Victor Radcliff looked around the well-appointed office where they drank. Whale-oil lamps lit it almost as bright as day. Some strange and almost obscene fetish from the South Pacific shared pride of place in a cabinet of curiosities with a bejeweled elephant from India and the mineralized skull of a long-snouted creature from southern Terranova. None of those would have come easy or cheap. Neither would Erasmus' desk, a triumph of marquetry in multicolored wood.

"I concede the eventuality, coz, but it does not strike me as imminent," Victor said.

"Perhaps not. Then again, I am more fortunate than many in similar straits," Erasmus replied. "Not everyone has so much to fall back on when times get hard."

No sooner were those words out of his mouth than someone started pounding on his front door. The octagonal window in the office rattled in its frame at the insistence of the blows. "That doesn't sound good," Victor said.

"A knock in the nighttime is never good news," his cousin said, and he could only nod.

The pounding stopped as abruptly as it had begun. One of Erasmus' servants brought a plainly dressed man who smelled strongly of horse into the office, "Mr. Mitchell, from Croydon," the servant said. And so it was: Richard Mitchell was a leading goldsmith in the northern town, and a leading light in the struggle to turn Atlantis against the mother country. His pamphlet called Where Now? was banned wherever the English could seize it.

"For God's sake, Radcliff, give me a drink," he said. Without a word, Erasmus did. Mitchell, a squat, powerfully built man, gulped it. "Ann!" He seemed to notice Victor for the first time. "What? You here, too? Just as well! It's started up north."

"What do you mean?" Victor and Erasmus asked together.

"They heard we had guns. They marched to get them. They did, too, or some of them-but we gave them a black eye and a bloody nose in the getting. It's war up there, Radcliff's-war, I tell you! And it will be war here, too, war all through this land, unless you're a pack of spineless poltroons." He slammed down his mug. "Fill it up again! Atlantis and liberty!"