Billy pulled out his pipe and tobacco and intently stuffed his bowl, grunting as if in some conversation with himself. For my part, I was glad of finding answers to the mystery but was now even more terrified of what lay ahead. Part of me wanted to let fate take its course as far as Mr. Cromwell was concerned, but I knew that was only one strand of the problem that I faced. Gideon Fludd would never cease hunting for me until one of us was dead. And our new comrade, Elias Ashmole, numerologist and astrologer, had yet to recover his rosy hue since hearing what was chasing us from out of the netherworld. He sat hunched and drawn, looking at his feet or blankly out onto the brown waters. And my thoughts turned to Maggie. Was she now huddled below deck on some merchantman, bound for France? Or was she languishing still in Lyme Regis, awaiting d’Artagnan’s return? I felt I had killed her love for me stone dead, and I prayed that as days passed her heart would forgive me for what I had done.
