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of the chain as it dragged around the cell.
    He lifted a finger to old Mrs Spurling. ‘Fetch us some wine and broth, Missus. Stump of candle.’
    Mrs Spurling gave him a disparaging glance and stopped pouring a half-quart of brandy for the Earl standing at the bar.
    ‘I’m sure he’ll be good for it,’ he answered her look and went back to his beer. ‘I’ve seen his kind before.’
     
    The further east Dandon trotted the newer and tighter the city became. Here and there were memories of older buildings, the medieval heart of the city with ancient stone and Roman gods weeping down at the thoroughfares. Most of her churches were still miraculously standing, although with blackened marks where The Fire had bitten into them, curiously like a shark, before moving on to far more palatable wooden delicacies.
    Here were no horses, the roads too narrow and dark for gentlemen after the broad thoroughfares and smooth, elegant stonework of St James’s. These passages had been cut through London’s veins for speed, for those unwilling to travel down to Holborn and civility to hail a cab.
    The city had been rebuilt but had learnt little, as wooden and clay houses still towered high above, overshadowing the passageways. Some of the alleyways even now held shanties with little more than sheets for walls and timber frames like army billets where naked fires burnt within and hollow-eyed children stared as you passed.
    Dandon, accustomed to the pastel freshness of the American colonial towns and the wide, sparse Caribbean hamlets, hurried through the city’s smothering closeness like a man drowning, clawing for air.
    And then at last he broke the surface as the wide expanse of Giltspur street, Newgate, Bailey, St Sepulchre, the taverns and shops, burst him back into civilisation.
    He leant against a wall, gasping for breath. He and Timms had run and walked for two miles without a care for Dandon’s thirst, and he wiped his face with his cuff. His lungs were bursting, his head aching.
    He pushed himself away from the wall, looking up at it, its grim façade declaring that it could be nothing but a gaol.
    ‘We are here, Mister Timms?’
    Timms took his arm impatiently. ‘This is the Giltspur compter. For gentlemen who have not caused grievous harm and owe very little, and for clergymen who disrobe where they should not. Hell is this way.’ He pulled at Dandon, who gathered his wits and staggered on.
    ‘Is there a hurry, Mister Timms? Do prisons close?’
    ‘The hurry, sir, is in the concern that your pirate may have given word and used His Highness’s name. The concern is that your captain is a notorious brigand that is overdue to hang, but, most of all, it is the concern that he may not be in there at all and but that you and I will be in there for breakfast tomorrow!’
    They had crossed the street. The gatehouse of the old prison still stood across Newgate street, the last of the gates into the old city. Dandon took in the face of the gaol that stretched down Old Bailey.
    Rebuilt after The Fire and Restoration it was now plain Tuscan in style. Four great arched windows rose either side of the ‘keep’, barred and glassless, and high enough for Dandon to presume their light covered the unfortunates’ wards.
    The keep made up the entrance of the prison, the glazed windows above it and the circular window in the roof’s pediment surely the chapel. Dandon looked around the street at the proliferation of blooms, now crushed and scattered, littering the road and pavement.
    ‘The flowers!’ His surprise halted Timms.
    ‘It is Monday. Executions this morning. The crowds like to toss flowers at the felons. It is good luck to give a nosegay to the condemned.’
    Dandon stooped to pluck up a bloom and explained himself to Timms’s raised eyebrow.
    ‘I may have need of luck.’
    Left and right of the keep were the lodges and the residences of the principal turnkeys. Shallow steps led up to a simple alcoved door. Timms took the