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forward silently. When he reached the corridor by the front door he put down his boots, then groped his way along the hallway. He slowly mounted the stairs, setting his feet close to the wall so that not a squeak would betray his presence. At the top there were four doors leading off to the left and right of the landing, but he spied the telltale thread of candlelight beneath only one of them. He inched open the door. This was the most perilous moment. He must creep up on the apprentice and silence him before the boy had time to cry out.
    The apprentice was seated before the dying embers of the fire. A burned-down candle stub flickered on a table beside him. His head had lolled forward limply; there could be no mistaking, he had fallen asleep on the watch. He could not have made the task any easier if he had tried.
    Harry Drake did not dither for an instant. With the stealth of a pirate, in three strides he had gathered a turn of his rope about each fist and positioned himself directly behind the unsuspecting apprentice. He seized the crown of the boy’s head and yanked it back so that his neck would be elongated for one swift twist of the rope.
    He expected a quick gurgle and a struggle, not the sight that confronted him. But the apprentice’s lips sagged open and his tongue protruded from the dark hole of his mouth, swollen and dark. His eyes were wide open and bulbous, as though something had surprised him. Something had surprised him. He was not sleeping. He was dead already, throat cut from ear to ear so deep that his windpipe was severed and his head hung on by no more than a few sinews.
    Harry Drake released his grip on the apprentice’s head, but the sudden movement caused a new torrent of blood to spurt over the floor, as dark and thick as gravy. He was reminded of the pudding he had eaten earlier that night, and his intestines writhed at the thought of it.
    He moved away from the corpse, stepping over the pool of blood that was oozing wider as he watched. He picked up the candle stub from the table and held it aloft, anxiously surveying the silverware displayed about the room. His eyes flickered over all manner of chandeliers, dishes, tureens, and ewers and halted on a hefty sideboard by the door. There sat a massive oval vessel, over three feet long and two feet wide, as big as the copper basin his mother had used for boiling her washing. Only this was not a washing copper.
    It was made of silver, adorned with mermaids, dolphins, tritons, and a pair of stampeding horses dragging a naked Neptune from the foamy waves. It was Sir Bartholomew’s wine cooler—the most valuable item ever made in the Blanchard workshop; the largest piece of silver seen in the city of London for many a month; the prize that Harry Drake had come to steal.
    He unbuttoned his coat and took out a length of sackcloth, which he laid over the wine cooler then tucked under each scalloped leg in turn, sighing pleasurably at the weight. It was as heavy, he reckoned, as Nelly the whore, who had clung about his waist earlier that night. Putting his hands under the cloth, he grasped the receptacle around Neptune’s torso and a mermaid’s breast, and careless of whether or not the staircase creaked, hurried downstairs. He recovered his boots and unbolted the door. Then, as brazenly as if he were Sir Bartholomew Grey himself, he went out into the stormy street.

Chapter Five
    R OSE F RANCIS EMERGED surreptitiously from the kitchen door into the darkness of Foster Lane. The gale still blew, but for several minutes her mind was so taken up with thoughts of the step she had just taken and the rendezvous ahead that she paid little attention to the wind or her surroundings. But in the time she reached Cheapside her cloak billowed about, the lanterns on the shop frontages were all extinguished, signboards swayed eerily in the wind, and clouds gusting across the moon made the street grow disconcertingly dark. She heard the sound of