It was equally difficult to keep his own heart from galloping. He knew their destination, from what Cardinal Black had said to Mother Deare before commending the souls of both Matthew and William Atherton Archer to the Devil: I will meet you at the tower. And then information was added by one of Black’s men taken during the raid: he thought it was a medieval watchtower in the forest about a half-mile this side of Adderlane. A place, the man had said, where Black went to commune with Satan.

Matthew had to determine himself to relax in the saddle, because his mount was feeling his demons of demand and was jumpy under the bit. He pulled his gray cloak tighter around his neck and shoulders, for with the disappearance of the sun behind the vault of clouds the air had chilled. He knew it did no good for him to mentally pontificate about the future of this mission and the results of failure, and therefore he had to concentrate not on the moments ahead but upon the moment at hand.

Take Julian Devane, for instance. Matthew was curious about how any sane man wound up in the employ of Professor Danton Idris Fell. “What’s your story?” Matthew asked, and waited for a reply that would seem as chilly as the wind.

It was a long time coming, and indeed was laced with ice: “None of your damned business.”

“I thought it might be beneficial to know who I was teamed with.”

“A fool teamed with a fool,” Devane said. “Now shut your mouth and give me peace.”

Peace, Matthew mused, was likely the one thing this man could never find. For all his criminal tendencies, Devane carried himself with an aristocratic air. One could tell a man’s bearing—and education—by the way he sat astride and handled a horse, and Matthew was certain from his observations that Devane did not come from the school of the gutter. Under that rakishly tilted dark green tricorn was a brain, and not simply one that served as an automaton for the professor or had been for the recently deceased Mother Deare. No mere henchman was Julian Devane, and again Matthew wondered what the man’s history was. He figured Devane to be maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, only two or three years elder than Matthew, who had turned twenty-four the previous May, which seemed eons ago here on the eve of 1704 and was not recalled as a very merry month. Since his adventure in the Carolina colony concerning the River Of Souls, time had been both a whirl and a disturbance. There was of course a period in which his memory had been lost until he had awakened on a ship bound for England as both a “servant” and a prisoner to that hideous Prussian swordsman, Count Anton Mannerheim Dahlgren, and the Devil must be lamenting that man’s arrival to muddy up the pretty red walls of Hell. Then it was into Newgate prison for Matthew, his association with the Black-Eyed Broodies and the avenger Albion, and now …