The System of the World

Lieutenant’s Lodging, the Tower of London
LATE AFTERNOON

BY THE TIME HE GOT up to the late lieutenant’s bedchamber, no fewer than four grappling-irons were already lodged in the sills of its open windows. As he approached, a fifth erupted through a sash, and flying glass nearly accounted for his remaining eye. He spun away, backed to the window, thrust his hand out into the breeze, and skated it back and forth until he heard an answering cheer from below.

Sixteen months ago, MacIan had been arrested for a violation of the Stabbing Act. The stabbee had been an Englishman: a Whig who had mocked him in a coffee-house, pretending that he could not understand a word the Scotsman was saying. The Prosecutor had been the Whig’s widow: a more formidable opponent. By dint of various connivings and intrigues, she managed to trump up a few moments’ impulsive dirk-work into an act of High Treason. Exploiting the fact that her late husband had been a Member of Parliament, she had convinced a magistrate that the imbroglio had, in truth, been an act of international espionage carried out by a Scottish Jacobite Tory against an important member of Her Majesty’s Government. So MacIan had been committed to the Tower instead of Newgate Prison. He had not set foot beyond the Inner Wall since then. Now, though, he staged half of an escape by thrusting his head and shoulders out the window.

It was a different world out here. The only thing he had an eye for at first was doings on the river: not the easiest page for a one-eyed man to read, given the number and variety of ships strewn over the Pool. As a boy he had thought ships wonders. As a veteran he saw them differently, each vessel a coagulated Motive, a frozen Deed.

His eye soon picked out the triangular sails of a sloop, and a blue French naval banner, and, below them on the deck, an assembly of blue-coated soldiers. In case this were not a clear enough message, the sloop now fired a spotty barrage from its collection of swivel-guns. That, MacIan knew, served two ends: it let the Wharf Guard know that these invaders were not a mirage. But it was also a cue to the other actors in the play, letting them know that MacIan had hit his mark, and appeared in a certain window.

Within the Moat and on the Wharf, at this moment, should be seventy-two private soldiers, four corporals, four sergeants, two drums and a single lieutenant, that being a single Company, and the minimum complement deemed necessary to guard the place.

Of that number, a quarter of them-one platoon-would normally be concentrated along the Wharf, which was by far the most vulnerable face of the complex in that anyone in the world could come up to it on a boat. The other three platoons would be scattered round the complex at a plethora of sentry-posts and guard-houses: at the gates, causeways, and drawbridges, of course, but also before the doors of the Yeoman Warders’ houses, in front of the Jewell Tower, and at diverse other check-points.

There were also about two score Yeoman Warders. These were, in a somewhat technical sense, soldiers-The Yeomen of the Guard of Our Lady the Queen, “the Queen’s Spears,” the vestiges of a sort of Praetorian Guard that Henry VII had organized after Bosworth Field. But MacIan was rather less concerned with them, for they were scattered amongst their cottages looking after prisoners, they were not well armed, and they were not really run after the fashion of a military unit.

Normally Charles White and a few of the Queen’s Messengers-who actually were rather dangerous lads-would be hanging around the place. But they were off on a river cruise today.

At least in theory there was a Militia of the Tower Hamlets. But to muster these would take days, and to get their firelocks in working order would take longer. Most of them dwelt on the wrong side of the Moat anyway.

There was a Master Gunner, and under him four Gunners. By this time of day the Master Gunner could be counted on to be dead drunk. Only two of the Gunners would be on duty. And this meant sitting in a dungeon taking inventory of cannonballs-not manning the battlements ready to put fire to a loaded Piece. To actually load and fire the cannons and mortars on the Wharf and along the parapets of the walls required quite a few more bodies than that, and so it was a duty for the Guard. When the guns were fired on the Queen’s Birthday or for the arrival of an ambassador, much of the regiment was kept busy looking after them.

So the task at hand was to account for the some fifty-four guards who were not presently on the Wharf, and put them out of action.

What Rufus MacIan wanted to hear, he heard now: the drummer on the Wharf hammering out a tattoo that meant Alarm, Alarm! He could hear it clearly through this window, indeed could’ve thrown a stone over the low outer wall and hit the drummer-boy on the head. But it booted nothing for him to hear it. The question was, could it be heard by the Guards sprinkled round the Mint and the Inner Ward over the alarms of the fire that was burning in the hamlets, north of the Moat?

