Destiny is overtaking us upon wings of canvas, thought Eponymous Clent as he sagged back against the wooden wall, mopping his brow, and it seems I am to die armed with nothing but a spoon. Until now he had remained quiet and cowed, hoping only to escape the wrath of everyone else on the Bower, but his mind had noticed everything as it scurried to and fro like a rat looking to escape a burning room. As he wandered back from a room full of blinding steam to a room full of blinding smoke, his foot struck a rounded something. It answered the blow with a sound like the flutter of wings. Wings of destiny. Wings of destiny . . .

“Tell me, young sir, how well can you throw?”

Carmine looked up from loading Copperback’s pistol. “Well enough to knock chestnuts from a tree.” His expression was a question.

“Could you throw this”—Clent lifted the wig box into his hands—“through one of the windows in the coffeehouse yonder?”

There was a long and prickly pause.

“I would need to be outside.”

“I know.”

“Would it help?”

“In truth, I cannot say. It might.”

“Give me the box, sir.”

With the wig box slung over his shoulder, Carmine paused at the bottom of the rope ladder. It did seem hard to be doing something heroic while everyone was too busy to notice. Almost everyone—the Cakes had seen him and was staring up at him in surprise. On impulse he stooped and kissed her on the cheek, clumsily, so that her forehead knocked against his eyebrow.

When he reached the top of the rope ladder, the wind blew his collar into his mouth and his short pigtail beat at the base of his neck. Brave Captain Blythe was crouching behind the chimney, cleaning out his pistol. The crew of the Bower ducked low to the deck or ran at a crouch from point to point when the lines needed trimming.

Carmine lay flat on his stomach near the edge of the deck and let his arm dangle over the side, the wig box hanging from his fist by its leather straps. As he began to swing it back and forth, Carmine kept his eye on a window below on the other boat, where a man in a plum-colored surcoat was beating a playful curtain out of his face and leveling his pistol at Captain Blythe’s hiding place. A swing, and a one, and a two, and a . . .

The man at the window took the wig box full in the face and staggered backward. The box bounced against the sill, then tumbled down inside rather than out. The men at the other windows of the Queens’ Heads pulled back, as if eager to find out what had landed in their midst.

“Pull yourselves together, men!” someone was bellowing. “You dolts! You . . . you squirrels! It’s a goose, nothing but a goose. Just a distraction. Here, I’ll show you . . .”