"Tear them to pieces!" someone squalled.
"Paint them with pitch and set them afire!" That was a woman. More than a few people of both sexes cheered the suggestion.
Victor shook his head. "If they are to die, let them die quickly. Are we not better served to leave harsh, wicked punishments to England?"
"No!" The cry came from a dismaying number of throats. One man added, "Cut the ballocks off 'em before you kill 'em!" He won himself another cheer.
"You will have to kill me before you murder them," Victor declared.
For a bad moment, he thought the mob would try just that He set his hand on the hilt of the Atlantean Assembly's sword. If he went down, he'd go down fighting. To either side of him, Atlantean horsemen raised pistols, while Croydon constables pointed ancient blunderbusses at the angry crowd. The blunderbusses, with their flaring muzzles, had barrels packed end to end with musket balls and scrap metal. At close range, they could be murderous… if they didn't blow up and kill the men who wielded them.
The sight of weapons aimed their way killed the crowd's ardor. People at the front edged back. People at the back slipped away. Victor had hoped that would happen, but he hadn't been sure it would.
"You see, General?" one of the horsemen said as he slowly lowered his pistol. "You should have let us settle the bastards up in Kirkwall. Then we wouldn't have had all this foofaraw."
"No." Not without some regret, Victor shook his head. "Laws have to rule. More: laws have to be seen to rule. Let Biddiscombe and the men who rode with him have their trial. You know what the likely result will be. Once the matter is settled with all the propriety we can give it, that will be time enough for their just deserts."
"Past time. Long past time," the Atlantean cavalryman said stubbornly.
"We can afford what we spend here." Out of the corner of his eye, Victor glanced at the crowd, which continued to thin. "Can we go inside now without seeming cowards?"
"Reckon so, but why would you want to?"
"To speak to Biddiscombe," Victor answered. "He was one of us not so long ago, remember."
"So much the worse for him," the horseman said. "If he'd stayed on the side where he belonged, we wouldn't've had near so much trouble throwing out the God-damned redcoats."
"That is true," Victor said. "Biddiscombe, of course, purposed our having more trouble still."
"Devil take him. And Old Scratch will-soon."
"I shouldn't wonder." Victor did go inside then. The jail smelled of sour food, unwashed bodies, and chamber pots full to overflowing. Much of Croydon smelled that way, but the odors seemed concentrated in here.
"Hello, General." The jailer, a man with a face like a boot (and a man who hadn't missed many meals), knuckled his forelock as if he were a servant instead of the master of this little domain.
"Which of the scoundrels d'you care to see?"
"Biddiscombe himself," Victor answered.
"Thought you might. Heh, heh." That chuckle would have sent ice snaking up any prisoner's spine. "Come along with me. We've got him in the snug cell by his lonesome, so he can't go trying any mischief."
The snug cell had a redwood door as thick as the side timbers on a first-rate ship of the line. The pair of locks that held it closed were both bigger than Victor's clenched fist. The jailer opened a tiny door set into the enormous one. An iron grating let people peer into the cell. The jailer gestured invitingly.
Victor looked through. The window that gave the cell its only light was more than a man's height above the ground. Even if it hadn't been barred, it was much too small for even the most emaciated prisoner to squeeze through. Habakkuk Biddiscombe had got thin, but not that thin.
He lay on a miserable straw pallet. Along with a water pitcher, a cup with the handle broken off, and a thundermug, that pallet comprised the furnishings in the dark, gloomy cell. Biddiscombe's head swung toward the opening in the door. "Who's there?" he asked.
"Victor Radcliff."
"I might have known." Biddiscombe stiffly got to his feet. Yes, he'd taken a thumping when the Atlantean cavalry caught him- and maybe afterwards as well. "Come to gloat, have you?"
"I hope not," Victor said. "You would have done better to stay with your own side."
"That's how it worked out, all right. But who could have guessed ahead of time?" The traitor peered through the grating "And you would have done better to listen to me more."
"It could be so," Victor said. "You aren't the only man I didn't always heed, though. The others didn't turn their coats to pay me back."
"Well, the more fools they." Habakkuk Biddiscombe kept the courage of his convictions, even if he had nothing else.
"How well did Cornwallis listen to you?" Victor inquired.
"He would have done better if he'd listened more." Biddiscombe hadn't lost his self-regard, either. "In that case, maybe you'd be stuck in this stinking cell instead of me."
"He wasn't going to hand you over. You might have done better staying where you were."
Habakkuk Biddiscombe laughed raucously. "Likely tell! If he'd made up his mind to protect us come what might, he wouldn't've needed to call a council of war. And the damned Englishmen wouldn't've taken so long making up their miserable minds, either. No, they were going to hand us over to you, all right, sure as Jesus walked on water. They wouldn't've lost any sleep over it, After all, we were nothing but Atlanteans-one step up from niggers, and a short step, too."
And what would Blaise have said about that? Something interesting and memorable, Victor was sure. "If the redcoats felt that way about the loyalists who fought beside them, why did you stay on?"
"Because I wanted your guts for garters, General Victor High and Mighty Grand Panjandrum Radcliff, and that looked like my best chance to get 'em." Biddiscombe didn't bother hiding his venom. And why should he? Things could get no worse for him than they were already.
"If it makes you any happier, I felt the same way about you after you raised Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion," Victor said.
"It doesn't, not so much as a fart's worth," Biddiscombe replied. "Only one of us was going to get what he wanted, and I wish to heaven it were me." He scowled through the grating. "If you were any kind of gentleman, you'd pass me a pistol so I could end this on my own."
Victor shook his head. "The trial will go forward. The hounds baying outside wanted to end it on their own, too."
"Ah, but my way would finish it fast, and with luck it wouldn't hurt so bloody much," Biddiscombe said.
"When properly done, hanging slays quickly and cleanly," Victor said.
"Why bother with a trial when you already know the verdict?" jeered the man on the other side of the grate.
"So all the evidence comes forth. So the future can know you for the traitor you are," Victor answered.
Biddiscombe's mouth twisted. "A traitor is a man unlucky enough to end on the losing side. Past that, the word has no meaning."
"Not quite," Victor said.
"No? How not?" his onetime cavalry officer returned.
"A traitor is a man unlucky enough to choose the losing side in the middle of the war," Victor said. "You might have chosen otherwise. You would have done better if you had. And you will pay for what you chose."
Habakkuk Biddiscombe's sweeping gesture took in the whole of his sorry cell. "Am I not already paying?"
"You are," Victor said, and walked away.
Victor declined to serve on the three-officer panel that decided Biddiscombe's fate. "I doubt my ability to be just," he said. He doubted any Atlantean's ability to be just to Biddiscombe, but that was the turncoat's hard luck. At least Biddiscombe's blood would not directly soil his hands.
He was summoned to testify against Biddiscombe. The accused did have counsel, a Croydon barrister named Josias Rich. Outside the small meeting room in the town hall that served as a courtroom, Rich told Victor, "I do this not in the belief in the man's innocence, nor for the sake of my own advancement, God knows-people I thought my friends commence to cut me in the streets. I do it for the sake of Atlantis' honor. Even a dog should have someone to speak for it before it is put down."