There was no better vantage-point from which to answer such questions than the building he was in now: the Lieutenant’s Lodging. MacIan turned his back on the window and strode north, exiting the room and stepping across a corridor. This brought him, for a moment, in view of a staircase. Angusina, the big red-headed lass, was coming up with a fistful of skirt in one hand and a loaded pistol in the other. Her face was flushed beneath the freckles as if someone had been flirting with her. “The Centinells ir flichtered!” she proclaimed, “weengin away like a flocht o muir-cocks at the buller o’ the guns.”

“The guns, aye, but can they hear the tuck o the drum?” MacIan wondered, and ducked into a small room under the gables. A long stride brought him to a mullioned window that framed a view of the Parade. What he saw was to his satisfaction: “A see reid,” he announced. “ ’Tis a beginning.”

As MacIan knew from having watched their interminable drills through the window of his prison, when an alarm sounded, the company on guard was supposed to form up at their barracks and march as quickly as possible to the Parade. This was more or less what he was seeing now, albeit from a different window. One platoon was there, wanting a few men, and enough privates had strayed in from other platoons to assemble a couple of additional squads.

The fact that Rufus MacIan had just stabbed the Lieutenant of the Tower to death in his own dining-room had no effect at all, and would not have made a difference even if these men had been aware of it. They were carrying out standing orders, which was exactly what was wanted at this stage of the Plan. If the Lieutenant (Throwley) had been alive, or if the Colonel of the regiment (Barnes) or even its Master Sergeant (Shaftoe) had been present, any of them might have countermanded those standing orders, and dashed the whole enterprise. As matters stood, none of them was in a position to put his superior intelligence to use here. Besides them, only three other personages stood in the chain of command: the Constable of the Tower (the late Ewell Throwley’s superior) and the Deputy Lieutenant and the Major (Throwley’s subordinates). The Constable was presently taking the waters in the country, trying to rid his system of three dozen faulty oysters he’d tucked into yesterday afternoon. The other two had been drawn away for the afternoon on some pretext. And so the Tower guard, like a killed chicken dashing around the farm-yard, was aping the remembered commands of a head that had already been thrown to the dogs.

The ranking sergeant was in the middle of the Parade, screaming a bit of tender abuse at each solitary lobsterback who came running in. Squads were schooling like fish on the green. It put Rufus MacIan in mind of the War: of the glorious carnage of Blenheim, piercing the French lines at Brabant, crossing the morass on the right end of the line at Ramillies, breaking the French cavalry before Oudenaarde. A thousand tales of gallantry that had become mere stuff between veterans’ deaf ears. Part of him wanted to stride across that green Parade, rally those troops-for excellent troops they were-and lead them to the Wharf. But his status as condemned traitor and sworn enemy would be an impediment there. To settle his mind on the task at hand was easy enough-he need only turn around and look at that red-headed girl, and remember the day when he had picked her up from the cold blue breast of her dead mother and wrapped her in bloody bed-clothes and borne her up screaming into the crags above Glen Coe.

The ranking sergeant had turned his purple face to the south. For a moment MacIan was wary of being spied in the lieutenant’s window. But the sergeant was not looking his way; his gaze was directed, rather, towards Cold Harbour-no, towards Bloody Tower, the chief portal to Water Lane from where he stood. MacIan could not see what the sergeant was looking at, but he could discern from the man’s silence, and his posture, that he was soaking up commands. It must be the officer in command of this company. That would fit. The lieutenant, on hearing the guns on the river, and the alarm from the Wharf, would run to investigate. Seeing the improbable, the unthinkable, but not-to-be-denied sight of a party of French Marines bearing down on the Wharf and blazing away with swivel-guns, he would dash back across Water Lane and get in view of the Parade the quickest possible way, which was through the stalwart arch in the base of Bloody Tower, and order all available units to “follow me!”

The sergeant on the green answered the only way he knew how: methodically. With a deliberation that was as agonizing to Rufus MacIan as it must have been to the wild-eyed lieutenant on the threshold of Bloody Tower, he drew and raised his sword, bellowed a catechism of marching orders that caused the one company and the three squads to stiffen, shoulder arms, wheel to the south, and-finally, bringing the sword down-forward march. And once some momentum had been established he even went to the extreme of telling them to double-time it.

MacIan went back to the bedchamber on the south side and found that Angusina had already applied herself to the task of pulling in the grapnels and making rope-ends fast to the frame of the lieutenant’s massive bed. Her imposing pelvis was framed in a window like an egg in a snuff-box as she hand-over-handed some burden up on a rope. Rufus MacIan thrust his head out another window and looked off to the left down Water Lane just in time to see the head of the column of redcoats sally from the base of Bloody Tower. A jog to the left then took them across the lane and into the base of St. Thomas’s tower, which they could use as a bridge to the Wharf.

