thin nose and said, 'We shan't be able to wait. You'll just have to catch up.'
'Won't be long. Thanks so much,' he said and made his way through the group and back along the corridor to the Gents they'd passed a few minutes earlier.
Entering the loo, he quickly ducked into one of the four stalls. He shed his overcoat, rolled it up tight as any City man's umbrella, and shoved it into one of the large painter's pockets. Beneath the innocuous overcoat he wore paint-spattered coveralls. Inside the coveralls, under his armpits, hung two plastic containers. He had secreted them in two large curved aerosol flasks, strapped to his ribs, invisible.
He hung his fedora on the hook provided, flushed the apparatus, and stepped outside the stall.
The green-tiled room was empty, as he'd expected. He'd taken this tour enough times to know how much the guides loathed letting anyone use this particular facility, holding everyone up. Returning to the corridor, he only had a few feet to walk before he came to a door opening outside onto the Upper Ward, or Quadrangle as it was popularly called.
Walking quickly across the manicured grass, he was able to make his way to another door that led to the Queen's Private Chapel just as his group was trooping by. No one, of course, took any notice at all of him, especially the snooty guide who wouldn't be caught dead acknowledging the existence of one of the many painters currently doing restoration work in the Chapel.
He looked at his watch. Eleven twenty. Plenty of time until the painting crew came back from their 'elevenses' tea break. He stepped over the red velvet rope and pushed through the carved oak doors with the sign no entry! closed for restoration. Once inside, he quickly took his bearings.
It was a small room, this private chapel. Most beautiful, he thought, was the ornate wooden ceiling decor of blue Romanesque arches edged in gold. The eight red silk upholstered chairs that were normally arranged before the altar had been placed in a corner and draped with a protective cover of thick canvas. The floor as well was covered with canvas and scattered about were paint buckets, solvents, ladders of various heights, and tall, tripod- mounted spotlights with powerful thousand-watt halogen lightbulbs.
His eye alit on one of the spotlights. It had been left on. Quite hot already. Perfect. It was standing atop its sturdy tripod, dangerously close to a lovely blue satin curtain that extended down from the ceiling. Close, he thought, smiling to himself, but not quite close enough.
He quickly moved a tall ladder next to the spotlight and climbed to the very top. Then he reached inside his overalls for the flexible plastic spray tube attached to the aerosol canister under his arm.
He pushed down on the button that controlled the nozzle and a strong stream of powerful accelerant jetted out, soaking the curtain. He moved the nozzle up and down, saturating the material. When the first canister was empty he began to use the second, soaking a second curtain only a few feet away. Then he descended to the floor and admired his work. The curtains were ideal. He picked up the tall illuminated spotlight and placed it so that its scorching bulb was nearly touching the first curtain.
It only took a second.
The lovely blue silk draperies literally exploded into violent scorching flames, reaching up instantly to lick the beautiful wooden ceiling above. Then the second curtain ignited, spreading the fire rapidly to another part of the ceiling.
The alarms wailed.
Earsplitting warnings blared throughout the state apartments as he slipped out of the Chapel and headed back across the grassy Quadrangle to the loo. Inside the stall, he once more donned the long overcoat and fedora. That done, he stepped back out into a corridor in chaos. Above the shouting, he could hear the sounds of sirens, fire companies already racing up narrow winding streets from the town of Windsor. He quickly made his way outside onto the Quadrangle again, walking at a steady pace away from the conflagration.
He'd spent months preparing for this day. At first, the mere notion of what he had done had seemed unthinkable. No one could do what he dreamed of doing. The barriers were insurmountable, the chance of success nil. No amount of ingenuity was sufficient, no derring-do could do it.
And yet…Smith had done it again, plunged yet another stake into the rotten innards of his nemesis, nothing fatal, mind you, but still a devastating psychological blow to the Monarch. He would not stop until he dealt the last, deadly blow, but in the meantime he would savor these small triumphs, rejoicing in each as they came.
Now, making his way hurriedly but inconspicuously out of the castle grounds, he saw that the fire was now burning completely out of control, fire teams pissing water everywhere he looked. It was beginning to look to Smith as if he'd managed to burn down a good portion of one of the most potent and enduring symbols of British imperialism.
Yes. He had practically burned down the Queen's favorite castle. Poor old dear would be heartbroken, he imagined. He could not know it, of course, but his success today would be one of monumental proportions:
More than a hundred rooms would go up in flames that day. It would take more than 250 firefighters over fifteen hours and one and a half million gallons of water to put out the blaze he'd started. It would take five long years to restore it at the staggering cost of thirty-seven million pounds from the Queen's coffers.
Not bad for a single day's work, Smith thought, descending on the endless moving stairs down to the tube. Not bad at all. Standing on the grimy platform waiting for the train, he found himself literally shivering with pleasure.
Another day of retribution to salve for a moment his aggrieved heart, his tortured soul, his fevered brain.
TWENTY-NINE
JOHN BULLINGTON DRUMMOND WAS KNOWN throughout England, Scotland, and Wales as the author of one of the most beloved books ever published between two covers. It was called The Care and Feeding of the Proper English Rose Garden. Jack Drummond had spent most of his life writing his somewhat flowery masterpiece, although he was neither a writer nor a gardener by trade. He was, until recently, a policeman.
Drummond had retired, after a long, honorable career of dedicated service, to the bonnie banks of a fabled river. Retired in style, you might say; he lived in a right fairy-tale castle now, one of the loveliest in all Ireland. Glin Castle, a gleaming white edifice, had a charming toy-fortress quality about it. It was built in the late eighteenth century and overlooked the wide and gently flowing Shannon, now black dotted with coots and tufted ducks.
Well, Drummond lived near the castle to be honest, in the Gardener's Cottage, which rubbed shoulders with the stables. Still, it was a lovely little stone house, covered to the rooftop with roses. It was one of three battlemented Gothic folly lodges set about the five-hundred-acre wooded demesne, fiercely defended by the FitzGerald family for more than seven hundred years.
Jack found he awoke each morning filled with the simple love of life. The much-heralded golden years finally had meaning for him.
Prior to retirement, his home had been in the battle-scarred north of Ireland, a tiny council flat in a small town called Sligo. He'd been chief constable in Sligo Town for nearly four decades and had helped solve many crimes, including one of Ireland's most horrific assassinations, that of Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Drummond, having had his fill of enforcing the laws by day, then scribbling his masterpiece madly by night, had now retired to more or less permanent obscurity. He had become head gardener for the Knight of Glin. Which, he thought, had quite a nice ring to it.
The Knight, a most amiable fellow widely known by his proper name, Desmond FitzGerald, had hired Drummond based on the strong recommendation of his wife, a passionate gardener herself. Like everyone else, she'd read Care and Feeding, and immediately joined the countless legions of gardeners who proclaimed Jack Drummond a genius. She'd invited him for tea and a book signing at Glin Castle one afternoon and offered him the job on the spot.
For his part, he was delighted to now find himself in the employ of one of Ireland's oldest and most distinguished families. The current Knight was the twenty-ninth to hold that noble title, a fact that Drummond found quite remarkable.
The Knights of Glin were a branch of the great Norman family the FitzGeralds, Earls of Desmond. The family
