As Blythe willed himself to stand firm, the Duke carefully polished a slender, girlish pistol with a flared muzzle, then turned to regard his enemy shoulder-on, and brought his pistol down to bear. The other coffeehouse was close enough for Blythe to see the flash of the powder before the surge of smoke. There was a bang so loud it seemed as if someone had slapped their palms hard against the highwayman’s ears. He took a deep breath, and found that his lungs were still whole. The Duke had missed.

Blythe raised his own pistol and slowly lowered it, until he stared down the barrel at the figure of the Duke, bright as a damselfly. With a single shot he could take the Duke’s madness out of the world. But on either side, hundreds watched, and he felt the bating of their breath like the silence before thunder. Their eyes and hearts were full of Captain Blythe, the hero for whom villagers had risked the scaffold and the stocks, for whom the radicals would fight to the last man, for whom skippers of little boats would hazard fire and musket ball. If he took mean advantage of a now unarmed man, the Duke of Mandelion would die, but so would the Hero.

Blythe raised his gun to aim far above the Duke’s head, and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet through the string of the pursuing coffeehouse’s master kite. As he lowered his smoking gun, Blythe heard a roar of applause erupt from the banks. There were cheers nearby from the lighters and dugouts, the dinghies and sculls.

He was turning away from his opponent when the applause changed to a gasp. Blythe saw shock on the faces of the Bower’s crew, and turned to see the Duke pulling from his coat a second pistol, identical to his first, and leveling it with one smooth gesture. The beating of Blythe’s heart suddenly seemed too loud for one chest, as if he were hearing the heart of every watcher pounding for his peril. There was no time to throw himself flat. There was time only to think, So this is how it feels to be a hero . . .

Then the frozen second ended, and from the skies swooped the severed master kite, its canvas juddering with a sound like a mighty wing beat. It struck the Duke on the back of the head with a chopping-block thud and tumbled him overboard. After the splash, nothing rose to the surface but a seethe of bubbles and the Duke’s three-cornered hat.