He was distracted by a clanging noise nearby, and glanced down to see a Claymore bashing against the stone wall as Angusina hauled it up on a rope. The blade was almost naked, clad only in a sort of thong used for hanging it on the back. Scabbards for Claymores did not exist; such weapons were to be used, not worn. This particular blade had suffered worse, and MacIan was not troubled by its sparking collisions with the wall.

The lot below numbered a round dozen. They were ordinary London tavern rabble by their looks. Or to be precise, ordinary post-war London tavern rabble. For the Mobility had suddenly become a lot younger and rougher in the last twelvemonth, when much of Her Majesty’s army had been disbanded. Some of the veterans had gone off to be pirates or soldiers of fortune. But these happy few had been making themselves common, unremarkable features of a couple of drinking establishments spackled to the plinth of Bell Tower and the adjoining stretch of wall-directly beneath the very windows that Angusina and Rufus were presently looking out of.

“A praisent for thee, uncle, an weel to be seen!” called Angusina, and heaved the Claymore up into the room. After it several rods of iron clattered in series over the windowsill. For the great sword had been affixed to the top of a collapsible ladder, made of forged rungs separating a pair of knotted ropes. Angusina held the weapon out so that Rufus MacIan, wielding his bloody dirk, could slash the twine that bound it to the uppermost rung. This accomplished, he tossed the Claymore onto the bed-there was not room in this low-ceilinged chamber even for a practice swing-and helped the wench fix the head of the ladder to a Tudor armoire the size of a naval shot locker. Then it was back to the windows, as now came perhaps the chanciest bit of the entire Plan.

These windows were desperately exposed to view, and to more dangerous attentions, from the Wharf. What they had done until now-rope and ladder work-was visible but not, all things considered, conspicuous. Soldiers on the Wharf, distracted by the apparition on the Thames, could see it if they turned around and looked-but it was just as likely they’d not. What was going to happen next, on the other hand, could not be missed by anyone.

He hauled up a faggot of muskets on the end of a rope, slashed them apart, and began to charge one with powder and balls that Angusina had pulled up in an earlier load. A bit of covering fire couldn’t hurt. But what was really wanted here was cavalry.

“They’re so doughty,” cooed Angusina. “Yon blae-coatit Jocks oot on the River. And whaur were such stout-hertit Marines enlisted, uncle?”

“A bankrupt theatre,” he answered. “Yon French Marines ir no French, nor Marines, nor doughty, nor stout-hertit, nor aye soldiers. They ir actors, lass, an they hae been told they ir playin in a wee masque for the amusement o the Dutch Ambassador.”

“Never!”

“Aye.”

“Losh! They ir in for a stamagast then!” Angusina exclaimed.

“Fire!” came a distant scream from the Wharf. The cry was instantly buried under a barrage of mighty, hissing thuds as perhaps two score soldiers discharged their muskets. Then silence, except for a howl of dismay from the company of actors aboard the sloop.

“And that’s it for thaim,” said Rufus MacIan. “They’ll fleg off now. Tach! Whaur is ma bludie cavalry?” He had the musket loaded by now and he approached the window, wanting in the worst way to look to the right, towards Byward Tower and the causeway over the Moat. But prudence demanded that he scan the Wharf first. The soldiers were still in line with their red backs to him, the sergeant in profile watching them reload. But the drummer-blast, the dummer was looking right at him! His grip tightened on the stock of the musket. But blasting the drummer into the river, though it would have been easy at this range, was not a good way to be inconspicuous.

At least no one was pointing a gun at him. He turned his head to the right. Only a yard or two below the adjacent window, one of the Water Lane tavern crowd was scaling the ladder with a blunderbuss on his back. Several rungs below, another followed. Just beyond them was the sheer face of Bell Tower, which unfortunately blocked much of his view to the west. Bell was a bastion, meaning it bulged out through the planes of the walls to either side of it. This was done for a practical military purpose, viz. so that defenders, safe inside, could shoot out through its embrasures at attackers trying to scale the walls. MacIan noticed movement inside a small window cut into the near face of Bell Tower. It was really no more than twenty feet away. But a long twenty feet, in that Bell Tower was a completely different building, not reachable from here by any internal passageways that Rufus MacIan knew of. The window in question admitted a stripe of light to a prison cell, one reserved for important blokes. He could not recall who was in there just now. But where there was an important prisoner, there would be a Yeoman Warder. And how could a Yeoman not look out the window when he heard pitched combat on Tower Wharf? The Yeoman’s hand was moving up and down rapidly, and that was what really caught the old soldier’s eye of Rufus MacIan. Other eyes, reconciled to other professions and circumstances, might have read it as butter-churning, masturbation, or shaking a pair of dice. But to him it could be only one thing: use of a ramrod to shove a ball down the barrel of a weapon.

