“Right… um… well… Tom and I were talking, and… and I said wouldn’t it be amazing if… if you could mount a cannon on a carriage? And fire it.”

“Ridiculous,” Lord Ashcombe said. “The recoil would flip it like a leaf.”

“Well, yes. Tom said that. But then it occurred to me: What if you had two cannons? One on either side. So you could fire both at the same time. And make the carriage of steel, instead of wood, so it wouldn’t crumple. Then you could ride your carriage into the enemy and shoot it off. Like a warship, but on land. A mobile artillery platform.”

Lord Ashcombe looked off into the distance. “A mobile artillery platform…,” he mused. Then he blinked. “Why am I considering this?”

His grip tightened. For someone who only had three fingers on his right hand, he sure was strong. I almost told him he was strangling me, but then I supposed that was the point.

I continued. “Anyway—ergh—we didn’t have cannons, obviously, but… well, you know those fireworks I made last night? To celebrate the fact we’d finally be back in London today? I remembered I had one left in my apothecary sash.”

Actually, I had three left. But I didn’t think it wise to mention that.

“So… er… I told Tom it wouldn’t need to be a cannon. We could shoot rockets at our enemies. Call it Blackthorn’s Fire-Spitter! And… well, never mind. Anyway, I said I’d show him.”

Tom tried to shrink into the mud. Seeing as how he was about three times my size, he wasn’t particularly successful.

I did try to get him out of trouble. “Now, Tom said this was a bad idea, he did. But I thought, how can research be a bad idea? You always learn something, even when you fail. That’s what Master Benedict said.”

That was sort of true. I mean, my late master had said that—though it hadn’t stopped me getting punished from time to time. “Anyway, I tied the firework to a stick and lit it. It was supposed to shoot into the meadow. But… well… the road was so bumpy. I… might have lost control of it. Just for a second.”

Sometimes it’s the second that counts. Lord Ashcombe glared at Tom. “You couldn’t have stopped him?”

“I tried,” Tom wailed. “I did. But you know what he’s like.”

The King’s Warden regarded me. “Yes,” he said finally. “I suppose I do.”

He let me go. I really enjoyed breathing again. I even thought I might get out of this unscathed.

Then Lord Ashcombe smoothed out my collar where he’d crumpled it. That wasn’t a good sign.

“Get on the horses,” he said.

The King’s Men had saddled the carriage horses they’d freed from the now-charred reins of our transport. The driver had taken one of them. Tom and Sally, with a final look of deep disappointment, climbed onto the horses beside him, one of the King’s Men giving Sally a leg up.