that he cared, but Archie was not listening to him.

He had bent his broad back and was loosening the moorings, which seemed to be in an extraordinarily complicated knot.

Monk climbed in and Archie settled to the oars. He pulled out skillfully, twisting the boat around, propelling it and steering it at the same time.

The bank and the steps disappeared into the gray rain within yards. The thought crossed Monk's mind that no one knew where he was. He had accepted the offer without taking the slightest precaution. Archie McLeish could have been paid by Caleb to do precisely this! He must know Monk was after him. Monk could go overboard in the darkness and mist of the river and be swept out with the ebb tide, his body washed up days later, or never. Caleb Stone might be blamed, but no one could prove it. It would be one more accident. Maybe Archie McLeish would even say Monk threw himself in. He sat gripping the gunwales, determined if it came to that, he would make a damned good fight of it. Archie McLeish would go over with him.

They passed barges moving steadily, dark mounds in the mist, riding lights to port and starboard, hundreds of tons of cargo making them juggernauts on the tide. If they were caught in front of one of those they would be splintered like matchwood. There was no sound but the water, the dismal hoot far off of a foghorn, and now and then someone shouting.

They passed a square-rigger coming down from the Pool of London, its bare spars looming above them in the mist, reminding Monk of a row of gibbets. It was growing perceptibly colder. The raw wind blew through his coat as if it had been cotton shoddy, and touched his bones.

“Afraid o' Caleb Stone, then, are ye?” Archie McLeish said cheerfully.

“No,” Monk snapped.