The musket could not be wielded fast enough through the small window. “Ye there,” he said to the lower ladder-climber, “throw me your pistol and hold fast.”

It was an exceptional sort of request. But MacIan had learned how to utter such requests in a way, and with a look, that ensured they would be heard and heeded. Shortly the pistol flew at him butt-first. MacIan caught it just as the Yeoman was swinging the window open, and cocked it as the Yeoman was thrusting his own pistol out, and pulled the trigger an instant before the Yeoman did. This had not left time for taking aim, and so the ball spalled a chunk out of the window-frame and went zooming away with a weird noise, like a drunken wasp. But it had the desirable effect of spoiling the Yeoman’s aim. His shot grazed the wall short of the ladder. The man who’d thrown the pistol took advantage of the reloading-interval to scamper up the last half-dozen rungs and dive through the window; and as soon as he was out of the way, a white line flicked up from Water Lane and vanished into the sniper’s window. “God damn it!” shouted the Yeoman.

Rufus MacIan looked down to discover an archer standing in the lane in front of the tavern, calmly fitting a second shaft to his bow-string. This man looked up at MacIan as if expecting a commendation; but what he got was, “Can ye see down the fookin’ causeway? If ma bludie cavalry dinna come soon-” cut off by a crash and crack as a musket-ball from the Wharf smashed into the wall near MacIan’s head. MacIan dropped to the floor of the bedchamber and buried his face in his sleeve for a few moments, as it felt to have been shredded on one side by numerous skirps of rock.

But he got an answer to his question. For in the sudden quiet he could hear many iron horseshoes, and a few iron wheel-rims, assaulting the paving-stones of the causeway. They could be any group of riders, followed by a wagon. But the piper down the lane, who’d been silent these last few minutes, now let pent-up breath sing in his drone, and began to play a battle-song of the MacDonalds: a tune Rufus MacIan hadn’t heard since the eve of the Massacre of Glen Coe, when the soldiers had danced to it. The tune came in not through his ears but his skin, which erupted in goose-pimples all over; ’twas as if his blood were oil, and fire had been laid to it, and serrated flames were racing from his heart to his extremities, and probing through the uncanny mazes and dark recesses of his brain. And this was how he knew that they were not just any riders but his kinsmen, his blude-friends, riding at last to slake the wrake-lust that had burned in them for twenty-two years.

There was answering musket-fire now from Angusina and the few men who’d scaled the ladder. When his ears cleared he heard shod hooves biting into wood-MacIan’s cavalry, drawn to the sound of the pipes, had reached the wooden drawbridge that spanned the last few yards of moat before the Byward Tower gate. They were moving at a canter-meaning that they’d seen no reason to rein in their mounts-meaning that the tavern-contingent had accomplished its paramount charge of making sure that the portcullis was not dropped.

There was an epidemic of hammering noises, and the room became very dusty. A barrage had been fired from the Wharf into the windows. Taking advantage of the reload-interval, he raised his head above the windowsill. Two more men were clambering up the ladder as sprightly as they could go. A platoon of lobsterbacks, now with their backs to the river, were lined up on the Wharf reloading; one had been shot and was curled up on his side. The other soldiers who’d been on the Wharf were no longer in sight. Indeed, since the menacing sloop had suspended its attack, there was no reason for them to remain out there. The lieutenant must have perceived this and ordered them to march back through St. Thomas’s Tower. They would be flooding into the Lane at any moment-

Horseshoes below. He looked plumb down to see a line of a dozen riders in kilts trotting into the Lane from the gate; and sweetest of all, heard the Byward Tower portcullis hurtling down behind them, sealing the Tower off from London. “Fuck-all ahint ye,” he informed them, “Englishmen afore, comin athort the Lane-get the bastarts!” And without bothering to wait and watch his orders being put into effect, he whirled to the bed, grabbed up the Claymore in its rude back-holster, and bore it in front of him out of the room and down the stairs.

AS A LAD HE HAD plotted his wrake, his revenge, in day-dreams a thousand times. He had always seen it as a straightforward matter of wading through the intestines of Campbells and Englishmen swinging his Claymore. Fortunately, a dozen years of professional war-making had intervened between those laddish phant’sies and the opportunity of this day, and taught him that he must go about it systematically.

