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coal tubs lay roundabout, and ruined iron machinery, and heaps of firebrick, fabricated by the hundreds of tons to be shipped off to smelters, and all of it covered with black dust where the dust wasn’t washed off by the elements.
    The coal pits were quiet, it being the morning of the Sabbath, but there was a low hovel with smoke coming out of a chimney, with a stream that flowed alongside it, the water running black. The Tipper led St. Ives on a circuitous route, behind the pallets of firebrick and outbuildings, wary of the watchman in the hovel. They crossed the stream on a footbridge, the morning growing darker rather than lighter, and before long a spewy sort of rain started in. The Tipper vowed that if he had known that the weather would turn on them, he’d have asked for something more than six guineas for his trouble. Out of fairness, he said, the Professor should pay him the rest of his fee at once, and not compel him to wait for it, since the result was the same in either case, and if they were discovered and pursued, it was every man for himself. If he were captured, he would be three guineas to the bad.
    “Aye,” said St. Ives. “But a man with something to look forward to is likely to do his work more cheerfully, and not retire early from the field. And in the situation you describe, I’d be the one who’s three guineas to the bad, wouldn’t I?”
    The Tipper lapsed again into silence, and they went on, into the forest once more, leaving the coal dust behind them. Near Heathfield, the fog rose again around their knees, with here and there patches of it ascending into the treetops. “Pray this fog ain’t washed out by the rain,” the Tipper said. “A fog is perfect weather for a lark like this.”
    His prayer was answered, for the fog grew heavier as the minutes slipped away and they neared the point where they’d don the caps. The Tipper slowed, held out a restraining hand, and whispered, “Steady-on!” And then, when all was still, “Listen!”
    There was a distant mutter of voices, not the lunatic voices of a village gone mad, but of reasonable men, several of them. How close they were, it was impossible to say. The fog hid the world from view and obscured sound. The Tipper turned to St. Ives and in a low voice said, “So much as a quack from your lordship, and I’m gone, do you hear me? You’ll not see me again. I’ll go back after the payment that’s waiting for me in Blackboys and tell your friends that everything’s topping. You’ll be on your own.”
    “Agreed,” St. Ives said, and the Tipper muttered something about it’s not making a halfpenny’s difference who agreed with what. They moved forward carefully, keeping hidden, until they could see a road ahead, the fog blowing aside to reveal a small company of red-coated soldiers sitting beneath an open canvas tent.
    “Lobsters,” the Tipper whispered. “Up from Brighton, no doubt.” He nodded toward a dense birch copse some distance farther on, which ran right up against the road. “That’s where we cross into Heathfield proper. Put that cap on. Pull it low over your ears. If you lose the cap, you’ll lose your wits with it, although you won’t know you’ve lost either of them, if you ken my meaning.”
    St. Ives donned the cap, which was indeed cobbled together from a pair of gloves, the fingers rising atop like the comb of a rooster. He tugged it firmly down over his ears, deadening what little sound was left in the quiet morning. He had no real understanding of the science involved in the caps, although he suspected that the answer lay somewhere within the notebooks of Lord Busby. More to the point, he wondered how the Tipper could have discovered the efficacy of the asbestos cloth. He couldn’t have, of course. Even if the gloves were ready to hand, it wouldn’t have come into his mind to sew them into a cap. The Tipper was clearly in the hire of someone who had knowledge of such things. Busby being dead, that