At least no one was pointing a gun at him. He turned his head to the right. Only a yard or two below the adjacent window, one of the Water Lane tavern crowd was scaling the ladder with a blunderbuss on his back. Several rungs below, another followed. Just beyond them was the sheer face of Bell Tower, which unfortunately blocked much of his view to the west. Bell was a bastion, meaning it bulged out through the planes of the walls to either side of it. This was done for a practical military purpose, viz. so that defenders, safe inside, could shoot out through its embrasures at attackers trying to scale the walls. MacIan noticed movement inside a small window cut into the near face of Bell Tower. It was really no more than twenty feet away. But a long twenty feet, in that Bell Tower was a completely different building, not reachable from here by any internal passageways that Rufus MacIan knew of. The window in question admitted a stripe of light to a prison cell, one reserved for important blokes. He could not recall who was in there just now. But where there was an important prisoner, there would be a Yeoman Warder. And how could a Yeoman not look out the window when he heard pitched combat on Tower Wharf? The Yeoman’s hand was moving up and down rapidly, and that was what really caught the old soldier’s eye of Rufus MacIan. Other eyes, reconciled to other professions and circumstances, might have read it as butter-churning, masturbation, or shaking a pair of dice. But to him it could be only one thing: use of a ramrod to shove a ball down the barrel of a weapon.