The key had been produced within minutes.
And then the raiding party had commenced emptying the strong room.
It had taken some time to remove the bullion boxes, but the Frenchmen had worked with quiet, speedy efficiency. According to the surviving guard, Private Butcher, it looked as if it was something they did every day.
When the last box had been taken, the lieutenant had locked the staff in the strong room. He and his men had then departed with the bullion.
'Where was the army?' Hawkwood demanded. 'What the devil were you doing while all this was going on?'
The army, Burden told him miserably, had been outmanoeuvred.
Following a tip-off that two major contraband runs involving hundreds of men and ponies were planned for that evening - one to the north at Sandwich Flats, the other to the south at Margaret's Bay - the Revenue had turned to the town's regular contingent of troops, modest at the best of times, for assistance. Only a handful of soldiers had been left in Deal.
Hawkwood realized then how well Morgan had played his cards. He had obviously started the rumours himself, instructing his agents to spread the word the runs were taking place. With the troops out of the way, his men had soon sealed off the town's three major access roads: the Dover Road to the south, Five Bell Lane in the west and the turnpike road to the north.
Burden coloured. 'And we were stuck in the bloody castle. We were able to return fire, but I'm still not sure if we hit any of them.'
Deal Castle lay at the southern edge of the town, close to the Dover Road toll gate. It had been besieged once before, during the Civil War. Since then it had remained inviolate, its massive circular bastions standing guard over the town and the coast, a monument to Tudor engineering.
Like the carronade, however, the fortress had its flaws. Its primary use was as a defence against attack from the water, not from the land. Its guns faced the sea. The second major flaw was that, like all castles, it had only one main entrance: the gatehouse.
Access to the gatehouse was by a narrow stone causeway. Morgan's men had turned the causeway into a killing ground, blockading it with another of their heavy wagons and a pair of mounted swivel guns opposite the entrance.
When the carronade opened fire on the Admiral's residency, a patrol had immediately set out from the castle to investigate. The soldiers made it only as far as the causeway before Morgan's men, dressed in their French infantry uniforms, opened fire to lethal effect. Four men dead, six injured, out of a force that hadn't been large to begin with.
'We couldn't get at the bastards,' Burden said. 'And all they had to do was keep us confined. We couldn't get out by the moat either. They had the postern gate under their guns, too.'
'What about the Naval Yard; aren't there any troops there?'
Burden shook his head. The Yard lay next to the castle. It was small by Admiralty standards and its main role was to victual ships with bread and beer and ballast from the local beach. Enclosed by high walls and with only three entrances, it had been easy to seal off. In any case there were no troops stationed there beyond a couple of sentries manning the gates.
With his wagon crews effectively in control of the town, Morgan and his raiders had driven the gold straight down to the beach where his ship had been waiting. They had used a fleet of small boats to ferry the bullion boxes from the shingle beach out to the ship.
'She was flying the ensign,' Burden said heavily. 'In the dark, we thought she was one of ours.'
With the gold on board, the ship had weighed anchor and Morgan's wagon crews had melted away in the night, leaving the strong room bare and the town in a state of shock.
That had been nearly two hours ago, Burden told them.
Morgan had put the army to shame. And he had done it with a precision the army would have been proud of. Even down to executing the robbery at night so that the Deal telegraph station would not be able to send a shutter message alerting the next station down the line that the residency was under attack.
The time had come for Hawkwood to add to the lieutenant's suffering.
It wasn't the French, he told Burden, at which the man seemed to age a thousand years in front of their eyes.
Leaving the shattered lieutenant in the empty strong room to contemplate what remained of his career, Hawkwood and Lasseur made their way to rejoin Jago and Micah.
'Perhaps he'll shoot himself,' Lasseur said. 'It would be the honourable thing.'
'I think someone will probably do it for him,' Hawkwood said.
Outside, the bodies of the dead were being lifted on to a cart.
Jago nodded towards the soldiers guarding the overturned carronade. 'There are some bodies on the beach and the corporal told us there are more up by the castle,' he said, then paused and looked at Lasseur. 'They're French.' Jago turned back to Hawkwood: 'I thought you said Morgan and his men were behind this?'
'It's only the uniforms that are French,' Hawkwood said. 'It was Morgan's crew.'
Jago shook his head. 'The ones I saw were definitely French. They had tattoos. I'd know that eagle anywhere.'
'You've seen them?'
'Beach is that way -' Jago pointed. 'And you won't even get your feet wet.'
'Show me,' Hawkwood said.
The bodies had been laid side by side, face up, on the shingle, ready for disposal. In the moonlight, in their dark tunics, shakos and dirty breeches, and with their faces already grey and misshapen by death, they looked like bloodstained ragdolls left by the tide.
Le Jeune looked about a hundred years old. The tattoo was visible just below the crook of his arm. The tunic was too short for him and the sleeve had ridden up. Next to him, in complete contrast, Louis Beaudouin looked about twelve. Souville resembled a skeleton already; Rousseau wasn't much better.
Jago had referred to another lot of bodies found by the castle. Hawkwood was willing to wager he knew the identities.
'He killed them,' Lasseur breathed. 'He killed them all.' The breeze ruffled his hair as he gazed down at the corpses in disbelief.
'They'd served their purpose,' Hawkwood said, and then wished that he could take the words back, even though he knew it was the truth. Morgan had used Frenchmen in French uniforms; hearing them conversing and giving orders and probably exhorting their comrades to greater effort in their own language, any witnesses present would have been left in no doubt that the gold had been stolen by a French raiding party.
And dead men in French infantry uniforms gave added credence to the lie. In the confusion, it would have been assumed that some of Burden's beleaguered troops had managed to fight back.
Leaving Morgan's men to steal away scot-free.
Sooner or later the truth would have come out. Morgan kept his people on a tight leash and the hardened members of his crew knew how to keep secrets, but this was huge. Eventually, over a glass of grog or a pipe of tobacco, the story would be told. But by then it would be too late.
Wearily, Hawkwood lowered himself to the pebbles and rested his hands on his knees.
What had it all been for?
Jago sat down next to him and let out a sigh. 'Don't know about you, but I'm getting too old for all this runnin' about. A man of my age, it ain't good for my health.'
Hawkwood could hear cries behind him and the sound of tramping feet. Pretty soon the army, having learned that its pay chests had been stolen not by the French but by someone much closer to home, would begin hammering on doors.
To what degree, Hawkwood wondered, had the town's inhabitants been involved? Morgan could not have deployed his crew or distributed the weapons - especially the carronade - without reconnoitre or support. And there were the wagons and the horses to consider, too. Morgan had once boasted that there would never be a shortage of men willing to do his bidding. Did that mean he could recruit an entire town? Deal folk were a close-knit community, and they had seen their livelihoods overturned by the authorities on more than one occasion. They
