There was no such luck. The carriage was waiting for them right near the entrance to the theatre, one of a line of carriages awaiting the end of the play. Henrietta instructed her coachman to follow the sedan chair at the very end of the row.

“I don’t expect the doctor will go far,” she said to Charlotte, sinking back against the cushioned seat while Charlotte burrowed under a pile of lap rugs. “If he meant to go any distance, wouldn’t he have called for a carriage rather than a sedan chair?”

“Not necessarily,” said Charlotte. There were still streets in London too narrow for a carriage to pass, places where only a sedan chair would do. They were not neighborhoods she usually had occasion to visit.

It was too late to back out now, though. Ahead of them, the chairmen had hoisted their burden, choosing their footing carefully on the snow-slick cobbles. The initial flurry had melted into the ground, but a fine dusting of snow was beginning to stick, not enough to create drifts, but just enough to make walking treacherous. It was, as the saying had it, a night fit for neither man nor beast.

Charlotte felt the familiar quiver as the coachman coaxed the horses into movement, sending the carriage swaying on its narrow wheels. The false doctor had hired a linkboy to light his way. As they edged along a discreet distance behind, the small burst of light winked in and out of the snow like a shooting star reflected through an astronomer’s lens.

Through the shifting snow, Charlotte spotted the old Savoy Palace on the Strand and briefly recognized her surroundings, but then the sedan chair shifted sharply sideways, down a side street, and Charlotte was lost again. All she knew was that they weren’t in Mayfair anymore.

The carriage lumbered deeper and deeper into a tangled warren of streets that seemed to twist and turn in on themselves like the strands of a spider’s web. Charlotte had never actually been to a stew or a rookery, but this was how she imagined one must look, with the upper stories of buildings tilting haphazardly over their bottoms. Any closer, and the carriage wouldn’t be able to pass. As it was, it was a tight fit.

Charlotte was only glad that the weather had prompted the residents to take refuge indoors, behind bolted shutters. She doubted this was a neighborhood in which carriages passed often.

“I suppose conspiracies can’t very well meet in Mayfair,” she said, catching at the side of the seat as the carriage lurched across a rut.

“I don’t see why not. It would be so much more convenient.”

“For us.” Charlotte doubted that was the conspirators’ primary concern. “What if he means to go somewhere the carriage can’t follow?”

Henrietta glanced ruefully at her evening slippers. They were stylish, but not terribly sturdy. “Then we follow on foot.”

Charlotte looked dubiously out the window. “What if it’s not safe?”

With an air of unnerving competence, Henrietta whipped something out from beneath the seat. “That’s why I keep this in the carriage.”

It was long and metallic and had pretty mother-of-pearl inlay that sparkled in the light of the carriage lamp. Not all the mother-of-pearl in the world, though, could disguise the deadly purpose of the rounded barrel and elegantly curled trigger.

Charlotte instinctively ducked. “Do you know how to use it?”

“Oh, Richard and Miles taught me ages ago.” Henrietta hefted the firearm with a nonchalance that made Charlotte scoot back against the seat. If she could, she would have crawled into the seat, just for the extra padding. “Of course, it has been a while, but it should act just as well as a deterrent without our actually having to fire them.”

“Them?” Charlotte didn’t like the sound of that.

“For you,” said Henrietta benevolently, pressing the twin of her pistol into Charlotte’s hand. “You point. They run. Don’t worry! Yours isn’t loaded.”

The butt of the gun felt very cold, even through Charlotte’s glove, and surprisingly heavy. The weight of it bent her wrist back at an uncomfortable angle.

“Should that make me worry more, or worry less?” she asked, frowning at her firearm. If one was going to deal in the hideous things, one might at least have the use of it.

“I really did just bring them along as a precaution,” Henrietta hastened to reassure her. “I don’t think we’ll have to use them.”

Charlotte regarded the slim piece of steel dubiously. “I hope you’re right.”

Between the decaying buildings, the strong smell of sewage, and the firearm in her hand, this was all beginning to take on just a little too much of the taint of reality. It was all very well to theorize about a bit of ladylike eavesdropping from the comfort of Henrietta’s morning room, but it was another thing entirely to find oneself, at dead of night, in a decidedly dodgy bit of London with a pistol dangling from one hand and a smell one didn’t like to think too much about battering insistently on the windowpanes. In that, at least, the cold was probably a blessing. Charlotte didn’t want to imagine what it would have been like in summer, with people reeling out of tavern doors and the stench of unwashed flesh magnified by the humid air.

