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explosion, and he was left with the sense that she thought he had been caught in it for no reason other than reckless bloody-mindedness.
    Once he had changed into respectable clothes, he went to the drawing room and did his best to play the gracious host, but he was exhausted and his head ached. Moreover, he was not naturally loquacious, and hated the vacuous frivolity of Hannah’s courtly friends. The only person there of remote interest was Daniel O’Neill, although only because of his connection to the Post Office. O’Neill was with a woman who looked uncannily like him – elfin, dark and with brightly interested eyes. When Chaloner approached, O’Neill introduced her as his wife Kate.
    Kate held a very elevated opinion of herself, and immediately set about informing her listeners – at that point comprising Chaloner, her husband and an infamously debauched courtier named Will Chiffinch – that her embroidery was the best in London. Chiffinch quickly grew bored, and asked O’Neill about the Post Office blast instead. An agonised expression crossed O’Neill’s face, and Chaloner studied him closely, thinking that here was the man accused of having the Major imprisoned and Bishop dismissed. Were the tales true? And was his distress at Chiffinch’s question genuine, or was he just an extremely able actor?
    ‘It was dreadful,’ O’Neill replied. ‘Five dead, including the Alibond brothers, who were two of my best clerks. Fortunately, there was very little damage to the General Letter Office itself.’
    ‘The news is all over White Hallthat two of your men are accused of corruption,’ said Chiffinch. ‘And that one is now in Newgate Gaol. Do you think the other left the gunpowder in revenge for being exposed?’
    There was a flash of something hard and unpleasant in O’Neill’s eyes. ‘It is possible, because I inherited that pair from Bishop. I should have followed my instincts and dismissed them, as I did the rest of his staff, but they begged me to be compassionate, and like a fool I capitulated.’
    ‘I would not have given in,’ declared Kate. ‘When Bishop became Postmaster at the Restoration, he re-hired a lot of old Parliamentarians, on the grounds that they knew how to run the place. But it is better to have inept Royalists than efficient Roundheads.’
    Chaloner did not agree. He and others like him had been sent home from Holland because the new Spymaster had decided to replace them with untried Cavaliers, and intelligence on England’s most serious enemy had suffered a blow from which it had never recovered. And now it seemed the same narrow-minded principles were being applied to the Post Office. He supposed it explained why the service had gone downhill once the more enlightened Bishop had been ousted.
    ‘I have nothing against a little ineptitude,’ Chiffinch was saying. ‘Indeed, I am prone to it myself on occasion. However, the service you provide is a disgrace, and I cannot tell you how many of my letters have gone astray since you became Postmaster.’
    ‘Controller,’ corrected O’Neill tightly. ‘I decline to use the same title as that rogue Bishop. And there is nothing wrong with my service. If your missives failed to arrive, then it is because you addressed them incorrectly.’
    Chiffinch bristled indignantly. ‘I assure you I did not. And you were wrong to expel Bishop’s people, because their experience would have helped to—’
    ‘One does not need experienceto be a postal clerk,’ interrupted O’Neill contemptuously. ‘All they do is accept letters and shove them in bags to be delivered.’
    Even Chaloner knew the work was more complex than that, and O’Neill had just displayed a woeful ignorance about the foundation he was supposed to be running.
    ‘Put me in charge,’ suggested Kate. ‘I will turn it into a decent venture. And there will be no Gardners and Knights to steal our profits either, because I shall hire
honest
men.’
    ‘And how will you do that,