“Bonne chance, mes braves,” Fergus wished the boys gravely, and Roger stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him, watching them stride firmly away, each with one arm wrapped protectively around his heavy bag to keep it from swinging. Jem, for all that he was taller than his cousin, was still a boy—but Germain seemed to have made one of those mysterious leaps by which children somehow alter themselves within the space of a night and rise up as a different version of themselves. The Germain of this morning was not grown up, but you could see the nascent young man beginning to emerge through his soft, fair skin.

Fergus sighed deeply, eyes fixed on his son as Germain disappeared around the corner.

“Good to have him back?” Roger asked.

“More than you can imagine,” Fergus said quietly. “Thank you for bringing him to us.”

Roger smiled, shrugging a little. Fergus smiled back, but then his gaze seemed to lengthen, looking over Roger’s shoulder. Roger turned to look, but the road was empty.

“When must you meet your inquisitors, mon frère?” he asked.

The word gave Roger a small qualm, but he didn’t think Fergus had used it in anything more than its most literal sense.

“Three o’clock,” he answered. “Is there something you’d like me to do in the meantime?”

Fergus looked him over carefully, but nodded, evidently finding his appearance in shirtsleeves, shabby waistcoat, and slightly worn breeches acceptable for whatever activity he had in mind.

“Come,” Fergus said, with a jerk of his head toward the distant water. “I may possibly have found milord’s guns. Bring a small amount of gold.”

He and Fergus had—with great care and a little help from Jem and Germain—decanted the sauerkraut into a variety of jars, bowls, and crocks in order to retrieve the gold—“Well, we dinna want to waste it, do we?” Marsali had said, reasonably—and hidden the gold in various places in the house. He stepped into the kitchen and abstracted a slip of gold from under a large and rather smelly cheese on top of the cupboard, hesitated for a moment, then took two more, just in case.

A BIG DANISH Indiaman was engulfing its cargo at the foot of Tradd Street as they passed. Boxes of salt fish, huge hogsheads of tobacco, bales of raw cotton, and the odd trunk, wheelbarrow, or coop of feather-scattering chickens in between, all lurched up the narrow gangway on the backs of sweating, half-naked men, to disappear into the black mouth of an open hatchway with the sporadic, gulping greed of a boa constrictor swallowing rats.