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instinct and impulse. Both had won the day at times during the war. This time, he didn’t know. He could feel the stolen papers in his breeches pocket, but he hadn’t had the chance to read them, so he had no idea whether he’d risked everything for a good reason or not.
    The day had gone as expected, with him playing a minor supporting role as Julius Waite had given speeches and accepted the adulation of the Ardwick crowd of weavers andother working people. They’d cheered Waite for his condemnation of corruption in high places and his demands for honesty and justice. They had no idea of his true plans—that he was paving the way for bloody revolution. Nor did Waite have any idea that Mark was not who he seemed, and had infiltrated his organization only to destroy it.
    Waite’s organization was called the Three-Banded Brotherhood, after the flag of three colors adopted around Europe by revolutionaries. The prime example was the French
Tricolore
, but Waite’s flag was black, red, and green. Black for the pernicious current state, red for the blood that would destroy it, and green for the glory to come.
    There were members of the Three-Banded Brotherhood throughout the country, numbering thousands. They wore the three colors in whatever way they could so as to recognize kindred spirits. This had been one of Mark’s first suggestions when he’d gained a place on the central committee, the Crimson Band. The committee had seized on the suggestion, not realizing how it could mark the members to the authorities. Mark had found that even the cleverest of them were blinded by their fanatical dreams. They’d stop at nothing, but Mark would stop at nothing to destroy them and their cause. From his mother’s experience, he knew what evil revolution had created in France. He had pledged his life that such horrors would never happen in England.
    Now he had a new embodiment of his purpose. Hermione Merryhew, “aristo,” as the French revolutionaries would have called her, would never see her family murdered, or need to flee in terror, or face the guillotine’s bloody blade.
    The papers in his pocket might at last be the key that would lead to the Crimson Band’s arrests, convictions, and deaths.
    There were members of the Brotherhood all around Britain, but the Crimson Band was based in London, wherethey hoped revolution would erupt as the French one had in Paris. They’d traveled north to attend the ceremonies to commemorate the third anniversary of the death of Thomas Spence, hoping to inspire the crowd to march on London.
    Spence had been a revolutionary, but of a more Utopian type. He’d never advocated slaughter or violence, but had wanted to completely reorganize England on egalitarian principles. He’d wanted land divided equally among all, and government by parish councils supervised by a national senate. Some of his plans might have worked in the Middle Ages, but not in the modern world of industry and cities.
    Spence had worked for change with his pen and he must be weeping from on high to see his work exploited by men like Julius Waite and Arthur Thistlewood, who wanted total destruction of law and order. Waite was more subtle than Thistlewood, who’d been on trial for high treason earlier in the year. A shame he’d been acquitted, for he was half-mad and capable of extremes Waite and the Crimson Band would blanch at.
    At the memorial service today Thistlewood had ranted, but Waite had spoken in his usual calm and noble manner, urging the return of habeas corpus, drawing on the fact that Spence had been unfairly imprisoned a number of times. It was a safe subject, for many of the most righteous in Britain felt the same way, but he’d managed to turn it toward a general criticism of the government without saying anything to rouse the crowd. Yet.
    Tomorrow would be different.
    Tomorrow, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people from all over