confirming his presence.

I made myself as comfortable as one can be on a thin rope dangling twenty-five feet above cobblestones, and reached to slide my fingers through the narrow gap.

Two warm and oh, so welcome hands swarmed up to take possession of mine, and I felt happy for the first time in days. Well, perhaps happy is not the exact word, but I no longer felt quite so alone. I scooted over, searching in vain for an external anchor that would take some of my weight, and ended up stretched across the stones to hold my face to the window covering.

Before I could speak, a voice as much felt against my face as heard by my ear recited, “ ‘What is that form? if not a shape of air, Methinks, my jailor’s face shows wond’rous fair!’ ”em› Perhaps Holmes, too, had once laboured under a Miss Sim?

“Thank you, Holmes.” I, too, breathed the words into the blackness within.

“Good evening, Russell. I regret having to ask you to seek me out.”

“All in a night’s exercise, Holmes. I could see that your windows are considerably more secure than ours.”

“A number of the fittings of the house make me suspect that this was at one time the harem. And, as you no doubt could infer, the search of our bags was scrupulous.”

“Well, they seem to be concentrating on you men – we have no inside guards beyond the housekeeper and her two maids. It would appear that our pirates meet few females with a streak of independence.”

“And a climbing rope,” he added.

“Extraordinary, isn’t it? The only thing they removed from my bag was the revolver. They must have thought my pick-locks were a manicure set.”

“You have your pick-locks?”

“Indeed I do. Shall I-”

“That would be a great service.”

I worked the leather pouch of tools from my pocket without dropping it, thumbed out a tool by touch, and slid it through the metalwork. He thanked me, and got to work.

“I heard a shotgun yesterday,” he remarked.

“A warning shot, literally, to let us know we were not permitted to look over the wall that separates our house from yours. They seem to have decided that the lesson was well learnt, because there’s no one on your roof tonight. And you, are you all well?”

“Mr Fflytte is nursing a sore head after protesting against our confinement – not that the situation itself seems to trouble him, oddly enough, but he grew increasingly restive during the day, and when the guards finally opened his door he expressed his outrage, that our confinement will interfere with the making of his film.”

“That sounds like him. Do you have any- Aah.”

The lock mechanism gave its whisper of release, and I shifted so Holmes could push the shutter out. I studied the resultant hole.

“I believe I can get inside,” I told him.

“But the process will be slow, and I would not wish you trapped here.”

However, the open sill meant that I could transfer a portion of my weight onto the sill and off my hands.

“You were asking me if I had something?” he prompted, when I was settled again.

“Yes, do you have any of the pirate crew with you?”

“I think not, although our only communication has been brief tapping on the walls – someone knows Morse code, although three others only imagine they do, which rather confuses matters. La Rocha and Samuel were in the house earlier – my first inkling of their presence was a shriek that made my blood run cold until I realised it was that accursed bird. In any event, Hale was brought out to speak with them, for quite some time, but the conversation took place behind closed doors in a room on the ground floor. After the two men left, Hale’s voice shouted out that if we are obedient tomorrow, we shall be permitted to gather in the courtyard during the afternoon. That is the only thing I have heard from any of them.”

“Carrots and sticks.”

“Precisely. What have you learned?”

“The town is small and its walls and gates maintained. As you may have seen when you were brought here-”

“We saw nothing: Sacks were drawn over our heads. A certain amount could be discerned by hearing and by-”

“Holmes,” I interrupted happily, “I shall never again complain about men who believe in the incompetence of women. Thanks to my freedom, I can tell you that we are in the north-east quadrant of Sale, about a hundred metres in from the walls.” I described all I had found during the previous night’s wanderings: gates, walls, guards, the road out, the ferry; the layout of our house, the orientation of the adjoining streets, the heap of rubble to the side. I gave details of house and inhabitants, the distribution of the bedrooms.

Then I came to the more complicated part, which concerned the characters acting out their parts inside our tight little stage.

Four sentences into my analysis, however, Holmes stopped me. “Perhaps you had better go through that more slowly.”

The section of my body resting on narrow stone had lost sensation and my arms ached, but I could not bring myself to be impatient with him, since it had taken me hours with mental graph paper to map out the permutations of all that I had gathered on the rooftop harem that day.

“We knew on the Harlequin that Adam is smitten with Annie,” I began. “However, paying close attention to her concerns during the day, she responds to remarks concerning Bert-the-Constable with approximately the same ratio of interest as she does to remarks about Adam-the-Pirate, even though I’d have said that Bert was more intent on a friendship with Jack than on reciprocating Annie’s affections. Jack, on the other hand, would rather follow Edith about, being unaware that Edith is a boy.”

“Edith is a boy?”

I was pleased to find something he’d missed. “Didn’t I mention that? Yes, I found Mrs Nunnally plucking her child’s emergent beard. Beyond those specific links, various of the girls are interested in the young pirates and the young constables interchangeably – any young male will do – but I should say that Mrs Hatley-”

“Mother of June.”

“Right. Mrs Hatley appears to retain both affection and hope regarding Geoffrey Hale – although it could as easily be a sort of psychic contagion spilling over from her role as the pirate’s nursemaid, Ruth, since she also pets Daniel Marks, her Frederic, at any given opportunity.”

“And yet I should have said that if Geoffrey Hale is interested in anyone, it’s his cousin Fflytte.”

My numb hands jerked along the rope and nearly spilled me to the paving stones.

“Russell? Are you there?”

“Yes, Holmes, merely startled. You think …?”

“They would not be the first aristocratic cousins we have known in … that situation.”

“Except that Fflytte has a reputation as a womaniser. And is currently – well, not currently, but until Harlequin intervened – associated with the picture’s choreographer, Graziella Mazzo.”

“Which association appears to trouble Hale considerably.”

“But, Mrs Hatley, and June …?”

“A man’s tastes may change. Or they may be, shall we say, inclusive.”

I thought about that, about one or two times when I had found Hale studying his cousin with an expression difficult to analyse. “You could be right. But what about La Rocha and Samuel?”

“You suggest they may have a similar, er, affection?”

“No! I mean to say, I hadn’t thought of …”

“I should think more along the lines of the Barbarossa brothers,” he said firmly.

“The sixteenth-century pirates.”

“Aruj the elder – called Red Beard by Europeans – and his brother Kheir-ed-Din,” Holmes mused. “Aruj was

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