So he did not fly out onto the Parade and go looking for Englishmen to slay, but bided his time by the door for a moment and made a study of the place as he hung the great sword on his back.

The Parade was empty except for a single redcoat running from the barracks toward the Bloody Tower gate.

No, never mind, someone had just shot him, probably from Cold Harbour. The Plan called for ten men, give or take a few, to have slipped into the Inner Ward and taken up positions from which they could shoot over the Parade or throttle this or that choke-point. Which appeared to have been done. The Yeoman Warders looking out the windows of their houses would have seen the redcoat fall, and would understand that to step from their front doors was death. But this did not mean that the Parade was available to Rufus MacIan. For a Yeoman, or a stray soldier of the Guard, could just as easily shoot through a window or over a parapet. It had to be considered a no-man’s-land for the time being.

“I need to ken if the Bloody Tower portcullis is dropped,” he remarked, just thinking aloud. But hearing a man clear his throat behind him, he turned around to discover half a dozen lads, flushed in the face and breathing hard from the scramble up the ladder and the dash down the staircase, but all in the pink of health and ready to go with loaded muskets.

“Beg pardon, my lord, but we worked out a signal for that.”

“And ye ir-?”

“Gunnery Sergeant, retired, Dick Milton, my lord.”

“Ti the windie then, Milton, an look for thy signal.”

“There it is,” Milton replied after a glance across the Parade. “See there, the Chapel has a clear view of Bloody Tower, as we’ve a clear view of it. We’ve a lass in there. Came in last night for a funeral, stayed all night to pray, and stayed all day to keep an eye on Bloody Tower for us. Do you mark the yellow cloth in the middle window there? She put it up to let us know that the portcullis is dropped.”

“Then the Black-guard maun hae sprung the Russian,” said Rufus MacIan, “an the Russian maun hae duin his job. Crivvens! It’s a clinker.”

“A clinker, my lord?”

“A wadna hae believed it, tha a one-airmed man could fell so many. But he hae surpreese on his left flank, an mad panic on his right, an either o the twae, by itself, is more mauchty than Hercules. Ir ye all guidwillie, now, to practice your auld profession?”

“Aye!” and “Yes, my lord,” came the answers.

“Then count to five, and follow.” MacIan flung the front door open and stepped out onto the Parade, as casually as if he were the Lieutenant of the Tower on his way to church.

“One,” chanted the men crouched in the building he’d just left behind.

Smoke jerked from the window of a Yeoman’s house.

“Two.”

A musket-ball buzzed in like a massive bumblebee, ruffled the whiskers of MacIan’s beard, and destroyed the window he had lately been peering out of.

“Three!” chanted the gunners, except for one who was screaming.

Musket-smoke spurted from half a dozen odd places around the Inner Ward: from dovecotes and barrel-stacks in Cold Harbour, doors of barracks, and corners and crannies of ancient walls.

“Four!” Another musket-ball, much too high, dug a crater from the front of the Lieutenant’s Lodging. “Paltry,” was the verdict of Rufus MacIan. “A dowless effort.” But his comments were drowned out by the echoes of the recent fire rolling around the Parade, as several other shots had just been fired to suppress the efforts of those Yeomen who were taking pot-shots at him.

“Five!”

Three men piled out the door, dropped to a kneeling position on the gravel track that ran along the front of the house, and raised muskets to their shoulders, taking aim at windows where they thought Yeomen were holed up. Their fire heaved up a cloud of smoke that covered the emergence of a second three.

Rufus MacIan was running east down the gravel track, along the fronts of the houses that looked out over the Parade. Halfway to Bloody Tower, he stopped, and cold-bloodedly turned his back to the Parade so that he could scan the windows of a house for snipers. All he could make out was the head of a maidservant peering out an upper window. No worries there; but he readied his firearm just in case a musketeer should present himself elsewhere. The second group of three men ran to a spot a couple of yards behind him, threw themselves down, and got ready to fire across the Parade. In the meantime Angusina and a few of the Water Lane tavern crew had fired a covering fusillade from the upper storeys of the Lieutenant’s Lodging. The first group of three left their empty and smoking muskets on the ground, and sprinted down the track towards Bloody Tower, passing between MacIan and the other three just as the latter discharged their muskets in no particular direction.

A red garment flashed in the window of one of the houses off to MacIan’s left. He wrenched the barrel of his musket that way, but the soldier saw him and dove to the floor before MacIan could pull the trigger.

