The sounds that followed greatly resembled those that might be caused by locking half a dozen farmyard animals into a dresser and then pushing it downstairs. Somewhere in the confusion someone discharged a rifle. To judge by the edgy, hot-coals dance that the crew on the Queens’ Heads were suddenly performing, they had just seen the bullet hole appear through the deck upon which they stood. The street door flung wide, and someone dived into the water and began swimming to the shore, leaving a cocked hat bobbing behind him.

Carmine scrambled to his feet and ran back to the trapdoor. He paused only for a second at the top of the rope ladder, but suddenly he was staring up at the sky. The deck had charged him from behind like a bully, and something seemed to be gripping his upper arm fiercely as if he might escape upward into the sky. A wet heat was spreading across his shoulder, and as he tried to sit up the world raised its voice in a chorus of pain and pushed him down again.

Something was pulling at his leg. Looking down the length of his own body, Carmine could see the frightened face of Eponymous Clent, who had pushed his head up through the trapdoor and taken hold of Carmine’s ankle. Carmine wondered dully if Clent was trying to steal his boots, and whether anyone would notice. However, he let himself be dragged inch by painful inch, and at last felt someone grip him under the arms and lower him down through the trapdoor, where he seemed to sink into darkness like a drowner, amid a crowd of supporting hands. He was laid gently onto the floorboards. Voices echoed oddly in his ear, and there were red ringlets trailed across his face.

Blythe saw the young apprentice fall to a pistol shot but was too far away to do more than watch as Clent crept from cover to drag the boy to safety. What a world this is, he thought. Children put us to shame with their pluck, and are shot in the back for it.

The highwayman’s mind was filled with a terrible, aching clarity, for he had no doubt in his mind that he would be dead by evening. He hid this belief from his comrades, just as he hid the fact that his recent influenza had left his throat rough as bracken, and that from time to time his head became so light that the objects around him seemed to glisten darkly. The men who depended upon him needed to see him strong and able.