This, she realized, was probably what Penelope had meant when she argued that Charlotte was mad to want to go back to the Middle Ages, pointing out that the stench of a midden would undoubtedly outweigh the thrill of a joust. For the first time, Charlotte had an inkling of what Pen had meant. Some things worked far better in imagination than reality. In imagination, she was intrepid and resourceful; in reality, she wished she were home, wrapped in a quilt.

Down a dark and crooked street, the unmarked sedan chair drew to a halt in front of a building where broken shutters had been augmented by the addition of boards of wood hammered over the windows. A wooden sign creaked from a pole above the door, indicating its occupation as an alehouse. On the crudely carved sign, a potbellied ape sank his teeth with obvious enjoyment into an apple whose red paint had long since flaked off, except for a few sanguinary flecks of red adhering to the monkey’s teeth. The red flecks gave the ape a decidedly carnivorous air.

Next door, an old church sank into its foundations, as if wearied by the evidence of original sin. Even the stones in the graveyard could not be bothered to stand up straight; they tilted dispiritedly to one side, worn by time and pocked with snow.

The man who emerged from the sedan chair had undergone a transformation of his own. Gone were the cracked buckles on his shoes, the tricorne, the wig. Instead, the King’s physician was enveloped in a covering of dark fabric from his ankles all the way up to his hooded head. In one hand, he held an old-fashioned lantern, shuttered on three sides.

In the dark interior of the carriage, Henrietta and Charlotte exchanged a long look. “This just gets odder and odder,” whispered Henrietta.

“Is that a cassock?” whispered back Charlotte.

“Why would he be wearing a cassock?”

“I don’t know! Do you think we followed the wrong sedan chair?”

Instead of entering the Ape and the Apple, the hooded figure crunched his way through the dead weeds and bits of cracked crockery that littered the old graveyard. The light of his lantern disappeared with him into the side of the church. There had to be a door there, Charlotte rationalized. The crackle of crockery underfoot had been too crisp for their hooded friend to be anything but corporeal.

“What could he possibly want in there?” demanded Henrietta.

“It is a little late for Evensong.”

Henrietta’s lip curled. “I don’t think that church has seen Evensong for quite some time. Just look at it.”

Whatever stained-glass windows the church had possessed had been long since broken, the empty embrasures covered with the same boards used to bolster the drunken shutters of the alehouse on the other side of the graveyard. No light showed through the gaps in the boards. The church lay dark, still, and abandoned, isolated from the surrounding buildings by the scraggly churchyard.

“Do we go in?” whispered Charlotte, contemplating the long and twisty street with disfavor. There didn’t seem to be much distinction between street and gutter in this part of the town. Even blurred by snow, the alley was pitted with ruts and strewn with debris. Dark gaps showed between the houses and shops, like slashes in the fabric of the street. They made ideal crevices for footpads to lurk, ready to pounce on unwary ladies from Mayfair.

Looking no more thrilled by the prospect than Charlotte, Henrietta set her jaw bravely. “If we want to know what he’s doing there.”

Charlotte took that as a yes. “If I go through the front, will you go around the back?”

“That seems to make the most sense,” Henrietta agreed. “You have your pistol?”

Charlotte lifted it in silent assent, pleased to notice that it didn’t wobble any more than one might have expected from its weight. Now that the moment had come, she wasn’t displeased to have it. Leaving the carriage around the corner, the two women slid out of the carriage, moving awkwardly on limbs stiff from sitting in the cold. Henrietta slipped on a slushy patch of snow, and Charlotte caught her arm before she could go skidding down into the gutter.

“Just practicing,” whispered Henrietta.

Charlotte nodded beneath her hood. “We’ll do better from now on.”

The sign of the Ape and the Apple swayed above her head, the chains creaking like a raven cawing in the night. She could hear movement within the tavern as they passed, laughter muted by the wooden boards and a sour reek she assumed must be ale, but no one flung open the sagging door and demanded to know their business. Perhaps hooded women skulking down the street wasn’t quite so unusual as one would expect. Charlotte concentrated on keeping her footing and avoiding the most suspicious-looking protrusions beneath the snow.