The second group of three, likewise leaving their muskets on the ground, got up now and ran after their fellows towards Bloody Tower. MacIan took up the rear, following after them. But he moved only at a stroll. Partly this was because he expected a few more gunners to emerge from the Lieutenant’s Lodging. And he was not disappointed, for two and then another two came out helter-skelter and ran towards him, taking their chances against sporadic musketry from the windows of a few die-hard Yeomen. But partly it was to keep an eye on this house where one or more lobsterbacks were prowling.

Of the motley line of half-timbered houses that stretched along the southern verge of the Parade, the Lieutenant’s Lodging lay farthest to the west. The one Rufus MacIan was concerned with was at the opposite, easternmost end, therefore closest to Bloody Tower. It was thrust out into the green in a manner that, to the military eye, recalled a bastion. Between its eastern face and Bloody Tower was an open ground perhaps fifteen yards across-a narrow enough interval to allow for targeted musket-fire. In other words, Guards barricaded in that house could spoil their plans vis-a-vis Bloody Tower.

Another flash of red-a soldier had passed by a window in a hurry, seemingly on a downward trajectory. As if descending a staircase.

The door-handle was moving! MacIan watched in fascination from no more than ten feet away. The front door moved outwards half an inch. Oblivious, the last two of MacIan’s gunners ran by, headed for sanctuary in Bloody Tower. The soldier inside could see them, but he could not see MacIan. What would happen next was suddenly as clear to MacIan as if he’d witnessed it. He set his musket down and strode at the door of the house, reaching back behind his head with both hands and groping for the Claymore. He found it, and pulled it up out of the back-holster just as the door was swinging open. A musket emerged first, held in white hands.

MacIan drew the handle down through the air as fast as he could get his arms to move. But this was nothing compared to the swiftness achieved by the tip of the four-foot blade, which moved so rapidly that it spoke out with a wicked noise like the uncoiling of a bullwhip. Something messy happened and the musket fell to the ground outside the door. MacIan’s blade had passed through the man’s forearm and struck the edge of the door at an angle, skiving off an acute angle of wood and stopping when it struck a nail. The soldier had vanished inside without MacIan’s ever seeing his face. Suddenly the grip of the Claymore was jerked nearly out of his hands as the door was pulled shut. The tip of the blade struck the door-frame and was knocked free so briskly that the weapon, shuddering from end to end, sprang back into the air. MacIan caught it by the cross-guards. He heard door-bolts being thrown inside-from which he guessed that there was another soldier within.

MacIan flattened himself against the wall of the house and spent a few moments getting the Claymore hung on his back, and judging the number of steps to the musket he had left on the ground. Yeomen were taking pot-shots at him from the opposite corner of the Parade. But at such a distance a musket-ball would merely accept suggestions-not obey orders. The balls were smashing out windows above him and probably creating as much of a problem for the soldiers inside as they were for their intended target.

MacIan ran, snatched his musket off the ground, wheeled, and charged round the corner of the house to the open space between it and Bloody Tower. If they had been hoping to shoot down at him, they’d now have to present themselves at different windows, and perhaps move to different rooms.

The tactic worked, as cheap simple tactics commonly did: through a ground-floor window he could see a door flying open, and a man in a red coat running through it and wheeling toward the light-then freezing up in horror as he realized he had just blundered into the enemy’s sights. This gave MacIan the moment that he required to center the musket on the red breast of his foe. But as he did so he noticed a sash being flung open on the upper storey, and another flash of red appearing there.

And now a very rapid calculation: the ground-floor soldier was his. All that was required was a small movement of the trigger finger. As for the one above, if this Jock had a weapon in condition for use, then Rufus MacIan was about to be shot, no matter what he did; and if he tried to raise his musket-barrel and draw a bead on the new lad, he would probably miss. So he pulled the trigger.

What happened after that was anyone’s guess, since all he could see was powder-smoke. But a moment later an answering blast came from the window above, and he felt the ground jolt beneath his feet. This, he reckoned, must be the impact of a musket-ball on his body, being transmitted down his legs into terra firma; and if he stood still for a few more moments he would feel the first hot shards of pain traveling away from the entry-wound, would feel an unaccountable need to clear his throat as his lungs filled up with blood.

But none of these things happened. The smoke was drifting away. MacIan looked up at the window, out of a sort of professional curiosity, wanting to lay eyes on the soldier so incompetent that he could miss that shot, wanting to relish the humiliation in the Englishman’s eyes when he kenned he’d fired into the ground.

But when the smoke finally cleared, he saw no such thing, but rather an unbeast, a nightmare vision, like one of the horrors from Malplaquet that cluttered his brain, like so many stuffed monsters in an old hunter’s attic, and came alive each night to torment him just as he was about to drop off to sleep. This unbeast moved, and slid limp from the window, landing on its head in the grass before him. It did not come to a decent position of repose. Rather the corpse was propped up on something: a half-pike or javelin that had transfixed its ribcage, like an enormous alien bone that had grafted itself onto the man’s skeleton.

MacIan looked up into the vacant window but saw no one there-so it must have come in to the window from outside. But he was the only man in the yard, and he had no memory of chucking any spears lately. It had to have come from above, then. He turned around to face Bloody Tower and ran his gaze up forty feet of sheer stone to its parapet.

There, framed in a slot between two crenels, and silhouetted against the sky, was a very large man with a beard flowing down his front. Smaller men were active around him, hustling among the gun-carriages that were situated on the roof of this Tower, wheeling them about to aim toward the River, chocking them up with thick quoins so that they were aimed, not at the shipping in the Pool, but down upon the soldiers on the Wharf.

The big man with the beard was gripping in one hand another half-pike. He raised the other to make a gesture. It was not a hand but a barbed hook with a skein of moist detritus swinging from it, possibly hair or shreds of clothing. With this he pointed up, away from the river, drawing MacIan’s eye away from the toils of the gunners and towards the penetralia of the Tower of London. Over the roofs of the Cold Harbour storehouses he pointed, and over the soldiers’ barracks and the gate of the Inmost Ward, to the lofty prize that stood in the center of all, commanding the complex, the River, and the City from its four turrets: the White Tower. He thrust his hook at it thrice.

The Hero of the Gy needed no more urging. Dropping his empty musket, he unslung his Claymore for what he guessed would be the last time, and hurried between droning musket-balls towards Cold Harbour Gate.

LIKE ANY SELF-RESPECTING CONDEMNED traitor, MacIan had spent plenty of time plotting dramatic escapes from the Tower of London. He knew where the exits were. Today, though, he must think of them as entrances.

There were five gates to the Inner Ward. One of them was an old sally-port in the northeast corner, near Brick Tower, leading into the Mint. It was of no concern today. The remaining four gates were spaced unevenly along Water Lane. Bloody Tower and Wakefield Tower each contained a gate. These two structures were so close together as to constitute virtually a single, misshapen building. A stroller moving east on Water Lane would spy the Bloody Tower gate first and then, after rounding the bastion of Wakefield, see its gate. But though close together, these two portals were as divergent as they could be. The first was a broad, massive, handsome Gothick arch that led directly onto the Parade via the court where Rufus MacIan was now standing. Thanks to the Russian, the light shining through that arch was reticulated by a massive grid of iron bars. Beyond it MacIan could see several redcoats lying still in the middle of Water Lane. They’d marched back from the Wharf expecting to re-enter the Inner Ward through that arch, but had been stopped by the ancient portcullis. And at that moment a dozen Scots horsemen had charged down on them swinging sabers. When horse attacked foot the outcome was never in doubt, unless the foot had pikes, and were well drilled. The Wharf Guard of the Tower of London did not carry or use pikes.

The second gate was a little postern giving entry to the circular ground floor of Wakefield Tower. Thence one could cross into a long L-shaped gallery that ran up through Cold Harbour and broke into the open just short of the White Tower. This was not a fit way for cavalry to come in. If things were proceeding according to plan, Tom the Black-guard was ensconced beneath a window near the vertex of the L, commanding both legs of the passage, with a large number of loaded firearms in his lap. Few if any of the Tower’s would-be defenders would pass in or out through the Wakefield Tower gate. But some of its attackers should have come running in that way on the heels of the cavalry charge.

MacIan ran north along the verge of the Parade, passing by the Cold Harbour storehouses on his right. There was still a damnable lot of musket-fire coming from Yeomen’s windows, but none of it was directed his way any longer. When he reached the corner of the last storehouse and ducked around it, he at last had a safe vantage-point from which to appreciate why. The appearance of a few gunners atop Bloody Tower and the adjoining stretch of wall, aiming Her Majesty’s cannons down across Water Lane toward the Wharf, had compelled the Wharf Guard to pitch their muskets into the river and stand helpless. They were no longer able to shoot at men climbing the rope ladder into the Lieutenant’s Lodging. And so a continual parade of invaders was now emerging from the front door of that house and sprinting down to Bloody Tower where they could take stairs up to the battlements and man yet more cannons. As they did, they drew what little fire the Yeomen could muster. But even this was being suppressed by occasional fusillades from firing-points that the invaders had set up along the southern edge of the Parade.

He heard a gate groaning behind him and so turned his back to the Parade, which had become a sort of closed chapter anyway.

He had been engaged, these last few moments, on a project of looping north round the end of Cold Harbour to get from the Inner Ward (a parade for Guards and a village green for Yeomen) into the Inmost Ward (the court of a Royal Palace). He was facing now into an interval some ten or fifteen paces wide separating the Cold Harbour buildings from the corner of the White Tower. That opening was walled off; but there was a gate in the wall, which was being very considerately opened for him by a man in a kilt.

“At last, someone I can talk to,” MacIan said. “Welcome to the Tower, lad.”

“And welcome to the Inmost Ward, uncle,” returned this young man, and stepped back to let him enter.

This was a mere bowling-green compared to the Parade. It seemed even smaller than it was because it was mashed between the immense White Tower on the north and, on the south, Wakefield Tower (a palace unto itself) and a congeries of bulky office buildings and storehouses belonging to the Ordnance. Somewhere in the midst of that would be another tiny postern-the third of Water Lane’s four portals-communicating with the Constable’s Lodgings, and of no interest today. Far more important was the last gate, a proper arch, large enough for Highlanders to ride through without dismounting. That gave access to a sort of barracks-street along the eastern perimeter of the Inmost Ward, and thence to another gate, a partner of the one MacIan had just walked through…where was it, though? His eye, no judge of distances, had trouble making sense of the place. But the piper had taken up a position at the head of the barracks-street to lead the cavalry onwards. The sound of the music crashing from the stony environs gave MacIan the information he wanted to decypher the place. He found the gate in question. It was open. Men were beginning to ride through it. Some were slumped over in their saddles, clutching at battle-wounds earned in Water Lane, or perhaps earlier, when they had galloped out of the streets of London town to astonish the sentries posted at Lion Gate. But most were riding straight-backed and proud, and one-bless him-carrying the unfurled colors of MacIan of MacDonald.

“So that is the famous White Tower,” said the lad who had opened the gate for him, “Feich! It’s not even white!”

“The Englishmen have no self-pride. If you read their history you will see that they are nothing more than a lot of doxy and mistemious bog-stalkers. Think: what would a few gallons of white paint cost the Queen of England?”

“For the love of God, I’d come down and paint it myself just so I wouldn’t have to look at it. Everywhere you go in this cursed city, there it stands, a blot on the horizon.”

“I’ve a more expeditious solution,” MacIan answered. “I know of one place, not far from here, where you can look in any direction you please without having to suffer the sight of this rubble-heap.”

“Where’s that, uncle?”

“The inside of it!” And MacIan beckoned to the banner-carrier.

“What-how do you get in?” inquired the lad.

“Through the bloody front door. They built it high off the ground, you see, there-to make it easy to defend-but the English, lazy as they are, have built a lovely timber staircase so they need not strain themselves.”

“I cannot see it.”

“The barracks are in the way. Follow me!” MacIan entered the front door of a sort of gatehouse pent between two barracks.

“I’ll go before you, uncle!” cried the lad; and behind him, like exclamations could be heard from other warriors who were hastily dismounting in the Inmost Ward and running to catch up with them, encumbered by diverse cutlasses, Claymores, blunderbusses, and granadoes.

But Rufus MacIan strode out the back of the gatehouse and began climbing a rude wooden staircase towards a simple round-headed archway cut into the White Tower’s south wall. “You do not understand,” he called over his shoulder. “You are looking forward, now, to a pitched battle for the White Tower. As if this were a picaroon-romance. But the battle is over. You have fought it and won it.”

A Yeoman Warder suddenly stood framed in the arch. He drew an old rapier from a scabbard at his hip, held it up above his head, and began to charge down the timber stairs, screaming. Rufus MacIan did not bother reaching for his Claymore. The Yeoman was butchered on the hoof by musket-balls flying in from half a dozen different angles. He sprayed and faltered at each impact, disintegrating before their eyes, and then collapsed and rolled down the stairs leaving much of himself behind.

“He’s been reading picaroon-romances, too,” observed Rufus MacIan. “Watch your step, lads, it’s a wee bit slippery.”

He took the last steps two at a time and strode across the threshold of the White Tower, saying, “I claim thee for Glen Coe.”